WHAT UP PEOPLE IT’S YA BOY DARBY SHIMMERIN SHAW THANKS FOR TUNING IN TO THIS EPISODE OF YET ANOTHER MEXICAN DRUGS STORY LET’S GET WIT IT
Last week, last Friday, I was surprised in Mexico City by my cousin, the one, the only, Cousin Melvin, who for the sake of this story I shall be calling simply “Melvin.” Melvin works for the airlines as a flight attendant (homo!) and he flew out here from the US to meet me—for less than 2 full days. We had one night out together. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s “nights out together.” These nights are typically filled with hedonism and midget carnage, so it was destined to be a big one here in ol’ Mexico City.
We first visited a pulque spot. What is pulque? It’s a Mexican alcohol and they put flavors in it like nuts and fruits, and it’s the color (but luckily not the taste) of semen. So we had a couple of jars of that or whatever.
Next place checked out was a coffee shop, one rumored to be less coffee, more drugs. We walked in and the place had black light drawings all over the walls; there was a DJ playing, and like 20 people hanging out. We went to the bar and checked the menu. Seemed pretty normal. Ho, wait a second, there it was: toque de magia. So like, you could add weed to everything for 50 pesos. Or you could just buy a gram of weed in a bag. Did I say weed? I meant mushrooms. (And weed too.)
We ended up getting a Negra Modelo, a beer with weed in it, a bag of weed, and three bags of mushrooms. There were 2 of us—why’d we buy 3 bags you ask? Because the woman working at the bar told us, “One bag is a microdose.”
What’s the opposite of an exaggeration—an understatement? Yeah, understatement of the year.
Before we left “Cafe 42” we met a German girl and her English friend JJ, who had been released from Mexican jail just yesterday.
“Not yesterday. Today,” the German said.
“Oh shite. Was that today?” he asked. The German nodded emphatically.
And so me and Melvin went back to the apartment he was crashing at, which belonged to the son of some rich Peruvians who owned a beach-side hotel Melvin once taught yoga at. The son was kinda an anti-social turd, but the son’s friend, donning a purple + green outfit reminiscent of The Joker, said he “knew a party.”
During the brief walk to this party, the friend revealed that he was a world-class cellist—apparently that’s the word for people that play the cello. He also did poetry, and luckily, we made it to the party before we were forced to endure any of his poems. The party took place in a building called Centro de Salud, which means, in English: “It’s time to take some mushrooms.”
Prompted to eat them all right out in the open right after witnessing some really high bastard getting dragged out of the party, me and Melvin each took one of the three bags and ingested. As I ate mine, I kept thinking, “There’s three individual mushrooms in this bag; this feels like more than a microdose…?” I’m not sure how much time passed here—it felt like ten minutes, whereas Melvin claims it was an hour—but suddenly Melvin’s face started to morph into an array of nonsensical lines, and that’s when I made the startling discovery:
I am tripping balls.
Melvin was too; we couldn’t talk, not in words. The sounds being produced by our mouths were a mixture of grunts, squeals, wheezing, and laughter. We needed to get the hell out of this high-traffic hallway (where everybody wanted to greet us) and sit down somewhere.
We navigated the cramped hallways and found salvation in a tiny square room in the basement, with a couple of torn-up couches added to the feeling of chaos, and the walls all graced with the likeness of Lucifer, the Unholy One. This was a goth club, after all.
The stark contrast between Melvin and I, wearing white clothes and white faces—with everyone else wearing dark leather and heavily pierced and tattooed—made us just that more obvious. When you’re tripping as hard as we were, you don’t wanna talk to anybody. And yet, everyone and their mothers was trying to talk to us. “What do you think about my country?” “I love rock music.” “I’m looking for friends, can I be your friends??”
NO! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!
Of course I couldn’t say that. I just tried to pass this message off psychically, to all of these weirdos, weird-looking people with bug-eyes and inhuman characteristics. And here’s the moment where I started getting nauseous. Just like the girl on the couch next to us: hands on her face, and a bucket under her head, one that she continued emptying even more of her stomach into.
I needed air. No wait—I needed a cigarette. Where was Melvin’s friend, The Joker?
We found the guy and he did have cigarettes, but made us wait until he finished his beer to go out for a smoke. I was fighting this whole time, fighting with my stomach, which was on the verge of emptying its own contents.
Finally we went outside, trudging through the thick, gothic crowd, we all shared a cigarette, and surprise: it didn’t help.
An executive decision was made: I was going to have to force myself to puke.
I went around the corner and vomited on a cactus. I mean, I think it was a cactus? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a Venus flytrap or nuthin—but I guess anything is possible with my drug-addled brain.
Melvin was not nauseous, which I find interesting, but not surprising. He’s a tough one. And so am I, usually; I’m convinced that the alcohol I consumed combined with the shrooms in the worst way. Like a food poisoning; which is what shrooms are: a poison. A good type of it, albeit still a poison.
I decided to liquify myself and went across the street to Oxxo, the local convenience store. Somehow I acquired a water and I took a seat outside, water in hand. It wasn’t doing much to change the knot in my stomach.
A few minutes later, a chubby policeman came up to us, asking if we spoke Spanish, and if we had any drugs like “cocaina.” No, we did not have any cocaine, we told him. We did not mention the weed and shrooms in our pockets. Then, behind the initial police officer, three more cops appeared behind him. Sitting down, surrounded, we were sitting ducks.
Miraculously, almost reflexively, I was able to take advantage of how fucked up I looked, and the water bottle dangling from my hand, and tell the cops I had simply drank too much, and I was about to vomit.
They fist bumped me, told me to enjoy Mexico, and quickly scurried away.
“That could’ve been bad,” Melvin said. And then he suggested that we get a taxi home. Initially I fought this suggestion, thinking that I could turn it around, to conquer this feeling and not let it conquer me—but after my stubbornness yielded, me and Melvin were in an Uber back to my hostel in Alameida.
At Casa Mexico Hostel, sometime around 4 AM, we were greeted at the desk by a guy with cheetah-spots in his hair. Melvin asked this eccentric character what his name was, and he said, “Call me… Eye in the Sky.” We invited Mr. Sky for a joint upstairs on the patio, and he obliged. After we all smoked one together, he unlocked the TV/media-room, giving us access to bean bags chairs and Netflix.
Fortuitously, Mexican Netflix did contain one of our favorite shows, Trailer Park Boys. We put on the episode where J-Roc (a white rapper) hosts a BBQ, and we laughed so hard that for the span of that short 23 minute episode, I was lifted out of my dizzied and distraught mushroom body, and brought to a much better place. After the episode, we decided that J-Roc is one of the 25 greatest TV characters of all time.
And then a couple of Russian guys came and sat in the tiny room with us and made it weird. Melvin got scared off, went back to The Joker’s place, and I went up to bed. But not before shitting violently and passing out somewhere around 6 AM.
Moral of the story? Mushrooms are still awesome. I’m not mad at the mush—I’m mad at the alcohol mixing with the mush. Thanks a lot, alcohol, you fucking piece of fuck.
