I had no problem with the idea of marijuana.
I didn’t get why it was illegal since pretty much everybody I’d ever met had tried it and I’d never seen anyone pick a fight because they’d had too much dope. But since I’d started high school everyone—friends, teachers, even family—assumed I was taking drugs because of my writing. One reason for this was that I loved stoner humour like Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon, but I had no clue it was stoner humour. I wrote stories about potato chips laced with microchips created to take over the world. I once brought a potato into class with a plug sticking out of it and declared it, “the electric potato”—it could do everything a regular potato could do AND it was electric. My other fake products included such absurd concepts as shell-less eggs and caffeine-free cola. “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a cola without caffeine.”
I also used to buy postcards wherever I went and filled them out as if I was an alien tourist. Then I’d send them to my favourite writing teacher (who I’d address as Xonthar), list all the beautiful sites I’d seen ... and disintegrated.
And since that was my idea of funny, and this was Vangroovy, every time people read one of my stories they’d ask, “What were you on when you wrote it?”
I was proud of my imagination and the idea that people thought it wasn’t my imagination, that it was some combination of chemicals spinning my synapses, really offended me. I decided that as long as I was going to be a writer I was never going to do drugs. If I had an idea, I wanted to make sure it was mine. So the strongest drug I regularly ingested while writing was my ever-present Coke.
“You’re the writer, what do you want to do now?” It was a question, but it was also a challenge. Maybe Randy didn’t need me. Maybe he could write this himself or bring in another writer, someone with a wild, drug-fueled imagination or ...
I tried to imagine the world’s coolest trick, something amazing, something impossible. And as I stared at the burning skull candle I knew what we had to do.
“Set the audience on fire.”
Randy almost dropped his joint. “What?”
“Wouldn’t that be the coolest trick ever?”
“Burning down the theatre?”
“Not burning down the theatre. Lighting the audience on fire. But not for real—just making them think they’re on fire. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate illusion? It’s always about getting the magician in trouble, right? Making them think the magician’s gonna die. The ultimate—that’s gotta be scaring the hell out of the audience. Making them think they’re gonna die. That would be the coolest trick ever.”
Randy stared at me. “Yeah.”
“So you can’t do it?” I laughed. Randy wasn’t laughing though. The fire sparked something.
“I think you’re right. Let’s do something to the audience. We can’t set them on fire but …”
Now he stared at the skull candle, focusing. It was like he was talking to the skull, not me, when he continued. “We can make an audience member vanish. What about that?”
It wasn’t perfect, but as Randy said it, I realized we were onto something, something amazing. Maybe not the coolest trick ever, but really cool. “I got it,” I said. “Why not kill someone?”
Randy grinned.
I started to pace again, full speed. “We grab someone, kidnap them or hypnotize them or whatever and we bring them onstage and kill them. Light them on fire, cut them in half, put them in the guillotine, whatever, but we kill them. That’ll freak everybody out.”
“You want to kill an audience member?”
“Yeah!” I was pacing so fast I was practically jogging. “That’d be cool. But maybe it doesn’t have to be a real audience member. We can …”
“A plant?” Now he jumped off the couch and started to pace too.
“Yeah. But nobody will know it’s a plant. When we grab our victim, they’ll freak, they’ll scream. In a real magic show people volunteer, right? But this isn’t a real magic show—we’re in a demon dimension. So what if we grab someone and they try to make a run for it. And then …”
“We kill them.”
“Exactly.”
“Can we do it?” I asked.
“If it’s a plant.”
“Can we light them on fire?”
“We’d need a lot of mirrors.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Too expensive.” Then, “We could do a vanish!”
“No,” I said, and I was completely sure of myself now. “They’ve got to die. Onstage. You always see the magician or the assistant do the life and death stuff. And all the volunteer guy from the audience ever does is check the chains, or hold a stopwatch, or something boring. I want the person from the audience to be the one in chains. And since they’re not part of the show, once we kill them, we leave them dead. Let them bleed all over the place. Let the audience wonder what really happened. We won’t even let them take a curtain call, won’t let them leave the theatre till everyone’s gone. I mean the audience probably won’t fall for it, but maybe …” And I grinned.
We were going to kill an audience member. That would be cool.
“You’re right,” said Randy as he stubbed out the remains of his joint. “You don’t need drugs.”
8
Happy Phase
Dr. Bob was my best friend by accident. He wasn’t a doctor, but I was sure he would be one day—unless I had already destroyed his medical career. And there was a character on The Muppet Show named “Doctor Bob,” so that’s what I called him.
Bob had transferred from a school in Montreal just before starting grade eleven, and he arrived a week late. That meant when he started in chemistry class, Bob didn’t know anyone else there, so he got stuck with me as a lab partner. Science and I didn’t get along. The chemistry teacher and I got along even worse. Even though I was only in grade ten I was in grade eleven chem because I’d taken an advanced-credit science class in summer school as an excuse to hang out with Sarah, but since Sarah was in the class—which was the whole point of taking it—none of the science stuck.
I’d destroyed any chance of decent grades during our second week when our very proper teacher, Mr. Joaquin, was trying to explain the difference between animate and inanimate objects. He wanted to make sure we knew that living creatures all shared similar traits. The ones I still remember (and I hope Mr. Joaquin is impressed that something he taught me stuck) is they could eat, excrete and reproduce. After telling us all we needed to know the definition of life, our teacher turned to us and asked, “And how do we know that a candle isn’t alive?”
My hand shot up.
“Because it doesn’t scream when you light it on fire!”
All the students laughed.
Mr. Joaquin suggested I move to the empty table at the back of the class, and that was where Dr. Bob found me when he arrived. When he asked to pair up with me for an assignment, I should have warned him to run—but I didn’t know he had dreams of doing cutting-edge, real-world research.
When Bob showed me the screaming candle he’d doodled in his notebook I suggested we hand in one of our assignments in a series of cartoon panels, like a comic book. It was on cell multiplication. Don’t ask me why we were doing cell multiplication in chem class. Bob drew all the different phases of cell development. We had all the right phases, but we added a bonus