by J. R. Helton
I didn’t like the way these “antidepressants” made me feel in the least, as I had a very sensitive and mostly in-control consciousness. I could feel these drugs changing me to a false and negative degree, numbing me out. I quickly stopped any and all of these prescribed, legal “medications.” If I wanted to get high, I would get high, all the way with X or marijuana or opiates, not this mild, Big Pharma/government-sanctioned stifling of my system that the antidepressants provided.
At around that same time, I had, at a friend’s urging, tried St. John’s Wort, which was also supposed to lift your mood. Unfortunately, the day I tried it, I took several of the pills, a large dose, that I mixed with marijuana and tequila, the latter a usually pleasurable combination for me if not taken in excess. There must be something to this St. John’s Wort, as it definitely did something to my system. Even though I had barely smoked any pot and drank only two margaritas, I became violently nauseous, vomiting to the point of bringing up trickles of yellow bile and red blood from bursting blood vessels in my throat. I was overcome by diarrhea as well, forcing me to sit in the shower, vomiting and defecating on myself while trying to wash it all down the drain. I felt bad the next day but tried the St. John’s Wort again, and then for several days after, this time with no mixing of alcohol or pot. I felt very little change in my personality or consciousness, only nausea and drowsiness, so I tossed the pill bottle and don’t plan on trying it again.
I had only taken X at night while being stimulated by music and friends. I was curious then as to what would happen if taking it during the day in a non-nightclub situation. Patricia and I were married in the summer of 2004. For our honeymoon, we planned to go to California and take the proverbial drive up scenic Highway One, stopping midway to stay in a cabin at Big Sur State Park among the giant Sequoias. We would continue on up, skip San Francisco, and hit the wine country for free drinks.
We started in the south of California, staying for a few days at a friend’s bungalow in Hermosa Beach while she was out of town on business. We rented a convertible and drove to Santa Barbara and headed up the rugged coast, stopping by to see the opulent Hearst estate with all the other tourists, to marvel at this petty king’s splendor. It was the land behind this man’s castle that impressed me most, looking down from the real Greek columns and bas-relief sculptures surrounding his blue outdoor pool. We left and drove down to the sea near the Hearst family park and property, walking out on the piers over jade-colored Pacific water, strolling through the tall white and green eucalyptus trees that covered and shaded the shores. Patricia and I got drunk on alcohol that evening in the nice little nearby town of Cambria. The main event that night was the karaoke at our hotel bar, which was fun to watch. We ended up laughing, drinking, and dancing for the rest of the evening, alone in our room, to songs like “Mambo Craze” from Buddha Bar or the whole two CD set of the true Mambo King, Perez Prado, before we passed out, exhausted.
The next day we made it up to Big Sur, and after buying a few tourist sweatshirts and caps, we checked into our log cabin, which, it was nice to see, did not have a television. We had a big hike planned for the next day. Patricia had made a picnic lunch for us in our knapsacks. My plan was to take a full hit of X for the hike on a mostly empty stomach. The trail led from our group of bungalows into the redwood forest, up and down hills and across creeks to the Pacific Coast. I figured that one of the most singular and beautiful forests in the world was a safe and smart place to take the drug during the day.
The next morning, we had a very light breakfast of some fruit and juice, grabbed our packed picnic lunch, and set off on one of the park’s longest trails. Trying to hide it some from Patricia, I popped an X just as we were leaving with some water from my bottle. I should have waited until we ate lunch, as I wouldn’t eat anything substantial now for almost twenty-four hours; the amphetamine properties of the drug killed your appetite. We started up another short, well-worn trail that branched off of our own, following quite a few people to one of the main tourist attractions in the park, a tall thin waterfall that came down a cliff into a clear pool. As this was the closest scenic attraction besides the giant 200 foot high redwoods that surrounded us, it was obvious from the foot traffic and crowd that most of the tourists who stopped in Big Sur just made this short trip to the waterfall and went back to their cars. The waterfall was just a trickle because of the California drought. I tried to take a few pictures of Patricia in front of the waterfall, but it was difficult to cut out the people. We left then and started back on our easy trail.
