Mushrooms Make Me Scared
Every summer for the last six or seven years, my father, step-mother, brother and sister all go on vacation for a week or two, leaving me their sweet Beaconsfield pad and the dogs. I thank them for this set-up by having stupid festivities and all out gong shows. This place has become legendary among my friends and every year we transcend new boundaries with our mischief. The summer of 2003 was the second year I had the house and HorseBoy, a good friend of mine, sadly now deceased, was staying with me for two weeks. He was just released from Shawbridge, a youth prison, and wanted to have a ridiculous couple of weeks. So one night, we decided that eating some magic mushrooms would be a brilliant idea. I had never tried them before and neither had he so what the hell? Why not? Horror followed.
It was early on in the night, I had BBQ'd some burgers which would serve as vessels to mask the horrible taste of the mushrooms. Over at my place were HorseBoy, Tyler Durden, The Real Deal, Dimsum, Gonads the Barbarian and BigBear. Only HorseBoy, Tyler Durden, Gonads the Barbarian and I were dabbling with the hallucinogens. We stuffed a bunch into our burgers and chomped them down. Even with all-dressed burgers, I could still taste the disgusting texture of the shrooms. It wasn't pleasant. We settled down in the backyard, having some beers and shooting the shit. The Real Deal wanted to go for a swim but my pool was floating with dead bugs and it was a little cloudy. I convinced him it was fine and that he should just jump in. Jump in he did and as he came back up, so did all the bugs that were sitting on the bottom of the pool. He was less than happy with me.
After about an hour, the shrooms were starting to take hold. I kept gazing at the stars, convinced there was just something out there man...something...somewhere. HorseBoy was giggling like an idiot at everything and anything and Tyler Durden was composed, throwing out confusing comments here and there. We kept drinking as the buzz was building up to a pretty strong level. I was hammering back beers but couldn't feel a thing from them. I was invincible! After a little while, things were turning weird I guess, because Dimsum, BigBear and The Real Deal all took off. Maybe we stopped making sense...or maybe we were making too much sense? After they took off, the buzz changed gears on us into a more intense vibe.
Gonads the Barbarian was watching a movie about cannibalism called "Ravenous". We all sat down to watch the flick and were scared completely shitless. The movie is about some pre-WW1 army type guys stranded out in the forest and they meet some weirdo who eats people. He gains the strength or something important from the people he eats and develops bloodlust/spiritual power or something. Look, I was badly twisted at this point so everything that was happening on screen was terrifying and extremely confusing. My brain was racing over all kinds of awful thoughts when I suddenly began to think maybe my three friends, in the very same room as me, were going to try and eat me. Apparently they were on the same page as I was because we all began looking at each other oddly and slowly inching away from each other on the couches.
I watched this movie again when I was normal and it was fucking terrible but that night, it had a powerful and strange grip on all of us. The plot of the movie coupled with the odd music, random scenes and being mangled on mushrooms had driven me into a frantic paranoid state. For the next little while we sat on the couch, eyeballing each other, smoking in the house because we all refused to turn our backs on each other. There were a lot of, "Why are you looking at me like that?" questions followed by "Why are YOU looking at ME like that?" responses. Looking back on it now it'd be pretty funny to walk into that room and see four 18 year-olds completely terrified of each other, wide-eyed and scattered out on the corners of the couches. It was quite a scene.
After we settled down a bit, we decided it might be best to go outside. It was pitch black in the back yard so I told HorseBoy to go in the basement and hit the patio lights. He grabbed a kitchen knife and ran down the stairs. This was alarming. No one was in the right state of mind to be holding any kind of anything that could harm someone. So, in my infinite brilliance, I quickly grabbed a knife and slowly went down the stairs. At this point in the night, I was kicking such an intense paranoid buzz that I thought I was walking down the stairs to my death. Turns out I wasn't far off as HorseBoy was crouched in the corner of the basement in some kind of attack stance. Jesus, Mary and Joseph this is the end! We watched each other for a while before I blurted out, "Why are you holding a knife?"
HB-"Why are YOU holding a knife?"
ME-"Because YOU’RE holding a knife!"
HB-"I have a knife because you have a knife!"
ME-"I have a knife because YOU have a knife!"
This went on for awhile as neither one of us could not come to terms with the simplicity of why we each had a knife. So I'll skip us braying like jackasses and just say we eventually found the lights and successfully turned them on. We stayed outside for awhile, drinking beers and talking about what I could only assume was utter nothingness. We were all still tense from that cannibal movie so any quick movements made by anyone were immediately questioned. At one point, HorseBoy went into the house and barricaded himself in a room because he convinced himself he was the biggest one among us so if anything, we'd gang up on him and eat him first. Later on, he carefully came back out and basically ended up hitting a vicious body buzz and melting into the couch where he woke up the next morning.
I was having my own problems with Tyler Durden as he was pretty much sitting in the shadows. Whenever he'd take a puff from his cigarette it would light up a bit of his face and there was always a strange expression looking back at me. I was getting spooked but the night was coming to an end so things remained calm. I went to sleep that night gripped with fear, never knowing who might come in and take a bite out of my leg or something. All in all I would say that I was on edge for nearly the entire night, a good six hours of complete paranoid fear. It was exhausting.