STOOLS
So there I was, a young man, certain that I was about to perish, although never had this certainty prevented me from doing anything in any of my many adventures.
How did I arrive at the poisoned state I am about to write of, one may ask? I shall tell.
For a young man of no means, drugs of quality were quite hard to find in Wellington,
And being one who was desperately seeking the inky embrace of the void or the scintillating colors of the womb of the infinite, I had to bend my shattered wits to improvisation. After many treks to the library and many sessions of sampling strange and exotic plants, torn from the gardens of the denizens of Wellington and many hours spent clutching my crawling skin/ cramping stomach / burning eyes or fizzing lips, chance gave to me the grand daddy of experiences I had the inverted pleasure of coming to know.
A German friend of mine had happened while strolling in the forest one day to chance upon a large patch of Fly Agaric Amanita Muscaria, which is of course the red with white spots fairy story toadstool your parents told you to never go near. He had a whole jar of the dried caps of these dark delights and had bravely tried one, the result being a “strange feeling” and a sore tummy. So when I expressed my interest he gladly handed over the jar to my trembling self. I hurried back to my den where my brother in debauchery waited, anticipating my arrival with some new potion to poison ourselves, as was my job, being the smarter and more daring of us. My prize being the lion’s share of whatever I brought back.
So I burst into the lounge and said to the form sprawled on the couch “Are you ready for an adventure?” Showing him the jar and its malignant contents. “Aren’t they poisonous?” he said. “I think so” I replied. We hurried to the kitchen where we divided the booty, 6 caps for him 10 for me, which we cut into small pieces and washed down with lots of Earl Grey tea as the earthy and acidic taste was horrid.
The next step on any adventure was to go into town and roam about, while gauging the exact effects of the drug on our toxin-laden forms. We were just arriving at the top of the main street when we felt a growing desire to run. And so we ran, charging down along the street our booted feet, pounding the pavement! We then felt a desire to jump! So we jumped, leaping over sandwich boards, hydrants and the occasional small child.
So great was our strength that we felt nothing could stop us, I literally felt 7 or eight feet tall and the power coursing through my body was bordering on supernatural. At one point I leapt from the cement edge of a garden over a parked mini, blasting into the air with my powerful legs and tucking my knees up to my chin I watched the roof of the mini drift under me in ultra slow motion, seeing every speck of grime and chip of paint sparkle beneath me in garish detail, then back to the ground I flew! Pounding along the pavement.
We charged down a side street where a concrete barrier would prevent us from further travel. It was not a barrier to me and I, using my newfound strength, quickly cleared it. I heard a noise behind me that sounded horribly like a person trying to leap a large concrete barrier, hitting the top, slipping and falling down from the top onto one knee. I turned to see the sprawled form of my friend to who’s’ side I rushed.
His face a mask of pain, he gripped his knee and stuttered “The whole world is rushing into my knee! Whoosh, whoosh!” There was only one cure for such an ailment and that was to quietly sit in the café in the library and drink Earl Grey. So to the library we struggled, yet on the way we decided to get tickets to see a movie and we purchased these from strange looking people with elongated heads at the ticket box in the theatre before hobbling and striding to the café.
When I entered the library I was amazed to see the towering walls of volumes, stretching in all directions and the thick luxury of the carpet, which I felt myself sinking into. I alerted my friend that there were things here that I must investigate and that I would meet him at a table in the café presently. Into the halls of towering bookcases I ventured, the bright-multicolored books leering out at me. The tops of the shelves must have been towering 20 feet above me and I myself was at least 15 feet tall and the whole room was round like a huge fish tank, curving up and over my head threatening to topple at any moment.
I had figured it out! I was in wonderland! The most logical thing to do would be to find the book Alice in Wonderland for a clue on what to do next! I ran down the halls searching for the book but from the corner of my vision I spied my friend fleeing the café into the street so I charged after him as he was in great need of my help as only the strong and canny can survive in the nightmare world, which we currently inhabited.
I was watching him hobble to the bus stop when I slid in something very soft.
I looked down and saw that I had just immersed my foot in a pile of dog shit the size of a basketball! My friend was lost. There was nothing I could do but contemplate this situation. My world became dog shit. The very essence and true nature of canine feces I alone knew. I tore off my gloves and used them to wipe the mess from my brand new Airwalks. The stench was brutal, it permeated my very existence.
Hurling my gloves into the gutter I hobbled down the crooked heaving street and into McDonalds where I locked my self in the septic bathroom and using masses of toilet paper cleaned my shoe to the best of my impaired ability. Yet the stench was not to leave my hands as I was compelled to regularly smell my fingers in the same way a sore tooth makes you wiggle it to see if it’s still sore (which of course it is). Dejected I tumbled back into the street and went in search of a beautiful woman who would accompany me to the movie.
The tall buildings lent over me, colors threatened to engulf me and people with elongated faces passed me making strange hissing noises. The footpath was like a steep wall, which I climbed into a restaurant and with my swirling vision located a princess sitting at a table with some dark-shrouded, leering people. I pulled up a chair and made myself space at her table. I heard someone behind me say “Do you want to come with me to the movies I’ve got a ticket right here you can come if you want its in half an hour its supposed to be really good”. Then one of the people turned to me and said in a slow voice “ Are you ok man you look kinda hot?' I said, “ sure I’m fine, nothing wrong with me, I'm fine.”
