Cosmopolitan

It would appear that, incredibly, my drug dealer was dishonest to me. Who could've predicted that, one, a college dropout selling tabs of acid from an unmarked van in a CVS parking lot was untrustworthy, and two, that not only would he trick me once, but he would go on to trick me two more times? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, then at least give me a discount on the acid and help a brother out.

I've told people about this guy, this goddamn acid dealer who keeps lying to me about the drugs, and any sensible person in my life says, “Henry, what the fuck, man? Just stop buying from him,” and I would if it were that easy, but the bigger problem is not that every one in twenty of his tabs does something he didn't warn me about, but rather, the nineteen other tabs were so unbelievably eye opening and mind blowing that I can’t stop going back to him, no matter how dangerous a game I'm playing.

Today, when I was driving to JFK to board the flight to LA where I was going to meet with my publisher and pitch my new book, one that I have not come up with yet, I realized that there was no way in hell I was going to come up with a good story for a book while on an airplane, in boring flights surrounded by boring people, there was simply no creativity to reap from that situation, which is why I knew I would need some help, in the form of psychedelics.

My dealer, the cheeky bastard, sells me regular acid every time I buy, and then, every now and then, he'll add what he calls “The Chaser,” which is a psychedelic he's been miticulously tinkering with for the better part of a decade. "A base in LSD, a splash of Ketamine, and some PCP I found in a Singaporean ghetto" he would say as he tossed substance after substance into a heated bowl. He fancies himself an alchemist, I bet, but even if he were some misunderstood chemist and I was simply incapable of seeing his vision, it's hard to empathize with someones vision when you're sitting in a van in a parking lot. And you have a flight to catch.

Whenever I get a batch with The Chaser, he won’t tell me, so as to not influence his experiment, but he'll ask about it later. He’ll make me recount every second of that normally unpleasant trip, taking notes on scrap paper, tweaking his ratios and calculations to create the ultimate trip, the trip that you control. His plan is to make the trip last as long as you want, as intense as you want, and as surreal as you want. He says it'll be the perfect psychedelic, for everyone from hardcore users to beginners, which sounds fascinating, but then again, like I've said before, my dealer has a tendency to lie about goddamn everything.

So now, here I am, sitting in my seat, cursing my dealers name, and staring at my blank notebook opened on my tray, empty and expansive, swallowing me like a desert, dawn breaking over its white horizon, like the morning glow over a snowbank. A pencil melts into my hand, becoming one with my fingers, and I do my best to not just draw caricatures of people around me. Even still, in this state, I am noticing how the woman beside me has the tightest ponytail I've ever seen in my life, the man in the seat in front of me has a bald spot shaped like the communist hammer and sickle, and if I squint my eyes, I can peer down the aisle to the first class bathroom where it looks like, and again I’m on a lot of drugs right now, a Tibetan monk has just emerged from the bathroom with a black eye. Pretty hard to concentrate under these conditions. I put my liquid pencil down on my tray and took a look around, trying to find some inspiration. I peered back to the woman beside me, her skin pushed back like an eye-lift thanks to the tightness of her hair. She was reading a Cosmopolitan and made a habit of licking her fingertips before every turn of the page, but not an aggressive lick you'd see an old man doing where he may as well have spit on the book and slapped it to get some grip, but instead the very delicate dab to the lips where maintaining the integrity of the pages was perhaps of more importance than reading the actual content it contained. If she was like this with an airplane magazine, I could only imagine how she was with a book of actual value.

The more I looked at her leafing through the magazine, the more I began to imagine where that magazine had been through. That magazine has been sitting in this airplane for god knows how long, who knows who's touched it at this point, disgusting men scratching their asses and using the magazine to smack flies or teenage girls using the pages to wipe their tears because they don’t have the same tits as the supermodel on page twelve. Then again, maybe I've got it all wrong, maybe everyone who's come through has treated this magazine with just as much respect, also licking their fingers gently enough to catch some grip but not enough to stain the page.

What if everyone treated literature that way? Maybe I wouldn’t be in a dying industry if everyone who read actually respected writing like that. It’s a tough job, not to blow myself too hard here, but even something that most people would consider trivial and mindless like a Cosmopolitan takes somebody out there with some imagination to write. Maybe I could do a story about that, a writer for Cosmopolitan who wants to be a novelist. Maybe there could be a chapter where she’s in the office building for Cosmo and the walls start melting and she bursts through the wallpaper into her office where a fresh typewriter is waiting. Now that I think about it, that’s probably more just a reflection of the drugs I'm still on. I mean, I'm watching this woman page through the magazine and I swear I can see the blonde woman on the cover twisting and contorting, turning her face into a soup of eyes and noses. I still glance over at her pony tail every now and again though, just making sure it hasnt ripped off her scalp yet.

