46
I’m not one of those big psychedelic adventurer types. While that whole scene fascinated me, and I always listened intently to the stories, I’ve never been the guy who chased those particular highs. Most of my knowledge of drugs came from my conversations with Prince and a small group of guys we grew up with that fell into a pattern of experimentation shortly after high school. Prince was the first of my friends who had done acid and reported back to us just a little differently than we had known him the day before. Honest, not one person in my life was the same after a real acid trip, that was a fact.
I’ll never forget the day Prince showed up on my doorstep, hair messed and greasy and shirt drenched in sweat. He sat me down and said he hadn’t slept. He went on to tell me the long traumatic story of what might have been one of the worst trips anyone had ever had. He looked frightened, like a kid.
“Two straight hours. At least. Maybe three. Just, fucking, staring in the mirror, Cash. I couldn’t stop. And I tried.”
He shook his hair from his face as he stared down at the floor, pausing for a second, gathering himself. In a flurry he slicked the mane back.
“I watched my fucking face morph. It morphed man. It morphed into my fears. Every single one of them.”
“Whoa.”
“No. Worse than whoa, man. You don’t understand, Cash, I could fucking see them. All my worst parts. They—they manifested into my face. And I got super old and then young again and all hallowed out and shit man, it was the scariest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And my eyes got pure black and large. I looked like a fish . And I was drenched in sweat. And then I looked like my father, but worse. Like bloodied and dead like when I saw him after he fell. And then I was fat, Cash, fat as fuck and my cheeks looked like they were going to explode and then I was a skeleton and dying with AIDS or whatever the fuck and I hated myself man. That was the worst part. I hated myself. I was disgusted by myself.”
He went on and on and on, still sweating like crazy in my living room, twenty and alone and utterly panicked. And all I could do was talk him through it. That was only the first three hours of his trip which he claimed lasted like ten hours in total.
“Then I was looking at a painting on the wall—you know the one—of the field and that one tree under the moon. And even that turned into my father. God man the whole thing, the whole place was him. He was communicating with me. But it was dark. It was alive , man. You don’t understand.”
Man, man. Prince really lost it that morning, and I did what I could to keep him sane. Later, when I finally got him to calm down, he slept for almost an entire day in my guestroom with the windows pulled to black.
All to say, I only tried my luck with acid once, though Prince almost scared me off the stuff completely that day. I didn’t need any hallucinatory hauntings, but I knew that at some point I’d have to try it. I’d have to know just what it was. In the years to come, I heard from plenty of buddies who had much better experiences than Prince did. In fact, many came back with glorious stories of beautiful colors and images, ideas, and feelings of love.
So, a year after my mother died, I finally gave it a go. The following night I showed up to Prince’s for a bonfire with a few buddies, but I was running on no sleep and was still pretty scattered. I didn’t even sit down before I started talking.
“I painted for ten hours guys. Ten. There I was, and Prince, man, I know I said I’d wait to take it together, but I cracked a beer last night in the kitchen and all of a sudden, I knew it was time.”
“Fuck yeah.” Prince smiled, clapping his hands together.
“So, I took it and didn’t do a thing at first. Just put my mom’s Rumours record on and sat down on the couch. I was rocking a bit, just listening to Fleetwood Mac, and out of nowhere it hit me man, it hit me that I was supposed to be fucking painting, that I was always supposed to be painting. God, it was so real. So, I went into my cabinets, and you know I have a hundred old pails I never use, and brushes too. It felt like this ancient blue one was fucking placed there by God man, I’m tellin ya, it was calling out to me. So, I took this old brush and pail of blue paint and went downstairs to the basement. You know that huge white wall I’ve never done anything with. God, I swapped Stevie out for Zeppelin man and let Physical Graffiti start rolling. It’s the only thing I listened to the whole trip, and I just started fucking painting man. All. Night. Long. Anyway, this morning I stopped and just walked upstairs. I didn’t even sit there to look at it. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. I haven’t gone back down all day. You guys wanna see it?”
My buddy CJ busted out laughing and Seth, my childhood friend, said.
“You’re out of your mind Cash, you know that?” He joined CJ in laughter, but Prince wasn’t laughing.
“Fuck yeah I wanna see it, man. We’re going right now,” he said.
“You guys coming?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah, of course, Picasso, why not?”
CJ and Seth stood up.
