Lysergically Yours | Page 4

more than mild curiosity.
Johnny had been reading 'Doors of Perception' in class, re-reading in
fact. That much was true. However, he had been reading 'The Old Man
and the Sea' the week before and no one had asked him if he knew
where they could get some good marlin. The disconcerting thing was
that Johnny did in fact know where Lyle could get some acid, but his
natural defence mechanisms had convinced him to play dumb. He had
been a small time dealer all through his high school years in
Peterborough. He would receive a sheet of acid, 200 hits, at an
anonymous mailbox from a Russian guy he knew in Kingston in
exchange for 500 dollars. He would then break it down and sell it for

five bucks a hit. This kept Johnny in steady supply of black hoodies
and pocket money throughout his teenage years, it had also been the
primary source of the money he had saved for university. When he
came to Toronto for school, Johnny figured he had left his acid pushing
days behind him. He had assumed that the market was already saturated
and he'd be unable to find a niche. But now-- Now he wasn't so sure.
What he was sure of was that he had a good deal going with the U of T
physics department. The department was desperate for new students so
they pampered their undergrads with free pizza at lunchtime three days
a week. Johnny wasn't, technically speaking, a physics undergrad, but
he had been tipped off to the existence of the pizza Nirvana by a
classmate in Physics 140. The combination of Johnny's brief chat with
Haj-Mosawi and his run in with Lyle had rendered him ten minutes late
for pizza.
Those were a vital ten minutes in which the vegetarian pizzas had been
entirely consumed. Johnny had been a vegetarian for six years, but he
wasn't uptight about it; he was perfectly willing to pick pepperoni off of
pizza. Besides, he knew that it had not been the other vegetarians in the
room who had eaten all the vegetarian pizza. The truth was that those
who ate meat would dig into the vegetarian pizza first, leaving the meat
pizzas virtually untouched. They did this because they knew that,
although they were content to eat either, the vegetarians didn't even see
the meat pizzas as food. This meant that those pizzas could be saved for
leisurely consumption as much as thirty minutes post-pizza-arrival.
Johnny wasn't one to let others win that easily. He preyed on the false
sense of security that the meat-eaters derived from their pizza piracy
and managed to find an entire untouched pepperoni pizza still in its box.
He closed the lid and took it over to an unoccupied section of the
physics student lounge where he sat in a beat up armchair, opened the
box onto a coffee table and began to systematically pluck all the
pepperoni slices off of the entire pizza and deposit them into the lid of
the box. As he de-meated his pizza, Johnny's thoughts returned to his
short puzzling conversation with Lyle. Johnny had about fifty hits of
quality blotter in his dorm room at this very moment. It was earmarked

for personal use, but there was no reason he couldn't sell some of it to
Lyle and see what developed from there. If he hadn't already burned his
bridges. Johnny could certainly use the cash, at the very least. His bank
account was running dangerously low and there were four days every
week without free pizza.
Johnny was so caught up in his thoughts that he didn't notice anyone
was behind him until an arm reached over his shoulder and claimed a
small handful of the unwanted pepperoni. He could feel small breasts
against the back of his head. Before he could turn around, the girl had
dropped herself into the equally worn armchair opposite him. "Nice
shirt," she said with a mouthful of pepperoni.
"People seem to like it," Johnny replied.
"I'm Tinka. You should eat meat, it's good for you."
From the start it was easy to see that Tinka was something of an
enigma. Her hair was mostly black, though there were patches of red
and blue. It had ribbons and beads knotted randomly into it and,
although nearly shoulder length, stood up improbably and stuck out in
every direction as though straining with all its will to escape her scalp.
She wore a tank top onto which she had marked red "X"s across her
breasts in paint that was uncomfortably blood-like in colour. She was
wearing big black boots, torn fishnet stockings and a plaid flannel
mini-skirt which, given the haphazard way she sat with one leg up on
the coffee table, did absolutely nothing