Blasting a homemade tape of Sebadoh EPs, we passed Hypoluxo Road, two hours north of Miami.
I was just appreciating out loud the storytelling in Lou Barlow's lyrics, how easily they swung from clever to tortured, always nakedly personal.
GRANT [actually serious]: That's what a writer does. You pick the best details from your life and the world and assemble it on the page into something pointed and –
My best friend and roommate was now explaining to me how to write a story. Without a doubt, he finished his thought with an insight so brilliant it was visible from the moon, but I'd already turned up the music. Didn't hear, didn't care. Instead I lifted up one ass cheek and whiffed a hot, silent one in his direction.
Seconds later, it hit Grant's nostrils. His neck whipped sideways and he punched my shoulder before rolling down his window. It hurt like he meant it to.
ME [rubbing future bruise]: Ow. How's your novel going anyhow, Mister Metafiction? You don’t talk about it with me anymore.
GRANT: It's a hard thing to talk about. I’m at this stage where I'm layering resonances, connecting emotional color. No more literal information; everything now has to reflect off everything else.
ME: Wow. Sounds like a… challenging read.
He sneered at me, but I'd asked for it. Tensions were steadily escalating all year, but since his six-day acid bender, Grant looked down at me like a lesser creature. My friend became my psychological bully whose approval I wouldn't admit I needed, always reminding me of a holy fire I hadn't experienced, one he claimed he'd weathered until it evolved him.
And maybe he had. I didn't know. But my Toyota was taking us north towards an intention to change all that: a reunion, a celebration, a transformation, with possible stroke risk.
Grant turned on the radio to the local alt-rock station where a wacky morning DJ broke in to announce:
RADIO DJ: Howdy Central Florida, BJ for Breakfast here with breaking news... the Stone Temple Pilots have broken up!
BOTH OF US [punching the air]: Yes!
RADIO DJ: Just kidding! [canned trombone SFX] Here's "Plush" for the ten-millionth time. Enjoy, y'all!
Grant immediately clicked off the radio, sucked his teeth:
GRANT: America is so stupid now, it hurts my brain. The fucking Nineties.
ME: It was stupid in the Eighties and stupid in the Seventies. There was always stupid and there will always be stupid. Remember a few months ago, you asked me "how am I supposed to live here now"..?
He got quiet, remembering, formulating an answer he could stand on. He cleared his throat before he spoke in a calm tone, like I was interviewing him for NPR:
GRANT: Dedicate your life to availability to all experience. Whatever the Universe presents to you, keep your heart open as you leapfrog from moment to moment, appreciating and learning without judgment. Whether it's good food or bad sex or painful injury or childlike joy, show up fully for every single moment until your final one.
ME: Maybe you can be available to appreciate the Stupid Nineties.
GRANT: Maybe you can be available to kiss my unwashed ass.
We laughed and the tension blew out through the open windows. The fresh air inside the car was sweet with the smells of sawgrass and barbecue and lawnmower clippings. Grant stared out at the aluminum-sided houses of Lake Worth rolling past.
GRANT: Wow. [chuckles] Do you remember Yanira..?
I did.
++++
Yanira was 4'11", Honduran, goth. They only dated for a few weeks the summer before our senior year of high school. We met her at the same time, at a Meat Beat Manifesto show: she wore a dog collar and cat-eye makeup. I joked that she hadn't decided which animal to be. She nodded coolly, not taking her eyes off Grant's chiseled face, framed by clouds from the smoke machine.
Halfway through the show, he lifted her off the ground to kiss her and she wrapped her legs around his ribcage. By the time the show was over, they were together. We all left the club in a row, Yanira in between us. Next to Grant, she looked like a child. Next to me, she was a petite, perfect partner. Instantly smitten, already knocked out of bounds.
