The first time my friends and I ate psychotropic mushrooms was terrible, as were the second and fifth time. Three was good and four was fine. The sixth was years later and I was very drunk, so I’m not sure they had any noticeable effect.
But the first was truly terrible.
It was New Years Eve, the final day of the year 2000. I had just turned 17. Drugs were not new. My friends and I had been smoking weed multiple times a day for a year and some change by that time and I think we’d smoked opium, but that could have been in the months after the mushrooms, I can’t recall.
Once, in the absence of the stem and beaner riddled, Autumn ruffage swag we usually had access to at the time, Marshall and I had each drank a full bottle of children’s allergy medicine before a showing of Yellow Submarine at the Fargo Theater. We both slept through the whole thing.
I don’t recall how we obtained the mushrooms, but I assume it was like how we obtained any such thing. Some semi-local old degenerate obtained a massive amount of a particular drug and sold it to the younger guys he always sold it to, word began to spread, and they sold it to every other aspiring drug dealer who sold it to his friends and eventually it trickled down to us. You’d hear a rumor of mushrooms or good weed or whatever and then hope you got there before it was all bought up, there generally being some little used parking lot, maybe behind the Mini Mart or Videoland or the bowling alley. You’d have gotten a number, and then you and your friends, packed into a 1987 Buick Celebrity Station Wagon with a v dent in the front from where it had hit a tree, pulled up to a lonely, street lit payphone in some other parking lot and called that number and maybe, if you were lucky, the guy would answer and, luckier still, he’d show up – the guy was always the third or fourth guy to have handled the drugs since the old degenerate – and who knows how many before that – and he always had on a baseball cap with a flat brim at some preposterous angle and a Doors or Sublime t-shirt or maybe just an implied Doors or Sublime t-shirt and drive a shitty car with a massive sub in the back absolutely mangling an already pretty shitty Eminem song almost beyond recognition and have prematurely too tightly drawn, dry skin – and you’d pool your fives and tens to buy whatever it was he was selling, and he’d look at the sad wad of too many bills you were handing him with disgust and maybe tell you to drive to yet another parking lot to make the handoff.
So we had the mushrooms and we set a date to ingest them. New Year’s Eve was a week away. Perfect. Momentous.
Early evening New Years Eve, we gathered at Ben’s house. His parents house, really. They were away, which was fairly rare. We gathered in the basement and ate some of the ultra-dry dregs of the batch, stems and a few caps and a lot of powder in each of our eight of a gram baggies. Then we waited.
Here are the two most important things to know about mushrooms: First, their effects last far longer than you think they will. Like, eight hours, but time is weird on hallucinogens – it skips and drags and disappears – so those eight hours, if things are not going well, will feel like days. If you don’t have a completely open schedule for the entire day and/or night, today is not a good day to eat a handful of mushrooms. You’re not going to want to, say, go to work at a grocery store. You will not be an effective worker and everyone will notice and, even if they somehow don’t, you will be positive that they do.
Second, they take some time to kick in. At least an hour. Be patient. Don’t, as I did, assume that you got a bad batch and just eat the rest of it after like 20 minutes. You will have ingested too many mushrooms and you will see shortly that, if you are like me, this is not a good idea. Give it time. It will creep up on you. First – maybe, I don’t want to mistake my personal experience for a universal one, it could obviously be different for you – first, your body will start to feel sensitive, and then, quickly, foreign, as though you are experiencing yourself as an outsider, and this feeling grows and grows until you feel that dreamy feeling of being in a particularly confusing, not very good David Lynch movie and watching it at the same time. This is pretty fascinating at first, but you don’t want to experience yourself as an outsider for eight hours, I promise. And for god’s sake don’t drive a car.
Alright, so, for the first hour or two after these things kick in, I’m feeling great. Ben’s parents have this picture of North Dakota State University alumni on the wall, and it’s just a sea of only faces – drawn, not photos – and among them, like a too easy to find Waldo on a Where’s Waldo page, are two police officers – the only two people in hats. For some reason this strikes us all as hilarious. Then I start to rub my own hair and that took up about 15 minutes. The otherness combined with the kind of tingling sensitivity makes this very appealing, like petting a dog while the dog pets back.
