Twenty minutes into our first serving of shrooms, I was complaining of their non-effect on me. “I feel completely normal! They probably don’t even work on me,” I declared. “Let’s take the rest then,” Dave said. We licked the plate clean of mushroom dust.
Within minutes, Dave was bouncing around the room, laughing at every little thing and marveling at colors. I, on the other hand, was spiraling down a dark cave.
My limbs couldn’t decide if they wanted to shift restlessly, as they were beginning to do, or lay inert in bed. My head felt like someone was kneading it, and my stomach kept threatening to launch a revolution. The mushrooms were not sitting well with my body.
In our heightened state, Dave and I decided to walk to a nearby park. I still knew how to put one leg in front of the other, but not much else. Nausea was still invading my body in sporadic bursts, and though I hid behind large sunglasses, I felt everyone in the world could tell I was high.
After studying some puzzling elements around the park –a stuffed pig on roller-skates, tourists who asked for directions but never moved, people running to and from a tree with bright, fluttering balloons, he figured out that all these strange, disparate characters were planted by a Disney-sponsored Bingo game. “Now it makes sense,” he said.