The Andover superstar uniforms are shiny and new as the masters of the universe prepare to use us as the tools of their athletic glorification. They look like bourgeois marionettes to me, stooge puppets of the paramilitary fascist state. The thought of cutting their strings and watching them crumble cracks me up, and I catch an edge of my skate on the ice, tumbling down, and sliding headfirst into the boards with a loud crash. The game hasn’t even started yet, and I’ve already checked myself. Our whole team stops their pitiful warm-up, stares at me, and gets the giggles, tittering like schoolboys, kids in the stands pointing fingers and laughing at us, Andover superstars glaring with smug, condescending menace.

Then suddenly the game is starting, and the crowd shape-shifts, all beautiful fuzzy colors that only make sense when you look at the whole thing from a distance. When I focus on any one person, the face seems to disintegrate and lose focus. Or maybe it is me who’s disintegrating and losing focus. Hard to say for sure. The referee looks like a big fat zebra.
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Tripping the Light Fantastic (Cont'nd)
Then suddenly we’re pulling into Andover. You can smell the money. At least I think that’s what the smell is. The dorms are all swanky swank swank. The grounds are manicured to within an inch of their strangulated lives. The boys are wearing their spiffy little blue blazers, and their spastic little tassley shoes with their dorkadelic little preppy haircuts. If you weren’t high on some trippy shit already, looking at all these Young Republican bootlickers-in-training would make you go all wavy gravy in a New York minute.
I’m still not feeling any effects, and frankly I’m beginning to wonder whether Rat’s brother sold us all a bill of goods, as we troop into the Taj Mahal locker room, looking at each other for any tell-tale signs of synaptic scramble.
Not a word is spoken as we don the tools of ignorance necessary for us to get the inevitable ass-whupping we are about to take. Our coach, Mr. Clament, the Clam, a besotted French teacher, senses something is amiss. He clears his drunken throat, and launches into a Win-One-For-the-Gipper speech.
About half-way through the Clam’s speech, his face starts melting, his tongue flicks out like an iguana, and his eyes spring loose from their sockets like those eyeball glasses that hang down and wobble when you move your head. His nose spreads out like Silly Putty smushed as his eyebrows do the Australian crawl across his face. His lips are wax candy and his teeth are changing colors like the Wizard of Oz’s horse: red to green to blue to orange.
I shake my head to try and clear it, but that just makes little fireworks with tails shoot across the inside of my eyeballs in wonderful waving watercolors.
I look around. Everyone’s shaking their head, eyes covered with potter’s glaze, like a flock of sheep who’ve just been converted to Christianity.
The Clam reaches his drunken crescendo, expecting a rousing jolt of competitive manchild testosterone. Nothing. We just sit there, staring like big mouth bass, tripping our little brains out. He’s dumbfounded, and decides his next logical move is go into the bathroom and drink, so he shrugs, turns, and disappears into the bathroom to drink.
“Is this some trippy shit or what?” Rat pops his eyes out of his head and rolls them around, and the laugher lets loose – KABANG! – and we chortle like whacked-out bobbing head dolls.