But now it was time to head out into the world – to a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s home, which happened to be a trailer home. Now, I need you to understand that I come from trailer home people. I’ve spent a Christmas or two in a very nice double wide. I think trailer homes are perfectly acceptable abodes and that whatever reason you live in one isn’t shameful. I like a trailer park. I’ll go out of my way to ride bike or walk through one when I’m out getting some exercise. So this is not a criticism of trailer homes.
But a trailer home – this trailer home in particular – is not a big enough space for the mushroom experience. Really, you should be outside, but if that’s not possible – say on the last day of December in Fargo, North Dakota – you want a big space. And you certainly don’t want a crowded or a chaotic space, and this space was very crowded and very chaotic. As soon as we entered, half of us realized this was a mistake. I wandered into a bedroom lit only by black lights and a girl I knew fairly aggressively tried to convince me to hook up with her friend and, though I’m sure she was lovely and she was probably of a normal stature and there’s nothing at all wrong with a tall woman in the first place, this person struck me as gigantic. I mumbled something about getting a beer and fled.
The only thing I could think was – Brady. I need to find Brady. Brady being one of my friends who I find to be a very calming, rational presence. Another friend once called him the Jesus Christ of the Midwest while Brady hid under the bed listening and weeping, but that’s a whole other story.
So I began wandering through this too small but somehow also labyrinthine home, just repeating “Where’s Brady. I need to find Brady.”
Eventually, I wandered into the kitchen and what seemed to be some sort of oasis. It was calm. My memory is that Brady was sitting on top of the refrigerator, but that can’t possibly be true. He’s very tall and even in a normal sized home there’s generally not enough room above a refrigerator to sit comfortably atop it. And there were a couple other people who had also ingested hallucinogens and were not having a great time and just needed some space, and it felt very good to all be together, but, of course, this being a party, our serenity was soon broken, the oasis dissipated, and I realized that it was important that I leave this place immediately.
The timeline of this next part is blurry. I think it was after we left the party, but I also think my friend Jake was driving and I know that Jake stayed at the party long after we left and ate a whole other bag of mushrooms, which – I can’t even imagine. Maybe we left and came back. It’s not important. We left – me, Brady, maybe Jake – and were in a car, and seemingly from moment to moment forgot what we were doing in that car or where we were going. There wasn’t a plan, but it felt like that was because we kept forgetting it. There were arguments and shifting alliances and theories and worries and this was all probably, in reality, over no more than fifteen minutes and mostly in my head. At one point we decided that we needed to be around someone normal, so we would go to this very normal girl’s house and cool our heals, but as we neared her place it occurred to us that her parents would answer the door and neither she or her would be pleased to see us in this state this was a very bad idea.
Eventually, we managed to contact Ben, who was at home – maybe he had never left – and was also having a bad time. He told Brady and I that we could come over.
I feel like I’ve not done a very good job of describing why I found this all so unpleasant. I think the worst part of it was something that also began to happen in the last of my pot smoking days: The varnish of life seemed to have been scraped away. Everything felt very real – though confused – and very . . . flawed and silly. Humans – myself included – felt very animalistic and foolish, like a penguin in pants who thinks he’s very smart and almost unbearably funny. It felt like I was just noticing how everything was very ugly and pointless, which I suppose I’d had an inkling of before, but now it was inescapable and it made me feel disgusted and filled with just a deep, deep grief that it all had to be like that, that we had to exist like this and pretend everything, and I wondered if I was ever going to go back to seeing things how I had before. In retrospect, this was my first taste of real depression. Depression had been with me, I think, for a very long time – I’m not saying that eating mushrooms caused it – but it did exacerbate it. That feeling of unvarnished, pointless, unpleasant reality is how my Depression always manifests itself now. I told someone a few years later that I felt like I’d never really sobered up from that night and they thought that was very funny, but I guess I meant that I’d never felt like my pre-mushroom self again after that night.
All right. We get to Ben’s house. Ben’s parent’s house. He let us in because he had locked all of the doors and lead us upstairs, to where he had been fending off his particular demons in his parent’s bedroom. He laid down in his parents bed. Brady and I sprawled out on the floor. Kubrick’s 2001 was on the TV, intercut with TV commercials, but no one was really watching it.
I don’t know how long we laid there without talking. There was some pained groaning, but no talking. Eventually I had to take a piss, so I crawled to the attached bathroom, pulled myself up and turned on the lights. There were mirrors everywhere.
