So much for the tolerant left

 

The first time I was held back was in sixth grade, when my stepfather moved my mom and me to this giant house on a private island resort right on the edge of the Atlantic. I never appreciated this privilege, and in fact actively resented it. I would try to hide the fact that I was loaded from other kids. But it was a beautiful place, with giant palms and water oaks towering high above the ocean. You could walk out onto one of the various balconies and hear waves crashing on the sand, a pleasant sort of white noise that played at all hours of the day. It was here that my stepfather enrolled me at a Catholic private school, which, in hindsight, served his own obsession with appearances more so than anything else. The administration claimed their curriculum was “more advanced” than my previous public school’s. They said I had no chance of succeeding in “their version” of seventh grade, so they strongly suggested that I repeat sixth grade, and my parents agreed. I’m sure my abysmal test scores from my previous school also didn’t help matters. This made me quite a bit more acne-ridden and awkward than my peers, many of whom gave me a wide berth because I was very tall and always scowling. Early on, however, I made friends with some self-proclaimed misfits, who were rebels in appearance only, dressing in the emo, pop-punk fashion of the time, that being skinny girl jeans and Hot Topic tees bought by their rich island parents. Taste in music was about the only thing I shared with this group of faux misfits, so we formed a band, but they kicked me out after realizing that I didn’t know how to play a single instrument. At some point I met a pudgy boy named Aaron who wore thick-rimmed glasses and pocket protectors. I remember during one miserable school camping trip, this kid Aaron and I serendipitously bunked together, at which time we struck up a conversation about SimCity 3000, and from there it was a weak kind of kinship. We were quite different personality-wise. He took his grades very seriously and was very much a brownnoser, while I did not take my grades very seriously and was very much not a brownnoser, although I didn’t really make any trouble, because I was subtle about my rebellion, a quiet storm. I preferred not to make waves. Waves were too much of a hassle for me. My rebellion manifested in not doing schoolwork and sleeping in class and staying up real late playing video games and listening to old ’80s music and abusing my prescription Adderall. I was big into PC gaming back then, Counter-Strike Source, Team Fortress 2, Final Fantasy XI, Warcraft, that sort of stuff, and my music of choice was almost exclusively old stuff that was recorded way before I was born. I was big into The Beatles for a while, then eventually got into The Smiths. “Half a Person” was basically my teenage anthem. “Sixteen, clumsy, and shy, the story of my life.” Back then, my sole goal in life was basically to drop out of reality, to do my own thing whenever possible. Everything was a big joke to me, a parody. This, of course, was a defense mechanism, to guard myself from the harsh, intimidating expectations of modern reality. I think this air of faux-cool detachment was what drew Aaron to me, he was drawn in like some sort of awe-struck magnet. He looked up to me in a sort of misguided way. I liked the same nerdy things he liked but was also somehow a sardonic fuckup who didn’t take anything seriously. “If only I could be like him, if only I could not care,” that sort of thing. I did care though, I just pretended otherwise. I remember one time, when we were taking an algebra test, I noticed him looking at his water bottle a lot, and then I noticed he had taped the test answers to the backside of the wrapper so that he could slyly read the answers through the water itself. I whispered to him, “You? Doing that? I can’t believe it.” And he just looked at me with this look of absolute shame and embarrassment on his face. In hindsight, maybe I was a bad influence on him. Maybe I rubbed off on him in the wrong ways. I spent most of my time at school either with my head on the desk or drawing comics. I used to draw these little comics with this crude bald stick figure dude who wore big black sunglasses. He would make social commentary and tell offensive jokes. One of the comics got me into some trouble, actually, because it had the n-word in it, and one of the teachers found it in the wastebasket, at which point they gave it to the principal, and the next thing I knew, I was being called up to the front office for a little chat. Like an idiot, I guess I had written my name somewhere on the paper, or maybe all the teachers were just aware of my comics, because some of my comics were passed around from kid to kid. Thinking back, I was actually pretty popular, but not in any sort of positive way, more in an infamous kind of way. Some kids looked up to me the same way Aaron looked up to me, but most just saw me as a cautionary tale. I remember one kid, Austin, was very into my comics and would always tell me stuff like, “You should work for Adult Swim, dude.” Needless to say, I never ended up working for Adult Swim. None of my comics exist anymore, but I can draw the stick figure guy from memory, which isn’t actually a big feat because he’s very simple to draw. Anyway, the headmaster sat me down and said something like, “I appreciate this kind of humor, I really do, but this just isn’t appropriate for school, and you should really know that.” And I did know that, of course, but who fucking cares? And then he said, “So, I can either expel you, or you can write an essay on a topic of your choosing, within reason, of course.” I was happy to take the expulsion, but my mom wasn’t, so she made me pick the essay. The topic we landed on was “The Recording of Revolver,” which was my favorite Beatles record at the time, and the principal’s favorite band was The Beatles, he had Beatles stuff all over his office. I remember I put a lot of effort into that essay, probably because the topic interested me so much. I even went to the library a couple times for research. I remember the principal, after reading it, said, “Did your dad write this?” And no, my dad did not write this. My dad lived five hours away.

