Drugs

by J. R. Helton

  Patricia liked to go out and see live music and she quickly became my primary social life. We had similar eclectic taste in music and so it worked out nicely. I rarely went to see concerts or bands anymore, but with her it seemed fun. She bought us tickets one night to a concert up in Austin at The Backyard, a laid back outdoor venue with trees and bars and a stage nestled into a hillside to the west of Austin off of Highway 360, just on the edge of the Texas Hill Country. It was to be a double bill, a musician named Chris Isaak and another named Natalie Merchant who had once headed a band called 10,000 Maniacs. It would be a long drive back to San Antonio, so she booked a room in a bed and breakfast across the highway from the concert venue. I brought the small bag of mushrooms with me and rolled a joint of some strong California club weed also.

  Patricia was not a big drug taker except for the two big killers, alcohol and cigarettes. She hadn’t wanted to take any mushrooms ever again after our experience in my old apartment. This was to be a fun weekend excursion for us as a couple and she’d splurged on the good tickets and the lodgings for the night. Patricia had dressed up in a cute little Fourth of July outfit as something of a joke with a white skirt, red shirt, and a red, white, and blue purse. She had even put on some long, red, white, and blue false eyelashes that were only noticeable whenever she closed her eyes, getting positive, funny reactions from the people around us.

  The concert started at dusk with Natalie Merchant and from the beginning it was somewhat off. It was the Fourth of July in 2002, not even a full year after 9/11, and people were still on edge in America at many public settings. The government had issued warnings on that day and others of possible terrorist attacks, all of them erroneous, inducing fear to further control the population of the country. As Natalie Merchant began her concert, singing her heartfelt and earnest songs, the entire crowd was easily distracted during several numbers as two big fighter jets were for some reason circling above our arena in wide loops, flying low, their giant engines screaming and whining. The whole crowd was continually looking up to the sky, and I began to feel sorry for Merchant, who at one point even looked up to see what everyone else was looking at instead of her. She began to try harder, sing louder, dance about, but nothing seemed to work. Perhaps it was also the fact that she was singing many of her new songs that the audience didn’t really like. She must have picked up on this, for as she was wrapping up her set, she spit out sarcastically, “Well, this is the song you’ve all been waiting for anyway so here,” and she broke into one of her biggest hits. The crowd perked up as she sang “Kind and Generous” and she left the stage when done.

  When Merchant’s set ended, we got up and went to stand by a high side wall near the concert stage but away from the mostly seated crowd in their folding chairs. I had eaten about half of the mushrooms in my bag well over an hour before the concert, but nothing had happened yet. I had even run to the bathroom at one point during Merchant’s show to eat several more mushroom stems and caps, worried that I had ingested too little to initiate a genuine change in my regular consciousness. Patricia lit a cigarette as we talked about the show, both of us wondering about the next possibly more lively act. She asked me if I was feeling anything yet.

  “No, nothing.”

  “Well, maybe that’s good,” she said, lightly letting me know she didn’t completely approve.

  “I brought this joint to see if it would help make it last,” I said. “I guess I can smoke some now to help it kick in.”

  “Be careful.”

  She was a little worried about me lighting up but we were too far from the bulk of the crowd for anyone to really notice. Plus, I had come from a time in Austin when everybody smoked pot at just about every concert in front of everyone. I didn’t see any cops anywhere and didn’t give a shit otherwise who saw me smoke. It was powerful marijuana and I only took two quick hits as the sun moved down behind me for good and the night began to come on, cool and dark. I don’t remember putting out the joint. I may have just dropped it; I don’t know. I remember looking across the open air concert arena and seeing a man standing with his back to me beside a small post oak tree. He was wearing a red, white, and blue shirt with big stars and stripes all over it. Slowly, the stars began to melt off of his back. The red and blue stripes also began to stretch and move. They elongated and retracted like liquid, colored rubber.

  “Ohhhhhhhhh . . .” I mumbled, long and slow.

  “What’s wrong?” Patricia said.

