Yesterday was a fucking shitshow, and I’m still struggling to put everything together, but here’s what I’ve got so far:
It was a nice, unassuming day. I paid my friend Adam a visit at his hostel in Bogota, and he tells me that his buddy from England has gone full missing persons in the city of Cali and they are frantically trying to find him. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s great… let’s play some ping pong!” My Venezuelan friend— let’s call him Ricardo—shows up to pong-battle over some beers.
Around 6 PM I leave the hostel and go to an Irish bar in the old-town part of Bogota, a neighborhood called La Candelaria. I meet a girl there, she’s great, and has humongous boobs, and we get along nicely. At 8 PM the place closes (due to mandatory city-wide curfew) and she’s ready to go home.
But not before we sneak into the bathroom and bang our brains out of our heads.
Back at my own hostel, I run into Ricardo, who was supposed to have returned home after ping-pong. We guzzle more beers, smoke a joint, and then I step behind the bar and begin DJing. Playing all the classics: Claptone, Rufus Du Sol, Disclosure, etc.
Eventually I long for company, and I ask the reception if they’ve seen Ricardo. They tell me he’s in the volunteer’s room down the stairs at the back of the botanical garden. I find him and the volunteers all smoking more buds without me and get a little agitated. He says, “It’s okay, I have some poppers.”
And I’m like, “Poppers!? What the fuck?” Of course, I do the poppers anyway, and then I return to my DJ spot behind the bar. A few short minutes later Ricardo comes to me and says,
“Hey. Those people over there,” and he uses his head to point out a couple sitting in front of the outdoor fireplace just 30 feet away, “they’re indigenous people, from the Amazon. And they have Amazon drugs.”
“Oh… what, like Ayhuasca?”
“No, it’s called rapé. They use it for sacred ceremonies and stuff. Come on, let’s try it.”
If I hadn’t been drinking all day, I probably would’ve considered it longer than an eighth of a second. Instead, I nodded enthusiastically, and followed this indigenous couple into their private bedroom in the hostel. Ricardo sat down on the bed and the guy approached him with this type of homemade pipe, that looked like it was made of miniature cardboard rolls that you are left with when you run out of wrapping paper.
The guy takes the device and sticks it in Ricardo’s right nostril. And then he blows, and a huge plume of smoke goes flying everywhere. Ricardo stands up, in pain, his eyelids tensely squeezed together… and then he sits back down on the bed, and the guy blows smoke into his other nostril. Ricardo goes zipping out of the room, leaving the door wide open behind him. This is my chance to back out.
Instead I watch as the pipe slowly gravitates closer and closer to my nose. “Relax,” says the indigenous guy. I try and relax.
“Don’t swallow with your tongue.” I have no idea what this means.
By the time the device enters my nostril, the only thing I’m doing with my body is clenching my butthole tightly. And then woosh! Smoke goes everywhere, and my nose burns like when you go upside-down in a pool and chlorine water gets funneled to the brain.
I pop up involuntarily, then I stumble towards the open doorway and storm outta there. My mind is on fire. I feel dizzy. Crooked. I’m hoping that the cool night breeze offers some form of salvation, but nothing can placate me. And then from my spot on the stairwell, the indigenous guy finds me and says, “We need to blow it in the other side of your nose.”
“Fuck that! This shit is… AIEEEEE! What did you do to me!?”
“It needs to go in two times. For balance.”
“I’m balanced! I don’t need anymore!”
“This is an indigenous rule. It is disrespectful not to take it in both sides of the nose.”
Fuck. “Just do it then, get it over with!”
I go back into the room and he puts the thing in my nose, and this time he blows slowly, so the diffusion is less violent. But that doesn’t change the fact that my brain is on fire. I look outside the room and see Ricardo running up and down the stairs. “YO! What is this!? What are you feeling?”
And he says, “It got in my eyes. I can’t see.”
And I’m like, “Is that it!? Your brain can function?” And he nods.
What happened next? Well, I went to Hell.
