Each morning, I roll over and reach for the needle. There’s just barely enough in there to allow me to get my fix. I, using drug-addict precision, carefully slide the needle into my veins. There’s little masses of purplish scar-tissue that make it tough to drive the needle in. I wince as it penetrates my skin. When it’s finally in there, nothing can compare to the euphoria I feel. It has the power of a thousand suns. I’m like an animal, killing and fucking for it’s fix. And nothing will stop me from getting my fix. I need it to live, to escape, to feel. It heals me. It will only destroy me.

Once the euphoria passes, and I am faced with myself once again, I beat my shriveled dick to classic, eighties, playboy magazines. You know the type. The ones with the blonde girls wearing cheetah-print that looks real, but is really just some faux shit from the East. The girls are beautiful. I touch and feel every crevice and mole on their bodies. They distract me from myself and my present surroundings.

I then dole out two little lines of crack cocaine on a rolling tray I picked up from some backwater gas-station. I hold one nostril shut and snort the lines of coke. I lay back as the mucus drips down my throat, setting my esophagus and nasal cavities afire. My face is numb and I begin to talk and rage like some kind of dog. I have become less than human. I have succumbed to my most primal instincts.

Once the energy has passed, I retrieve a tab of acid from my glove-box. I place it on my tongue as I roll a joint. The tab has little, colorful, dancing bears on it. How cute. As it dissolves, I smoke the joint. I am faded beyond belief. Nothing matters anymore, the edge has been taken away.

I am a drug-addict. I am a manipulator. I must always be partying and fucking so I am not alone with myself. I am a loser. I am obsessed with myself. I am on a journey to rebuild everything from the ground up, just to set it on fire again. Do not put your trust in me, for I will fail you time and time again. I am not human. I am just an amalgamation of parts, sewed together from the people I admire. I am Payte Harring.

* * *

We were cruising down a lone stretch of Iowan highway. Cornfields stretched out for miles in every direction. Each window was rolled down, and the music was playing full-blast. You had to scream til your throat ached just to be heard. The four of us, Travis, Thomas, Jack, and me, had all taken tabs of LSD. It had been thirty-five minutes, so it was going to hit anytime now.

We had been traveling the country in a 1969 Volkswagen van for the past six months. We’d stop in every town we came across and get our supply of acid, weed, and booze. We’d then walk around town until we were bored, and our feet were sore.

We had one goal in mind, and that was to get to Maine. And why were we going to Maine? None of us could remember. Our brains were so soaked in hallucinogenic substances, we couldn’t think straight.

I took a healthy drag of my cigarette, then tossed it out the window. “You guys wanna see somethin’ cool?” I shouted as a wide grin was displayed on my face.

“Payte, I don’t really care.” Travis said. He had shaggy blonde hair that hung down to his shoulders. His nose was crooked and pointed outwards like an “L.” He was in the midst of playing poker with Jack and Thomas, and losing horribly.

Travis had always been the problem child of the group. He never broke any laws. He was just very emotional. Sensitive is the word.

“It’s really cool though, just trust me.”

Travis sighed and looked at Jack, who held his cards up to his face. Jack was a bonafide military-nut. He always had his head shaved down to a buzz-cut. He also always wore the same military jacket. As you can probably tell, it was his dream to become a Navy Seal. And now that I think about it, it’s ironic that he was spending his time partying with us to begin with.

“I’m all in.” Jack said, faking a grin.

Travis grimaced and paused for a second. His eyes glossed over between Jack, and to Thomas. “I fold.” He said, placing his cards face-down on the leather seats.

Travis turned his head to me and asked, “You’re gonna rev the engine, aren’t you?”

I shook my head furiously, “No, I’m not. I wouldn’t do anything to annoy you guys, ever.”

“Payte, this is a fifty-year-old van. Each time you rev the engine, I swear I can hear someone dying.”

