Drugged Cat Milk draft_3

Drugged Cat Milk
issue 2

Contributers
Photos and Design - Jacob Spetzler
“Jelly” and “An Index of Vomit” - Zeke Foerster
“Burlington, Colorado” and “What happened
while we were drunk and high and tripping” -
Nathaniel Kennen Perkins
Photos pg. 6, 7, 15 - ADM

JELLY
by Zeke Foerster
Rigid woke up in the early afternoon on his couch to the kimchi smell of his
dried saliva and looked over to see Romance on the floor next to him. Rigid
wondered why they hadn’t shared the couch, it was a fold-out after all. Despite
sleeping on the room’s hardwood, Romance was already awake and reading
a handmade chapbook. Rigid yawned, stretched, and sat up sticking his legs
beneath his knees. It was half past one in the afternoon when Rigid looked at
his phone, he rubbed his stomach and felt sick.
“Up early?” Rigid asked his friend
on the floor.
“Not really, about an hour
ago.”
“Reading?”
“Poems from a friend of a
friend. Remember Kali? Came up
and visited from Asheville… one
of her ex’s named Budd.”
“Oh.”
“You should read it, boy
worked as a ranch hand—“
Rigid pursed his lips and
waved his hands above his head.
“—Okay, but read it
because it’s good?” Romance said
with the chapbook in one hand
and a purple Nalgene in the other.
Rigid accepted the Nalgene
bottle but ignored the paper
and drank. Determined, Romance
tossed the poems onto Rigid’s lap.
“Aight, I’ll read it—“
“Yes baby, you will. Because we’ll be with him for a while in Beering.
He’s staying with Astrid for a couple weeks around the same time we are.”
“Mmphf,” Said Rigid as he felt his blood loosen and sweat condense on
his pockmarked forehead. Standing up, Rigid’s body moved before his brain
could register motion and pass that information to his inner ear.
The woodgrain on the floor matched
the spirals he saw when he closed
his eyes. “I think I need to perform
ablutions.”
“Right now?” Asked Romance,
his eyes darted around the room.
Finding nothing, he ripped open the
velcro on his messenger bag, Rigid
winced and held his head.
“Emergency ablutions.” said Rigid
as a burp caught in his throat.
Romance plucked a large jar of
granola from his purple messenger
bag, looked around again and poured
the granola into a crusty ramen
container on Rigid’s floor. He thrust
the empty jar under Rigid’s head and
patted his friend’s back while humming
Marvin Gaye to the sounds of
splashing bile.
They ate granola out of the

