One-Shotted

When the going gets weird...

I hated psychedelics.

I did acid a few times. Once in a Grateful Dead show parking lot. I hated the Dead, but I was young and naive and I thought this was what college kids were supposed to do.

It was musical cargo cultism. I saw upper-class kids from successful upper-class families listening to the Dead and aspiring to “go on tour” in the summer, so obviously that’s what I needed to do.

I also thought the women were sexually freer (sluttier) than the typical women I dealt with.

It turns out hippie chicks are more prudish than average and are looking for loser abusive boyfriends instead of intelligent guys who are going places like me. They also smelled bad.

My old Volvo looked just like this, but worse.

First my buddy Nate bought a substance promoted as “hashish” from a black dude. They did the deal in the backseat of my rusty Volvo sedan.

We smoked out of a pipe and it didn’t do shit and my lungs were raw.

I’m like, “Let me see that shit.” He handed it over and I realized it was pine tar—the stuff you put on the grip of a baseball bat.

I’m like, “Nate, that’s fucking pine tar dude.”

He’s like, “No way.” Then he paused to think about it. “You know what this is? This is opium, man.”

I’m like, “Fuck no, that’s not opium. That’s a ball of fucking pine tar. It smells like pine sap because it’s pine sap.”

Nate wouldn’t admit to getting ganked by the black dude, so he proceeded to smoke bowl after bowl of the pine tar.

What they don’t tell you when you’re eighteen is that you’ll get pretty fucking high if you smoke enough of anything. The New York Times will get you high if you smoke enough of it.

I left my furiously smoking friend in the Volvo and proceeded to score blotter acid. It was on Beavis and Butt-Head blotter paper and it was harsh nasty shit.

I’m not really sure what happened, but I remember dancing. Someone had stack speakers on top of an old school bus and they had a tape with James Brown on one side and War on the other.

Remember auto-reverse tape decks? Well this tape was sticky and it kept changing sides going from GET ON UP to SPILL THE WINE TAKE THAT PEARL and back to GET ON UP every thirty seconds or so. But I was too high and just kept dancing.

It was jarring and every time the tape would switch sides I’d see sparks. But I kept on dancing and even found a girl to dance with.

She was sixteen and had braces. She told me she ran away from home nine months ago and had been touring with the Dead ever since. I kept wondering how she was going to get her braces off.

Though I forgot most of the trip, I remember that it turned bad at the end. We went back to the dorms. It was late, we were making noise. Some foreign grad student started yelling at us for waking him up.

He was making threats in a heavy Slavic accent. Most of the threats were in a language I didn’t understand. This is when things turned bad.

I went paranoid. If I had made this guy angry then who else have I angered? Are they coming for me? Am I safe? Oh fuck no, I’m not safe.

Overwhelmed by an amorphous sense of dread I withdrew to my dorm room. Thankfully my roommate wasn’t there. I locked the door and closed the blinds. I tried to listen to music to calm down, but I was constantly peeking through the blinds to see if that Russian guy was coming after me.

The trip ended around dawn, but I was shaken for days.

I think it was bad acid.

A few years later I had a totally catastrophic mushroom trip at a concert in Washington. My buddy and I decided to take a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. The plan was to go backpacking in Olympic National Park, hang in Seattle (grunge rock was still a thing then), then end the trip at a Phish show at the Gorge.

I was still into hippie chicks at this stage and horny me was all about this trip.

It should have been a fun adventure, but my buddy brought his new girlfriend along.

She just plain sucked. Dumb as rocks and looked like a Care Bear. Round body, short hair, and wore Care Bear–style overall shorts.

She just wanted to be with her boyfriend and he just wanted to fuck his new girlfriend, so I turned into a third wheel (even though we took my van and I was driving the whole time).

I was livid by the time we got to the Gorge. But … I ran into some people from home. Thank god I could hang out with someone new.

The Gorge. Good place for a bad trip 👍

They had just scored mushrooms. And I was so pissed off at my buddy and the Care Bear and the world that I ate about a quarter-ounce of shrooms out of revenge.

Of course that was way too much. That’s the Hero’s Journey +P+.

It started to kick in and I was overcome by nausea.

I went into a porta potty to vomit and looked down and saw my reflection in the middle of floating shit and tampons. My eyes were like saucers. Then I started vomiting, and watched it all come out in psychedelic slow motion.

I couldn’t tell if I was in the reflection looking up or if I was looking down. Suddenly I was in both places. I was both sides of the shit reflection. I’d bridged the gap. I was through the looking glass. Myself, my reflection, the turds, the tampons, bathed in a beautiful blue porta potty light. And it was all connected by an endless stream of vomit.

We were all one. A singularity with profound metaphysical implications. It was beautiful and terrifying. Then I kept barfing. (They say there are portals …)

I don’t remember what happened after that. But the fact that I spent the rest of the concert with the paramedics led me to believe that I somehow freaked the fuck out.

I spent the rest of the concert sitting between two ambulances and I never saw Phish.