Oh look, another glorious morning. Makes me SICK!

....to continue the Halloween story (recap here)....

PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR AN EPIC TALE

Mike#1 and I probably looked like a pair of homeless devil-worshipers when we left the church lawn on Halloween morning to go back to the payphone.

Unfortunately, we were out of change, so we went to beg for some from the gas station attendants before calling Mike#1's mom again.

She was a heavy sleeper. She didn't answer the phone.

The guys working at the gas station said we couldn't loiter, so we walked in a half-hour-long circle and then came back to try again. This time, thank God, his mom answered. She was not happy at being woken up before 8:00 in the morning on a Sunday.

Their conversation went something like this:

Mike#1: Hi, Mom. Umm.... do you think you could do me a huge favour and give me and Mich a ride home?

Mom: ....but I thought you were home? I heard you come in last night.

Mike#1: Umm....... what?

Mom: Hold on.

[Silence while Mom went down to the basement.]

Mom: What the fuck is Rocko doing passed out on the floor downstairs?!?

Mike#1: Oh thank God. TAKE THE KEYS. DO NOT let him leave in my car. Can you come get us? Please please please?

Mom: Where the hell are you?

Mike#1: The Market Basket. In Franklin Lakes.

Mom: Ugghhhhhhhh fine. I'll try and be there in an hour. Try not to get arrested between now and then.

(Now if that was Mumsy, she'd have had me arrested, beaten me up, and shipped me off to a nunnery before the day was out.)

Mike#1's mom arrived an hour and a half later. During our waiting time, Mike#1 and I were kicked off the premises of every single business in that shopping centre. His mom didn't even ask how we had gotten to that location, or why. She simply demanded that we buy her breakfast at the diner and a pack of cigarettes to repay her for the ride.

So we went back to Mike#1's house, he asked his mother would it be alright if I crashed for a while with him so we could catch up on sleep, and if I could stay the night in the event that we came back to his house after Halloween shenanigans. She gave him that raised eyebrow "I know what you horny teenagers are really up to" glare, but said ok.

Mike#1 and I went down to the basement. Rocko was still asleep on the floor. Mike#1 rectified that by kicking him in the stomach.

This occurred with some frequency.

 Turns out Rocko had hidden on the next street over with the car off so it looked like it was parked and unoccupied. When the fire department left, Matt#2 and Sara crawled out from wherever they'd been touching each other, saw the car, and eventually went home with Rocko. Beforehand, they apparently spent an hour driving in circles around Franklin Lakes looking for me and Mike#1.

-________-

So we cat napped for a bit, then fecked around in the basement until like lunchtime, and then went to the Monroe Diner to meet up with Matt#2 and a few others to plan the actual Halloween festivities. We knew of six parties going down, and planned to make an appearance at all of them. It would be a caravan of sorts, with two drivers and probably more passengers than would be comfortable.

I got distracted by the diner's placemats. They were typical diner placemats--the paper ones with all the ads for local businesses and whatnot.

This guy had an ad for as long as any of us could remember:

I don't remember if he was a lawyer or a realtor or what, but for whatever reason his face really freaked out our friend Lizz. (And BigSis#2 as well, but I didn't torture her as badly...).

I took everyone's placemats and tore his face out of all of them. Before we left the diner, Rocko stoke a stack of like 50 placemats from the hostess stand, so we could make a collage of his face for Lizz.

Back at Mike#1's house, we did some drugs, played some video games, and then before we left to start picking up everyone else, Mike#1 requested that I sew his mouth shut.

Perhaps some elaboration on Mike#1.

To anyone who didn't know him well, he was f*cking terrifying. He prided himself on the fact that he had 26 holes in his face, not even counting the tongue ring and the many many many holes in his ears.

On top of that, he always looked furious. It was just his normal facial expression. Add the typical metalhead hair (shaved underneath, long on top) and what I always think of as the rockstar goatee, and the supergoth/metal wardrobe, and he probably looked like the son of Satan to the average bystander. Like seriously people crossed the street when they saw him coming.

So with this black rubber band thread stuff, I sewed Mike#1's mouth shut using the holes from his nine lip rings.

Obviously, when we were picking everyone up, we had to send Mike#1 to the front door.

