“And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom
concerning all things that are done under heaven”
Ecclesiastes 1:13-14
Is he me?
Wow! I’d never been this fucked up before. Ok, sure, there was the time on “ice” – the super-speed derivative briefly popular in the late eighties among a small subset of desperate halfwits who’d snort or swallow anything to escape reality. On that occasion, I had found myself lying naked on a sweat-sodden mattress in the Yuba City U-Sleep-Cheap Motel at 4 AM, surrounded by liquor store, three-pack smut of the cheapest variety, heart flopping like a dying carp in a shoebox, on the cusp of escaping reality forever and idly wondering what friends and family would think when the body was found.
“That’s not the Henry we knew,” they might say. “Uh uh, our Henry was tidy and responsible, polite, socially liberal, fiscally moderate, never one to bogart the doobie. On the other hand, there always was something about him you could never quite put your finger on, nor would one want to without Playtex rubber gloves. Oh well, it’s a puzzle and let’s just leave it at that! As they say in ‘Shogun,’ ‘Karma, neh?’”
“So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble:
He delivereth them out of their distress”
Arriving one Saturday morning at H’s home in the Santa Cruz mountains, I had honked my horn wildly, waved the Glad baggy of psilocybin out the car window and crowed the words my friend yearned so terribly to hear: “Supply is not an issue!” H broke into a jig of unfeigned exultation, and as soon as I could disembark, I joined him in a few high-stepping doh-see-dohs myself. Two balding, middle-class, middle-management, middle-aging men dancing on the driveway, desperate to escape the frantic, panic-struck fraudulence of modern life the only way we knew how – namely, a twelve-hour, drug-fueled intermission of mind-boggling dementia.
Or call it a Sacred Vision Quest. In any case...wild, wild horses couldn’t have pulled us away.
“The Lord looseth men out of prison:
the Lord giveth sight to the blind”
We probably over-indulged in our subsequent intake, carried away by our neediness and despair, and a certain element of anticipatory Christmas-morn enthusiasm. This happens even with the best of intentions. If truth be told, in H’s and my case, it happens pretty much every time where supply is not an issue. On the other hand, the art of illegal drug dosage has ever been an imprecise science. It’s like those Ex-Lax commercials regarding the inexactitude of prunes: “Is four enough? Is six too many?” The fact of the matter is, whether ingesting psychedelics or laxatives, one never really knows the answer to that question til it’s too late to turn back. Like love, lap dancing and sweet life everlasting, it takes a leap of faith.
So we choked down a handful of noxious mushrooms, waited perhaps 45 seconds, looked at each other with eyebrows raised, and gagged down another fistful just to make sure. Our yearning souls were fixed upon a distant and shimmering Yerushalayim. Only the outcome remained uncertain.
“Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler;
the snare is broken, and we are delivered.”
We moseyed over to sprawl in a nearby meadow for the teeth-tingling and rubbery-leg stage of the journey, and within the half hour, H hallucinated a full-sized, steam-spouting, freight locomotive racketing and roaring through the tall grass, purple thistles and golden poppies around us. Though I cannot personally attest to its corporeal reality (distracted as I was by a bluebottle fly the size of a cantaloupe), the train’s appearance nonetheless put paid to any lingering anxieties we might have entertained about the quality of our psilocybin.
And then, to complete to metaphor, we hopped on board that train.
We were congratulating ourselves on our safe return to the upper deck, when H’s wife came out to check up on us – a wonderful woman, her already nebulous grasp on reality precluded any indulgence in serious drugs – and expressed the meant-to-be-reassuring thought that “at least you two aren’t jumping off the deck.” Regrettably, this innocent comment immediately sprouted into a lush and perturbing Triffid of uncertainty: mightn't I, after all, at any particular moment, jump off the deck? I mean … it certainly didn’t seem impossible. H, who can be irritatingly childlike on drugs, just kept waving his arms around like sparklers, exclaiming Whee! Oh Man! and Wow!
However, I instantly pictured myself crouched and howling in a cell for the criminally insane, scooting around in my strait-jacket like a dog on its ass; the faces of loved ones crowded goggle-eyed at the reinforced window. I had not only vaulted screaming in Esperanto off the deck but had landed on a small, beautiful, ethnic girl-child holding a kitten and collecting for the March of Dimes.
Bummer, I had really hoped to avoid this.
“Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy;
forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid”
Now might be an appropriate time to address the general lack of guarantees accompanying this class of substance abuse. You want to escape reality? Of course you do, and your mother and I fully approve. And as your pharmacological locomotive chugs happily up into a vasty and unfolding sky of limitless possibility, one gazes down upon “ordinary” life with no little compassion and bewilderment. Honestly, considering the unstrung charade of daily human existence – Hummers, cell phones, goat-tees, candidate debates, and Shoney's Big Boy All-You-Can-Eat Breakfast Buffet – it’s hard to believe one wasn’t under the influence of some inferior-grade, rogue chemical then. But you settle back with a sigh (“Miss Moneypenny, hold my calls”), and all that is soon left far, far behind.
Then things get iffy.
“He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek;
He looked again and found it was
The Middle of Next Week!”
