10
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too
(Stevie Nicks)
Their engines died; their headlights ambered and went dark. Once Stan could see again, he felt his tension dissipate immediately as he realized they knew all four of these people. Eric Cartman (sporting long dark hair and a beard) was driving the first ATV, with a very composed-looking Tweek Tweak seated behind him, blond hair longer and wilder than ever. Clyde Donovan was driving the other ATV, with Bebe clinging to his waist behind him.
"Hey guys! S'up?" Cartman said, smiling broadly. The light of the campfire glittered off the zippers of his leather jacket.
"Hey, Cartman…Tweek," Stan replied. Kyle stood up behind him. He looked toward the other ATV. "Hey, Bebe…how's it going, Clyde?"
"Pretty good so far!" Clyde answered loudly, and he and Bebe dissolved into helpless laughter, much too hard to be from just his nonsensical reply.
Stan and Kyle exchanged nervous glances. "Oh…kay," Kyle said, watching the two people who had been high school sweethearts a dozen years ago begin to laugh themselves into a complete frenzy.
"Don't try to make any sense out of those two!" Tweek said loudly. There was something decidedly off about his eyes. "They're tripping their balls off…well, Clyde is at least…I don't know what Bebe's tripping off."
That made Clyde and Bebe laugh even harder.
"Jesus," Kyle said, watching them. A log in their campfire popped, sending sparks swirling toward the sky. Bebe and Clyde both turned toward the fire. "So you guys are like on acid or something?"
"Not acid!" Tweek replied; even from five feet away, Stan could see Tweek's pupils were blown wide open and realized he was tripping as well, only he was handling it a lot better than Clyde and Bebe. "They're—"
"Uh oh!" Cartman interrupted loudly. He stood up, thick legs straddling each side of the ATV. "Uh, excuse me!" He loudly broke wind, his jean-clad ass inches from Tweek's suddenly outraged face. Tweek stood up and tumbled backward from the vehicle, landing on his butt in the dirt behind the ATV.
Stan and Kyle couldn't help but laugh. "Aah! You sick bastard!" Tweek screamed, looking up from the ground behind the ATV's rear tires.
"'Ey! I said 'excuse me'!" Cartman replied, looking around innocently. Clyde and Bebe were nearly falling off their ATV seat laughing. Stan and Kyle looking at each other and shook their heads at this absurd, crass display. Another log popped.
"As my friend Tweek here was saying," Cartman continued as if nothing unusual had just happened. "Don't listen to those two black assholes." He gestured toward Clyde and Bebe, who were again transfixed by the campfire. "They ate enough magic mushrooms—"
"Psilocybin mushrooms," Tweek clarified, crossing his forearms on his bent knees.
"Yeah, whatever." Cartman shook his head. "Either way, those two are going to be out of it for the next six hours or so." He spotted the twelve pack of beer next to Stan's chair. "Hey, you wouldn't have a spare one of those, would you?" He gestured toward the beer. "We'll get you high!"
"Fuck yeah, Cartman!" Kyle replied happily. "One thing we have plenty of is beer." Stan crouched down to reach inside the twelve pack and offered Cartman a can.
"You're not tripping too, Cartman?" Stan asked.
"Oh hell no! I don't do that hippy shit." He cracked open his beer and took a long drink from it. "But we didn't buy enough beer for tonight, so when we saw someone else camping here, I was sort of hoping…"
"Let's go sit by your fire," Tweek said, standing up behind Cartman and brushing dirt from the back of his legs.
Clyde seemed to think that was a great idea. "Yeah…let's…" he looked around, then back at his feet where something on the ground near his front left tire seemed to fascinate him. "Look at the shadows on the ground," he said reverently.
"Jesus, Clyde!" Bebe smacked his shoulder with the palm of her hand. "I know it's all flickery, but you're acting weird about it."
"Sshsh!" Clyde shushed her, looking up again. "Okay, Bebe."
"'Flickery?'" Kyle whispered and Stan chuckled, reaching down to pick up the twelve pack.
"Yeah. Let's sit by the fire." Cartman stepped away from the ATV, walking toward the campfire, which by now was burning brightly with the branches Stan had added. They gathered around it and sat down in a circle, Kyle on Stan's left, Tweek and Cartman on his right. Bebe and Clyde settled together on the other side of the fire.
"Fire is awesome when you're tripping," Clyde said dreamily. Cartman drained his beer and crushed the can. Stan wordlessly handed him another one.
Tweek reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out two hand rolled cigarettes and lit them both at the same time, handing one to Cartman and leaning forward to pass the other one across to Clyde. The two joints made their way around the group a few times, and soon Stan thought he might be higher than he'd ever been.