  I pointed toward the man as his whole upper body melted into a pool of color. “That guy’s shirt . . .”

  “Jake? Jake?”

  I turned to Patricia and was seized by an indescribable wave of panic and anxiety. Everyone at the concert seemed to be looking at me. I had an uncontrollable urge to flee, immediately, overcome with fear. I wanted to explain it but couldn’t speak.

  “Jake, are you okay?”

  “I have to get out of here. I have to go . . .”

  I left her there and quickly walked out of the enclosed main concert arena, past a full bar of loud people and toward a short embankment-like bridge of dirt and gravel a few feet above a small creek. By the time I reached the bridge, walking had become impossible. First my feet and then my legs sank down into the sandy ground, causing me to grab my legs to pull them up out of the imaginary muck. The gravel bridge had a crude railing of cedar posts on each side. I stopped on its far edge to lean on the railing, thinking to myself: This is exhausting . . . I’ll close my eyes to rest . . .

  The next thing I remember was being wet. My back was wet and cool and I was at the bottom of a deep, dark swimming pool. I was trying to hold my breath as I pushed and swam toward the surface of this pool. Near the top, I could see a man’s bearded face distorted by the water that separated us. Slowly, he came into a sharper focus as I cleared the water. I breathed in deeply with relief and felt utter relaxation now, the intense panic was gone, but this man’s brown bearded face was looking down into my own. I was trying to understand him but he was speaking in slow motion.

  “Are . . . you . . . okay . . . man? Do . . . you . . . want . . . me . . . to call . . . the EMS?”

  I could see him clearly now and realized I was on my back in the muddy little creek as it came out from under the bridge.

  “You want me to call an ambulance?” he said. His face was so serious and concerned that I almost laughed. I heard the words “security” and “police” though and it sobered me up. I looked up at Patricia and she could see I was back now. Like a complete pro, she scooped me up and told the bearded man, part of the concert’s security detail, that I was fine, that I’d just had a little too much to drink.

  “I’m fine,” I told the man as I stood and brushed off my pants legs.

  He seemed unconvinced, as did the small crowd that I realized was surrounding me. The audience briefly brought me to my normal senses as I reached back to feel how wet I was. “No, really, I’m okay,” I told the man. “Shit, I’m all wet . . .”

  Before I could say anything else, Patricia told Security she was taking me home, and she looped her arm through my own at the elbow and whisked me out of the concert, off the property toward the highway. I could just hear Chris Isaak’s show beginning to start. They were playing the surf song “Wipe Out” to get the crowd going, and the colored lights and loud sounds from inside near the stage seemed like a brightly lit and gaudy neon carnival. I wanted to go back inside. I told Patricia I was okay now but could see she was pissed.

  “They’re not gonna let us back inside there.”

  “Come on, really?”

  “Yeah, really. You passed out in that creek and it scared the shit out of me, Jake. I was chasing after you and you just went down. I thought you were really hurt there for a minute.”

  “I’m sorry, let’s just go back. I don’t want you to miss the concert.”

  “No way. That security gu
y was gonna call the police and an ambulance. He’s right there, still looking at us.”

  I looked back and sure enough, the security detail was at the front gate watching us at the edge of the now impossibly busy highway. I was sinking back down, or rather, floating back up into an altered state again, but now it was a pleasurable, laughable one. The yellow headlights and red taillights from all the cars were streaming in long ribbons of color in either direction and it seemed to be completely impossible to cross this road. I saw another couple cross, running beside and before us and they seemed like comic book stick figures, as did we, for I realized Patricia was now leading me across the road of lights and all I could do was laugh with a feeling of great triumph and accomplishment that we made it to the other side.

  I don’t remember how we got to our hotel. We’d obviously walked but I lost that segment of time. Once inside our room, I came back enough to see how genuinely worried and somewhat angry Patricia was. She had me take off my muddied and stained shirt and she began to wash it out vigorously in the hotel bathtub. I told her that this had never happened before, which was not completely true.