 

The second time I was held back was more of a subtle process. I wasn’t at the same private school anymore, because I had told my old counselor, “Look, I hate school, and this place is really expensive, so I kind of feel bad for wasting my mom’s money,” and I guess I made a good argument because the counselor reluctantly agreed with me. Maybe he thought I was a hopeless case or something. “I don't get paid enough to fix kids like this,” is something he might have been thinking at the time. He talked to my mom, and after some convincing on my part, she put me back in public school, where I proceeded to do absolutely nothing with my life. Everything was a big joke to me, a parody. I spent most days walking off campus, wandering around seedy downtown, meeting all sorts of crazy, borderline dangerous people, one of whom was a homeless dude who pulled porn out of his pocket, showed it to me, and said something like, “Printed it from the library. Pretty nice, huh?” No, not nice. Gross. Get away from me. Anyway, because of my truancy and general lack of giving a shit, I failed almost all my classes and was required to “make them up” during the school year, so while on paper I was a junior and eventually a senior, I was still taking all freshman and sophomore classes during those years. It was around this time that I met my best friend. We met through a girl, her name was Alison. I knew Alison had a boyfriend named Robert, but I would talk to her on the phone every night anyway, flirting and whatnot, without any real intention of winning her over. I was just an incorrigible flirty, and still am. At school one day, Alison introduced me to Robert, and from that moment, I was Robert’s boyfriend and Alison was basically out of the picture. Robert and I were not sexually involved or anything like that, it was all platonic, but we shared a sort of soul and were basically inseparable. We’d spend every waking hour of the day with each other, which Alison hated to the point that she eventually spread rumors that Robert and I were gay together and “that’s why we broke up,” which was not true at all but was funny as hell, so Robert and I would lean into the lie a little bit when people brought it up. We both loved music, Final Fantasy, and smoking cigarettes. Marlboros, Lights. He would stay over at my house every weekend, and we would take Adderall and play video games and smoke cigarettes on my private bedroom balcony, just talking about random stuff until the sun came up, all of which felt super deep and meaningful at the time. One weekend we just lay in my giant bed together watching Dragon Ball Z DVDs all day and night. We made it through the Saiyan Saga and about halfway through the Namek Saga. His dog would join in on these hangout sessions. His name was Hannibal. And despite the name, he was the sweetest black lab you’d ever meet. I remember I used to wear this oversized multicolor bohemian sweater, and one time I put this sweater on Hannibal and he wore it for like a full hour. It was the goofiest shit we’d ever seen. We took a picture of him wearing the sweater with my digital camera. This picture has somehow survived all the MySpace and Photobucket wipes that came years and years later. It’s the only surviving picture of my bedroom from that era, so it’s like a window into another world, another time and place that I can now only remember through myth and legend.

 

 

It was on the day of my eighteenth birthday that I sauntered into the counselor’s office and told him I was dropping out of both high school and reality. I told him, “Look, I’m done with school and there’s no legal way you can make me stay,” and, well, that was it. In that moment, I’m sure this counselor was thinking the same thing my old private school counselor had been thinking all those years before. I hated school, and I wasn’t going to come around. It was all a big joke to me, a parody. There was nothing my mom could do either, she was never very assertive or parental to begin with, so she begrudgingly supported my dropout as long as I promised to get my GED, which I did, and I passed that thing with basically perfect scores, which wasn’t hard to do considering one of the questions was literally, “Who is the current president of the United States of America?”

 

And it was Obama, because it was 2009.

 

It was around this time that I became obsessed with Syd Barrett. I thought he was shadowy and mysterious and handsome, and he had this reputation in the late ’60s as some sort of mad wizard recluse genius, which was an aesthetic that very much appealed to me at the time. I also wanted to be seen as a sort of mad wizard recluse genius. I was very much about appearances. I didn’t actually like Syd’s music very much, so the whole thing was kind of superficial, but I did like that one song, “Dark Globe,” which, back then, sounded like the crazy wisdom of a man who had dropped out of reality through some secret door accessible only through the imbibing of some seriously psychedelic shit. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to drop out of reality.