Lewis Carroll
You may alight at a Bodhisattva’s paradise pulsing with ineffable beauty and the transcendental unity of all things – and I earnestly hope you do, my friend. (Similar results have been obtained through an electric probe to the hippocampus, but, trust me, that’s not as easy as it sounds.) Blue Krishna may appear in his effulgent Viswarupa form to tootle his flute and play chuckling host at a cosmic Let’s Make A Deal. You may gallop across shamanic dream-worlds popping with mystical epiphanies to have grave Wakan-Tanka whisper thy secret warrior name into your deserving ear canal – Beefalo Stick or Moaning Prostate perhaps. Or a surging tsunami tide of unfocused, but all-encompassing Ur-lust might wash you back into the warm, generous womb of the Great Mother herself. That can be nice.
And if the hilariously exquisite absurdity of every aspect of creation suddenly reveals itself (“The possum! The platypus! The president, forgodsakes!”), one can only yelp, squeal, clap and drool in helpless appreciation. Who would have guessed that God is such a sly Rabelaisian! The chest aches from its hysterical heaving. Oh bravo, my dear Fellow, bravo!
Music also sounds incredibly good.
“I was an insignificant speck on a giant spider web …
and the spider was God or the Devil”
Allen Ginsberg
On the other hand, on more than one psychotropic occasion, I have found myself inescapably pinned beneath a leaking, zeppelin-sized, water balloon of unspeakable horror (no, not your spouse – I told you, that’s finito). Sirens sing sweetly of self-powered flight, ostrich-sized praying mantises stalk your hallways, Satan drops by for a tête-à-tête having possessed the soul of your miniature schnauzer. Once, I was seized by the unshakeable conviction that “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” was written especially for me (which quite roiled the music world), and on another occasion, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror without my glasses and literally shrieked and scrabbled in terror. Indeed, it can seem as if your very soul is spiraling like a cloud of bats into a white-tiled and tenantless abyss.
It is commonly agreed that lunatic, blood-dripping paranoia is the absolute worst, but makes for the best war stories if one can avoid arrest and institutionalization.
It’s a crapshoot! The pods in the smorgasbord garden of the subconscious pop open and what crawls out? Any-fucking-thing you can imagine: revelations, paradigms, delusions and nightmares, the nature of love, the omnipresence of fear, dead parents, Jesus in a bowl of curly-roni, past lives, aliens, free will, the enormous size of your skin pores. Friends will go slack-eyed at your vapid allegories (“I’m telling you, Z, the universe is a peanut M&M!”), but it is a profound moment – the Truth at last! And I, for one, have always been a buyer.
Whatever the specific experience, the trip will last for what seems like several lifetimes. This is especially true if you’re at a rock concert, waiting for your girlfriend to come out of the women’s room.
“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind.
Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.
How true that is.”
Dan Quayle
So, anyway, after the deck-jumping and insane asylum scenarios, I made the prudent choice and moved indoors to the guest bedroom. Here, burrowing deep within the bedclothes, I assumed a fetal position cocooned in fertile darkness. I believed, perhaps optimistically, this reduced my chances of jumping to my death or disfigurement. In any case, I certainly did not require any external stimuli to compete with the Fellini-esque circus playing within the mushroom cloud of my own irradiated brain. A hell of a show – Mrs. H later said I muttered and chuckled under there for hours – but, sadly, the details have slipped away. Like a dump truck of fried eggs unloading into the void at the edge of the world: astounding to watch, but too slippery to catch.
Some aeons later, I slithered out from miasmic Self. Hello? Anybody home? Whoa! Things were so much quieter out here, it was kind of spooky. Downstairs, on the lower deck, I re-encountered H and it was then that I had my historic “Is he me?” moment. It is true that people not infrequently mistook H and I for brothers – glasses, high foreheads, bland faces – but I personally had never before had any difficulty telling us apart. This could engender significant confusion among spouses, employers and video clubs. The mind reeled! Fortunately, my attention could not remain fixed on anything for more than a second or two and the crisis passed.
“He hath awakened from the dream of life …”
Percy Shelley
Around this time H’s wife put some avocado rinds down the In-sink-erator™, which reminded me of the Stephen King novel where a guy gets so crazed from idiot jingles that he sticks his hand down the disposal. Though deeply empathetic – Lord knows, I’d wandered that insane landscape enough times with the Phil Collinses and Billy Joels of the world – this was not a happy thought and I made a note to avoid the kitchen environs. A little later, H turned on a basketball game where everything occurred in reverse slow motion.
I was floating bemusedly in an amorphous parallel universe where literally anything at all might happen at any given moment, when a lasso, such as Lee Van Cleef might use to drag a tenderfoot off his Appaloosa, sailed lazily up through the ether. I contemplated this event with some idle perplexity – Huh! What’s this? – when it looped around an ankle, yanked hard, and I abruptly found myself strapped once more into the kitchen chair of time and finitude, gumming a few dry corn chips and nursing a lukewarm Corona. On the TV screen, Michael Jordan was graciously accepting the All-Star MVP award.
That great hero stared out with an immense sincerity, and then his bright words spilled forth from a strong and victorious heart: first of all, he wanted to thank Edge Gel.
“So passes the glory of the world”
Ah yes … back on earth, terra too cognita. And tired, so very, very tired. But as best I could tell, H was not me – which is good because he has some very annoying habits.
Endnote: Attention vigilantes and law enforcement authorities! I have completely aged out on illegal drugs and currently rely solely upon anti-depressants, caffeine, alcohol, psyllium husk, Ginkgo Biloba, HBO, self-help religion and internet pornography to transport me to other, better worlds. I boldly D.A.R.E. my readers do the same.
By Henry E. Panky
"Unstrung, Unflagging, Unknown, Unwanted: The Un-Humorist"
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