  “I’ve never passed out like that.”

  “You had me worried,” she said, scrubbing the shirt for me.

  “I’m really sorry. Look, I’m throwing this shit away.”

  I made a show then of throwing away what little mushroom dust I had left, dumping the small brown mix into the toilet to flush it away. I wanted to get rid of it not so much because I’d worried her, but because that was twice now that I had had a somewhat negative experience with the drug. Each time though, it was mainly at the onset. Perhaps if I took less, brought The Change about more slowly . . . I put the thought out of my mind.

  We tried to salvage the evening by sitting out on the balcony with an expensive bottle of wine, but I wasn’t in the mood to drink. Small waves of a distorted alternative consciousness were still passing over me, manifesting themselves now as paranoia. I watched a shirtless man who seemed to be working for the hotel as he went from room to room with a vacuum cleaner, entering through the back patio door of the downstairs units. He suddenly seemed like a shady killer to me, checking out rooms for a victim. I couldn’t take it anymore and pointed the man out to Patricia as he walked now below our balcony, and she only added to my suspicion as she too thought his actions were strange, checking and vacuuming rooms at ten p.m., without a shirt at that. This strange man sobered me up some but I wasn’t tired. Soon, Patricia went to bed while I sat up out on the balcony, watching for this killer who had now disappeared. I stayed up for another hour, staring at the sky and the distant lights of Austin below me until the drug wore off completely and I went to bed.

  I have not taken mushrooms since that night in Austin. Regardless of the mostly negative experiences of anxiety, fear, and self-loathing of my second trip, I found the second massive dose I took to be most valuable simply for that one moment that allowed me to be so completely separated from my normal, daily state of consciousness, to see my outward self, my personality, for what it was: this projection I’d been telling the world was me.

  -19-

  The way Patricia had handled herself with my concert mishap was impressive. She didn’t rattle when under pressure from the police, and I liked that. A few months later, at the end of 2002, we planned a big New Year’s Eve excursion into Austin from San Antonio with Dean Brown who was in town for a visit. We set him up with Patricia’s friend Melanie, who was a graphic designer, funny and intelligent. She was a wild partier, mainly a drinker, whose favorite hangout in SA, the Cobalt Club, was a grim gay bar on the corner of Ashby and McCullough that stayed open all night. Melanie dragged all three of us into the Cobalt early that evening.

  Inside, a few lonely old men and desperate young men leaned on the filmy bar before them. Dean and I tried to play pool on their one ripped and battered table that smelled of vomit while Melanie slammed down vodkas at the bar with her sad friends. At some point, with no apparent prompting, a tall, ugly, black teenager with acne climbed up on the bar, took off his clothes, and began shaking his obviously long dick in some skintight, sock-like G-string at the chattering, oblivious crowd below. “This place is like Misfit Island,” I told Dean, and we soon got the hell out of there and left for Austin.

  I’d heard about the drug Ecstasy, or X, back in the 1980s. A friend of mine named Steve who I used to do a lot of cocaine with had taken it and had a horrible experience. He told me it lasted for four to six hours and he had felt like shit the whole time and was worn out for days afterwards. The long duration of the drug, much like hallucinogens, had kept me away from it back then. Now, though, in my early forties, I wanted to try it for the first time. Dean had brought a hit for both Patricia and me, one for Melanie, and two hits for himself. He had assured us that he had tried this batch of pills and that it was excellent, pure MDMA. Patricia had taken her fair share of it before, in the 1980s, when she was living in Los Angeles and going to clubs with her girlfriends. She’d quickly grown tired of X, though, especially the comedown that accompanied it for everyone, and she had stopped years ago. I had to talk her into taking it on this New Year’s Eve.

