Teddy | 24 June 2021

The last shot I had must have been stronger than I realized, as I’m now fuzzily coming out of a nap of unknown duration to see that the Summer Solstice party is still underway but has changed in spirit and tenor. I no longer recognize the faces around me, the lights have dimmed significantly, and the music is of a darker tone that leads to a sense of foreboding. I’ll have to find Teddy, as he’s my ride out of the desert.

IEF Response

Teddy was the guy. We don’t know how else to describe him. When we smoked our first cigarettes, he had the pack. When we got high the first time, he had the stash. When we tried cocaine the first time, the man talked us down. He was like a cold wet towel on the back of our necks.

So when he invited us out to the badlands above the mountains, into the deep desert, how on earth could we say no? We piled into his beat-to-shit Ford Astro, & didn’t ask any questions.

The thing crawled up into the low desert like a slug, all of us worried that we’d spend more time pushing the thing along than getting to camp.

Once we got to the campgrounds, the sun had just gone down, and the chill of the air beginning to set in. We were surprised to see that the site beside ours was evidently home to a group of… let’s call them “rustics.”

They had clearly set themselves up quite a while ago, and had stood up a set of floodlights, and a PA pumping out the worst kind of drum and bass.

But there we were. What could we do?

They came over, their awful music pumping behind them. They didn’t seem awful-charming, even. And they’d brought the moonshine they’d been sitting on for near on a month.

We took a shot. Then we took another. The second one sent our heads spinning.

We can’t quite remember what happened next, but the throbbing music and the glaring lights began to meld together into a single pulsating thing, and where in the fuck was Teddy?

The sand against our face was still hot from the day. The night sky spiraled above us.