on Drugs: Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

In 2012, I ventured into the Amazon to try ayahuasca, a spiritual medicine and hallucinogenic brew. This was not my mission; While traveling through Bolivia, my friend and I stumbled into a guide and shaman who were offering “shamanic dream experiences” and figured we’d give it a try. Here is my experience tripping absolute-fucking-balls…

Gnawing on a handful of coca leaves, I’m trying to catch my breath in the thickness of the Bolivian rain forest. Our guide to the campsite halts once again to allow us to catch up. We’ve been instructed not to eat or drink (besides water) for the previous 24 hours, and we are feeling extremely weak. We’ve been traveling all day on foot, motorbike, and ferries. This quickly begins to feel like the type of lark that will certainly lead to personal injury or death, though I am convinced that this experience will ultimately be something I hold dear with me for the rest of my life, so I am trying my best to not vomit or black out — as this will make for a better memory.

A brief synopsis of how I got here: My friend and I are in Bolivia attending a wedding and, after the ceremony, decide to reschedule our return flight and explore the country. (Basically, we missed our flight on purpose, deciding we’d figure it out later. Oh, the beauty of being millennials who hate their jobs!) After a brief, awkward conversation with my boss, we ventured into the depths of Bolivia. Ayahuasca was not even on our radar―we just wanted keep enjoying the Southern Hemisphere weather in January. We bounced around Bolivia for a couple of weeks, from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz to La Paz, ultimately settling in Rurrenabaque via really small fucking aircraft. Rurre is such a small town that they don’t even have an airport. We literally landed on a patch of grass. Sometimes I wonder how I’ve lived this long.

Back to the story: We manage to catch up with our guide, who insists we rest for a bit. I use the opportunity to ask him how he found himself in this line of work.

It turns out he has come by way of commercial fishing in Peru. He was in a shipwreck there, though, so he had a little downtime before he got here to Rurre. Octopus boat went down. Sank with full traps on board, but he lived. Tore up his arm pretty good when it got stuck in some rigging, but nothing that didn’t heal up with some injury pay, a little rum, and a week or two of rest. Still, the adventure of barely escaping a sinking boat—stacked full with a half ton of pissed off octopodes—so he could come here and guide tourists to trip balls in the rain forest—seems practically biblical in scale to me and my recently-updated LinkedIn profile.

He says he has a girlfriend.

Hell yes, he would have to have a girlfriend! Who wouldn’t, after that? You would walk into the first bar, order a stiff shot, and explain to the best-looking surfer girl there that you just escaped a sinking ship stuffed and stacked with savage, angry, clawing monsters. You would casually go on about how you were going to have a few drinks, rest up, and head to Bolivia to guide tourists deep into the rain forest now that you’ve cheated death. Hell yes, you would leave that bar with a girlfriend! As a matter of fact, there would probably be two of them. And they would be there with their sexually advanced, open-minded best friend; the three of them hanging on your every word about how you weren’t afraid to be on a sinking ship out there at sea that day.

We arrive at the campsite at 7pm, and the shaman is already there preparing the drink. For those who don’t know what ayahuasca is, how can I explain it? I suppose it depends if you yourself have taken drugz before, so that you would have a reference point. Buuut to not further incriminate myself, ayahuasca is a brew which has the psychoactive compound DMT. The whole point is to lose your mind through intense, drug-aided introspection. I had learned about ayahuasca years prior, from some guy I met at a party who had it shipped into Chicago for recreational use. He explained how he would drink it a few times a year to mentally refresh himself. Said it provided him enlightenment and direction. He smelled of bong water and it seemed like he took a little too much acid in college, so I didn’t really take him seriously. Never mind that I had never done anything more extreme than a little pot. I was curious and asked him more about the drug.

He told me how ayahuasca was made: through a mixture of vines and roots, macerated and boiled with plants, resulting in a dark brown liquid. When pressed about what exactly he had experienced, whether visually or emotionally, he would default to saying, “You just have to see for yourself, man.” Thanks, dick. Real enlightening.

These are the memories going through my head as I sit before the shaman while he prepares the brew. I’m actually here, this is really happening. The shaman lets the ayahuasca cool before pouring it into a plastic bottle, which he then shakes vigorously and allows to rest. And for as unappetizing as this shit looks, it tastes much, much worse. The shaman pours me a big-ass bowl and instructs me to chug it. I don’t hesitate. I spent my entire collegiate career preparing for this moment.

We consume the ayahuasca at approximately 8pm. The effects of the brew take about 45 minutes to kick in, so we sit in a circle and chat. Our Shaman tells us about his upbringing in a very spiritual family. His aunts practiced brujeria. His father taught him of ayahuasca’s healing powers, hoping that his son would carry on the tradition. “No one can understand our culture,” he says, “without first drinking ayahuasca.” Christ, does everyone from these parts have some epic coming-of-age story to their name? Apparently so.

“So where are you from?” asks the Shaman.

“Chicago,” I say, hoping it makes us seem tough.

“Ahh, ok. What brings you out here?”

