chapter Two

Twelve shiny red little pills rolled around in Day’s hand.  “Take these.”

                “What in the heck are they?”

                “Don’t ask any questions, just take them.  We are going to Kenya.”

                "Kenya," the top of a mountain about five miles out of town, is a plateau with shrubs and dirt and gravel trails that looked like it could have been a scene straight out of the Great Rift Valley.   It was one of my favorite trails to run.  I loved the feeling of being miles away from the rest of the world running my legs into a pulp.

                We were an excellent program for a small liberal arts school of 1600 individuals.  We competed with the best D1 schools we faced, beating many of them, and we trained like savages, logging 70-90 miles easily on any given week. 

                But ours was a very tiny school number wise, in a small rural community, a town not many would refer to as college friendly.  So we had a very different undergraduate experience than most.

                A few of us had a certain predilection to finding trouble in between classes, practices, and races.

                I had managed to go all throughout high school without drinking or partying whatsoever.  I was too closely guarded by my parents in my small and very quiet home town, and I was also too busy training for cross country, track, and maintaining my A plus average.  And then there was Latin Club, Quiz Bowl, 4-H, piano lessons, marching band, and sometimes garage band singing duties.  Not to mention, I was an altar boy.  And yes, my priest did come on to me several times and I was too naïve to realize it, which is beside the point.  I was a “good” kid.  I certainly wasn’t  projecting towards failure. 

                But I never necessarily wanted to be this kid; it wasn’t even really my choice, in fact.  A lot of people would have killed to have been in my spot.  I definitely took it all for granted.

                So when I got to college, I was definitely a candidate for “letting loose” a little bit, which is precisely what I would end up doing.

                It started out simple enough, a couple of beers here and there, nothing before or leading up to races.  I was a freshman, of course, so I didn’t immediately fit right in with the upperclassmen like Day, Joey, and Pubert.  But they did invite me to drink with them on occasion, mostly due to the fact that they couldn’t recruit any girls to hang out with them.  This was the conundrum at Cumberland College.  The girls were completely stuck up.  Either that or they were ugly, or fat, or football groupies, or wrestling team “cum dumpsters.”  So it was hang out with me or nothing at all.

                They also picked up another freshman runner.  “Mono,” named as such for having mononucleosis the very first week of school, was a high school state champion 800 meter runner.  Mono was built like a small bear, not the type of person who you would expect to be a very good middle distance runner, but what he lacked in height he made up for in “retard strength,” speed, and explosion. 

                Mono was never without a bottle in his hand and a dip in his gums.

                The five of us comprised a group called the Triple-S, which was short for Secret Sausage Society.  It was a suiting moniker for five horny and undersexed college students. 

                We started spending all of our time together after Nationals, where (as a team with no seniors, one junior, five sophomores, and myself) we finished 7^th out of 28 teams.

                This was the time in my life when I was introduced to Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, or DXM, a dissociative frequently found in cough medicine.

                DXM just happens to be the active ingredient in the red pills Day handed to me on this Sunday afternoon after brunch. 

                Skeptical at first, but always somehow convinced through Day’s and Joey’s relentless and devastatingly logical peer pressure, what would I do?  I ingested every single one of them fuckers.

                One hour later, I was on a “level” that I could not possibly ever have imagined, in a place so beautiful that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God existed, and that my fellow Triple S, Day, Joey, Pubert, Tiny Tim, and Mono were all with me, in a spiritual moment of “pseudo-enlightenment.”

                It was in this moment that I realized that my entire life I had only seen the very surface, but now there was such depth in every single thing.  I had never experienced such a glorious feeling of understanding before until this point.

                The significance of the trip can be summarized in a lecture I had heard from my favorite professor, Dr. Hancock.  The lecture was about string theory, and he explained that the ten or eleven dimensional world we live in as like a goldfish living in a Koi pond.  The fish understands the world in two dimensions, left and right, and forwards and backwards.   And then one day one fish postulated that another dimension might exist, a so called hidden up and down dimension to go along with the other two.  This would be the way Koi fish might explain the natural phenomena of rainfall on the Koi pond, because rain coming from above adds new realities that must be taken into account.  The rainfall is like unexplainable things here in our three dimensional world, such as gravity.  As such we can imagine gravity as possibly existing in a different dimension in nature.   The bottom line, just because the fish can only experience two dimensions does not suggest that other dimensions do not in fact exist.

                That afternoon my three dimensional world turned into an eleven dimensional world.  No words can really describe the beauty, wholeness, and euphoria that I felt.  It was the best day of my life.

                It was the best day, because it was the penultimate experience of my nineteen year old life, and it reinvigorated a sense of awe and wonder into the world that I had lost over time.  It was not just a singular, “self” moment.  It was out of self.  It was as if Heaven was making direct contact with me.  I felt “special,” and blessed by God's grace.               

                Coming down from the mountain, and also coming down from the high which lasted all afternoon, I recall telling Day that I felt as though I was part of God for the first time in my life, as opposed to something entirely separate.

                I had no idea that this ineffable feeling would be a turning point of sorts.  Because, when looked at in a much different context, I can also say that this was the worst day of my life.  But how can it be both?  If you consider that every single time I have consumed drugs since, it was in search of this feeling that I felt in Kenya, then it is an experience I would have much preferred I had never known to begin with.   It is this reason and this reason alone that I would never encourage someone to try cough medicine, or any other drugs for that matter.  

                Once you open up that Pandora’s box of consciousness altering, you can never, ever go back.  Because you will be chasing a bird that will lead you into the Devil’s Hand itself.

The Next Day.

                I remember waking up that morning.  I had missed my morning run for the first time ever because I was so worn out from the previous day.  I should have been getting ready for class, but I couldn’t seem to get out of bed. I wasn’t sick, or even particularly tired. but I felt a huge emptiness inside of me that I hadn’t felt before.  The emptiness was overpowering.  It was as if waves of negativity were crashing against my chest, swallowing up my heart. 

                In my head I knew that I was not supposed to do drugs.  I knew it was wrong, that drugs were bad, and could only lead to bad things.  At least this is what my DARE officer told me in high school.  And I believed what he told me on some level because I felt very guilty for having allowing myself to do what I did. 

                In this moment of sadness, I remember thinking to myself; my life is never going to be the same.