by J. R. Helton
-16-
I had my first experience with mushrooms at forty years old, my first trip with Dean Brown. He’d flown in from Dallas to stay with his father for Christmas. Mr. Brown now lived out in the country north of Austin, and so Dean made the hour and a half drive south to visit me in SA. He couldn’t believe I had never taken acid or mushrooms at my age. I told him I had been taking drugs almost every other day of my life for the past twenty-five years. But I had always known I didn’t want to lose control to such a degree and had avoided these long-acting hallucinogens. It was a perfect December night, though, and I had a rare feeling of no anxiety; no worries and no pressing problems clouding my mind that evening. I had just met Patricia upon moving to San Antonio and was falling comfortably in love with her, which put me at ease. She was in Los Angeles visiting her family. I wanted to experiment with hallucinogens, to at least try them once.
“You don’t want acid,” Dean said, “you want some mushrooms. Mushrooms are warm and fuzzy. Acid is cold and prickly.”
He made up his OJ/mushroom mix then and downed twice as much as me. We got into his father’s old car, a gigantic 1975 Lincoln Continental and drove around the city waiting for something to happen. I directed him through Olmos Park and Alamo Heights, the Tory neighborhoods of San Antonio where most of the city’s old and new money lived. We stopped at a video store to rent some movies for later. I was complaining to Dean that nothing was happening in the back of the store as he looked through the videos when I noticed the light in the store beginning to change . . . The florescent bulbs above my head took on a sickening lime-green hue and I suddenly wanted to leave.
“Hey . . .” I said.
“What?”
“We need to leave—NOW.”
Dean smiled and said calmly, “Just relax. It’s starting to kick in. And you don’t want to be in a video store when it happens. Let’s get out of here.”
We almost ran to the Lincoln. Once inside, I felt safe and warm as we coasted out through the neighborhood. I was floating in the big car, suspended above the ground in a boat. I was supposed to be giving Dean directions. I saw a police car pull up to Austin Highway and could see him looking at us.
“Turn left, no make a U-turn,” I said, “and watch out for that cop.”
He guided the car into a wide circle, cutting across four lanes which should have brought even more attention but we escaped into Alamo Heights. It struck me then that this was not the best place for us to be in his old car. Alamo Heights had their own aggressive police force, just like my neighborhood, Olmos Park. I was trying to get us back to Broadway. I saw another cop car then, in the distance and ducked down, “Go right!” I yelled.
Dean was laughing. “Take it easy, man.”
I could see our car from above, as well as different police cars that seemed to be hiding on every side street waiting to come out and chase us. I suddenly felt as though we were in an actual video game, an old game called Pac-Man, and we were trying to get away from these . . . things that were chasing us. I was a two-dimensional character on a television screen caught up in an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the police who seemed more silly than threatening now. I began to laugh uncontrollably.
“What’s so funny?” Dean said.
Could I tell him?
“I feel like we are on a TV screen. We’re in a video game.”
“What game?”
“Pac-man.”
He laughed lightly and shook his head. He had taken much more than I had and yet he was hardly phased. Dean was the ultimate coper. He was the person who drove everyone home, back across the desert at dawn after an all night acid trip in Las Vegas. His system was already much more tolerant to psilocybin than my own. I was beginning to come back briefly to some reality and guided us to Broadway, turning right off of Hildebrand. As we passed Incarnate Word University he slowed as we both stopped to stare at the huge display they had put up for Christmas. Every tree around the university had been sprinkled with twinkling blue, red, green, yellow and purple lights. Their colors vibrated and shifted on the live oak trees, colored, shimmering leaves of light moving in a cold wind. “It’s so beautiful,” I said sincerely and Dean shook his head at me again.
We cut left back through Alamo Heights and after many turns somehow ended up on Basse, passing under Highway 281. The freeway entrance from Basse to 281 South is a giant rising sharp C of a curve and as he took it in the massive Lincoln, I sunk completely and totally into an alternative reality. There was no anxiety on this very first trip. I felt warm and comfortable even though I was now in a roller coaster making a hard turn, curving up past the freeway and straight into a vibrating purple night sky. I gripped the frayed armrest trying to hang on. I must have been speaking out loud.
“Whoa . . . WHOA . . .” I said. “CAN YOU SEE IT?!” I yelled over the roaring wind coming into the car.
“What do you see?” Dean asked.
Time had slowed as though we were moving through a gel-like substance, the air an amber viscous fluid. Long streamers of blue and orange lights flew past my face as we came out of the curve onto the freeway.
“My god . . . the lights . . .” I was coming back some. We were on the freeway but headlights and traffic lights were still leaving long blue trails of themselves wherever I looked. “I’m seeing these streaming lights . . .”
“Really?” Dean said. He seemed disappointed. “It really hit you. I’m barely feeling anything. I haven’t seen streamers in years. You’re lucky . . .”
