Duck Hunting On Acid

Striker’s Bay is an odd mix of the gentrified white upper middle class, the godlike super rich once a year visiting Bay Area celebrities and the blue collars that drown themselves in debt and then bust their asses to maintain a lifestyle they rarely ever get to enjoy. And an army of poor that arrive daily to service the residents, but don’t actually live here themselves. Despite the deep deep pockets living here much of the surrounding waterways began in the 1850’s when near slave-like Chinese labors were used to build the levees that would eventually create the channels and canals so prized for boating, fishing, water skiing, and jet skis, and various other water sports now.

The kids growing up here have a brimming toy box of distractions to keep them entertained, but most of them by the time they hit puberty begin seeking out the endless weekend teen house parties that roar through every Friday and Saturday night. Probably because the entire length of the community can be covered on foot, bike, or skateboard, and probably because alcohol is abundant (there is always an unattended liquor cabinet somewhere in Striker’s), and probably because many of their parent’s themselves are throwing wild drunken parties of their own on any given weekend, and probably because many of those parents also do their share of weekend coke, weed, speed, and MDMA, most of the teens believe that weekend parties are just a cultural norm out here in the delta and do their best to “get fucked up” every Friday and Saturday night.

Wild drunk behavior within the confines of people’s houses or boats (some of them 40–100 feet long), if it doesn’t lead to car or boat wrecks, is tolerated in droves by most of the 6000 residents of Striker’s. In addition to the usual party drugs that were prevalent in the late 80’s and early 90’s occasionally slightly more exotic substances would make their way there. Almost every house in the community is right on the water butting up against the now deepened and widened channels and canals first created by the Chinese labor’s levees.

During the summer of ’87, a brand of LSD called God’s Playground was making its way out of some unknown laboratory in San Francisco eastwards into the hinterlands of Northern California. A sheet ended up in the hands of a small-time local dealer, son of a Striker’s Bay dock builder, nicknamed Turtle Back. Turtle Back at eighteen and having no interest in a job in the family dock building business chose instead to deal small amounts of whatever drugs he could score in San Francisco that he thought would be popular with the teens in Strikers. He would work just long enough with his father to scrounge up enough cash to make the three hour run into the city and buy the cheapest shit he could find, usually weed and weak coke cut with aspirin, No Dose, or baby powder when Turtle Back didn’t have the cash for more expensive white powder diluting material.

Turtle Back was enthusiastic in the acquiring the drugs, but not too bright about quality control. His general method to test for quality was convincing the holder of the drugs he wanted to buy to give him a little sample. Based on that he would buy a small quantity and bring it back to Striker’s singing praise about its potency regardless of its actual effects. There was a lot of grumbling amongst the Striker’s teen druggie community about being “burned by Turtle’s shit”, but his stuff was always cheap and he was almost always holding something. So it was a huge deal when Turtle Back’s mini acid wave of ’87 turned out to be legit. Within a few days of God’s Playground hitting the Striker Bay streets tales of palm trees morphing into giant pink bunny rabbits and half pipes becoming skate-able alien landscapes flooded the teen community like a bad flash flood.

Nicholas, a sixteen-year-old consistent customer of Turtle Back’s heard about the great trips that were being taken around Strikers and couldn’t wait to get his hands on some of God’s Playground. Nicholas was somewhat of a local legend amongst the water skiing crowd in Strikers. Many of the original inhabitants of the Delta community had bought houses out here because of the water skiing boom in the 1970’s.

Though it was quickly losing ground to jet skis a recent surge in popularity of the fairly new barefoot water skiing had somewhat brought it back and Nicholas was considered a strong hopeful for the annual state water skiing Olympics held every summer near Mt Shasta. But he often complained about the pressure put on him by his parents, former water skiing champions themselves. His mother had participated in the 1972 Munich summer Olympics when water skiing was introduced as an exhibition sport that year.

“If Black September hadn’t of fucked it all up I would have won a gold medal in the ’76 summer Olympics for slalom,” she always complained. To deal with the stress Nicholas spent most of his free time gobbling any and all drugs that came his way.

On that particular afternoon Nicholas, Turtle Back, and another friend had all met up at around 4 pm at Nicholas’ house to trip on God’s Playground. It was a Thursday, but Nicholas’ parents wouldn’t be home until 11 pm and Nicholas figured he would have already peaked at that point and could just retreat to his bedroom and pretend to be asleep while riding out the last few hours of the acid trip. Nicholas had his Nintendo NES set up, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was in the VCR, and the menu to the local pizza joint was sitting next to the telephone.

According to testimony from Richie, Nicholas’ friend that was their they all took a hit of “God’s Playground” at 4:15 pm. At 5:15 pm Nicholas’ neighbor Janet went for here evening swim off the end of her dock. She said she saw Nicholas standing on the deck of his three story house near the railing holding something shiny that she didn’t recognize at first. She waved to him and yelled, “Hi Nick” from the water. The .357 Magnum ripped through the early evening quiet of Striker’s Bay like an offshore racing boat’s propeller through an unlucky water skier’s leg. Janet claimed she screamed Nick’s name after the first shot, but he only laughed, aimed the gun at her, and pulled the trigger again. She swam underneath her dock to escape and waited until Nick stopped firing, four more times, and went back inside his house.

When the cops arrived fifteen minutes later they found Nicholas alone in his house playing the Nintendo NES Duck Hunting game though the television was off. Richie was hiding in the upstairs shower and Turtle Back apparently recognizing through the God’s Playground psychedelic fog that gunshots off the upstairs balcony were a really bad sign had crashed his car into a telephone pole across the street in a stoned out his gourd attempt to escape. To their credit, despite three officers arriving with shotguns and 9mm drawn no one was shot.

After a day in a detox hospital Nicholas during a police interrogation told the detectives that he remembered playing Duck Hunt downstairs in his living room and then deciding he needed a more powerful gun to shoot the fucking dog once and for all. Beyond that it was just a bunch of blurred memories of a laughing talking duck swimming near his next door neighbor’s house and Nicholas’ vague plan to shoot it for dinner.

He spent seven months in a juvenile detention rehabilitation work farm in Byron, CA not far from Striker’s Bay. His parents were greatly disappointed when he missed the 1987 Crystal Lake Water Ski Invitational that year. Nicholas for his part, discovered heroin while in juvenile detention and never competed again.