 

 

Little did I know back then that Syd Barrett was basically just fucking batshit insane, due to serious mental problems mixed with one too many tabs of acid, but even if I had known that, it probably wouldn’t have changed my trajectory in the slightest. When I got an idea in my head, it was impossible to deter me, and I had gotten it in my head that I wanted to experiment with a lot of drugs and officially drop out of reality, just like Syd Barrett had done. Nothing was going to stop me. I wanted people to observe me from afar and think, “that dude has done some wild shit and knows some wild things and I’m afraid to even talk to him because he's on a totally different plane than I am.” That was how my brain worked back then, and that’s still kind of how it works even today, unfortunately.

 

Anyway. Robert and I knew this other guy who was also named Robert, whom I’ll call Bob from now on for the sake of differentiation, and Bob was a big hippie type with his own apartment, paid for by his rich mom. He was a little older than us, if I remember correctly, and his hair was already thinning. He was very short and had a beer belly, and he had the puffy, red face of a drunken Irishman, and he often wore a cap, probably to hide his bald spots. At first glance, Bob seemed like a typical Southern boy, but when you started talking to him, you quickly realized he was batshit. He spoke almost exclusively in nonsense and riddles and old ’60s music, with long, drawn-out syllables, like his brain was totally fried or something. Sometimes Robert and I would go over to Bob’s apartment and smoke weed while he and his strange hippie buddies would experiment with harder drugs, like cocaine and mushrooms, none of which I was interested in until I got it in my head that I wanted to drop out of reality for real.

 

And when that happened, I immediately thought of Bob, who was the obvious choice for getting my hands on some harder stuff. My preferred choice was LSD, but LSD was impossible to find on the island, so I settled for mushrooms. I called Bob up, and I remember him saying something like, “Yeah, dude, I can get caps whenever, mail ‘em right to my house, come over next Friday, you and Robert can get shroomin’, I’ll be your guys’ chaperone. It’ll be fucking dope.”

 

So, next Friday night, Robert, Hannibal, and I went over to Bob’s house to drop out of reality. He lived on the second floor of an apartment complex behind the only McDonald’s on the island. His apartment was a pretty standard one-bedroom affair, but with a spacious living room and a big kitchen area, and a screened-in porch off the living room. You had to walk up two flights of stairs and through a brick hallway lined with generic doors to get to his peephole. His living room was basically barren. I don’t remember there being anything on the walls, no paintings, decorations, nothing like that. He lived very much like a frat boy who had just been kicked out of his parents’ house or something, just the bare necessities to keep him alive and entertained. Near the front door, there was a black CRT television pushed up against the wall, with a dark blue couch that could sit three or four people on the opposite wall. His bedroom door was always closed, but I snuck a peek once. There was a mattress on the floor, a shade-less lamp next to it, and an electric guitar and amp. I don’t think he actually played guitar, or if he did, I had never seen him play it.

 

While Bob fiddled with stuff in the kitchen, Robert and I sat on the couch while Hannibal sat by the porch door. Bob eventually stumbled into the living room with a mason jar full of brown, shriveled things. He said, “We can either bake them into a brownie or you can just eat them.” So, of course, Robert and I took the easy path and just ate them, having one each. They tasted like ass and made me gag, but I got them down with huge gulps of water. Bob didn’t have any, though he did smoke copious amounts of weed before and after our ingestion of the magic mushrooms. Thinking back now, Bob was probably not the best chaperone for our first trip into the land of magic mushrooms.

 

The effects were not immediate. I remember sitting around on the floor near the couch for about an hour, talking about video games and music with Robert, who was uncharacteristically quiet for most of the conversation. In between topics, I would say things like, “When’s it going to kick in? I don’t feel anything. Did I really eat shrooms? Nothing’s happening. When’s something going to happen?” At some point, Robert leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes, still awake but evidently somewhere else. Bob went up to him and said, “Robert, how’s it going? Feeling alright?” I don’t remember what Robert said, but he certainly didn’t say the words of a sober person, which prompted Bob to get up real close to Robert’s face and shout, “DON’T WORRY. YOU ARE TRIPPING. EVERYTHING IS FINE. YOU ARE JUST TRIPPING. YOU’RE SAFE,” which prompted Robert to roll over on his side and hide his face in the cushions while mumbling something pretty much incoherent.

