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“What about you?” I asked. “What did you self-medicate for?”
“Who said I did?”
“You did. ‘Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the hat,’ remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Right. Forgot I told you that.”
“So?” I prodded. “What were you self-medicating for?”
“Because I couldn’t handle it.”
“Handle what?”
“The fame. The craziness. The absolute insanity of being in a world-famous rock band. Life on the road 200 days a year… everything.”
“And so you slept with a lot of women?”
He bobbed his head back and forth noncommittally. “…yeah.”
“Did you drink a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“What about drugs?”
“A little.”
“But now you’re back to the straight-and-narrow.”
He smiled. “Because I’ve been off the straight-and-narrow and didn’t like where it was taking me.”
“What about me, then? I mean, I just ate a bunch of mushrooms, for God’s sake.”
“So?”
“So you must think I’m terrible.”
He laughed. “I don’t judge, Kaitlyn. You’ve got to do what’s right for you.”
“I don’t know if it’s right or not,” I said morosely.
“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’” he quoted.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that. What do you use to self-medicate now?”
He smiled. “Music. Just music.”
64
Ryan and I got off of the heavy topics and onto some more light-hearted fare – how his sisters kept asking him for cell phone pictures they could show around school, how his mother kept trying to set him up with the daughters of her friends – when I started giggling uncontrollably at one of his comments.
“It wasn’t that funny,” he said.
“I know,” I said, slightly alarmed at my reaction.
“Well, thanks,” he joked.
That set me off giggling again.
“No, I mean… oh my God, is it happening?” I asked, suddenly remembering that I had eaten an illegal substance about twenty minutes ago.
“Could be.”
“Could be?”
“I don’t know. I never did mushrooms.”
“What did you do?”
“Cocaine, pot, some uppers and downers… nothing psychedelic.”
For some reason beyond understanding, that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.
He just stood back and smiled as I doubled over in laughter.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I was more than okay.
I was absolutely fan-fucking-tastic.
“I’m just… happy,” I told him. And it was true; the corners of my mouth ached, I was smiling so big.
“Okay, well, that’s a good thing.”
“It is, isn’t it?” I said. I couldn’t have been more overjoyed that we agreed on that fact.
“Do you see anything yet?”
I looked around. “No, I don’t – uh… wait…”
I’d been expecting giant crocodile skeletons in the sky and fire hydrants with feet, so I missed it at first. But as I scanned the horizon, I noticed something odd.
The land kind of moved in… and out… and in… and out. Slowly. Like respiration.
“It’s breathing,” I whispered.
“Breathing?”
“Yeah… it’s like I can see it pulsing… real slow…”
“What is?”
“Everything.”
“O-kaaaay…”
I looked down at my right hand and was suddenly enthralled.
All the tiny, tiny lines – the creases in my palms, the quarter-millimeter grooves in my skin – were suddenly as distinct and obvious as if I were looking at them under a microscope. The blue shadows of my veins were absolutely fascinating as they twisted and branched under the pink of my skin.
Patterns.
Just like Derek had said.
And then my fingers – first the ring finger, then the middle, then the pointer – sloooowly grew longer, maybe a quarter of an inch… and then sloooowly retracted back to their former length.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “I’m tripping.”
“Are you okay?” Ryan asked in concern.
I looked up at him.
And started grinning again like the Joker.
“I’m AWESOME,” I announced.
He laughed. “Okay, good.”
I looked down the road. Derek was standing out amongst the cacti and rocks, legs spread wide, arms flung out in the air like he’d just won an Olympic gold medal for… something. Probably for being Derek.
Killian was slowing turning around beside him, taking in the whole world in wide-eyed awe.
I gave Ryan a questioning look. “Is it okay if…?”
“Go ahead,” he smiled. “Have fun.”
I whooped, threw my arms around his neck and hugged him, and then ran off to join Derek.
When I ran up to him, he was beaming. “Did it kick in?”
“Yes!” I giggled.
“Isn’t it AWESOME?!”
