Free The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott

in Death in Venice ,” said Trippy. “And not ’cause I’m homophobic either, dog. Lolita did the whole obsession-with-youth thing much better, went way beyond flirting with taboo. Homie can spit. Probed the whole titillating nightmare. Got down into the pink throbbing horror with black humor and spasms of genuine despair.”
    â€œYeah, but Lolita ain’t homoerotic.”
    â€œTrue that. If the nymphet had been a catamite, that shit would have never flown.”
    In addition to the Bernhard, our brains were swimming from the slew of more theoretical “texts” covered in that day’s BAIT downloads: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler; Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida; Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson; Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault; and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna Haraway.
    We had shit to talk. Our brains were on fire. And we still had at least a hundred downloads to go before reaching full cognitive capacity (FCC).
    â€œFuck that punk Derrida,” said Trippy. “Got game in his flow but no heat.”
    â€œHe had a few moments,” I said, “but, yeah, fuck that noise.”
    Moreover, this was the first night that Trippy and I tapped into our vat of Pep. We’d dumped a whole box of Dixie Crystals packets into a hundred-quart cooler of Dr. Pepper, added Robitussin and herbs, yeasting the elixir with a wild growth Trippy’d cultured in a quick-noodles cup. At last, the yeast cells had gone to town, and we had booze to swill. We were keeping it on the down low for obvious reasons, discreetly enjoying our heady swill in the Nano Lounge. Nothing stronger than ibuprofen was allowed at the Center, with the exception of the pharmaceuticals prescribed by Dr. Morrow, who’d recently weaned me off Sophiquel.
    We’d stashed the cooler in my dorm room in spite of Needle’s drug-hound nose. We could totally see that tweaking freak sticking his head into our vat hog-fashion to swill up our precious Pep. Nevertheless, we also intuited that the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, despite its progressive lip service, would be more likely to ferret our vino in a black ex-con’s room. So we hid our cooler under my dirty laundry, careful to block the security camera with a piece of paper. Plus, we crowned the laundry pile with some Fruit of the Looms we’d smeared with chocolate ice cream. Trippy had learned this trick at Georgia State—not the university but the maximum-security prison in Tattnall County, where he’d done a few stints since his late teens for weed-related escapades: bullshit like intent to distribute, possession within one hundred feet of a park (a barren lot featuring an unused jungle gym that he didn’t know existed), and distributing to a minor (some seventeen-year-old at a party who he never even saw that night).
    â€œAin’t nobody gonna touch your unmentionables if they think they’re smeared in feces,” Trippy advised. “The most taboo, mostabject biological substance in the human catalog of thou shalt nots.”
    So far, Needle had stayed clear of that area, avoiding it as he would a biohazard-stickered waste bin.
    Trippy had also mastered the ancient art of alcohol fermentation at the clink. He could manufacture all kinds of intoxicating substances out of common household chemicals, food scraps, human biological effluvia, and herbs of the field gathered from the prison yard. That’s why peeps called him Trippy J. He was famous for a brew called Cobra—concocted from various pain-relief pills, gasoline, powdered lightbulb tungsten, and red phosphorous scratched from matchbox strikes, mellowed with dandelion root and a dash of lemon balm. The recipe had come to him at Georgia State, when he’d discovered a moldy nineteenth-century edition of