PRINCETON HHH HASH #1028.9

Date: Sunday, February 20, 2005

Place: Princeton Community Park School, Mountain Lake, Woodfield Reservation 

Weather: Bracing 

Time: An hour 

Hound: Homoerotic Tick Checking 

Hares: Geezer, Hey YO! Paully, Woueepi, Delicate Psyche, Ju(d)[sti](o)n, Excitable Boy, 
       Safe Sweats and much later, Hand Solo 

Polemics, Descriptions and Lies: Fear and Loathing on the Woodfield Trail 

We were somewhere around the Great Road on the edge of the playing field when the drugs 
began to take hold.  I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you 
should look for marks. . . ."  And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the 
sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around 
the pack which was stumbling about two miles an hour with heads down to Woodfield Reservation.  
And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" 

Then it was quiet again.  Our engineer had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his 
hairy chest, to facilitate the tanning process.  "What the hell are you yelling about?" he 
muttered, staring up at the gray sky with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish 
sunglasses.  "Never mind," I said.  "It's your turn to find a mark."  No point in mentioning 
those bats, I thought.  The poor bastard will see them soon enough. 

It was almost three, and we still had more than a thousand meters to go.  They would be tough 
meters.  Very soon, I knew, we would all be completely twisted.  But there was no going back, 
and no time to rest.  We would have to hash it out.  On-in festivities on the overhang were 
already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our place on the rock and the bag 
of what the hare claimed were green jelly beans.  I knew better.  The trunk of his borrowed 
car looked like a mobile narcotics lab.  Inside were two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets 
of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, an Ivy salt shaker half full of cocaine,
 and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a 
quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Rolling Rock, a pint of raw ether and two dozen 
amyls. 

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed cycling all over 
campus--from Cottage to Forbes, the hare had picked up everything he could get his hands on.  
Not that we needed all that for the hash, but  once you get locked into a serious drug 
collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.  The only thing that worried me was 
the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the 
depths of an ether binge.  And we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.  Probably at the 
next beercheck.  We had sampled almost everything else, and now--yes, it was time for a long 
snort of ether.  And then do the next thousand meters in a horrible, slobbering sort of 
spastic stupor.  The only way to stay alert on ether is to do up a lot of amyls--not all at 
once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at 5 miles an hour through Princeton 
Day School. 

"Man, this is the way to hash," said Geezer.  He started humming and then moaning the words: 
"One toke over the line, Sweet Jesus. . . One toke over the line. . ."  One toke? You poor 
fool!  Wait till you see those goddamn bats. . . .