“What a change of events,” Prince said.
They followed me to my car, and we left.
I walked us down to my basement, not really knowing what to expect. I know that sounds insane, that I had painted the entire night but I really had no conception of what I’d created or what I’d think of the piece now that I was sober. Something told me when I was finished to just let it be and only return when I was ready. Well, I waited all day. As my feet moved down the stairs, I began to grow a little nervous because I had invited my buddies to come with. Ah, fuck it. How bad could it be? I took a breath and swallowed what I could of my anticipation. I reached the carpeted floor, flicked the lights on and rounded the corner. There it was, my illuminated canvas.
I’m not kidding, I lost my breath. I don’t know what sort of acid I had taken but whatever it was had transformed me into a modern-day Pollock.
“Jesus Christ,” Prince whispered in awe.
“Holy shit,” CJ murmured. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had painted a magnificent mural of abstract cuts and swoops, splashed and chaotic but somehow specific, right on the money. The wall looked like it was crying, like it was hemorrhaging blue. I had covered the entire wall of my basement in blue graffiti.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Cash?” Prince asked.
“You painted this last night?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Yeah, man.”
He walked up real close and ran his hands along the design, tracing some of the movements and then stepped back.
“This is the greatest fucking painting I’ve ever seen in my life.”
After the boys left my house, I went back downstairs and I stared at that painting for hours. How had I done it? Sure, I could paint, but I had never done anything like that. I could feel the blue slashes of pain, the torment, the chaos, all together with the serene, calm areas of relief. There was ecstasy in the assortments of lines, the tiny collections of dots, leaving tails of paint behind them like comets. It was my life. That’s the only way I could describe it. It was all of our lives. The curves and the explosions and the gashes and the smooth waves, all blue. I stayed up again, well into the evening, tracing each stroke, recalling my inspiration as it had come to me the night before. I thought about Johnston, about everything and everyone. I thought about our lives, and the graffiti of our town. We each left our mark. We are cracks in sidewalks, bent street signs, rusted gutters, and train tracks. We are nails in wooden boards, handprints in cement. We are creaks in the doors of diners, stains from cigarettes. We are streaks of graffiti, blue as the sky.
Well, it was the last time I did acid, and it was the last time I ever painted like that. I could never recreate it even if I tried. To this day, I have no idea how I did it, and the wall in my basement is still adorned with blue paint.
There were a hundred different stories about drugs and what they did to us, each different from the next. My buddy Mark stayed up on molly for like a week straight once before he almost killed himself.
In Jimmy’s one night he laughed and said.
“The shit you do when you’re young.”
We were still in our twenties. Would we all pay the piper in the end? My friends and I had our own scattered past of ecstasy and acid and shrooms and the whole mess of them, no doubt, but the truth is I probably had the most love for drugs out of anyone on Earth who didn’t really do them that often. I mostly was there for my friends in the aftermath, listening to all of their crazy tales while drinking my fair share and smoking cigarettes. Alice , Jeff had called it. I sorta liked the name now.
I haven’t done shrooms since last fall when Prince and I went west to La Crosse and rented out a place off-grid. We went exploring, and ate them high in the bluffs and saw wondrous things. We spent the day hiking and communicating with the deer and eagles and the other wild beasts that were roaming the land with us. We spoke platitudes to the trees, and the clouds formed mystic images. It was a fine day in my memory, but it was long ago. When Jeff smirked, asked, and offered, I figured, well, what the hell. It had been long enough. I was on an odyssey after all. He was right to assume that.
So, here I sit in the afternoon haze with a small bag of Alice in my grandparents’ revitalized home. The smell of the shrooms isn’t all-consuming, but they’re quite dark and carry a specific musk. Jeff told me a few things about the guy that he got them from to comfort me, but it didn’t matter. I trusted Jeff and that was enough. It was an instinct, at least. I take the shrooms out and I put them in the palm of my hand. What mysteries will they hold? There’s only one way to find out. I put the whole stock in at once and chew them, scowling at the taste. I hate how they stick to your teeth, I forgot about that. They really are foul in flavor. Even cooked mushrooms, prepared and sauteed, were liable to give me chills from time to time.
They make their way down. I know I have maybe forty-five minutes or an hour before they start setting in. Maybe sooner, I’m not sure. I haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch. I get up from the rocking chair, put my grandfather’s blue and black flannel coat on, and first go to brush my teeth. I have to get the foul taste out of my mouth.
