That Time I Ate a Bunch of Mushrooms and Died

It was the opening weekend of Spring Break, 2010--my Senior year of high school. My plans to invade the beaches of Panama City had been confounded by my parents who, after saying I could make the trip with a few friends, reneged on their word and sentenced me to the opposite of exile, a local lock-down, the result of which would surely be death by boredom.

My pilgrimage to the promised land of vice and venereal disease had been taken from me in the cruelest fashion, so I made up my mind to arrange another trip.

I had dabbled in hallucinogens before, but I had never experienced the flying unicorn visuals I had come to expect from so many movies. Luckily for me, a friend of mine (we'll call him Merlin) had recently chanced upon a high volume of rather large fungi--those big ole boomers you usually see on black-light posters in the room of your dorm's local "weed guy." 

So we ate a bunch of mushrooms. About an hour later, I had to go to the bathroom. As I got up to go inside, Merlin uttered a most unwarranted and counterproductive warning: "Whatever you do, don't look in the mirror."

Thirty minutes later, I finally broke free from the bathroom mirror and reconvened with Merlin to play a bit of Halo 3. In fairness, I can't exactly say we "played" Halo, because we spent the next hour utterly transfixed by Zanzibar's virtual sky and foliage. It was mesmerizing.

Just look at those palms

After running laps dizzying around the interior of a Covenant ship to the sounds of Juno Reactor, I had to lie back on the couch. A kaleidoscope of deep purple diamondbacks swirled behind my eyelids. I opened my eyes and the white clock on the wall had turned a greenish/yellow, and as it warped into a oval it seemed to continually climb up the ever-growing wall. I sat up and stared into the coffee table. Its dark brown wood turned black, and the specks of white grain turned to stars. I was in space.

Merlin was not in space. He had long since reentered Earth's atmosphere and was now calling up a few friends to come over and get reckless over a Natty 30 rack. I was not about that life.

I called a buddy of mine, we'll call him "Bud," and asked if he wanted to pick me up and go to the local Taco Bell, which doubled as a safe-haven for less-than-sober suburban youth. 

On the way we got a call from our friend Jay. Naturally, Jay was due for a Taco Bell run himself.

We lived in the Capital of Suburbia, and as we cruised down one of its main roads Jay lit up a bowl in the backseat. This caused me to become slightly anxious, and as any psychonaut knows, anxiety does not mix well will psilocybin. As we crossed the biggest intersection on the busiest street in town, I received a text from someone I hardly knew:

"Did someone die?"

--- 

Hitchcock strings peaked as I looked at the fast approaching cars to our right, and for a moment I was lifted from time. It was only after we had cleared the intersection and pulled into Taco Bell's parking lot that I realized we had not, in fact, been T-Boned in the process.

We had all received the same text and, though my amigos were (relatively) sober, we had all experienced the same fleeting dread.

A flurry of texts were exchanged and cross-referenced, and before long we realized something had happened. A classmate, a friend, had gotten drunk on Spring Break, fallen off a balcony, and died.

It was our first experience with this kind of death--the death of someone who wasn't old and/or terminally ill. We had just seen the guy a few days before. He was our age; our equal. It could have been any one of us.

And that is when I realized that I had died.

--- 

There is no way to justify the line of logic induced by hallucinogens. When you're in that state of mind, everything makes sense. You can convince yourself of just about anything. I wasn't close friends with my departed classmate by any means, but we'd talked a fair amount and been in group projects together. Regardless, my relationship to him had been so ordinary and real that my own mortality hit me like a sack of marbles. 

Before long I had formulated my own theory. I was dead. My classmate's death was a symbol of that, a way for me to realize that I had died hours before, most likely when I had sat back on the couch and let my eyes roll back into my head. I had probably vomited and, in my state of oblivion, choked and died as a result. I just had to come to terms with it.

It makes no sense to me now but in that moment it was an inevitable truth. I was dead.

We drove back to Merlin's house. We didn't know what else to do but get on Facebook and see if it was true. The list of "RIP" statuses served as our confirmation.

I knew I had to go home. By this time my parents would have heard about it, and whatever excuse I had conjured up for staying out that night would not suffice once they decided to call and see if I had heard the news. I packed up my goody bag, which consisted of a tie-dye T-Shirt and three pairs of prism diffraction glasses, and began the walk home.

Merlin lived just down the street from me, and the short walk did not have the desired effect of sobering me up. Even though it was almost midnight and my parents were probably asleep, I tried to think of a getaway plan as I entered the garage. There was no doubt in my mind that if they were still awake and looked me in the eye, they would see little dancing mushrooms and the jig would be up. So, I grabbed a root beer and held my breath as I opened the door.

"Did you hear?"

My parents were waiting for me in the kitchen. I managed a few muttered words as I avoided eye contact and made my way to the basement door. The basement futon served as my bed on odd weekends, and I wasted no time muttering something along the lines of "muhgoto bedn...sleep now..."

I collapsed onto the futon and exhaled for the first time since I had entered the house. I had made it. Now, I'd just turn on the TV and fall asleep.

"Still no leads on Tim Heron's death?"

I jolted out of my momentary calm as the cast of CSI discussed my death. I sat, suspended. It was like one of those dreams where you dream you just woke up from a dream, only to discover that you are still dreaming. I was still there, stuck, and I was still dead.

A few minutes later the investigator put my mind at ease, but only slightly: "Tim Herod wasn't at the bar that night, he was at his son's basketball game!"

Tim Herod. OK. But still...too close...

The reenactments started to freak me out, so I turned off the TV. Moments later, the silence freaked me out, so I turned it back on.

White noise. White noise on every channel. Well played, fate. 

The basement door opened. My dad walked down the stairs.

"Did the cable go out down here?"

BOOM

The power went out. 

"Huh, must've been something with the power lines," my dad said as he made his way to his work bench. He grabbed a flashlight and handed it to me, then made his way back to the stairs. As I sat there trying to turn the flashlight on, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

Suddenly a massive cackling alien face appeared right next to mine. It was glowing and bouncing around as it emitted a series of bloopidy-bloop's and weee's.

My dad, mistaking my paranoia for depression, decided it would be a good idea to try to cheer me up by donning a glow-in-the-dark alien mask from a childhood Halloween costume. It kind of worked, because all I could think was, "My dad is bugging me out. I am tripping and my dad is bugging me out right now."

He removed the mask, chuckled, and went back upstairs to scare my mom with the mask. What a guy.

So, I sat there, alone, and stared at the sole illumination the flashlight cast on the ceiling. Before long my mind had started to race again, and the creeping nausea had returned and, with it, my resolve that I was already dead. I had simply to vomit to complete the circle and seal my fate.

I wretched once or twice, but nothing followed. Suddenly, my spirits lifted. 

This is going to sound odd, and it still sounds odd to me. For whatever reason, I felt the need to announce-- to say out loud-- "I'm not ready to die. Not yet."

The lights turned on. Less than 1 second after I had said I was not ready to die the lights of the basement, the TV, everything, turned back on.

I slowly rose to my feet and looked around. I did not know whether to feel empowered, terrified, humbled, or simply amazed by this impossible coincidence that seemed just slightly too well-timed to be true. 

--- 

I spent the remainder of the night cycling between anxiety and reassurance. I still wrestle with all that happened, and what forces, if any, may have been at work beyond the void. That night left me with a story. However, it happened alongside a tragedy, one which would leave myself and my fellow classmates with a new perspective on life and death.

At times I have trouble telling this story. I do not wish to downplay my peer's death by speaking of it as a mere contextual element in this psychedelic saga. I touch upon it only as a means to explain my altered train of thought, and it deserves its own story.