One Night on Pandora

This story takes place miles away from normal civilization, which will be blatantly obvious as you read this.  A story like this could never happen anywhere else.  A story like this could only happen one place:  Koh Phangan island, miles away from the coast of Thailand.

The first thing that catches my eye as I step ashore Haad Yuan beach is a toucan, just sitting there all casually atop a basketball hoop.  At that moment, I entered a deep, contemplative state, and silently mused:

“What planet am I on right now.”

The beach was modest in size, much more personal than the island’s other beaches.  This is what we were looking for.  We had had enough of the tweakers and “sky people” from the neighboring Haad Riin beach.  Night falls, and we establish that it’s gonna be a night filled with excitement.  And by excitement, I mean DRUGS.

WARNING: This story involves excessive hedonism and rampant drug use.  If you are turned off by this kind of behavior, get the fuck out of here, now.

We go to this place, a kind of tree-house cabana hideaway hut up on the rocks, a place offering loud beats, colorful lights, and any kind of mind-warper you can imagine.  Owned by a middle-aged man suffering from Parkinson’s (at least, that was our prognosis) named Peter.  Blah blah blah blah SHROOM SHAKES.

The shakes were purple, fruity tasting, and came in a frosty mug.  We polished them off and sat in the corner and waited.  The problem was, we got a little too comfortable, and these shakes didn’t have hormone boosters in them like the ones over on Mushroom Mountain (which kick in after like 5 fucking minutes), so there was a point when we all came to terms with the fact that this shit was bunk, yo.

Enter JAKE SULLY’S first exhibition of his leadership skills.  He proposed we leave and venture towards “Mt. Fuji” (some 8 ft. tall pointy rock we saw down on the beach).  Looking up at him from the ground, it was hard to argue with the man.  Completely dressed in blue, face paint under the eyes, and a blue headband to boot, he planned to make our journey to the planet Pandora one worth remembering.

Sully was our leader.  We were the Children of the Wind.  A blue color-coded theme ran in everyone’s clothing choices, and a variable amount of blue paint was splotched on each of our faces and bodies.

We were Na’vi.

Everyone climbed out of their hammocks and followed Jake Sully out of Peter’s drug cabana.  We walked across the rickety man-made bridges winding around the cliffs, with giant flickering torches as our only guiding light.  Looking down and seeing these 6 ft long sticks bundled under my feet made me feel like I was on another planet.

…Or maybe that was the psilocybin, which had just started taking effect.  When a dog ran by and startled SOULTIRI, his reaction “what the fuck is a dog doing up here yo?” elicited an airy, ditzy laughter from everyone in the group, and I knew that they were feeling it too.

We never made it to Mt. Fuji, not after B-PWEYA shot Jake Sully down (“fuck your rock”), but we found a better “rock” anyway.  200x larger than Mt. Fuji, we posted up on a steep ridge, where everyone spread out and fixed their gaze on the sky above.

WOW

I can’t even explain it.  There were stars fucking everywhere.  It was like someone adorned all of space with a never-ending string of Christmas lights.  The stars glistened brighter than ever, and they seemed only a swipe of the arm away.  Constellations became their mythological counterparts.  But the biggest attention grabber out there wasn’t the stars.  No, it was…

THE CLOUDS

The fucking clouds took a life of their own; crawling, twisting, contorting, morphing, breathing.  We looked into those clouds and recognized the faces of one famous person after another; Jesus, for one.  Also, his cousin, Zeus.  And it wasn’t like a sky you’d see at a picnic, where you get one good cloud a minute.  These clouds were ADD-style, blowing by us like missiles, like futuristic floating cars from “The Fifth Element”.  The apex of all visualizers lie directly above us.  And then I hear

“Yo, I am fucking TWEAKING right now!”  I swivel my head around and see Soultiri sitting in solitude 20 feet up and behind me, hands masking his face.  “These clouds are coming for me!”

We all got up and went to offer Soultiri our presence.  After avoiding a potential freakout, we discussed our next move.  The next destination would take us backwards, through the jungle, and to the “magic carpet” we found earlier that day.  I had no idea what the fuck anyone was talking about, but everyone seemed pretty excited about it so I just went with it.

