“It goes by Z, but also—Twonic, Dotters, the Id Squid, the Death Fuck, the Jolly Corner, and the Red Bullet.
“It’s a Shirley Temple spin on a mutant speedball, laced with TA shavings. The speedball is meth with a buprenorphine coat of morphine (basically, a methadonic balm, a slight anti-withdrawal agent), dropped in a Cherry Coke. In each vial of Z, the TA is a quarter-grain of acid-soaked pot—tea, acid, TA—get it? Baked then frozen overnight as a chocolate brick, TA sits at room temp for about two hours before the cook grates it into a chilled bowl of fish oil. So, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about a carbonated, synthetic derivative, an alkaloid, psychotropic analgesic soda that makes your skin glow a lighter shade of green. Zeeks (Z-heads, zunkies, zits) laud the ease with which they get high. You drink it, you get horny. It tastes good. It’s about as small and aphrodisiacal as an oyster shooter, with a toffee note. The drug comes packaged in four-ounce vials—if it’s the real deal. The price can soar to 30 bucks. And if I didn’t know better, sir, I’d say it looks like cough syrup.
“The high lasts 10 to 12 hours: a shot of love—a day, or a night, in the flanged shade. And you feel at-one-ment. In heat. It’s true. You see your fake twin beside you.
“This hallucination—a shade, a shroud—it’s the alter ego made flesh. The single sees the double, the double the single. Counterparts exist to themselves; you alone see your twin. The twin is monochromatic, its pupils black. And, as the drug wears off (because eventually it will, and the zeek’ll have to refuel), your twin cries black tears.
“The zeek, she’s a total shut-in. Megalomaniac. Crowing delusions of grandeur she feels have merit. She’s up, and then she’s down. Forging an elastic emotional bond with her twin, the zeek isolates herself.
“The graduated zeek, though, is easy to spot. Her teeth have rotted. Her cheeks are pink. Moody, she displays a raw talent where once none existed—or she develops the skills she already had. (On Z, for example, a writer may land a book contract, but can’t deliver a timely manuscript to save her fucking life.) Subsisting entirely or mainly on Z, the graduated zeek is a skeleton, talking to her twin—if, that is, you see her in her cave. You know, her bedroom, or her cellar. Maybe even a shower stall. It just has to be dark enough.
“Biologically speaking, the zeek’s catecholamine freaks, OK? Dopamine fries the poor thing’s retinas. The eyes dilate and produce astigmatism. In crude psychological terms, Z triggers an addictive, schizophrenic out-of-body experience, not unlike having a dead version of yourself follow you around. Run errands with you. And correlative malnutrition notwithstanding, you can’t die from the drug. Not quite. The high surpasses the toll it takes on your body.
“So yeah: There are peeps who chug the drug. They drink so much they frigging drown. Technically that is an overdose. Still. The average zeek fades away from blindness and a broken heart.
“Z (nice name, by the way) is about three years old. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, itself an index of the drug’s ascendancy, estimates that about one in six people have taken Z or know of it.
“No one knows how or where it started. Theories abound. One is a doctoral student from UC Irvine, with ties to Mexican heads of state, hatched the drug after failing to create an energy drink better than Rock Star, Red Bull, or Amp. Some say a botanist and a gallery owner from Humboldt County concocted the first recipe; and then, when the recipe had landed in Mexico, Z had matured. It had grown strong.
“The drug is ubiquitous. Your neighbors gossip about this. ‘She don’t leave the house, Candace.’ ‘Oh, but she ran for the mail, Gerty. Zorched the fuck out.’ Plenty of people cook it themselves, but to little effect. Fine grade cut? It has no peer. How is that, you ask, sir? Well, the brand is so entrenched, so hi-fi, so higher-fucking-web, sir, the guvment spares no cost to protect its interests. Think: what if rainbow herbicides had hit the home market? You think people didn’t try? They bust homegrown Z all the time.
“And the business grows. Movers multiply. Bob Katy, the one who changed the face of rock in the 1980s? He’s the main mover, the umbilical cord to the States.
“I don’t know how he got in the mix.”
–From an audio-memo (dated May 9, 2009) circulated to Mr. Tell
at The Shed,
dictated by Shiloh “Chip” White immediately after drinking Z
***
On a boulder, Shiloh watches the Mojave through a pair of binoculars. He is stoned.
Doesn’t see a goddamned thing but dunes. Tumbleweeds. That’s it.
Is someone zooming back at him? Camo’ed, with a zoom lens?
The desert blinks.
He binocs.
Do they like his red bandana? The Point Break look? He wears aviator shades from the Taco Toot in Jalisco. Some holy jeans, and a pink polo shirt. When I got down there, man, I got the worm. And—what’s it called? The heebie jeebs. That was a trip.
He drops the binocs.
Nope. Not a one.
They’re coming, though. He can taste it…