A few weeks later we drove up to Orlando to the first Lollapalooza festival. Grant bought a ticket for a different girl he'd already stopped seeing, so Yanira joined our three-car caravan of Broward County's high school misfits. In my car's backseat, she rode in the middle because she was the tiniest. She spent the entire ride with her arms wrapped around Grant's football-muscled arm, listening as we bullshitted and laughed, smoked and blasted alternative rock hits. I couldn't check my rear-view mirror without catching her cat-mascara eyes staring back at me.
Lollapalooza climaxed with a Jane's Addiction set that followed the sunset into the night. In the muggy air thick with mosquitos, the stage lights turned down to leave us together in the dark, disposable lighters swaying over our heads as they played "Classic Girl." I looked over at Grant, his arms draped down over Yanira's shoulders, lost in their own world. From behind, a wiry skinhead jostled them and handed Grant a baggie with a few joints in it. Grant nodded thanks, slid his hands down the front of Yanira's t-shirt, fondling her nipples until she bit her bottom lip and squirmed.
After the show, our misfit caravan reconvened at a Motel 6 where we'd rented three rooms to house twelve people, but our room was where the party happened. High school kids, six-packs of cheap beer, the party didn't last long before the teens got drunk and passed out.
The three of us left standing sat out on the balcony overlooking the motel parking lot, watching a haggard old bum trying every door handle in case one was unlocked. When he clocked us up on the second story, he waved innocently and wandered next door to the Best Western to try his luck. Grant remembered the baggie of joints the skinhead gave him and lit one, passing it to Yanira, who passed it to me. We'd each taken a puff and coughed our lungs dry, then our hearts started racing, the lights began to swim:
GRANT: I– oh. There's something in this weed...
YANIRA [standing up]: Yeahhhh noooo, I don't feel righttt at alllll...
I was, of course, afraid; every Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" ad started to play in my head all at once, at full blast. What the fuck did was that joint laced with? PCP? Cocaine? Crack?! Lightning jolted us to our feet, propelling us from the balcony into the too-bright motel room. Thirsty and breathless, I sat on the edge of the bed, upset by the rusty creak of mattress springs.
Grant swooned and dropped to his knees, then lay down on the floor like a drugged lion. Yanira and I prodded him with our bare feet, shook him by his shoulders. He was breathing but wouldn't wake. Yanira panicked, her pupils huge; she wrapped her arms around herself as cat-eye makeup ran down her cheeks.
YANIRA: Oh God oh God this is awful Dan, I'm really scared...
I was too. She leaned against me, folded herself into me, her body soft and smelling of cinnamon, her head heavy against my thumping heart, and our mouths found each other. We kissed as our knees lowered us together onto the bed, tearing off our shirts, ravenous. Her nipples were brown and long like fingertips; just brushing one with a fingertip made her body quiver until she came over and over again.
Hands fumbling down each others' pants, frantically stroking and poking, she rolled me over and climbed on top of me, dry humping me like a horny poodle. And behind her, from the linoleum, Grant rose silently up in the dark like a vampire. Eyes wide and burning, he looked down at us without speaking, his mouth a toothy grin, the flickering streetlight outside strobing orange across his face. He looked ready to kill us both. Her back to him, Yanira leaned in and forced her whole tongue into my mouth and a flashbulb went off.
When I came to, bright sunlight poured through the glass door, jabbed my retinas like knives. My face was pressed into Yanira's bare armpit, her stubble scritching my lips, both of us naked from the waist up. Grant was still on the floor, snoring. Quickly, she and I put our shirts back on and stared at each other:
YANIRA [into my ear]: He can't know about this, okay?
My mind flashed to Grant standing over us: Yanira had her back to him the whole time, didn't see what I had. Or did it even happen at all? What the fuck did we smoke?
But even under the obvious betrayal of my friend, I felt sad. I was really into her and it turned out she was into me too. There was an easy connection that simply could not continue without confrontation.
ME [my ears hot]: Right. Of course.
Heading back south, I let Grant drive while Yanira sat shotgun. This let me sprawl out in the backseat and slept like a stone. When I woke up several hours later, we were twenty minutes from Gray's house, but there were only two of us in the car.
