Salvia Gets Too Real For Hunter

I wish I could have recorded my experience and the images that went through my head.  I wish I could convey and project my understanding onto you, but all I have are words.  They are insufficient in describing this particular encounter with salvia.  And, I'll start off by saying I've done salvia several times and that I am not inexperienced.  Granted, I have never done 15x, but I knew I could handle it.  Or, at least, thought I could.  This is that story:

The night began when Horatio and Yetti show up.  I know exactly why.  Our friend, PK, his house has been empty for two days, this being the second.  Last night I was over there getting rather drunk on shitty beer(See: Natty Ice).  Tonight is the night of the actual party, in which a lot of people are showing up.  Horatio's nose dons a bandage.  We went to a Children of Bodom show recently, and someone's fist or head met up with Horatio's nose, crushing it a bit to the side.  He went to the doctor to get it fixed.  His bandage says, "I'm on hydrocodone and feel good!"

We head outside to Yetti's vehicle and hop in.  We have to stop by his house to grab a GB cap.  I'm excited, I only expected shitty beer to be at the party.  When we get to the party, though, I am less excited, because no one has pot, just salvia. I notice a bubbler sitting on a table.  I remember John Lee telling me a story of how he acquired a bubbler, and since he's sitting on the couch opposite it, I assume it's his.  I ask him about it and he retells the story to everyone.
John Lee: "Nick Volante just gave it too me.  He was just like, 'John, I never use this unless you're around, here, take it.'" I was like 'Sweet!'"
Horatio: "He was high as shit wasn't he?"
John Lee: "Yeah, Nick was high as shit and I was drunk as shit."
Hunter: "Wait so, you have your bubbler here, that implies that there's pot.  Is there?"
John Lee: "Nah, [PK] and Alex have some salvia, though."

I have done salvia many times, and none of them were particularly interesting: 

The first time I did it, Horatio and I went down to this place in the city, AfricaHouse, and bought some really overpriced shit.  We mixed it with pot and took GBs of the concoction on the rail-road tracks near our house.  The effect was smooth and nice, I saw colors that I wouldn't have normally, you know, purples instead of blues.  And, the trees lining the railroad tracks bent in towards eachother and formed a tunnel of brances. 

The second time I did it, I did it with Yetti and PK on Horatio's back porch while he was gone for the weekend, which is kind of fucked up. It was purely salvia, sans pot.  We packed it tight and took GBs.  I laughed really hard for about 10 seconds before I started choking.  I had to remove myself from the situation and sit on the steps, because I was "Choking on the spheres that we're all made of."  It was a brief trip, and not worth choking for. 

The third time I did it was terrible and made me hate salvia.  My friend Chocolate gets some and we decide to smoke it.  He has a small piece that has a hole too big for salvia's fine, ground up leaves.  Theft, being the boyscout and theif that he is, goes into the bathroom on our dorm floor and whips out his knife.  He pries a faucet guard out from the sink.  He feels accomplished, and fails to inspect the guard.  We go outside and light up.  It hits incredibly hard.  We are all gasping by the end of it, and I fumble the piece.  Something hard and charred falls out of the piece.  We look at it like dogs look at the source of a high pitched noise, our heads all cocked to the side.  I pick it up and go, "Guys, I think we were smoking plastic."  THE GUARD WAS FUCKING PLASTIC, AND WE SMOKED IT.  Knock about 10 years off my life.

Flashbacks aside, I am standing in PK's kitchen playing Drink The Beer.  With myself.  John Lee stands next to me, visibly drunk.  He is standing on a ledge of stairs, and I tell him to be careful.  He only says, "That ledge is my bitch." 
The typical beer vs. liquor argument breaks out.
Horatio: "You know who is the only person on earth to have thrown up on beer alone?" 
He points to me.
Schwemmer: "Haha, really?"
Hunter: "Hey, hey, hey.  Now, that was all under an hour.  We're talking 40 minutes or less."
Horatio: "It was like seven beers dude."
Hunter: "In like 30-40 minutes."
Schwemmer: "Damn, that fast."
Horatio: "Well, yeah, he did throw them back pretty fast."
Hunter: "And beer does terrible things to me.  I am a liquor fan."
Schwemmer: "I can understand that.  I mean, genetically, we respond to things differently, all of us."
I am impressed and agree.  PK is offended that I am knocking beer, because that's all he has.  I reassure him that it's cool and I'm not complaining.  Just defending my pride.

