Hunter Gets High, Driving Barely Ensues

    So, yesterday one of my best friends--we'll call her "Jane"-- messages me: she's back in town and wants to hang out. I spend the day on my ass, knowing that all laziness will be negated in the coming storm that would be the night. Turns out though, that I should have been spending that time procuring some sort of substance to be abused-- it's always nice to have something to keep the party going.

    I call Jane and explain to her message-machine that I'm working on getting stuff, and that we should consider going to Sahara's, which is a hookah bar downtown. Her message machine is cold and unloving. My next move? Calling Horatio's brother, who we'll call "Jay." Knowing that Horatio himself was low on supplies, I invite him to go with me. "Hell yeah," was his response.

    I take a bassackwards route to Jay's house, missing it and thus requiring a half-assed looparound in which I fully apply my breaks, causing the SUV behind me to swerve off the shoulder a bit. As they pass us, one of them, I assume the driver, leans out enough to scream "ASSHOLE!" like I had stomped a bag of kittens or something. Maybe he was getting someone to the hospital, it wasn't far up the road. But whatever, I like to simply think of him as the asshole, and not me, the person who was taking up the entire road in my tiny MX-6-- because I'm that important.

    At Jay's we notice something eerie and calm about the place--no one is there. Typically, this man's house is CRAWLING with people. Tonight, however, the house party was elsewhere.
That's okay, though, because we just hung out and smoked while listening to Bonethugz 'n' Harmony, whose soothing vocals and heavy backbeats allowed me to slip into a pot-haze. After awhile, we get restless and leave.

    We manage to get in the car, and I manage to turn it on. After that, it all went downhill. Immediately, immediately, immediately the loudest, deepest trance/techno hits us in thumping waves and I burst out laughing, unable to handle the intensity of the music any other way. Like, seriously, sometimes laughing at things is the only way a body can handle the godliness of things like Airbase, the best and greatest trance artist ever. I turn it down a bit and turn to Horatio, saying, "This'll be interesting."
He looks back and laughs with an edge of nervousness. The usual seating arrangement for Horatio is this--DRIVER. He is the only one of our friends who has had a car until now, so he's not adjusted to passenger status, so yes, yes this would be interesting.

    I put the car in reverse and tap the accelerator, and VROOOOOM. And for purposes of understanding my experience, I'll translate things... like, for instance, I just used the term 'tap', which, apparently while high, means SLAMMED WITH ENDLESS RAGE. We rip out of the gravel driveway, spewing rocks forward and away, and again begins the can't-deal-with-it-any-other-way laughter. The car nearly drifts into the ditch before I realize the car isn't going to operate itself.  I tap the break, wait, cough out a few remaining laughs, and slowly turn to face Horatio, who is still as stone:

Horatio: "Oh God."
Hunter: "By the way, we're probably going to die"
Horatio: "No, I know. Oh... oh god"
Hunter: "I'm sure we'll be fine though, aside from dying."

    Seconds later we're in some random neighborhood, pulled off to the side of the road because I keep breaking out in fits of unfettered laughter. I give myself 2 minutes to calm down and pull my shit together. It works. For the rest of the trip back to Horatio and I's neighborhood, however, I keep getting "STOP!" "WHOA!" "SLOW DOWN!" Horatio's commentary on my driving. Thing is, however, this man was screaming, thus causing me to slam on the breaks, thinking he saw, let's see, any number of things obstructing our path, but no, it was always a stop sign like 10 feet away that I was completely knowledgeable of. As I would tell Jane later that night, because apparently she's a shotgun-seat-driver as well, I do respect the "double-check" method, as long as it's not yelled in my ear. That shit just makes me nervous. Nervous + high + driving = death.

    I end up taking Horatio home and making a false statement about hanging out later, but see, the beauty of tenative plans is that you don't have to pull through on anything. At some point on the way to Jane's, a bug hit my windshield kamikazee style. Seeing this, and having no regard for any life other than my own, I said "nope, you gotta go," and turned on my wipers for a second, smearing the poor bastard across half of my windshielf. Karma would get me later in the form of a cheese fry lathered in ketchup falling on my lap. After driving to Jane's, I get caught up in a verbal melee with her mother, pulling conversation out of my ass, all in an attempt to segway to me not having to talk to her.

    The rest of the night is too much of a haze to recall, really. I remember cheese fries at Sahara's, a creepy park downtown where two random people stared at us, and running from the cops at the park near my house. Fucking searchlights. Fuck 'em.

    Actually, I do remember getting home and making the biggest fucking chicken salad sandwich known to man, and, having nothing else on at 4:42 in the morning, watching a scene from I Love Lucy in which Ricky Riccardo makes fun of women's rights.

written July 4th, 2006