People will tell you not to look in the mirror when you’re on hallucinogens, and that’s good advice, but I couldn’t have felt worse than I already did and I’ve never been great about taking good advice, and there were mirrors EVERYWHERE, so I really had no choice. I looked like I felt. Like a shaved, embarrassed, sad ape who needed some sleep.
I zoomed in on my face, neared a mirror, stared myself in the eyes, noticed every line and pore and blemish. Stared. Smiled. Couldn’t hold it. Frowned. Better, more accurate. Grimaced, twisted, inflated and deflated, distorted my face in every conceivable way, got lost in the idea that I didn’t really know my own face, had to look at it longer to get a real sense of me.
Have you ever seen an uncle after a very long time and realized that the platonic image of that uncle that you had in your head was pretty indistinct and not very well considered and extremely inaccurate, like you’re seeing this guy for the first time and recognizing him as a human being with an eternal life and feelings? It was like that, but I was my own uncle.
I stared and stared, drifted in and out of myself, and, eventually, I couldn’t recognize my face at all. It was gaunt. Older. Drawn taut in places and sagging in others, The eyes were still mine, but above them I was bald. And as I looked at it, the face changed. Though I had stopped contorting my face, the reflection continued to do so, less a contortion than a continual slow melting of one into the next, like the in the video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”.
And then I – it – spoke.
“Hello, nephew,” it whispered conspiratorially.
I stared right into it’s eyes. His eyes. Still my eyes, but in a different head.
“I am your distant relative – an uncle dead nigh these 200 years and more. In life I was Franz. I don’t expect you to speak back. This will be a monologue. Just keep staring.”
I thought to myself, “There’s more gravy than grave about you,” and nearly chuckled, but kept staring.
“How now!” I whispered back to him. “What do you want with me?”
“Only a small thing” he whispered back.
“Who are you again?”
“Ask me who I was.”
“Who were you then? You’re particular, for a hallucination.”
“In life I was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, your distant relative. An artist.”
I sat, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment and it played the very deuce with me. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. I could not feel it myself, but this was clearly the case; for though the face was stationary, moving neither to the right or to the left, its hair and face continued to shift, at one moment grinning, the next pulled into a taught, toothy scowl, as though growling.
“Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”
“Man of the worldly mind!” replied my reflection, “do you believe in me or not?”
“I do, I guess. I must. But why do you come to me?”
“It is required of every man,” the Ghostly reflection returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to appear to only those who have taken too many drugs.”
“Your face keeps changing,” I said, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the expressions I forged in life,” replied Franz. “I sculpted them by my very hands, head by head. I molded them of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore them. Are they strange to you?”
“They’re kind of objectively strange.”
“Would you know,” pursued Franz, “the shape and textures of the feelings you bear yourself?”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Please, continue your monologue.”
“How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.”
“I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance that you will disregard art and feelings and become a normal person! Never again must you write, never again must you draw, sing, obsess over music, watch art films – any of it! And there will come a day when a thing inconceivable to you now will come into being – a kind of internet radio show thing, and it will be very popular, but whoa to you if you attempt to partake of its siren song! Will the podcast – that’s what they’ll be called, terrible name – will the podcast that you create if you do not heed my advice be good? Nay! It will be great! A work of art! But it shall bring you no pleasure. It shall bring to you not but sorrow and ruin. Hear my words! The soul of an artist is within you, Nephew, but there is still time to banish it and be happy and normal! And, as a side note, maybe take it easy with the drinking for the next decade or so!”
I began to answer, something like, “Seriously? They’re going to call them podcasts?” but Uncle Franz would not let me finish.
“I have spoke all that I may! Heed my words nephew! Heeeeeeeeed myyyyyyyyyyy woooooooooords”
And then he disappeared. It was just my face in the mirror again, ashen and doughy, bags under red rimmed eyes.
And though the interaction with the reflected specter had seemed, in the moment, to take some time, now it felt as if it had just been a glint of a flicker between blinks of the eye.
“I hate these goddamn things,” I said.
So I left the bathroom and laid back on the floor. Brady had not moved. Ben had not moved.
We lay there, silent, for another eternity, until Ben said, exhausted, “It’s 12:01. Happy fucking New Year.”
The end.