I was at the Cleveland, Ohio bus station smoking Marlboros and doing bumps of meth off my key, watching students sitting Indian style waiting, itinerant janitors waiting to get off work so they could drink beer, washed-up burger-flippers smelling the marijuana on the air. I made it down the street to a bar and ordered a beer and a plate of wings. After I had eaten I moved out onto the street and immediately purchased a nugget of good hash off some dude for a cool twenty. Luckily I had my paraphernalia with me and went into a gas station stall and lit up. I bought a pint of Jim Beam for the bus ride and boarded, back at the station. What passed me in my stoned window was a marvel. Landscapes the likes of which I had never dreamed. Lush green ferns and crab grass, crooked winding trees and striking sunrises and sunsets. I smoked meth-laced hash bowls in the bathroom of the bus and spit the smoke out the window. The stoned trip was relaxing to say the least, and when I pulled into New Orleans bus station I immediately booked a bed in a local hostel and went out to call my dealer. I pounded down a couple of Budweisers and took a cab to his apartment. The scene there scared me into believing this whole trip had been a mistake, a joke, a ruse, a false effort at an attempt at living. The walls were all painted bright pink. In one room were about a thousand marijuana plants and an aroma that could only be described as the stench of skunks. Everyone there was stoned. A drunken wino was aggressively hitting on a blond transvestite with breast implants that constantly and belligerently shot him down. The trannie was making out with a goth chick that kept doing shots of Single Barrel. They would make out, smear lipstick, and fall on a couch. In the living room guys cut up coke into baggies and passed a clay pipe around filled with pot doing deep hits and blowing the smoke in each others' faces as they worked. Porn played on the TV, some sick sideshow of transvestites shoving their feet into fat women's cunts that would seemingly do just about anything. Someone passed me a joint and I did a deep toke. "I need you Anna..." the wino was whispering at the transvestite that stared at him like he wanted to kill him. I purchased my QP then sat down to do a sample toke with a Budweiser tallboy. It was early September, and drinking and pot was everywhere down there. I was offered some coke, but refused as I was too tuned up on the meth I had been bumping the entire substance-corroded road trip down. "STOP!" I stare out of a monsoon of swirling colors passing in the damp autumn air. The wino has produced an M80 from his pocket and reaches into his pants, inserting it into his rectum. He strips, and gets down on his hands and knees. "All I ask of you Anna, is that you light the fuse...." Everyone rushes to their feet and runs over to go watch. They hastily light cigarettes and crack bottles of Heineken. Anna walks over, leans over, and lights the fuse. It burns down to the explosives and with a meaty thud the wino's ass is gone. He groans and stands up. Flesh tubing falls out of the wound where his ass once was. He stumbles around trying to grab the dealers and they push him away. He stumbled back, picks up his guts in his bare hands and walks out the door with them stark naked. He stumbles down the stairs, out the apartment gate and limps down the street holding his guts. People scream and cross to the other side of the street. After a few blocks, he lets out a low inhuman grunt, throws his guts into a concrete trash can and collapses onto a pile of garbage on the side of the road. Rivulets of blood seep down the sidewalk and drip like water out of a leaky faucet into a nearby sewer, while the wino's eyes roll back up into his disheveled head.
