My Four Loko Story

If you were between the ages of 18-25 in 2010, there's a good chance you had the good misfortune of experiencing Four Loko in its prime -- before the authorities got involved -- at a time when its contents were as mysterious as they were potent.

It was a go-to for college students on a budget, or for high-school kids out of options. For the price of a pack of 5 Gum you could achieve new heights of recklessness. What you saved in cash you made up for in regret and nausea the following day. Still, there was no denying the effectiveness.

Poor decisions were a staple of my freshman year of college. One of these regrettable life choices involved my girlfriend who went to Ohio University, a solid trek away from my school, and began with the initial choice to date said girlfriend, but that is neither here nor there.

As I sat on an ergonomic space-saving twin bed taking healthy sips of one of the less repulsive Loko flavor variations, my girlfriend (we'll call her Becca) and her roommates held theirs in the air as they did the white-girl-dip-n-twist to "Like A G6."

This went on for quite some time, as the song was on repeat. Finally, it was time to go to the party which, as per usual, was being hosted by someone's roommate's older brother.

The girls packed their purses and struggled to drink the rest of their Lokos. When they couldn't quite make it through, one of them suggested that I finish the remainder.

These girls read Cosmo religiously (no, seriously, Becca called it "The Bible") and had undoubtedly been judging me on a mind-boggling number of levels since the moment I arrived. Here, I had a chance to prove myself. What exactly I was proving was unimportant. I snatched the remaining toxins from their hands and, in succession, drank what would amount to a little over a full can's worth of radioactive horse urine.

Poor Decision Count: 1

We bundled up and waddled out into the arctic night. Twenty minutes later we arrived at the house. Throughout the course of our trek, the toxic concoction had crept its way into my grey matter, and by now it had seized control of those parts responsible for sensibility and reason.

The house was modest in size and filled to the brim with reckless adolescence. Becca transferred the contents of her purse into my over-sized winter coat,  effectively transforming me into a walking wristlet. However, she kept her purse at her side to complete her outfit. We made our way to the kitchen and made quick work of the latter half of a tequila bottle we found in the freezer.

Poor Decision Count: 2

Someone began handing out Peppermint Schnapps and Hershey's Syrup shots. Delicious.

Poor Decision Count: 3

Those shots were seriously tasty, and for a group of youths unacquainted with drinks that didn't torment the gag reflex, they were a discovery to be fully exploited. So we found three more bottles of Peppermint Schnapps.

Poor Decision Count: 4-7

Something wasn't right. A sinister rumble in my lower abdomen spoke to me, softly at first, then with an unmistakable roar.

-- Pro Tip: Hate your toilet? --

Mix 2 1/2 Four Loko (preferably a variety of flavors)  
Add a carton of Peppermint Schnapps
 Garnish with Hershey's Syrup 
Pour resulting mixture our over a base of dining hall meatballs

When I got the bathroom there was a line. If there is one thing my compromised cognition was still capable of processing it was this: deadly deuces and crowded house parties don't dance well together. I spun on a heel and walked back into the fray.

Good Decision Count: 1

I had made up my mind. I would go back to Becca's dorm, punish her toilet, and be back before one could say "indigestion." I wasn't quite sure which way to go, and Becca and her roommates were nowhere to be found. No matter. My sense of direction is impeccable.

So, I clenched my buttocks and strode away towards her dormitory like an Emperor Penguin late for an important meeting.

Poor Decision Count: 8

Twenty minutes later I was in a part of campus I had never seen before. But, her dorm was just around the bend, I was sure.

Ten minutes later I was on a football field admiring the surrounding administrative buildings. I kept going. I was close.

Five minutes later I was on a farm.

Fifteen minutes passed and I was at the foot of a hill. At the top of the hill, the path I had been following made its way into the woods. I did not remember this landscape from our initial walk to the party. Still, I was sure it was a shortcut.

Five minutes later I was staring at three peculiar silhouettes set against the moonlit snow: two horses stood beside what was either a coyote or nefarious farm-dog about twenty yards ahead of me. I decided I would take a detour so as not to disrupt this mysterious late night gathering. I made my way directly right and into the thick of the woods.

Poor Decision Count: 9-13

Just like this, but with horses

True to penguin form, I slid about 20 feet down a 45-degree snow-covered slope before crashing into a fallen oak. I stood and brushed myself off, then made my way up the equally steep and twice-as-tall hill before me. I grabbed at trees and loose branches to pull myself up the icy wall, falling more than once in the process. When I reached the summit, I saw a series of similar hills and ravines in front of me. By this time, I had ripped the right leg of my jeans from my knee to my groin. I decided it might be a good time to call Becca and ask for directions.

Good Decision Count: Still 1.

I heard her ringtone and instinctively whipped around, expecting to see her behind me chuckling at my misfortune. I stood, confused, unable to locate the source of the ringtone. Then, I felt it -- her phone in my coat pocket.

It's really quite remarkable that her phone had stayed in there as I tumbled up and down the antagonistic trail. However, this wondrous fact was lost on me as the demon-baby woke up and cried out from the depths of my lower colon. I decided to keep going because, obviously, these woods couldn't go on forever, and her dorm was probably just on the other side of the next hill.

Poor Decision Count: ∞

Twenty minutes later Becca's phone rang. I was lying on the side of a hill, half covered in snow from a small-scale avalanche, breathing heavily. I removed my sopping gloves and grabbed the phone.

Accurate

"Where are you?!?"

It was Becca, calling from her friend's phone. I explained that I had left when I needed to go to the bathroom, and that I was on my way to her dorm but had gotten a little lost. When I asked her what part of campus the woods were in, she became quite concerned and tried to coach me through the remainder of my trek.

About ten minutes later the woods began to even out and I heard running water. I tumbled down one more hill to the foot of a small stream. Just beyond the stream was a road. I burst out of the tree line and onto the asphalt. It was the freeway.

I skirted along the edge of the treeline to avoid being seen by a cop car (by this point I had sobered up considerably, and some semblance of reason had found its way back to my mind). After about fifteen minutes of creeping along the freeway, I finally reached an exit and called Becca.

"I'm at Denny's."

She had no clue what I was talking about, and for good reason. As it turned out, the nearest Denny's was two exits up, about two miles away from campus and three from her dorm. I was just slightly off course.

Becca and her friend found me in the Denny's parking lot, hunched over on a parking block with the better part of my right thigh hanging out.

I stayed away from Four Loko for the remainder of the weekend.

Good Decision Count: 2

Epilogue: 

The next day we reviewed photos on Becca's digital camera which she and her friends liked to use to document their debauchery. We figured out that I left the party at around 12:00AM and they picked me up at Denny's just after 3:00AM. Becca and her roommates were partying and posing for photos, oblivious to my whereabouts, at 2:30AM.

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.