Red Lake

Hey all! This is an excerpt from a project I’m working on. It’s part autobiographical-chaos, and part drug-induced hallucinations. Enjoy.

 

I went over to Tommy’s house because I was bored. We stood in his kitchen while looking for a paperclip. Why did we need a paperclip? Well, we wanted to get stoned, but we didn’t have any weed. The plan was the scrape the resin out of the pipe, and smoke that.

Tommy threw open cabinets and said, “Dude, have you ever hit a wax cart while masturbating?”

I snickered and said, “No, but I do that with vapes.”

Tommy broke into a fit of giggles and turned to me for a second. “Okay, well I did that once right as I was cumming—right? Well, I just broke into, like, a fucking seizure—“ Tommy proceeded to shake his entire body while sputtering at the mouth, “Then I just collapsed into bed and fell asleep. I woke up not knowing what the hell happened.”

A burst of laughter erupted out of me and I held onto the counter in order to not fall to the ground. I looked up, and saw that Tommy was still shaking his entire body.

I began looking through cabinets, and even little plastic baskets. Tommy was on disability and was Section 8. His apartment was small, but it had it’s charms. Opposite from his couch, was his Hindu altar where he prayed and meditated at. There was even, like, a four-hundred-dollar statue of Shiva on it.

I looked at Tommy and he was looking into a cabinet on the floor. “Payte, the last time I opened this cabinet, there was like eight-year-old licorice in here, and it was all brown and stuff.”
“Did you eat it?”

“No—well, I mean, I’ll eat skittles off the floor, but not that. Turns out, it was from the last guy who lived here.”

“I would’ve eaten it.”

“Fuck no you wouldn’t. You’re lying.”

I smiled and looked over at Tommy’s blue-tooth speaker. We had used it before, and it was pretty much just completely bass. I figured that you could stand outside the apartment complex and hear it. “Hey dude, can I play some music?”

Tommy turned his neck to me, “Sure—wait, do you listen to jazz?”

“I love jazz!”
“Okay, dude, when I got out of the hospital, all I’d listen too was jazz. For, like, months.”
“I got the perfect playlist then. It’s called ‘Doomer Jazz.’” I grabbed my phone and connected to the speaker. I opened spotify and selected the playlist. Chet Baker began playing.

I opened one of the drawers in the counter, and sifted through it. All that was in there was can-openers and silverware. It was a bust.

I turned around and caught a glimpse of the statue of Shiva. I turned to Tommy and said, “If Shiva’s God, then what’s the difference between them and Brahman?”

A smile crossed Tommy’s lips and his eyes lit up. “Okay, so there’s this story in the Mahabharata where Krishna and Vishnu are, like, playing card games on Earth, when suddenly—a giant fucking pillar shoots up from the ground. And it’s, like, going all the way through the bottom of the Earth, and into space. So the both of them quit their card games to investigate it—they’re like: “Okay, you go to the bottom, and I’ll go to the top.” So they do. And then they find out that the pillar is just nothing. Completely nothing. And you know what that nothing is?”

I raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“That’s Shiva, dude. Shiva is nothing.”

“Cool.” I didn’t understand it, at all.

I looked up to the top of the refrigerator and saw a bobby-pin. I gasped and held it up for Tommy to see. “Can we use this?”

Tommy took it from me and said, “I’ll try.”

He grabbed his bong and took the bowl out. He began scraping, but because of how the bobby pin spiraled, it couldn’t make it all the way in. In the end, we ended up getting no resin, and no high.

We sat down on the couch to play a game of risk. I had learned that quitting and going back inot the game, reset your turn. This made it so you could have another try, if you lost all your troops attacking an enemy.

It was soon eleven at night, and the game was finished. I had won by a hair. What made it last so long was the fact that an entire hour was spent just fortifying our borders. There was simply no way to attack each other, then.

I brought up the idea of driving out to Red Lake. It was a dry lake bed just forty miles out of town. All you had to do was keep going North on the main road through Kingman, and you’d reach it. Tommy said yes, and we headed to my car, vapes in hand.