But then I started to feel hot, a slow red heat starting from my face and burning its way down into my chest, the walls were also closing in and the people and objects in the room started to squelch and slowly spin, their colors coming off their edges.
This was not a good sign. It was time to go and get my money back for my friend’s ticket. I appeared at the ticket box, I was looking at a young man with a halo of blue fire tinged with red sparks which I couldn’t help staring at while I explained that my friend had been hit by a car and wouldn’t be able to make it to the movie, oh yes he’s fine, well he’s in hospital but he will be ok but he wants his money back.
Arriving back into the street a dark border had appeared around my vision and it seemed to be threatening to engulf the edges of my swirling world. I realized that my kaleidoscopic wonder land was under attack and I marched forward in a positive manner focusing on the deep lush colors of the gray stones of the sidewalk, keeping the darkness at bay with three deep breaths and a single focus.
My body was trying to shut down all auxiliary and non-vital functions (like consciousness) and focus on staying alive. But I’d be dammed if I were going to miss this! All of a sudden I was aware of a huge pounding in my chest like a hundred dogs were jumping inside me and trying desperately to escape! With every third pound of the dogs, the black border was getting nearer until after 9 pounds I was winking out of existence and appearing some distance up the street.
POUND! I’m by a phone box.
POUND! I’m holding on to a traffic light.
POUND! I’m standing in the middle of the street and there’s a guy who’s going by in a car looking at me and he says, “Are you ok mate?” I stare at him with my mouth open and wonder why he’s asking that.
POUND! I’m sitting on a bus bench and feeling like millions of fishhooks are hooked into every part of me and are pulling in all directions.
POUND! I struggle to the bathroom of the food court I’m in and look at myself in the mirror. A frightened ghost stares back at me. Drenched in sweat. Skin white and waxen. Eyes yellow, rimmed and shot with red. Pupils going huge, tiny, huge, tiny, huge, tiny. And when they would go tiny all sight would gray over.
I went to the toilet and pissed a long stream of reddish brown piss that smelt like the forest just after the rain, when the sun has come out and is shining down hot on everything. I then fell to the floor feeling so strange… it was like being encased in pine needles and a huge evil poisonous cow pat which was killing me, while my entire body had been filled with some sort of witchy brew made of poisonous toadstools and Earl Grey tea. I vomited huge amounts of lumpy witch brew into the dunny and fell to the tiles, my last thought before surrendering myself to the inky embrace of the void, being a future conversation my mother was having with someone who asked “Where’s Weston?” her answer being “Oh, he died on the floor of a bathroom from an overdose of poisonous toadstools.”
I had no dreams, only the dark nothing where there was nothing except dark. Well if I was conscious of anything it would have been that, although as it happened I’m just sort of saying that there was a dark nothing as I probably had my eyes closed. But I’m not even too sure about that. I awoke. Struggled to my feet, and had a drink and washed my face. I felt remarkably better. Just a lingering inner sickness remained.
“Oh what’s this?” I thought. It seemed my body wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted and it was kind of twitching and shaking, my head would twist to the side and I would attempt to walk forward while looking out of the corner of my eye.
I made it to the movie theatre, driving my body like the harshest puppet master ever drove an evil puppet down a Wellington street. I handed over my ticket and not unlike a robotic Frankenstein lurched down the isle and into a seat. My central nervous system was lit up like a Christmas tree with faulty wiring and was firing off at random intervals, twitching and contorting my body into strange positions, much to the amusement of those in the rows behind me. I was able to face the screen for most of the movie and only once had to eject a thin stream of vomit onto the floor, so all together I thought the whole venture was quite successful.
I arrived home and burst into my friend’s room to see if he was still alive. He was, and he excitedly told me a tale of hallucinating the wrong bus, winding up far from home, and having to journey in an exact straight line across peoples back yards and the edges of the Wellington zoo, at one point slipping down a bank and hurting his knee even more.
All the time with the feeling that the world was collapsing behind him and to stop for even a moment was to be sucked into oblivion. He felt the need to spew for most of the way, yet he courageously managed to save it until he got home, where he spewed through a sieve into the toilet. Salvaging the pieces, which he then ate again. I looked down at his white sweating form and saw a frenzy going on inside him.
I left him to the dark fairies and went to bed.
I awoke from an earthy tasting slumber and gently urinated into an ice cream container I kept under the bed for such purposes. The urine was a light red color and smelt like the grave. Swigging from the container and my bottle of water, I managed to get all of the horrid pissy red brew down with out throwing up and I slowly felt the familiar and unwelcome feeling of thousands of needles poking at my innards. I headed off to poly tech.
Things get kind of hazy from there… I do remember laughing manically in class for no reason and then bursting out of my chair and up on to the table to put my hands around the neck of an Indian guy, knocking him from his seat and onto the floor where I continued to choke him until pulled off by my classmates. I then stated laughing again and they (although confused) laughed with me.
I also remember climbing a tall tree in the yard, yelling out and waving to people. I think I remember something else … no it’s gone. Now when I see those things I look at them a while, have a little sniff (they truly don’t smell like anything else on earth) and then I kick them to bits as hard as I can. I discoverd years later that eating the toadstools had damaged my kidneys and liver quite badly and I had come close to death. Now I work in drug rehab and dont think drugs really help any one.