ME: Hey– where's Yanira?
GRANT: We broke up.
ME: Oh. Shit. But– where is she now?
GRANT: I left her at a bus station in Ocala.
I wanted to say something else, but the way he stared at me sideways, gripping the steering wheel of my car like he wanted to rip it off its column and use it to break my jaw, I knew he knew. Whether he saw us or Yanira fessed up, we never talked about it. And I never saw Yanira again.
++++
ME: Why're you thinking about Yanira now? It's been years.
GRANT: This is the exit I pulled over and booted her ass out of the car for being a cheating whore.
I looked around at two lanes of hot interstate asphalt, no streetlights or business, just sawgrass and swamp stretching to the horizon, the next exit ten miles in either direction.
ME: You can't be serious. You just dropped her out here? On the side of the road?!
He stared at me with dead shark eyes.
GRANT: I was a different Grant back then.
++++
We'd each drained a 64oz Big Gulp and halfway to Gainesville needed to pull over and piss, stretch our legs. The next rest stop had no tourists, just a State Trooper vehicle parked out front to keep watch over German tourists who kept getting murdered at these rural rest stops along the Florida turnpike.
The trooper in the car paid neither of us any mind, but I couldn't help but worry about the tray of spacecakes in our trunk. I swore I could smell them from inside the urine-soaked restroom where we stood pissing side-by-side until Grant paused his stream and backed into one of the stalls without zipping up:
GRANT: Give me five minutes. I have to take a shit.
Heading back to the car, I sat alone in the Toyota. In the rear-view I could observe the State Trooper in his car, picking his nose three knuckles deep, flicking his brain-worms out the window at lizards. I also had a view of the men's room exit.
On the floor by the passenger seat, Grant's backpack was unzipped, the speckled cover of his composition book peeking through. Checking the mirror again, I picked up the notebook: he'd written "SECOND NOVEL" on its cover. Creative.
Quickly I began flipping, scanning. He'd written everything longhand, but after the first three pages of notes – all dated six months ago with headings like "Protagonists", "Main Plot" and "Subtext" – his writing became random, disorganized, with entire paragraphs redacted in heavy, angry scribbles. He'd also made cartoon drawings in the margins of me as a pig-nosed baby with captions like:
- "Boo hoo! Daddy pays my bills but I have to go to college!"
- "Wah! I wrote her a screenplay but she only fucks my roommate!"
- "Antidepressants and weed keep me from getting laid! Wah!"
His cartooning was pretty good: mean but sharp, not totally untrue. And that allowed me to say these words aloud for the first time:
ME: Grant… I... can't... fucking... stand... you.
But even as I admitted that to myself in the rear-view, I was smiling. Because even though he couldn't stand me either, his notebook contained no trace of "SECOND NOVEL" and I was petty enough to get off on that.
I double-checked his pages – there weren't that many – in case his metafictional process was invisible to a low-brow film student like me. But my suspicions were right: there were written notes in a child-like voice about his drunk dad beating his mother, who I knew was schizophrenic. There was a crossed-out list of mental health facilities in Fort Lauderdale. There was a five-page repetition of the phrase "Cum on my tummy, son" in an increasingly loose scrawl. There was a phone log for a number in Madrid with a list of call dates and times.
And there on the inside back cover, hidden close to the white threads holding the composition book together, was her name. The one who'd wedged us fully apart. She'd written her name and phone number beneath it in her tight, business-like cursive. A vein in my neck pulsed, my left eye twitched, I heard the roar of the sea.
In the mirror I caught his lean legs exiting the men's room, quickly stuffed his notebook back into his bag. He climbed back in, put his public-restroom shoes up on the dashboard and reported:
GRANT: That cop says we're about two hours out of Gainesville.
ME: Then let's get there already. My ass is sore.