 

I was sitting on the floor the whole time, watching this unfold, still thinking to myself that nothing was happening, that the shrooms weren't working, when Bob turned to me and said, “What about you? You OK?” And I told him, “Yeah, I’m fine. Nothing’s happening.” And he said, “Then why haven’t you moved in like an hour? You’re like a plank of wood.” And I said, “Am I? Am I a plank of wood? Is that all I am?” And then he started going, “YOU ARE TRIPPING RIGHT NOW. DON’T WORRY. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE FINE. YOU ARE SAFE. YOU’RE JUST TRIPPING.” I was just sitting there, blinking at him, thinking to myself, what the hell is he talking about? Nothing’s happening. Of course I’m fine. But evidently Bob didn’t think so, so he kept shouting, “YOU ARE TRIPPING. JUST GO WITH THE FLOW. EVERYTHING IS FINE. YOU ARE STILL YOU, JUST DIFFERENT.” Which started to freak me out because I was convinced that I was not, in fact, tripping, and that I was actually totally fine, and, like, please stop yelling at me please. But then Bob’s eyes started bulging out and his lips grew into big flaps and he looked like a straight-up monster. I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, so I crab-walked over to the porch door and opened it with my foot, then sat down on the hard cement out there. Hannibal followed and curled up next to me. I remember the porch light was very dim and everything was real dark out there. I looked down at the cement and saw what I can only describe as twinkles, like little stars going out. I was fascinated by these stars, which, in hindsight, were likely just visual artifacts we all have all the time, but I didn’t realize that in the moment, so I started thinking about that one sci-fi novel I had read months earlier, the one in which these monks are trying to build a supercomputer to record all the names of God. Apparently there were nine billion names, and if they were all recorded, then the universe would end, so the monks enlisted the help of some super smart tech guys to build this supercomputer, to start naming names. The tech guys didn’t believe what the monks were saying, of course, but they helped program the computer anyway because it was a paying job. Once the computer was built and turned on, it started naming names, and the tech guys left the monks’ temple and then went back to their cars in the parking lot or whatever. When they got outside, it was night, and when they looked up, the stars were going out, one by one. The whole world became like a dark globe. Reality dropped out. And it was around this time that reality dropped out for me too, because I must have been looking at those stars going out for over an hour, until Bob came out with some water, which he basically forced me to drink, then he started with the whole YOU ARE TRIPPING routine again.

 

Trying to get away from him, I crab-walked back inside, where I found Robert in the same spot on the couch. He hadn’t moved at all. Hannibal jumped up and curled up next to him, at which point Robert shot up and started patting down the crotch of his pants, repeating, “I think I peed. I have urinated myself. I have soiled my pants. Please, please check, please, is it wet? Do you feel wetness? I think I peed myself. I have urinated. I am wet.” So I did what he said. I crab-walked over to the couch and started patting down his crotch. But his crotch was totally dry, so I told him, “Your pants are totally dry.” But he didn’t believe me. “Are you sure? They’re wet. I can feel it. I can feel it dripping down my leg. My pants are soaked. I am moist. I have peed. I am soiled. I have urinated myself.” I kept trying to convince him otherwise, but Robert just kept going on and on. Bob was there too, going, YOU ARE TRIPPING RIGHT NOW ROBERT, THERE IS NO PEE, but Robert still didn’t believe it. He got up off the couch, nearly fell over, then swayed into the bathroom, where he remained for some time.

 

The next thing I remember was Bob coming out of his bedroom enveloped in thick dope clouds. He had a huge grin on his face and was holding a large machete high above his head, which for some reason felt totally normal. He said, “I’m going into the backyard to cut down some trees,” which also seemed totally normal, so I said, “OK, I’m going to watch some TV,” and that’s what I did. I crab-walked to the television set, pushed the power button with my big toe, then crab-walked back to the couch and propped my back up against it, still sitting on the floor.

 

Then I thought, wait, there’s no backyard, this is a fucking apartment complex, and that’s when I realized that even in this state of epic highness, somehow I was still the most sober person in the room, which started to freak me out a little bit. But reruns of Saturday Night Live were playing on the TV and that quickly eased my mind, got me laughing, because it was some of the most hilarious shit I had ever seen or heard in my life. They were doing some fake news broadcast, and the fake news anchors were on my same wavelength, turning everything into a big joke, a parody of real life.

 

 

This one had me chuckling.

 

 

This one had me basically holding my sides, crippling myself with laughter.

 

 

This one had me totally rapt, no longer laughing but now leaning close into the TV, like I was studying the comedic genius of the parodies at work, trying to figure out what they truly meant.

 

 

At this point I was completely quiet, just staring into the television. Robert was still in the bathroom, and I had no sense of how much time had passed.

 

While I was watching the broadcast, Bob walked back into the apartment with a plastic bag full of snacks. Instead of cutting down trees, I guess he had gone to the gas station or something. He tossed a bag of Lay’s into my lap, and it landed without me reacting at all. Then he said, “What are you watching?”

 

“Saturday Night Live,” I said matter-of-factly, still staring into the glow.

 

He was quiet for a moment as he opened a bag of chips, then he slid a few into his mouth, started munching, and said, with a full mouth, “Dude, that’s just Fox News.”

 

And when he said that, I don’t know why, but I started to cry, watching what was apparently just Fox News.