Tripping the Light Fantastic (Cont'nd)
Half-way through our season, we’re 0-5. We’ve scored 4 goals, while allowing about, I don’t know, maybe a kazillion. We’re going to play our sixth game, on the road, against Andover, 1 of the hoitiest of the toity prep schools in America. As we’re getting ready to leave, Rat comes in all excited. He’s just scored some acid from his brother who’s out on parole and laying low in Rat’s room. I’ve never taken acid at this point, but the word from Rat’s brother is that this is the trippiest shit he’s ever seen. And apparently he’s seen some pretty trippy shit. And there’s enough for everybody. Rat whips it out. I’m expecting some bubbling liquid in a laboratory beaker, with smoke and prisms and colored lights. But no. It’s just an 8 x 10 sheet of paper. He peels something off, and with an impish grin, places it on his tongue and downs it. He holds it out for us to join him. Everyone sits and stares.
“Come on, you sorry bunch of pansy-asses. We gotta go show those rich bitches what it means to be play this game with a head full of the trippiest shit in the Berkshire Mountains. We gotta show the world that we may be the worst hockey players in history, but we’re the all-time greatest partiers. We gotta let our freak flag fly, man!’
Rat’s speech stirs something within me. In all of us. We’re castoffs, misfits, the throwaways of our generation. And suddenly we’ve got a shot to go down in school history, turn ourselves from laughing stock into folk heroes, talked about around campfires for generations to come.
Still, no one wants to be the first to follow Rat down the road to Infamy. Eyes are averted. Feet shuffled. Harrumphs abound.
It’s times like this that turn boys into men. While us white suburban bourgeois laddies sit with our thumbs up our collective ass, it takes a young brave from the reservation to lead us. A boy warrior whose ancestors have been raped and pillaged, lied to, deceived, mocked, vilified, burned out of the land they loved, hunted down and destroyed like vermin. Joe Starfucker. He rises slowly, a beat-up rented mule of a goalie with long, straggly scraggly raven hair. He walks with the weight of the ages to Rat and sticks out his tongue.
Rat grins like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
“Yeah baby, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Joe Starfucker, you are the man!”
Joe closes his eyes and crosses himself, while Rat places the tab on his tongue like he’s giving Holy Communion. When Starfucker swallows, everybody whoops and hollers. Rat then dispenses the rest of the acid like he’s High Priest of the Order of Psychedelic Hockey, a cross between the Pope, Timothy Leery and Wayne Gretsky.
Beevo, Nevs, Harry the Hoagy, Fat Phil, Dougy the K, even Lurch, all gobble down their medicine.
When my turn comes, I’m shocked to find out that the tab of acid is actually a thin little transparent Mickey Mouse. I smile as I swallow my electric Disney coolaid, visions of Snow White and her freaky dwarves stoned off their nuts, as Jimi Hendrix wails “Some Day My Prince Will Come” in the background.
It’s quiet on the bus to the game. Scary quiet. Everyone’s bugging eyes at each other, trying to see if anything’s happening, wondering if this really is some trippy shit, and if it is, what it will be like trying to play hockey against the masters of the universe Andover superstars while we’re massively loop-de-looped. Follow the Words...