++++
We barrelled into Gainesville with the fuel light on. I pulled into a Shell station to fill up while Grant bought cold beer and snacks so we didn't show up empty-handed. When I went inside to pay for the gas, Grant called Beau from the pay-phone, scribbling directions on the back of a Lotto ticket.
Several pickup trucks' worth of local college girls pulled into the gas station too, climbing out of truck beds and jeeps on their way to wherever the action was. Grant's eyes flicked between tan legs and toned butts flitting between trucks, gas station shop and restrooms. He was holding the phone, but I knew Beau had already hung up:
GRANT [fixating on one]: That little redhead with the Teletubby backpack is a dish.
ME: Yeah, she's cute, but we're just passing through, right?
GRANT: So why don't you go stick your dick in the dirt?
I received that like a slap. Today was the first day in three years I hadn’t taken my Lithium. I didn't know what lay ahead, but spending the whole day alone with him in the car, remembering that Lollapalooza night with Yanira, I felt keenly aware and ashamed of how asexual I'd been.
ME: My dick's just fine where it is, man.
++++
Beau's apartment was a few miles from the U of F campus, and looked just like our building down south: 1970s concrete blocks painted with earth-tones, rusty water-stains on the walls that bloomed into black mildew. Slinging our backpacks, I grabbed the tray of spacecakes from the trunk and we walked up the open-air stairwell to the second floor. Oak trees spilled moss-bearded branches into the breezeway; we ducked under them while following the apartment numbers to the end of the hall.
Standing in front of apartment #12, Grant lit a cigarette and banged on the door:
GRANT [bellowing]: Gainesville Police!
Fumbling sounds from inside, the hiss of aerosol air freshener, then the door opened. There stood good ol' Beau, tense for a moment, then relieved to see us: a shaggier version of his high school self. His hair was grown-out and wild, his goatee wiry, his tan polo shirt replaced by a raver tee with a Photoshop-swirled buddha sitting on top of giant speakers.
BEAU [smiling]: I know these guys.
He hugged me, sweaty under his t-shirt. Looking over his shoulder, I caught a white girl about our age peering out from the kitchen. She was plain but pretty, long hair and no makeup, barefoot. Our eyes met and she waved gently.
BEAU: Oh, hey this is my girl, Steff.
She came out, shook our hands awkwardly before changing her mind and giving us both long back-patting hugs.
STEFF: So nice to finally meet you! I've heard so many stories!
I knew she was talking about Grant. Beau and my overlap didn't hold that many stories, mostly just presence in the same space and time. I held out the plastic bag of beer and snacks, and Steff took it into the kitchen:
ME: Just so you know, the brownies aren’t for snacking. They’re loaded.
She looked at me with a tired expression that she morphed into a smile. Being with Beau, she'd met my type of stoner dude before.
STEFF: Y'all must be hungry from all that driving. I was about to fix some dinner for us, but there's plenty to go around. Tofu fried rice all right?
It was for me, but Grant was always macho about consuming meat with every meal, a practice leftover from football training days. When he nodded enthusiastically, I knew he was trying his best.
The three of us sat on the sectional sofa together. Beau rolled up a tiny joint and we passed it around. His student apartment was a lot like Chuck's: stoner art and thrift shop furniture and head shop tapestries, but he'd also placed a bunch of his own ceramic work on homemade bookshelves.
Steff came out with wooden bowls of tofu fried rice in desperate need of salt, a squirt of lemon, but still the healthiest food I’d eaten in months. We made small talk, and when our plates were empty, she took them away without asking to wash up in the kitchen.
ME [to Beau]: She's super chill and down-to-earth. I like her little hint of Southern accent too. Well done, man.
BEAU: Um, thanks for the... approval? Steff's the best; we've been together for over two years.
After Steff came back into the living room, she almost formally announced:
STEFF: Hon, I'm gonna head over to Janey's so y'all can do your... visit, okay? [smile less real now] Y'all have lots of fun and PLEASE DON'T DO ANYTHING STUPID, okay?
