The men huddled in the trenches. A few females were among them, garbed in haltertops and short shorts. Crosby whispered to Johannson, “They’ve got an LSD mister, I know they do.”

One of the women, a Wild Turkey addict named Swingin’ Jo, broke into song. “One pill makes you nervous, and one pill makes you strong, and the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all…”

“Please be quiet, Karma Baby,” said Crosby, “we may have a situation here. Oy!”
“What situation?” Swingin’ Jo cried. “You mean the fact that we’re out of ice?”
Just then the droplets surrounded them, this wasn’t mist, these were droplets. Crosby, held his breath, for moments, before he gave in to his urge to breathe. After a few deep breaths he lit up a smoke. “What the hell,” he said to Johannson, “why don’t we just party.”

The year was 2075 and the police state, inspired by the long effort to eradicate illegal drug use, had given up on criminal apprehension. Instead, the social control agencies had created a combat zone, a safe though relative merciless perpetual war zone, where combatants could fight their entire lives, or check in for just a few days to experience all that comes with drugs and war. Loss, euphoria, intense excitement, emotional and physical wounding, social disease and hangover, these were all on tap. But this war was no ordinary war. No, this war and the war zone the combat occurred in was an eighty mile front, where two huge armies were ranged against each other. The drug wars of the late 1900s and early 2000s had transmorgrified to this: a war, where combatants fought with narcotics, weed, booze, mushrooms, cigarettes and various pills. Real warfare had been outlawed, ostracized, joked about, banished and forgotten, years ago. But the police forces and armies still thought it their duty, and a good many citizens thought it their duty, too, to stop people from taking illegal drugs. It is not that drug use per se, in this era, was especially frowned on or prohibited, because there were so many many new drugs being developed every year, and to try to control or make illegal all of them would be impossible. Yet, the old drugs, the natural drugs like marijuana, opium, peyote, and the easily refined drugs, like heroin, cocaine, MDMA, were strictly illegal. Use or even talking about them in polite society was grounds for banishment. But banishment to where? To the drug war, of course, that peculiar institution of Earthly society, a battle area some eight hundred square miles, where, with advanced weaponry and the single pipe and bong, with LSD and barbiturate cluster missles and the single pill tossed in an unsuspecting (or suspecting) opened mouth, two mighty forces (and various factions within these groups) fought the drug war, the hand-me down social problem from earlier in the century.

Polite society was sterile. Corporate-controlled, rationalized, efficient, calculable; real society was McBot. Efficient, productive, boring. The drug war allowed people to volunteer for duty, to leave the staid boring world of everyday work, or writing the endless computer programs, and to immerse oneself in espionage, in counterinsurgency, in offensives and repulses, in everything military except discipline and gettin up early. And the military objective of this war, of the drug war? Nothing short of getting the enemy as fucked up as possible! With the enemy reciprocating! It was like a grand old party where the objective of the game was to treat your enemy to a really good time! This was the post apocalypse drug war.

Crosby woke up. He was covered with silver streamers. His mouth was dry; he spit a few pubes. “Wow,” he said, “combat fatigue.”

Johannson, a brusque man on his most patient of days, had been waiting for Crosby to surface. So had the whole platoon, an amorphous group of hardened drug and alcohol abusers, along with attendant weekend chippers.

“Hey Roberto!” Johannson yelled. Roberto was Johannson’s pet name for Crosby. Johannson called Crosby “Roberto” because as he said, Crosby had a ‘Penis of Stone’ like the ‘70s boxer Roberto Duran had ‘Hands of Stone’. “Got a real walnut cracker there” Johannson used to say, about Crosby’s penis. “Let’s get moving.”

Crosby’s head began to clear. One of the fluff girls, of the bitch-gang that rode with the troop, brought him coffee. Crosby used her breast for cream. “Where we going?”

“Word is E-sector is going to make a push. General says we should get over there, use the ‘lude launcher on ‘em .”

“That thing don’t work,” Crosby muttered, “its such an old fashioned weapon. Everything is a mister nowdays, or just plain good-ole hospitality. What’s the use?”

One of the ladies bent over in front of Crosby, she offered herself to him. He obliged. In mid-act he had a plate of beans and caviar placed on her bottom. He ate while he gored.

“General says get over there,” Johannson said. He loaded a launcher and fired. A ‘lude lodged in Crosby’s craw. He took it like salt, with his caviar and beans. “Mmmm..” he said as he finished pussy, caviar, ‘lude and beans. He buttoned up, farted, picked his teeth, and looked at Johannson.

“Let’s go,” he said, now mellow.

The troop marched. “Marching, marching, marching,” thought Crosby, “it’s all we do.” In fact, the troop did very little marching.

When they had marched about a hundred feet, and the troop came to a slight ridge, covered with artificial plants and trees, a thousand Arabs bearing Irish whiskey attacked. Johannson was an early casualty. He fell in with a Turk, and, both trying to outdo each other in hospitality, Johannson finally gave in and began drinking Raki, the anise-flavored Turkish national drink. With two of his ‘ludes in his own belly, ‘ludes he was supposed to use on the enemy, Johannson took a veiled woman and, after drinking two bottles of Raki with the Turk, he vanished.

Crosby and the rest of the troop had to deal with the remainder of the attacking Arabs. The little whiskey and Raki the Arabs carried went fast, and Crosby was at a loss. He really didn’t like not drinking when he partied, which was the Arab way. Arab armies in the drug wars, too, lost many battles because they did not involve as much alcohol in their attack. But that killer hash from the Bekka valley, yeah, that felled more than a few.