Travis wasn’t wrong. The sound of Bessie’s engine being revved really sounded like something dying. Like an old lady’s last moan before she passes into oblivion. Or the sound of someone throwing up, the kind of throwing up that really hurts, and you kind of just sit there for a moment in the bathroom, disgusted with yourself.

“I promise that I won’t rev the engine.” I pleaded with my hands folded together, like I was praying.

“Alright, fine. What is it?” Travis asked, moving his hand in the air as if he was swiping something away.

I revved the engine.

“God damn it, I am never trusting you again!” Travis shouted.

Jack gazed down at his hand and a wide grin passed his face. The whites of his eyes became wide, and his pupils dilated. “Thomas? Are you folding?” He asked.

Thomas chewed his lip in thought at the prospect of folding. He was an interesting guy. We had picked him up in Eureka, California and he’d stuck with us ever since.

Thomas had dark skin and dark hair that hung above his forehead. He also wore glasses with little strings on the ends of them, tied neatly behind his head. When he wasn’t playing cards or dicking around, he had his nose in a book. If you asked him what he thought about books, he’d go on an unintelligible rant for two hours. One time, we actually timed it.

Thomas groaned and put his cards down, “Yeah, I fold.”

Jack giggled and placed his cards down on the seat. “I only had a pair of two’s.”

Travis grimaced, “I fucking hate you.”

Thomas sighed and said, “Yeah, I hate him too.”

Jack giggled like a madman. He shrugged and, with a smile, said, “Maybe you guys shouldn’t have folded then. It’s not my fault you all suck at poker!”

Once Jack finished his sentence, he got up from his seat and moved to the trunk. He tossed underwear and dirty clothes aside, and threw bags of rotten food and trash out the window.

“What are you doing back there?” I asked him, gazing in the rear-view mirror.

“Looking for weed.” He replied dryly. He flung an orange, tattered, shirt across the van and it landed on the dashboard.

Unknown to Jack, there was a half-pound of weed under my seat. As I kicked my feet along to the music I could hear the crinkling of the bag. I reached under my seat and pulled out the bag, then I tossed it to Jack. “There you go.”

Jack caught it in the air, and took a pack of rolling papers from the trunk. He climbed in the passenger seat and got to rolling a joint. Soon enough, we were cruising down the highway, stoned and feeling sick to our stomachs. It was like everything was wobbly all of a sudden. The acid finally hit, and neon tracers were lighting the road in front of me. The sky had turned purple and the clouds had grown eyes, all staring down at me and judging me for my countless, unforgivable, sins.

The weed I had just handed to him was not ordinary weed, it was something else entirely. It was something that should never have been created. It was an absolute testament to mankind’s perversion of the natural world.

We had got it from this guy behind a Denny’s in Denver. He told us that it was grown on the first summit of Mt. Everest, and that the bees that pollinated it, gave the weed a special chemical called psilocynitron. We were also told that it could, and probably would, fuck our world up.

It sounds like a bullshit story, I know. To be fair, we didn’t believe it at first. That was until we decided to smoke it to see the effects for ourselves. Each of us passed out and I woke up in the dumpster of a Korean massage parlor with a myriad of bruises all over me. They gave more than just massages at that place.

The rest of the guys woke up under a bridge in a different city, thirty miles away from me. After that incident, we knew that this weed was not something to be fucked with. However, we always ended up smoking more than we wanted too.

Jack rolled a second joint for me to smoke and one for himself. They came out wrinkled and fat in some places from rolling them too fast. He joined back into the poker game and they passed the joint around in circles. They put their bets out and giggled with each other, losing themselves in the moment. But their calm vibes were short-lived due to the sound of sirens piercing through the air.

“What’s that noise?” Travis cried out with eyes as wide as the moon.

Jack turned around and lifted his head up, looking out the back-window. “We’re getting pulled over!” He yelped.

I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a fat police officer in a police car, quickly gaining speed. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it.” I said, pulling over to the side of the road and pressing on the brakes. The van bounced and jiggled on the rocky dirt. We stopped just in front of a road, leading to a fence. “This pig doesn’t know shit, he probably graduated from the school of eating donuts.” I muttered.