  All four of us piled into the Lincoln and headed north on i-35. Melanie had brought a quart of tequila with her, a purple bottle with decorative writing on it. She took a hit and passed it back to me. I had a slug and almost spit it out; it was some expensive but flavored tequila. I passed it up to Dean at the wheel and mentioned that it was flavored, and he declined. I gave the bottle back to Melanie and she just kept upending the thing all the way to South Austin. At one point, Dean looked at Melanie and then at me and grinned; I knew he was thinking he was going to get laid now as she began to slur her words. But Melanie mentioned that she hadn’t had much to eat all day and Dean now looked at me, a bit worried. All three of us then cautioned Melanie to slow down as it was hours until midnight.

  We checked into a La Quinta off Oltorf in South Austin and booked two adjoining rooms with king-size beds. Dean pulled out several blue and pink pills with little teddy bear faces stamped on them and his pill cutter. I was a little nervous trying this new drug and said I only wanted half at first. He shook his head.

  “Listen, you can start off with half. But I promise you, in about forty-five minutes you’re gonna beg me for the other half.”

  I said fine, took the half pill, and he put the other half in a piece of crumpled paper in his pocket. Patricia took a whole hit, but Melanie, complaining of a stomach ache now from all of the tequila, just took a half hit. We hung around the hotel for half an hour or so. We were going to see two musicians at the Saxon Pub over on South Lamar, a singer named Bob Schneider who was opening for Guy Forsythe. The Saxon was an old club that I had frequented two decades before when in college. The place was a small dump, nothing fancy, with a large medieval knight in armor in the front parking lot near the road. Dean was Mr. Electric, the Tech Man, and he always carried the latest gadgetry around to play music. This was before the iPod was ubiquitous so he had his laptop rigged in the old Lincoln to play digital music files off the computer. Massive Attack’s “Be Thankful for What You Got” was blaring out of the speakers. I was sitting in the back seat listening to the music while the rest were talking when I noticed that everyone was looking at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  Dean and Patricia were both smiling widely.

  “You look like you’re enjoying the music,” Dean said.

  I realized then that I was tapping my feet and banging on my knees wildly with my hands, humming and singing along with the track playing. The music, this song I had heard before, suddenly sounded new and different; it was pulsating through my body in waves of crushing numbing pleasure. The windows were down and a cold wind was blowing into the car.

  “Goddamn, I love this song,” I said, and then started to babble for a couple of minutes about the original singer, blurtin
g out useless, ebullient trivia on this particular cover and group. My friends were still staring, Dean in the rearview mirror and Patricia looking up at me, her arms around me at my side. Her touch had never felt so good nor had she looked so beautiful, and I had to stop myself from gushing out that I loved her. I realized then why they were smiling as I returned briefly to my normal consciousness and mood; it was the drug starting to work.

  “Okay,” I said, “I get it. You think it’s the drug, right?”

  Both Patricia and Dean were nodding knowingly.

  “I know it’s the drug,” Dean said. “I have never seen you ever tap your feet like that or go on about some song. It’s hitting you, man.”

  “Well shit, give me the other half. Right now, goddammit.”

  He laughed and fished out the paper for me and I took the half with a sip from Melanie’s sickeningly sweet tequila. I wasn’t much of a hugger but Patricia felt so good now in my arms that we melted into each other in the back seat, bracing ourselves against the winter wind.

  The lot at the Saxon was completely full and we parked borderline illegal to get closer. At the door we were sorely disappointed to be told that they were full and that the fire marshal might be called if they let any more people in. Melanie was just beginning to fall apart as we were all going up, swaying on her feet and complaining that she was hungry. The bouncer at the door heard her and commiserated saying he had yet to even eat dinner. Dean offered to go get the man a burger and fries and bring them back if he let us in. The man let Patricia and Melanie in and Dean and I went to get him some food. We offered to get Melanie some but she said she felt ill now and wasn’t hungry. When we returned with the bag of food the bouncer thanked us genuinely and let us in, even trying to get us a table, which turned out to be impossible. He did the next best thing, though, and got us a place to stand near the bar so we could see the stage on the south side of the club. The north half was a pool table and game room, which was also completely packed even though the people there couldn’t see the stage.