putrefying ramen bowl and left the jar of bile ignored on the floor, Romance
sealed it shut with a roll of plastic wrap he found in his bag along with a full
pickle jar, a fifth half full of E&J, and four dirty plastic shot glasses. Romance
poured a wake-up pickleback for both of them
while Rigid went back and forth between several
websites on his cracked laptop trying to find a
working pirated CNN stream.
Rigid patted Romance’s head with the hand not
involved with fingering granola into his mouth.
Romance reached up and patted Rigid on the
back, causing him to choke and retch until the
jar was full of bile.
It was three when they left the apartment. Rigid
shared the expired deodorant under his couch
and put on clean clothing. In the living room,
they both waved goodbye to Rigid’s roomates
Colt and Rain who were watching the original
Heavy Metal with an alternative soundtrack by
some unidentifiable maximalist.
“Basically Panda Bear meets Jodorowsky
meets Prurient,” Colt said when Romance asked.
“Animation is better than 2000,” Said
Rain. “The architectural elements are an interesting
extrapolation of— of— of…“
“Of the modular system of penning
structures within the American Midwest, especially
as they are too often compared to the
stabling practices in Germany. And I think you
mean exploration,” finished Colt.
“Sounds like nonsense,” said Romance.
When the four of them finished Jockey School
together, Colt and Rain had immediately entered
grad programs, while Colt focused on researching
stabling techniques Rain handled the design end of their thesis-cum-manifesto:
Sequestrian, Modern Pasture Economics and Design, currently entering
its fifth draft in an attempt to reduce it from seven hundred to five hundred
pages.
“Y’all watching it for Advanced Steading?” asked Rigid.
Colt and Rain lifted their Rolling Rocks together to confirm.
“Who you got. I heard Saltpeter also taught
grad.”
“Saltpeter is on sabbatical in Nepal, reliving his
own college years,” Colt rolled his eyes. “I don’t
remember their name, and I stopped going after
they went on a rant about some vertically integrated
livery stable slash glue factory that belonged to
The Kremlin or whatever, some sort of experiment
with communistic stabling that didn’t jive well
with my whole modus operandi considering the
USSR’s policy regarding Steading Law or rather the
lack-thereof of any policy.
“His spirited,” Colt throws up air quotes. “callto-action
during class amounted to one student,
Zaragoza or Alameda - who cares - asking if The
Kremlin knew about their own history of stable
neglect during the USSR. Class went silent, Rain
farted, pretty fucking hilarious. The poor fucking
prof one-eighty’d and started talking about the necessity
of Euclidean Geometry in the construction
of non-quadrilateral grazing pens.”
Colt leaned back into the living room couch and
sucked his teeth, Rain bumped beers with him.
“Well… all right.” Said Rigid. “We gonna head
out and grab some food, if you want to join?”
“Naw.”
Romance and Rigid left Colt and Rain and
stepped outside into sunlight.
Romance forgot his wallet in the room and went
back to grab it, when he came back down he held
the jar full of Rigid’s bile and poured it out under the front steps. Rigid asked
him why he hadn’t emptied it in the toilet, Romance shrugged and said he
wasn’t headed that way.
Walking in the direction of the Q train, Romance played with his hands and
looked around.
“Be nice to leave soon,” Said Rigid. “See Beering in person.”
Romance nodded, thinking about the stress of travel.
Near the Q was a Jamaican spot, and they ate with
their hands on a bench outside. The sun, the fish,
and the hangover joined forces and Rigid vomited
into a trashcan next to the bench. He met the
eye of the old man at the register, who gave him
a pitiful look as Rigid walked inside for another
plate of fish.
As the door closed, the old man blessed Rigid in
patois, Rigid said “bet.” Neither understood the
other.
On the bench, Romance sat with both hands
stretched along its top edge, one leg over the other,
his head turned up towards the sky, mouth open
hoping for anything. With his curly black stubble,
speckled cargo pants, and frayed trucker hat,
Romance looked exactly like a younger, squashed
version of Rigid’s father, or just another anonymous
daddy Rigid would drink with in the underground
bars he found so comforting during the
first alien year on Rodeo Tour, the kind of daddy
who paints houses and moves furniture with a
demo tape of acoustic ballads and pictures of
his kids in his wallet, the daddy who lives across
town with his girlfriend he calls ‘Old Girl,’ the
fair-weather father.
None of which describes Rigid’s real father, which
is a different thought.
Rigid ate his fish again, looked over at Romance
and noticed his friend in the midst of an idea, his
nose wrinkled and twitching.
Romance sighed, closed his mouth and leaned over his knees with his palms on
the back of his neck. Rigid nudged his friend with his elbow. Romance turned
away and frowned at the sun.
“We’re gonna head up to Queens and collect a small favor from a friend
of mine. You down for that homie?” He said.
“We gotta rough someone up today?” Rigid rolled his sleeves up to a
small tattoo of a pair of dentures on the inside of
his right bicep, revealing a sharp farmer’s tan.
“No no no…” Said Romance. He was playing
with his hands again.
“Maybe… no.” Said Romance. He smiled at Rigid
and turned his face back towards the sun.
They boarded the Q and took it north through
manhattan, Rigid’s hangover was exasperated by
the jostling and the juking of the train car as it
passed over the Brooklyn Bridge into Chinatown.
The inevitable need to vomit rose up out of Rigid’s
chest and took hold of the muscles around
his throat. He clenched everything and waited,
Romance shot him a look and shook his head.
Rigid nodded back to reassure his friend that all
was well, that he would vomit on Canal street.
Over the years, through practice and consequence,
Rigid had mastered the art of vomiting out of a
train without being stranded underground for another
twenty minutes, stewing in subway humidity,
and thus vomiting again.
When leaving from his own train station in Flatbush,
Rigid had found several spots to board that
allowed for easy purging; Five feet to one’s right
from the Manhattan bound stairs or twenty feet to
the left, either position corresponded with a trash
can directly outside the doors at Astor Place.
Today, Rigid was forced to relinquish his stomach
to a Canal Street trash can, difficult to pull off due
to midday traffic. As they rolled over the bridge, Rigid grabbed Romance and
the two of them shifted from one car to the next until Rigid found the door he

needed for his ablutions.
The cars trundled forward until they reached Canal. Rigid waited for the doors
to open, let a few of the elderly cart-pushers off before him, poked his head
into the trash can directly outside the door, vomited, spat once, wiped his
mouth, waited for those in front of him to finish boarding and stepped back on
the subway. Nobody said a thing.
Rigid sat back down next to Romance, leaned his head on his friend’s shoulder
and nodded off till the sweat on his forehead cooled under the subway car’s air
conditioner and chilled him awake.
As the doors dinged open, the exhausted voice of an MTA employee
announced their stop and both of the travelers stepped outside, blocking the
midsummer light with cupped palms.
“Where we at? And what we about to do?” Asked Rigid.
“Nowhere important and nothing much at all, I just thought you should
come along.”
“How many years we been here and exactly how many times have we
been to Queens?”
“Speak for yourself… whatever you were going to say… I came here
once a week, during the last couple years.”
“Buying some horse?” Punned Rigid.
“Mushrooms actually,” Romance missed the joke, his fingers were looping
around themselves, his pupils mirrored his fingers. “You remember Jelly?
Jay Locke? Our year. No school record basically but he graduated. Ghost with a
degree, never hung out with the other Jockeys.”
Romance’s hands grabbed each other behind his back, fingers working
over the muscles of his forearms. He let a long breath out and smiled.
“Drank beers in Prospect with the other stable hands?” Said Romance.
“Naw…” Said Rigid, who was staring at his friend’s hands. Romance
chuckled.
“Forgot who I was asking. Anyway, I would buy shrooms from him
and his dad, sold them right out of their garage, and we’d eat a couple caps and
hang in his backyard. They had this gazebo thing with the whole setup, I mean
like, widescreen, xbox, playstation, surround sound. Man cave idealism, but
outside, so… like a Man-zebo… forget that.
“Jelly’s dad owned an AV shop too and had all this crazy camera equipment
everywhere, shit bruh, tripping with them dudes and fucking around with Jelly
Dad’s tech was what got me back into photography. That and the Muybridge
and His Influences elective during sophomore year—”
“—So why we here?”
“Chill my dude, chill.”
“I hate when people say that.”
Romance rolled his eyes and pshh’d out the side of his mouth.
“Jay and I have a strange relationship,” continued Romance. “When his father
died our junior year Jelly slid into a dark place.” Rigid blew air out his mouth
and raised his eyebrows. “Dark like you haven’t seen bruh, it wouldn’t help you
for me to explain tee-bee-aych, you just gotta know this man was somewhere
most people don’t come back from. He missed most of junior and senior year,
not that anyone would notice.
“But, yeah, Jelly was friends with all the stable hands and those dudes can
drink, like, they’re all stable vets who’ve been working for the school since it
opened.
“So Jelly is getting his Jelly on — you know, he’s smooth like that — talking
to the stable hands, getting drunk, and when those old-heads drink they start
dropping hints to Jay about some lascivious type shit going down between
administration and the stable hands, deals of sorts.”
Forgetting the empty feeling in his stomach, Rigid stood up straight and tried
to meet Romance’s eye, but Romance’s pupils were still dancing around, his
neck turned thirty degrees from Rigid.
“Basically it was hush money,” said Romance. “The stable hands had been
facilitating administrative orgies for generations. And one night they get drunk
and let Jay onto their little secret because they figure him to be a native New
Yorker and an all-around stand-up type (which he is, but part of Jelly no one
saw included a spiteful drunken anger. Because he is smooth like that) so Jay
supposes since he’s probably going to be flunked out for missing most of his