In the rusted mirror all the way back near the bedroom, I run my fingers through my beard and remark upon my age. I haven’t cut my hair in months. It’s been almost half a year. I haven’t shaved for weeks. I am becoming one with the vagabond life. I chuckle. I spit the toothpaste out and gargle some water doused in iron. It makes me think about my buddy Cameron from grade school. In middle school he had to go to the hospital every week because of a severe iron deficiency. He could have just drank this shit. He was so skinny, you could easily miss him in the crowds of youth. Cameron ended up being one hell of a friend, and I wondered where he was in the world. He moved out of Johnston almost ten years ago now to somewhere in Iowa. His blond and brown hair used to fall out and leave him like it had some other place it had to be. He must be bald these days, but I hope he had the iron thing figured out. Resilient Cameron. I wipe the water from my beard and walk my way to the front door almost forgetting about the hallucinogens in my stomach.
I’m deep in the woods when the ominous clouds begin to roll in, the type that bring the night. It’s early afternoon but it’s starting to feel like evening already and I’m a couple miles out from home, too far out to turn back this early. No abnormal feeling has set in, I’m still sane of mind. The wind is picking up and I think, if lucky, I’ll be part of one hell of a storm. I have this thing about the rain. When I was young, I would run out into our yard during rainstorms in my underwear and go crazy. I’d sit beneath drainpipes and let the water crash and cascade all its omnipotence into my young skull. Even in the lightning I would play; and the fiercer the wind, the better. And Ma would call out from the doorway and plead for me to come back inside, but I was gone, wholly convinced that I belonged in the downpour, soaked, and getting more so all the time. I was wild and alive. As I grew older, I still couldn’t help it. I would wander down to the Fox and watch the water fall. All the minor drumbeats would play out, thousands and thousands each making their indents on the surface of the speeding current, and if you listened close enough you could hear their spirit. I could feel it against my skin. I adopted the rain as my communion with Heaven and was swept up in its magic. I let no rainfall pass me by without at least reaching a hand out to feel it.
I look up to the darkening clouds. In a matter of minutes, it will begin to come down and cover me completely. Sooner or later, I’ll be tripping, lost in the woods and the rain. I smile like a cinematic protagonist. The wind picks up and begins whispering secrets. I envision the ground rising up around me, flowing in water and earth like the flood that lifted Noah to the sky. Today I am him, convinced I can ride the wave right up and swim to salvation. I have total clairvoyance.
I’m trying to find the fort that Grandpa and I made all those years back when we ate sandwiches, and he told me about the Second World War. Imagine it now? The fall leaves crunch beneath my feet and I think, yes, fall, make the most of your music. Let your orchestra play before the water turns you to mush, soundless. You deserve your final symphony, and I, yes, I, will listen and remember your last dying song on the planet. And it happens.
Somewhere in that thought, things start to shift. The sound of the forest begins to grow more crisp and intricate as I begin to trip. For all I know, my footsteps are echoing all the way back to my land out in Johnston. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there are endless reverberations to everything, traveling further than we could ever imagine. In one smooth effort they traversed the whole globe in an illustrious call to arms. Each indentation I make sounds so varied and purposeful that it becomes clear, this communication. I smile. I know this is just the beginning.
I’m sheltered by the shadows of the woods. All around me is an ocean of dead leaves, brown and getting darker. Soon they will be snowed upon and buried down to the generation before them, and the one before that, making way for the younger, more beautiful crowd. And it’s true that it is the same with us all. What’s left of us, anyway, running around. God, what a wide ocean of brown. Even the bark on the trees is a gorgeous thick brown and black. Sometimes chipped and faded, sometimes wet and saturated. Some have the sap and some have been burrowed by woodpeckers, but they’re all of one body. One towering bunch of guardians with life in their branches, filtering the air and taking care of us daily. How would we ever repay them?
Far off, I hear my first bit of thunder but still the rain has not started to fall. I’m beginning what I imagine will be a long journey into chaos. A thin layer of sweat coats my neck but when the rain hits, I’ll be chilled to the bone. This is what I need. All around me I can feel the woods breathing, matching my tempo. It’s really something to see the bark shiver and swell. To see the few squirrels taking cover, and in the distance, all the deer, bounding to safety in the woods they called home. White spots dance on their sleek and athletic spines.
