I always did mushrooms on an empty stomach. That’s what my friend John Kimmich said to do. We’d sit in that shithole apartment on our recliners staring at the TV waiting for it to kick in. It was always the same with psychedelics: we’d start inside, go outside, then come back inside. It followed the same pattern as the Hero’s Journey. We’d start off together and then cleave off into our own psychosis. Had to battle through it and come back together at the end, usually for a bong hit or a drink. Each trip followed the same arc, and they always began on an empty stomach.

John said the food interfered with the balance of chemicals to your brain and you definitely wanted a higher balance of chemicals to make sure you got off. There was never quite enough drugs to go around. John knew a guy who sold little baggies and we’d split them between two or three of us and sit on our recliners waiting.

There was a show called Ren & Stimpy that came on Saturday mornings and though it was early we had no problem waking up to get high. It was a cartoon show but you could tell they were playing to adults, or near adults, with the inside references to drugs. So we’d sit there waiting and then things would get strange. And then John or I would get up to use the bathroom, look in the mirror and know it was time to go out.

Then time would go Dali-like, melting, frozen, slowed down. All kinds of things happened in five minutes or less. You could stare at a lamp or the pattern in a rug and forget where you were. We were out of our minds, that was the point. The trip was taking a vacation, going somewhere far away, all of it imagined. And it bound us together through some odd passage like primitive people did in tribes.

The last time I did mushrooms I was 45 and by myself in Amsterdam. They weren’t actually mushrooms they were truffles, because the Dutch outlawed mushrooms after some poor French girl lost her mind and jumped off a bridge. The Dutch said no more psychedelic mushrooms but as a compromise, they allowed for the truffles which were different botanically but had the same effect.

I didn’t know anything about truffles and asked the girl at the smart shop what was a good dose for a grown adult and she said the whole bag. There were maybe a dozen and they looked like turds, the kind of thing I’d pull out of my cat’s ass if it got stuck and she was scraping herself on the carpet.

I got up that morning in Amsterdam and took about three of these things on an empty stomach, just like John Kimmich said 25 years before. I took one of the pocket-sized maps from the hotel lobby and circled my location so I could find my way back and then headed out into the cool April air. I was only five minutes from the hotel when I got stuck in an alleyway taking pictures of the graffiti, trying all different angles to get the perfect shot. And then I knew the drugs took.

The truffles hit me hard. I hadn’t taken something like that for years. But here I was in Amsterdam all by myself and I knew this could be the last time so I wanted to make the most of it. All the streets and canals had names I couldn’t remember or pronounce but one near my hotel had the word for king in it, so I tried to fix that in my head as a mental handrail. I had the whole day to myself to just wander around but I didn’t make it more than an hour before I got stopped at a playground near the Van Gogh museum.

It was the same place we’d been with our kids just a few months before, when we came through on our way to the UK for a three-month tour. We’d stopped in Amsterdam for a few days in late October and that was the same playground we took the kids after the museum. There was a family like us but younger with their two kids, mom and dad pushing them on the swings. I saw myself in the dad but he looked nicer than me, he wasn’t on mushrooms (or truffles), he looked like a decent person. I didn’t feel decent at all. Here I was by myself getting high in the morning roaming around Amsterdam. What kind of dad was that?

I looked down between my legs and started to weep. I squeezed the bag of truffles in my pocket and threw it in the trash, pushing it to the bottom so no kid or decent person would see it and get infected like I had. And then I wandered back in the direction of the road with the word king in it, looking for my hotel. Feeling like I had that day with John Kimmich when we did mushrooms in the morning on an empty stomach and I’d walked past that church and lost my shit seeing all those church goers, proper-looking people who didn’t do drugs like me. I’d thrown out my stash that day too, flushed it down the toilet. Then regretted it the next day.

Charlotte and I went back to my old college this past week, the first time I’d been back in thirty-two years. Just saying that made me feel old. We walked across the main campus in the direction of my dorm so I could show her where I lived. I couldn’t find the dorm and had to look at a map. Nothing about it registered.

We then walked in the direction of my old apartment, the one where John and I used to hang out. There was a lot of new development, buildings I’d never seen before. Normally when this happens I’ll find a place where I once lived has been torn down or replaced. This is the first time I’ve visited a place like that and been disappointed they hadn’t torn it down. It was literally falling apart. It looked like a construction crew had started renovating it, but I think it was just neglected, the brick crumbling, the handrails sagging down. There were sofas that had been torn out and laid on their backs by the dumpsters. A dead bird on the ground with its head missing, a bloody stump for a neck.

This is the past, I said to Charlotte. Right here: this is what the past looks like. I don’t think she understood what I meant.

We walked in the direction of the playground near the apartment, the one where I’d taken an old girlfriend M.L. that one time she visited for the weekend and I’d given her and her friend Deanna mushrooms. She was still in high school and I was in college so it was kind of messed up to think I’d do that, to give her psychedelic drugs. There was a photo I had of her at the top of a sliding board that had some native American Indian design, like a totem pole with M.L. crouched at the top, her head poking through the hole, making a funny face to match the totem pole’s face. I had no idea where that photo was and the sliding board was gone. I wanted to tell Charlotte that story but there was nothing remotely appropriate about it. She was the same age as M.L. was then, I noted.

We went to my old college because Charlotte is starting to think about where she’ll go and what she’ll do. I often wonder what my life might have been like if I’d applied myself more in school: if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with getting high or doing drugs. It’s not like I did it all the time, it’s just that was my favorite part of going to school. All my best memories were the times we got out of our heads. I don’t regret any of them but it makes me feel kind of hollow and small, in hindsight. And I wonder why I felt like I needed to do that. Maybe we were just kids.

Charlotte and I went to the Starbucks by our hotel and sat watching the college students start their day. They were all near adults like I was, mostly kids. But no one would remember me here, no one at all. All those old professors of mine would be long gone.

I watched my hand shake as I gripped my paper cup and lifted it to my lips. And thought where has all the time gone. And how many memories do I have of this place? Not enough. It was like I hadn’t been there at all.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, mid-life crisis, prose