Clyde was fixated on the ground again. He nudged Bebe and pointed. "Look at the shadows from the fire," he whispered, and this time she seemed as interested in whatever Clyde was watching as he was
"That must be some really good shit," Kyle commented, watching Clyde's face as the light from the flames glittered in his eyes. Tweek was the one who replied, and Stan couldn't recall ever seeing him look as relaxed as he did right now.
"It's the best man! It's way better than LSD; it…it opens up your mind in a way you can't imagine…and you never completely lose that openness afterwards!"
"Sh—yeah!" Cartman scoffed. "Your mind is going to be so open you'll be talking to the trees in an hour." He cracked open the beer Stan had given him and took a long drink, then held his can up in a toast. "This is all I want, right here. Stan, thanks for this." He took another drink, and included Kyle in his next remark. "It's good to see you guys again."
"You too, Cartman." Kyle raised his beer can in a toast; apparently in the years since they had last seen him, Cartman had mellowed into a more pleasant person to be around. "Thanks for the weed; we kind of helped each other out."
"Hey, you guys want to trip too?" Tweek asked. Clyde was holding a stick into the fire, trying to light the end of it.
Stan and Kyle looked at each other. "I don't know," Stan replied slowly, still watching Kyle. "Do we?"
"I kind of do," Kyle replied. "It's not like we haven't done it before…and we don't have to go anywhere anytime soon."
Stan hadn't heard Kyle speak as much as he had tonight in years. If they did this, he could let Kyle trip by himself and look after him. On the other hand…the two times they had tripped together some ten years ago (with actual LSD that Kenny had gotten for them, one hit each on a piece of blotter paper a quarter of the size of a postage stamp), they had had an incredible amount of fun.
Kyle had said he wanted to trip. "Yeah, me too," Stan heard himself say. "Like you said, if we stay put, we'll be fine."
"All right!" Clyde said happily. The end of the stick he was holding in the fire was ablaze and he held it up in the air, several flaming pieces of bark dropping from it and landing on the ground near his feet. "Woah…cool."
Tweek stood up and walked around the fire, crouching down behind Stan and Kyle. He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a small plastic baggie. He stuck two fingers inside it and brought out a small wad of what Stan expected to look like marijuana but instead looked like dried cow shit. He offered it to Kyle, who held it in the palm of his hand, looking at it curiously.
"It's just dried mushrooms!" Tweek said. "You'll want to swallow them as quick as you can, and have a beer or something ready to wash them down with." He laughed. "They don't taste very good." He reached back into the baggie and offered another large pinch of the dried fungus to Stan.
He looked down at it. He could faintly make out where it had once been small mushroom caps, now shriveled and tangled up with twisted gnarly stems. He thought he could faintly smell them, rancid and cloying.
"These are, like, safe, right?" Stan asked; Kyle was hesitating as well.
"Well, they're going to fuck you up!" Tweek replied happily. "But I know they're the right kind of 'shrooms. Ah…you don't have to take them if you don't want—"
"Screw it!" Kyle said, raising his palm to his mouth and quickly following what he had eaten with a large gulp of his beer. A moment later his face twisted in disgust. "Aw, Jesus…"
Tweek laughed as Kyle leaned forward as if he were about to vomit. "There you go!" Tweek said long moments later as Kyle seemed to get himself under control.
Stan looked at the brown and withered mass in his hand. Now that he'd decided to do this, he was determined to shove the whole thing in his mouth and swallow it, washing it down immediately with mouthfuls of beer. Kyle had already committed himself, so… Just before his hand reached his mouth the smell hit him even harder and he felt his throat close as he stuffed the horrid-tasting fungus into his mouth. It may have looked like dry cow shit but it tasted a thousand times worse and he forced a swallow, chugging beer to wash it down and feeling his gorge rise as the rancid mass slid past his throat and down toward his stomach.
"Oh, fuck," he moaned, not certain he wasn't about to vomit what he'd just swallowed, along with everything else he had eaten or drank in the past six hours. The nausea slowly, slowly passed and he looked up again. Kyle had straightened up as well and was smiling.
"Hell yeah!" Clyde said happily, the burning stick he was holding over his head momentarily forgotten; Bebe was staring at it, fascinated. "You guys are going to have a blast!"
"This calls for a toast…or something," Tweek said, sitting down behind Stan and Kyle, their shadows wavering on his face. He produced yet another joint, lit it, and passed it to Stan.
"Jesus, dude!" Kyle said, taking the joint after Stan had taken a large hit from it. He took a deep drag and passed it to Cartman. By the time it had made its way around two more times, Stan felt like his head could float away, and he lay back on the ground resting on his elbows and staring into the fire.
"We're not going to stay much longer," Cartman said a few minutes later, watching Stan and Kyle as if waiting for something to happen. "I'd love to take a couple more beers back with me when we leave though."
Stan nodded. "No problem, Cartman." He thought that perhaps the fire seemed a little bit brighter.