I lean down and pick up a particularly thick branch. This will be my staff. And didn’t Noah have a great giant staff? He must have. And the mist begins to settle all over my body. I can taste it now. There are few more inspiring moments than the ones before the swell, before the monsoon from the skies. As the wind picks up the fading dry leaves and sweeps them away to another place, I close my eyes and let my arms stretch all the way to the coasts. My left hand grasps at the hot coal sand in California and the right cleans the glass of the Empire. It’s true we are limitless. All the atoms stretch far from my nails and grip the ocean weathered borders of my continent. I begin laughing with a joy purer than I’ve ever remembered.
I feel it all. I feel God and the unbounded beauty of everything. Swimming and dancing and playing around. To be in the middle of everything! And this is possible for anyone! Yes! I am sure of it. A raindrop hits my eye, right beneath the lashes and it’s here. At last! And the thing about a good storm is that it doesn’t come all at once, not always. The best ones start slow.
I open my eyes and through the bare branches above I watch each individual orb fall blue and clean from the sky. Slowly at first, then faster, and faster, and faster until I am surrounded by rain. I hold my arms up and spread them apart, still holding the country together as the water begins to wash my face. What richness it offers, what rebirth. And it all makes sense to me now, how in the Bible they talk about that. Those stories all at once are clear, that big flood and all that came with it. Every evil thing will succumb, will be purged, and then perish. It’s all a cleansing. The dark will always, eventually, run its cruel course before it returns to the layers of Earth where we walked, where we buried and built up once again. This is the flood, and these are the times of revival.
I am all at once astoundingly gone, spun everywhere at last. My mind has fully morphed as I continue forward through the woods. The wind swirls even stronger around me as the leaves grow dense with water. I can see all of their tiny veins absorbing the wet, bemoaning the fact that in a way, it is too late for them.
Where have you been ? says the leaves to the rain, and also, to me.
So, I step forward and the forest floor attaches its body to my boots. We are one moving entity now. Onward I go, my hair plastered to my forehead and falling over my eyes. I push it away and run my hands through my beard. I am back, back, back to the past. I am my great great great grandfather gathering steam and gaining honest intellectual thought one hard earned day at a time, in the middle of nowhere.
Convinced that the rain will keep falling, and that I will be carried away in its wake, I at last come upon the lost fort. There, hanging before me, disembodied, are the remains. There are some boards scattered about, a few of them hanging off the tree at an angle, clinging desperately to rusted nails. Strands of rope still hang from the branches, waving about in the wind. The only part that stood the test of time is the floor, which now looks like a small diving platform stretching out from the stomach of the tree. It catches the rain, sheltering a patch of dry ground beneath. It has been a lifetime since I first made this fort with my grandfather.
I think about all those who came across this place since. What did they think about the creators? Did they know who this was for and why we had left it? In the downpour I walk to the bones, and I kneel. I scoop up some sideboards. There’s a long holy panel of wood that I believe was once a door. I stand it up on its side and think, if it floods, we will glide on the water together, forever to the new world.
My clothes are drenched and heavy now as I stand beneath the platform for a second to watch it all fall down, crashing in sheets around me. What a storm. The strongest I’ve seen in years. What a song. Surrounding me are the cacophonies of the water and bark, animal, and branch; ringing out in intelligent, spontaneous creation that personifies genius, coherency. It is elevated and above my imagination, but I gather something transcendent. Like Beethoven or Bach or the rest. The savants, the powerful, the divine.
It is the Mother’s turn, above and sending sheets of herself down around me, telling a story so ancient it surpasses words. And it is dark, but it is blue. Blue sheets of rain are falling in patterns, epic all around me. Another hour of this, and everything will flood. I kiss the tree where my grandfather once rested his tired spine; and decide to make the trek back.
It’s becoming colder and a shiver shakes through me. In the blink of an eye, the forest is nearly black and for the first time, I begin to have doubts I can make it back. The wind is thrashing now, blowing phenomenal gusts that could rip the smaller trees from their roots and it too, has a color. Mirrored in the lightning through the vapor, it shines. I swear it is silver and moves vicious and violently beautiful through the maze in the woods. Like a moth to a flame, I feel the temptation to be close to it. I almost beg it to lift me from the Earth. As I walk on, I cling to the trunks of the trees. I will make it, I think, or I simply will not.
