Chapter 33: Tripping at Last

Pauline shared a bit about her process and the decision not to take mushrooms, along with the shame and self-loathing she had dropped into once she had made it. The rest of us were sympathetic to varying degrees, with Leslie also seeming a little disappointed that Pauline hadn’t talked to her before running off, and perhaps a little guilty that she had not picked up her friend’s unhappiness and fear. I wasn’t keen on group psychotherapy while I was trying to enjoy my own trip, but I didn’t want our first experience of tripping as a group to be slimed by anyone’s unprocessed distress, so I pushed.

“Sounds like you might be thinking you should have supported Pauline better. She is your oldest friend.” Pauline jumped in before Leslie had a chance to reply.

“Nah - You’re right about the friend bit, but she’s always done it easy. No way she really gets it!” She turned to Leslie directly. “You’ve always been supportive and loved me even when I was a mess, but you don’t know how bad it gets in there when my head is fucked up.” Stan was confused.

“Fucked up on drugs? I thought you didn’t do them?” Pauline grinned. She was obviously feeling better.

“I don’t need drugs to fuck my head up!”

Our trip was obviously well under way, since we all found that hilarious and cracked up. No group therapy required! I relaxed into the experience, which was lots nicer than my previous trip in the Vaughan’s conservatory. My place was a new venue as far as tripping was concerned, and I was beginning to see many familiar objects with new eyes. I had meditated thousands of times with an Indian print of a picture of a peacock in my line of sight, but I had never before really seen it. Now, the details of the tail feathers with thousands of individual pen strokes drew me in. A ceramic pheasant, a fifty-year-old wedding present from a long dead aunt, took on a whole new level of vaguely disgusting verisimilitude. And I could suddenly clearly distinguish between the parts of the room smelling of Sarah’s patchouli bodywash, against the background of the coconut and kiwifruit that Pauline had decided she liked. Lowell George’s slide guitar was making the air in the room shimmer and my whole body tingle.

I noticed that my legs were moving without any volition on my part (I won’t claim I was dancing), and Leslie started to giggle. I wasn’t offended, my ‘Spastic Seal’ had elicited enough embarrassed groans of ‘Oh Dad!’ over the years to shatter any delusion of grace or muscular coordination. Ryan had been holding Leslie’s hands and had seemed engrossed in the texture and appearance of her nails. He sussed that she was laughing at something internal.

“What’s that?” She kept giggling.

“It’s silly!”

“Yeah – but what?”

“Why can’t Democrats play bridge?” Ryan grunted, but I pricked my ears up. Lesie had never shown the slightest interest in my obsession with American politics.

“They can’t resist bidding ‘No Trumps!”

Everyone must have been listening, and we were clearly right off our faces, because we all cracked up. Little Feat had meanwhile given way to the Bruch Violin Concerto, and I found my way to a beanbag, closed my eyes, and let the music take me where it would. That was no place in particular, but there were lots of swirling colours and geometric shapes that kept morphing and dissolving into each other. As the music seemed to get louder, I got flashbacks from my childhood, brief snippets of scenes I recognised from the Auckland suburb where I was raised. There was no obvious pattern or theme, but a part of my mind kept trying to find one.

As the Bruch eventually faded away, I was dimly aware that the emotional tone of the group had subtly changed, and as the opening chords of ‘Wish You Were Here’ filled the room, I opened my eyes to see Sarah and Stan all over each other and about to leave. That seemed unnecessary.

“You don’t have to go home – you can use the spare room.” They smiled and disappeared down the hall. Butch appeared unconcerned, but Ryan and Leslie started making out on the couch.

That left Pauline and me. I was in an oversized beanbag cruising with Pink Floyd, she was investigating my peacock picture, and sex wasn’t where it was at for us, at least not right then. I had previously had no problem being around other people having sex while everyone was tripping, or being involved myself, but that was then and this was now. I grabbed the bull.

“You guys can have my room if you want.” Ryan and Leslie looked at each other, and very quickly decided that was a good idea. They departed for the bedroom and Pauline abandoned the peacock picture and joined me in the beanbag.

