The Orange Barrel Polka

Trigger Warning: Drug use

When I was 16, the cliques in my high school were the Goodies, Alkies, Druggies, Squirrels, Motorheads, Jocks, and Loners. I considered myself between the Alkies and the Druggies but in reality, I was a good girl from a two-parent home who studied the piano. I was already playing Beethoven Sonatas and Chopin Nocturnes but none of my friends knew this. It wasn’t cool to play the piano. At least mom and dad let me quit the violin.

“I got some OB,” Roseanne had whispered to me at 10th grade homeroom, giving me a feral stare.

“Oh,” I said.

“Wanna drop some tonight?” Roseanne asked. I wondered how she got away with wearing an army jacket to school because I would have been sent home if I tried to wear one.

That morning, I chose my outfit carefully. I never knew what boy might glance at me, think I’m cute, and invite me to the Junior Prom happening next month. My form-fitting top in robin’s egg blue, short skirt, white tights, black ballet-type flats was a style I had stolen from Leah Messner. But then, everyone copied her expensive look with thrift shop wear.

“Yeah," I said. I knew OB was orange barrel acid. It was my first time and I thought it might be exciting. “I’ll meet you after school?” I said and she nodded, then sauntered back to the Druggies’ circle.

Roseanne was a full-fledged member of the Druggie clique. She was popular and had a certain toughness I admired, an easy way she could float from one group to another without any noticeable distress.

It was spring, April, the snow gone until next October. Nixon was still president, and the Viet Nam war raged somewhere far away from us.

As Roseanne and I walked to my house, I noticed pink and white flowers blooming in the front yards of Victorians with peeling paint. Down the hill past Kenneth Howe Funeral Home, we made a left on Parkdale.

Roseanne wanted to know if I was inviting her to spend the night.

I said “Sure,” not really considering any other response. I knew mom didn’t like Roseanne. Mom said she was trouble with a capital “T.”

“Did you hear about Debbie?” Roseanne asked.

“No,” I said, always the last one on the grapevine of juicy gossip.

“She’s pregnant,” Roseanne said and then she made that sinister laugh she was famous for.

“Wow,” I said. “Is it Mitch Watts?”

Roseanne stopped in her tracks, looked right at me. “Well, duh?”

By 10th grade, I had kissed exactly twelve boys, usually when we were all out drinking beer in the woods behind Lisa’s house. I kept track of the kissers in the front page of my diary, complete with a rating sheet:

Danny: good, long kisser

Stan: icky cigs!

William: tongue.

We walked in the back door.

“Hey girls!” mom said, bent over, searching in the fridge for something.

“Hi Mrs. Sollinger,” Roseanne said. She glanced around our kitchen like she was checking for an escape route.

I asked, “Can Roseanne spend the night?”

“Okay,” mom said. “Do you need to call your mother?”

“Nah. It’s no problem.” Roseanne could do whatever she wanted. Her dad had left town years ago and her mom, an all-night waitress at Your Host, seemed like she didn’t know what Roseanne or her older brother, Randy, were up to most of the time. Randy had already been arrested for stealing some lady’s purse.

“Want some sodas?” Mom asked and handed us bottles of Orange Crush from the fridge. We used the “church key” to open them, took long drinks because we were thirsty, and then headed upstairs.

My room had one of those slanty ceilings to accommodate the pitch of the roof and, back in 8th grade, I had cut silhouettes of my bare feet from black construction paper and taped them all over the ceiling. I thought it was a cool idea, like I had been walking around up there without worrying about gravity.

This was Roseanne’s first time in my bedroom and when she looked up at the feet, she said, with an edge of sarcasm, “That’s cute.” She ignored all the cool band posters thumbtacked to my walls and the garbage-picked wicker chair I had painted red, white, and blue.

Reaching into her purse, she unwrapped two orange pills the size of nail heads. She lay them on a white Kleenex like they were cut diamonds.

Roseanne picked up a pill, gazed at it for a moment, then popped it into her mouth. She swallowed with a gulp of Orange Crush.

I held up my pill, hesitated.

“Come on, do it!” she laughed. “Come on...” she repeated louder, “...don’t be such a loser!”

I placed the orange tab on my tongue like a communion wafer. It kind of fizzled then got stuck on the roof of my mouth.

“Drink,” Roseanne said, handing me my Crush. “Take a swig, come on!” I didn’t want to be a loser, so I drank the soda and the pill slid down.

