“Are you sure, man?” asks Rob. “There’s no going back after this.”

So it’s a head change. What the hell. Cough syrup goes down, four ounces apiece. It’s supposed to take about an hour to set in, but things get patchy fast. We’re in a car, headed somewhere to watch people do something. Rob’s asking the driver to pull over. He pukes red.

“Does that mean it won’t work?” I want to know.

“Hard to say. It’s been forever since I did this.”

At the club, she ditches us to find real men. We gesticulate on the dance floor, two awkward wrong-eyed loners. It’s not working, so we find a booth wherein to sit and smoke. Somehow the table is at dance floor level, which puts us in our seats below sea level. It all gets visceral, women with peculiar shapes, waitresses with trays of drinks—No I couldn’t possibly—men with obscene pectorals all waft by in the green undercurrent. Lights and smoke and the overarching drumbeat twist our nerves. Finally she returns and we ride back in silence, ears ringing.

Dropped off on campus, we wander over to Evans Stupid Center. There’s always something going on, no matter how lame. This time it’s Christmas bullshit, which makes perfectly horrendous sense to us in our receptive state. We glide past off-brand fraternity and sorority groups—Hey wasn’t she at the Odyssey?—and up the stairs. There’s a bridge up there on the third floor, a darkling railed area with great carpet for somersaults. We lie on our backs in the dark, washed by noise from below and insights from beyond. What we need is music, not the tinny trash blaring unholy carols to the decorators. We saunter back outside to see a car parked on the sidewalk. “Have you seen any keys?” someone wonders. We may have, but not the sort of keys he needs.

The stuff wears off hours later, but I’m still awake to everything looks different. We try to figure out exactly how with a session of the thinking game, our name for analysis of situations, characters, possibilities. It’s a strange, private form of public discourse. Years later I will watch Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and wonder if Stoppard stole the idea from us. The thinking game is where Rob and I make decisions to initiate or discontinue lesser games. We give ourselves to experimentation, two souls wandering a while together. It’s just another game, like role-playing Palladium or comic book heroes, like the talking to girls game, or the saddest game of all:

“Wasn’t that one girl supposed to come down?”

Rob looks at me across the living room of his dingy trailer. “Yeah.”

“So we’re playing that one game, where we wait around all day and she never shows.”

“Yeah.”

The pentagram scarred in his chest for protection is the only sign she exists. That and memories, like the time I drove up to North Little Rock one summer and smoked two joints with her and Rob on the roof of a shed. They kept quiet, smoking like professionals, but it was my first time and it hit me like childhood. I kept trying to climb these ridiculous post oaks that had been pruned so they had no real branches below ten feet. The stobs I grabbed broke and eventually Rob called softly, “Hey man, we have neighbors.” I felt like a werewolf, but I climbed back up the shed and sat. The sunrise burned up through a power plant below us, a great red gob of lifeblood fresh from some river somewhere on the rim of the world where all peace prevailed.

She never shows, but once Rob goes up to Little Rock and brings back some potent herb. We smoke it at Iron Mountain with that one girl. First the light goes. The boat ramp, the water, and the trees make a gray study, like some beginner’s exercise in drawing shadow. Then there is no god. Next thing I know, I’m face to face with the generative function of the multiverse. Stuff streams from an undefined center in every direction, shapes, colors, faces, meanings coruscating and expanding. I am nowhere. I wonder what will happen if I run up the road and puke, only to find that is exactly what I have done. It hangs hair over my face.

The thinking game mandates that we work on that one game, talking to girls. So we try to make a party. Unfortunately, predatory males weasel their way into our plotting. We end up out by Degray with three girls and one extra guy. He’s bragging about the weed he scored but there’s only enough for one hit. He takes it and shotguns a reluctant Quisling. She passes the residue to me with more grace. I chortle and pull out a half-gallon of Evan Williams. It makes the rounds of blankets on the sand by the fire burns brighter as light fades from the sky. I am mesmerized by the coals, where elementals writhe: Here is no hell. Then someone jumps me, the priestess as it turns out, knocking me off balance and ripping hairs from my head. She wants me to grapple her, but I think about Buddha under the tree and recompose myself.

“Y’all are the most boring stoners I ever met.” She disappears into the woods.

Skinny-dipping follows. Rob is trying to do something involving a cigarette and water. He has his back to us and Cherie says, “Cute butt, don’t you think?”

“Not as much butt as gut suggests,” I reply.

She looks like she likes him. Then the smoke blows in her face and she says thrice quickly, “I hate white rabbits.” It must be some kind of charm, because the smoke shifts again. No fluke, either. Every time the smoke sought her, she turned it. Later Rob and I realize that Cherie, an Army veteran, is a tenth level fighter and fourth level mage.

We get high after the loser leaves. Trying to be lost in the woods, Rob and I wander into a glade. “This is a sacred place,” I say. “Make this gesture here, and nothing evil can enter.” I show him how. The prietess coming down the path turns another way. She couldn’t possibly have heard us. We have ascertained, through Thinking Game protocols, that she is a major character and we are minor characters.

She turns up at another party. This arose one day in the O when I saw everybody without clothes. It was not prurience or porn that suggested I see this way; simply so, bored in the O, “Nothing to do nowhere to go / I wanna be sedated,” and all of a beautiful sudden, the flesh shines through the garments of all those most holy snobs. I stay recumbent so as not to shake it, but when Russian girls arrive for a cigarette, I spring into action. They like to drink, so I promise them alcohol if they return to the O when it gets dark. Success! I look at Rob, lying with his eyes closed, silent as usual when around idiots. He smiles. The rest of the day I tell everyone who approaches me about the party. This is the best game ever. They all want to be there. Rob thinks I shouldn’t tell guys, but it turns out all right because today the O works to keep fools from speaking to me.

Tussined, stoned, and drunk that night, Rob and I sit outside the party house. Half of those who said they would be there actually are. Laughter drifts out to us, alone on the lawn. We’re having a cigarette, since there’s no smoking inside.

“What’s going on here?” Rob asks.

“Rix is playing the guitar to the Russian girls.”

“That’s a given.”

“Right. The rednecks are hitting on the priestess.”

“Anyone else?”

“We’re playing the thinking game,” I say.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Habit.”

“Let me get this straight,” says Rob. “We finally organized a party, the best place to meet girls, and there are girls at the party, and we’re sitting outside.”

“That’s about it.”

“I don’t think we’ll play the thinking game anymore.”

We go inside. Rix becomes a god. Rob and the priestess turn into a stained glass window. And we never play the thinking game again.