I am thinking of a way to make the answer seem as romantic, fierce, and road-weary as it seems his and our guide’s lives have been. Maybe I’ll say something along the lines of, “Well, we’ve been clawing our way through Chicago for the last six or seven years, in the trenches…rats…cockroaches…had to get out of the greed race, just head to the airport and figure it out. Ended up coming down here—gotta think about our next plan, since I will probably get fired from my job for taking 3 unexpected weeks of vacation and I’m not too into the idea of going back to living within some bullshit corporate structure.”

But what comes out is, “We live in Chicago and came to Cochabamba for our friend’s wedding. We walked past the sign you had on the road and thought we’d take a day and give this a try.”

Nice.

The Shaman looks at his watch, and instructs us all to find our own comfortable spot within the campsite. He expects the ayahuasca to kick in shortly.

“Make sure you sit or lay down; do not stand up or try to walk around. Not that you’ll be able to, anyway.” I’ll understand what he means shortly.

I go with the hammock, and lay there looking up at the stars. Hoodie? Check. Bottle of water? Check. Aaaand awayyy we gooo! Right? I don’t know, I don’t feel shit. I look over and my buddy is off in the distance tripping absolute-fucking-balls, moaning about God-knows-what, having the time of his life. I look at the Shaman. He nods and smiles, like everything is working just like it’s supposed to. Yeah right, asshole. What a fucking scam this is. I can’t believe I paid for this shit. Ass ass ass ass ass ass ass ass. Japanese. Balled-up clouds! Whatever. Nothing is going to happen and I’m feeling super bummed and there is more love and beauty in this world than we could ever imagine. I was at Home Depot once. I must have been, like, I don’t know, nine or ten, and I found this wad of cash. It was over three-hundred dollars worth of twenties. Obviously that’s not a lot of money, but at age nine? Ten even? I mean, Christ, I was rich! Never mind that I walked that cash right to customer service and turned it in. But at the time, that was more money than I could have ever imagined to be in a single place. It seriously felt like if someone had told you that they found a bajillion gazillion dollars. Fucking stupid amount of money. Anyways, isn’t that how it must be with love and beauty, too? Seriously, don’t you think so? You know, like, there’s so much love and beauty in this world that we’re all bound to find an abundance of it sooner or later. And not just an abundance, but an amount so much greater than we thought we ever deserved.

Holy shit. It’s kicking in. But seriously! Turning that money in felt great. I think that was the last time my mom was proud of me. I wonder if I’m a good son. There is so much shit that I have messed up and ruined, so many mistakes and burned bridges. What is wrong with me? I need to get my shit together. I miss my dad. I wonder if I’ll ever be a dad. I’m so scared of marriage, of all of that. It freaks me out. Will I be a good husband? I start to wonder if I’ve ever screwed anything up in my life because of fear.

The winds pick up and I can hear rustling bushes and swaying trees in the distance. This only adds to the experience. The leaves of the trees above me begin to bleed into the clouds. The guide and Shaman’s faces look contorted. My hands are melting. Fifth gear shit.

Life is crazy, man. I’ve always found that everything is most entertaining amidst chaos and, because my life has become so unbelievably, almost confusingly random, my subconscious has learned to shrug off any objective analysis. Beautiful moments layered with heartbreaking ones, no matter how frustrating this pattern of extremes might be, my sense of self is stretched and molded to become part of something much larger. Life is moving in slow-motion now. I try to sit up in the hammock, but my body doesn’t respond to my brain’s request. I begin to fidget out of panic, trying to ask for help, but my mouth cannot form words properly. The shaman approaches, rests his hand on my chest, and tells me that I am fine. I can feel tears rushing down my face, being blown every which way from the high winds. All I want to do is call my mom and apologize for every shitty thing I ever put her through.

I start to worry about my friends and manage to shift my head 45 degrees to see that one of them is being held up by the guide and Shaman so that he does not shit himself. He’s literally shitting uncontrollably, like, ten feet away from me. I decide not to ask questions, close my eyes, and ride this thing out. The stars are dancing above us.

This euphoric tidal wave (+ uncontrollable bowel movement, depending who you ask) lasts for 3 more hours.

It is now midnight; the moon is directly above us. I can feel the effects winding down. I am exhausted. Drained. I say that I want to go to sleep and our guide carries me to my tent. It takes everything I have to put one foot in front of the other. I pass out instantly.

The next morning, we hike back, pick up our motorbikes, ride them to the ferry, ride the ferry back to Rurre, and I part ways with the group to head to an internet cafe.

It must have been the quietest day of my life. No one spoke a word. I was lost in my mind, questioning how I used to spend a considerate amount of time wishing that timing were better with certain situations. This was a result, I had realized at some time during my trip, of my habitually becoming increasingly alert and aware of my surroundings just as they’d begin to fall apart. I become honest with myself: there was always this little part of me that loved the way things happened, how they worked out like that. This little part of me that whispered that maybe it’s when things fall apart that’s really the best time to actually show up and start living. 

This was the first day of my life where I actually felt comfortable being me.

I send my mom a Facebook message. She is fucking pissed because I have been unreachable for over a week, last updating her on the wedding day. I assure her I’ll be home by the end of the month.