She gave Beau a long kiss and stared into his eyes – an almost maternal warning – then she hugged us and grabbed an already-packed satchel on her way out the door. And in the silence that followed, Beau pulled a baggie of dried mushrooms from the pocket of his jeans and tossed it casually onto the coffee table. It landed on the chess board, interrupting an existing game still in progress.
GRANT: You're my hero, Beau.
I swallowed, my fate sealed.
++++
We nibbled these long, thin dried mushrooms, huddled together on the couch like rats. They tasted of barnyard straw and dust. Beau apologized:
BEAU: I've had these in a drawer for like, seven months. They might not do shit.
They did do shit. Ten minutes after eating them, my stomach began turning itself inside out, bloating up with gas, stabbing me with pain.
ME: Uggghh... is this normal? Aren't you guys feeling this too?
Neither of them was feeling a thing.
Twenty minutes later, I got up to poop. No horror story here, but afterwards I felt much better. When I returned to the sofa, Beau had poured us all big goblets of cheap red wine. I sipped mine slowly:
ME: OK so tell me, what's it gonna be like? When the mushrooms come on?
BEAU: I mean... it's different for everyone. It depends what you're bringing into the experience. You'll see.
Thirty minutes later, I was waiting for a visitor whose face I didn't know, an experience I was trying too hard to imagine.
ME: I'm not feeling anything. Just... a lil' wine buzz.
Beau got up, went to the floor lamp and turned down the dimmer switch. Immediately the room took on a feel of warm candlelight, of campfire, of neolithic ritual.
BEAU [softly]: Close your eyes and let your mind go.
The insides of my eyelids showed me my veins as usual, but slowly my squiggling blood vessels began turning at right angles, forming interlocking geometric patterns that slowly zoomed outwards until they looked... Aztec? Mayan? I knew a bit about those cultures' art and legends and they were some of the earl–
The patterns suddenly burst into roaring flames that filled the field of my mind's-eye's vision and a bare white skull slowly arose from the shadows behind them. Eyeless, it faced me, its jaw opening to howl in pain from the core of its soul, the frequency of it chilled and sickened me. There was death here in this place. The skull screamed as bone roasted in the fire, blackening, flames licking out from eye sockets, from between its teeth, all this boiling loudly inside my own skull until--
Something warm touched my arm and my eyes opened: it was Grant's fingertip. He was watching me intently with his black shark pupils, eyes wild, smiling wide:
GRANT: Hey, how're you doing in there...?
ME [nervous laugh-cry]: I– I don't even know where I am...
Still holding his wineglass, Grant threw his hands up and laughed, arcing gas station merlot all over Beau's beige living room carpet. Instantly sober, Beau leapt to attention:
BEAU: Fuuuuckkk, Steff is not gonna like this--
He returned moments later with a can of foaming stain lifter. Shaking it up, he sprayed a three-dimensional island of white foam that began expanding in the middle of the carpet, leeching the red wine out of the rug into its chemical cloud. The three of us kneeled and stared into it, each simultaneously seeing different faces of our loved ones rising from the foam:
ME [warm]: It's my fourth-grade art teacher, Miss Gail–
BEAU [humbled]: It's my father, he's disappointed in me–
GRANT [hissing]: It's my mother, she's screaming for help–
Grant grabbed his Bic lighter and flicked it:
GRANT: Lemme see this in proper light–
Holding the flickering flame above the still-rising foam, the shadows began turning, faces changing, mouths opening, each speaking in a different voice to one of us. I was only able to hear:
MISS GAIL: Danny, I know life's been difficult for you, but don't ever forget what I see in you. God has touched you with the spark of Creation. Start using it again.
I hadn't thought about Miss Gail in decades, the first adult in my life to treat me as an artist. Tears flowed hot down my cheeks, slid down my neck, moistening my collar. Next to me, Beau withered in shame while Grant bared his teeth at his mother's chaos. The foam peak reached up for his hand, catching the lighter's flame. The entire foam island flashed blue, instantly catching fire.