By my third beer, another group of people shows up.  Clay, back from the military, carting two large party packs of Smirnoff bitch drinks.  Lot of good the military did in teaching him to be a man.  Behind him, two girls follow with a small group of gothic characters. Black, red.  Some pink on one of the girls.  She is quiet and reserved, and heads immediately downstairs with her group.  Only one of them is sociable, other than Clay.  It is the other girl, and she seems cool enough, but I notice she has a hollow-point bullet on her necklace.  I slowly back away while Horatio hits it off talking about guns and her shirt, which is of the band Yellowcard. 

I am in the dining room where a piano is.  John Lee is playing it rather drunkenly and I am attempting to communicate good vibes to the other group.  They are angsty and resist.  I give up and start talking to Clay.  He gives me a stern handshake that not many people can muster and I ask him:
Hunter: "So, how is 'it' going?"
Clay: "Have you ever blown up a tank with a rocket launcher?"
Hunter: "Uh, no, have you?"
Clay: "Oh yeah."
Hunter: "Oh, the perks of being in the military."

Basically, because there is no group cohesion, Yetti, Horatio, and myself head outside to smoke some of the Salvia Yetti has been saving.  He snatches John Lee's bubbler on the way out.  I chug my third beer and grab a bitch drink because I am a hypocrite. It is Smirnoff Ice, and it is delicious.  We sit in a circle... triangle really, and Yetti loads it up.  Before we start, he notices my drink and goes to grab one.  He comes back and we light up.  Yetti hits it first, passes it to Horatio, and then to me.  My reality dampens as I exhale.  Salvia hits really fast, by the way.  I put the bubbler down on the concrete.  On its side.  So, now, there is water in a small puddle in the middle of us.  No one notices but me, and I don't actually care at this point.  It's refillable.  No big deal.

Everyone is quiet for a second.  Yetti is staring at the ground when Horatio asks him a question.  I don't understand the question.  Apparently, Yetti understand it less, as his only response is a two-syllable word in what seems like tongues:
Horatio: "[questioning tone]"
A pause ensues.  Yetti looks up.
Yetti: "Barr-haw!"
Another pause ensues as everyone, even Yetti, runs the interaction through their head a second time. 
Hunter: "Did you... did... What the fuck was that?"
I am laughing uncontrollably at this point, which spurs laughter in them.  We errupt and sit for about three minutes just laughing.  We manage to get a few words out inbetween breaths, but they only serve to feed the raging fire of hilarity.  I have never laughed this hard.  Ever in my life.  I am seriously ROLLING on the ground.  Suddenly Yetti is worried:

Yetti: "Guys, oh shit."
Hunter and Horatio in unison: "What?"
Yetti: "We broke the bubbler."
Hunter: "What?"
Yetti: "Yeah, look, it's broken, there's water everywhere."
I explain and talk him down for like ten seconds.  He grabs his now empty Smirnoff, holding it opposite the hand clenching the bubbler and says, "Then what's this?"
Hunter: "That is your empty bottle, it's fine dude."
Yetti inspects it and goes, "Oh, oh yeah."
At some point he calls Horatio a motherfucker which is really out of character for him.  He is joking of course, but it's a sure sign that he's still riding the high.  He explains his experience as Horatio becoming part of the background and me as a laughing enigma.