“Payte, can’t you take this seriously?” Travis asked. “We might go to jail for fuck’s sake!”

I turned around to face Travis and pressed my fingers to my mouth. “Just chill out, alright? Do you realize how many times I’ve been pulled over?”

“How many?” Travis asked, quietly.

“Twenty-five times, and I always weaseled my way out of it. You all seriously doubt my capability for breaking the law. These government guys don’t know shit, that’s the only reason their cops in the first place!”

We waited silently as the cop stepped off his motorcycle and waddled over to the van. I rolled down the driver’s-side window and took a drag of my cigarette. “Whats seems to be the, uh, the problem, miss”

“That’s sir to you—“

“Oh, sorry. You kinda look like a woman from that angle.”

“Enough horseplay, son—“

“I’m not your son, or, I don’t think so. Did you have a son you walked out from eighteen-years-ago?”

The cop sighed and scratched at his mustache. It looked like a furry log resting on his upper-lip. He had a big potbelly, and spoke like he chewed gravel every morning. “Do you know why I pulled you over?”

“I have no clue, officer.” I opened the glovebox and grabbed a stick of jerky. I put it out the window, pointing it to the cop. “May I interest you in jerky?”

“Why do you think I pulled you over?” Before I could respond to his question Jack exhaled the smoke he was holding in, and it blew right through the open window, and into the pig’s face. By this point, the acid was hitting hard, and the police officer had grown a pig snout.

Jack climbed over Travis to roll down the window. He stuck his head out and pointed to the cop. His eyes were as red as blood. “Holy shit! You’re a talking pig!” He crowed.

“Son, is that marijuana I smell?” The cop said, staring down at Jack.

I looked at Jack then back at the police officer, who had now morphed into a pig standing on it’s hind legs. “Oh that? That’s for medicinal reasons. The doctor’s say he has…” I leaned in real close and whispered, “Stage three prostate cancer. It’s pretty bad too, sometimes we have to wipe for him.”

“Your eyes are red. Son, I want you to step out of the vehicle.”

“Pig-man, I can assure you, with all the certainty in my heart, I am not stoned. I did not smoke any weed. Only the passengers did.”
“Step out of the vehicle.”

“I can see that this isn’t gonna work between us. Sorry, pig man.” I grabbed onto the gear-stick and put Bessie in what I thought, was second-gear. I slammed onto the gas pedal and reversed straight into the cop’s car, denting the front bumper. “Oh, shit.” I muttered. I quickly put the van into second-gear, and slammed on the gas pedal.

I almost felt bad for desecrating such a beautiful creature. A being that was half-pig and half-man, a fairy-tale.
As we blazed down the road, glowing eyes appeared in front of me and swarmed the windshield. I let out a primal roar as I swerved between them. “You guys okay?” I screeched. There was no response. I twisted my head behind me and saw that the entire back of the van had turned into hell. A type of hell where only the worst and most disgusting evil acts could occur. Take all of the worst things you can imagine, torture, rape, death, cancer, sobriety, and none of it would add up to the back of the van.

Travis had morphed into a creature with bloody welts and scabs all over him, I watched as his skin peeled away, revealing nothing but a void. Thomas had turned into a hooded figure with three mouths along his chest. Out of his three tongues, stretched a snake that began to wrap around me. I took my hands off the steering wheel and snapped its neck before throwing it out the window. Jack had turned into a bat-creature with an un-countable amount of wings that stretched through the van, turning any light into a void.

The police car trailing behind us had shifted into a gray cat with wheels for paws. It’s gaping mouth stretched and tried to consume the van. I stomped on the gas pedal and sped away. There was a dirt road just up ahead, I pressed the brake pedal and turned onto it.

“I told you guys I’d get rid of him!” I shouted to the back of the van, turning my head and looking at my friends.

“Payte!” Thomas shouted. “Watch out for the tree!”