| Ladies and Gentlemen, Spike Fasto: "Okay, they're definitely starting to kick in." The brown marble walls leading to the Getty Center's bathrooms were tuning up, preparing to begin the show. The swirls of white in the smooth surfaces were twisting slightly, testing their natural boundaries and breaking outside of them. I knew I was about to have my mind blown apart and reassembled. Lucas, naturally, wasn't having it. He reacted to my comment with his typical brand of condescending cool, his lip crinkling easily into a note-perfect smirk. Lucas was convinced that mushrooms would have no effect on him, his Herculean constitution being what it was. Lucas could drink ten shots and not get drunk. Lucas could hit a barrel-sized gravity bong ten times without receiving a buzz. Mushrooms? Mushrooms would not be able to find a single chink in his armor. His forty dollars, along with his bus fare, would be wasted on watching Rachel and me freak out while gazing at profoundly uninteresting works of art in Santa Monica's premier gallery. But I knew that Lucas had no idea what he was in for. Hell, I'd already done it twice and I had no idea what I was in for. That was the wondrous, delightful quality of the psychedelic mushroom: it always opened the door to the undiscovered country, the untapped level of the subconscious. As Lucas and I made chit-chat, Rachel came out of the women's bathroom, visibly confused by some facet of the surroundings. When I asked what that facet might have been, she said something indecipherable about the status of the water fountains. I took this as a sign that she and I were on the same page. "What about the wall, man?" I prompted, "Check it out." "Oh, I saw the walls," she responded absurdly. "There's some freaky stuff going on in here." Well, at least Rachel was willing to admit the patently obvious. Now if only Lucas would be so bold. I needn't have worried. As we moved into the first gallery, a stately room enclosing fascinating examples of Greek sculpture, Lucas began to show signs of cracking. He followed Rachel like a lapdog, seeking reassurance that the sky really wasn't falling. The sky might still have been intact (at least as far as I knew at the time), but the art was another story. The statues in the room began to seem quite odd to me, almost as if they were spinning ornaments hanging from some unseen Christmas tree. Passing around them was unnaturally amusing, so I made sure to circle each of them several times. Upon moving with some difficulty to an upstairs hallway lined with glass, I was able to observe that the natural world had gone haywire as well. An entire hillside of the Los Angeles countryside was in tumult, its wildly colored trees surging up and down like fantastic waves. If not for the thought of attractions yet to come, I think I could have stayed standing in that corridor for the remainder of the trip, entranced by the smooth undulation of that vegetation. Rachel and Lucas stepped through a door and out onto a balcony where I could still see them clearly. I didn't even think of following, knowing that their always stormy emotions concerning each other couldn't help but be heightened during this experience. Feeling somewhat awkward, I watched them embrace in the wind like all the movie couples of all eras rolled into a single pair of icons. That, I thought, is the quintessential romantic moment (though they probably would never realize it). When they came back in, Rachel let loose the first tears that would lead the charge for many to come that day. Her relationship with Lucas, doomed to fail as it was because he had decided not to return to USC for school the next year, was tearing at her, and the shrooms had smashed her defenses. Adding to the uncomfortable situation was the fact that there wasn't anything to be said to her, because she wouldn't say anything about it. How utterly feminine. Therefore, I made up my mind to have a good time regardless. Browsing through the art, I was able to find specimens that blew me away. On a recent return trip to the museum I discovered a painting I had seen on shrooms that day which was a representation of the martyrdom of a saint in front of some crumbling ruins. During my trip, however, it became a much more heartening scene, as the saint's assailants were not grabbing stones to murder the holy man, but rather to reconstruct the temple I saw in the background. It was rising, piece by piece, brick by brick, in front of my eyes. Consider my mind boggled. In a painting of Greek water gods, I was able to watch the minions of Poseidon literally swimming through fantastically sparkling water, their broad arms and lithe torsos rising and falling rhythmically in the churning sea. In a nature scene, I could have counted all the tiny hairs on the coat of a grazing rabbit. And of course, nearly every work seemed to become a three-dimensional piece, most notably Van Gogh's. That guy, let me tell you. He seemed to be painting exclusively for those of us on psychedelic drugs. Our group was not much interested in talking. Rachel was still crying, so that avenue was out, and Lucas didn't seem to have any greater ambition than to be freaked out by security guards and lick Rachel's ear. And freaked out they were. Near as I could tell, they were being shadowed by some Verne Troyer look-alike who had it in for them. Personally, I couldn't see how we could possibly be evading the attention of the authorities. In a sensible world, everyone at the museum would have had it in for us. We were loud as hell when we did speak, and usually we were expressing how it felt to have our minds melt inside our skulls, then to have them leak out our ears onto the floor, and then to step on them while they made repugnant squishing sounds. If we had held signs which said I'M ON DRUGS in ten foot letters made of flaming dog feces I doubt we would have been more obvious. But no retaliation from The Man or any of his associates was forthcoming, and eventually I had to go to the restroom. Like a small child. Because I have the bladder of a four-year-old girl. Or her eighty-year-old grandmother. So I left my comrades in the darkness of a room covered with medieval art hoping that they wouldn't proceed to rip their clothes off and have sex while we were still in public. My fears could be seen as justified, considering they had done just about everything else already and were still extremely stoned. The way to the bathroom was fraught with many perils, all of them imaginary, and I overcame them all valiantly. Once I had completed the unpleasant business of urinating (which never seems to become more enjoyable, no matter how high you get) I exited and finally found time to put on my headphones, which I had brought along special for the occasion. Guns n' Roses was definitely on the menu. I popped it in, cranked up the volume, and let it hit me like an anvil to the head. You already know there's more |