by Seth Rogen
I had actually met Katie before, because I was in an episode of Dawson’s Creek a few years earlier. She had a vague “please rescue me from this place” look on her face. The baby was adorable—and real.
Judd arrived a couple minutes later, and we went to Tom’s screening room to sit down and chat. We talked for about five hours, and it was a ride. We talked about movies we loved, what we were making, things like that. He told some stories about Stanley Kubrick, which were great to hear, and talked about this new director, J. J. Abrams, whom he was working with on the new Mission: Impossible movie.
It was all totally normal…until…it wasn’t.
For those of you who don’t know, Scientology is a religion/cult/pyramid scheme invented by coke-addled/moron/science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Basically, Scientologists believe that seventy-five million years ago, there was a “Galactic Confederacy” that was ruled by an evil alien named Xenu. Xenu brought billions of his alien friends to earth, put them in a volcano, and exploded them with a hydrogen bomb. The spirits of the aliens, known as Thetans, adhered to the spirits of humans on earth, and the journey of becoming a high-ranking Scientologist is one of shedding your Thetans and becoming “clear” of them. Then you get superpowers and shit. Overall, it’s not much crazier than any other religion, but the fact that it was literally made by a guy who wrote terrible science-fiction books that essentially have the same plot probably docks it a few points. Also, they don’t believe in treating mental illness or depression with drugs.
About four hours into the meeting, it finally came up: The conversation slowwwwwwwly veered into how the public thought he was…losing his mind.
Tom: Well, yeah, they’re making it seem like I’m losing my mind.
Judd: Making it seem like it?
Tom: Yeah. There’s a coordinated effort to make it appear that way.
Me: Who would do that?
Tom: The pharmaceutical industry.
Me: …Oh yeah?
Tom: Yeah!
Judd: …And why would they do that?
Tom: Because my exposure of their fraud has cost them SO much money that they’re desperate. They’re scrambling and they’re doing everything they can to discredit me so I won’t hurt sales anymore.
Me: Big Pharma made you jump on Oprah’s couch?
Tom: They edited it to make it look so much worse than it was. They do that all the time. You should see what they do to my friend Louis Farrakhan!
Of all the strange sentences I’ve heard in my life, this one coming out of Tom Cruise’s mouth is in the top three.
Judd: Well, Farrakhan has said a lot of blatantly anti-Semitic things.
Tom: No! He’s great!
Judd: He’s great? He’s compared Jews to cockroaches.
Tom: No! See, that’s the media! They’re distorting all of it! Take my religion, for example—Scientology. They make it seem sooooo fucking different than it is! If you just gave me like an hour to tell you about it, you’d be like, “No fucking way?! That’s what Scientology is?! No fucking way!!” In just one hour, I could completely change your minds!
Me and Judd looked at each other. Do we bite? Are we strong enough to be proselytized to by one of the most famous and charismatic men on the planet? Would I come out of this thinking I had to expunge alien spirits from my soul?
Judd: Yeah…maybe another time.
We left soon after that, and I was driving back down his long, now-dark driveway. I had passed the spot where I’d stopped to pee in the bottle, when I saw it: a red light coming from the trees. I squinted….It was a video camera, with its little red recording light now visible, pointing directly where I had peed. If a camera could wink, this one would have.
Am I kept up at night by the thought that Tom Cruise likely has video footage of me urinating in a Snapple bottle in my car? No. But if I ever start expounding on the virtues of clearing one’s Thetans, you know it’s bad and he’s blackmailing me.
The next day at work, Judd had all these ideas for Tom. I remember I was like, “He’s not just meeting with us! He looks crazy and he’s just trying to be in a comedy so he seems in on the joke! We can’t be the only ones he’s talking to about this.”
Judd: Maybe, but I think we can get him….
A few months later, he signed on to be in Tropic Thunder. He was hilarious and everyone loved him again the second they saw it.