junior and senior year he might as well go out with a bang.”
“Wait,” said Rigid. ”Can I guess what happens next.”
“Absolutely not, but you probably could.”
Romance rolled a cigarette in his hand while he walked. Rigid watched
him, but Romance never looked down, just finished and put it behind his ear.
They turned past a line of larger apartment buildings onto a street of townhouses.
Romance took the rollie from behind his ear and put in his mouth,
then put it back behind his ear.
“Jay’s dad had a ton of camera equipment right, and after he died the AV store
dissolved but Jelly inherited a lot of it because it was his dad’s personal inventory.
Jay’s Daddy had a thing for antiquated equipment, some soviet shit I guess,
all this microfilm Jay wanted to show me one day while I was visiting him for
some drinking and shroomin in the man-zebo. I told him ‘hell yeah, let’s take
a look’ but he gets really solemn, his pupils were darting like he couldn’t figure
me out. For real, looked like he was gonna ask if I was a narc, but I think he
sensed my discomfort because he smiled, clapped me on the back and took off,
beckoning forward in a way that betrays a secret knowledge you about to be
initiated into… what the whole experience felt like before we got down into the
basement and he showed me the microfilm…
Romance took a while to let the moment stew into a portent and smiled at
Rigid out the side of his face.
“Okay, now you can guess.”
“Horses.”
Romance raised his eyebrows at Rigid.
“Yeah,” Romance took a long time before continuing. “Dark shit: students,
faculty members, cleaning staff, homeless dudes they would watch shoot
up beforehand, a lot of crusts with a new story no one will believe. Eyes Wide
Shut shit… I could make out a couple of our professors and classmates but I’ll
spare you the details.
“Besides, no one we knew was ever involved with anything more than a completely
vanilla illegal orgy.”
“Jay took all those photos?” Rigid asked.
“Yeah, he never showed me where the camera was hidden, and I never
asked.” Romance takes the cigarette from behind his ear and puts it in his
mouth then sticks it between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it between them,
tapping on the filter like it was lit. His eyes dilate.
“I mean, what was the point? Once you saw it, does it matter how it was shot?”
He sucks his teeth while Rigid steps over a puddle in the sidewalk.
“And seeing all of this suddenly makes him beholden to you?” Said
Rigid.
“Hold your horses — Jay shows me the photos right? And naturally I’m
asking him a million questions like ‘whatchu gonna do with this shit’ and he
shrugs his shoulders saying how ‘fucked up’ it is and how ‘someone should pay
for this’, then I go like, dude pay who what? So he smiles all funny and claps me
on the back again, saying ‘that’s why I was his boy,’ because I asked him shit like
that, then I leave and I don’t hear from him for another week. At that point,
I was visiting every other day because whenever I came over he always complained
about how empty the house was… I started to realize that besides the
stable hand dudes, I was the only friend he had at the school.
“After that week I hit him up and he texted back some cryptic shit like ‘I figured
it out bro’ so I left it at that but then I started seeing people I didn’t recognize
staring at me across The Nethermead, professors never called on me in
class no more, Jay wasn’t responding… and you were in your bad place.”
Rigid frowned and put his fingers to his lips.
“Okay, let’s not talk about that.” Romance crushed the unsmoked rollie. “That
deep set feeling of being watched. Everywhere, all the time.”
“Oh shit!”
“What?”
“Is that why they painted a dick on Bitter, And Then Some?”
“Eye-Dee-Kay man, but it was around the same time so yeah, probably
a connection.”
“Fucked up what they did to her man, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s fine, I was only taking her out for exercise and air, Qiang LaoShi
had me shooting all the events at that point so when was I ever going to race?
But because I was shooting all the events, I was called in to see Dean Cassabian
and he immediately began asked me questions about my relationship with Jelly.
At that moment, everything clicked into place so I had to tell the dean I was
dropping out, right there in his office. He started spouting off about paperwork
and bureaucracy and personal responsibility.”
They both laugh.
“But I never went back. Kept ignoring their calls, their emails, snail-mail,
in-person representatives and social media Dee-Ems. The administration finally
faded out because they got wise to the fact that I knew about all the photos.”
Romance’s hands did somersaults.
“If you’re going to commit group bestiality, you better have a nose for trouble.
“Anyway, eventually, I hear from Jay who tells me that he’s blackmailed everyone
he could tell for certain was on the microfilm. So I ask him what he wants
from the school and Jelly says one of the best things I’ve ever heard: ‘humility
and a degree’, not justice, not retribution, not money or power or whatever else
people blackmail for, I guess silence… naw, Jay wanted them to understand
that he knew what they were doing, and he had cameras, and anytime he felt
like it those photos could be shared. He wanted them to know that he didn’t
need nothing because he was taking it.”
“What about the degree?” Asked Rigid.