I am only climbing higher. I am only further lost in my hallucinogen expanse, and the storm is raging, gaining momentum. Lightning and thunder begin to shred the sky around me and I have no concept of time. All I can be sure of is that it is freezing, and the evening is setting in quickly. My heart pounds in my chest. I can hear it. I am breathing heavy and shaking. I am muddied and desperate, searching for the paths I have walked all the days prior.
The problem is, of course, the water. It is now rushing along the crevices and the small, wood hidden ditches. It is washing away any trace of the life that passed before it. There is no path to follow, there is no certain way forward. I am lost and seeing visions, embodied by darkness. I begin to think of things most negative and feel close to my capture. To death.
“C’mon, Cash, c’mon,” I repeat to myself as I force my way forward, one step at a time.
This is no rain, no more. This is something entirely cosmic. This is nature’s whole reckoning with the world. I know it. She is having it out, at last, with me and the rest of us. She will have her answers and revenge for her sorrows. It is clear she intends to take me. The skyward black walls are closing in. I am drowning. When I look at my hands, they are ancient. They are swollen with water and wrinkled, and my boots are like roots, unmovable now. They are cratered with mud, water, and woods.
Still, one step at a time, I fight onward, looking out for a light or an angel or hope. Big heavy breaths fill my lungs until finally, I collapse. I go down to a knee. Am I having a heart attack? All around me images dance like nightmares. The lightning strikes violently everywhere. The thunder is shaking the Earth.
I begin to see cats on branches. Hundreds and hundreds of cats. And in the corners of my vision there are red eyes from wolves and witches. I hear sounds ricocheting off the pounding water. I hear all sorts of demons. High pitched laughing and screeching. I crouch down, close my eyes, and try to focus. It isn’t real and I know that, or is it? I keep shaking the rain from my eyes just to see clearly again but I’m hopeless. I am engulfed by storm. It has gotten me at last. I sink deeper into the Earth. Beneath my knees it feels warm, welcoming me to the mud. What a nice long sleep could do for the lonely and broken.
I open my eyes one more time and standing before me are the ghosts of my whole washed up life. All lined up and staring me down. My mother. My father. Grandpa Bill. Grandma Ruby. Tommy. Jimmy. Prince’s father. So. this is it then? Dead and beaten, delusional and freezing, wet. In the worst storm of the Midwest, in the woods, I will be consumed. I am staring at the gates which wait like Hell, just for me.
I claw at my beard and my face, and I shake my head, but the images remain. If I am to go, then I’ll go, but before that, we must have it out. I begin crawling through the mud and I’m yelling questions into the abyss. I’m spitting out water from my mouth. I’m throwing fistfuls of earth at the ghosts. But nothing calls back. There are no answers here.
Finally, I stand. I stumble forward now, mad. Foaming over my teeth and sick. Dying in the rain where I am failing to breathe. And I remember as a kid thinking I was the storm, and the storm was me.
I am as naked as ever, though cloaked in my grandfather’s coat. And my mother is standing so close. Her eyes unblinking, morose. And I’m losing the strength in my bones. I keep shaking my head, the image must go, but it won’t. It stays, and at last, the group gathers. The line comes closer, together.
What is it you want?
What have you learned that I haven’t? And Grandpa, don’t you know that I found our great fort? Grandma, your house! Have you seen it? It’s back! It’s finished!
I slap at my face and whip it frantically back and forth as they take step after slow moving step closer, if they reach me, I know it is over.
Ma. Say something, Ma. Say it, and then I can go. Please.
I fall to my knees, and my hands follow. They strike the ground and sink deep through the mud. The water is running like madness around me. I yell at the top of my lungs. The ghosts suddenly stop. I look up to my mother so near. Her brown hair is soaked wet in the torrent. She is smiling.
Ma, you’re smiling! Ma! I never thought .
I try to stand, but am useless. She kneels down, and slowly draws a warm cross on my forehead. Like she would every night before bed. She has blessed me, again. She stands, and I’m spinning so fast. She walks back through the woods where she came.
Ma. Ma. Ma!
I close my eyes and try to steady my breath.
I open them, and they’re gone. But to where?
I am dead.
The heat of eleven suns gathers, it presses its light to my flesh.
I’m kneeling at the gates before God and the rain never stops.
The woods are gone.
It is white. It is white. It is white.