- A vicious satire of the war on drugs, a DEA agent is sent underground to bust the toad smoking scene with apocalyptic repercussions and romantic consequences.
- Based on a true report in the Wall Street Journal in March, 1996, Deep Toad is a wild farce that tells the fictional story of a rookie DEA agent sent to Tucson to monitor the burgeoning "toad smoking" scene. The DEA fears a huge new drug fad, powered by the unlimited ability of 20,000,000 Colorado River toads to produce a free, readily available, powerful psychedellic drug which some claim allows users to astral project, or leave the body.
If leaving the body proves the existence of the soul outside the body, the DEA will have none of it. "I'll be damned if a bunch of Arizona hipsters are going to create a new God. As long as I'm head of the psychedellics division people are going to stay in their bodies," Chief Agent Charles Rock says. "This country needs a cloud to be a cloud, and a plane to be a plane. Things need to stay as they are without a bunch of slackers hallucinating otherwise."
And so Rookie Agent Syd Kelso is dispatched to shut it all down. But 20,000,000 live toads who live in a state of inert hibernation, only to emerge in the August rains to engage in a an orgy of eating and mating, are a formidable adversary. Worse, the DEA suspects their behavior could rub off on humans. An orgy of eating, mating, all done out of the body.
"Aint gonna happen on my watch," Rock says as he whips his Psychedellics Division into Red Alert status.
Given a live toad as his buy and bust resource, Kelso quickly wheedles his way into a hiptser cell familiar with the ways of the toad. But Kelso's biggest problem is the toad itself. Feeding it, misting it, and getting it to shut up its bellowing croak so he can sleep. He fails on all counts. Not only does a loopy hipster girl fall in love with him, she turns his room into an "environment" for the toad, littering it with dead flies and desert rocks. Worse, as it turns out the toad prefers half eaten burgers to dead flies.
The last straw is when the kids he is supposed to bust learn that he is a DEA agent, and they dish him to "Rodney", the village idiot/hipster/toad master for "training". Rodney also moonlights as a male fashion photographer, specializing in cowboy regalia shots.
The "training" is severe, sometimes homoerotic, pushing Kelso closer to the edge of his nerves. He is mercilessly hazed and coated with a thick armature of peanut butter, chocolate, walnuts, and high octane rum, which is then set on fire.
Eavesdropping electronically on Kelso the DEA becomes concerned for his security and dispatches a team of agents with a toad concussion bomb, a specially designed device to destroy tadpole eardrums in the act of procreation, halting the chain of life and birth in this endangered and exotic species. Always looking for new enemies to bomb, Rock has the full support of the Administration.
"Ever tried fucking in front of a jet engine?" Agent Rock asks. "That's what the tadpoles will be up against".
Events converge. As Kelso douses his human torching, the toad escapes and disappears down a hole behind his hotel room. Kelso frantically digs to find it, then disappears down the hole after it, and refuses to come out, alarming hotel guests. The DEA troops arrive anxious to use their percussion device. They impulsively bomb a Ku Klux Klan Cowboy convention where they think Kelso is being tortured.
"But I thought we were here to RESCUE Kelso," another agent asks Rock.
"Kelso's a hard jock narco cowboy, he can handle it," Rock allows, and gives the order to bomb.
The tadpole bomb works, nobody can hear a damn thing, perhaps a positive development because a huge gun battle ensues. Of course, Kelso isn't even there.
Meanwhile, deep in the hole behind his hotel room, Kelso hallucinates he has been eaten by the toad, and he rests comfortably in the belly of the beast, thinking about the true meaning of life and the fact that his butt has been whipped by a quarter pound blob of green toad who's only purpose in life is to create fifty thousand tadpoles which will continue its little portion of life on the planet. Kelso decides this is a worthy goal, and he waits with the toad for the rains which will cleanse and renew his soul, which will save the soul of America itself, even the Universe.
Indeed. A modern parable of life and death, love and religion and the unlimited power of nature.
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