“The degree? The degree is just an official relationship between the school and
Jay providing irrefutable evidence in the event that he decides to release the
photos. Just paperwork, bureaucracy, and responsibility.”
“Jesus… dangerous game.”
“Exactly why he owes me—”
“—Because—”
“—I still have the original microfilm, in a lockbox buried in Prospect
Park.”
“Directly under their noses.”
“In the stables.”
“Genius.”
“Bet.”
Romance and Rigid had been walking along one of those Queens
streets so far from anything it no longer feels like New York to a non-resident,
and the houses remind the Romance of Bronxville and Rigid of a New England
Levittown. They kicked cans and looked into front yards, nodding at old men
in open shirts fanning themselves with panama hats. Every block or so Romance
would clear his throat, stop in mid sentence, point in a direction and
follow through with his feet, Rigid trailing half a note behind. During the last
block to Jay’s house, they walk in silence while Romance rolls another cigarette.
Sharing it outside of Jay’s house, the boys try to distinguish the ranch home
from its neighbors and find nothing to speak of other than the shadow of a
gazebo striating the alley behind the house. Romance cleared his throat for the
last time and grinds the half-finished cigarette underneath his feet, failing to
notice Rigid’s hungry look.
“Riggy… understand this… Jay, uh, Jay ain’t doing too well, mentally. I
mean, he’s all right, he’s all there, but since the whole blackmail thing he’s highly
paranoid.” Romance put his hands on his hips and bit his bottom lip.
“Okay so Jay’s like… He’s got this thing where… alright… Jay’s smart, but he
got the fear worse than I did, which only makes sense.”
“Understandable.”
“So he’ll know me and trust me, but he don’t know you, so he’s not going to
trust you, and I didn’t call ahead because sometimes that just makes him closeoff
and get all weird about hanging out.”
“Understood.”
“So don’t be offended if he shakes you down a little bit when we first get there,
he thinks everyone is a rep from the school trying to find out where the micros
are.”
“I won’t be, and of course.”
“Because Jay doesn’t even know.”
“… Jay doesn’t…”
Romance’s fingers did the can-can.
“Half of it is just having the evidence itself,” said Romance. “But Jelly’s genius is
his forethought, and when I buried those tapes he made me promise I’d never
tell him where I hid that shit.”
“What if he rats on you though?”
“He not going to rat.”
“But I’m a jockey, so he can’t trust me. What do I got to do? Leave my
phone in the mailbox? Take my shoes off and walk through a metal detector?”
“…Don’t be offended my guy, I have to do it too.”
The three of them stood inside Jay’s kitchen drinking powdered pink
lemonade from frosted plastic cups. Jay had brought the lemonades out on
a Daffy Duck collectible dinner tray. He also placed on the counter between
the lemonades a bottle of Stolichnaya. Rigid made a face Jay didn’t notice, but
Romance did and kicked him in the shin under the table. Jay opened the bottle
and poured each of them three fingers.
“Right before he died,” said Jay. “My father won a Stoli contest, so we
get a case every three months, he had heard about it from a friend but we only
started on the work when another of my boys came over and showed me the
insta with the details. We had to take a photograph of a bottle in a famous
place, that’s it. Watch the formica my dude, shit gets you ants.”
Rigid asked for a napkin. Jay got up and tossed a paper towel square at
him, speaking as he lumbered through the kitchen.
“We thought about it a lot together: Statue of Liberty, Leaning Tower of Pisa,
The Hagia Sophia, you know, famous shit like that. Landmarks.” Rigid listened
and stared at the bottom of his cup, Romance leaned across the table and nodded.
“We stayed up drinking Stoli for like three days doing that shit. Thinking
of places and locations, planning out travel and expenses, considering how
we’d flip this cheap Stoli once we won it. You remember?” Jay laughs and slaps
Romance across the chest with the back of his hand.
Turning his face towards the light coming through the vertical blinds, Jay’s eyes
pass through the chiaroscuro as Rigid watches them flash from black to gold,
Rigid watches them shine.
“You know, it’s like, we thought all that shit up and then sat there and went ‘oh,
wait, we’re broke as fuck, we can’t travel to Italy’ but we’re thinkers right, so we
think: we just as important as a broken-ass colosseum. Waited for the perfect
angle of light, and called up the neighborhood (because pops was smooth like
that), and told them all ‘bring a bottle.’
“We crowded like seventy niggas in the fucking gazebo, raised a toast, and took
photos for hours. You’ve never seen that many drunks standing still in your
whole life. Big fucking party bro’s.”
“It sounds like one brother,” said Romance and tipped his cup to the
middle of the counter, Rigid and Jay both drank. It tasted disgusting, Rigid
noticed the powder in his drink wasn’t fully dissolved.
“Yeah man, to pops and his big fucking ideas.”
“Pops.”
They drank.
Jay looks outside at the gazebo, looks at its peeling siding and the spray
paint covered flat-screen, his gaze lingers over the tulip heads of a dozen trash
bags, peeking over the chipped railing. Romance looks behind Jay into the
kitchen; the sink is immaculate in comparison to the stove and the floor, both
jeweled in amber resin. The walls look like they might have been splattered
with iodine, or blood browned by oxygen and death, but neither and only
grease and cigarettes. Rigid leans his hip against the counter and turns his head
to the wall behind Romance to count the unframed photographs stuck into it
with mismatched pins (push, tac, sewing, etc) creating a pointillist interpretation
of a father’s legacy.
Many of the photographs were the glossy kind printed at a CVS but between
them a number were obviously developed in a bathtub darkroom, their browning
edges curling up off the wall. Rigid focused on a single bookmark sized
photo, and noticed it was part of a contact sheet, cut to look like a photo booth
strip. Jay and his father stood arm in arm, beers in hand, posing in their backyard:
Jay piggybacking his father, Jay’s eyes following the direction of his father’s
outstretched beer hand, Jay’s father smiling into the camera on one knee,
holding out a beer to his son while Jay pressed both palms against his cheeks in
campy shock.
Jay’s father stood by himself in the last print with one eye closed and a single
finger pointing at the lens, smiling a different smile. Romance cleared his
throat because Jay had noticed Rigid looking at his father’s photos and was
staring at him with narrow pupils.
“Y’all want to sit outside? With all this beautiful weather it’s such a shame to
waste it,” said Romance as he tapped the counter with his fingers.
“Watch that formica bruh,” Said Jay, still eyeballing Rigid. Romance stopped
tapping the counter.
They moved outside at Jay’s suggestion.
In the gazebo, the three boys spent a while talking about the various
nothings they were each involved with. Jay lived by hustling AV equipment on
Craigslist, a buy and sell operation that kept him afloat. They played a couple
hands of poker after clearing the Burger King wrappers and beer cans off the
table in the gazebo and drank Jay’s Stolichnaya until the bottle was finished.
It was late July and the sun was still hot, but it had dipped below the high fence
surrounding Jay’s yard. Rigid felt the sucking pressure of heat sleep, yawned
and convinced himself it was automatic. Romance noticed but continued to
deal out cards as Jay got up to grab another bottle. Rigid shifted one leg over
the other and cleared his throat at Romance.
“Yeah boy, I know I know,” said Romance. “I’ll tell him to order a pizza
or something.”
“Okay.”
A moment where nothing is said.
“Dude,” said Rigid.
Romance narrows his eyes and curls his lips downward in frustration.
“I thought we were here to collect a favor,” said Rigid. “I’m not complaining,
but all we’ve done is drink and play cards, so I’m just over here wondering
like… what’s the favor my dude? You know I got people coming tomorrow
to take the tv and xbox and shit, you know my dad’s gonna drive up in the
morning to take the other shit back to Maine, so like, what’s the deal, where are
going with this narrative?”
Romance kept his lips curled but his eyes softened, with the languished
movements of a sea cucumber, he shot back the last of the pink liquor, ice
scraping against the plastic as he set his cup down, managing to make the entire
action important.
Rigid nodded.
“Have you ever been the caregiver for someone?” Asked Romance.

