The Highly "Influnced"Adventures of Mick, Mike, Dan and Pat.

by Daniel Johns

Episode 2: The Bridge

We were approaching the Pyrmont Bridge. To the average person the Pyrmont Bridge was just another bridge, but to your drug-fucked lunatic the Pyrmont Bridge was an amusement park. The walk from the Underground had sent the blood rushing through my body and I remembered feeling an overwhelming sensation. "Fuck me!" I said to myself. Patrick, meanwhile was experiencing that same feeling as well as the jubious sensation of having just killed someone. He stumbled up to me with a disorientated expression on his face and for a moment I was scared for my own well being. "Daniel, I'm fucked man, I'm fucked!" he splurted. I lit up another cigarrette and told him to stay cool which was slightly hypocritical as I was, by this stage, a mess.

Things became strange and small everyday things seem to expand into life-threatening nightmares. The bridge was wide enough so that I was able to keep at least ten to fifteen meters away from oncoming pedestrians as I passed them. Why? It seemed logical at the time that one of the passing citizens might perhaps throw me off the bridge. Or perhaps one of them was going to pull out a cigarette lighter as I passed and singe my nipples, after all it was summer and my clothing was quite light. Anything was possible, or so it seemed on that cloudy humid night. The truth of the matter was that the people passing us probably suspected that we were going to do the same things to them and with people like Patrick in our company, that too was entirely possible, if not, likely.

None of this seemed to bother Mick who was trying to pursuade Mike to sing a duet of Advance Australia Fair with him. It was not going to happen however as Mike had other ideas. He had spotted a family of Japanese tourists who were in search of somebody to take a family photo with the dazzling sight of Cockle bay in the background. Mike enthusiasticly agreeed and immediatly switched to speaking pigeon English hoping that they would understand and get into a deep conversation about whether you can falsify the claim that a triangle has three sides. It didn't seem likely, however, as not only coundn't they understand Mike's lame attempt to commune with them, they also didn't really care that Mike's cousin had two aesophaguses.

Meanwhile, as I was busy keeping safe distances from passing pedestrians, I spotted something that still haunts me to this day. A cage. An empty cage. "An empty cage in the middle of the fucking bridge!", I exclaimed partly to myself and also partly to Mick who had entised Patrick to sing with him a few meters up ahead. They spun around to find me halted in the middle of the bridge with my eyes fixed on this fucking empty cage. I was petrified. Nothing I thought up could tell me why there was an empty cage in the middle of the Pyrmont Bridge. Furthermore, I couldn't establish whether it had been there all along, as I had crossed the Pyrmont Bridge a thousand times before or if someone had simply placed it there tonight for some special reason. Why was there no-one in it? Had someone been trapped in it earlier in the night? Or was there to be someone caged later on? These question raced around my head in the company of a lot of other illegal substances as Mick and Pat tried to comfort me.

Patrick finally convinced me that there was nothing to worry about when he climbed on top of the cage and shouted, "see, I've beaten the cage! It's ok, I've beaten the cage". And he had. He had conquered the mysterious obstacle. Other people didn't understand why this was the case, but I did in some amphetamine influenced sort of manner.

We continued our journey. There were to be other cages evenly spread across the length of the remaninder of the Bridge, but I found that as long as I kept clear of them and think too much about their purpose of being, they were no threat to me. We finally reached the end. No harm had been done. A few confused and startled citizen's perhaps (who wouldn't wonder about a six foot tall, ninety kilogram man jumping on top of a cage claiming he'd "beaten" it?) but nothing serious. It was on to our next destination: The Pyrmont Bridge Hotel.

To be continued...