We were 15 miles outside a small gay community in Teabag, Kansas, when Mr. Bongo’s vials of Metanodine started to kick in. I saw 60-foot giants stepping over our car as if it were a expensive rental cockroach, and I swerved to miss their massive feet as they landed before us. The undermedicated will swear they weren’t there, but Metanodine is more than the world’s most powerful insulin-based drug: It’s a gateway chemical, used by ancient medicine men to see into a world that we only can have glimpses of, and occasionally they used it to get really fucked up.

Our hitchhiker, the red-headed kid with a tattoo of a vagina on his face, had refused to take the Metanodine because he had enough intelligence to not take strange vials of fluids offered to him by people who offered him rides. He was traveling with someone else, a girl who didn’t speak much, and may have in fact been a dead body, but we were too loaded to be judging anybody else.

“Let me tell you something,” I whispered to the kid, a low voice to ward off any electronic listening devices that kick in at certain decibel levels. “We are on the cusp of something brilliant, my friend.” I called him that even though I suspected him of being a right-wing insurgent. “My accountant here is convinced that if we drive this car fast enough backwards, we can actually go back in time.”

The kid didn’t seem too convinced. I had tried to tell him our great plan: To go back in time, to the day before when we had rented the car, and choose one of a much more durable nature, since this one had lost its wheels somewhere in the plain state of Wyoming. This communication failed to get through since I had inadvertently stopped speaking English in exchange for Pig Latin. Metanodine is a potent substance, and if you take nothing else away from this diatribe, take that.

Sans the hitchhiker, who jumped out of the moving car with his girlfriend/dead body somewhere around Lawrence, we hit a steady car pool lane and blacked out. When we awoke, me before Mr. Bongo, who was still driving, we were twenty miles inside of Atlantic City.

“My god, you can smell the vinyl over the stink of burning tire fires,” I said. Mr. Bongo responded by grabbing my throat and threatening to rip it out if I couldn’t prove my identity in 30 seconds. Fortunately, he blacked out again and he didn’t wake again until we were thoroughly on the strip.

The strip is like the vein in a cancerous man’s arm, full of more inorganic than organic material. It reminded me of snake already half out of its skin, with its teeth broken out like it had gotten in a bar fight with a redneck and hadn’t the sense enough to back down before it turned ugly. A toothless snake half out of its skin. Sorry, but that analogy’s so good I might use it five or six more times before this chapter ends.

We had no plans for Atlantic City. I had been given an assignment, of course, but on the way out there I had already considered blowing it off for something more anarchist. I had developed a philosophy during the trip that taking money for your art ate holes in your soul like a passed-out drunk’s cigarette in the passenger seat of a rental car. I made a note to myself at that thought, about whether you could get your rental deposit back if the seats had cigarette holes in them, but since we were tireless and had been riding more than a thousand miles on the rims, I didn’t think it mattered all that much.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Mr. Bongo, through a thin haze of tears, sweat, and spittle. “Let’s crack open the gluesticks.”

Shit. We were already down to the gluesticks. This could only bode ill for our spiritual quest-slash-drug-filled road trip.