Michael's Corner

I had an experience recently. I had planned to encrypt it in a fictional narrative, but then thought: Oh, hell, why not come clean.

Despite my age, I do not have a list with checkmarks next to its items. The concept of a bucket list is idiotic. Bucket lists tend to contain nonsense that the left hemisphere of the brain talked us out of because the consequences outweighed the thrill. If an eighty-five-year-old man jumps out of a plane and it goes badly, at least he’s got eight and a half decades of equity under his belt. At worst, he’ll be an office joke or labeled Moron of the Week. If a seventeen-year-old jumps out of a plane and it goes badly, he’s the tragedy of the week, the focal point of a standing-room-only funeral.

But I’m no thrill-seeker. If I can have intimacy with the love of my life, a great cup of coffee every day, watch baseball, and enjoy an occasional bowl of ice cream, I’m way ahead of the game. No underwater spelunking for ol’ Mike D. Still, there’s one somewhat edgy thing that I’ve always wanted to try: Mushrooms! Not portobellos or shiitakes; I crossed those gastronomic fungi off my list years ago when wheeling a shopping cart through the produce section of Genardi’s. I’m talking shrooms.

Now, I may be an idiot, but I’m not an irresponsible idiot. I didn’t buy mushrooms from the bearded man around the corner; I purchased them at a reputable establishment called Brady’s Botanicals. The place is owned and operated by a couple, Roger and Sharon. Brady was their dog, who died of cancer. Since then, Roger and Sharon have formulated edible strains of substances to help cancer patients and those suffering from PTSD. Kathy and I had an interview with Roger. I told him I wanted to tap into parts of my brain that could heighten intimacy. Not for sexual pleasure, but to experience communication with my prefrontal cortex, otherwise the brain’s director and editor, having less sway.

And that’s how mushrooms work: they tamp down the prefrontal cortex and serotonin receptors so the parts of the brain where all the really cool shit happens can chime in and override the editor and director. Why did I decide having this experience was necessary?

A couple walks into an art museum. What’s their purpose for being there? What, if any, enrichment do they hope to derive? They pay the admission fee, get stamped, and their first thought is: How much time do we have to spend here? They have yet to see a single exhibit, and already their brain’s director and editor has become a furunculous entity seeking to limit their experience. Where should we eat afterward? is their next plaguing thought, followed by Will the dog be all right if we’re not home in time to feed him? And I hope the lawn guy shows up today.

That’s no way to enjoy something meant to titillate your receptors. And thus Kathy and I departed Brady’s Botanicals with two small containers of White Enigma and a third container of another strain. We followed Roger’s instructions to take the entire containers of the White Enigma (a loading dose) and, two weeks later, take pinches of the other strain. Since this was my maiden voyage with an edible, Roger recommended that I do it in the friendly confines of my home. So, on a Sunday night in August, while eating cucumber salads, Kathy and I ingested White Enigma. Was I nervous? I didn’t know what to expect, and I had just dived headfirst into uncharted waters. There was no undoing it; I had consumed the mysterious fungi and was nervous. Kathy put on YouTube and chose a two-hour show about far-flung, exotic destinations: civilizations built on pillars of salt and monasteries in places that required the agility of a mountain goat, etc. Before long, she made comments on colors, textures, and why certain places held allure for her.

“Are you watching?” she asked. “Look at that!” she urged.

I did not share Kathy’s fascination. “This is terrible,” I told her.

Kathy appeared bewildered. Surely it couldn’t be what we were watching that I found objectionable.

“I feel terrible,” I told her.

“How so?” she asked.

I felt terrible everywhere. But what assailed me most was the hollow of my throat. It was on fire. Moreover, my head felt like it was constricting and far too heavy for my neck.

“Try and walk around,” Kathy urged, but no sooner had I reached the center of the room than nausea became a third affliction. I returned to the sofa where Kathy uttered words to inspire calm, but I was having, as they say in Mushroom Land, a central nervous system meltdown. The regions of the brain where all the really cool shit happens were way too loud and causing me to experience physical trauma: my blood pressure was elevated, and the veins in my head and neck were visible. As I grew increasingly debilitated, Kathy, an RN, after taking my blood pressure and checking my airways, said, “I’m putting you to bed.” Next, she handed me something for anxiety because, from head to toe, I was beginning to tremble visibly. I didn’t question what the tiny pill was. Moreover, my mouth was like sandpaper. Before long, I asked her, “Why is my stomach so distended?” She told me, “Because you just drank two 24-ounce thermoses of water.” I thought I had just sipped enough water to swallow a pill. I was losing time, and three-dimensional space was collapsing in on me; I would blink, and, that quickly, Kathy was in another part of the room, her voice pulsing in irregular modulations. I repeatedly asked her for the time. Why? I had just enough of my logical mind intact to understand that a mushroom trip, however bad, has a shelf life, and although I was powerless to regulate it, eventually my prefrontal cortex, or director, would reclaim control.

