CLOSE SHOT of sign on door:
Contraband Control Room
WARDEN opens door by entering code on mounted numeric keypad.
INT. CONTRABAND CONTROL ROOM
VARIOUS ANGLES showing cornucopia of confiscated material.
Impounded items are categorized according to methods of concealment and extraction:
Body Cavity/Rectal
Body Cavity/Oral
Body Cavity/Other
Swallowed/Excreted
Swallowed/Stomach-Pump
Miscellaneous
The extensive variety of goods rivals an in-flight duty-free catalog: glassine envelopes of heroin, cocaine, methcathinone and PCP; condoms and balloons filled with heroin and cocaine; amytals, Doridens, Fentanyls, Rohypnols, Stelazines, Trancopals; assorted blunts and spliffs; sundry crack vials and pipes; peyote buttons; N2O cartridges; a plastic honey bear dispenser filled with chloral hydrate syrup; a 75-ml Anaïs Anaïs eau de toilette atomizer filled with liquid cocaine; liquefied LSD painted on the backs of postage stamps; liquefied Ecstasy painted onto the adhesive strip of a business reply envelope in an issue of George magazine; a Richard Simmons Deal-a-Meal card saturated with DMT; an 8″H x 10″W x 5″D Braun Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker; a polished brass shower head with a 10-inch extension arm; a Black & Decker Xenon SnakeLight; etc.
Displayed in a special vitrine are those objects smuggled in for the pure aesthetic and conceptual pleasures of subterfuge. These items have no practical illicit value, and, beyond the allure of their exquisite craftsmanship, function metaphysically, as talismans of dissemblance: a Toblerone Honey & Almond Nougat chocolate bar in a Godiva Hazelnut and Cherry wrapper; a 200-ml Elizabeth Arden Visible Difference Refining Moisture Creme container filled with Christian Dior Svelte Cellulite Control Complex; and perhaps the most elegant and rigorous formal exercise in dissimulation — a 16-ounce bottle of Diet 7UP, emptied, filled with Diet Sprite, and meticulously resealed, including delicately resoldering the tiny metal flanges that clinch the screw-cap to the breakaway drop ring.
MARK (voice-over)
As I browse through this astonishing array of contraband, I can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of the inmates. In the Body Cavity/Rectal section, for instance — I can imagine someone smuggling in a wrapped shank, a box-cutter, or a honed nail swathed in plastic wrap, lubricated with Vaseline, and inserted in the rectum. But four 5-piece place settings of Bastille stainless-steel flatware? And a 7-piece Henckels Cutlery set (boning knife, paring knife, chef’s knife, serrated bread knife, utility knife, and shears) in an 11-inch high, slotted beechwood block? Unbelievable! And in the Body Cavity/Oral section — I can see how, during a visit, a girlfriend could convey, through a kiss, a condom partially filled with heroin. But a 959-piece 3D Alsatian Village Puzzle? How? Piece by piece, one kiss per visit per week? Imagine the incarcerated hobbyist’s Zen-like equanimity required to abide such glacial progress! And what if, on the other hand, the puzzle had been conveyed all at once? All 959 pieces. In one single passionate and protracted kiss! Wouldn’t a supervising guard have found it even slightly suspicious that as the grotesquely distended cheeks of the girlfriend subsided, the inmate’s grotesquely swelled?
CLOSE SHOT OF ASSEMBLED 3-D ALSATIAN VILLAGE PUZZLE, GLAZED IN SALIVA.
We hear ADAGIO INTRODUCTION TO FINALE OF MOZART’S STRING QUARTET IN G MINOR and see VARIOUS ANGLES of the scale-model village, its gables and chimneys gleaming, as if sheathed in the ice and rime frost of an Alsatian winter.
DISSOLVE TO:
INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE
MEDIUM SHOT OF WARDEN AND MARK DRINKING “GRAVY” FROM PLASTIC SUNNY-D BOTTLE
(Gravy — also known as Red Sauce, Grave Juice, G, General G, Gravity, Gravitas, Gravlax, Sh’ma, Sh’ma Yisroel, Rupture, Hernia, Enema, Portnoy, Mom, No Mom, I Can’t Talk Now Mom, Lodi, Wanamassa, Bogota, Leonia, Leona, Ivana, Kato, Seneca, Pirandello, Brecht, Borscht, Won-Ton, Duck Sauce, Bug Juice, Booger Juice, Oyster Stew, White Clam, Pus, Pee, Elle, Allure, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s, Atlantic, Pacific, Cortez, Stout Cortez, John, Jackie, Lady Bird, Pat, Checkers, Chess, Go, Come, Cream, Milk, Half & Half, Comme Ci Comme Ça, Après Moi Le Déluge, Louis Louis, and Knob — is a psychedelic beverage pharmacologically analogous to ayahuasca, the pan-Amazonian hallucinogenic potion made from the alkaloid-rich bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and various admixture plants including Psychotria carthaginensis, P. viridis, Tetrapterys methystica, and Banisteriopsis rusbyana, the leaves and stems of which contain large amounts of DMT.
A black, viscous liquid with the surface iridescence of motor oil, Gravy is made from scrapings of the outer bark of the Banisteriopsis lutum vine, which is indigenous to the northeastern United States and thrives especially in areas downstream of pulp and paper mills that are contaminated with effluent containing high concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Gravy also consists of a crucial admixture plant, Phalaris dromos, a reed grass species that grows near stadiums and indoor sports arenas, particularly in the dioxin-saturated marshy areas of Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey. The leaves and stalks of this lavender marsh grass contain several psychoactive tryptamines including the very short-acting 5-methoxy-DMT)
CLOSE SHOT OF MARK, seated, motionless, silently experiencing the hallucinogenic effects of the Gravy.
Aside from an initial 90-second sequence at the onset of the drugs’ effect, during which his eyeballs twitch rapidly beneath closed lids, and he’s then stricken with transient Bell’s palsy with paralysis of the facial nerve causing weakness of the muscles in the left side of his face and an inability to close the left eye, superseded by a paroxysm of facial tics — involuntary grimaces, pouts, cracking of the temporomandibular joints, gaping rictus, etc. — accompanied by a spasm of the sternomastoid muscle that forcibly wrenches his head up over the right shoulder, followed by a simultaneous episode of exophthalmos — a protrusion of the eyeballs from their sockets — and heterotropic nystagmus — rapid involuntary movements of the eyes first from side to side, then up and down, and then one eye moving from side to side as the other moves up and down, and then one eye spinning clockwise as the other spins counterclockwise, and culminating in violent undulations of the cheeks akin to those experienced by subjects in G-force experiments, MARK’s face is impassive throughout.
(CASTING NOTE: If the actor playing the role of MARK is incapable of achieving some of the foregoing ophthalmic effects, a Stuntman may be required for this particular shot.)
Although, in the middle of the following voice-over, the camera pans to a brief close shot of the warden, who is similarly sedentary, mute, eyes either shut or gazing into the middle distance as she experiences her own hallucinations, we are otherwise locked into a head-shot of Mark for the five-minute duration of the Gravy’s peak effect.
MARK (voice-over)
I know, from having seen Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alicia Silverstone on The Charlie Rose Show, that certain drugs, particularly the botanically derived hallucinogens used by shamanistic tribal societies in South America, induce a remarkably wide incidence of consistent and specific images — geometrical patterns, jaguars, tigers, anacondas, naked sorceresses, the color blue, phantasmagorical cities, etc. In that regard, I’d be curious to know if my Gravy experience is similar to those that other people might have had; i.e., I wonder if these are the archetypal Gravy motifs encountered by everyone who does the drug: