by halfbaked420 in Uncategorized

So I decided it was time I hung out with my friends more. There was a concert over in Athens that my friends were going to see, so I joined up with them. Ben borrowed his parents’ van and his new girlfriend, Kaitlin, sat up in the passenger seat while I sat in the middle-row. And in the back were the freshman Michael and Evan, and Michael’s girlfriend Haley. The sun was setting as we drove off campus and headed for the highway, and Lord what would happen before the sun would rise again.

As we drove down 75 and merged onto 85 for Athens, I heard the sound of tinfoil crumpling in the backseat. Michael, Evan and Haley were dividing up their LSD. Acid. Crazy. Sterile. Why would someone need to take a drug that people synthesized when the Earth offered plenty of drugs to please our minds? All I knew about the drug was a vague sense of an uncertain disapproval, and as I listened to the backseat riders talking I felt like they were entering a different world, one I hadn’t even dreamed of.

When we pulled into Athens, we still had an hour to go before the concert started, so we parked behind the Georgia Theater and went inside the store 42 Degrees around the corner from the venue, a popular head shop. I had been using one of Ben’s spare bowls for a couple months by now, so I figured it was time for me to upgrade to a bowl of my own, so flashed by ID at a clerk and approached the glass cabinets along the wall. Meanwhile Michael, Evan and Haley were starting to trip, giggling as the clerk kept pulling out trippy looking pipes, the glass curved and concaved, swirls of red, green, yellow mixing together, with specks of gold in the glass that cause the glass to change color as resin builds up, circulating them between the wide-pupiled disciples. I settled on a piece with a deep bowl that fit comfortably in my palm, the glass a cloud of purple and orange—a price tag of eighty dollars plus an orange pouch with a mushroom design stitched on it to carry it in with. As the clerked swiped my debit card, Ben grinned at me.

“What are you going to name it?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” What was the sense in naming something that could break so easily?

“We gotta think of something. How about—” he took the bowl from me and turned it over in his hands. “How about. . . the vortex.”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out in time.”

On the way to the venue, I stopped by the van to stash my purchase, then I caught back up with the group, walking towards the sound of chatter where a crowd was mingling on the sidewalk in front of the venue. Many of the people were dressed up in costumes—a court jester with the tinkling hat, far-out hippies—and as we walked inside the venue, the sound check buzzed up on stage as the instruments were set up—drums, guitar and bass, keyboards. It was relief that I wouldn’t just be watching someone dancing in front of a laptop. A crowd was gathering on the dance floor, but we followed the stairs up to the balcony and found our seats.

“Uh. . . Ben,” I said, “Do you think I could find some mushrooms?”

“That guy who’s dressed like a jester,” Ben said. “He was at the P. Groove concert on Halloween. I bought some shrooms from him.”

“You think I could buy some from him then?” I asked.

“Shyea! Go talk to him.”

I wandered back across the balcony and down the stairs, I scanned the dance floor for sign of the red and yellow jester hat, my ears attuned to its tinkling. Spotting him standing next to the bar, I carved my way through the crowd and wondered what to say.

“Uh, hey,” I said, at his side. “How’s it going?”

“Uh shoo. . . who is shoo doing when?” the jester asked.

“Um. . . I was wondering if you could help me find some. . . uh, shrooms.”

“Shroom shroom, I don’t know who shoo what is shoo?”

Unable to decipher the jester’s rhetoric I retreated—definitely not cut for the task, avoiding Ben’s gaze as I returned to my seat.

“Did you get any?” he asked.

“Maybe since you already know the guy,” I said. “Maybe you could buy it for me—I’ll give you the money. How much is it?”

“You’re worthless! It’s like thirty bucks for an eighth.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Kaitlin wants some shrooms too, but an eighth should be plenty.” Ben took my money and stalked across the balcony as I looked at Ben’s girlfriend.

“You want to try shrooms too?” I asked.

“Yeah, I mean, why not,” she said. “They’re tripping. Everyone’s tripping!”

“I don’t know what to expect,” I said.

“Me neither!”

I was surprised at my desire to try mushrooms. I hadn’t ever considered it—I didn’t even know what was supposed to happen! But I had heard about magic mushrooms, and since they were all-natural I figured that it would be a safe experience. Since opium had been such a transformational experience I thought that this experience might change me as well. Maybe I would find out that I had been blind all this time and learn how to open my eyes onto the world that existed outside of my experience of the world. Maybe I would learn the words to give meaning to the confusion of not knowing. At the time it was just a feeling, but my heart thudded in my chest as I anticipated Ben’s return.

I was staring across the balcony at the stairwell when Ben returned and as he took his seat beside me, he pulled a plastic baggie out of his pocket.

“Are you ready for this, man!”

“I dunno,” I said. “What’s going to happen?”

“It’ll blow your mind! How do you want to split the bag?”

“I don’t want too much,” Kaitlin said. “Just a couple.”

“I’ll save you like a gram,” I said. “Okay?”

Taking the bag from Ben and pinching out a mushroom cap, I remembered some movie that had mentioned how bad shrooms tasted, so I braced myself as I popped the cap into my mouth. Chewy, but I couldn’t notice much difference from a normal culinary mushroom. I munched up more caps and stems, somewhat disappointed that the mushrooms were so normal. I almost forgot to save any for Kaitlin, but I stopped myself and handed what was left across to Kaitlin.

“Man, you didn’t leave much did you?” Ben asked.

“You know, they taste pretty good.”

“They’re not bad.”

“Why aren’t you taking any?” I asked.

“Dude, I need to drive us back.”

“Oh, right.”

The overhead lights dimmed as the band marched onto the stage, far beneath us, beyond a sea of bodies packed up against it.

“Hello Athens!” the front-man roared into the mic, moving the crowd into a froth. “So good to be back home! Let’s do this right tonight!”

The stage-lights blinked to life, cutting beams through the air as puffs of smoke began collecting in the air. The band started playing and the lights started strobing and I slipped outside of myself. Or I slipped out of my body and into the setting of my mind, where synaptic doorways clicked open, a hallway stretched beyond the horizon between my mind and the world outside my eyes—music vibrating through my nerves, quantum vibrations racing up and down my spine, and the lights flashed and beamed over the crowd, lasers singeing the hair of a girl with glowsticks twirling who jumped reaching for the light. She was swallowed back under the crowd but others were jumping. I saw them as fish and the light being the sustenance on which they fed, like fish in a lake that drift under the surface until a dragonfly flies too low to jump and snatch the life for its own. I thought about the expression small fish in a big pond and how as a freshman in high school I had felt so timid although the year before I had been the pro, involved in extra-curriculars, hanging out with friends skateboarding, playing video games, watching funny videos on the internet.

My elementary school had decided to experiment with keeping a single class together from third grade to fourth grade to fifth grade, whereas they normally picked new classes each year, so I had formed solid friendships with the other kids in my class. My best friend was named Kevin, but he liked people to call him Chipper—like the baseball player. I liked spending the night over at his house because he had a television and his parents didn’t mind if we watched South Park—until his sister asked them what a dildo was—and we would play on his Nintendo and computer. One Halloween I went over to his neighborhood to trick-or-treat, and we had both dressed up as Ghostface from the movie Scream (I hadn’t seen the movie, but the mask looked spooky! And we had cloaks.) One of our classmates, Anna, daughter of Russian immigrants, lived in the cul-de-sac behind Kevin’s house, so her house was one of the first stops on our tour. I was carrying a pillow-sack to stash candy in, walking up with Kevin to press the doorbell. Anna was standing at her mom’s side when the door was opened.

“Trick-or-treat!” we cheered.

The mother and daughter jumped back screaming, and ran into another room while Kevin and I looked at each other in confusion. After a moment they walked back into the room, laughing as their hands shook.

“We just watched Scream 2,” Anna’s mom said. “You scared us.”

“Yeah, there were two Ghostfaces in the movie!” Anna said.

She looked like she was in the middle of putting on a costume—maybe she was wearing an angel’s tunic. I wondered who she was going to go trick-or-treating with, but we didn’t invite her with us. And Kevin was right—the people in his neighborhood gave out full-sized candy bars!

Keeping a class together for three years had been a good idea, but as it worked out, my house was built on the wrong side of town. While most of my classmates were in the zone that fed into Dodgen Middle School, another middle school had been built down the street from my neighborhood four years before, so I was split apart from my friends to attend Hightower Middle School.

Things had been so much more normal back then, back when I could walk through my backyard, follow a path through the woods, step over rusted barbed-wire and follow the creek to a cul-de-sac where all the neighborhood kids would gather to play tag or hide and seek, cops and robbers, even red rover from time to time. A basketball net was set up so we could shoot, or I could bring a baseball and a bat and we could take some whacks. I must have been really young because the rules of the house were that we children weren’t allowed to cross the road across from the cul-de-sac until we turned ten. But not all kids could get to the cul-de-sac without crossing a road, so when all the other kids wanted to explore the creek on the other side of the road, my sister Rachel and I were tempted by the call of the forbidden.

“We’re not allowed to,” Rachel said, hesitating.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” I said.

“Okay.”

Looking both ways, we scampered to the other side of the street. Back then the other side of the street had been an exotic location on the map, where mist hung over the bubbling creek, where the shade of a tree’s branches seemed to be a new shade of darkness I hadn’t seen before, where the grass clung dewy to my shoes, and there was a tire swing! We could swing out over the creek.

“Jump!” a boy said. “I dare you!”

“No,” I said.

“Come on!” a little kid’s drawl. “You can make it to the other side!”

I dragged my feet in the dirt, the tire oscillating to a stop. Eyeing the kid, I said, “I double dare you!”

“I triple dog dare you!”

“Come on,” Rachel said.

Other kids in our gang had wandered across the yard, so we left the tire swing behind and followed them to where the yard turned into a meadow, so I raced through the shade into the unknown woods beyond. A dirt path was etched through the trees, though not as deeply as the one behind my house. The ground was different here—moister, being in the lowlands by the creek while my house was atop a hill—dry dirt and that Georgia clay. My shoes squished in the mud as we came to a ford in the creek where I could hop from rock to rock across the water. On the other side, the trail snaked back around, following the creek back the way we had come.

As we passed under the stern gaze of a grey house—two back porches!—the tolling of a bell echoed from the distance. I caught Rachel’s eyes.

“We’re going to get in trouble,” she said.

“Not if we run!” Laughing, I left the other kids in the dust as Rachel followed behind me. Coming to the road, I looked left and I looked right, then I looked left again. My shoes clapped against the pavement as I crossed the road, running down the cul-de-sac, into the woods at the other end, following a path along the creek (the creek went through a sewer under the cul-de-sac), jumping over the barbed-wire, dashing up the hill, through the gate into my backyard, beating Rachel home by a longshot. Covered in mud and sweat, I went into the bathroom to wash up. When I came out Rachel and my mom were standing in the den.

“You tracked in mud!” my mom said, so I bent down to take my shoes off.

“Scott went across the street,” Rachel said.

That made my blood boil. I tossed my shoes aside and glared at Rachel. “You promised!” I whispered. And louder—“Mom, Rachel said she wouldn’t tell on me.”

“My hearing must be going bad,” my mom said.

“She went across the street too!”

“Is that what she said? Since you’re telling me, you’ll have a punishment, but Rachel—it’s not good to tattle-tell, so you need to spend an hour in your room too.”

“Mom!” Rachel said. “That’s not fair!”

That’s what it was like growing up with a psychologist for a parent. She was probably amazed by the differences in our temperaments, and I could see my child-self cast in a portrait within the frame of my mind, and I could see a musician down on stage standing within a semi-circle of keyboards and a console of buttons and levers. The way the light reflected off his shirt sent chills through my bones, a halo surrounding his head, and in that instant I knew he was god of the venue, static energy zapping out the tips of his fingers as he gave life to the music. And the music swelled out of the floor, out of the bench I was frozen upon, and there were even people dancing in the aisle next to me. I couldn’t understand what the guy was shouting over the microphone but then the music stopped and the overhead lights came back on. Empty space and then a buzzing and people were moving so I turned to Ben.

“What’s happening?”

“You’re alive?” Ben asked. “You haven’t moved in a while.”

“Why is the music gone?”

“It’s intermission.”

We were surrounded by a wall of bodies—I hadn’t realized there were so many people—in front of me people were autonomous things that still existed even when their faces were twisting in upon themselves. How could I comprehend? My journey had only just begun, now that I had a trail to follow deeper. Now I could look back over the pain and swallow the taste so that I could finally digest—or begin to digest—the side of me that couldn’t be captured in a picture. So that I could gather all the loose ends and find how to tie off the knot that would hold my mind together.

When Perpetual Groove came back on stage, the musicians were wasted and the lead singer started doing jaegerbombs on stage—which I wouldn’t discover until I later downloaded a recording of the concert. I wasn’t really hearing the music as the vibrations pulsed through me, more a sense of the energy and the emotions that had welled inside me, the harmonic resonance triggering an area of my mind that I had locked off long ago.

I couldn’t allow myself to look backwards. Backwards was the car accident. Each year that passed after the accident I felt like I grew a little more distant from that scar and tissue built up little by little to blot out the memory. But as the memory was obscured so were others lost within the vaults of my mind, the memory of what it was like to be a child, to run laughing through a meadow. I had forgotten in a way that Rachel was not able, having her memory of the accident stored in the conscious part of her brain. So in dreams she sees that day while my recollection is based on hearsay and conjecture. So she could talk about it like I had heard others say—

“Isn’t that the boy with the head injury?”

And I could remember the special treatment I had been given—in Kindergarten one day I had been bored during nap time so I took a handful of crayons and colored the carpet a new color, but I didn’t get in trouble although the kid next to me did. And I had noticed, so one time to get out of trouble on the playground, I told my teacher that I had tripped and didn’t mean to hurt the other kids (I had knocked their heads together). And I was five years old, who had only been living with the brain injury a couple months.