Everything beyond that point exists in my mind in fragments. My body spent time slumped and slouched over in various regions of the quaint botanical garden out back. I can remember things episodically, but not chronologically. I’d like to believe that it started with the indigenous guy recognizing I was spiraling out of control, and coming to me, and patting my chest like a drum. Rhythmically. Telling me stuff like “you need to straighten your posture” and “you need balance” when all I wanted to hear was “the fun part is just ahead.”
My nose was ablaze. My head was splitting apart. I couldn’t find the right stair to lay on. When Ricardo came and offered me encouragement, my responses were curt; my voice was meek. I can remember the sentences that came out of my mouth, and they were limited:
“This isn’t a party drug.”
“You can’t mix this with booze.”
“This shit is serious.”
Ricardo found me a big bed in a private room and made me lay down. The instant my chest hit the sheets, I felt it, for the first time: the urge to vomit. I stood up and the puke filled my cheeks. I kept it in my mouth until the first plant was within range, and then erupted all over. The vomit came regularly thereafter, although it got to a point where I was dry heaving, over and over, clearly depleted from all of my bodily contents, but still wrecked from the drug.
My body wasn’t done expelling it’s contents; now I felt the urge to shit. I rushed into the bathroom and exploded out of my rectum. I made three separate toilet runs, and by the last one I had decided it was too hard to wipe my ass; if I was going to shit myself, it was a fate I was prepared for. Standing up and wiping was simply too much multi-tasking. When I put my chin on the toilet seat and shot snot out of my nose, there were thick brown chunks of tobacco splattering into the toilet.
At some point I decided to visit my actual bed that I had rented, but three seconds of complacency was enough to tell me that I could not make this end. I was trapped, I was at the behest of this fucking amazon drug and sleep would come when it allowed me to.
I found yet another spot in the botanical garden out back and started painting the plants with regurgitation. Ricardo found me and started giving me a back massage, which didn’t really do much for me aside from annoy me. Up on the hostel’s second floor balcony, the receptionist Camila laughed at me, and one of the volunteers came and brought me a glass of water. To them I was just drunk—they had no fucking idea!
And then I spotted the indigenous guy sitting just atop the short staircase I was sprawled out on. I gave him a look that said, “Put me out of my misery!”
And he said, “It is not yet time to end this.”
And I thought, “I’ll KILL HIM, SONOVA BITCH!”
Ricardo kept trying to get me into the private bedroom to lay on the big bed, but whenever I would stand I had to sit immediately. Standing was a chore, and yet, it was my only path to redemption. I had to get into that bedroom. I had to lay down again, even if it would make me heave and puke and potentially paint the white bed sheets brown. I gave into Ricardo and he pulled me up over his shoulder and took me into the bedroom, where I collapsed with all of the dead weight I was.
I put my mouth over the tiny wastebasket next to the bed and I heaved, and I heaved. There was a mini A/C machine in the corner that was serving to cool my brain down, all the while Ricardo firmly rubbed my temples. And then I heard a voice that wasn’t Ricardo’s. It was the indigenous guy. And he said, “Okay, now we can finish this.”
I sprang up and sat full attention. “Give me… please.” And he starts talking about the philosophy of this stuff and I’m like, “PLEASE, GIVE IT HERE, GOD!” One short and utterly useless history lesson later, he takes out a small device that looks like one of those pointy nasal spray things. I’m prepared for it to blast off into my nose, but he sprays it in the air like he’s Febreezing the room. A few sprays to my left, a few sprays to my right. And then he sprays once over my head. And then with a moist hand, he lightly rubs my forehead.
It wasn’t immediate, but I didn’t maintain consciousness much beyond that. I plopped my head on the pillow, and the nightmare gradually faded away…
I woke up in the bed with Ricardo, and I was as sober as ever. I felt… dare I say… good? Minus my nose—my nose was impossible to breathe out of. I checked the sheets of the bed, and they were still white. I climbed to my feet and went into the same bathroom where I had suffered greatly, a mere hours ago. I looked into the mirror and studied my face, the left side then the right. And then I calmly cleared my throat and asked the man in the mirror:
“Just who in the FUCK are you!??“
So yeah, that all took place on Monday. How’s your week going?
