Mescaline Trips Gone Horribly Wrong - Written by Sans Nom

I was watching the news today, out here in the great unknown, where the people are too afraid to leave their own houses; where the drugs debilitate and the spider’s roam carelessly throughout your house, devouring wood bugs and claiming corners, nooks, and crannies as their own; wait a minute, houses? Let me re-phrase that; some of these places are less like living quarters and more like third world clap shacks a beggar wouldn’t shit in. The standards are border line criminal. Out here on the west coast, I’ve seen school buses cut in half and wheeled up to a mobile home, tarped off and labeled, ‘the children’s room.’ Oh! How fun it would be, to sleep in a school bus? If the kids start crying, you can just give them a crack rock to chew on, or a small dose of heroin to shut them up. I am not in....Vancouver.... though; I am many kilometers north, at the end of highway 101. Where the draft dodgers, drug addicts, and scumbag’s come to hide out.

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Well, anyways, the less you know the better, right? Ignorance is bliss? Bullshit. This place deserves to be trampled under foot; where rain and discomfort draw people into shelters for three quarters of the year, the rest is spent debating over their phobias of the outside world… But now, an unbreathable menace has found its way into the air vents and circulated its way throughout an apartment building in ....Vancouver...., and it has all of the fob’s running into the streets, spurting and wheezing, and muttering in Mandarin Chinese, praying that the cops don’t come, lest they are tagged and deported immediately. Ah, a far cry from the story I will embark though. ....

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It was a hot summer’s night, and the sun was drowning into the jagged abyss of the rocky mountains. People and creatures and bad trips were budging. And the hullabaloo of a hellish experience was itching under everybody’s skin. I had arrived at the Zoo around quarter to nine, and I’ll be damned if I can remember what day of the week it was, where I’d been previous to my arrival, and what was happening in my midst. I ordered a double rum and coke, dark, hold the lime… Oh, fuck, who am I kidding? You have to ask for those amenities here. We like the bare bones, the skinny… But ice would be nice. ....

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I pay the waitress, Kate, and hold the tip. Rachel is drinking tonight. And apparently so am ..I... “This place is empty, isn’t it a Thursday or something?” The need for idle chit-chat is unnecessary, but I engage willingly.....

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“Yup, it sure is,” Kate replies. She’s sitting on the lower counter of the bar, flipping through channels on the TV. ....

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Jees’ if we didn’t have this, what else would be doing, right? Probably watching TV alone somewhere, and getting ancy for something real.  For ‘American Idol’ is so simply put; it says it all in the name… ‘AMERICAN’ Idol. The shit that American people buy into: ....Brittany...., McDonalds, Wal-Mart, George Bush. But it’s all false. And it’s no wonder we’re here drinking tonight. We’ve lost our heroes, our idols, our entertainment. And so we find it here, in a room of copious endeavours, greed, gluttony, and stupidity.....

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I soon find out from my colleagues, that a bag of mushrooms is at hand, and that the few people that filled the bar, were now on them. I was one of three people that were not. And it was a damn shame, but my adverse reaction to the last mushroom binge I joined in on was enough to scare me off for an un-determined amount of time… now, approximately three or four years since I indulged in any sort of drug other than marijuana. A trip of epic proportions.....

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May long, of two thousand and three, or four. Christ, it doesn’t matter, as time is only relative in a mushroom trip. I had taken two or three grams with my friend Michael, a school-mate from college, before we drove into town to rob job sites of their cut offs from lumber. We were on a scavenger hunt for firewood. The night previous to that, we were drinking copious amounts of alcohol and inciting other party goer’s and campers around half-moon bay to drink with us. They soon started following and repeating anything we said. A real stale crowd of non-instigators. So we figured we’d throw the next night into over-drive. ....

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When we returned from the pillage, Michael and I decided to indulge a little more, consuming up to seven grams of mushrooms now. As we sat around the fire, cooking smokies and laughing at eachother’s jokes, I drank four pints of Guinness. I bummed the occasional cigarette like a shit hawk, packing nothing but the habit, and someone had soon passed a joint around, so I took a long pull from it, not yet allowing the substances in my body to react with each other. ....

