I was chatting about drinking earlier and it got me started thinking about my old drug stories from when I was an experimental teenager. Some of them are better than others but one really stuck out in my mind. Anyway, I thought it might be time to dust it off and share it here.
We talk about good trips and bad trips but sometimes there are good bad trips and bad good trips too. I have had my share of "all of the above" but there is one experience that really seemed like an awful trip at the time that I cannot help but to remember fondly now.
I was a teenager (maybe sixteen) and I had already developed a deep love for weed and psychedelics. I wanted to share that love with some of my less experienced friends and I made arrangements for myself, my best friend at the time, his brother, and his sister to all share a big bag of mushrooms. The plan went like this: The mushroom man was going to come pick me up from my house, drive me across town to my friend's house, and sell us a bunch of weed and mushrooms. Next, we planned, we would make a pot of mushroom tea, smoke some weed and have a good time.
That sound's like a fine plan, you may be thinking, and it was but things don't always work the way that we expect. This is especially true when you are an impatient person, like I was. The time had arrived for the mushroom man to come and pick me up but he didn't show and he wasn't answering his phone. I waited around for a little while and, eventually, gave up hope for the trip happening (that individual was known to be flaky, so this was not a shocking development). I decided that there is no point in having the night go to waste, so I broke up around fourteen grams of decent cannabis and began cooking it.
I know that fourteen grams sounds like it is a lot and that is because it is. Remember, I had hoped to go off wandering around in a psychedelic mindscape and that wasn't going to happen. I knew that weed wasn't going to get me there but I had hoped that if I ate enough, I could visit a place that was trip adjacent.
I was no expert at making good edibles at sixteen but I had an effective, if somewhat crude method. I took a small pan and fried finely ground weed in butter at a very low temperature. When it was cooked and the butter was brown, I transferred it to a bowl, added a bunch of honey, and downed it in five or six big spoonfuls like some foul tasting medicine. I want to stress that this is effective but it is also really hard on your stomach and that was made worse by the excessive amount of weed.
Then, a knock came at my door. "Could this be the missing mushroom man?" I excitedly thought but those hopes were dashed when I saw a different friend, holding a bag, on the other side of my door.
When he came inside, he reviled the contents of the bag and, to my surprise, it turned out to contain a six pack of terrible cheap beer and a small plastic bottle of terrible cheap rum. I didn't know the difference between good alcohol and bad alcohol as a teenager and my plans had fallen through so I eagerly drank three shots chased by three beers while we smoked a joint.
We sat there on my back patio for an hour or so and I complained about losing the opportunity to take mushrooms but the various types of "buzzed" were starting to set in and I was at peace with the situation. A few minutes after my friend had gone stumbling home, my phone rang and I was shocked to see the mushroom man's number on the caller ID. I answered and slurred out the word "hello." "Hey man, I'm outside" he said in his ever jovial voice.
I found myself in his crowded car already beyond the state that I would call "blasted." They had several large blunts lit and were enjoying a rather intense hotbox. Not being one to be rude, I politely joined in on the fun. There were five of us in the car and the others had rolled four blunts which were all being smoked as we drove down a cop infested highway.
This is where things started to turn south. The thick smoke in the car and being passed a new blunt every time I handed one away, combined with the poorly cooked weed and cheap rum in my belly almost caused me to throw up all the wonderful intoxicants that I was keeping in my stomach. Luckily (or not), I managed to soldier on until the blunts were gone.
A short time later, we arrived at my friends house, all the transactions were done, and the mushroom man and his entourage went on their way while we began preparing for the trip. The plans started breaking down here. My friends sister had left, thinking that the everything was going to be called off, which was particularly upsetting to me because I had wanted to date her and this was going to be a great opportunity to spend some time with her. It also meant that the three of us had an extra gram added to out share which put us up to four each.
If you are not familiar with mushrooms, the difference between three and four grams is quite a lot. In fact, four grams is starting to border on high dose territory in my mind. Plus, that doesn't account for the other substances I had working their way through my system.
We made our tea, mixed it with grape juice to kill the flavor, and chugged it down. That was all uneventful.
Before the leading edge of the of the psychedelic started to make itself know, I was already feeling uneasy. There was the typical pre-trip anxiety but the bigger issue was my stomach. The combination of everything that I had put in there and not having eaten anything except for sweet buttery weed was not pleasant and I knew that nausea was going to be my companion for the next several hours.
Mushroom tea seems to work a lot faster than simply eating them and, as a result, the trip was upon us in no time and the full effect of my epic edible had arrived too (this is maybe two or two and a half hours after eating that dose). "This is Interesting" I thought. I had a few very visual trips before that night but nothing like what I was going through in that moment. We were sitting outside and the stars were swirling around and forming patterns. The ground and all the walls were breathing and undulating and all I could do was lay there feeling sick while I was completely dazzled by everything that I was seeing. We smoked some more weed and my friend's brother said "you guys want to go to a party?"
I felt horrible but my head trip was great. I was somehow miserable and utterly euphoric and that strange mix of states of mind caused me to say "sure," when we were asked about going to a party. We all piled into a car (don't trip and drive just because we did it, by the way) and started making our way to a house that was, maybe, five miles away. I sat in the back seat and closed my eyes. The visuals seemed to flow with the movement of the car. When we would turn, they would turn. Little orange cubes seemed to rush past me for a long time. It was a really long time, it seemed. I decided to pop back into the real world to see what was going on. "Where are we?" I inquired. "We missed the turn" was the response. We came back around and missed the turn again. Then we did it a third time. We just kept forgetting to turn. Finally, on the fourth or fifth try, we managed to go right at the right time and we found the elusive party.
As soon as we stepped out of the car, I realized that coming to the party was a mistake. It was way too fancy. They had white lights on all the nicely groomed trees and bushes in the back yard. Everyone was dressed up for the occasion and they had a man "guarding" the entrance. He said something about us needing ID's if we were going to drink. We walked passed him, garbed a few beers, sat down with some young ladies, and tried to participate in the conversation. Everything looked wrong to me. The world had stopped breathing but all the people looked distorted and unpleasant. The colors of everything seemed to glow like they were all fluorescing under a black light and the noise lingered in the air like thick fog. I told my friends that I was going to be sick and they said that they weren't really enjoying themselves there either. We said that we needed to leave and the girls looked perplexed because we had only just arrived. I think that I must have looked pretty bad though, because one of the girls followed us out, asked if I was okay, and gave me a hug. Strangely, this caused me to cackle wildly which I think freaked her out, thus destroying my chances of getting her phone number but that was also funny to me so I laughed even harder.
We drove back to my friend's house (we even made the turn on the first try) and I finally, allowed myself to release the contents of my stomach next to a rock wall in the front yard. This was the weirdest part of the trip for me. As I heaved, the shadows seemed to dance around and the orange cubes returned to the corners of my eyes. As soon as everything was out, I felt like I had stepped into a new world. The discomfort was gone in an instant and I felt light and nimble. The visuals stopped being menacing and became friendly, warm, and welcoming too. That night, despite all the suffering, suddenly felt like the best night of my life.
The rest of the trip was wonderful. We sat in the yard, smoked, talked, and laughed until it had ended and the sun was coming up.
That is my story. I don't know if it has a moral or even a point but maybe there is something of value in there. If you are waiting on your own mushroom man, don't get impatient and start downing other drugs before you are sure that he or she isn't coming through. If you mix a bunch of drugs, don't think that you are obligated to hold them down. When you are sick, let it out. What else can I say? Don't go around crashing fancy parties when you are on psychedelics because it won't be fun for anyone. Is that a moral? Probably not but it is something.
Peace.
All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com