The walk was intense, but our burning drive to get there enabled us to march vigorously up the mountain, past the wooden huts, under the swaying trees, and into the light being generated by my headlamp—did I mention I was wearing a headlamp?  When we got to the magic carpet (a small gazebo thinger), we were crestfallen to discover that…it sucked.  There were bugs all over it, no pillows, and it stank like your momma’s pussy.

Having exerted much energy coming here, we decided “let’s stay on this half of the mountain and go explore that mysterious little beach.”  Word.

B-Pweya discovered that she could walk with her feet bent at an 150 degree angle which gave rise to a new quote for the rest of the night: “I understand [walking] so much now.”  You tend to understand the world so much more when you take mushrooms.

We backtracked to this colorful rock garden/mini village being soused by a sprinkler system, turned right at the Muay Thai gym, and were met with our biggest obstacle yet.  A naturally-occurring staircase, tremendously steep, only 2 feet wide, protruding out of boulders on our left, and a surely-fatal drop to the right, should we slip on the damp and crooked “stairs” and go over the edge.

I reequipped the headlamp and became the caboose, where my only instructions were “Darby…don’t be Darby right now,” alluding to my Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and overall ineffectiveness to shine the light straight ahead for more than 3 consecutive seconds.  We shuffled down the precarious passageway, where we encountered some Asian tourists approaching us from the front.  We had to pin our bodies to the rock so they could just slip by.  It was a real tense moment.

The last one of them, a waifish, possibly Chinese girl, had a small boombox playing.  As she passed Sully, he commented, “I like your music.”  She must’ve thought he had said, “I’m going to kidnap you.”  She fucking went sprinting, past each of us, and away from Sully, without ever looking back.  It was one of the greatest reactions I’ve ever seen.  Sully turned to us and coolly stated, “must be from the Chinese tribe of Na’vi.”

We survived the descent and made it down to the beach.  The gravelly sand was rougher on the feet than the grainy white sand on the first beach, but I didn’t care.  I was too busy studying a crab I had captured in my light.  Nature is awesome yo.  I snapped out of my trance when NEYTIRI announced she was going for a swim.  Fuck it; let’s all go.

You know that scene in the movie “The Beach” where Leo and the French chick are making out in the water?  When everything is so luminous and dreamlike?  That night, swimming under the moon’s mystical glow, we LIVED that scene.  The water allowed me to loosen my grip on reality and free my mind.  I felt blanketed by it; protected; warm (even though the water was a little chilly).  It was like the endless ocean was reduced to a tiny little sandbox.  I recognized this as a metaphor for life: the world is your sandbox.

The water was full of many thoughtful, intellectual conversations, including but not limited to: Neytiri being a mermaid; people who were definitely booming (on mushrooms): All-4-One when they made the song “I Swear”, James Cameron when he made “Avatar”, Michael Jackson um his WHOLE LIFE (come on–Neverland Ranch??); two dudes named JK and Crip who went Christmas shopping at North Riverside mall while booming, which tied into how great stories should only feature the punchline, which tied into how my stories are way too fucking long, which I vowed to shorten and just get to the point, which as you can see from this very sequence I flat out failed at; everyone’s shared contempt for original-flavored potato chips; me and Soultiri being the black and white versions of each other…and yeah, that’s the short list.

About after an hour, we went back to shore, where we compared ourselves to see if the paint on our faces and bodies still remained intact.  When they shined the light on my face, everyone burst out laughing.  Somebody said, “Darby, you look like a creepy mouse.”  It didn’t help that I had the slicked back “peedo-hair” (pedophile hair) as well.  I whined whimsically as I pleaded for someone to wipe the paint off my face, but all I got was a barrage of laughter coming from my fellow tribesman, as well as laughter coming from somewhere out there in the dark.  This was startling, because we believed that we were alone the whole time.  I can only imagine what this scene looked like to random beach bystanders, me nearly having an aneurysm trying to get paint off my face.  It only took a mere 10 MINUTES (sarcasm) to rid myself of the creepy mouse look.

We went back to Peter’s drug cabana and ingested 3 more forms of stimulants: booze, buds, and “Joe Rogan’s” (MDMA—>MMA—>UFC commentator Joe Rogan).  I think that’s how we got so infatuated with the Dave Chappelle quote, “My feet are strong, Joe Rogan!”