We walked through the woods slowly, stopping to look up at the different trees in the forest, crossing small crystal clear creeks with amber bottoms. We hiked and hiked, and as we gained some altitude and speed, I became winded. I forgot about the pill I had taken until I suddenly began to feel nauseous. I stopped and Patricia caught up with me.
I put my hands on my head, started yawning incessantly, and felt very dizzy.
“What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “Uh . . . nothing . . .”
“Did you take something?” she asked, slightly perturbed.
“Yeah, I took a whole hit of X this morning.”
“Jake . . .”
“I know, I just thought I’d try it out here. This is a different batch though and it is hitting me hard.”
“Just relax, it will be over in a minute. You’re getting crushed.”
I felt very warm and began to sweat profusely. I walked down the trail to a nearby creek and took off my cap. Without hesitation, I went down, my knees in the dirt, and cupped the clean water in both hands, washing it over my bare head several times. I looked up and my vision was significantly blurred. I felt some anxiety. I looked up and up, trying to find my way to the end of the giant sequoia before me; strands of ivy circled the red bark all the way up to a distant blue sky. I saw fuzzy green ferns moving gently on the edge of the creek bed; moss-covered gray boulders tumbled down around me. I realized where I was in a new way, staring up at this rusty cathedral of majestic giants which now seemed to represent the concept of infinity, or eternity.
“Jake . . . are you okay?”
Was I? My vision was still blurred but the nausea had passed and a sense of wonderment combined with a sense of purpose and urgency came over me. We had to finish the hike and go up this trail. I could feel a smile forming on my face as it suddenly seemed the perfect thing to do at this moment, to reach the Pacific Ocean.
“I’m fine, let’s go.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” I said and flashed her a smile and took off walking quickly.
We talked some and noticed that our breathing was becoming more difficult with the incline of the trail. I was chugging more water than usual from my large plastic bottle. I began to sweat heavily again even though it was comfortable outside, cool T-shirt and shorts weather. I also felt more of that nervous speed-like anxiety and began to grind my teeth. The more I thought of my anxious mood, the more it increased. Perhaps there was more amphetamine, a drug I no longer liked, in this batch of ecstasy; there was no way to know. I could tell though that this kind of mildly strenuous effort outdoors didn’t go well with the drug. Dancing in a club could also be strenuous, but this hike was different somehow, and I never danced at clubs anymore anyway, whether on X or not. I put a good face on it, but something seemed off, and I could already tell that this experience with MDMA wasn’t going to be as good as my others. My thinking that I didn’t even need to take it in such a scenic setting only amplified my level of anxiety.
We followed the trail up and up through some dense undergrowth and low-lying limbs from some of the non-sequoia trees. Just when both of us felt we needed a break, two people came walking toward us and mentioned that the trail ended up through the brush ahead. Another couple had just caught up with us as well from behind, and the four of us stepped out of the forest to a
wide field of tall yellow grass, the tufts at the end of the stalks moving slowly, back and forth, in the breeze. We were atop a high steep hill or cliff that sloped down surreptitiously so that it was difficult to see where the field and cliff met.
Patricia and I immediately sat down and looked out across the deep cobalt and thalo-blue Pacific Ocean, the waves too far away to see or hear. I was feeling only comfort now. I felt I had reached the end of the earth and all I could do was stare at the waving yellow grass and the undulating blue-green sea. There was a special quiet on the hill as well, the type of quiet that comes after a long exposure to noise, so that the silence hums and dully roars in your temples and ears. It was a perfect moment, I thought—no, it is the perfect moment and I am in it.
I was so entranced by the sea that I saw a large splash and called out loudly that it was a whale to Patricia. She didn’t see it and was skeptical. No matter though, I knew what I saw and felt even better. I had begun to think of John Steinbeck and what he wrote of California, and I was briefly hypnotized by the unending blue sea before me, a liquid carpet of incomprehensible vastness. It was frightening even to think of the Pacific Ocean’s enormity, and I felt deeply humble and small before the sea, before these ancient trees, transported back through the ages to prehistoric times, long before human beings began contaminating the earth, when voices broke into my vision.