I gave Tommy control of the music and he played Satsang. He was this artist who had backpacked through the Himalayans and soon found Hinduism. When he came back to the states, he decided to play music and write lyrics about Hinduism. Pretty cool stuff.

“Dude, you shouldn’t worry about anything people say about you.” Tommy said. We saw about fifteen feet of the road ahead of us. The sky was pitch-black, and the last thing visible were the shrubs on the side of the road.

“Why?”

“Because, think about it, nothing matters. Top bible scholars have said that on the day of redemption, God will save the fallen and give them their rightful place in heaven—top bible scholars, dude. Bible scholars! Tell me why anything matters!”
“I mean, you’re kinda correct. Even if atheism is right, you just die—and then, well, nothing matters.”

“Exactly. You get it.”

The GPS took us the wrong part of Red Lake. Just about five miles up the road, was the “entrance” to Red Lake. I use that term in quotation marks, as it wasn’t really an entrance. You just went off the road, and then suddenly you could do burn-outs and donuts without worrying about anything. Really, Red Lake is a popular spot for drag races. I’ve been in a few.

We went further up the road, and then off it, into Red Lake. I drove forwards through the vast expanse of dirt, and then parked the car. We got out, and stood in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere, hitting vapes and talking.
Tommy shut his phone off, and put it back in his pocket. He paused, and then looked up at the sky. Then, his eyes looked around him. “Dude, we could just scream as loud as possible and no one would hear us.”

My jaw dropped, and my eyes went wide. “Oh my god, you’re right…”

What would commence was a five-minute fit of just about the most blood-curdling screams you would hear. We stretched our vocal cords, and yelled out profanities into the night. All as if God was watching, and he could hear us.

Shortly after, we decided to walk off into the night. The plan was to just go in a straight-line and then walk back. Simple. It was easy. Well, about twenty minutes later, we realized we had been following the moon the entire time. You know, the moon that moves? Yeah.

When we turned around, we were hit with the realization that the car was nowhere to be seen. There wasn’t even a shadow or the circles of headlights. It was just pitch-black nothing. I wish I could say I felt fear about getting lost in thirty-degree temperature, but I didn’t feel that stuff. I just kind laughed at it.

We circled around the dry lake-bed, laughing, screaming, and cursing. I took my key out, and pressed the unlock button, trying to signal the car. Meanwhile, Tommy took photographs of the ground, and the sky, all while ignoring Sammy.

As our hands slowly but surely froze, the topic of Tommy’s last relationship got brought up. Basically, he had been with the love of his life for a long time. Then, it all came crashing down when he got in his motorcycle accident. He was in a coma for six-months, and had to be tube-fed. He was missing a bone in his shoulder, and had severe brain damage.

In the hospital his lover told him that she simply didn’t love him anymore, and that he was taken off the lease. At the end of the year, he would be kicked out of the home he had been paying for, for years. It was betrayal at it’s finest, in my opinion.

I exhaled sweet smoke and turned to Tommy. “So, that’s why you don’t wanna date anymore. Is this why you don’t wanna commit to Sammy?”

Tommy nodded. “Yup.”

“Okay, dude, let me put it this way. Would you rather spend five years of your life madly in a love with a girl, only for it to end? Or would your rather never experience something like that again, all because you’re hurt?”

Tommy reeled back and groaned. “Honestly man, I think I’d rather just not experience it at all…”

“What?” I yelped. “But isn’t it worth it?”

Tommy shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. It’s not worth it.”

I ran out of things to say. I wanted to try to convince him to give love another shot (as cheesy as that sounds), but I also didn’t want to push my life-view onto him. I figured that, in the end, he’d come around to what he truly wanted.

Just then, I took the key out of my pocket, and began signaling the car in random directions. Directly left of us, two-hundred-feet away, the car beeped.

It wasn’t until I got home and looked at the photographs Tommy took, that I realized the car was in them all along. Seriously, you could see it loud and clear.