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Graham laughs, a dry but warm sound. “I know, I know. Because you’re one of the good guys.”
“Exactly.”
We say goodbyes. Grantham Boulevard is south of the river. In the Burrows.
14
A note on the Big Fry: AKA delicious freak, delicious fry, DF, BF, the dose, demon dust, demon, the devil, capital D, Jimmy Hoffa’s teeth, speed cunt, gray matter detonation, the virgin drop, the red-eyed stare.
The drug that, for a time, experts feared might just push both meth and crack out the door. It was designer, came about back when I was still on the force. Half speed, half hallucinogen. All horrible.
It’s similar to meth in that is causes a brain dump of dopamine. The brain never dumps like that again after the first chemically-induced time, which is why addicts get a taste for it so quickly. They chase the first high and will never re-achieve it. They spend the rest of their short lives ingesting harsh chemicals and sweating out solvents.
It’s similar to LSD in that another chemical in it causes hallucinations. They are not as intense as LSD-induced hallucinations, but still fairly constant.
It comes in a pill form and must be ingested that way. The hallucinogenic compounds, like LSD itself, are too sensitive to heat to be smoked. So someone has to press the pills. Pill presses are regulated here in the States by the FDA, so clandestine operations have to build their own or raid a pharmaceutical lab. Ecstasy producers in Europe pressed the Big Fry for a time. Eurotrash cocksuckers got the ball rolling and then ditched it when it became obvious the drug was a one-way street. No return business.
Gangs in Mexico picked up the slack. Every year during Spring Break the States get a big influx of date rape drugs—which are produced legally down there—and the Big Fry.
Why some shitbird clandestine chemist thought about mixing speed with tripping I’ll never know. But, then again, dopers do that shit all the time. It’s called polydrug use. Ask a cop qualified as a drug recognition expert; they’ll explain it.
The bottom line for this new Frankenstein’s Monster: cash. A new drug properly distributed brings with it a new cash flow.
It hit the streets. Cheap. Easy to find. Easy enough to make. Made the rave circuit. Corrections began pulling baggies and balloons of it out of inmates’ assholes upon entry. Schools started finding kids as young as seven whacked out on the shit.
Swept the nation. A-List dope, the Hollywood Oscar winner of drugs. Not so hard you’d be stigmatized as a serious junkie if you used it, not so light as to be some Mickey Mouse shit.
Then stories started surfacing. First a few, eventually a flood. People started calling it ‘demon dust.’ Then just ‘demon.’ Then ‘The Devil.’ Capital D.
Here, in our backyard: an elementary school teacher south of the river realized she issued a bathroom pass to some goofball fifth grader who never showed back up. Some female student, walking the halls with a pass saying she could hurry and take a piss and get back to class. Oh, the horror. The teacher wanted her back.
Teacher-lady got up to go fetch the kid. Later, when she was capable of speaking again, she said she was fully expecting to find the absent student dealing with her first menstrual period. Teacher-lady went in to the nearest little girls’ room. Teacher-lady started screaming.
The ambulance said the girl had suffered some kind of massive, internal-cranial hemorrhage. Maybe a freak stroke. The Perfect Storm of strokes, to be sure.
In the narcotics bureau we called it gray matter detonation, GMD. Like a lot of cop lingo, gray matter detonation weaseled out of the squad rooms and onto the streets. It seemed like just a few days before we started hearing criminals using our jargon.
Stroke or GMD, either way the little girl’s eyes were so bloodshot nothing else was recognizable. The Red Eyed Stare. No response to stimulus. Shallow breathing. Low heart rate. Still clutching a bathroom pass in one arthritic claw of a hand. She went in to dose herself. A fifth grader, dropping the Big Fry.
Her body was on autopilot. Reflexive. Emptied. Ruined. Forever.
The thing about the Big Fry is this: it works with brain chemistry in such a way that some folks genetically predisposed to a bad high would...get fried.
Permanent. Scramble. The drug, with the right genetics, will turn the unlucky user into a vegetable. Irreversible.
The lucky ones: stiff, six feet under. Unlucky, the red eyed stare. In between are some who don’t die or become vegetables. Any new user pins all their hopes on being in that elusive third class of folks. The smeared, we call them. The smeared have a bizarre brain chemical reaction that foils the drug’s ability to kill instantly. Instead, like acid flashbacks, the drug pops back up here and there. Just in bursts. Smears.
When I was assaulted, the hit was an overdose of Big Fry.
I’m not dead.
I’m not a vegetable.
I’m smeared.
Word on the street said it was a freak accident. The little girl OD’d. Could happen to any retard taking too much. That’s why fifth graders shouldn’t dose. But then other folks started getting the red-eyed stare. Became a spreading, not-so-isolated phenomenon.
The Big Fry.