I was always afraid to do acid, but, dear god, I wanted to. I think the propaganda got to me. I remember hearing as a kid that if you did acid once, you could get “acid flashbacks” for life. That at any moment you could suddenly find yourself in the throes of hallucinogenic hysteria. I remember a kid in school telling me that if you EVER did acid, you couldn’t be an airplane pilot, just in case a flashback happened mid-flight.
I also heard stories about bad trips—people thinking they could fly and jumping out of windows, people thinking there were spiders crawling all over them and tearing their skin off…genuinely horrifying shit to think about confronting, especially when coupled with the fact that the OTHER thing I’d always heard about acid was how long it lasted: over twelve hours sometimes.
It had kind of a “cult-y” connotation, too, so that made it scary. I remember hearing that Charles Manson drugged his followers with acid so they’d become murdering, brainwashed zombies, which isn’t the greatest commercial for a drug. I also watched the Woodstock documentary, which captures the moment a man stands in front of the crowd specifically to warn everyone that there’s some bad brown acid going around and to stay the fuck away from it.
Sure, I’d heard about “seeing the music, tasting the colors,” and that stuff, but still, throughout high school and the years after, me and my friends steered clear, instead opting for herculean amounts of shrooms.
Shrooms had taken me on some pretty intense trips over the years, and the thought that acid was more intense made it downright terrifying to even consider. But there was always one voice in my head that stuck out. The voice of a guy at summer camp, who was like, “Acid is wayyyy less intense than shrooms!”
“Really?”
“Yeah. With shrooms, you’re the passenger. With acid, you’re the driver.”
Well, I could definitely attest to the first part, but I straight up didn’t believe the second part.
As I got older, I got more curious. And I found myself around people who were on acid from time to time, and they didn’t seem like they’d jump out a window or tear their skin off. They actually seemed coherent and like they were having a great fucking time. So, because I’m wildly on the nose, at the age of thirty-six, me and some other friends who had never done acid all booked a place in Joshua Tree to try it for the first time.
My friend Ben flew in from Vancouver, and we planned to arrive on Friday morning, get the place ready, and then Kyle, Ariel, and Evan would come in the afternoon. We’d take the acid at around 4 p.m. and then…see what happened?
We got to the Yucca Valley, where there’s a giant military base and a fuck-ton of barbershops and very sketchy-looking massage parlors, giving the impression that this town had a lot of well-groomed servicemen who loved themselves a good hand job. Which is good, I guess. I want our armed forces to be clean-cut and not in any way sexually pent-up.
We found a health-food store and bought whatever we could find that seemed tasty. We weren’t really sure what we’d want to eat; drugs and food mix differently depending on what you’re on. On most drugs, you can just avoid eating altogether, but acid lasts so fucking long that we were gonna have to eat eventually.
We were anxious about doing the acid, as doing any new drug is scary. I was particularly nervous because, a few weeks earlier, at Martin’s place, I had a wild fucking time on shrooms and was still a bit shell-shocked.
My friend Martin had just moved into a new house
with a pool, and me, Evan, and our friend Andrew made a plan to go to Martin’s, eat a bit of shroom chocolate, get a tour of the new house, and then go hang out by the pool as the shrooms kicked in and just overall have a chill night.
We got to Martin’s and he had rose-shaped shroom chocolates waiting for us.
Martin: There’s gold caps in here!
Me: How much?
Martin: Not sure exactly…
We each ate a chocolate and began the tour. As we were admiring the sconces in the guest room, we all looked at each other.
Me: Are you guys REALLY starting to feel this shit?
Evan: I’m very much starting to feel it.
Martin: This shit is coming on hard and fast as a motherfucker…whooooooooooooo.
We couldn’t even finish one lap of the house. I went down to the dining room and held on to the table for dear life. My hands melted into the wood up to the wrist, and the swirly pattern of the grain started to work its way up my arms. No matter how many times I shook my head, the hallucination stuck.
