In the summer of 2008, my life wasn’t great to say the least. I ended up getting in with a ‘bad’ crowd, and things just sort of spiraled from there. Not that it’s entirely their fault, of course. I wasn’t exactly a successful up-and-comer before I met them and I’m certainly not one now that I’ve been away from them all this time…
I was nineteen-years-old and going absolutely nowhere, working a shitty gas station clerk job that paid next to nothing. Me, Mike and Larry would spend most of our free time driving around getting drunk and high on pretty much anything we could get our hands on. Mike worked with me at the gas station and we’d more often than not spend our respective shifts shitfaced from whatever we got up to on our lunch break.
“Are you going to the quarry on Friday?” I asked Mike through a deepened voice as I expelled the balloon-full of nitrous oxide from my lungs, that familiar numb feeling overtaking me. The dingy little fire escape out back was perfect for us back then, secluded enough to do whatever we wanted but not so much that we couldn’t spot our dickhead manager heading our way to bust up the good time.
“Definitely,” He breathed back at me through a cloud of smoke from his cigarette. Every year, all the kids leaving highschool for college or whatever would meet up to get wasted at the abandoned rock quarry a short drive out of town and every year Mike would go out there to sell weed or X or anything else he thought he could get rid of for jacked up prices to drunk teens far too out of it to notice or care that they were being ripped off. “and I got some new shit that nobody around here’s ever fucked with before.” Now that definitely got my attention. Naive as I was, I never failed to get wrapped up in Mike’s antics even when I knew it was probably all bullshit. The guy always had this way with words that just brought you along for the ride. It made you want to believe him.
“What exactly are we talking about here?”
“Don’t worry about it, you’ll see on Friday.” That all too familiar shit-eating grin crept across his stupid face. I always did hate surprises. Especially from him.
I almost didn’t even go to the ‘party’. It was always underwhelming. The same people with different faces. Boring assholes showing off and trying to get laid with whatever desperate jailbait they could, getting too drunk and starting fights over nothing. I’d just gotten my shitty little wage for the week, my pathetic pittance for all those hours wasted away in the gas station, and I wanted nothing more than to just torch a bowl or few at home and watch a couple shitty movies in the comfort of my bedroom, far away from any potential drama, but after a relentless fifteen minutes of Mike and Larry taking turns calling me demasculating names I eventually gave in and dragged myself into the back of Larry’s gross van and off we went into the unknown. If I’d just stayed in… I don’t know… maybe things might have been different. I try not to think about it too much…
When we showed up, it was already about Nine P.M. and the sun was belting down its last rays of summer heat. I assumed a lot of the people who’d shown up had bailed for somewhere better. There was less than a dozen kids left, and Mike wasted no time feeling out the group for potential buyers.
Larry and I stayed in the van and rolled joints for the drive back, talking shit about Mike and all his shadiness. “The guy could sell sand to the Taliban”, Larry said, “Ice to the Eskimos…”
“He’s fucking greedy about it, too.” I added, rolling the last cone. A few minutes passed and we hopped out to try and find him.
He was sitting in a circle of ten or so people near the edge of the maybe fifty foot rock quarry, and I could see him rummaging in his bag and pulling things out. As we joined the circle he took out a long cardboard box which rattled as it hit the center of the group.
“Twenty bucks a whips. No exceptions, no deals.”
A wave of derision came back from almost everyone present, and I felt as if Mike had finally underestimated his marks.
“If you saw how much I paid for all this then you wouldn’t be running your fuckin’ mouths about it so much. This is the real shit. Not that one-and-done trash your mom bulkbuys on Amazon for her fuckin’ cream dispenser.”
There he went with his aggressive salesman routine, predictably it worked as usual and one kid dug into his wallet and forked over a few crumpled bills.
“Much obliged, my man.” Mike said as he inserted one of the small crimson canisters into a NOS cracker he’d brought along with him. “You won’t be sorry.”
Mike twisted the cracker, puncturing the canister, slowly filling a balloon for him as the hiss carried over the din of our passive conversations. It bulged to the point of popping, thick swirls of gas visible through the thin, expanded latex. He eased it off gently and handed it over. The kid, who I’d never met before, short but mature in appearance with that classic wispy mustache look and acne to match, exhaled out sharply and then breathed in the entire balloon over a few seconds. Silence took over as the rest of us watched intently for the verdict.
