The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (27 page)

Besides teaching English, Mack was the drama and debate coach. Being nerdy, non-athletic types who fancied ourselves intellectuals, we were drawn to those activities, and he encouraged us. The meatheads and jocks were not particularly interested in such things, so it was a chance for us to shine. Our debate and drama practices became rich opportunities to hang out together and share time with this wonderful man. He seemed to believe that maybe we actually had things worth doing, worth saying, worth thinking. We presented George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as that year’s junior-senior class play. I had the leading role of Winston Smith, while my buddy Phil played O’Brien, Smith’s betrayer and ultimately his inquisitor. The story provocatively highlighted the hypocrisy of the times, and we flung ourselves into it with enthusiasm.

Later that spring, we put together a one-act adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
and entered it into the state drama competition in Denver. This proved to be the stoners’ revenge. When we performed the play we were loaded—on cannabis, mostly, though some of us may have been on stronger stuff. We totally swept the board: best actor, best play, best adaptation, best everything. Mack was pleased; the rest of us were stunned and ecstatic. We were a Podunk high school from the Western Slope going up against the best drama departments in Colorado, and we had totally triumphed. I think the faculty and a lot of others at the school didn’t know what to say. We were supposed to be the degenerate, dirty, rotten, hippies and we’d brought glory and recognition to our school. We were congratulated—grudgingly—by the principal during a school assembly at the end of the semester. Knowing what he really thought of us, I’m sure that stuck in his craw.

I remember Mack with fondness. He was my first real mentor-teacher. I have been blessed to have others since then, but Mack was the first. He believed in me, in us, when no one else did. I will always love him for that. Not only was he a mentor, he taught me, by example, the importance of that role. I have been a teacher myself now for over a decade, and I try to be a mentor and encourage my students to believe in themselves, to think for themselves, and to not let anyone stop them from doing what they need to do. Some of them have taken that to heart, and I have been proud to see them go forth to pursue careers and life paths that are way beyond anything I could ever accomplish. It’s satisfying to know you have made a difference to a bright mind.

Chapter 22 - My Datura Misadventure

Following the bust, our oppressors underestimated our ingenuity and commitment to continuing our explorations. Soon thereafter, my fellow adventurer Richard and I were severely poisoned, thanks to my lack of botanical expertise at the time. According to the mainstream media, a craze had been sweeping the country: young people were flocking to their local garden-supply shops to buy morning glory seeds, which had been reported to contain LSD-like compounds. In fact, this is true of certain species. There’s evidence that some species of
Ipomoea
and
Rivea
were used as ritual intoxicants by the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican groups, and were known in the Nahuatl language as
ololiuqui,
meaning “round thing,” in reference to the seeds. I had known about that for some time, and had tried
Ipomoea
seeds a few months earlier. The dose must have been either too small or insufficiently digested, because I never got anywhere besides a mild nausea after bolting down 300 or so seeds of the Heavenly Blue variety.

But, being the intrepid and reckless psychonaut that I was, I was ready to give it another go. After all, there were very few other options, after the bust, and I thought I knew more than I did. (I have since compensated for that in my old age by realizing that I know very little about anything.) There was an odd fellow living in Paonia at the time, a harmless gentleman who worked in the local haberdashery. He was also floridly gay, so naturally he was ostracized, vilified, mocked in the ways that were accepted and yet so needlessly cruel in those days. He lived by himself in a tiny one-room building behind the clothing store, and the yard of this humble dwelling was a weedy lot. Among the weeds growing there was a beautiful, robust plant that had a strong odor and put out enormous white flowers. Fancying that I was a far better botanist than was the case, I determined it to be a moonflower plant, a morning glory species now known as
Ipomoea alba
, which indeed does have enormous, lovely white flowers. And so I thought that its seeds might be a good source of the lysergic acid alkaloids reported in related species. Richard, Phil, and I decided it was worthy of a LAB, that is, a large animal bioassay. So we waited until after dark one night, snuck into George’s yard, collected several of the unripe, juicy, spiky seedpods, and went off somewhere to bolt them down.

Those with a modicum of botanical expertise have by now recognized my dangerous mistake. The plant we collected is sometimes referred to as moonflower and does have large white flowers. It is more often called jimson weed, however, a name applied to several species of
Datura
, a toxic member of the deadly nightshade family. What we’d gotten our hands on was
Datura metel,
which is highly psychoactive but not psychedelic. It contains the toxic tropane alkaloids atropine, hyoscyamine, scopolamine, and related minor alkaloids. They are potent anticholinergics, meaning that they block the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. At high doses they can be fatal, but at the lower doses we (thankfully) had ingested, it induces a state of profound delirium and confusion. One usually has little recall of the experience, because it also wipes out short-term memory.

In my lectures these days, I tell my students that
Datura
is a true hallucinogen but not a psychedelic, whereas psychedelics like psilocybin are true psychedelics but not hallucinogens. I make the distinction on pharmacological and phenomenological grounds. True psychedelics are serotonin or 5-HT
_2A
agonists (serotonin is also called 5-hydroxytryptamine, commonly abbreviated to 5-HT). This means that they activate a particular population of 5-HT receptors in the brain, namely, the 5-HT
_2A
receptor subtypes. True psychedelics like LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and mescaline all have in common that they are 5-HT
_2A
agonists. They induce profound visual distortions and hypnagogic images behind the eyelids but rarely induce true hallucinations, which psychologists define as seeing something that is not there but that one is unable to tell is not there. On psychedelics, one may see things that are not there but generally knows these things are not “real.”