Me: Hoooolllllyyyy fuuuuuuuck!!!!
Andrew appeared holding a sword, which is never a good thing while on shrooms.
Andrew: Look at the size of this letter opener!
I laughed hysterically till I wept. I looked at the time. It had only been twenty minutes since we had eaten the chocolate. This was just starting and was going to get steadily more intense for the next few hours. Good lord, I was in for it.
My brain then felt like it was ripped out of my head and thrown into a kaleidoscope. I struggled to operate doors, light switches, faucets—simple things I’ve had a pretty good handle on for quite some time. I lay on a lawn chair for hours, weeping about how much I missed seeing my wife and my dog due to my work schedule, and the next day I quit two jobs because I had the cosmic revelation that they weren’t great uses of my time.
When you’re so high you’re calling your employer the next day to quit your job, you know you’ve done a lot of drugs.
Me and Ben drove from the grocery store to the house we rented, near the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. When we got there, it kind of reminded me of where Sarah Connor’s friends live in Terminator 2, the place with the underground bunker where Arnold gets the minigun. It had a bit of a “survivalist” vibe. But it also had an outdoor fireplace, so we were psyched.
The others arrived and Evan pulled out the acid. It was on little tiny paper tabs, which surprised me for some reason. We each took a tab and put it on our tongue. It was one of those moments when I thought, I’ve only ever seen this in movies, and it always looked exactly like this. Which is also what I’ll probably think when a tsunami wipes out Los Angeles.
I was scared shitless. My heart was pounding. I strapped myself in…and was pleasantly surprised.
It came on a bit weird, with a kind of chemical-y feeling, but around an hour and a half after we took it, we were fully in the throes, and it was wonderful. It was way less intense than shrooms—at least the amount I had been taking—and although I was decidedly fucked off my ass, I did in fact feel like I was in the driver’s seat. For the most part…
The time came to eat. We were starving, which again, was kind of a surprise.
We all went to the kitchen and laid out what we had gotten at the health-food store:
Tortillas
Chicken breast
Potatoes
Feta cheese
Kyle: What the fuck is this?
Ben: Mmmm…I’m not sure.
Evan: What did you plan on making?
Ben: Well, I’m not sure! We didn’t really talk about it.
Ariel: Why not?
Me: We’ve been fucking stressed out all day about doing this fucking acid!
Ben: The nerves got to us!
Me: We weren’t thinking right!
Ariel: No shit. These groceries don’t make sense! There’s no meal you can make with this!
Ben: Sure there is!
Kyle: What? It’s like some fucked-up Top Chef challenge! Do acid and make a meal with a bunch of ingredients that don’t make sense. We’re gonna starve to death!
Ben: No! Shut up! I got this! We’re having fucking Greek chicken tortillas with mashed potatoes! Don’t worry! I got this…
As we sat in the living room, we could hear Ben working hard around the corner. After about twenty minutes he yelled, “Guys, this is going to be fucking GROSS!”
After dinner, even though there was room for each of us to have our own bedroom, we all gathered in a little bunk room together. It felt like camp, except every time I closed my eyes, I saw spider legs appear and peel away layers of reality, but in a not-at-all-scary way. Whenever it got unpleasant I could steer it away, because, again, with acid it felt like I was in the driver’s seat. With shrooms, at best I’m in the passenger seat, but more often I’m strapped to the hood, holding on for dear life.
My first experience was great, and I did the perfect amount. But there was this nagging thought in my head. It’s not a great thought but one that I stand by: You haven’t really done a drug till you’ve done a bit too much of it.
Luckily, the next year, at Burning Man, I did too much acid.