“Well, how is it?” Some girl piped up.
“Woah… “ He croaked out, voice deep like Satan himself. Pupils dilating.
After that, cash started coming out from everyone in the circle and in the space of about a minute there were several balloons being handed out at a time. Me and Larry assisted in the filling. Shit, even I started to set one up for myself because I sure as fuck wasn’t getting dragged all the way out there just to stand around and watch. I had put the balloon to my lips, ready to inhale, when I noticed that the kid who’d first taken a hit was suspiciously quiet, visibly shuddering a little bit. I breezed over to him, balloon full of gas gripped between my thumb and forefinger, and asked, “Hey, you okay, bud? First time, huh?”
He looked up at me, and I’ll never forget that fear in his eyes. He was white as a ghost, and it looked like he couldn’t answer me even if he wanted to. It had been close to five minutes since he did his balloon and it wasn’t exactly normal for the high to last anywhere near that long, and it was definitely odd to see red N20 canisters as far as I knew. But, looking around, everyone else seemed to be having a good enough time, so I pushed the concern to the back of my mind and released the gas into my lungs; assuming that any ‘bad trips’ that might have been going on were down to inexperience and nothing else.
As soon as I exhaled the sulforous tasting gas I was struck with an immediate and heavy ringing in my ears, far beyond anything I’d experienced before. My vision began to shake and my knees gave out. I collapsed to the ground, and a chilling realization washed over me in an instant. This isn’t nitrous.
I must have blacked out, shuddering violently as I propped my head up under my elbow. I observed the scene around me. It was chaos. Five of the ten others were laying down comatosed, occasionally letting off a slight twitch and little else but groans. Mike was freaking out, trying to shake them back to consciousness, but it was no use.
Three girls were holding each other on the ground, taking turns to scream. One would screech out, then another, and so on. It was as if they thought interrupting each other might somehow nullify their cries for help.
I managed to pull myself to my feet, staggering around, still firmly under the spell of that terrible ringing in my ear which was now throbbing so painfully I could hardly think. Almost like tinnitus, except worse, like church bells ringing in my head. That’s when I realized that the kid I was talking to was standing on the quarry’s edge, arms spread out, and as I stumbled over to grab him and pull him back he jumped feet first onto the stone beneath with a horrible crunch, followed by a howl of pain. He hardly sounded human.
I clutched onto Mike’s grimy bomber jacket and I managed to blurt out something like, “What the fuck, man”, but he didn’t answer. Just stared at me with this deer in headlights look I’d never seen in him before. That’s when Larry, one of the only of the group not to partake in the mystery gas, yanked both of us towards the van.
“We need to get the hell out of here, right fucking now!” His frightened tone sounded so strangely distant as I clenched my eyes shut, as if he were a million miles away and yet still right there in front of me. Everything seemed to fade into the background behind the ringing in my ears. Those clanging bells… I tumbled into the back, and before there was even time to slide the door closed Larry was speeding away from the scene. I got one last glimpse at the group we were leaving behind, still shaking and screaming and spazzing out and rolling around on the stone and the dirt, and I started to cry; not giving anything close to a fuck about what either of them thought about me as they sat in shocked silence up front.
I didn’t go out much after that. I never saw Mike and Larry again either. I went back to work for my Monday shift to be hit with the news that Mike had taken his dad’s gun and shot himself in the head. He didn’t die, although I bet he wishes he did.
It seems like nobody ever managed to ID us. Those kids at the quarry must have been so far gone that they couldn’t even remember who we were. Just that somebody had turned up with ‘whippets’. The van was parked over a hill out of sight, so they couldn’t even give the cops that specific detail to work with. I never read the news, and I didn’t listen to anyone who talked about it, so I never found out about the aftermath. I wanted to play as dumb as possible in case anyone showed up at my house asking questions, but they never did. I never found out what the gas was, and I never found out what happened to that kid who jumped. Honestly? I don’t think I’d ever even want to. Ever…