GRANT: Fuck!
BEAU: Oh NO NO NO NO NO
Flames licked up Grant's arm, his cry more a choke of shame. Throwing his burning shoulder down onto the foam, he rolled over onto it, flattening the foam but spreading the fire wider. Beau pushed him away and tossed a wet towel to the floor, snuffing out flames with a hiss. Behind him, Grant sat up, his t-shirt charred, the shoulder beneath red and shiny.
We all stared at the beige carpet, now wine-soaked, carmelized and melted into sharp points where the fire was hottest.
BEAU: There goes my security deposit.
Grant tried to apologize but couldn't without breaking down into nervous giggles. Collectively, the tension passed, our brains excreting post-danger chemicals that lifted the fungi within us. What was wild got quiet, what was silent began growing very loud. Gathered over the burnt carpet, we joined arms and gritted our teeth as our mushroom trip gained power, towering over the tops of our heads like a tsunami about to wash us all out to sea:
GRANT: My veins are full of electricity, like wires...
BEAU: I'm fiberoptic, man... information's flowing through me...
And then: we melted into each other, language failing, blood pulsing between us as we held onto each other's forearms, the shared energy flooding the room from floor to ceiling.
There was, at some point, a knock on the door: three visiting friends of Beau's just dropping by who found us deep in a shamanic state, none of us able to form coherent sentences. One of them – "Mark with a K" – took a set of bongo drums from his rucksack and handed them to me.
++++
Knowing fully how cliché this would sound when I told the story years later, but Mark’s bongos played me. I'd never owned a pair, had zero musical aptitude, even after studying bass guitar for a year with my delicate hands. But that night, those bongos became an extension of my body and my mind; talking percussion came through me as I played repeating variations without thinking, without second-guessing, like I'd been a master in a past life.
I can't play them like that now. But the lesson I took from the mushrooms wasn't that I could play the bongos; it was that at any time it was possible for Doubting Danny Goldman to lose all awareness of himself and dissolve into music, let his blood and body speak wordlessly through a primitive instrument.
Apparently I drummed for hours, long into the night, thoughtless, without pause. As the mushroom trip finally began to recede and I became aware of my selfhood again, my hands just… stopped playing, and everyone else in the room began to applaud, snapping me out of my trance:
MARK WITH A K: Dude, that was amazing! You carried us with you for like, hours!
GRANT: I didn't know you could play like that...
ME [truly]: Neither did I.
And like the rising of the sun, my re-entry to the mundane world happened in tiny degrees, the crawling geometric chaos vanishing in ruby sunlight. Sensing the party vibes ending, Beau's buddies split to let us come down in peace.
As I squeezed my expanded self back into an ego that suddenly felt one size too tight, Beau got up and opened the front door. Outside, the parking lot was rain-soaked and steaming; it had stormed all night but just cleared up.
BEAU [to me]: You had a good first trip, right? [I had, but would be processing it for years] Because for me, those shrooms were old and weak.
ME: Th-those were... WEAK?!
Grant's face lit up and he smiled like a wolf. The door to more damage was opened, incoming.
BEAU: Mushrooms fruit after the rain. Let me call my buddy Rich. He's an ACR who knows all the best spots outside of town.
ME: What's an "ACR"..?
BEAU: "Alachua County Resident." A local who's not connected to the university. Y'know, a townie.
GRANT: He means redneck.
BEAU: No dickbreath, I mean local. Rich knows exactly where to pick a load of the freshest, best mushrooms for free. But they're only out for a few hours, so we've gotta hustle.
I swallowed, stunned but not afraid. It was clear that whatever my own life experience, I'd dipped just one tiny toe into the shallow end of a much deeper pool.
BEAU: ‘Cause we're gonna need strong mushrooms if we're going all the way to New Orleans.
End of Episode Three