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I was watching two of my schoolmates across the fire, who were already stoned from the smoke, putting together some peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches one after another in the fashion of an assembly line, when it suddenly hit me. The drug! I looked down at my jean jacket, and slowly sunk my head in. How could this be? ....

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I was a rock. All of this blue and grey. But then I had it pegged. NO! I was a MOUNTAIN. I saw moss and crevices, little ridges, a billy goat. I looked into the fire, and saw flickering city lights. My god, I’d have to stay completely still, for fear that they would find out. I’d made a big mistake, I thought to myself. The feeling of impending doom foreshadowed that thought, and so I tried to grasp my way to the top and out of the trip before it was too late.....

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“MICHAEL,” I yelled, not aware of the volume of my voice. The wind was howling and sweeping distant cries past me, of a land far beyond this realm. I was immobilized, and feared for the village people below. The crowd around the fire fell silent, and so I looked around to see what was going on. The floor was velvet, and the walls of tarps, satin drapery. I was at a council meeting of some sort. But there was still complete silence. Was it possible this was just my messed up perception of reality for the moment? And so I finally looked at Michael, and said “Dude, I am really – fucked – up.” ....

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Michael was standing in front of a tailgate, and looked faintly Elvin, with his ears sticking out from under his toque. Am I at a council meeting for the lord of the rings? Everyone was holding staffs, and the dwarves were consuming sandwiches at a rate like no other. Beyond Michael, the sky was a beautiful Picasso’d Painting, and the wind had fell silent, but the waves of half-moon bay, and the trees flowed like a dream.....

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“I know,” Michael said. “You’ve been staring at the fire for an hour.” An HOUR, I thought? ....

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“AN HOUR,” I barked, again I was having troubles with volume control. What happened? How could this be? He must be immune to them. Or even worse, that sick sadistic bastard is enjoying his mescaline. Enjoying laughing at me, watching me writhe!!! But it was too early to point the finger. Not now. I’d look like an imbecile in front of everyone. An animal. So I restrained my convictions, and moved on.....

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“I was looking at the fire, dude. It looks like city lights.” Michael knelt down to see.....

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“Oh man it totally does. That’s crazy!” We needed to go on this trip together, to be on the same level; otherwise it would all fall apart. ....

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“I’m going for a nature walk,” I blurted awkwardly. I stood up, and left the council meeting. It was way bad, and super ugly. Too fucked up for this cowboy. I was going to the woods to cool off, and lose the monkey on my back. My intention were for Michael to join me, because that’s what you do when you’re on mushrooms. You go on the trip together, and check shit out, get lost in the woods. But he wasn’t following me. I had no idea where I was going, and desperately needed a partner in crime. Hours later I would realize that Michael had thought a ‘nature walk’ meant I had to take a piss. The entire time I had just singled myself out, away from the herd, and into my own demise.....

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I was only in the forest temporarily before I realized that I needed to hit the washroom immediately, and in that moment of clarity, understood the side-effects of the mushrooms! Through poisoning! God-damnit I needed to shit. And so I found myself huddled into a frozen outhouse with no lights and no toilet paper. But it was better in here than out there. Outside of those four walls, a dangerous place had erupted, too unsafe for a man of my esteem. My senses were heightened to extremes and I could see and feel the evil that lurked in our presence. But for now, I was safe. ....

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Time had passed along with a strangeness of foreign thoughts, before I had soon realized I was lost again. This time, the room had become smaller. And I saw myself repeating simple motions over and over like an old man with OCD, I couldn’t focus. I was a robot at his end, and I was malfunctioning. It was like I had been the brunt of some practical joke on the night of my bachelor party, and woke up on a train ride, with no clothes, and a killer hangover. I regained my thoughts, as they were running rampant now, with a very loose lasso.....

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I was taking a shit, I thought. ‘Oh yeah’. I finally finished my business and settled on heading back out into the wild again. I couldn’t stay like this any longer, it wasn’t right. This was the set of some horror movie, I imagined. The walls - a dark blue - very cold - very baron. Void from the outside world. It was a ghost world. And so I opened the bathroom door and crawled outside.....

