blurring_the_edges_49_lights_shadows_and_noise birdmad When Teri awakes she sees you already awake, showered and dressed in head-to-toe black, jeans, boots and silk shirt worn halfway open to reveal the red t-shirt underneath and your shades. You have scored enough of the various and sundry snacks from the "continental breakfast" of coffee and danish from the lobby to bring back to the room in addition to what you have already eaten and have it waiting there for her when she wakes. "Well," she says, "aren't you just the sweetheart?" and promptly proceeds to munch on the cherry danish. Reaching into your backpack, you pull out a plastic lunchbag with two more and proceed to cut both in half, a blueberry and a cheese danish, taking half for yourself and putting the other half back in your bag after she wrinkles her nose at it. "Hey, Teri," you say. "What, babe?" "If you liked that, you'l like this even better" She gets a wicked grin in her eyes when she sees the bag of shrooms you acquired last night from the man in the casino, tellin her the story of walking around with the guy through some of the side-streets and buying them from him when you got to his car, just out of any significant view of anything but the unfinished edge of a neighborhood. "Aw hell, babe!" she says, "I've said it before and i'll say it again, if i wasn't queer, i think i'd be askin' you why you haven't stuck a ring on my finger, you do such a job of reading my mind." "You know," you tell her, smiling, with your fingers in her hair, "if you weren't, i would." Knowing that they will make you both at least a little bit pukey, the two of you start out with just a couple of small buttons, washing them down with a swig of coffee to kill the nasty taste. You made sure to clean them as well as possible, but you know from experience anything born in cowshit isn't going to taste very good regardless of cleaning. If you were ever in a place conducive to hallucinogens, you know it would have to be Vegas or Disneyland, and you have opted to follow in Hunter's footsteps and do your tripping in a place that looks more and more like a deranged neon apocalypse as the day wears on. With the remains of the extra cash you picked up last night, the two of you know that you are in for a shorter casino run today than yesterday since the bus is heading back home at five o'clock tonight and you can actually go ahead and enjoy the sights and sounds of the slot machines and all of the other gaudy minutiae as you spend another four hours in the Imperial palace and then take your closest jaunt to the Strip to close out the run with a stop at the Rio, where you haven't been since the weekend of your 21st birthday, wondering if that cocktail waitress who helped make that weekend so enjoyable was still around but hoping for her sake that she had moved on to bigger and better things. The waitresses uniforms are a tiny bit skimpier than they were the last time you were here and the back end borders more and more on being a thong in its narrowness than it was before. The sight of all these cute women in skimpy outfits wandering about is actually influencing Teri more than you as you catch her ogling more than a few times and making remarks to the tune of how she'd like to fuck some of them. You agree, but as you have been munching from your split of the bag everytime you get the chance, you are too far out in the reaches of space to be overly concerned with those details. Teri, who is saving some for later remarks to you through your disconnected haze that your attempts at trying to look nonchalant are drawing more looks than discouraging and when you fall out of your chair laughing as you pick up a twenty dollar jackpot from a nickel slot machine, you lie to the pit boss who comes along to determine why you are acting strangely and say that you are a diabetic having a low-sugar episode and if he could bring you back a candy bar or preferably a soda, you would be quite grateful. In the men's room, you run across the redneck from the bus and take the opportunity to "accidentally" let a little squirt hit the ankle of his pantleg while you are standing at the urinal next to him. You have to exercise every bit of restrain not to laugh uproariously at the fact that he doesn't seem to notice at all as he walks away with a line of droplets on the back of the ankle of his jeans. "I saw that," the urinal tells you in your deepening hallucination. "It's alright, man" you answer back, "if you'd have heard that guy spouting off he shit he was saying the other day, you'd wonder why i didn't set him on fire and THEN piss on him." A guy comes out of a toilet stall a few doors down and looks at you having your conversation with the urinal and mutters "fucking drunks." as he walks out the door and back to the casino. (more later) 031014 ... mcdougall this is awesome. i can't wait for more. 031015 ... birdmad (i've got 48 previous chapters and prologue and a slight bits of commentary relating to some of the bits and pieces in the bag, click on my name and scout the links all of which will start with either blurring_the_edges or b_t_e depending also, there are two chapter 29s where i had a major brain-fart so the b_t_e post that references chapter 30 should take you to the one that should have been numbered as such I started this thing a few months ago so there will be some scrolling down to do through the list.) 031015 ... birdmad Stepping back out of the restroom, you catch up to Teri who looks at you like she doesn't know whether to be exasperated or amused. "Well," she says, "between your luck at the tables, our little bout of bad chicken and you tripping on shrooms, Alex, you have certainly made my first trip to Vegas something i'm not gonna forget soon." "Is that good or bad, love?" "Silly, it's good..." she pauses "'cept maybe for the chicken." she says, with that twang in her voice becoming more adorably apparent when she says it. Yeah, your crazy luck, dude. You meet the right girl, but it turns out that she's still looking for the right girl too. Anyway, sorry to interrupt you in mid-trip... now where were you? Ah yes, out of the men's room and back on the casino floor