We didn't honk in driveways because most parents hated that. Also you couldn't honk the horn in Mike#1's car because then it wouldn't stop honking.

We met up with Danny and everyone else in the other car at the first party. And so it began.

Party Number 1 - Jason's House

Basically:

Party Number 2 - Matt#1's House

You could probably have moved into Matt#1's house and no one in his family would ever notice. Since he didn't want anyone destroying his actual house, he threw the party in his basement. It was like a rave--lights out, music blaring, blacklights, a bar. It was kind of crowded, though, so me and Mike#1 snuck upstairs to explore the rest of the house.

But then Rocko got into a fight with some other kid for unknown reasons, so we left.

Party Number 3 - Mike#5's House

Mike#5 lived two blocks over from Matt#1. It wasn't a big party, and some girl started vomiting all over the kitchen like 15 minutes after we got there, so we decided to move on.

Party Number 4 - The Woods

Mike#1 almost killed us several times on the drive there, because Rocko kept trying to pick a fight with him and WOULD NOT leave him alone, and since Mike#1's mouth was sewn shut, he couldn't retaliate verbally. But we somehow made it in once piece, parked on the designated side street, and made the trek into the woods.

I don't know who threw the party, or who invited us. I'm actually pretty sure we had found the wrong party, because none of us knew anyone there. Until Sara recognized someone from her school.

These were not goth kids, nor were they punks or metalheads or hippies or anything similar. They were just dressed that way for Halloween. According to Sara, these were the popular kids from the public school in her town. (At the time, we actually called kids like them the "trendy" kids. No one ever used the term "popular.")

Mike#1, Sara, and I decided that we should play one of our favourite games with our new trendy friends. Only we altered the rules slightly.

"Where's Waldo" involved everyone getting an identical bottle of some kind of beverage (usually soda). When we played, all but one of those bottles would be spiked with different drugs and/or alcohol, but no one knew which ones or what drug(s) were in them.

So yeah since we had a huge supply of acid with us (in a box of sugar cubes), we spiked pretty much every single one of the trendy kids' drinks. We felt entirely justified doing this because among the group of trendy kids were two girls who used to torture Sara in grade school.

(This is why you should't bully the weird kids. We are more cunning than you, we have no qualms about doing evil things to you, and we will hold grudges.)

About half an hour later, most of the kids of the woods party had started acting kind of strange.

As much as we wanted to sit and watch the ensuing bedlam, we thought it might be best that we get the heck out of there before anything really bad happened (as in, before the cops showed up). As far as I know, no one died or got seriously injured, but I can't truly swear to that... I DO know that the police were eventually called.

Party Number 5 - Mike#3's House

At this point, not even the drivers were entirely sober (Danny had smoked quite a bit of pot, Mike#1 had smoked opium). Rocko was both drunk and tripping (because those were the only things that would not show up on his weekly drug test) and getting increasingly belligerent, which meant that he was getting better and better at pissing off Mike#1.

Roughly five minutes into the party in Mike#3's backyard:

They fought a lot, perhaps because they had been BFF's since kindergarten, starting with the first time Rocko held someone down while Mike beat them up and took their lunch. (Their roles eventually reversed in high school. Rocko was one of those guys who was known as The Fat Kid until he hit puberty and started lifting weights. Then he went from the guy most likely to crack open another bag of donuts to the guy most likely to crack open another bag of donuts right after cracking open your face.)

 ...Actually their friendship is summed up perfectly in the lyrics of this song.

So Mike#1 and Rocko got thrown out of that party, and we lost about half of the group in the process because we couldn't find Danny, Mikes #2 and 4, and a bunch of the others to tell them that Mike#1 and Rocko got kicked out. So we just left them there.

Party Number 6 - Total Mayhem Accomplished

We had decided to save the best for last. Lizz lived in a big house out in the middle of nowhere and her parents had gone away for a week. She had a guest house behind her house, and a loft above the garage, so most of us had "reserved" space for spending the night. (We didn't have to worry about school Monday because we Catholic school kids had the day off, and everyone else planned to just cut school.)

Rocko and I had been working on our collage with the diner placemats pretty much the entire night, in the car between parties. By the time we got to Lizz's house, we had made this:

I folded it neatly and stashed it in my bra for an opportune moment and promptly forgot about it.

