Cassie Part 2

Cassie 2

         As we sat around staring at the bottom of the bottle trying to figure out how that big old fat worm got down there, Cassie set about boring us silly with his bull.  We did our very best to ignore him and just attributed his chalkboard screeching nonsense to having too much sun on his thinning hair, not wearing a hat, and boiling his brains to the texture of poached turtle eggs.  The paint was drying on the walls by the time he said something that caught our attention, or at the very least, said something to draw our attention from Tammy Wynette wailing on the jukebox.


         He said it so fast and had it buried so deeply in the rest of his tripe, I wasn’t sure I heard what I thought I heard.  When you have a few too many tornadoes tumbling your tumbleweed it becomes difficult to tell if the voices are coming from the inside or the outside.  So being the civil-minded chap that I am, I told the little idiot savant to repeat himself.  Everybody else gave me the look of spoiled bear meat, but I kept on.  Cassie never was one to need too much encouragement to flap his jaws, and the audience didn’t help, so he started all over again from the beginning like his brain needed rewiring.


         “I was out at the edge of the caves, naked, as usual, communing with nature, hoping against all hope that the Gods would speak to me.  All I got was echoing silence, as usual, so I decided to turn up the volume.  Nothing was happening, if you know what I mean?  You could nod, you know, you bunch of squaw idiots.  I figured I might be in need of some help, since none of you son-of-a-bitches ever help me, so I brought a little something along to loosen up the spirit voices; and don’t bother asking me where I got it. 


I added a little gimmesomeofthat to my Daddy’s pipe and puffed away like I was trying to get lung cancer.  I must have gotten a little looped in that as I was loading my third or fourth pipe, I dropped my bag and scattered my entire product on the floor of the cave.  Cursing to myself, I leaned over to scrape it up.  This stuff ain’t cheap, not that any of you could afford it.  I couldn’t see anything since I’d been staring at the sun for a little while, so I wouldn’t have even known I was stung until the pain reached my brain a few minutes later.  It must have been a scorpion, but I couldn’t guarantee anything.  I could barely acknowledge pain.  I know you bunch of moonshine drunks know what I mean.


         I thought for sure I was dead especially since I was so far out hiding from you punks, and nobody knew where I was, or likewise, cared. You guys couldn’t track the last albino buffalo climbing up your ass.  I knew I was dead.  I was so high, though, it didn’t much matter.  I just lay down on the cool floor of the cave and thought, since the Gods have been ignoring me all my life, maybe crashing their party would be cool.


         When I woke up I was talking with some rat turds and was clear across the desert with cactus spikes in my ass and everywhere else you wouldn’t want them.  I had no idea how I got there.  You bunch of dummies are probably thinking UFOs.  All I knew was that I felt great.  I didn’t have a hangover, a hangup, or anything suggesting I had just dispensed with a load of some of the hottest stash since college.


I knew I had lucked on to something.  So, of course, I did it again.  Then I did it again a few more times, selecting out different parts of the experiment to try and figure out what was key and what was not.  You guys wouldn’t know about the null hypothesis or scientific theory, but suffice it to say, the scorpions were the important ingredients.  And you don’t have to get stung; you can eat them and get the same effect.  It is important to get some cactus spikes in you though; take my word for it.  Larry ain’t coming back.  He didn’t listen very closely, dumbass.


         I wobbled my ass home that night, or at least, I think I did, and proceeded to forget everything the little weasel said; assuming everyone else did the same.  It wasn’t until the bar crowd starting thinning out week after week that I figured something was up.  People just went missing left and right,  and every night, little college boy would be sitting in attendance, sober as Mother Teresa, telling his same old story and getting the same old glassy-eyed stares.  It was then that it became apparent just how dangerous he was and just how stupid we were.


         It took two months for everyone to get out of the hospital.  Some of them went stone cold sober and turned religious. 


Later on when they found Cassie’s barely warm naked body with the scorpion marks and the cactus spines all over, we were happy to assume he had just tried to commune more closely with the Gods.  As luck would have it, the Gods rejected him and he survived a stay in the ICU.  He practically transferred from the ICU to a college up north, bless his heart.  We miss him dearly and send him lots of presents; scorpion tails, cactus spines and the like. 


Dumbass, I’m sure.  Forgetful?  Sure, we’re Native American, but we don’t forgive.