We made it back to my apartment and Dean went inside to piss while I stood on my third-floor balcony and looked at the stucco building across the back alley that was part of an old private school directly behind my apartment. I became transfixed by the texture of the stucco, by the rich green and blue colors of its windows; I could see the glass shining, every rolling imperfection in the distant surface. A profound urge to draw what I was seeing came over me. As a boy, I had once drawn everything and everyone I saw for years. I’d used pastels, oils, watercolors, pencils, pen and ink, airbrushes, all of it, up into my late teens when I suddenly stopped, no longer confident in myself or my work. Even though I drew constantly, I felt as though I was just copying what I saw and didn’t really have what it took to be a real artist. I had always avoided even calling myself an artist and I’d hated the others who called themselves the same in college, the pretentious fine artists I had known as a freshman who tossed about the appellation with such nauseating frequency and aplomb. I viewed these young men and women, my peers, as false or simply weak for even uttering the word.
Now, over twenty years later, I found myself noticing the overall shape of the stucco building, the shades and highlights; I realized I was drawing it in my mind. The building itself began to even look like a two-dimensional drawing. A feeling of deep comfort and profound confidence slowly melted into my skull and limbs. I am an artist, I thought. For the very first time, I truly felt it. It mattered little what others thought of my work or me; it mattered not at all. The point was the way I was now looking at the world, the same curious way I had once looked at so much of the world as a boy, as something to copy, something to draw, to paint, and reproduce. I suddenly realized, for so many years, I had just been afraid. I had lacked the simple and basic confidence I’d once had as a child. Now, on this balcony, my worries over my work all seemed so utterly foolish, pedestrian, and dull.
Dean was back out on the balcony and his entrance snapped me out of my reverie. I was coming back and the stucco building, well, it was just a building that I had seen a hundred times. Nothing special. We began to talk and laugh some but were both sobering up. The sense of time came back to me and I looked at my watch to see several hours had passed from that sickening moment of panic in the video store. I told Dean what I’d seen and he was again impressed that I had had such a strong experience. I asked him how he could take s
o much more than me, or take a heavy dose of acid, and still manage to maintain his cool.
“Well, your system grows tolerant after repeated doses, just like with any drug. The first time you take any of them is sometimes the best.”
“But how can you stand such a profound loss of control for ten or twelve hours on LSD?”
He shrugged. “It’s all a show to me,” he said. “I just open my eyes and watch the merry-go-round. Are you getting hungry yet?”
“Actually, I am.”
“Let’s smoke some pot. It can enhance the mushrooms and bring some of it back.”
I rolled a joint and we got back in the Lincoln and smoked while driving to the Liberty Bar just round the corner from my neighborhood. The pot did kick in some mild hallucinations when we entered the restaurant. Liberty Bar was an old house that was slanted and falling down, the walls all dangerously crooked and propped up outside. It was also a trendy nightspot in San Antonio where local artists, musicians, and wealthy people came for dinner or a drink. But it was not a good place to walk into stoned out of your mind on mushrooms and marijuana, mainly because of the crooked and sloping floors and walls. The marijuana had given me some paranoia that wasn’t there before and the neon lights in the bar were pulsating and streaming. I found myself having to hang onto chairs, the bar, to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. Dean usually walked very fast and with determination so it was difficult to keep up with him. When I reached his table I fell into my chair with an audible sigh of relief and my friend laughed again.
“What?”
“You’re still blasted.”
“It’s not me, man, it’s that goddamn floor.”
“This place really is pretty crooked.”
“I feel like everyone is looking at me.”
“They are,” he said. “Let’s eat, I’m starving.”
A waitress came up and she knew me but I could only giggle and speak gibberish. I couldn’t get out my order because the menu moved in my hands and passing food on plates seemed repugnant.
“You look like you’re having fun,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said. I looked at my watch again and saw that somehow I had lost another hour. I had been gone again and hadn’t realized it. I snapped to after Dean ordered a big meal and I ordered a hamburger and fries that I didn’t want. My intestines were grumbling as we’d taken the large doses on empty stomachs to enhance the effect of the drug. I needed something to eat before I became too nauseous to eat anything.
Dean and I talked now about the mundane aspects of our lives, our jobs that we both despised in different ways. By the time my food arrived, most of the mushrooms had worn off, but the marijuana had given me an appetite and I gulped down the meal, hardly chewing at all.
-17-
At the time, it seemed like a bad trip. We’d gone to the bed because it seemed to be the safest place in the room when The Change kicked in hard. I’d been sitting in a chair in my apartment living room just before, forty-five minutes after the three of us had ingested large doses of mushrooms blended with orange juice to get the psilocybin into our systems more quickly. Patricia stood up from the couch slowly, moving in jerky, time-released steps. Her words were thick and fell like wooden blocks from her mouth.
“I’m going to lie down on the bed,” she said, covering her eyes with one hand. “I want . . . this . . . to be . . . over . . .”