While we were waiting for “things” to begin, we gossiped about the girls in our Sophomore class; who was sleeping with who, who were the sluts, who were the prisses, who should wear more makeup, and then, the boys; their drinking and drugging habits, who ran away, who went to Juvie, which boys had superior anatomical measurements. On this subject, I knew nothing. I had to fake it since I was pure as the driven snow.

Then, I started to feel something weird.

“Hey,” I said to a poster of Neil Young on my wall. Turning to Roseanne, “His mouth is moving.”

She laughed out loud. “Shit! I think you’re ready!”

Then I said, “Bobby Dylan’s hair is a-blowin’ in the wind,” and I laughed then Roseanne laughed so hard at what I said, I thought she would fall over onto the floor.

“Shhhh..,” I said, afraid mom might hear us and come upstairs to see what was going on.

Roseanne stood, looked at herself in the mirror above my vanity table. Grabbing a cylinder of mascara, she applied it to her already heavily mascaraed eyelashes. We romped down the stairs.

“Going out,” I yelled to Mom, “be home by 11:00.”

“What about dinner?” she yelled back from the living room.

“We’ll get pizza. Bye!” We headed out the door.

Our streets were safe and we could walk from one end of town to the other in thirty minutes.

As we trudged back up the hill, my legs were wobbly and my knees wanted to buckle. When we reach Main, I was in full Play Dough mode, feeling all rubbery and nervous, without a bone in my body. I desperately needed to sit down.

We ran into Mia and Becky in front of Rizzo’s Pizza and all of us sat on the steps. I was turning into Gumby, that green clay humanoid character on TV.

How am I ever going to walk again?

Roseanne told Mia and Becky about the orange barrel, she said, “It’s Ellen’s virgin flight!”

“Whoa!” said Becky.

“ Wowza!” Mia exclaimed.

Whoas and wowzas echoed and ricocheted inside my skull, a metallic sound that knocked against the inside walls, clanging and denting the sides. The sidewalk rippled like a piece of fabric in the wind, a magic carpet ride of cement. Streetlights were melting, oozy wax sliding down the light poles.

“Oh my God!” I yelled.

Then a guy I didn’t recognize walked past us.

Does he know we’re on acid? What if he calls the police? What if we get arrested?

“Who’s that guy?” I asked Roseanne and Becky. They started to giggle.

“She’s trippin’,” Mia said.

Still perched on the steps at Rizzo’s, my hands were bright blue, and I waved them in front of my face. Time slowed, the movie played at half-speed, my flapping hands were separate frames in the film. I enjoyed this magic trick.

“Do you think that guy, you know, that weirdo guy that just walked by is gonna call the police?” I asked Roseanne.

“What?” Roseanne asked and started laughing. “You are so fucking funny,” she said.

We cheered when our large pizza was delivered to eat sitting there on the steps. Roseanne opened the box, took the first piece and strings of mozzarella stretched across the sidewalk, beautiful glistening white spiderwebs, a wild congestion of cheese strings.

“Here,” Becky said, handing a piece to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

I took a bite, my tongue burned, then turned into a leather shoe on fire. I spit it out.

Now, they were gossiping about Debbie’s baby while I watched the sidewalk turn all kinds of colors, purple, yellow, then neon green.

“I mean, doesn’t she even know about the pill?” Mia said.

“I think she wants to marry him,” Becky said. “I think she’s trapping him like a rat!”

Roseanne made that sinister laugh again, said, “He’s such a dickhead. He stinks.”

The others nodded so I nodded too.

The walls of Rizzo’s were tipping over and they were going to fall on all of us.

I yelled, “Run you guys!” and I got up and dragged my pizza slice with the string of mozzarella so long, it was like I was walking the dog with a long leash of cheese.

“You are a real paranoid fucker, Ellen,” Mia laughed.

Everyone else was still talking about Debbie and ignoring me.

I was totally freaking out.

I whispered to Roseanne that I was going home and when she turned to me, she looked like a lion with red nail polish on her furry paws that could scratch my eyes out.

“I’m going home,” I said a little louder.

“Shit, man,” Roseanne said in a low, lion-like growly voice. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Then she said “weenie,” and this was followed by Mia and Becky’s high-pitched laughter. “Weenie, weenie, weenie” spiraled in the air above my head.

“I gotta get out of here,” I shouted and bolted in the direction of home, my legs working again, thank God. As I ran, the “weenies” chased me like rabid dogs, all the way home.