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This time I was faced with a full-on-party, and I had missed the entire build up. Some asshole had let the army in. And with them, the circus trailed alongside. The ground was breathing like we were ticks on a dragons back and the General gave everybody glow sticks. It was too much. Voices were scattered and non-sensical. Scattered around me in fragments. Kids were waving colours in my face and I knew I was being played. I wandered up the hill and saw an abundance of bodies, piled up and laughing, drinking. Such shear terror had taken over by now. My last vestige was to locate Michael, and drag him out of this bloody mess. As I kept walking I bumped into a few people asking a few questions which I never answered… They were on to me! The usual, ‘where’ve you bin’s,’ and ‘he’s fucked-up’s.’ HA! I’ll show them.....

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Finally I located Michael. He was in deep trouble, fully engaged in ‘conversation war-fare’ with one of the soldiers. “Michael, God Damnit, come with me,” I muttered. The soldier spoke up. ....

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“Hey man, how’s it going?” I couldn’t help but to ignore him slightly. We needed to get the hell out of there fast. ....

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“It’s going... yes, yeah.” I was an idiot, running from nothing and trying to drag Michael down with me. I wasn’t convincing enough about the nature of impending doom though and so he finally pulled me aside and sat me down at the fire where the council meeting had been held, and now it was story time with Sergeant Rock here, with his knees spread, and his feet crossed, churning up hieroglyphs in the dirt with some crude instrument, a poking stick. All the women were surrounding him talking about bullets, and heart-throb-bullshit. ....

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The other soldiers started to mess with a drunkn, half retarded kid, Myles, who was drooling by this point. His fully retarded brother looked on as Myles stumbled towards the fire, and fell half in. I watched for awhile as the peanut butter and jelly consumers lifted him out of the pit, patted him off and began to tie him to his chair. They handed him back his mug of rye and coke. Sergeant Rock continued on with his story, unphased by the entire incident. He was a liar, for Chris’ sakes! and he played the innocence role a little too well, sitting there on his stump acting like he wasn’t really excited inside about the violence, and stupidity brewing between Myles and his counterparts. I couldn’t concentrate.  I had had enough.....

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The drugs had really kicked in at this point, as Michael and a couple of girls pulled me away from the fire. We began walking up the hill away from the madness. They knew where I was at, and I knew that I was in serious danger of losing my mind if I didn’t escape now.  Swastikas were floating towards me back at the campfire and I was swatting at thin air. I wasn’t going to let my fore-fathers down by ignoring the third Reich’s presence. The army guys had really brought a party, one that was out of my reach. I had seen that some ugliness and bad, bad violence was about to erupt, and so we vanished up the hill. I could only repeat myself, letting the people know how screwed I was.....

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“We know Steve;” It was Jeff’s wife. She found the crowd to be too boring. I’m sure she was looking after me. “We were watching you, and you just looked so terrified back there.”....

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I mumbled incoherently, things that didn’t make sense, or matter. The hill we were climbing grew exponentially and I was having a really hard time scaling it. My vision was skewed and the I just kept clawing away into what looked like a ‘warp-speed’ version of the ground… and when I turned to Michael, he was well aware of my problem, as he was having the exact same one. ....

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He looked like Michael Jackson from that music video, where everyone was leaning at extremely acute angles to the ground, and so this sent me over the edge. I ran and hid in my tent, trying to sleep off the terror, but the terror prevailed, and I had visions of multiplying chicks, as in yellow chickens, multiplying, and then bubbling, and then melting into a yellow ooze, in which they would begin to grow and multiply from that cesspool, on and on, and over again... Making hideous sounds, totally out of my control. My body twisted and wretched like one of those hanging spiral ornaments people have on their deck. ....

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People were yelling my name …and the soldiers were rolling a keg of beer beside my tent. The cops arrived and started to break the crowd up. Over the inter-calm, I could hear their orders for the people to go home immediately. Cars were starting and kids were getting arrested. My vehicle was there, but I was in no state to drive home. I was worried that they would soon find me, all huddled up, freaking out on a horrible mescaline trip. I was going to spend the night in jail. My God, all I could do was stop breathing. But it all managed to escape out my ass, like a secondary escape valve to reduce air pressure build-up. ....

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Finally, my friend Jeff had located me. “Hey Buddy, we were looking for you.”....

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“Jeff, Does it smell like shit in here,” I asked.....

