Slaughterhouse High

Out of the madhouse at last and on the road, thought Condor Plasch. His buddy Blayne had one fucked-up family. "You have one fucked-up family, Blayne-O," he said.

"The shit they don't eat, they are." Stoic, dark, an anodyne for Condor's worldly woes, Blayne glanced out the passenger side and dug idly into a coat pocket.

"One last hurdle, we head west."

No comment from Blayne.

Condor wove from street to street out of the housing development. His tongue barbell knocked against the inside edge of his zipper mouth. He pictured lightning jags over wet enamel. "Yep, that's where we be headed. Put in our time tonight, pack up, ride way the fuck over to San Fran, where the funny papers are sayin' all good zipheads congregate." Blayne nodded but said nothing. "What's up, my good bud?"

Blayne stared over: "Me and Altoona did the lip thing today." He fetched out a kerchief, blue and white checked, rubberbanded at the middle and pulled into rabbit ears at the top.

"She just another sneerfuck privately pining to kiss metal?"

Blayne reared back. "Get real. This is Altoona you're talking about."

"So did she spill? Whether her and Pim did it, I mean."

"She implied." Blayne unbanded the kerchief. "Real strong."

"They've been walking funny since Easter."

Once, thought Condor, those two chicks had been a stone-cold drag. Couple o' wannabes.

Lately, they'd started getting interesting.

First, Pim had sidled up to him outside the cafeteria and brazenly requested their piercer's phone number. That had been followed by obsessive stares and all, capped by rumors of what she and Altoona had done over Easter.

"Not too raunchy in the visual way neither, them two," said Condor. "Cute lobes, big swellers beneath their sweaters, killer curves that narrow down into a tight clench below."

Blayne dropped a compliment: "They'd be hot and finger-rocking good in the sack."

"But wait up," said Condor. "We had to go through whole heaping gobs of pain when we had our way them girls'd let that shit be perpetrated on them you-know-where. I can still smell that cream-white oval pan with the red drool and spit, me goggle-eyed over it with my wuttering head on wobbly like I was fit to pass out. And I can feel the crimp of that skin-punch as my blood sprayed out over Cabrille's fist."

Condor signaled a turn.

"And those were my lips! You think I'd let anyone do that to my gens?"

Blayne shrugged. "Believe what you want. I think they did it. Anyway, we get to find out tonight."

Yeah, right. "What's with the pills?"

"Some heady stuff," Blayne replied. "Brain revealers, Altoona calls 'em. While they were in Topeka, before they drove to Cabrille's parlor, they met this guy in a bar whose brother used the university labs in Lawrence to make it pure. No shit, no cut, no speed. Just a smooth high hit."

Condor's stomach flexed. "I dunno. Last time, my gut took a turn, loops of no-no-no and a quick uncatchable ralph or two, floors to mop in a dead-dog stupor the next morning, and pain, pain, pain. So I'm gonna beg off."

"That was Cobra's street-scam crap, cut six ways from Sunday with baby powder and strychnine, more'n likely. This stuff's the genuine article. Altoona says she and Pim took hits, got naked, it went on forever. She told me, get this, she told me her pussy tingled like a fizzing sizzling hot tub and that her sexlobe felt like it had swelled up and stretched out near three feet long and that soft wet hot invisible slave-tongues were lapping and sucking every goddamn cubic inch of it, hour after hour of yummy sexy shit, and I ain't lyin'."

"Altoona said that?"

"In so many words."

What the fuck.

He and Blayne had gotten into black candles a year before. They had written bleak poetry to the loneliness, sharing the verses before they engaged in yet one more bout of fruitless suck and flay.

They had stood by one another in Kansas City twice while a well-paid felony-risker had taken a tattoo needle to their underaged skin.

And they had gone together through the pain of zipper installation, a Christmas break Condor would never forget, the unending stairstep of hurt across his mouth and back again, the blood, the swelling, somehow managing to coax Blayne through the same.

The other kids' taunts thereafter were as nothing. They were as the bip-bip-bip of the zipper handle against his right chinflesh as he walked, a tickle soon become custom.

Now his buddy and lover (the one kid in the world who likewise had his ear attuned to the suck-tunnel of emptiness, who grokked that the probability of truly sharing anything with anyone anywhere ever was zip zero zilch) held forth a pill to pixie-dust the next several hours away.

Prom shit would unfold its truth, the lows lower, the highs higher.