Friday, November 5, 1993

I was already hallucinating wildly when my friend Crank Boy came to visit. Most of the time he looks a little funny anyway, but today he had three heads and little chirping mouths all over his chest. Yes indeed, friends, I was having an interesting evening.

"How you feeling, Scotto?" Crank Boy's middle head, the one that looked like Cheryl Tiegs, asked.

"Well," I replied slowly, so as not to bite my own tongue off, "you know how sometimes you really have to throw up, only you can't, and you just sit there and heave and heave and heave..."

Crank Boy's heads nodded.

"Well," I continued, "imagine that you're heaving like that and somebody comes up, doesn't matter who, could be anyone, let's just say it's Fred Grandy. Fred Grandy comes up and starts shoveling spoonful after spoonful of Hellman's mayonnaise into your mouth, jar after jar, and then he scrapes sandpaper across your eyeballs and starts singing 'Ave Maria'..." I paused for a moment. "Umm... did I have a point with all of this?"

Crank Boy's three heads looked disdainfully at the pile of garbage that surrounded me. I was literally bathed in empty Mad Dog bottles, used syringes, empty Robitussin bottles, three or four mounds of macaroni and ketchup and bottle after bottle of pills that I filched from my shrink.

Crank Boy's first head, the one that looked like Phyllis Diller, asked, "Scotto... are you a substance abuser?"

"Of course not," I replied in a huff. "I treat my substances very well, thank you."

Little green faeries were climbing out of the walls and going through my CDs, looking for old Donna Summer albums. For some reason, Crank Boy didn't notice.

"Scotto," said Crank Boy's third head, Karl Malden, "haven't you heard about the War on Drugs?"

"I'm fighting the War on Drugs, can't you see?" I replied.

"How so?"

"BY TAKING ALL OF THEM!"

"Come on," Crank Boy said, lifting me to my feet. He dragged me outside to a waiting car. My friend Laurel, Crank Boy's second cousin, was in the driver's seat. Crank Boy tossed me in the back seat, climbed into the front, and we took off.

"Where are we headed?" I asked, casually munching on a sheet of LSD I'd hidden in my pocket. It was especially tasty, being Barney blotter and all.

"We're taking you to detox," Laurel replied. "At the rate you're going, the city of Cedar Falls will run out of Mad Dog in 23 hours and 17 minutes." She spun around, fixed me an evil glare, and said, "And I can't have that."

What a lush, I thought to myself.

---

I awoke to find myself strapped to a hospital bed in a room with rubber walls. Luckily, the bed was a Craftmatic adjustable bed, and by the time the doctor arrived, I had folded myself into a neat little parallelogram.

"Hello, Scotto," the man said. "My name's Dr. Schlitz. I'm here to talk to you about your problem."

"What problem?" I replied. "I got over that bed-wetting stuff years ago." I paused. "Well, almost a year ago, anyway."

"Not that problem," Dr. Schlitz replied. "Your drug problem."

"Which particular drug problem?" I replied. "The one where I run out, or the one where wild goats continue to break in and graze on my magic mushrooms and then wreak terrible goat-like havoc on the neighborhood?"

"Why do you take drugs, Scotto? Why do you need such an escape?"

A ha, I realized. This was the trick question of all time. He wanted me to tell him that I'd had such a horrible childhood that I needed drugs to deal with the pain. He wanted me to say that this reality was just too much to bear, and drugs were the only alternative.

In truth, the reason I needed such an escape was due to my toaster, which had slowly been failing me over the past years. Ah, my beautiful, beautiful toaster - the anchor of my kitchen, the true heart and soul of my motley assortment of kitchen appliances. It had served me so well lo these many years, patiently applying just the right amount of heat on both sides of a slice of white to produce what can only be called a toasted slice of golden brown heaven. Not one, not two, my friends, but four entire slices could be given the magic treatment by my darling, darling toaster - a toaster that had almost become more of a friend, really, than a servant of my breakfast and midnight snacking needs. But now, at long long last, its trusty wires were failing. No longer could I trust it to perfectly understand that when I set it a little higher for toasting a bagel, I didn't expect a charbroiled briquette of misery. The acclaimed "middle" setting no longer responded reliably; sometimes my "toast" was hardly toast at all, just a dried out shell of what had once held such toastly potential, while other times my bread was destroyed in an unholy inferno of electric heat. With such pain in my once idyllic culinary life, was it any wonder I had resorted to drugs to block out the pain? Heaven knows drugs can be stolen from any 12-year-old on the street - but the wonders of the four-slice toaster were heavily guarded in our town.

"Well, Doc," I say softly, "I had a horrible childhood, you see..." Subtlety was never my strong point, after all."

---