The world had not made it easy for me to take part—the umbilical cord was wrapped around my throat when I was born so my mom needed a C-Section. I bounced back right at the very beginning, and all I’ve been doing these restless years of my life is bouncing on down the road with each bump, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Maybe I got a hole in me at some point and some air escaped so that my rebounds started to fall flat—when my parents divorced. But I know that I had a good idea where I was headed before then, so if I could remember then I could mend the hole and then give myself another bounce.

I could remember the girl that I had a crush on in first grade, but I had been a shy boy so it was difficult for me to talk to the girls I had a crush on—maybe prank call them, but nothing more. But as high school started I guess puberty was making me bolder. There was this girl in band with me who I had a crush on, so I found her phone number in the band directory, calling her to ask for her Instant Messaging name. We chat on the computer but in class my knees wouldn’t stop shaking whenever I thought about talking to her. I remember when she told me that her parents were divorced I felt like that somehow made her a worse person, like she wouldn’t be able to have a steady relationship. I don’t know why a fourteen year old kid would be thinking about that, but I felt a prejudice against divorce even before I realized it would break apart my life.

I was friends with this kid named Jonathan who happened to have several classes with me—he introduced me to this computer game called Runequest, a primitive MMORPG, and he was on the JV Soccer team. I hadn’t realized that someone could walk the line between jock and nerd, so I looked up to him in a way, envying how girls would come up to him during class and ask for his AIM name, who he would politely reject. One day at lunch I asked him,

“Those girls like you, why aren’t you interested?”

“I feel like it’s a waste of time,” he said. “We’re only freshman, there’s a lot of time ahead of us, so I figure that if I stay focused on school and myself then I’ll have time to date when I get to college.”

Who’s ever heard of a high school freshman talking so much sense? I didn’t even need to think twice. “You’re right. Who cares about dating in high school?”

“Yeah, we’re all still really young.”

Jonathan ended up going to West Point on a soccer scholarship and the summer after we graduated he showed back up in town, coming by the movie theater I worked at with a girl at each side, an arm draped around each. Of course I hadn’t shaved in several months and hadn’t cut my hair since I was sixteen. Maybe he was my doppleganger and that could have been my life if there hadn’t been that crashing of glass that shattered and split all the dreams that our family had of fitting into a picture-frame life.

It felt nice to be free of the anxiety of trying to talk to a girl, but when I “broke up” with the girl I had been chatting with, she said that she would have dated me for real. I didn’t know anything about that stuff, and I couldn’t help but feel that karma had come around with my parents’ divorce. That’s what I got for judging her because of what her parents had done. And I know that a thought can’t cause someone else harm, but when we later think upon what we thought before we knew what would happen—at least for me I feel great shame and regret. I see so many faces that I want to apologize to, but I never did learn how to connect with other people—not really.

The overhead lights turned back on and the stage lights all turned off, releasing me from the prison of my mind. There was now space in the air for me to stretch out in, for me to comprehend the sensations of skin, the sounds and the sights.

“Let’s go!” Ben said and he darted into the crowd—getting stuck between a blood-shot fairy and a pirate with a peg leg. I pushed my body against the wall of bodies and merged with the direction of traffic—staring around the rafters, taking a step, looking under my shoe to see what went crunch—a plastic cup—taking another step, bodies writhing all around me. Like we were a tube of toothpaste being squeezed, squeezed out the door. Flowing down the stairs I saw the bathroom and veered off from the crowd. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I stepped inside and a puddle splashed under my shoe. The floor was covered with an inch of liquid, and the urinal was caked in vomit. Not a good place to be, but I had to pee, so I got that over with and ran out of hell, walking down the stairwell—the pressure diminishing, more space between bodies, the taste of air as I walked through the door onto the sidewalk. I didn’t know where the others were but I walked where I was walking, out into the parking lot where the van’s door was hanging open, a frame for all my friends’ faces. I let the momentum carry me to the end, sliding the door closed behind me as Ben yahooed and revved the engine up.

“Dude,” Evan said in the back. “What happened?”

“I think I sat down,” I said. “Right?”

“No man, in the concert. You didn’t move at all for four hours.”

“Oh, right.”

“What happened, Scotty?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know.”

All I knew was I needed music to push me forward on this journey, so I pulled out my CD player and hooked it up to my ears. The side of the highway swirled by in the forgotten shades of night, the colors that hide whenever we turn our eyes to see, but I stared out as the darkness stared back at me—no wait, it wasn’t the darkness that was staring, but the bulging eyes of a deer that dashed into the road, trying to headbutt our van. Ben swerved out of way without an inch to spare, and Jesus Christ, was that an agent of hell sent to foil my plan?