Maple Daydream

The drugs, mainly. The drugs are high-grade, no doubt, expensive shit. The drugs are Canadian. The drugs are so far up my ass, if I sneezed you’d probably get stoned. Or, you know, the flu. I've been sneezing more than I probably should be. Even before I had the half-brick of Maple Daydream shoved up my tailpipe by a large, ungentle Samoan woman with hands of ice and absolutely no sense of humor.

I was gonna go to the doctor last week actually, but then my buddy Steve called and said he had a job for me. Steve’s good like that. I mean, sure, the last job ended up being gay porn, but it paid well. And it’s not like he lied or anything, just left off an adjective or two.

Anyway, like I was saying, Steve called and said his regular mule was beaten to death by an entire playground full of kids, bludgeoned like a pinata actually, ‘cause the guy had told them he had a “bellyful of the sweet stuff.” I mean, that’s what Steve said, anyway, I don’t know if it was true or not. Either way, he still needed me to make a run.

Now, normally this isn't my thing, and I told him that, but he swore up and down that it'd be alright, that it's only Canada and, hey, it's bound to be less invasive than that Essential Fluids shoot. Plus he said he'll split the profits with me, 30/60. So I said, OK, sure, but what about the other ten, and he said, that's for the cat, and I said, the cat?, and he said, yeah, the cat.

No, the cat’s not some code for his dealer, I thought that too at first. The cat’s just a cat. Steve’s weird like that.

But, yeah, like I was saying, I agreed and took a red-eye to Vancouver the next day. Only we never actually made it ‘cause the fucking engines failed. All of ‘em. Somehow the pilot managed to pull the plane under control and land us in the middle of the fucking woods, we were just bouncing up and down and up and down, trees and moose speeding past the windows.

Eventually we stopped sliding, the plane’s barely a plane anymore, and the handful of us that survived climbed out to find ourselves in the middle of frigging nowhere. We have to hike our asses across the Canadian wilderness just to get a damn cell phone signal. And as soon as we do we’re attacked by wolves. No kidding. Everybody panics and runs, in, like, thirteen directions. I end up in Sasquatchaketchawanaka or something with a poet and her whiny-ass musician boyfriend. She’s lost her phone along the way, my battery’s dead, and the douchebag boyfriend doesn’t have one to begin with because he doesn’t believe in them, so I punch him in the head repeatedly and sell him to a truck-driver for sixty Canadian dollars and a ride to the nearest town which is, like, a day’s drive away.

Yeah, she argued, but not, you know, a lot.

So, yeah, we get to this backwater town, which ends being just a truck stop somewhere in some other part of Canada I can’t pronounce, and I buy a charger and we eat some waffles while we wait, and then I call Steve and I tell him, dude, I’m out, I can’t do this. And he’s like, what, no, you can’t give up, think about the cat. And I’m like, I’ve never even seen this damn cat, fuck you. So he sends me a picture of the cat on my phone and the thing’s adorable. Seriously, criminally adorable. Here, take a look.

I know, right?

But, yeah, Steve’s persuasive like that, so me and the poet hitchhike our way to British Columbia where we meet up with my contact, Gertrude.

No, Gertrude’s a dude.

I don’t know.

Gertrude takes us out to dinner and a Canucks game, we all have a pretty good time, and then he throws me in the back of his car and takes me to meet the angry Samoan.

No, she got to ride shotgun. Gertrude never really explained that. That’s just how things go down in the B.C. apparently.

Yeah, I’m kidding, I totally made that up. They just call it British Columbia. They’re not as retarded as we are.

Anyway, after my visit with the angry Samoan, me and the poet, we’re both still a little traumatized from the last plane ride, so we decided to take a bus back to the States. We’re practically sitting on top of each other on some kind of cut-rate tourist bus, but we’re hitting it off pretty well, everything’s going pretty good, and then we get to the border. Customs decides to board our damn bus and, sure enough, the dog they got comes right over to me.

I started panicking, thinking this animal has somehow sniffed out my guts, and, honestly, I’m a little worried I’m gonna shit myself right there and get found out for good, but it turns out it’s not me but the poet that the dog’s after. She’s been carrying around three kilos of hashish in her satchel this whole time. I start breathing again, but then the bitch sells me out and we both get hauled in.

So there we were, handcuffed to each other in some sheriff’s office in a Podunk border town no one’s ever heard of and they’re going on and on about how terrible we are and this is a big fucking deal and all this other nonsense. I’m sitting there, going over my situation, thinking, yeah, alright, I’ll cover for Steve if it comes to it, but, man, fuck Gertrude and that Samoan and her cold God damned hands. I’m getting all set to rat them out and cover my own ass, but I don’t have to. Not only did that poet chick have three kilos of hashish on her, she had a couple condoms full of LSD in her. But because of all the shit that went down and the delays and the bus instead of the flight back home, the condom dissolved or shifted or something and the girl just went completely fucking unhinged. Starts screaming about butterflies and unicorns trying to chew off her face. She’s thrashing around and I’m thrashing around with her and she’s jumping up and down and I’m trying to hide but it’s not working and then she slides her hand out of the cuffs and starts throwing shit and scratching and, I don’t even know, I just ran.

Right back into the wilds of Canada.

Although, to be fair, after a day of running I’m pretty sure it became the wilds of the Northwestern United States, it’s hard to tell the difference. But it didn’t really matter, because at that point, I’m like, fuck Steve and fuck his stupid cat. I’m lost in the woods, with nothing but Canadian Monopoly money in my pocket and a half a brick of marijuana in my colon, I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m confused and a little worried about the poet and even more worried about what might happen to my insides and, not for nothing, but I need to take what I can only assume is going to be the single most massive shit ever recorded by man. I have been holding it for days. Seriously, I would’ve sold Steve’s ass out to whoever whenever wherever if they promised me a sandwich, a toilet, a bed, I didn’t care, all of which I explained to three hikers, a state trooper, and, like, thirteen truck drivers before this one grizzly motherfucker finally offered to give me a ride to Seattle in exchange for half of what I’m carrying up my pooper.

And that, my dear, sweet, very pretty Taco Bell employee, is why I would like seventeen burritos and a plunger.