I’d taken a massive dose for this, my second experience with the drug. I couldn’t move and only shut my eyes and saw nothing but an overwhelming swirling whirlpool of color. I thought: this must be how the hippies came up with tie-dye. They were trying to replicate this experience . . . I have to get to the bed . . .
Dean Brown was laughing and walking around my bedroom with a red throw pulled over his head, pacing, looking out of the tall six-foot sash windows that lined every wall. At one point, as Patricia and I lay in bed, he appeared to be the devil. My apartment was the top floor of a well-restored Victorian mansion. I could see the complete skyline of San Antonio, lit up like some vast glittering chemical plant in the night.
“Let’s go out. Come on, let’s go out.” Dean kept repeating it, smiling gleefully, pulling on that blanket, tight around his head. “We need to get OUTSIDE.”
Patricia and I seemed to intuit his demonic qualities without ever speaking. We simply knew he was now The Trickster, The Tempter, as we cowered on my mattress and box springs stacked on the floor in a far corner.
“You guys need to chill out,” he said. He put on some music, an Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong CD, and he lay down with us, the voices calming him more than me. I was having waves of nausea mixed with acute anxiety with every problem that I fretted over obsessively in my normal day-to-day existence now bobbing to the surface of some dark black lake that was now my consciousness, every severed or strained relationship amplified to a debilitating degree. I opened my eyes to see the tall walls in my apartment glowing blue and breathing like a living sponge.
“I want this to stop,” I thought. I staggered to the bathroom. The old interlocked tiles moved and changed shapes as did the toilet making it impossible to urinate. My body suddenly seemed dirty, soiled. I could feel and smell my own pungent sweat.
“I smell . . . I stink . . . I can smell myself,” I said and crawled back into the safety of the bed. Both Patricia and Dean were laughing at me now. Suddenly, I had a brief moment of clarity. I began to speak in my usual, normal, knowing voice, commenting on my life in the city, the city itself out my window, and my friends were listening with nothing being unusual. I stopped, or rather, I didn’t stop; I was simply outside of myself now, as an observer, and I listened to this forty-year-old man speak. It hit me then how comical, how fragile, my real self was. I wasn’t talking, I was pontificating, laughably full of shit. I shook my head and fell back to the bed. What charades our lives were. This personality we carried around. What on earth was I talking about? Whatever it was, it was pointless.
I stood up to walk across the room, drawn to the wall of windows. Next door was another hundred-year-old mansion that someone had bought and tried to start restoring. The money must have run out, something fell through, and they’d stopped mid-way, a rusty, three story scaffolding standing unused behind the house. A dark blue tarp they had thrown over the unfinished construction was flapping and blowing in a strong wind. It made me profoundly sad to see this tarp in the wind, this failed effort.
“Their work . . . all of their work is deteriorating . . . it’s decaying . . .”
Dean was at my side laughing again. “Decaying,” he said, repeating my every word it seemed to an irritating degree. Back in the bed, Patricia pointed to the skyline.
“I can see my veins, my nerves and muscles,” she said in wonder, staring at her hand.
Her arm stretched like rubber into the distance before me, turning to bone with a thin veneer of skin, flowing into the window, both flesh and glass, now one in the same. I closed my eyes again and tried to concentrate on the music. Armstrong’s voice, I could hear it now for the first time, all of the pain in his life was contained not just in the song, but in the timbre of his voice emanating from the blue light in the corner. I could see then that the blue light was from my stereo, a display light for its functions.
“He’s earned the right to sing that song,” I said. I was completely serious but everyone laughed and I did as well at the comment, and as quickly as I’d gone up, I was now back, coming down from the edge for good, regaining control. For the next hour, I still had brief moments of panic, but I would close my eyes, breathe deeply, and slowly, and they lessened in intensity and passed.
We did go out eventually, to “The Beach,” as Patricia called it. There was an old limestone stadium, Alamo Stadium, standing bare on top of one of the highest hills in the city, a large empty parking lot before it that sat abo
ve the skyline, a 180-degree view next to Trinity University. Patricia had gone to The Beach with her friends in high school. The entire lot was lined with tall palm trees, thus the name. We parked under those trees and sat on the hood of the car to watch the stars and lights of the city. I could hear every rustle of the palm fronds as they moved in the warm summer night, could see every single blade of green grass shimmering in the breeze. It was my last alternative conscious sensation as I came back to my normal reality, catching up with the others, and we drove down the hill to go eat.
-18-
I moved out of my apartment not long after Patricia and I had hidden on the bed after seeing through our own flesh. I moved into Patricia’s smaller apartment in Alamo Heights. We would not be married for another year or so, but both of us knew we were a couple now, destined to spend our days together. After my bad trip, I wasn’t going to take mushrooms again. But the memories of that first magical experience with Dean Brown still haunted me. I wanted that feeling again, to see those colors, to feel that confidence, that contentment and that sense of long ago childlike wonder at the world that the drug had unlocked. I had another small bag of stems and mushroom caps I’d bought from a musician in town. They were dark blue and purple underneath and supposed to be very powerful and pure.