“What?” Asked Rigid. Romance rolled his eyes and answered with his
hands.
“Nigga, you ever care for someone? You ever taken care of them? Like
change their diapers, feed them, house them, love them.” He swung his arms
around him.
Romance waited until the silence between the two boys fermented his
question into rhetoric and sighed. Rigid stayed quiet.
“I spent so much time with Jay and his dad… then his dad died and I
stayed here for a month during some derby or whatever, honestly I was so done
with Jockey at that point, I don’t remember.”
Rigid nodded, and Romance stared into his ice cubes.
“But yeah, I was there all the time, I mean, we’re friends. But Jay and I,
it’s family. I love you Rig, but Jelly is someone who needs people to take care of
him, and you don’t.”
Rigid kept his neck stiff and faced the fence where the sun was setting
behind it. He wondered if Romance could see his disappointment.
“Imagine if I didn’t see you for years then rolled through to ask for a
favor,” said Rigid. “You gave it to me, and I dipped after that? Fucked up.”
Jay opened the screen door with another bottle under his arm and a
speaker.
“Okay.” Said Rigid.
Jay started playing reggae.
“It’s fine,” said Romance. “I want to be here, and I wanted you to be
here.”
The speaker is placed in the middle of the table until Romance makes Jay move
it off to the side, they keep the bottle in their hands till it’s finished and Rigid
says goodbye. Jay tells him that they are good.
Romance stays up with Jay taking photos in an unfinished pier as day breaks
over the East River. The construction equipment at golden hour stands out on
digital.
They sleep at the pier. In the afternoon, Romance hides a new camera in the
inner pocket of his overalls.
Rigid smokes weed alone in his room and listens to his roommates argue. At
two o’clock in the morning, Rigid wakes up and finds it difficult to fall back
asleep.

