Taint My High

Micaela poses with an elephant she shot

I want Michaela Strachan to be my wife, said Aloysius watching Animal E.R or whatever it is she does. I’d use her shit as toothpaste.

This afternoon we had an experiment with salvia. I’ve heard a few things about Salvia. I missed the ‘Getting High Legally’ with mannequin-come-to-life Larry Lamb junior, but anecdotal evidence garnered from psychedelic psychonaughts bring me to the conclusion it would be a thing to try. So, yes, this afternoon me and Aloysius went to Rip Off to buy a bong. We’d heard from Rueben (who’s been in touch to tell me about his secret mission in Iraq) its better to heap the salvia in the bowl and suck it all down at once. He likened it to the psychedelic equivalent of downing a pint in one.

Back at home we filled the bong with water and the bowl with salvia and played scissor rock paper to determine who went first. It was both our feeling that going first would be the best thing. I won with paper over rock and slammed the mother in one go. I had Camel’s Moon Madness cued up for when I was commin’ up and when the rubber hit the road the piece melded royally with the blooming high. I felt weightless when it hit. I repeated over and over it was a beautiful thing. When the thing really starts on Song Within A Song my arms started to rise like when you’re in a swimming pool and you can’t stop your arms from rising to the surface. A sensation came over me. It was like a blurred multitude of iridescent threads spooled from out of every pore and ran through the stratosphere reaching a specific length and stopping there suspended in dark starless space. It was a sweet sweet feeling came over me.

Aloysius took a hit then and stretched back in my rocking chair my granny donated. This fact (that he was in my granny’s chair) brought to mind a creepy story I could tell him when he was coming up.

One day home from school with the mumps I was lying on my mother’s lipstick pink PVC sofa swaddled in blankets with a vinegar soaked cloth applied to my forehead. It was around half 2 and Sons and Daughters was due to start. I was drawn to Sons and Daughters some time before from when I was off school sick. I liked it and had a twisted attraction to a shapeless GILP (Gran I’d Like To Fuck) with a bad perm and an obsession for standing at the sink cleaning dishes. The episode I watched the day I was off with the mumps looked to my young media savvy eyes like it was the culmination of a heavy story – that is incestual rape between an uncle and his niece. Because as I’ve said it was on at 2.30 in the afternoon the scene where the uncle finally rapes the niece is all shot from the shoulders up. She is supposedly crying but because the actress’s skills are so woefully lacking she appears to me then like she is laughing maniacally, beholden to an expression of total unfettered amusement like she’s been possessed momentarily by some jester archetype that finds every human emotion to be having the utmost credentials in the hilarity stakes. So she is very happy, it appears to me, in this embrace with her uncle. He was harder to draw an opinion on, if memory serves. But my 6 yr old mind basically took the verb ‘rape’ to mean a ‘meaningful and happy embrace between relatives.’

A day or two later when I was feeling better I accompanied my mother and my granny to Musgrave to do the weekly shop. It was back then that the only people that could have a pass card to the cash and carry were traders. If memory serves the only people that were allowed to be in the possession of one of these cards were people like catering companies and corner shop owners, of which there were a lot before the monolith Tesco’s et al terraformed the landscape. There were so many people that owned corner shops and ran catering companies in those days that there were a lot of people you could run into in Musgrave. Ma used to say you could meet the world and his wife in there and dressed appropriately, wearing her big Jackie O shades to disguise herself and save on any unwanted and awkward conversations about the weather with people she hardly knew. That day granny and I broke of from Ma who went to buy her meat so granny could take me up the toy aisle to get a knock-off counterfeit Action Force. I picked out one called Asp Eyes who owned nunchawks and a tape measure and granny took me to the shortest checkout lane to pay for it. When we got to the till and the girl was ringing up all granny’s things, including tampons, cos she didn’t get the menopause till she was 72, I got bored and recalling my viewing of Sons and Daughters from a couple of days previous turned to granny and asked if I could rape her when we got home. The girl on checkout’s eyes rolled out of her head and she was having trouble pulling an expression having been for so long keeping a happy affable gub on her for all the beer soaked Jontys coming past.

When granny told ma about what I’d said ma confronted me over dinner and asked me if I knew what I’d asked granny to do. Da laughed and sister, who was four, shoveled mashed potato into her gawky wide gub, totally oblivious. I told her what I thought it meant, happy and meaningful embrace, and she told me it didn’t mean that that it meant something evil and I’d hurt granny. In the weeks after I taunted granny with strange notions. I walked up to her silently when she sat stroking her cats and pointed to the Sex Positions cover in the book catalogue at the back of the Sunday Times Magazine. I told her that at times I thought about how sensational it would be to be stabbed in the stomach. As it was the summer months I went outside and whipped mice to death with strips of carpet cutoffs. I presented them to granny at dinner, after having put them in the microwave for 45 secs so they’d smoke when I lifted the lid off the platter I’d shoved under her nose. I also put them in her teapot and her slippers. After 8 weeks of this she had a stroke at 59. I don’t know why I did it. I thought somehow at the end of it I might get some money.

So I told this tale to Aloysius as he was coming up and, understandably, he was very annoyed I’d tainted his high.