of the Rio for another hour and a half while having some very vivid hallucinations. Down the row, you see a small red plastic hand waving at you from the end of a slot machine arm and when you get closer you realize it is actually flipping you off. For spite, you drop in a trio of quarters and come away with fifteen more dollars, sticking your tongue out at the machine as you collect your bucket of change and calling it a bitch under your breath. You don't know if it is one of the horde of slot-machine grandmas playing obsessively that whispers it or if it's another psilocybin induced auditory hallucination, but you would swear that you just heard the machine say "Aww, Fuck!" in the muttered exclamatory tone of someone who just lost a bet. You realize it's the shrooms again as suddenly the whole row of machines is calling out to you as if they were hookers on Van Buren street back home, urging you to spend some of your money on them too. (Though hell knows, you wouldn't touch the girls on Van Buren with somebody else's dick, much less your own. especially not when you have both been and been with more expensive service anyway.) Teri gives you a funny look and asks you what is so funny "Oh, shit, babe... I am so far out right now." "I've had a few more pieces m'self, didn't want you havin' all the fun by yourself, y'know." "I'm hearing more than seeing right now, babe," "Not me," Teri says, "I just saw some nice sweet granny by the Keno parlor who suddenly looked like she had a bunnyrabbit head for a minute and that cashier in that cage over there looks like he's got dicks for fingers." "Ewwwww...that's funny." "It's kinda gross, is what it is." she laughs. "What are you hearin' anyway?" "SLot machines calling to me like game booth barkers at the State Fair or like hookers on Van Buren." "Now THAT's funny," In spite of the increasingly surreal state of the world you are in as you have slowly munched half of your half of the shrooms, you are surprised as the time comes to get back on the bus and head home, with Teri telling you again how sweet you are for getting both her bags and your and her gear packed back up before she got out of bed. Before you left, you took your sharpie marker and drew the eyes from the Grendel mask in your favorite comic book and left it on a piece of hotel stationery in the middle of the Gideon's Bible in the drawer by the bed just like you did with the one in the room you shared in San Diego. The day has been long and the two of you cuddle up and sleep in the same back part of the bus, though not altogether soundly, from Vegas all the way down to a stop in Kingman where the bus is experiencing problems with the running lights. Still tripping, you walk into an Arby's next door to the truckstop where the bus is parked. Teri comes in with you and starts laughing at the sign for the latest item on the menu here... Chicken fingers, with you adding in your own two cents and saying "Yeah, somewhere out there are some pissed off chickens who are never ever going to play the piano ever again." You order a container of them to go and pick up Teri's order as well eating in an empty corner booth pondering the dirty look being shot over at you by a trucker who appears to hail from the same kind of good-ol'-boy stock that the dick on the bus comes from. He appears to be visibly offended by the sight of you and Teri in such close proximity to each other, and you can bet that he would be even more so if he knew the whole story about her. Teri told you a story once about a beatdown she caught once when her secret slipped out in the little town where she went to college. Even if you're high, you aren't about to let anything like that happen to her here. and you are reassured by the long slim knife tucked into your boot. All sorts of people pass through Kingman on the way up the US 60 to Vegas, more people used to pass through it in the days of Route_66 on their way to California, so the locals, while a bit conservative have seen nearly every crazy stereotype that late 20th century America has managed to throw at them. Oddly enough, you remember hearing once that it is the truckers who come through town with their freight-loads and their predominantly south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-stars-and-bars mentality and their meth-fueled tempers that get into the most trouble in and around Kingman, except for the occasional rowdy bikers. The trucker seems poised to say, or maybe even do something until a couple of hungry DPS officers walk in and stand in line behind some of your fellow passengers to place their order. When your bus is fixed and underway again after a two hour wait, you are dropped back off at the parking lot where you caught it and go back with Teri to her place to pick up your car, exchanging a small kiss goodnight before a very sleepy Teri retires to the inside of her apartment to go to bed. The shrooms have mostly worn off by the time you get off the bus so you don't have to worry too much about driving or looking all weirded out if your mom is up to ask questions. It turns out she is awake and is sitting in the kitchen drinking a glass of iced tea and working on a quilt pattern on the kitchen table as it is just about the only peaceful time she can do it with everyone in the house. "Did you have fun, mijo?" she asks. "Yeah. actually came out a few bucks ahead even. It was a weird trip, though, i don't think I'll ever do one of quite like that again." You give your mom almost half of the extra two-hundred you still have and slip a couple of fives in your oldest nephew's piggybank. That weekend, you will buy a few toys for your brother's older two kids and a couple sets of baby clothes for little Stevie. But for now, though you are tired, you are also restless and decide to play Mortal Kombat II with the volume off so as not to disturb the sleeping ten year old whom circumstance has made your roommate for a few more months to come. When sleep finally does come down, it is deep and untroubled for the first time in months. You are glad both for you and Stevie that he has slept through the morning without incident. 031015 what's it to you? who go blather from