Burlington, Colorado
by Nathaniel Kennen Perkins
It was kind of a one-horse town, Burlington. The only bar was closed, and
there weren’t any restaurants open either, except for the Carl’s Junior back in
the truck stop where we had just come from. The liquor store was closed, even
though it wasn’t even 8:00 yet. I could feel my heels starting to blister in my
boots, and I was sick of carrying my pack around. We found a grocery store
and jumped in the dumpster. There was plenty there, potatoes, sausage, eggs,
all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t eat because we didn’t have the means to cook
it. All we came out with were few mangoes, a bunch of freckled bananas, and
the half of a bag of baby carrots that hadn’t yet completed the metamorphosis
into slimy orange-brown mush. We ate it all in the parking lot of a real estate
office, and washed it down by splitting the pocket-sized bottle of Evan Williams
I had in the front pocket of my backpack. It was the kind of meal that only
makes you hungrier, and we were only drunk enough to feel sleepy and kind of
sad. Not drunk enough to really romanticize our current position of freedom
and wildness.
I tried to send a text to L------, but I didn’t have any bars out here in the
middle of butt-fuck nowhere. My battery was at 12 percent. I turned my phone
off and stuck it into the spot in my backpack that the whiskey bottle had previously
occupied.
We walked back toward the truck stop, back toward the glowing edge of
the freeway, and looked at the Day’s Inn that sat across the street from it, coveting
the expensive rooms with their soft beds and TVs and hot showers. But
these accommodations were well beyond our price range. Instead, we dragged
ourselves out behind the hotels and into the endless cornfields, where we laid
down a plastic tarp, bundled up as best we could, and tried our damnedest
to look up at and appreciate the night sky and its sickly-beautiful jizzwash of
Milky Way. We were beat.
The distant lullaby of trucks downshifting on the I-70 eased me toward
sleep. In the bizarre, half-dream/sort-of-awake state of consciousness in which
I found myself, I flashed back to being a young kid, sitting with my dad on the
carpet-looking couch in the living room of the home my family lived in when
my sister and I were children. He was trying to be fatherly, to impart some
sort of wisdom, teach me a life lesson. I imagined sitting next to my long-dead
father again, the sunlight coming in sideways through the window, listening
eagerly to everything that he had to say. At this point in my life I wasn’t aware
of him ever having said anything unimportant or offensive or stupid.
This was the story he’d told me:
A paleontologist had just discovered a new species of dinosaur, one previously
unknown to science. He needed to ship the skeleton from Des Moines,
where he had been reconstructing it in his own lab, to California, where it
would undergo further study and be displayed in a natural history museum.
(Like many boys of that age, I was very into dinosaurs at the time, and

this introduction to the story intrigued me)
The paleontologist would need to hire a trucker to carry the priceless
specimen all that way. He put a classified ad in the newspaper, looking for
someone up to the task. He got some calls and set up interviews for the next
week. The day of the interviews came, and the first interviewee showed up at
the laboratory right on time. The two men spoke for a few minutes, getting to
know each other.
Then, the paleontologist asked, “How good of a driver are you? There
are lots of dangerous mountain passes between here and California—winding
roads that on one side drop off thousands of feet into the canyon below. Do you
think you can handle that? “
“Are you kidding?” said the would-be trucker. “I’m such a good driver
that I can get the wheels of the truck right up to the edge of the pavement,
mere millimeters from the edge of the cliff, and not go over. No problem at all.”
“Very interesting,” said the paleontologist. “Very impressive. Well, I have
a few other interviews to do, but you’ll hear from me by the end of the day.”
The trucker left. There were a few minutes before the next interview was
scheduled, so the paleontologist smoked a cigar and read his mail.
At 9:30, right on time, the second interviewee knocked on the door of
the laboratory. The process was the same: introductions, light conversation,
and then the big question.
“Very interesting,” said the paleontologist. “I’m impressed by your confidence.
I have a few other interviews to do, but you’ll hear from me by the end
of the day.”
The third interviewee, unlike the first two, was about ten minutes late.
The paleontologist sat him down and, feeling pressed for time, skipped right to
the big question:
“How good of a driver are you? There are lots of dangerous mountain
passes between here and California—winding roads that on one side drop off
thousands of feet into the canyon below. Do you think you can handle that?”
“Are you kidding me?” said the third truck driver. “I’m going to stay as
far away from the edge of the cliff as I can.”
“You’re hired,” said the paleontologist.
I woke at first light. It was cold as shit, and a thick gross layer of dew
had collected on everything. At some point during the night, Jacob had had the
right idea and had wrapped himself up like a taquito in his half of the tarp. I
stood up, and started stuffing my wet things into my wet backpack. The rustling
of the tarp woke Jacob. We peed onto baby corn plants, and walked back
toward the buzzing truckstop lights.
“How good of a driver are you? There are lots of dangerous mountain
passes between here and California. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Are you kidding?” said the interviewee. “I’ve driven every single inch
of highway in the United States. I’m the greatest truck driver to ever live. I’m
so good I can get half my tire hanging over the side of the cliff and never lose
control.