They were speaking some sort of unintelligible gibberish and doing so loudly. We were not alone. Besides the fairly normal and quiet couple that had passed us to the summit, there was a gaggle of young girls, four of them with dark black hair, dressed up as though ready to go out shopping rather than hiking. I realized they were Japanese and thought they might be speaking another language. They were maybe ten yards away and below us on the hill and the wind shifted from the sea bringing with it their voices, loud and clear. As it was, they were speaking English, but talking very rapidly in obnoxious California Valley Girl accents.
“So anyway, she said that he’s like, you know, bothered by her calling him on Saturday.”
“No!”
“I know, I couldn’t believe it cuz he’s like, you know, usually so awesome . . .”
The tone of their voices was ruining my holy experience.
Patricia was sitting quietly beside me, but she too noticed the girls. She wasn’t as irritated as me, but I could see she also found them obnoxious. She mentioned maybe trying to take out some of our lunch to eat in what should have been a perfect spot for a picnic but I told her I wasn’t hungry. I tried to get back in a good mood but it was gone. All I could think of was the loud incessant jabbering of those four young women. I may have even wished for them to shut up, out loud. Another couple came up the trail, and now ten of us were on the promontory. I felt restless and needed to stand. Suddenly, and quite strangely, a small brown creature began to flop in the air around us, flying very near and even brushing against my shoulder. We both stood up quickly and realized it was a bat. This little mammal started to float and drop and fly awkwardly around all of us then, like a giant, purposeful mosquito, forcing us to dodge him. The bat flitted over to the girls who made a great deal of noise and stood up to run away. I had no fear of bats and even liked them, but something was off here. Patricia was not afraid of bats either, but was flustered as the bat kept flying right at her head, forcing her to duck.
A man next to me said, “It’s only a bat, they don’t hurt you,” as though we were frightened idiots. The fact is that bats are nocturnal creatures and it is very rare to see one during the day, up close, at noon, out in the sun, on a cliff beside the ocean. I knew from living in the country for years that a daytime spotting of any nocturnal creature, especially one that was moving awkwardly, was a clear sign of rabies infection, something real that didn’t just occur in the movies. One of the couples quickly left, as did the man who said we had nothing to worry about, after the bat flew into his chest. I dodged as it came toward me and we reluctantly started back down the trail.
Unfortunately, the bat followed us, the last two to leave the cliff, flapping and turning and diving at my head as we began to quicken our pace. Patricia and I looked at each other incredulously for this scene was so absurd—who expects a single, solitary rabid bat to attack them in a redwood forest? Without saying anything, we both knew it was time to actually run, which we did, genuinely trying to get away. The little fucker was right behind my head, and when I ducked under a thick hanging branch on the trail, he flew right into it and tumbled to the ground beside me, yet another sign that something was wrong, that a creature that could use radar to catch an insect could run into a person or a tree limb. We hurried further down the trail before he could get up and finally stopped in an open clearing. Large swaths of red and green trees were growing on the steep hills before us. We were laughing at ourselves, but the bat and the girls had spoiled my mood completely, obliterating all of the normal happiness I had felt with the drug before. I looked down to my belt for a drink from my water bottle and saw the plastic container was gone. I felt terrible. This was wrong. As a boy when camping or hiking, I’d been taught to never leave anything behind. I told Patricia to press on as I ran back up the trail, watching for rabid bats, found my bottle, and ran back down the trail to catch up with her. The extra effort only worsened my feelings of nausea and discomfort. There was nothing to me but speed-like anxiety and an awkward, now seemingly false ebullience as I sweated and gritted my teeth wildly.