Fifteen minutes went by while Stan became more and more distracted by the flames; there were a few attempts at conversation but most of the time passed in silence.
The world seemed more and more off-kilter, the fire too bright, the wind rustling in the trees too loud. Clyde had become engaged in a conversation with Bebe and Cartman that Stan had mostly ignored, until Clyde said something that dragged him abruptly back into the moment.
"He wanted me to drive all the way to Denver at 4:30 this afternoon to pick up those brake shoes for him." Clyde snorted. "Heh, yeah right! I told him…I told him to eat the shit out of my peanuts." He blinked, suddenly looking confused. Realization dawned in his eyes and he laughed again and sputtered, "I mean…the peanuts out of…" He lay down on his back, staring up at the sky and howling with laughter, braying like a jackass. Bebe was staring down at him incredulously.
"All right!" Cartman said, suddenly climbing to his feet. "I think we've inflicted ourselves on Stan and Kyle enough for one night. Let's go you guys."
"Hey Cartman," Stan said, standing up and feeling the earth lurch beneath his feet. Whoa. It took him a moment to steady himself. "Come on…I've got something for you."
Cartman looked at him curiously. Stan turned toward his SUV; something about the way the firelight reflected off the metal of the vehicle fascinated him. In fact, everything suddenly seemed much more interesting. Walking intensified the effect as the world seemed on the verge of slipping into chaos. His senses felt overloaded as each insignificant detail of everything around him demanded his attention. He heard Cartman walking behind him, heavy shoes crunching through pine needles. The wind whined above, and the brighter stars winked behind the pines as they swayed overhead. Stan realized that Clyde was correct, and that staring into their campfire later tonight while tripping was going to be awesome.
It took Stan extra effort to wrap his hand around the handle of his truck's back lift gate. He twisted it and stepped back as the hatch opened; the dome light was much too bright and he winced at the glare, remembering Kyle's lighter. "Jesus Christ!" he muttered, loud enough for Cartman to hear. He laughed.
"You're starting to feel it, eh Stan?"
"Yeah…I think so." Stan squinted through the dome light's glare; it was impossibly bright and surrounded by a halo. He reached in and opened the lid of the cooler. The ice surrounding their beer glimmered like thousands of tiny diamond chips. Stan blinked and thought: Holy shit…
"You're gonna be a complete mess in an hour, Stan," Cartman told him, no longer laughing but his voice was still uncharacteristically friendly. "Don't worry…we're not gonna stick around. And as long as you guys stay put and don't try to go anywhere or do anything else stupid, you'll be fine."
Stan nodded, realizing afterward that Cartman probably couldn't see it. He reached in and grabbed an unopened twelve-pack of Busch. The ice loudly dropped away as he lifted it from the cooler, diamonds glittering at they tumbled (flickery) back into the ice chest; a few landed outside the ice chest next to the spare tire. "Here you go, dude." Stan handed him the half-case of beer. "I'm glad you guys stopped by."
"Sweet!" Cartman replied happily, taking the beer from Stan. "Hell, yeah!"
Stan wasn't sure if he was giving the beer to Cartman in payment for the weed they had smoked, or for unintentionally breaking the ice a bit with Kyle. At least tonight was going to be interesting (fuck, it's going to be hella interesting), and wouldn't end with them sullenly climbing into Kyle's old tent and passing out after a few more hours of uncomfortable silence.
He slammed the door closed and they walked back toward the fire and the four people sitting around it.
Clyde was holding a much thicker piece of wood into the flames. "Wow…" he intoned, holding the burning branch overhead, its blazing end burning like a torch. He began waving it slowly back and forth. "Look at the trails, Bebe!"
Stan could see them himself now as well, a visible shimmering wake of light following behind the burning torch as Clyde slowly waved it over his head. Kyle seemed at least as interested in what Clyde was doing as Stan was.
"Thanks again, Cartman!" Stan was having trouble organizing his thoughts to speak. "We really wanted to smoke pot tonight, but all we could get at the last minute was beer. This is going to be way better."
"Glad it all worked out," Cartman said. He said to his group: "Saddle up you guys, I have stocked up on beer. Let get back to our campsite and leave these two to trip in peace."
The small party began breaking up, Clyde helping Bebe (who seemed completely out of it) to her feet and leading her back toward the ATVs. Stan stood next to Kyle who, from the way he was staring at the fire, was obviously feeling the effects of the hallucinogenic mushrooms they had eaten as well.
"Good night you guys," Clyde said, Bebe clinging to him from behind. He started his ATV, Cartman doing the same a moment later. The night was filled with the sound of two small engines revving.
"See you guys around…thanks!" Kyle said as the two vehicles lurched forward and turned around, their headlights lighting up the night as they drove away, red tail lights receding in the distance.
Stan and Kyle turned to each other, grinning wildly. Stan spoke first. "Jesus Christ, dude!"