I rushed in my back door and yelled, “I’m home.”

Mom came into the kitchen. “Where’s Roseanne?”

“I had a bad night,” I said. “She went home.”

When I looked at Mom, her eyes were yellow and large, a panther in the dark. The kitchen swirled like a boat on a turbulent ocean.

“Have you been drinking?” Mom asked.

“Nope,” I said. “I just have a really bad stomachache.”

Mom came close to administer “the weekend sniff-test.” I was petrified she might realize I was high on acid. But, yay! I passed, not a drop of alcohol on my breath. When she stepped back, her movements were separated into individual frames, another slowed down movie. She leaned on the kitchen counter.

“Did you eat something bad?” she asked. “Maybe you’re getting the flu?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, wanting to get the hell out of the kitchen. “I just want to go to bed.”

“OK, honey,” Mom said.

Up the stairs and into my room, I stretched out on my bed but kept the light on.

Something moved above me. The black construction paper feet I taped to the ceiling were walking around, just wandering aimlessly, over to the window, back to the door, over to my bookshelf. I blinked a few times because this couldn’t really be happening. It was funny at first! After walking around on the ceiling for a while, the feet started dancing the polka! That made me laugh because they were dancing to happy polka music that I could hear playing in my head. Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah-pah! They danced with clip-clopping noises on the ceiling. Then the feet polkaed down my walls, trampling right over my posters of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush and Bobby Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. While they danced, they left dirty blue marks like tire tracks on my wall.

It started to be less funny when the feet came for me. They danced in three-quarter time right over my chest.

I picked up the phone in my room, one of those pink princess ones, because now I was scared. The phone felt like Green Slime and slipped out of my fingers a few times. On the slimy dial, I called my best friend, Paula. As her phone rang, I mumbled, answer, answer, please, Paula, please answer. When she picked up, I said, “Thank God you’re home! The feet on my ceiling are dancing the polka!”

Paula laughed, “I told you not to take that acid with Rosie-Posey!”

That was funny, Rosie-Posey! What a girlie name for a not so girlie girl.

“I know, I know. You were right,” I said. “But I’m totally freaking out and I think the feet are gonna hurt me.”

I swatted at them on my body like they were biting black flies but they kept trampling over me.

Paula said, “Remember when Brian and I did that acid and I thought I was melting like the wicked witch of the West? I kept saying, ‘I’m melting, I’m melting.’”

“Yeah,” I said. “you guys were so funny.”

Paula said Jimmy and Landon were over so she couldn’t talk long.

“Don’t leave me, Paula, please,” I said.

I heard Jimmy’s booming voice in the background like he was speaking into a microphone. Paula said, “I’ll call you tomorrow. Gotta go,” and she hung up.

I closed my eyes tight and swore I wouldn’t open them until the dancing feet stopped their stupid polkaing. My swatting and squeezing my eyes closed went on and on and on and on.

I don’t know how many hours but finally, a clearing in my brain, a fresh breeze a-blowin’ in my head. I mercifully fell asleep.

When I woke the next morning, the normal world had returned. Black paper feet were securely taped to the ceiling where they should be and they weren’t dancing any more.

Feeling terribly guilty I had taken that orange barrel acid, I wondered if it would mess up my brain for life. I swore I would never, ever take acid again. And, more importantly, I would never tell my parents what I did.

The sun burned bright and warm as I sat down in the living room with Mom and Dad, who were drinking their morning coffee.

“Morning,” I said, sipping some left-over Orange Crush.

“Good morning, honey,” Mom said. “You feeling better?”

“Yep, all I needed was a little shut-eye.”

I held my hand up in front of my face and waved it slowly back and forth.

“What’s that about?” Mom asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

The smell of spring, a lovely fragrance from those pink and white flowers, wafted in the open window.

“I think I’ll go practice the piano,” I said, standing up, still in my pajamas.

Dad said, “Really? This early on a Saturday morning?” Then he turned to Mom. “Is this our daughter or is she an imposter?” They smiled at each other.

I could hear the Chopin Nocturne in my head, imagining melodies floating from the instrument that would fill the whole house with passionate music.

Didn’t I feel more alive when I played the piano? Wasn’t the sky a more brilliant blue? Wasn’t the world more exquisite with this music under my fingers?

I turned away from my parents, toward the piano in the adjacent room. I didn’t want them to see me cry.