When I was 19, I was really into psychedelics. I treated them as a thing I could do all the time, which I more or less could due to working part time and living with my parents. It was easy to just kinda waste time, get high at the beach, call it life changing, and feel like I was better/smarter/more ascended than everyone else, as if I was the only person doing that in Vancouver.
Hannah had just recently finished a month-long mushroom binge, so, much like me, she thought she was hot shit. She called me, told me she got a number for quad dipped acid, $10 a pop. We agreed that they were probably lying about the dose given the price, we agreed that we hoped that they weren’t lying. She tells me to come on out to the boonies Friday night while her boyfriend’s out of town.
I had a soft spot for the boonies out where Hannah lives. Some parts of the Fraser Valley are clean-residential, streets of manicured lawns in front of equally manicured houses imperceptible in their differences from their neighbours, full of nuclear families and retired couples. My grandparents lived there when I was growing up; I have a vague, possibly false memory of trick or treating in their neighbourhood when I was little, before my sister was born. I didn’t see the Valley outside of visiting grandma and grandpa a couple of times a year until I was 18, so I figured the whole area was like that. Wrong I was. Once I met Hannah and started going out there semi often to see her, I saw a whole new side to the area. She lived in the part that looked as if a highway service area had been expanded to the size of a city, crawling with lost souls who had nowhere to go after the provincial government deinstitutionalised and closed down the two biggest psychiatric hospitals. Strip clubs, random acts of violence, the kind of drug activity to be expected of any town in the Lower Mainland. Later I would come to know Golden Ears and all of her high mountains and low rivers. The Fraser Valley is a many faceted thing.
Hannah picked me up from the bus stop at Haney Place Mall on Friday the 13th as the sun was going down. We walked back to her apartment and shot the shit until her friends Sam and Hunter arrived; they wanted to see what the quad dipped acid was all about, Sam needing to see how we reacted to it before deciding if he should ever take it himself, Hunter wanting to assess if it was worth buying and reselling. When the sun had completely set, the four of us walked to the elementary school Hannah and Sam had gone to as kids, ten minutes away by foot. We killed time on the playground, Hunter too tall for the monkey bars, Hannah’s hips too wide for the tunnel in the dinky little jungle gym, before going around to the back of the school at The Guy’s request.
The Guy arrived, moving all business-quick, brusquely tearing open a pizza delivery bag full of all manner of substances. “Four quads, forty bucks,” Hannah and I handed him a twenty each that he pocketed before digging through all of his pills and potions. He passed me and Hannah four little plastic baggies, sagely wished us luck, and took off as quickly as he had arrived, but not quickly enough for Hunter to not get his number and get in a quick “take it easy out there brother.”
“Why the fuck did he say good luck?” Hannah asks. The boys and I shrugged our shoulders and the four of us walked back to the front of the school to sit on the steps. Hannah and I took our respective doses, tilting our heads up to stare at the full moon through the street lights, waiting for the tabs to disintegrate under our tongues. Sam took some 2C-B he had rattling around in his pocket, Hunter (thankfully) opted to stay Cali sober for the evening. Hannah started talking about how it was funny that The Guy had a pizza bag because there’s this rumour that one of the pizza places near here is a massive drug front. Urban legend has it that you can order party favours using pizza code when you call for pick up and they’ll stick the baggies right in the box, swimming in olive oil and grease fat. That all too familiar casual-ambient threat of vomit started to creep in right as a sound like a gun shot goes off behind the school. We were sure it was just someone with car troubles but reckoned we should get out of there anyway.
The four of us started making our way back to Hannah’s, Hunter keeping up with his own animated chatter, Sam quietly taking in the sights through his grubby oversized glasses, Hannah and I keeping our mouths shut in case we nervously barf and embarrass ourselves. Things weren’t looking so good all around us, or all within us for that matter, and we focussed resolutely on moving each foot in front of the other until we could get back indoors. During the whole walk back Hunter was engaging in a text back-and-forth with The Guy, negotiating prices on large orders —we reached the oasis of the apartment and he told us “I’ll be right back” and to take it easy on our own for a few minutes. Once he closes the sliding glass door behind him and hops over the fence of Hannah’s little ground level terrace, all hell breaks loose. There were faces and beings in everything, even the static apartment air in front of us, giving the illusion of cryptic glass walls closing in around us. Everything was too cold, then too hot, much too hot, we’re sweating in March, Hannah and I stripping down to close to nothing, writhing on the cold tiles of the kitchen. Sam meekly called out “I’m having a bad trip too guys,” Hannah yelled back “oh my god, shut the fuck up Sam!”
Hannah got up and stumbled to the front door, locked it, stumbled to the back sliding glass door, locked it too, stumbled back to the kitchen to crouch down on the floor, shake me gently and say “come with me.” We stumbled to her big desktop computer, she turned on her webcam, and started recording. She sat in her desk chair and turned to face me, I took my queue and backed into the bench in front of her Yamaha keyboard. We spoke for an unknown but long stretch of time, grew to know each other, learned one another. Hannah told me she worries that she’s an incomplete person because the thing she cares most about is being perceived as “cool and casual” by every friend and stranger on the street. She asked me when my birthday is, “May 29th,” “that’s my best friend’s birthday,” she smiled wide eyed, pupils all immense.