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“Yeah dude, You OK?” He had a foul look on his face and worried about helping me out had I really shit myself. I let him know that I hadn’t shit myself, but my head-space was all too much. “I’ll leave you alone, dude.” And so he left me to wallow in my own brewed up concoction of gaseous fear laden thought.....

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But, I digress.....

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The OOZE. The mushrooms. Keira had eaten his off the floor of the bar. I’m sure that he’d dropped them by accident. He and his girlfriend were laughing about it. Yeah, it was weird, but it was better than nothing. Everyone was on drugs for this one, except me, Kate, and Rachel. The tables had turned for me, and I was going to enjoy this to a great degree. ....

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People were enjoying themselves though, as usual here, thrust away from the same old boredom that haunts everyone in this town. It was very one for all, like the three musketeers. But I had revenge on my mind. I wanted to watch the chaos, and confusion, simply as an observer, so I passed on any offer of the drug. Small signs were trickling through. People were laughing at simple conversation and thoughts… anything really. Things that aren’t regularly funny, but with a heightened sense of awareness, even the smallest things get blown out of proportion. And so I was the KING. ....

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Seasons in the Abyss came on, by Slayer. And Coleman and Keira were joking about Kerry King’s spoken word / poetry at the end. I drank enough that I’d hit the stage in the night where, anything I said was either astonishingly brilliant, or down-right hilarious, and I had them rolling. I tried to maintain my level of drunkenness so that I would soon be the smartest guy on the planet. Or at least, that would be my perception of people’s reactions to my conversation. ....

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I followed everyone onto the deck, where we had some drinks, and a couple of smokes, trying to cool down from the muggy heat that draped the insides. We were all sitting on the floor of the deck, laughing and joking. Those who were on mushrooms just ‘couldn’t believe,’ half of the stuff that we, the more sober ones could. Effect of the drug, I ‘spose. ....

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Rachel came out and gave us a lecture, not directly intended for us, but a lecture none-the-less on how we were all wasting our time out here, and that she was surrounded by so many brilliant minds, just being destroyed. She would have no problem joining in, but to no avail, her comments were brushed off like lint on a jacket. People began to crack under the pressure. And what was initially just a relaxed little party on the patio had now become one of Paranoia, as fear started crippling them one by one, like a black ninja, masked in silence and discipline. Those hit first began sitting beside eachother, and delving deep into the state with eachother. Courtenay was debilitated in a corner of the deck half crying, and half laughing. Periodically she would try to formulate some sort of input for the conversation at hand, but it would all fall apart into a fit of giggles, and cries, and confusion, and then fear… and Paranoia; deep thoughts that were lost and found, and motions that repeated themselves until the trip were to wear off.....

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Mario, was curled up across from Courtenay; his back to the road. And things became interesting when his sixteen year old son walked by. He asked a couple of questions, but was all too embarrassed with the state of his junkie father to care anymore. He left as soon as he arrived, disappointed. Mario kept repeating to himself, “why did he have to show up?” Yes, of all the times your son came into your life, you’ve been too stoned. Deal with it.....

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Everything was becoming a little too redundant until Courtenay noticed something running through trees, by the rail-road. She addressed it to everyone, worried that it was some paranoid delusion of her own thoughts, but shortly after she brought it up, a large rat like creature began to run along the tree line. Hard to believe. ....Alberta.... is rat-free. The problem with mushrooms and hallucinogenic's is that there is the power of suggestion, like being hypnotized. You are more receptive to believe you see something if it’s brought to your attention.....

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When I was younger, in my late teens, I’d taken some mescal with a friend in ....Red Deer...., and we planned to go on a terror, that night. We were with a larger group of friends, but Chris and I enjoyed eachother’s presence, we got a long, and we both liked to raise a little hell. So when we were offered a gram each, we both obliged, choking them down… they had tasted like the smell of a record store, so we washed them back with a few drinks, a few shots, a joint. ....

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Before we headed out to hike uptown towards the bar, Chris and I had been hanging around outside, goofin off and being jerks when we heard a man yelling up the street. He was shuffling kids into his car beside a playground, yelling and waving his hand like he was holding a gun. As the kids began to pour into the vehicle one by one we started yelling and running towards the car, “Don’t listen to him!!! GET OUT OF THE CAR! STOP, YOU FUCKER!!!”....