WHAT HAPPENED WHILE WE
WERE TRIPPING AND DRUNK
AND HIGH
by Nathaniel Kennen Perkins
It wasn’t just the mushrooms. The party was objectively beautiful. The terror
of the shooting lingered in a back corner of my mind and everyone else’s, but
there was something more beautiful present now, a benevolent spirit brought
in on the spring-tanned shoulders of about 70 smiling punks. They milled
around, wandering between groups and conversations, admiring each others
second-hand clothes, showing off their new tattoos, making each other laugh,
throwing sticks and tennis balls for the overstimulated dogs.
Jacob and I stood together, backs to the overgrown greenery of weeds
by the chain-link fence. We sipped our beers. We grinned at each other, each
reading the other’s mind. It was easy to do because we were thinking identical
things.
Someone came up from the basement to announce loudly that the
first band was going on. Everyone filed down the stairs and packed into the
low-ceilinged basement. The band counted off one-two-three-four, and we all
danced like Neanderthals in our cave, bumping into one sweaty body after the
other. Jacob jumped on my back, and I spun around, twirling us through the
chaos like a planet and its giggling moon.
I wanted to kiss someone.
I wanted to kiss everyone.
The set ended, and we flooded back into the yard for cigarettes.
In the time that the band had been playing, the cops had shown up.
Immersed, even temporarily, in the anarchist party utopia, I’d forgotten about
the very concept of police. They weren’t there for us. No noise complaints. They
couldn’t give less of a shit about the party. They were there to investigate the
shooting. An hour and a half had passed since the shots, a period of response
time that had surely elapsed because this was a historically black neighborhood.
The pigs could barely be be bothered. But now there were flashing
lights— cherries and berries, Max called them— and police tape along the
entire block. Black-clad officers stood around in groups in the street.
We did our thing, trying to ignore them. People went inside or hid behind
the house to do drugs.
It was a hot night, so Jacob and I went upstairs to take a cold shower.
There was no other temperature option for the shower. Max hadn’t paid his bill,
and the gas company had cut off service. It was a good thing we didn’t want to
warm up.

On the ground floor of the house and in the yard and in the basement
the liquor was flowing freely. Someone had built a bonfire out of empty beer
cases and two-by-four scraps left over from Max’s various construction projects.
People stood around it, drinking, getting wobblier.
Instead of going
inside to see the
next band, Jacob and I
ate more mushrooms
and bought and did
half a gram of cocaine
and scurried around
the yard finishing off
half-drunk and abandoned
cans of Hamm’s
or Natty Light. We were
like squirrels gathering
spilled peanuts.
Those who had
watched the second
set came back out and
drank more, while the
touring band loaded
their amps and instruments
down the steep,
narrow stairs.
I couldn’t tell if it
was my own increasingly
soggy brain, or
if everyone was slowly
becoming less magical.
Some people, having already seen their friends’ bands play, tried to
leave, only to be turned around by the cops and sent back inside. The street was
officially a crime scene. There was no place to go. We were all stuck.
I found myself separated from Jacob and standing in a group of people
I didn’t know but thought I recognized from previous visits to KC or maybe
from other cities where lots of traveling punks end up. Someone was telling a
story about their stepmother.
Some time, years
or a decade before they
had met and married
this person’s father, the
stepmother had been
kidnapped from the
parking lot of a Kansas
City, Kansas bar. A group
of men had actually
snatched her up, thrown
her in a U-Haul truck,
and taken her to a house.
They’d beaten her unconscious
and chained her
wrists around the back
of a toilet. The bathtub
was full of ammonia. The
fumes kept her disoriented
and groggy. The men
took turns raping her.
Her family and work had
no idea where she was.
She was there for three
months. It wasn’t until
one of the men, extremely
drunk and thus particularly
affected by the temporary exposure to the ammonia, passed out on the
floor of the bathroom that she was able to escape. With her bare feet, she fished
the keys to the cuffs out of the pocket of his wranglers, and she freed herself.
I walked over to the bushes and threw up.
Someone yelled that the last band was starting, and I staggered toward
the basement. It was too crowded, though, and I got stuck watching claustrophobically
from the stairs. Too packed to descend, too many people behind me
to go back up. I was
sweating. I hoped I
wouldn’t have to vomit
again. I didn’t know
where Jacob was.
After the last
band, back in the
yard, I tried to get my
bearings. Doing so felt
like slogging through
a marsh, occasionally
hitting dry land, gaining
speed and traction,
and then plunging
back into the muck.
Any mental clarity was
short-lived. I went to
the weeds and stuck
my fingers down my
throat, making horrible
sounds that I didn’t
care if anyone heard.
It worked.
I felt a little
better.
Jacob came running out the back door and stood on the porch, calling
my name.
When I made my way to him through the crowd, he shouted, “Come
quick! Max is getting arrested!”
Through the house where people were dancing to “Emergency on Planet
Earth” by Jamiroquai,
where people were
slumped on the couches,
where people were
tagging the refrigerator
door and the stovetop
with paint markers
and hobo crayons.
Down the front steps.
Sure enough,
Max was out there in
the street, hands cuffed
behind his back, only
one strap of his train
conductor overalls
buttoned, nothing
on underneath. Four
cops were up in his
face, screaming, bright
pink, spittle flying
from their jagged and
cavernous mouths.
Max was just
laughing hysterically.
The yellow police caution tape was broken and strewn across the ground.
“You’re going to go to fucking prison for interfering with a crime scene!”
one of the officers was yelling.