We heard a sound from her bedroom, the window opening, and then someone entering. Hannah and I sat paralysed while Sam, long forgotten, stayed stagnant in child’s pose on the living room floor. A tall lanky figure appeared in the doorway but before we could think to scream or react in any way whatsoever, we heard Hunter go “yoooo why’d you lock me out?” He came into the light laughing, saying “Hannah, dude, it’s true about the pizza place, that’s where I had to go to meet The Guy.” She laughed shrilly and it was hard to tell if she actually found it funny or if it was just entirely too much to hear at that moment. We remembered our nakedness and the catatonic Sam and started reaching for our clothes on the floor with clumsy disconnected fingers, still trapped in glass boxes. Hunter caught the hint, “oh shit,” got two plush animal suits from Hannah’s room and tossed them at us before bending down to help Sam up off the floor. “Let’s go for a drive y’all.” We dutifully nodded, Hannah and I slipped our undressed selves into the kigurumis, hers a red panda, mine a black cat. Before we left, Hannah went to stop the recording only to find that her computer had shut down. We lost everything.
Hunter packed us up in his car, Sam in the front seat, me and Hannah cowering in the back. Hunter’s keeping it light, connecting the aux, “any requests girls?” “I dunno like…T he Beatles I guess?” Hannah answered. “That all good with you man?” he asked Sam, who didn't respond. Hunter shuffled the entire Beatles catalogue and A Day In The Life started playing, “oh god, no, not this one, too much,” Hannah whined. “Can you play Please Mr. Postman?” Hunter obliged and furthermore repeated the song on loop on Hannah’s immediate second request. “I fucking hate this thing,” I heard her grumble next to me, holding some hated stuffed octopus she found on the floor of the car.
Hunter pulled into the nearest gas station and sent us into the 7/11 with $20 for snacks. Sam was still close to catatonic, slumped in the passenger seat, his presence omitted by me. Hannah and I schlepped inside in our silly animal suits and after much careful deliberation agreed that those blue/red/white cyclone popsicles were the only thing we could stand eating. We took a box of eight and went to stand behind the only other customer standing in front of the register. We had been so focussed on acting cool and casual that we hadn’t noticed before that the guy in front of us had a knife and was threatening our midnight cashier for the register. The air was all glass walls again and the Doritos are ensouled so what use could we have possibly been? Better to stand over here in the corner with this box of popsicles and wait for someone to do something. Hunter, tall, lanky, and vegan as ever, came in looking for us and with a simple “hey hey hey buddy, cut it out,” in his pacific northwest slacker drawl and some passive handwaving, buddy leaves. Hannah and I pay for the cyclones.
We drove towards a lookout point only I had never seen. The road looked stretched out and eternal —up ahead looked as if it went all the way to heaven. When we reached the bottom of the incline, a car started speeding towards us backwards, a game of chicken. Hunter steered into the ditch, letting the maniac pass us by, still going backwards.
The lookout point of course moonlights as a hook up spot. There was a car in front of us with two people making love in the front seat; “hey look, there’s people fucking in there,” Hunter boy-laughs, laying on the horn while Hannah and I begged him to stop. All movement in the other car stopped and the guy got out of the passenger side, zipped up his jeans, slammed the door, marched towards us. He knocked on the passenger side window, Hunter obliged and opened it. Buddy leaned right over a suddenly very alert and very terrified Sam and started to violently menace our driver before going “woah, Hunter, is that you man? Shit man, sorry man, I thought you were a cop.” It’s worth mentioning that Hunter did at this time drive an old cop car with the decals stripped off that he had gotten from one of the police station auctions. As we drove off Hannah turned to me; “that guy was ready to fuck up a cop —he was gonna kill Sam, then Hunter, then me, and then you.”
4 am and we were finally back at Hannah’s place —we were nowhere near coming down, only seeming to spiral higher and higher, glass box threatening collapse. I was so scared that it was never going to end that I decided to call the one person I could think of who could help —my dad. I boarded myself up in the laundry room and struggled to type out one of the few numbers I knew by heart, praying that he would pick up despite the late-early hour. He did. “Honey, it’s 4 in the morning, what’s going on?” The glass box shattered and I hyperventilated sick, choking out between ugly gasps “dad, dad, I took a lot of acid, like a lot a lot, like eight tabs yunno?” Brief pause on the other line, then a slow chuckle, then a full bodied suppressed laugh, then “are you fucking stupid?” I laughed too, “yes.” He told me he’ll meet me first thing in the morning, downtown Vancouver, for coffee and a walkandtalk, then we can get brunch or something at one of those places where everything is $4.99. When I came back out to the living room, everyone was calm. The worst was over.
I arrived disheveled and wide eyed at around 8 am to meet my dad and ramble crazed about everything I could put into words. I didn’t stop talking even when busy eating three triple grilled cheeses with cranberry sauce.
I called in sick to work three days in a row; during one of those days Hannah called me to tell me that she read in the local paper that someone was in fact shot behind the elementary school that night.
For all the years since, I have had the pervasive feeling that I am dreaming an entire life in a vacuum, that one day I will wake up and I will be in the back of Hunter’s car again while Please Mr Postman plays on loop.