We stayed at the drug den until we, well, we were never really kicked out per se, but the music had stopped and they did turn all the lights off on us, so being 3/4 AM and still heavily sedated on psychotropics, we decided to follow a random tipster’s tip and go in search of a rumored party in the jungle that people were waking up at 2 AM just to go to, and stay there and party til noon.  It sounded epic, and epic was the theme of the night, and thus we ventured off in search.

We returned to the beach we swam at.  There were a bunch of empty water taxi’s hoisted ashore, and unless we were hallucinating (very possible), these boats were not here when we went swimming.  That was all the evidence needed to send us walking blindly in the jungle in search of some party that may or may not exist.  But then, we heard it: an ever-so faint thumping noise.  We followed it, the sound growing louder and louder, until it led us straight to the jungle party.  With the breaking dawn approaching, the party was going hard as fuck.  We posted up on a rock just outside of the “dance floor” (made of sand) and gazed at all the characters in the crowd.  A pirate, a–OMFG,  PURPLE PEOPLE EATERS.

I can’t describe the Purple People Eaters without conveying enough creepiness, or reflecting the amount of disdain that they had for humanity, for etiquette, or for being a human being; but you should know that if somebody took the shriveled mind of a lab rat drunk off seven bottles of hair spray, and put it into a human body, that still wouldn’t even come close to conveying the behavior of the purple people eaters.  They… were not of this galaxy.

We did what any self-respecting drug fiends would do and put literally every last dollar and COIN we had into a big wad and then bought more drugs…AT THE BAR.  Seriously, WTF is this place?

“Hey bartender!”

“What’ll it be, Mick?”

“The usual.  A bottle of ‘happy water’ and a pill of Ecstasy.”

“Comin right up Mick.  How’s the missus?”

We ingested round 2 and waited.  Neytiri mentioned something about “having to sweat to get the full effect” and in that moment, I understood why I had never felt the effects of E like how it seemed to affect others.  I had surgery in high school on my tits (my “thyroid” if you wanna be a little faggot) and it severely reduced the sweating on my upper half of the body.  And while it might be more challenging for me to sweat, it is still possible.  Thus, I disappeared into the shrubbery and pumped out 50 push-ups…

And it worked!  Somewhat.  Although the increase in euphoric sensation was marginal at best, it was a new tactic I could implement in my life in the “war against the war against drugs”.

I recruited Jake Sully and B-Pweya for my boot camp, but when we returned to the location of the great push-up fiasco, nobody was interested in doing push-ups anymore.  We just kept on walking, into the darkness, and into the unknown.  Then we ran into someone, out there in the ebony, someone who could have hacked us to bits if he wanted.  But by his casual demeanor and avidness for lollipops, he didn’t seem all that threatening.

His name was Donnie.  He spoke of a promised land, a third, super hidden beach, which was supposedly the best place on the entire island to watch the sun rise.  He obliged when we asked if he would take us there, and when we reached it, he politely cut ties with us (“my role as your leader ends here”) and left us to steal lawn chairs from a hotel and plop them at the ocean’s edge.  The next 1/2 hour was spent watching the absolute most beautiful sunrise on earth.

Well…it felt like 1/2 hour.

After some Thai dude went mental on me for ignoring the gigantic DO NOT MOVE THE FUCKING CHAIRS sign, we decided to return to Soultiri and Neytiri, who according to Sully, had a 0% chance of being there.  I was a little more optimistic: a solid 1% chance of finding them.

We found them sitting on the rock, right where we had left them, 3 HOURS AGO.  Everyone nearly cried upon reuniting and we shared our biggest family moment of all, embracing in hugs and lots of spoken love.

It was the perfect way to end the night.

We left the Purple People Eaters to drown in their own faces, which were melting off, and the pirate to scrounge their facial remains for any jewelry, nose rings, etc.

I spent the night in Neytiri’s 100 dollar hotel room (you can get your own bungalow on Koh Phangan for 4 bucks a night.  You can imagine what her room was like).  I lay down, smiled, and went to sleep.

…And by “sleep”, I mean “entered a coma”.  What?  You didn’t actually think a human body could handle all those drugs, did you??