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I was wearing these biker boots and tight jeans, which made running awkward, and all I remember is seeing them all stare back at us, like there was no choice. He had them all in the car, and began driving off, so I turned back and Chris kept running towards the vehicle. When I got back to the house everyone was shocked to hear what I’d seen. I called the police, and they took it as a prank call; thought I was some Jeffery KID!!! So I yelled at them, falling into this tirade of insults, and explained how they were letting so much slide by, even if it was a prank call, it should be taken seriously, as response time is everything. This was no laughing matter, so I’m not sure what misled them in our conversation.....

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My stomach felt empty. This was amber alert, but nobody cared, nobody wanted to pursue it. Chris got back and he was pouring sweat, with a look of worry upon him. The cops wanted to come and talk to us, but we were high on mescal, marijuana, and booze, which made me question the whole situation, and so we called it in anonymously, and left it at that. Nothing had ever popped up in the news in the future.....

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 And so we had continued our binge in order to wash away what may have just been us witnessing a father exaggerating to his children. Our perception was entirely flawed. I was haywired. We drank in every bar that night, picking up booze along the way, taking short-cuts through town, and terrifying passerby’s by just ‘being ourselves’. Chris and I, along with my best friend Sara were separated from the crowd somehow. Maybe they left us, as they couldn’t handle the antics of stealing empty kegs and tossing them into the parking lot of a liquor store; tackling eachother over guard rails, or hauling a flatbed trailer into the street at wee hours of the morning, which I still don’t understand, how or why, or what possessed us… But! We destroyed ....Red Deer.... that night. Only, the perception of the entire thing was really screwy, right from the start.....

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And so, returning to my story, I didn’t believe everyone at the OOZE about this rat until I saw it with my own eyes. Shortly after that, a couple of RCMP followed it until they were heal and toe. They had the rodent surrounded as we all watched in wonder and awe. It charged, suddenly, towards the male RC, the female standing back by the trees, the rat and the officer in the street now, with a backdrop of fast food restaurants behind them. He was dancing like a caveman, hoisting each leg up in the air, one after the other, trying to keep his balance as he stumbled backwards screaming. This rodent was huge, like a small beaver, or a muskrat, and the male RC really made himself look like a fool. He deals with scumbag’s everyday, but a tiny rodent brings him to udder panic. I wonder how he is around bees? He pulled his mace, and started to spray the thing; emptied the whole can. As far as I can remember, he tried to bludgeon the poor little bastard to death, when really they needed a net, or some idea of what rodent removal involves. But the rat kept crawling, and fighting, to the death. I never saw, or heard what happened to it, all I remember is it blazing through a cloud of bear mace. The same bear mace that caught wind. And the same wind that started to blow in our direction.....

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Our eyes started to sting, and our nasal passages tingled. The pepper spray crept into the backs of our throats, and those on mushrooms began to freak out. We all ran inside and closed the door, coughing and wheezing, with no idea what was happening, the shock of it all, was so confusing, that after a few seconds we realized, we had been maced, unintentionally. It was like some bad horror movie, like ‘War of the Worlds,’ where you watch the events unfold but only react when people start losing their heads. ....

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Inside, Kate was pouring waters for us, and started coughing herself. Everyone that wasn’t outside started catching wind of the mace and Rachel yelled, “It’s in the Air Conditioning, Shut it off!” Panic struck through us, and with all of the booze and mescaline in the building, and in us, we had blown the whole situation out of the fucking water. This was bad.....

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Kate, being asthmatic, started to go into shock and so the bar closed down early. One of us called the cops while the rest of us ran to the back-door and away from the building to catch some fresh air. The cop’s only response was to pass some jugs of water around. This is the mentality right. They believe that we’re low-lives because we hang out at the Zoo and that’s as much as they know. There was no apology, because I imagine they felt stupid enough as it is, because they fucked up an entire situation, and that fuck-up manifested into a bigger problem that they would rather ignore, and avoid like the plague. Taking blame for anything is something that police don’t seem to be trained to do. It was an event that would never be written about, for the paper or anything. In a small town like that. A completely ugly and hideous cluster fuck that turned a mushroom trip for some into a maelstrom of confusion and horror. Oh, how glorious I felt when the mace wore off!....