“YES!”
He took me in his arms and kissed me, and for a moment, it felt like I was on the verge of exploding with happiness. All I was conscious of was that he was kissing me, and I was kissing him, and together we were sharing one perfect moment of absolute bliss.
It was all downhill from there.
65
There are a lot of things about hallucinating that are really only interesting if you happen to be the person on drugs. In general, though, I can tell you this: the colors were amazing. Everything was vibrant and beautiful.
And just like Derek said, there were patterns everywhere. Every line and edge among the rocks and scrub brush was fascinating, seeming to interweave with others until they formed a tapestry put there by the Universe and Nature and God, a wonder of design totally ignored by the average person until mushrooms lifted the veil and allowed them to see.
And everything pulsed. Everything was alive – and by that I mean in an organic way, like the earth and the desert and the rocks were all part of some living, breathing organism. It was astounding.
I was also giddy beyond belief. I could never remember being that happy, that overjoyed at the mystery and beauty of creation.
I would say that the first hour of that trip was one of the best of my life.
Unfortunately, the next three hours were among the absolute worst.
Everything was fine at first. Derek and Killian and I were laughing and pointing out things and oohing and aahing, while Ryan followed at a distance, watching the proceedings with a benevolent smile.
And then the sun started to go down.
The closer it sank to the horizon, the more unsettled I began to get. I didn’t realize it at first, the shift was so gradual – but I went from hilarity, to happiness, to contentment, to vague unease, to mild anxiety, to raging fear… and with no understanding of why.
In retrospect, it was obvious. There are two things I absolutely hate: being cold… and darkness.
I think my problem with darkness is more about feeling safe. My apartment at night is tolerable.
New York City streets at 2AM? No.
A strange, alien landscape getting swallowed up by shadows as the sun dipped below the horizon?
HELL no.
And the lower the sun went, the more rapidly the temperature fell.
By the time the sun was gone and the sky was a haze of pink and orange, I was starting to shiver.
I should have been totally geeking out on the beautiful colors in the sky.
But it wasn’t possible, because I was cold, and it was getting dark… and because of one other factor which nobody had warned me about.
I had thought that taking mushrooms was going to be like special effects in a movie. A bunch of amazing sights – CGI on steroids – but nothing more. I would otherwise be in my right mind, totally in control of my emotions.
Not so much.
I began to get paranoid, for one thing. I kept imagining Santa Bob racing up the road with an FBI SWAT team, and all of them screaming at me to get on the ground.
How I was going to explain it to my parents, I had no idea.
More than that, though, I lost my sense of time and reality.
This one is really hard to describe, because we take it so much for granted. But I’ll try.
For instance, if you wake up in the morning, then go to work, then go out for lunch, then work some more until quitting time, then go to the grocery store, then fix dinner, you could tell me the exact order in which everything had occurred. More than that, you would know what order it happened, on a deep, experiential level. You could feel it in your bones, the same way you know 2 + 2 = 4 or the sun rises in the east. It just is.
I didn’t have that anymore.
For one thing, the things I imagined seemed almost as real as actual memories. As my paranoia built, I pictured myself running out into the desert, screaming in panic – and I kept thinking, Oh my God, maybe I already WAS out in the desert screaming, and I just don’t realize that I already did it. Or worse, maybe I’m running out in the desert this very moment, and I just don’t realize that I’m actually DOING IT RIGHT NOW. I only THINK I’m still back here on the road, when I’m REALLY out THERE, running around and screaming.
That’s not a fun place to be in mentally.
Time was gone, too. There was no past, there was no future, there was only the present. The furthest back that seemed real was the car ride here… and in my mind, I felt that I had been on the road forever in that 1969 Mercedes, and that nothing before had ever really existed. I could remember my parents, and my brothers, and my entire life… but they were like fleeting memories of movies I had watched and half-forgotten. What seemed more likely was that I had been travelling eternally up until a few hours ago, and now that I was here, this was all that would ever be until the end of time.
