28
Jan
‘You know, I never tried to unpack the reoccurring trip I had off the spectacular OTC hallucinogen Salvia Divinorum my senior year of high school.’
‘I thought Salvia was banned.’
‘It was swiftly outlawed once I got to college and YouTube took off and all these rural state senators saw these satirical viral videos of people failing basic household tasks and couldn’t live in a world where people were allowed such a legal thrill. The irony here being that these same legislators sat on their hands while their constituencies later turned into overdose factories for Purdue Pharma. But anyways, I could buy all the salvia I wanted using a money order purchased from the Shell station nearest the hockey rink (so my parents didn’t see the $200 transaction from SALVIA-ZONE.NET on my monthly statement). But the kind folks at Salvia Zone would pack all sorts of free extras in my shipment so I could comfortably sell half of what I bought for twice what I paid and still have a considerable amount left for my friends and I to smoke ourselves. And I guess that made me the only salvia dealer at our large public high school in Mid-Michigan.’
‘Salvia is a very strong hallucinogen, is it not?’
‘Oh it’s one hell of a drug. First it needs to burn hot, so you have to hold a butane torch to it while you inhale, and you need to keep it in for at least 30 seconds for the chemicals to pass through the lung tissue and get to the brain or whatever, but worst of all the smoke is woodsy and harsh and none of my friends or I had ever smoked anything other than cheap cigarillos so our lungs were wholly unprepared for the wicked, doubled-over coughs that would ensue, all while falling into a new spectrum of altered-consciousness.’
‘And you enjoyed this?’
‘I was just along for the ride. I turned 18 the summer before my senior year of high school so it allowed me to purchase all matter of sin for my younger classmates but the only thing I was ever interested in trying myself was salvia. I still remember the packaging with its putrid puke green and single yellow eye peering out from the plain folded card-stock. The salvia came in a little ziplock bag stapled to the underside of the card and it was not pretty to look at either. Like kief passed through a vaporizer, much darker than anticipated and just a single gram per package which was meant to be portioned into about four hits.’
‘How many times did you do it?’
‘Well the first time all we had to smoke with was a glass bowl one our friend’s older sister’s boyfriends brought over. He’d seen the YouTube videos and wasn’t going to miss out on seeing a cadre of his girlfriend’s little brother’s friends trip balls. He also brought over his younger intrepid brother who volunteered to go first and after exhaling a thin cloud of grey smoke commenced repeating, hands on knees leaning way forward in white plastic lawn chain, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa’, describing in baby-like babble, with a dangle of spittle swinging from his agape mouth, that he felt he was tumbling off the face of the earth. We’d been warned by someone—likely the YouTuber or dreadful packaging—that users should be seated and not try to stand. But by God the little brother was off and running through the field adjacent, joyfully screaming about floating away from the planet. The buddy’s house we happened to be exploiting while his parents were away was a half-million dollar mid-century modern built by Alden B. Dow protégé Red Warner. The buddy’s mom came from wealth and his dad was a workaholic we never saw except for end-of-the-year cross country potlucks. Their home backed up to a tremendously landscaped park that had no public access. The road they lived on was sarcastically called Pill Drive because it had the largest accumulation of doctors in town. So here was the little brother, in a white t-shirt and running shorts, skipping through a non-public park in the most exclusive part of town, screaming happily about falling off the planet. I think there were three of us still sober and it took all three to wrangle his wiry little body and sit still for the rest of his ‘trip’. The little brother died from a heroin overdose in an empty Chicago apartment just five years later.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s okay, we hung out but were never really that close.’
‘And what happened your first time?’
‘Well we were all so scared from chasing down the little brother that we waited to a later date to attempt ourselves. I don’t remember where we were, probably some dark church parking lot or empty county park, but someone else held the lighter and homemade bong and all I had to do was inhale and try to count to 30. I think I made it to 10 and then a highly detailed floating globe appeared in my lap and it was suddenly my life’s work to keep it revolving. Except I didn’t have hands, I had stumps that were on fire and the only way to turn the globe was to pat one emblazoned stump with the other, so that’s what I did, slapping the top of my flaming stumps and watching the world whirl around faster and faster while laughing maniacally.’
‘Did you take any meaning from that?’
‘Well the funny thing was that I broke my wrist a few weeks prior and the cast had started to smell and itch and for some reason I thought Icy Hot would alleviate both concerns. So I think my trip was because my brain couldn’t process why my hands felt like they were on fire. And that made me think I kind of ruined it and maybe didn’t hold it in long enough or get a big enough hit or whatever so I wanted to try it again.’
‘And how soon before you started having the reoccurring trip?’
‘After that initial trip, I never had a different one.’
‘And what was it?’
‘So there’s like no easing into salvia hallucinations, one second you’re there and then you’re someplace else. So the trip was this: cartoon-like faces—I’m talking huge bulbous eyes, Cheshire-esque cat-in-tree sneering mouths, exaggerated features—on each side of a colorful turning die. Each side held a different face and different bright color. The cube was all there was. There was no ‘me’. ‘I’ didn’t exist as anything other than whatever it was taking in the experience of that floating, revolving cube. The trip wasn’t frightening but the come-down was. For the next 5-10 minutes after the visual hallucinations stopped I was unable to believe anything existed outside of myself. My family, the hottest girl in school, my friends, myself, they all seemed to have disappeared. It was the oddest thing. I had thoughts and a body but the ‘feeling’ human, with desires and dreams, had vanished.’
‘And what made you finally stop doing it?’
‘Well I didn’t like that feeling of not knowing anything. It was the opposite of insight. It felt, in those moments after I stopped seeing stuff, that I was internally empty in a way I despised. That I had no destiny or free will. Complete meaninglessness. I was also worried that some part of the hallucination was real. That all we are is our perceptions and these social and biological links to our families and friends are hallucinations we’ve all just accepted as fact in order to get on with our lives. I’m not sure if it made me into the person I am today or if I was always that kid searching for something beyond the faculties of reality—but either way I have a subsurface longing to leave this place, this body, this mind. Maybe it’s the idea I’m not enough that has me searching for more, maybe it was my frugal upbringing in a community that valued extravagance, and maybe there’s just a universal struggle to uncover what lies beyond the basic senses.’
‘Okay, we’ve got about two more minutes. Anything else you’d like to share before we go over your meds?’
‘I don’t think anyone is actually listening to me. I think everyone is just waiting for their turn to talk. When I listen, I look the person in the eye instead of at my watch, or phone, or over their shoulder at the next client in the waiting room.’
‘I was just checking to make sure everything is on time. You wouldn’t want your appointment to start late or end early, would you?’
‘I’ve been your patient for 15 years, I hope you could use professional judgement to figure out what’s best for each of us.’
‘That gets me to your meds. How’s the taper been going?’
‘Horribly.’
‘We could step you back up but there’s always the chance the rebound in dose has the opposite effect and the drug stops working for good.’
‘It’s a chance I’m willing to take, I guess.’
‘Okay, I’ll forward the updated script to your pharmacy.’
‘See you next week.’