For what felt like an eternity, Kathy had a firm hold of my hand and was guiding me through a hellish wilderness where the worst distortions of reality prevailed. I couldn’t fathom how she was able to function while I was so debilitated. Then, at long last, Kathy seemed lighter of heart. She sensed that my nightmare was ending and that I was nearing the light. We were three hours into a trip meant to last five hours.

“Will it bother you if I put the TV on?” she asked.

“I’ll be okay,” I assured her.

And now it was time for the real games to begin! Kathy had been watching a series on Netflix, some Spanish piece dubbed in English. Last night, she had dozed off and on during the last episode and wanted to rewatch it. I came to bed after watching baseball and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

“Are you sure you didn’t watch it?” I asked her. When she assured me, “Yes,” I asked, “Then why is it familiar?” I knew what the characters were about to say before they said it. Then I began saying the dialogue aloud. Even stranger, the visuals were familiar. The human brain is an amazing mechanism. I had lain there, sound asleep, and my subconscious had soaked up dialogue to the point where it could create accurate visuals. When the show ended, Kathy and I lay side by side, hacking into each other’s brains. She was answering questions I was sure I didn’t ask aloud, and vice versa. In Mushroom Land, this phenomenon is called auditory hallucinations. Often, we uttered the same sentence simultaneously, not knowing which of us was thinking the thought and who was doing the parroting.

Next came phase three of the experience. My body recovered from the trauma of phase one, and I was up and ambulating. My penchant for irony kicked into overdrive; the wit and humor I tend to cram into 100-thousand-word narratives that take two years to write gushed like a body of water whose dam has broken. It was unimaginable that a night that began in hell would end with laughter. But the night wasn’t over. A fourth phase awaited us. It’s the one people fear most before venturing into Mushroom Land: Unresolved issues, otherwise subliminal matters that, for better or worse, form relationships.

The year is 2001. Kathy and I wait for the traffic to thin before leaving the fireworks at Cooper River. Andrew is in the back seat. He just turned five. We were chit-chatting—mindless and unfiltered drivel—when Kathy accidentally blurted out the phrase, “My ex-husband.” After Andrew was born, Kathy and I discussed whether and when we would confess our past marriages.

Warily, I turned my head to see how Kathy’s misspeak had landed. I could see Andrew’s mind fracture. His “mommy” having a past marriage was a concept beyond the grasp of a five-year-old. And thus I had a dilemma, a choice. I could have told Andrew that his mother and I didn’t meet until we were well into our thirties, but that the only part of our lives that mattered came after he was born. Instead, I chose to balance the universal scales and confessed that I, too, had a past marriage.

Parents are supposed to be gatekeepers. That night, a five-year-old went to the fireworks, oohed and aahed, and then left grappling with what, for him, was an unimaginable reality because his gatekeepers screwed up. I got off easy. Why? Apparently, in the minds of five-year-old boys, dads having ex-wives is not an unpardonable sin. The landscape is far more treacherous for the mom in that scenario. Kathy having an ex was a bridge too far. I went to bed that night, hoping a night that ended with a child learning something at too delicate an age would blow over and be forgotten. Unfortunately, just like the last episode of that Spanish series on Netflix, once something gets lodged in that complex network we call a brain, it tends to stick around; the residuals travel far into our lives even if we don’t remember the root cause.

We don’t choose our roles; they’re assigned to us, handed out by a world that understands far better than we do how malleable and fragile our minds and bodies are. Someone has to drag the cross up the hill, and someone has to play the impotent bystander. For years, I watched Kathy and Andrew exist on each other’s razor’s edge. It’s a precarious place, but a place more potent than any drug, for every encounter had the potential to reach the pinnacle of love or combust into white-hot flames.

The next night, Kathy and I had Andrew over for dinner to admit our mushroom escapade. We walked him through each phase: the trauma, the auditory hallucinations, the humor, and lastly how even the best-intending parents screw up their kids. He sat there grinning at his middle-aged Baby Boomer parents like they were nascent experimenters who were finally breathing air outside Plato’s cave. His grin was his way of telling us that he was long healed, and that for those who are truly loved, Hell has no gravity.

And so that was my mushroom experience. I would definitely recommend it. But first, you should understand why you want to try it, acquire it from a reputable source that can give you good guidance, and do it with someone you love and trust.