Drugs are Bad
Or
I Tripped and Fell Down the Stairs
         Mushrooms are nothing new to me.  I’ve been eating them on pizza for two decades and I have scraped them off the floor in my apartment’s bathroom with some frequency.  I have also, on occasion, partaken in hallucinogenic or “magic” mushrooms.  The latter brings to me much euphoria and a much, much cleaner high than acid could ever provide.

         I do not want you, the reader, to think that because every so often I am tripping fucking nuts, that I am any sort of junkie. (Nick, Craig, stop snickering)  I am simply a young man who feels that the ban on use of a product that was plucked from a bovine’s fecal material is ridiculous.  I am not going to stop smoking weed, eating shrooms, stealing cars, or sending Anthrax to news corporations simply because it is illegal to do so.  In a way, every time I trip, I am (unbeknownst to them) punishing the government and its bullshit policies on, well, bullshit fungus.

         I now realize that I have digressed greatly from the intended point of this essay, which is not in any way a political commentary on drug use, or, for that matter, sending Anthrax.  It is an important issue but it deals only loosely with the story I am about to unfold.  All you really need to know, and probably already do, is that I take drugs.  And that’s pretty much that.

         As are many of you, I am employed at a shitty job that I only sulk my way through due to the horrid inconvenience of finding anything better.  I have coworkers and bosses, responsibilities and tasks, you know, a job, right?

         The interesting part of this is the “bosses” part.  I have two.  Two bosses?  Two bosses, Bob.  They are a grossly mismatched pair, but between his absolute lethargy and her total raging insanity, I suppose they equal a rather weird number within the hole in “0.”  (Contact me for more information on Robb’s Number)  Now this overbearing and absolutely horrible, wretched human being of a woman has made it no secret that she and the big boss smoke weed.  (Did I mention that they are dating?  Well, they are, but he really hates her down to her rancid organs) I do not want to know that my bosses smoke weed, especially since I am rather oblivious to everything about them and like it that way.

         But now I know the truth; that the people who won’t let me order salami because they don’t trust me smoke weed like Cypress Hill at a rave.

         Now truth be told, I rather pity Tom, my boss, because to date Stephanie, 605 California St., Apt. A, Lawrence KS 66044, must be roughly like being dropped from some height, naked and with your eyes taped open, into a swimming pool full of fluorescent light tubes.

         Days go by without me giving it much thought, but as Tom and I were closing one night, he and I talked about the numerous problems his girlfriend and assistant manager was creating at work.  He agreed almost completely, and in fact impressed on me even more that he wanted to choke the cunt and tie her to a tree with barbed wire.

         He rubbed his eyes.  “I need to get high,” he informed me quite casually.

         I was taken aback to say the least.  Hearing the person who signs your paycheck say he/she needs to do illegal (grrrr) drugs is, as always, an interesting spot to be put in.  Was he testing me, or did he want me to sell him some shit, what?  “You could do that,” I finally popped back.  My response sounded more like a confused question than a statement of indifference.

         “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Tom.  “I just assumed you smoked weed.  I guess I assume everyone does.”

         Again I was perplexed, now by the fact that my boss “assumed” I smoked weed.  Did I stink?  Did I have dreads and a bandana?  Was there a Phish sticker on my car?  No.  I feel slightly miffed when friends think I am a junkie.  Hearing my boss “assume” it was a plain old kick-in-the-guts.  I decided to kill my wounded (they were weaker now) feelings with narcotics.

         “Well, that’s actually what I’m planning on doing right now,” I said to the guy who could fire me if he didn’t like my shoes.

         I’ll spare you the rather inane banter that led him to my apartment to eat shrooms and smoke weed and opium.  And I will be honest…it’s because I was high then, I’m high now, and it is simply not coming back to me.

         So we puffed and tripped while Requiem for a Dream played.  We had fun for a while until I peaked.  Have you ever heard of a bad trip?  This was what they call a “BAD, BAD, BAD MOTHAFUCKIN TRIP TO HELL.”  I didn’t think the walls were bleeding, oh no, I thought the blood was walling.  For a brief period I freaked, but luckily most of my roommate Paul’s computer tower was spared and the voices did, after a time, cease.