We go inside, but within minutes are back outside with a larger group of people, drinking more.  Schwemmer, PK, Horatio, Yetti, and myself.  Also, this kid Alex, who is drunk as shit, stumbles all over the place.  I ask him what he would do if I drop-kicked him into oblivion.  He just laughs at me and falls down on his face, unable to get up.  He stays down for a few minutes while the big boys talk.  Then he gets up and decides to go inside.  A few of the others do too, and then there are three: Horatio, Yetti, and myself.  Again, ready to smoke more.  We sit down in our "circle" and begin.

For greens, Horatio and I play Rock, Paper, Scissors.  It is a hard fought battle, us matching eachother 4 or 5 times in a row, but I eventually win.  I take notice of the bowl.  It is packed to legendary standards.  I ignite the patch of green, inhale for several seconds, and hold.  I pause for a few more seconds and exhale.  I cannot emphasize enough how much I took from this one hit.  A heroic sized cloud rolls from my lips, and I say, "Guys, I might die," jokingly, but the next thing I know Yetti and Horatio have evaporated, interwoven into the scenery.  They have, as Yetti said earlier, become a "part of the background."  They become part of the fence, the ridges.  Small, individual slivers that make up a whole.  I am a very visual person, and sometimes it is hard to describe what I experience.  This experience boarders on impossible-to-describe.  For 30 minutes, head time, I am flying around the back yard, which is about 100 times as large as it actually was. The weird part is I see myself doing these things, as I am a plane.  A plane with a face.  And a propellar for a nose. I am swooping by the fences(made up of Horatio, Yetti, and the shed I see in the background).  I am pretty sure that I fly into the sky, and suicide drop to the ground.  I stretch, endlessly against a black backdrop of time and space.  My thirty minutes of head time take about 10 seconds of real time, and I swoop back into the shell of Hunter Caldwell, my body.  My mind has returned, and now I am standing up, facing Horatio.  I run my hand against my forehead and back beyond my hair.  I am sweating, and Horatio is talking to me.  I am pretty sure he is trying to get me to fuck a vehicle.  He might as well be speaking in a foreign language, I can't understand anything he is saying. 

I asked Horatio what he saw from his perspective and he said this: "Yeah we were all sitting down and then you burst out nervous laughing and stood up and just started roaming around babbling incoherently. And you would grab various objects which I termed 'anchors.'  Like, to keep you in this world"

It's true, I do vaguely remember grabbing things, because I felt like my world was being torn apart, like my reality and actual reality were at odds, fighting for their place.  And my strange reality was slipping back to normalcy, and I was coming down.  I stand, staring at Yetti, not truly recognizing him.  I head to the front of the house, bumping into the fence and a van. Yetti somehow makes it to the front door before I can, slips inside, poking his head out and says, "Dude, I am going to find you a pen and some paper.  Just don't wander off."  I tell him I am probably going to.  I have no idea where a portion of my time went, and I am confused and still buzzed off of the beer and bitch drinks I have consumed.  I head inside, say peace to a few good people and leave.  I give John Lee the power fist before I go, because I don't feel up for much more contact than that.

I am speed walking down the street, terrified out of my mind at what just occurred.  Nothing seems real in this blanketed  world of cold air and blaring gas giants.  It is night time and a pick up truck is slowing down in front of me.  Its lights are aimed at me, but I walk past it. 

"HUUUUUUUNTER CAAAAAAALDWELLLLL!!!!"  A voice emanates through the thick shadow.  I am going to die tonight.

"It's NICK, man, what's up!"

My heart pounding, I wave and continue walking.  Things are still too real and this is totally unexpected.  Nick Volante, the guy whose bubbler it was originally. That I smoked out of, was calling my name from an ominous pick up truck.  He was heading to the party, and I was heading home.  Heading home, afraid that I would never be normal again.  Afraid that life was going to turn on me, and all the taking I have done from the universe would reverse itself, and start taking back.  Afraid that my future was doomed.  Afraid. 

But, by the time I had marched home, I was normal again.

Comments

[**~Stang~**]

As always, your writing is absolutely amazing. This is awesome.

[racheal.]

i just read this and all i can say is that you're a good writer. i couldn't stop reading.

[Bollocker]

thanks ladies