1/The craziest story I've heard was from my old doorman, Larry. Larry was black, 6'3, early 40s, intense. I throw a too-crazy party, tripping people freakout in the lobby, Larry has to bounce'em. I say sorry.

He says, "that's nothing. I did LSD all the time, in 'Nam. Once..."

2/"when I was in Nam, I was a sergeant in charge of a pontoon boat, dig?" Larry continued. "Our job was to go up the river into enemy territory, scout, set up a beachhead. We'd done it a lot. But this time, we'd all got a new batch of LSD—a bottle of, yaknow, the pure stuff."

3/"Now, I had never dealt with the liquid, I didn't know how to dose it out. So I just split the whole bottle with my squad on the way upriver. Just another day in the jungle, right? And we were all on yaba, anyway, so what could go wrong?"

4/(If you don't know, yaba is methamphetamine mixed with caffeine. It was the pep pill of choice for the grunts going up against Charlie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya_ba  – oh, and the LSD Larry squad chugged was enough to hold an electric kool-aid acid test. This is when things go awry.)

I'll tell the rest of this story later—it's been a long day—but I'll reveal that when I told this part to my wife (first time telling this story to her after years of marriage) on a long drive, she literally started screaming at me from shock and delight.

Should I finish this story today?

5/"Things start to get weird right away after we take a drink from that little blue bottle," Larry continued. He used to run with the Black Panthers, and presents like Huey Newton on an IV drip of THC—chilitant. "I see weird lines in the water, patterns in the sky. There are bugs

6/everywhere, and I keep thinking they're trying to warn me about something; buzzing we're in danger or some shit, you know?" I nod knowingly, and swallow a joke or two so that he gets back to his story. He does presently:
"We somehow get to the landing site and get out our gear,

7/but by then, the squad is on tilt. We start giggling like madmen when we touch ground and we don't stop. Everything terrific, everything funny as a five-legged cat, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, you feel like you can fly."
"Right. But—we were in enemy territory."

TBC!

8/"Now, everybody in the squad knew what to do, and we were pepped from the yaba, so when we landed it was tight, the squad buzzing back and forth, grinning, laughing, grimacing. We keep up chattering like fools, and I can't understand a damn word people were saying.

9/"Either they was talking nonsense, or I just can't understand it. I hear a thing or two that's like a password from a past life. I see angels and demons jumping around in the spaces between moments, fighting, fucking between frames. We was on tilt, like I said."

10/"But anyway, we set up somehow and bivouac in place, back to the river, holding the position until a landing in t-minus 32, something like that. I try to look at my watch, the numbers melt. When the squad makes eye contact we start screaming. I see the men being melted or

11/"exploding in a gush of blood, we all feel the eyes of the jungle all around us, the sky is watching us, there's a big hand ready to snatch us, we're all real quiet, never been more awake, back to the sea and watching the thick forest. Perfect noise discipline, we sit like

12/this for hours. That's when we hear it. We're scared to look at eachother but we all sort of point and look at eachother's fingers, there was a rustle in the underbrush, just beyond the perimeter we set up, there are a pair of eyes like hellfire, burning. He sees us."

13/"What sees you? What'd you do?" I'm getting antsy.
Larry: "Just listen to the story, man. I'm telling you, these eyes were two little gates to hell. About Charlie high. One of our scouts hales him, asks him to identify himself. He just snorts. Then, the whole jungle opens

14/around the thing, trees and bushes waving to the side like one of those bead doors things they used to have. The eyes are furious. The thing's not human. And it is charging right at Tony, the point-man who tried to talk to it."

15/"The second it breaches into our area, two things happened," Larry continued, absentmindedly picking at his afro. "First, we saw what it was: either an actual demon, come to kill us all, or some kind of water buffalo or whatever, but bigger than we'd ever seen. Second,"

16/"Things got really loud and really bright and really confusing because we all had our M1911's out and we were just peppering that fucking thing as fast as we could. It's amazing we weren't just shooting each other. But it was wild, man: the thing didn't slow down, it sped up."

17/He chuckled a bit at the memory. "It sped up even though it was covered in what looked to be a shroud of blood with a nimbus of dust. We can't hear shit. I'm the ranking sergeant here, though, so I say to myself, Larry, you gotta figure this out before that thing rips up

18/TONY, which he will any second. I think all this in less than a second, but it's real clear and slow in my head, because I'm watching the whole scene from above. So right when I see that the Government" (he explains this refers to the Colt pistols they've been firing)

19/"ain't gonna be able to stop this thing, I dive for the pontoon boat, which is about 20 feet away, in a ravine with a tarp on it. It's hard to hear anything since the beast is now WAILING, the men are all SCREAMING at the top of their lungs, and they're still getting off shots

20/"like those Chinese fireworks, POPOPOPOPOPOPOP," he claps his hands to demonstrate. "I get to the boat and wheel around and see Tony is in a bad way: he's abandoned his position and he's running like hell, but he's about to be run straight into the water. On me to save him."

21/"Like I said, nobody can hear shit in this scenario. But somehow, I catch Tony's eye and I mouth (scream at the top of my lungs): 'HIT THE FUCKING DECK!' I'm not sure if he heard me, or if he's just lucky, but he DUCKS DOWN just in time. Cause I found what I wanted in the boat

22/"Now, they say you shouldn't operate heavy machinery when you're drunk. And that's probably true for being spun on LSD and yaba, with maybe some booze and pot on top of it, too. But this was an emergency, because one of my dudes, maybe a whole squad, was about to get gored;

23/and because what I had sprinted for and found in our pontoon boat was my trusty motherfucking STOVEPIPE. You know, the team's bazooka. Use it to blow up tanks and shit. So I'm screaming, "HIT THE DECK," and I've got a clear shot at this thing, which is still a ways from Tony

24/on account of it's leaking blood everywhere and confused. I should've asked myself, 'is he gonna be in the blast radius,' but I'll be honest, man, it was like one of those old-timey stories, I could feel the hand of God directing my shot. I just blew.

25/No recoil but I still almost fell (I wasn't in a good position), but it was the squarest BULLS-eye I ever hit. Get it, Derek, bulls-eye?" We laughed.
"This thing, the water buffalo, demon, whatever, EXPLODES from the inside out. The shell fell on its posterior, so there was a

26/sort of ticker-tape parade of its ass and its guts, like red and greenish and brown confetti, just caking all of us. Everybody puked. The only person who wasn't covered in this thing's guts was Tony: the guts made a little protective arc around him, that I swear looked like

27/he was being hugged by a grisly angel as he cowered in a fetal position."
"Holy shit," I said, smacking my lips. "So, then what happened?"
"Then we all went quiet. I'm not kidding about that hand of God directing my shot, not kidding about the Angel. We didn't talk about it,

28/"but I know we all felt it, and they all knew I felt it; we all knew it. It's not something you can talk about right away. You gotta give it some time. What happened was we wordlessly got the mess cleaned up a little bit, then we moved upriver to a spot that wasn't so fucked,

29/and we just sat there not sayin' nothin' until the rest of the platoon made radio contact."

30/At this, we gave one another searching glances, and then we both fell silent and sheepishly glanced to the side, as if the stucco there held some deep fascination. We stood in this silence for a good ten minutes, as the sun unhurriedly crept into the dawn sky.

31/Larry's story was over: it had been given new life as it passed between us.

*** END ***

[Just came back on to note that I wrote the back half, as with the front half, in a single burst on a phone with kids yelling and such. Annoyingly I'd meant to keep to the present tense for his story but messed it up; will fix in the folio ed.

also: i love you all deeply.]

. @threadreaderapp unroll please