The Ipecac Incident, Part One.

Ipecac is a drug that causes people and animals to vomit almost instantly. Jesse had a vial and him and his friends were using it on each other. Apparently it was very easy to obtain from Walgreens if you told them in a panicked state that your dog swallowed bleach and you needed it immediately.

The restaurant sat atop a street and sewer system that was one hundred years old and in need of repair for the last ninety-nine. One day, many years back, a pipe collapsed underneath the restaurant and the smell of the sewer permeated the entire restaurant. Matt and Pat, the bosses, opened up a crawl space in the break room and poured powdered lime through a pipe. It caused some sort of volatile chemical reaction and while I was washing dishes a big cloud of what I thought was just dust came through the kitchen. I coughed and waved it away from my face as Matt ran in yelling at us to hurry the fuck up and cover or put away any and all exposed food. I went out to the floor and told Sammy the waitress that the kitchen was full of dust and she looked at me like I was retarded and told me I probably inhaled lime and that I was totally fucked. During this time Andy Dick was in Tucson performing a show with a bunch of Amazonian women he formed a band with at a venue down the street. After the show he came to the restaurant late at night, stepped in the doorway, looked around and exclaimed “THIS PLACE SMELS LIKE SHIT!” before leaving.

Here we were four, five years later. On occasion the restaurant’s plumbing would stop working, usually because people would flush tampons or paper towels down the toilets. The chain of events would happen as follows: first, both toilets would stop working. Then Satan’s Asshole, what we referred to as the drain that was in the center of the line, would start to overflow with water. At that point everything in the restaurant that was water-dependent had to be shut down, which meant that the entire restaurant came to grinding halt. You couldn’t have a restaurant full of people not allowed to use the toilets, you couldn’t have cooks not be able to wash their hands, and you couldn’t have a dishwasher not wash dishes. So we had no choice but to finish every order that was pending and shut turn away any new tables, and tell everyone presently in the restaurant where they could find a bathroom if they needed one. Next, we’d call in a plumber to run a 50–100 foot snake through the same drain that was the site of the great lime explosion of ’03 or ’04 or whenever it was. They’d push through whatever shit was stopping everything up and by the next morning we’d be back to normal, knowing that in six to eight months time this would happen again.

A couple days later we were standing outside the restaurant waiting for Pat to tell us what was going to happen. The most we knew was that a pipe had completely collapsed, the hundred year old sewer system finally had enough and no plumber could come in and solve our problem by unclogging it with a snake. The one guy we got had to bring his kid inside because it was such a late call and didn’t want to leave him sitting alone in his truck. He told us we’d have to give the restaurant a colonoscopy of sorts; attach a video camera to a line and run it through the pipes to see what was happening down there. We didn’t know yet but we knew it could get costly. Involve taking a jackhammer to the floor of the kitchen and really getting in there. I don’t remember what I did with my time off that was granted to us all. Maybe I read.

We stood outside and Pat gave us the same news. Hang tight and we’ll find out soon enough. A homeless man walked up to us carrying a Vitamin Water bottle that was obviously refilled with malt liquor. He started talking to us and Pat ignored him, told us the rest of whatever he had to say and went back inside. We had nothing to do so we verbally batted the guy around for a bit. He was stone-drunk and couldn’t understand anything we were saying. Jesse pulled out the vial of Ipecac and asked him if he wanted any, he told him it was pure codeine in liquid form. The man screwed off the top and let Jesse pour the whole vial in the bottle and immediately drank it. It should have worked then and there as we all stepped away from him to avoid what was to come. But it didn’t happen. He kept walking down the street and at each turn and lurch nothing came out. He didn’t spew all over the lunch crowd of business people on their way back to work or the smattering of other civilians walking by. He just kept going. So we decided to follow him.

The Ronstadt Bus Station. A perfect hole in the center of the earth. If you played it right you could pass through that hole and come out the other end in one piece but it was the right place to go if you were ready to give up. Positioned perfectly so that you could roll to the bottom and coast to a stop, settling nicely in that permanent groove. We followed him there and waited for him to get on a bus.