In Search of the Penn Dream
by Raoul Duke
We were somewhere around Rahway on the edge of New Jersey when the Percs began to take hold. Our vehicle was a crimson Audi, stolen from a roommate and driven by my associate and personal spiritual advisor, a former squash recruit named Veronica who, despite her frail appearance, can handle more extra-bodily stress and less sleep than the cockroaches who inhabit my air conditioning ducts. She spends with equal profligacy at Hollywood Tans and Roasty Toasty and could probably survive a small nuclear blast with skin tempered from years of artificial sunlight exposure.
Like so many other accounting majors of our generation, my driver was discovering how it is becoming more and more difficult to introduce a new and effective narcotic into one's system after years spent in the successive crucibles of places like Trinity and Penn. Hence the jar of raw ether in the glove box, for when her concentration began to slip. Addictions and immunities aside, no one had a greater intuition for the expedient liquidation of one's soul-the object of our quest, in addition to bachelor's degrees.
Questionable decisions are made every day and a disproportionate amount can usually be credited to me. This trip was no exception, except that we weren't aware of its questionability due to our being in questionable states of mind since its inception-roughly the respective mental equivalents of North Dakota and West Virginia.
The idea had blossomed over adderall-laced mojitos at Pod-or the attempted ordering of such, and when the service would or could not comply with our pharmaceutical request, Veronica's punitive rage and still-strong backhand resulted in a messy melange of powder blue and wet, glistening red. We were soon on the road.
We careened towards Manhattan at speeds slightly upwards of sane. Our swift and unfettered passage was ensured by a Masonic license plate frame we had swiped at the last truck stop. (Truly stable and therefore pure artificially-induced instability must be fueled by a constant intake of artificial goods, thus we made our only stop on the turnpike to stock up on Cheetos, Funyuns and Icees for consumption, and Slim Jims to hurl like javelins at less righteous cars along the way.) Should both Dan Brown and the Simpsons' Stonecutter episode prove to be full of shit it would be of little consequence: our parents are lawyers.
Hesitant to use the truck stop bathroom for fear of adding a Jim McGreevy chapter to our odyssey, we made efficient on-road use of a flat section of dashboard and a quarter-sheet flyer for weight loss. Critical looks drawn from the passenger seats of minivans were quickly smote with Slim Jims to their windshields.
The Lincoln Tunnel at dusk posed a challenge, not only from the de-stimulating effect of the tunnel's yellowed panel lighting, but from the deadening pace of traffic that forced us to bumper tap and wave out the sunroof to neighboring vehicles, hoping that the security camera operators didn't take the spectacle for an incipient Islamofascist attack-although the rhetoric was similar and the situation nearly warranted it. Ether is extremely flammable.
We emerged from the tunnel and woke up in St. Vincent's.