We made our way back down another well-traveled path to the ocean, stopping at a scenic overlook where there were a few friendly tourists like ourselves whom we asked to take a picture of us. Patricia noticed a man kayaking below in the rough turquoise and white sea. I briefly sank back into a pleasurable state watching this man navigate the high surf to beach his boat and lay in the white sand. A high waterfall silently gushed from the forest above him, cascading down a gray rock cliff onto the beach and into the ocean. I wanted to go down to his spot, but it could clearly only be reached by boat.
Back at our car, we drove to another trail that led to the ocean, parked, and walked to the beach. There were a number of people there, but most seemed to be packing up to leave. A very high wind was picking up that blew the coarse white and yellow sand into everyone’s eyes and clothes. Patricia tried to take out our lunch again, but it was too difficult to eat with the sand blowing up into our mouths. And I still had no appetite. Desperate to get something out of the drug, or just to calm down, I searched my wallet and found only a small roach there. I borrowed Patricia’s lighter and ran up the beach to the bottom of a low cliff and ducked inside a crevice to light the joint. It was impossible to light it in the wind that swirled around me, filling my mouth with more sand than smoke. A family appeared above me and easily saw what I was doing. They didn’t seem to care, but I stopped and went back to my wife. Ever the cute couple, we posed for another picture before a giant mountain of rock in the ocean and headed back to our room in Big Sur.
Inside the cabin, though I tried to outwardly appear otherwise, I still felt terrible. I could eat nothing and my lower jaw moved uncontrollably, as though I’d drunk a thousand cups of coffee. We talked some and played Spades. Patricia, tired from the day, fell asleep like clockwork as she always did at ten p.m. Foolishly forgetting to bring any Xanax or Valium, I tossed and turned as I always did throughout the night, trying to sleep. Only after a meal the next morning did I come back to a normal state of consciousness with almost no emotional comedown from the drug as I had never really gone up.
-22-
Ecstasy used to be legal in the early 1980s. A
lot of square people I knew took the drug with little or no consequences for fun. It wasn’t dangerous as long as it was pure, not mixed with anything else, and they hydrated themselves well, as it was often taken by some to go out dancing. The extremely few, maybe four or five people a year, who ever died from the drug in the US did so because they had foolishly t
aken too much and danced around like an idiot all night without drinking enough water, dying from heat exhaustion. Or they had mixed it with too much Ketamine, a vet tranquilizer, or GHB, or cocaine and alcohol, and they had made themselves ill. One builds up a tolerance to X, as with all drugs. I knew a woman in San Francisco who told me she would take five of the pills over the course of a long night.
“Doesn’t that hurt your system?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “you just never come down. You take another one an hour or so before you feel the last one wearing off.”
Of course, she was wrong in a way, as she well knew. You always come down if you go up, and vice versa. You can prolong either direction as long as the money, will, or time holds out, but tolerance to the chemistry always prevails. I once read that J. Paul Getty, Jr. couldn’t keep himself high enough all of the time on heroin. If even the son of one of America’s wealthiest robber barons cannot keep himself in enough H, then how could I, or most people, ever hope to sustain a lifelong artificial high? It was impossible, even boring, and detrimental to both physical and mental health to try to stay high all the time anyway. Plus, you continually weakened and shortened the duration of the very pleasure you once felt with the drugs. As with most things in life then, if you are going to “take drugs,” drink alcohol, smoke pot, snort or smoke coke or heroin, or take hallucinogens, moderation is still the rule.
Too many people must have been having fun and talking about X in the ’80s in the US, for the Law and the State in a continuing effort to control the consciousness and behavior of the majority of American citizens, made it illegal overnight. The word came down in San Marcos and Austin, my stomping grounds back then, to be careful. As mentioned, at the time my fear of the duration of MDMA’s high had kept me away from it for years, but I’d also been concerned by stories about bad batches and purity. Cocaine, like MDMA, was also known to be cut with all kinds of crap, from laxatives to god knows what. Free-basing cocaine though can help get many of the horrific impurities out of the cut crap that so many people snort. Once X became illegal, it became subject to the same problems of consistency and composition that one encounters with coke and heroin, and yet I knew of no way to test the purity of any batch of MDMA other than by taking it.