Lizz didn't really do drugs, or even drink that much. Her family was kind of wholesome and innocent, and she'd been pretty sheltered. So, naturally, the most evil among us kept trying to convince her drink and do drugs.

We discovered this was a mistake, because Lizz + alcohol = Lizz turning into a sloppy kind of slutty drunk.

Once she was drunk, all she wanted to do was get more and more wasted on whatever substance anyone had. And the rest of us were too retarded by then to have the sense to try and stop her. She eventually started aggressively hitting on Rocko, and then around the time the party was dying down, she dragged him off to her bedroom.

Mike#1 and I retired to the loft above the garage. Very soon after that, Mike#1 found the collage that I had stashed in my bra.

It took him a second to realize what it was and who it was intended for, but then his eyes lit up like a child's on Christmas morning.

I presume his overexcited reaction was because of all the substances still in his system?

He fled the loft

wearing only his knickers and one sock

Rocko and Mike#1 had their biggest fight yet

and then

I have described the effects of acid before. It makes your mind work in a different way, and that can alter your reactions to things.

Lizz FLIPPED.

 The sounds of Lizz flipping woke up everyone else who had crashed at her house. They came running to her bedroom, where Mike#1, Rocko, and I (all in various stages of undress) were trying to calm her down. Except because she was flipping out, it probably looked like we were sexually assaulting her.

Which is probably why her 11-year-old sister called 911.

Seriously we didn't even know Lizz had a sibling in the house until then.

Lizz calmed down enough to discover that her sister had called the police. She flipped again.The rest of us grabbed what we could of our belongings and fled.

Only we had a slight problem--nearly all of us were too high/drunk/whatever to drive. But the police were coming. We had to get out of there.

We elected Matt#2 to drive, because he had not consumed any alcohol, was no longer tripping, and had been mostly unconscious since we left Mike#5's house, so we figured he had slept off the pot and whatever else he had taken before then.

Only Matt#2 had no driver's license, and didn't want to drive.

The combined forces of an angry and panicking Rocko and Mike#1 got Matt#2 into the driver's seat. He did have a permit, so it wasn't like he didn't know how to drive. We got a good distance away from Lizz's house without incident. Matt#2 made his way to Mike#1's house, because no one else had parents who didn't care if 4 random half dressed teenagers were passed out in the basement and the living room.

But then

another car pulled out in front of us and almost crashed into us

and Matt#2 instinctively hit the horn.

Remember what I said earlier about the horn in Mike#1's car? It wouldn't stop beeping.

The 1983 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am may have looked the sh*t, but I PROMISE you, those cars were all trainwrecks. Big Sis#2 had the 1986 version, and hers was just as bad. One problem after another.

The only way to stop the beeping was to go under the bonnet and disconnect the fuse for the horn. But because Mike#1's car was a POS, it was nearly impossible to open the bonnet because it always jammed.

It was after 4:00 in the morning. None of us were completely sober. Three of us weren't even completely dressed. And we were stopped in a residential neighborhood in a car that was determined to wake up everyone and everything in a ten-mile radius. We figured we had maybe 30 seconds tops to stop the beeping before it attracted the local law enforcement.

Rocko and Mike#1 frantically beat the car until the bonnet opened.

If the horn hadn't already alerted the cops, then Mike#1's shriek after getting shocked by the fuse box most certainly would have.

We heard the sirens as soon as the horn stopped beeping.

Mike#1 took charge.

You'd be amazed how often that worked.

Once the flashing lights and sirens had gone, Matt#2 drove us the rest of the way back to Mike#1's house. Mike#1 then angrily chased everyone out of the basement to find their own place to sleep upstairs, because his sexual exploits at Lizz's house had been interrupted and thus left unfinished.

(Never mind the fact that HE had been the one to interrupt them.)

His banishing of Rocko, Matt#2, and Sara to the upstairs was the reason we were woken up three hours later by his mother, shouting and swearing and saying something along the lines of, "don't you f*cking delinquents have your own houses?!"

She didn't kick any of them out, though. She just left for work.

And that, my friends, is why you shouldn't do drugs.