Super Dopeman of the Haight and Ashbury Part II

Driven by a desire for boozy good times, an unlikely and reluctant hero finds himself wielding incomprehensible powers of psychedelic proportions! Stay tuned in, dropped on and turned out for The Adventures of Doug, the Super Dope Man of the Haight and Ashbury.  Read part I here.

Doug wasn’t sure whether he’d been shot or not. He was already so banged up – and there was so much adrenaline pumping through him – he just couldn’t tell for sure. Speaking of adrenaline: shouldn’t he be able to have, like, superhuman emergency strength like a mother lifting a car to save her babies? Or was that just a myth? His cousin Vince – a cop – had told him first-hand about a guy on PCP that was really scrawny but had been able to fight off half a precinct. So PCP strength was real.

Doug looked at the briefcase again…

He stretched out and ground his teeth in pain but pulled it over and cracked it open. It was full of pills and powders in different bottles and baggies. There was also some weed, but that wouldn’t really help right now. There were two syringes and a clear vial with a label that read: “morphine.”

“Shit,” thought Doug. “I’ve always wanted to try morphine. Well, no fuckin’ time like the present.”

He pulled the syringe cap off with his teeth and plunged a needle through the lid — you know the type of lid that was designed for needle insertion — and then jammed it into the little bit of his thigh that poked out between the people pile.

“Aaaaah…” Doug thought. And he probably would have actually gone to sleep just then except for that the gunman let off a few more shots and the people in the bar screamed. Doug thought he heard his ex-girlfriend cry out. “Gotta…gotta save Jenny…” He thought.

Jenny was actually in Austin, Texas at the time. But that really doesn’t matter. The point is that Doug was inspired. So he reached into the briefcase and started shoving drugs into his face. PCP hadn’t been popular for some time, but who knew, maybe there was some in there.

First he popped a few pills: a couple little round blue ones, a big white one, a yellow one with a pyramid stamped into it, a diamond-shaped blue one with a V on it. Then he started tearing open the powder bags with his teeth. First he found some blow and snorted some of that. Then he found some more blow and snorted some of that, too. The third baggy seemed to be blow, too, so he shook the briefcase around a bit. The next bag he grabbed was definitely something different. It looked like coke but it burned like fire. Wee-ooo! Doug was starting to feel good now.

The next bag was a little bit browner and tasted awful. “Must be MDMA,” thought Doug as he licked plenty of the brown powder from his finger. “We’ll save some of that for later. Where’s the PCP, man?!”

He was starting to feel quite uninhibited, though. So when he found a bag of mushrooms, he decided “What the fuck!” and munched on a cap while he searched through the rest of the drug pile. What did PCP look like anyway? Was it a powder or was it a pill? Hell, it could be a liquid for all he knew. He’d never seen the shit in person.

Inside, there was some nonsense about Hitler and the pyramids being shouted when Doug found the PCP — or what he at least thought was PCP. It was a prescription pill bottle that was waving around like jello in a race car. The printing on the side of the bottle was swirling around like wisps of smoke but Doug could plainly make out the letters P-C-P on the side near the top. It actually read: “Prescription: Charles Patterson: Ibuprofen 500 mg.” Charlie had been taking them for an inflamed knee joint due to a basketball injury.

But Doug popped a few of them and just knew — knew — he would have superhuman strength soon. He would just have to wait for a moment while they took affect. He looked over at the wall and was amazed at how beautiful the concrete was. He wanted to caress every little crevice, ponder every pebble frozen in its face, love every inch of the moldy, dirty patio wall with his eyeballs. And so he did, gazing affectionately at the concrete for about twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, the police had arrived and were attempting to negotiate with the gun-wielding, headphone-wearing jerk inside the bar — who had about sixteen hostages. Sadly there had been nineteen hostages when Doug popped the placebo pills, but well, this isn’t a Disney movie. The police negotiator was talking into a bull horn and assuring the gunman that they were calling the President of the United States to see what could be done about changing the Constitution in order to allow Christianity to be taught in schools. Meanwhile swat teams were starting to climb up the roof.

Charlie stood in the back doorway, his large Stetson hat pulled down close to his eyes. He was full of bullet holes and covered in blood. “You sir!” He cried at the gunman, who immediately wheeled around. “You drink like a goddam girl!”

BRAAAAATATATATATATATA!!!!!

A stream of bullets ripped through Charlie and he fell backwards out the doorway, revealing the broom handle that had been propping him up. Breathing heavily, the gunman walked slowly over to examine Charlie. He thought he had killed the man twice already. What was he? High on PCP?

He nudged Charlie with one foot. If he had looked up, he would have seen Doug, standing on the upper section of the patio despite his misaligned ankle and bullet wound, grinning like a psychotic Easter Bunny and holding aloft the nearly four hundred pounds of the late Sally.

To be continued…