My friend Bondy had a brain the size of a jackhammer and twice as loud. You could hear Bondy’s brain coming from five miles away. We used to joke that only a pre-emptive satellite strike could keep him from mind-blinding us.

“Why are you friends with that guy anyway?” my ex-girlfriends always asked before their restraining orders came through.

I always had the same answer. “He’s so good at running drugs, booze and hookers across the border.” If he weren’t, we wouldn’t have been friends with him.

Bondy had a tapeworm in his brain, the longest ever discovered in a human that accentuated his brain rather than going pure parasite on it. And, of course, it was the only adult tapeworm to be found alive and sucking in a brain. Usually only the larvae find their way through the blood-brain barrier, and cause cysts and seizures or some such shit. All that mattered was that he had a motherfucker of a worm in his head. Maybe his brain had its own digestive tract and colon. Who knows?

Bondy went on about it. In the end no one could be bothered listening to him. Most people expressed belief when he told them about his tapeworm. “Tapeworms don’t live in the brain,” they’d say. But Jesus, is it so much of a stretch that a tapeworm could take root and spread its tapes in someone’s head? Larvae-on-the-brain is so common nowadays that it was “mystery illness of the week” on House for Christ’s sake.

When people disbelieved Bondy he usually ended up mind-blinding them and they’d wander off in a daze and get run over by a university on wheels.

Bondy wouldn’t let anyone touch his head in case you damaged the worm. Sometimes we didn’t know if it was the worm or Bondy talking.

“Bondy,” I said one day. “Why don’t you just let them take out the worm, go back to being a normal brain, and kick back here with us. We’ll get someone else to run the border.”

Only yesterday he’d brought across some synthetic peyote that had all the effect and none of the side-effects. Still, it didn’t stop Bondy getting ruffled at the slightest mention of his worm. “Don’t talk about my worm like that.”

“I’ll talk about your worm any way I like. It’s only a fucking tapeworm.”

Well, that worm hated being called a tapeworm more than anything in the world, more than a guy named ‘Davis’ hates being called ‘Davies’.

Bondy mind-blinded me.

Mind-blinds turn me filthy at the best of times. They hurt like piss, and right then I had a gutful of tequila and synthetic peyote. I flew into an alcoholic rage and bashed that fucking worm clear out of Bondy’s skull. It slid out his ear like a great pus-coloured turd and died of emphysema.

Now Bondy is just like us, but we never see him anymore because he’s an annoying bitch who’s not even good for running drugs and booze across the border.