Mescaline Miracles

<-----Ben Corbett in his new home, Ocean Beach.

I'm sitting in a place called "Sinbad's Hookah Lounge & Cigar Bar" on Garnet Street in the PB neighborhood of San Diego. How this came to be involved a lot of different decisions and variables over the course of the last few days, with the major crux point of this location being the need to get online as freely as possible.

My trusty companion (Benjamin Corbett) and I began the weekend in a typical fashion, hooking up at the Bloc-Busta party at the Open Source space in the DMV (De-Merchandized Zone) of Santa Fe with a six-pack of beer (for both of - we were feeling timid after some hard weekends) and hanging there to catch Walker, DJ Harry, and the inimitable Feathericci and his wack collection of records. Sangria was on-hand as were many of our friends, and there was a competing party down the street at Meridian Six with a much better bar so there was a lotta drift between the two spaces.

Anyway - some cat (who SHALL be nameless) showed up bitching about how he'd just been on his over to show us all his latest score - 350 hits of high-grade LSD - but he'd been busted. It'd been awhile since any psychedelics had entered my life, and knowing that they *almost* had but didn't *quite* make it there wet my whistle in a big way, and so I asked him if he had *anything*. Turns out he did - mushrooms at a fairly decent price and I said okay and he said okay and we did the deal.

Ben and I each took ONE CAP. Enough, I thought, to wake us up and get a little lift, a micro-dose really, nothing more. In NO TIME AT ALL, we were tripping like high school kids, wacked on beer and sangria besides, and Ben had been dipping into the whiskey, so you know how these things go...

Suddenly, it's about 4:30 in the morning (Open Source has a way of warping time like that) and we're sitting in Ben's living room and he hands me half of a very stale cookie. It tastes...like a very stale cookie, but then all of a sudden it occurs to me that I wouldn't be eating a cookie at 4:30 in the morning with my friend Ben unless it had some advanced properties, so I said, "Ben, what did we just take?" And he just starts cackling madly and says, "Nothing. It's gotta be bunk by now," and start to feel very, um...HIGH, and I'm thinking that maybe the mushrooms are kicking in again and suddenly he shrieks at the top of his voice, "Oh shit - it's not bunk at all - jesus Greg, I'm sorry, but...we just took MESCALINE."

At 5am on a Sunday morning, no less - and then he says, "Quick, before we're too high to do anything - we MUST go to the mountains." So we get in the car and we drive to somewhere just above Hyde Park to the Borrego Pass and head for the woods - and a good thing too, because just about then, we really came on - I was certain I could *see* the curvature of the Earth (which is never a good sign, but happens fairly regularly on mescaline, I've come to find) and we hiked all the way to the end of the trail to a little spot where the last of the winter snow melt comes barrelling down the mountain into a little stream-creek, and we stripped off our clothes and plunged our naked bodies into the ice-cold agua, thus initiating the first meeting of the High Desert Polar Bear Club - all before the first sight of the sun.

And somewhere along the way, we decided that as long as we were awake, we might as well head for the Ocean - it had been a long time since either of us had seen it, and so we headed back to his house, packed the car, then drove to my house in Albuquerque and had a good long nap - and then we hit the fucking road - which is Part One of why I happen to be in Sinbad's Hookah Lounge and Cigar Bar on Garnet Street in San Diego, California at this very minute.