The attack raged. Many fell where they stood. The attacking Arab army soon retreated, however, as a low level acid mist released by the Vanguard Army had them seriously re-considering their love for Allah, and the whole idea that the spirit revealed every word of the Koran to a big-headed big-footed capitalist man who was married to a widow. The whole Arab army retreated, contemplating. The rest of Crosby’s men and women, the Vanguard Army, continued on to E-sector. Johannson resurfaced, during the march, eating a Moon Pie. “Great invention, indigestion,” he kept repeating.

When they arrived at E-sector the attack had already started. The Opposition, which was in fact just another randomly aggregated army from the Southern Half of the Earth, was attacking with exploding cocaine puffs and nitrous. After meeting with the E-sector commander, Colonel Roy Corn, Crosby and Johannson and the rest of the troupe joined the fray.

Crosby hugged an attacker, long enough to spit liquid LSD in her eye. Johansson was able to coax a teen into smoking a joint with him; then with a straw he blew coke up her ass. She stuck him, however, with her hypo, filled with a load of the finest China White. When the two great armies let loose of each other, and the ambulatory Opposition attackers retreated to their trenches, to their lines, the retreating enemy was singing, smiling, beaming, glowing. The Opposition’s attack had been a failure, but yet too a success. They had been forced to retreat, for food mostly and more ice, fucked up as hell. The Vanguard Army had carried the day; they were reasonably sober, still talking and making sense, having a good time, still ready to party. The battle was over. Johannson lit a doob. The enemy, wasted, lay stretched out before him for miles.

“It’s a pity Hannibal isn’t here,” Johannson said. “I’d like to get high with him.” He exhaled clouds. “I’d like to ask him what the fuck was he thinkin cutting those people’s legs off like that.”

Crosby’s greasy fingers wrapped around the doob Johannson passed him. He toked. “Seems as if life’s not linear anymore,” he said.

Johannson, and then one of the strippers that habitually butted into Crosby’s and Johannson’s conversations, took umbrage.

“Bloody hell!” the loose titted wench crowed, “linear Billy’s scrotum was last night, pressed against me arse it was!”

Crosby exhaled. “The Earth, man, it has become a gradual perception.” Obviously, the stripper was jostled, too, by this last comment.

“The blind have underestimated the sightless,” she fillibusted. She began to bray, like an overweight girlfriend that wants to get married. Another man loves me, she said, and then looking at Crosby, she cackled, “you don’t love me.”

“What, me?” Crosby opined.

“Yeah, you.” She said.

Function follows stoned form. So it had been taught at the Fraught With Nervousness Great University. So afraid of lies, the great Halls of learning were, to Crosby’s eyes. Did they not fully understand the attraction of Errol Flynn?

Johannson was again jabbering at Crosby. “Hey man,” Johannson said, “General is saying E-sector is unstable. This is good, he says, chicken is good too, he says.”

“Hold it, hold it,” Crosby tossed his two cents. “How the hell do you hear this General. Who is he and where is he? What the hell you got a wire in your ear?” Crosby thought Johannson might be some kinda narc.

“Telepathy,” Johannson chirped. “It is an artform that is lost on a coarse brute like you.”

“You seem to respect yourself and that is good,” Crosby said. “It has something to do with the unseasonable weather, does it not?” Just then a volley of hash nuggets rained upon them. Then another volley, and another. Crosby opened up his face, opened up his mouth, opened up his ears and his soul to the sound and peace-tranquillity that was the hash deluge. A chunk, a nugget, a cake all ca-chunked past his teeth and into his mouth. It was an Opposition rear guard action. With the hash volleys the Opposition walking wounded at the sound of Moby Grape arose as one from the field of engagement and began to weave home, hopelessly not worrying about mortgages or work. The returning hoard sang, a clear-headed song mocking the polite world, a song about trying to find weed in an essentially weedless society. Crosby, mouth filled with sweet grainy hash, chewed, greedily, and wished he had beer. He looked for a fluff dollie.

Johannson threw him a hard stare. “I’m a banker,” Johannson said. And then, seemingly irked, “we should be serious. What do you do?”

“Sales,” said Crosby, chewing and swallowing great hunks of delicious hash.

Johannson nodded, in apparent agreement. “Well, that explains it,” he said.

“Explains what?” said Crosby.

“Your willingness to be in this story.”

“It is strange. I mean, me, here, isn’t it?” Crosby was seriously contemplating now. He was “all forehead veins, all the time.”

Crosby settled in, got comfortable. He sat in the shade of a bosom of some ampletude. When his face was hidden by great saucer sized aureolas he poked his head through boobflesh. “You know who I am?” he said, peeping.

“No. No I don’t” said Johannson, suddenly interested in what his brutish friend had to say. “Who are you?”

“I’m the Roman Emperor Stein,” said Crosby.

“That must explain your role in this story then,” Johannson countered.

“Oh, it does,” said Crosby, “you’ve just got to figure it out.”

Johannson thought for a moment, was enveloped in a free-floating cloud of nitrous. His thoughts drifted. “Stalin and Chuck Norris, making love, a popsicle, peace.”

“That’s not it,” said Crosby.

Johannson pondered. The war raged around him.

“Snugglekins? Gertrude? Is that you? What the hell is the question?”

“Being a genius is not easy, you know.”