What do I do here, I wondered. Tackle the cops? Incite a riot? Film everything
with my phone in case they beat the shit out of him?
I just stood and watched.
Max was going to go to jail.
He was laughing less now, but still laughing.
Word had spread. A group had gathered around me.
Leon, burly and filled with the tough but loose confidence of alcohol,
appeared next to me.
“Officers!” he shouted. “You’ve got to let us go home! We gotta get back
to our children!”
They were escorting Max back to the front yard.
I felt like I was going to pass out.
Max said, “everybody get the fuck back inside.”
We obeyed.
In the living room, Leon said to Max, “Man, you’re lucky you’re a redneck-ass
white dude. If that was me out there you’d be visiting me in County.
Or in the hospital.”
We all nodded.
I thought about Max’s words: You don’t even have any fucking kids.
I remembered my pregnant girlfriend, two states away.
time.
kids.”
Max turned his head and registered the crowd of his friends for the first
“Man, shut the fuck up, Leon,” he said. “You don’t even have any fucking
Now it was the cops’ turn to laugh.
They thought that was hilarious.
They had their hands on their knees.
Spit still flying from their ugly mouths.
They were clapping Max on the back.
They were unlocking the cuffs.
What the fuck was going on?

The boy is sick in his childhood bed. His
body shivers with the atoms he can see
dancing in the corners of his ceiling. A
knock at the door, the mother enters. The
boy is looking at the atoms, the mother
places a stewpot to the left of his head.
Sorry, says the boy, the mother ruffles his
curls and sits on a stool painted with the
boy’s name. Phlegm chokes the boy. The
mother works in a group home and takes
the day off to care for her sick child. The
stewpot on the carpeting to the left of the
boy - in front of the mother - to the right
of a bookshelf. The mother pools pink
medicine into a cold spoon, tilts the boy’s
head forward and drips it over his puffy
white tongue. At its taste, the boy vomits
into the stewpot. Most makes it in, some
will stain the carpet, which the mother
cleans, the mother who says nothing but
pushes the stewpot closer to the boy’s
head, catching the strings of sickness dripping
from his chapped lips. Sorry baby
boy, says the mother.
Thank you, says the boy, who turns back
to watch the atoms dance. The mother
takes the stewpot downstairs to wash, and
the boy sits up, leaning over the new stain
to grab a book, feeling much better.
-----------------------------------------------
The boy is sick in the bed of the lover. No,
the boy is sick on the couch of the former
lover. To the left of his head is a stewpot
full of pale vomit. A Halloween party last
An Index of Vomit
by Zeke Foerster
night, somewhere in Alphabet City. The boy
leaves the overstuffed apartment. A trashcan in
the hallway, how convenient, he vomits into it.
Outside, the boy puts his cheek against sidewalk,
cold comforts. The boy is picked up by
two friends, one the former lover and the other
the former lover of another. They shoulder the
boy to the bed of the girlfriend’s; no, the couch
of the former lover. A stewpot to the left of his
head, the boy vomits. I’m sorry, says the boy,
some of the vomit doesn’t make it and dribbles
on her shiny linoleum. The former lover sits up
with the boy for a while, she cleans the vomit.
I’m sorry, says the boy, and chokes up more
bile. A quiet hand on his back. Thank you, says
the boy. He wakes up as the former lover is
leaving for work, he rolls over and calls his boss
to quit his burrito-rolling job. Falls back asleep,
embarrassed to be much better.
----------------------------------------------------
The boy is sick in his Denver home. Wakes up
anxious with the sunrise, still high from last
night. In his desk is an unedited manuscript.
On his desk, an index card:
Voluntary Fiction + Involuntary Reality +
Voluntary Editing = Novel/Time Voluntary
Time(Fiction + In(Un)Reality + Editing) =
Novel
Unreality = A Reality still Involuntarily lived
Reality = Voluntary(Drinking + Un-Vomit(?) +
Cleaning)
The boy stares at his ceiling for a couple
of hours, then walks to the corner store,
his finger-picked afro under a dirty white
hood, buys a six-pack and an armful of
microwave
burritos. The
boy nukes
two burritos,
smokes a joint,
and drinks
the first beer.
The boy keeps
the six-pack
on his windowsill,
as it
is winter. The
boy watches
cartoons on
YouTube,
drinks another
beer, smokes
another joint,
eats more
burritos. Two
more beer,
head clear
stomach queer.
An unopened
guitar case at
the boy’s feet
shames him
into smoking
a couple of
cigarettes on
his front steps, porch light wiggles overhead,
one beer left. The boy decides not to
smoke the last joint he rolled - eats his last
burrito - his roommates come home - the
boy lowers the volume on his television.
Can’t sleep, drinks the last beer. Can’t
sleep, smokes the joint. Falls asleep without
remembering falling asleep, the boy
wakes up and opens the window to the
left of his head
and vomits into
the alley. The boy
closes his eyes
again, feeling
embarrassingly
better. The boy
dreams of a party
where he feels
sick and excuses
himself to kneel
over a toilet.
Patiently, the boy
waits to vomit,
and waits, and
waits. Are you
okay, asks the
host’s toddling
daughter outside
the bathroom
door. Yes, thank
you, says the
boy, and waits,
and waits, and
waits. Waking up
for the last time,
the boy walks
into his kitchen
as the sun rises,
boils water
in a stewpot, and melts the vomit frozen
against his windowsill.

Drugged Cat Milk is an experimental zine
series by Jacob Spetzler and Zeke Foerster
which aims to put unrelated photos and
text together to create new meaning.
Photos were shot in New York City, the
Ukraine, Tbilisi, Georgia, Costa Rica, and
Bogota, Colombia.
Contact: jacobspetzler@gmail.com