I didn’t take much notice of her when she sat down next to me on the bus. It was a busy morning, there were only so many open seats available, so a sudden seatmate wasn’t really that much of a surprise.
I was a bit taken aback when she poked my arm to get my attention, though. I put my iPod on pause and popped out the headphones to see what she’s said. Unfortuantely, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying. I did rather quickly manage to pick up one very pertinent piece of information, though.
This girl was stoned out of her mind. Absolutely blitzed. And whatever she was on, I’m pretty sure it was a lot stronger than anything I ever tried in my more adventuresome days.
For the rest of the trip, she sat next to me, talking to herself (and occasionally to me, though very rarely did I actually catch any intelligible words), inflection bouncing up and down the scale as she asked and then answered her own questions, and occasionally bursting into a sudden fit of giggles.
At one point, after examining the cigarette she was holding in one hand, she dug into her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Opening the pack, she slid the one she’d been waving around into the pack, and pulled out a fresh one. Replacing the pack, she then opened a side pocket on her purse, and pulled out a small brown glass bottle. She unscrewed the cap, extracted a small applicator stick, and proceeded to smear some rather foul-smelling substance along the length of the cigarette she’d just taken out. Once the cigarette was quite covered and soaked in whatever was in the bottle, she capped it, put it back in her purse, and resumed her private little monologue.
I haven’t really got a clue what was in the bottle, but I’m guessing that I’ve just had my first close encounter with “smokin’ stix“. Hopefully my last, too — that stuff smelled foul.
iTunes: “Your Very Own Tank” by Rollins, Henry from the album Talk is Cheap, Vol. 1 (2002, 17:42).