If you don’t know, Burning Man is essentially a giant art festival. To get there, you drive an RV to the middle of fucking nowhere in the Nevada desert and then turn off the only road and go two hours farther into what’s REALLY the middle of fucking nowhere. They sell nothing and have nothing other than porta-potties—no plumbing, no garbage cans, no stores, no water. You bring everything you need, and you dispose of everything you use in your own camp and take it all with you when you leave. They call it “radical self-reliance,” but it’s mostly just eating a ton of microwavable burritos for three days straight.
I completely get why people are annoyed by the concept of it, and before I went, I was, too. But ultimately it’s a drug wonderland, so it won me over. Whatever Disneyland is for kids who like cartoons is what Burning Man is to adults who like hallucinogens. Mostly you ride bikes around the moonlike landscape, high off your fucking ass, going from one giant art installation to the next, which is pretty much the most fun thing one can do.
About fifteen of our friends made a camp on the outskirts of the festival, and as the sun was setting, I took two hits of acid. About twenty minutes later, it came on fast. My first trip was a beautiful if not tiny-bit-rocky metamorphosis from sober to high; this felt more like a scene in a movie where someone turns into a werewolf. I wanted to tear my clothes off. I had to remind myself to breathe. The thought of engaging in any sort of conversation was appalling. As my friends congregated to go out for the night, I stood alone, looking out into the desert, thinking, What the fuck did I just do to myself?!
But about five minutes later…I was just really high. I thought, As long as I don’t have to navigate any actual high-stakes situations that require my brain or common sense or anything, I’ll be fine!
Unfortunately, Burning Man does have actual high-stakes situations that require your brain and common sense, because, well, they burn shit. It’s actually the worst part about Burning Man to me, which makes it confusing in that it’s their titular selling point. It’d be like if an art gallery was bragging about the fact that they were gonna destroy all the art after the exhibition was over. It’s a strange stance. Even stranger is the feeling that some of this shit was made just to be burned, which is maybe poetic to some people but not to me. A festival brought to you by the weirdo you hung out with as a kid who poured lighter fluid on all his toys and melted them? Fantastic!
Lauren and me were still high on acid—her, the perfect amount, and me, still a bit too much but stabilizing. We were watching a giant four-story structure be burned to the ground, when suddenly the wind shifted and giant pieces of flaming de
bris started to rain down on the area we were in. People scrambled for cover, but the fire kept falling. Flaming whirlwinds whipped through the crowd; it was pandemonium.
We spotted some cop SUVs parked a few hundred yards away and ran behind them, trying to take cover. The cops were afraid to damage their cruisers, I guess, so they hopped in and drove away from the scene, leaving us exposed again.
As we held hands and ran as fast and far as we could into the desert to escape the flaming wood pieces that were falling all around us, one thought kept rolling through my mind: Thank fucking god I’m not on shrooms right now.
All this likely begs the questions: “What’s wrong with you, Seth? Why do you do so many drugs and why can’t you stop talking about it?” And the best answer to that I can come up with is “They give me insights into my own thinking, feeling, and behavior in ways that I haven’t found elsewhere, and they’re super-fun.” It’s really nothing new. People have been getting fucked up for thousands of years. There’s something about removing myself from my normal baseline of operation that feels exciting and adventurous. And shared adventures can be incredibly bonding. I think I also keep yapping about drugs like acid, MDMA, and shrooms because of how incredibly fucking bothered I am that they’re viewed as these big bad wolves compared to alcohol, which is both way more prevalent and way more shitty for you.
Like, if I told you there was a drug that you drank and it made you have fun for like an hour, then it made you dizzy for three hours, then you blacked out, then the entire next day you had a terrible headache and generally felt like shit, you probably wouldn’t be clamoring to try it. But alcohol is so mainstream that it’s somehow overcome the fact that it sucks, which is also how I hope to be described one day. But in all seriousness, if I have two glasses of wine, I feel like shit the next day. And the sugar and carbs are objectively bad for your health. I’ve done so much acid that the desert itself crashed like waves on a beach; it has no sugar, no carbs. In fact, the next day, I felt fucking fantastic.