The tropane alkaloids from
Datura
and other nightshades act quite differently. They are antagonists—that is, they block the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at a subtype of receptors called muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. And the experience they elicit is quite different than the typical psychedelic experience. They don’t cause pretty patterns behind the eyelids, nor do they induce the feelings of ecstasy and oceanic boundlessness that is a typical aspect of the mystical, transcendent states that make psychedelics so interesting. But they do induce true hallucinations, meaning that one sees things that appear to be real but aren’t. And there is no way to tell, at least not in the resulting state of delirium and confusion.

The dose we’d taken was more than enough to manifest the full spectrum of tropane alkaloid poisoning for the next thirty-six hours. We suddenly got a crash course in datura consciousness, although I was trying to fit it into the context of a bad acid trip, based on my assumption that we’d eaten morning glory seeds. I had only taken acid once or twice previously, so as far as I knew, this was the “bad trip” that the supposed experts were trying to scare everyone with. A few weeks later I found a picture of the very plant that grew in the haberdasher’s garden, and it was
Datura metel
. Then it all made sense. What we’d survived was not an atypical acid trip, but a textbook example of acute tropane intoxication.

The experience was horrific in many respects, and my recollections are fragmentary, given that the drug itself partially blocks short-term memory. From what little I do recall, I can say that the seeds began to act very quickly after we’d eaten them, and things got weird.

After the three of us had collected the seeds, we returned to my home and reclined in my room. Phil, who had to drive home, had decided not to ingest, but Richard and I had done so. It took about twenty minutes for an overwhelming effect to manifest, and by the time I got up to see Richard and Phil out the door the effects were already out of control. Mom was sleeping, and in my confusion I lost my way and stumbled into her bedroom. She was appalled; she could see something was wrong but couldn’t tell what. She became very alarmed, almost hysterical. I thought she was going insane, but just the opposite was true. I brushed past her, muttering something like “It’ll be OK,” and barricaded myself in my room. I was panicked but I just wanted to sit down, and try to get my center.

An effect of the tropane alkaloids is that they induce mydriasis, that is, they markedly dilate the eyes. As a result, you can’t focus on anything; vision is blurry, and if you look at mottled surfaces, anything with texture, they’ll appear to be moving or squirming. The tropane-impaired vision, accompanied by tropane-impaired cognitive and interpretive functions, construct a hallucinatory representation of reality that may or may not correspond to consensus reality. Which explains why I saw
bugs!
In my delirious and visually impaired state, every surface in the room appeared to be swarming with insects. I was quite distraught. Finally the situation reached a crescendo when, somehow, kind of out of nowhere, emerged what I saw as the Chief Bug, or the seed source of all these bugs. I have no idea what the actual object was; I think it may have been a piece of charred paper or something like that. But I determined that the Chief Bug must be expelled; and so with great fear and loathing, I caught the evil thing up and burst out of the room, ran to the trash can in the alley behind the house, and disposed of it. Then I ran back to my room and barricaded myself in again.

This is what I remember happening. I think it happened, but maybe it is a complete fabrication or false memory. All this time, while the drama with the bugs was unfolding in my bedroom, people would appear to me, wraithlike, at the foot of the bed. They were mostly my friends, or at least I thought they were. I would plead for help, crying out, help me, help me! And they would just look pitying, and slowly fade away. These prolonged apparitions are completely typical of the tropane experience. Certain
Datura
species and the closely related
Brugmansia
species are used extensively in witchcraft in South America. (The
Brugmansia
species were formerly classified as belonging to the
Datura
genus and are sometimes called “tree daturas
.
”) The plants are widely used for
brujería
both in European witchcraft and in indigenous practices. This is partly a result of the fact that they are power plants, that is, they can be used to render a person helpless as a result of the confusion and disorientation they can produce. Their ability to evoke an unseen world populated by disembodied or wraithlike spirits may form the basis for such belief systems in both the Western and indigenous traditions.

After I had succeeded in expelling the Chief Bug from my room, things settled down a bit. The experience was far from over but at least my panic had subsided. I eventually fell into a troubled and dream-wracked sleep, although sleep is a misnomer because the state of datura intoxication is much like being in a dream, or more accurately, a nightmare. Sometime the next morning the effects were diminished enough that I could emerge from my room and talk to my mother. We had a more or less coherent conversation about what had happened. My vision had improved; I was no longer hallucinating bugs, but wraiths were still showing up at the peripheries of vision, and this persisted for hours.

Later that day, we went over to Richard’s house and talked to his mother. Richard’s experience had also been long and horrific. Like me, he was far from recovered; our symptoms persisted even eighteen hours after ingestion. While we were sitting at the kitchen table in Richard’s house, the air suddenly filled with a brown fog, and large pieces of hash began to materialize out of the air! Only Richard and I could see it, of course, but despite our best efforts, it was not possible to lay our hands on any and smoke it! This was the first manifestation of what came to be known as the Good Shit. It also figured prominently in the aftermath of the experiment at La Chorrera some four years in the future, when I conjured hash out of the air with my guitar, while performing with my band, the Good Shit. Of course I had neither guitar nor band, nor Good Shit for that matter, but during my delusions at the time I believed I had both.

The misadventure marked the end of our explorations for a while. My father was furious when he returned and heard about it. By then, I think, he was ready to wash his hands of me. He asked me if I’d learned my lesson, if I’d ever do that again. I said yes, I would, because I saw it as important to confront one’s fears. (Remember, I thought I’d survived a bad acid trip.) After that answer, he said that I had to be demented, and perhaps I was.

Within a few weeks, reports of our datura encounter had spread through our circle, inexplicably compelling a couple of girls to try it themselves. After collecting seeds from the haberdasher’s plant, they bolted them down at the local pool hall and caused a minor scandal when they took off their clothes and ran into the street. Though I was not present, I was, naturally enough, blamed for it as the pied piper who had led these innocents astray.