Second Encounter

I hadn’t seen Jim Sink since helping him relocate a seemingly sentient bookshelf across the Highway of Potholes (also known as the Sink Superhighway). I hadn’t particularly looked forward to seeing him again, either. There were things that went on behind those eyes, distracting things of an infuriatingly and curious origin that stole so much of my focus that it was damn near impossible to put together a proper sentence when speaking to him.

Nonetheless, I bumped in to him as he was crawling out of his trailer.

“Ah! Alabaster!” Part of me was surprised that he remembered my name, but another and somewhat more persuasive part of me was convinced that anything and everything that happened within fifty feet of him was committed instantly and eternally to a timeless Hall of Records that one could access only through his irises.

“Where are you off to?”

I was busted. I had my travel sack on and it was glaringly obvious that I was leaving. I also hadn’t paid for the last few nights of my stay on his land.

“I’m hitching to a festival,” I truthed, unable to devise a lie that would bail me out of having to pay the sixty bucks I had in my pocket.

“Fantastic,” he chirped. “I’ll give you a bundle of mushrooms, and some LSD!”

I gaped, unsure as to whether or not he was truthing. Raindrops began to patter on the pooling tarpaulin that rested atop a lichen-covered patchwork of rust and chipped paint that constituted Jim’s trailer. The trailer looked like it had ventured here in search of food and had failed miserably. He beckoned me inside.

The inside was much more palatable than the exterior. Soft blankets cushioned every surface. Cupboards overflowed with jars of herbs and empty vitamin bottles. He sat me on a sofa piled with half a foot of thick, patchwork comforters, and as I sank into their comfort he told me that he trusted me.

“I can tell. You’ve got… that about you.”

You trust me? Our whole relationship consisted of us moving a run-down bookshelf several feet.

Regardless of my thoughts, I was flattered because here was Jim Sink, owner and manager of a property in which thousands ragged spirit-seekers had called home at least some point in the last few decades, a multi-millionaire who was developing similar projects in obscure third-world countries, telling me that he trusted me.

“Thanks?” I asked, still dazed by the disconnect between the icy cogs turning behind his eyes and the way that his soft voice oozed with enough compassion to comfort me more than the bed of blankets beneath me.

“No,” he mused, pulling a bible of LSD and a bucket of mushrooms out from a cupboard, “thank you.”

The bible of LSD, decorated with images of rainbow-colored bears dancing over a black background, and the sack holding a mycological entity rearing itself up to burst forth through the consciousness of deluded hippies seeking Truth in bits of fungi, stared at me as hard as I stared at them.

He grabbed a handful of the mushrooms, shoved them into a huge bottle that once held enough vitamins to correct the nutritional deficiencies of an entire family, and then broke off a hundred hits of LSD. Neither of these actions made the slightest dent in the respective receptacles.

“This should be good,” he grinned, passing me the goods, “for the weekend. If anyone asks, you just like to pack vitamins around to stay healthy. Actually,” he paused, grabbed a bottle marked vitamin C, dumped half the contents into my mushroom bottle so the impressively intelligent interspecies intelligence was covered by capsules of ascorbic acid and finished, “now you don’t even have to lie. Just bring me the money next time I see you.”

I gave him a hug, partly out of thanks and partly because I wanted to embrace this clownlike character who was becoming increasingly divine with our every interaction.

I was now strangely bound to Jim Sink. He didn’t know a dime about me (or, rather, I didn’t know a dime about him, but he seemed to know a lot about me) and he had just handed me more than a thousand dollars worth of psychedelic goodness without asking for so much as a dime in a deposit.

Of course the idea of running off occurred to me. However, being in cahoots with a character like Jim seemed, at the time, to be more valuable than a boatload of good trips and enough cash to pay rent for a couple months.

Armed with a bottle of conscious awakening, I hit the highway.

disclaimer: this particular entry and other ones involving drugs are absolutely fictional