“It’s pretty detailed.” I imagined she meant the picture.

“Psychedelics seem to do things with perception when there’s lotsa detail. I’ve had that print for more than twenty years and when I was looking at it earlier, it was like I’d never really seen those tail feathers before.”

I felt Pauline shift her body quite awkwardly and looked down at her to find I was holding the hag. As I watched, her face crumpled and she started to sob. As I had absolutely no idea what to say, I said nothing. Good choice! After a couple of minutes, Butch got to his feet and came over. He licked the top of Pauline’s foot and whined softly. Gradually, the sobbing subsided and Butch lay down by our feet.

“I really really want to trip with you, but I’m still too scared!” I ‘hmmed’. “If it goes wrong I’m stuck with it.” I had an interesting idea.

“What if you could change your consciousness, for a short time and knew that you would be ‘normal’ again very soon even if you didn’t like it and got paranoid or scared or whatever?”

Pauline looked thoughtful and as I waited for her answer, Pink Floyd gave way to Grateful Dead. I got distracted and lost in the music, and was almost surprised when she disengaged from our cuddle and sat up.

“If I knew it was just for a few minutes, I’d risk it – is there something that will give a short trip?”

“I read that a Ketamine trip is pretty short, but I was thinking about diving deep enough to experience Nitrogen Narcosis.” She sat bolt upright and pulled away even further.

“Shit no. That’s really dangerous!” I was in no condition to argue, so I kept quiet. I was ready to drop the subject, for the moment anyway, but Pauline wasn’t. “That’s why the depth limit for breathing air is 40m. The instructors on my diving course were really freaked by the idea of going deeper, and wanted to make sure we all understood how dangerous it is.”

“We certainly lost a few in the early days.”

“There’s nothing to see down that deep anyway! It’s too dark!” She paused and I watched as a faint tinge of doubt crept into her expression. “At least that’s what they say.”

I still didn’t want to argue, so I just ‘Hmmed’, but my mind was full of fifty-year-old images of Black Coral, snake stars, hydroid trees, and fluorescent fish. When I closed my eyes, these memories seemed to combine with the continuing effects of the mushies to accentuate the effects of both, and I found myself breathing slowly and deeply - sucking syrupy air though the mouthpiece of a regulator in the half-light 60m down, with the dreamy unreal feeling of being thoroughly ‘narced’. Pauline noticed. She had taken no drugs, so the change in her consciousness was probably a ‘contact high’ – but whatever was causing it, her head was in a different place from usual. She eyed me keenly.

“What happens when you close your eyes?” While I was thinking how to respond, she guessed. Reasonably accurately.

“You fucken went back there just now? Didn’t you? You used to do it!”

“Lots!”

Pauline had been sitting upright beside me. Now, she struggled to her feet, outrage apparent in every line of her face and body.

“Just like the fucken nuns!” She kicked the beanbag close enough to my tender bits to make me concerned. “Exactly like the fucken nuns! Scare us off sex but never done it.”

“Who? What?”

“The fucken instructors! All sorts of stories to scare us off depth but they’d never done it themselves!” I understood.

“They preach the gospel of Saint PADI!” We both thought that was funny, and Butch thumped his tail on the floor a few times. My trip was still giving me a pretty interesting sensory experience, though I found I could still string my thoughts together to make sense – at least to me – and Pauline remained interested, so I went on.

“They believe it. They live it. And it’s mainly right. Diving deep enough to get narced is dangerous. The bit they got wrong was the ‘nothing to see’ bit.”

“If you did it lots, there must have been some goodies in it for you, ‘specially if it is as dangerous as the instructors say?”

“It’s a fifteen minute trip. There is usually new stuff to see, and when we were doing it we knew we were usually going where no human had ever been before! That knowledge, combined with the danger, was quite a buzz! And there are ways to reduce the risks.” Pauline lit up. Usually, her Little Red Riding Hood persona had a strong sexual element, but this time it was pure excitement.