I suddenly feel a wave of pity and shame wash over me, thinking about the ass scratching old man and the insecure teenager. I mean, I'm not usually one to stereotype. I know what a stereotype sounds like, and more importantly, what it sounds like to be stereotyped, and even if I didn’t go through all that, only shitty writers make clichés out of people. Human beings are so much more complex than that, so much deeper than just a guy who scratches his ass and doesn’t read or a teenage girl who feels bad about her body and can’t stop reading. Jesus, I'm out here sounding like a genuine stoner, “its all love man” type of shit, ridiculous, and still, I'm just sitting here wondering how many disgusting hands have touched that magazine.

“Can I help you?” a female voice asked me. I looked up to see that the woman sitting next to me was looking straight at me, or maybe she was looking at either side of my head, considering that her stretched face made her look like a horse.

“I'm sorry?”

“Can I help you with something? Like, do you need anything from me?” she said assertively. I sat with a

foot in my mouth for a second before the cabin lights stopped dilating and my tongue stopped feeling puffy.

“What makes you think I need something from you?”

“You've been staring at my hands for the past ten minutes” she said calmly. I checked my watch, confirming that she was right. I looked back at her and thought of being truthful, saying to her, “honestly, I noticed you licking your fingers and turning the pages of your magazine, and I was wondering how many people had touched that with their gross, unwashed hands, like stereotypical old men and teenage girls, and then I thought about how I should write a story about a writer for Cosmopolitan, and then I realized that most of that idea was bullshit because of how much acid I took before this flight, which was also laced, but I kind of expected it to be laced. Its a whole situation, basically my dealer has this bad habit of giving me bad acid but its actually good acid so I keep taking it. So yeah, thats why I was looking at your hands,” but to be honest, I didn’t wanna say all that and I doubt she wanted to hear it, so instead I did what I do best, and made a story.

“I used to be a hand model, and I think you should be consider a career in hand modeling”

“Hand modeling? Like for rings and bracelets and stuff?”

“Yeah, rings and bracelets and stuff”

“You really think so?”

“Sure. I work for Schumer and Schumer modeling. Out in California.” Schumer and Schumer. Nice one, Henry. Sounds more like a law firm than people that deal in fingers and palms.

“Oh my God, do you really?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Well, it’s just that, I had moved from mississippi to New York to pursue hand modeling, and it all went to shit, so I’m going to give it another try out West!”

“That’s probably smart, Schumer and Schumer doesn’t even have a New York office”

“That explains why I’ve never heard of you!” Her eyes open so wide, I could imagine myself slipping in and drowning, “My name is Hayley, what’s your name?”

“Henry”

“And what do you do at Schumer and Schumer, Henry?”

I thought of my dealer suddenly, the sick little tricks he plays on me. I looked at Hayley, this starry eyed Mississippian, gullible and silly, and imagined how gullible and silly I must look when I ask my dealer, “and you’re not giving me any of The Chaser this time, are you?” I’m no better than him, not meaningfully at least. Just another asshole liar.

“I... I don’t actually work for Schumer and Schumer. I made that up. Sorry.”

“Oh. Why did you do that?”

“My dealer lied to me”

She didn’t say anything, just looking at me for a while, studying me. Although her eyebrows were swooping and swirling around her head, I could tell they were frowned.

She went back to reading her magazine but now holding the magazine with the hand furthest from me and the other hand in her pocket. I sat there, feeling the drugs hold an even tighter grip on my brain, and I opened up my notebook, allowing ideas to brew within me and I began to write on the page.

There was nothing dissatisfying about being a writer at Cosmopolitan, but somewhere deep inside I knew every time I looked down at my hands typing out the newest article that those hands belonged somewhere else, like in a catalog selling rings and bracelets and stuff. Yes, I knew this much was true, my hands were made for modeling, not for writing.

As I wrote and watched my precious words melt into goo, I felt a strange sympathy for my dealer. That ambitious little freak, making me his guinea pig, lying to my face. He considers me a friend, I’m sure, but I think of him as a sneaky fox, thinking he can outsmart me with miracle drug experiments. I wasn’t friends with this woman beside me, but I had become so familiar with her hands and the licking of her fingertips that I considered us familiar. She could be a handmodel, I’m no expert on the subject, but her hands looked at callus free and bald as any billboard I’ve seen urging me to shop at Tiffanys. I wished her well on her journey to California, I hoped to see her hands on a Tiffany billboard some day. Maybe I’d even recognize it. I’d be driving and see a pair of hands that look like they treat magazines and books with care. I’d give the billboard a knowing glance, and continue on my drive, like seeing an old friend in a place you’d least expect. I considered us friends, in a strange one sided way, and what’s a little lie between friends?