         So we’re both tripping nuts and high as a pair of aces when we decide it would be a good idea to go and get some food.  Why either of us thought this was a good idea when we couldn’t even exactly pin down the source of the ambient noise (the ambient noise was coming from the television) is beyond me.

         I didn’t think my legs were shaky, I thought the floor was shaky.  Compensating your movements based on the shakiness of your legs is easy.  But when the floor itself is rapidly gyrating, it’s not so easy.  I did have it easy on the escalator that carried me to the lobby of my building.  I know I don’t really have an escalator in my apartment…please don’t ask me how it worked then.  It just worked, and I’ll say no more about it.

         I did have a slight misstep at the bottom of the ride; my foot got hooked on the escalator operator’s cane and I took a tumble.  I cracked my skull into the hard linoleum floor with what can only be called severity.

         Tom noticed that my blood was heading, and luckily he had the common sense to sit on the floor and start pounding his forehead with his fists.  “I’m too fucked up to do anything about this!” he whined.

         Now languish is a severe and horribly lonely word to use here, but it more than adequately applies, plus I beat Paul to it in story setting.  (He’ll get it)  I lay, languishing, upon what I felt sure was my DuPont deathbed.  I felt like I was the only person in the universe, and what made it worse was the firm feeling I had that the universe was shaped like an infinitely huge pair of those novelty Groucho Marx glasses.

         I was the only person in the world, and my head was bleeding.  If the human race wasn’t in trouble before, it was fucked now.  I snickered as the thought of me as the only human left reviving a corpse of one of the people now dead and successfully mating and creating a race of super-powered Zomans…but again, I deviate from my course.

         Ponder, if you will, my plight.  I am on the floor, a severe and leaking head wound causing me no end of frustration, and a boss crying in the corner and muttering about Karma.  It was a smidge uncomfortable and I knew that my seeping life fluid would soon be the end of me.  I decided to act.

         My action was merely the benign movement of my left hand from my chest to the floor.  It made sense at the time.  I would later come to find that my left arm had been dislocated and broken in nine places.  I also had a new opposable elbow.  At any rate, I finally decided that it was time to prompt Tom into getting some help.  I managed to lift my head from the floor, wincing at the peeling sound.

         Tom was weeping gently and gnawing on an electrical outlet down the hall.  “Um…Tom?”  A piece of a tooth chipped off and shot up like an enamel flare.  He remained oblivious and continued his snack.  “Tom!”

         He cast me a glance this time.  He then screamed and crawled down the hall and out the back door.  I felt like my zombie wife (remember her) just left me because she found me unattractive.

         The clot on my scalp would likely have helped, in the long run.  That no longer mattered as I dropped my head to the floor.  I realized then that I hadn’t felt bleeding for some time.  My wound had scabbed.  The life-saving scab was not long for the world.  My head went down, and I went out.

         I don’t remember anything else until I woke up a couple of days later at LMH.  I had apparently tripped at the top of the stairs and rolled down the three flights.  I had also the misfortune to repeatedly hit the harsh corners of the stairs with my shins and tibia, leading to a total of 17 breaks total.  To move me more easily the paramedics had actually rolled my legs up.

         The gash in my head was not as bad as I had thought.  The gouge in the bone was only a half-centimeter in depth.  I was patched up and tossed into a bed to wait for the doctor.

         Then who should appear in my door but Tom and Stephanie, 605 California St., Apt. A, Lawrence, KS, 66044.  “How ya doin’, Robb?” asked Stephanie, 605 California St., Apt. A, Lawrence, KS, 66044.

         “I’m fine.”  My words sounded muffled around the tubes.

         “I’m really sorry, Robb.”  Tom sounded sincere, but he was playing with string while he was talking.  I had obviously slept off whatever he was still experiencing.

         We chatted, they parted, people came and visited, and yet I was still alone on the left eyebrow of Groucho.

         My date of release rolled around, and the doctor gave me something for the pain.  That was just a stupid move.  He knew why I’d hurt myself.

         I am now outside 605 California St., Apt. A, Lawrence, KS, 66044.

        The moral of this story is that drugs are bad because the Bible says so.

If you would like to read other stories with morals by Robb McKinney, check out:
Cunt, and Why It’s Ok to Say It
Why America Needs Terrorist Jokes Now More than Ever
Blowing Up Churches, The True Adventures of Rudy the Bird