It makes for a decent story, but it was a really bad idea. Things could have gotten pretty fucked and they didn't. Part of me wants to think that pure intentions and a good heart go a long way toward karmic latitude. Even then, I'm inclined to think that maybe I was just very, very fortunate.
Let me set the scene for you:
The furious crash and driving rhythm of electronic dance music and the smell of beer are in the air. Bodies are bouncing and voices rise and fall over the cacophony. There is lots of laughing and some dancing. Fifty or so fun-loving, rowdy but gentlemanly bikers are packed into a medium sized Irish pub. Intermingled, and yet standing in stark contrast are thirty or so breathtakingly beautiful, over styled young professional women, flirting ferociously with the swath of overly masculine men they didn't quite dare to expect to find in their regular haunt. And let's not forget a contingent of local young men who look like they are just making the transition from frat boy to yuppie, clearly intimidated by our presence and unsure how to proceed with their pick-up plans. It is a strange brew. I mean, EDM in an Irish Pub?
My motorcycle club had rolled into this high class burg for a big little party. Clarendon is a classy neighborhood, right? I think it's full of lobbyists and interns and people who want to be somebody in Washington, D.C. someday. Regardless, we had done a little asking around about where the largest numbers of young, mindblowingly gorgeous, unattainable women could be found. And somehow despite the diligent inquiry, we landed in this shitty little Irish pub. Mostly because a few of us were drunk before we got there, and it was only two blocks from the motel. We probably could have made it to a bar five blocks away, but we are smart even when we're drunk and the weakest among us couldn't have managed to crawl back the five blocks. Like I said, classy.
Fortune smiles upon the wicked however. Tonight, a contingent of blonde beauties wanders into this Irish pub, looking for a fun group of bad biker boys to drink beer with. Of course they didn’t know that's what they were looking for when they got here, but it turns out they don’t need much convincing either. The night swims along and social gears are lubricated; dances are danced and before long the beautiful, breathtaking, blonde aspiring lobbyists and interns forget their political discretions for the night and get bad with the bad boys. Just before last call, we invite them back to our motel for drinks. I still can't believe there is such a cool retro motor lodge in Clarendon, but it's there and our club has the whole thing booked out solid. We have canopies. We have picnic tables. We have free beer. Of course they will come. It's only two blocks.
When we get back to the motel, the parking lot party which had been winding down between midnight and 2am is suddenly enlivened. Someone put a rockabilly Pandora station on their bike's stereo and someone else is passing around a bottle of Fireball. The girls are out of their element and having the best time. In the background, The Reverend Horton Heat croons about his Big Red Rocket of Love.
Over the course of the next hour, some girls wander off home. A few others pair off with a guy and find something more interesting to do than dance in a parking lot. But this one in particular is here to party. She's tall and not self conscious about it, wearing high heels and rocking them. Thin, lithe, golden skin, and golden hair, bold and big. The most gorgeous green eyes that sparkle with trouble and brash charm. All the girls who are still hanging are a little drunk, but this girl is also loud. Very confident of her social charm and ready to have a smashing good time, damn the torpedoes. Her shrill nasal brays of laughter wake guys who were long since passed out in their rooms. She steals the occasional glance at me, her eyes flashing with mischief. She plays the crowd with her banter. She laughs at herself with child-like abandon. I am enthralled.
"Who wants to go back to my place and get in the hot tub?" she blurts. Murmurs of ascent from five or six of my guys. I sit back, relaxed and well on toward drunk, watching to see how this is going to play out.
"I live like two miles from here. Y'all gonna ride your bikes?" A few guys look at each other and discuss, knowing it's the worst idea, responsible drunks that they are. A couple lose interest. The conversation returns to the drunken absurd, the din of laughter and commotion begins to build again. She's losing her audience. Time for the gambit.
"Hey!! I got an idea. Which of you fuckers wants to come back to my house and eat mushrooms?" She looks around, with a devious and hopeful smirk on her face. Everyone stands silent. I enter the fray.
"I'll go."
The smile spread across her face. I felt like that smile confirmed that her hopes had rested on me all along and I feel a sudden swell of confidence. I grab her by the wrist and whisper some direction in her ear and we head down the balcony stair, around the side of the motel and away from the others, her laughing her donkey laugh the whole way. I pull out my phone to call a cab but she stops me, telling me how she already has an Uber on the way. He had already pulled up in fact. This girl is good.
I climb in the back seat and she climbs in my lap and starts kissing me. I love Uber. You don't even have to stop and tell them where you're headed, you can just get straight to business. It's a short ride to somewhere, hell if I know where. I'm not paying too much attention to anything exept what I have my hands on. "This is the place," she says. "Thanks!"
The driver nods to her and then throws me a knowing smile before taking off to continue his night of spectacle. I can't imagine what kind of things an Uber driver sees. He probably has better stories than this one.
She leads me up the walk and up the steps to the front door of her little house. "We have to be kinda quiet," she whispers. "My roomate is asleep in the basement."
We go inside and she shows me to the bar. I find the ice and pour us each another drink, my usual whiskey ginger for both of us. She has a bottle of Jameson so that's what goes in there, but any whiskey would do right now. I come back into the living room and find her sitting at the coffee table, portioning out several dehydrated mushroom stems and a few extra caps.
"How many?" she asks me without looking up from her work. I ponder. This is a serious decision. I realize my tenuous position and don't want to go balls out tripping on a freak rampage, at least not in a strange place with a beautiful but admittedly strange girl. Set and setting, man. I've had enough experience to make a good estimation. She finally looks up at me and we lock eyes.
"Three."
"Stems and caps?" she asks, clearly dubious about my threshold. Still she has a faint smile on her lips. I imagine she is imagining me in bed, and then get the feeling it isn't in my imagination. I smile back.
"Yeah, three stems and three caps. The whole specimen. Do you have any peanut butter?"
"YES! That's how I eat them too. Perfect!"
She goes to fetch the peanut butter and I sit down to chop up the little gems. She comes back with a jar of Jif and a big spoon and a big smile. Her whole face really is electrifying.
"How many do you want?" I ask, curious about her tolerance and experience.
"One cap."
I take a minute to reflect. She must want to just relax and have sex. Maybe I should just have one or two?
"Done and done," I say. "Just two for me then."
Her smile grows. I'm meticulous to get a fine consistency and not lose any valuable psychedelic material. Spoon of Jif, slathered in magic, and then we eat from the spoon together.
While we're waiting for the effects to take hold, I remember the hot tub.
"So how about it?"
"How about what?" She looks expectant, eyes full of mischief.
"The hot tub?" I ask. "How about it? Not as much fun without the whole crew, or what are you thinking?"
Her eyes twinkle, remembering her proposal from earlier. She's immediately possessed by the idea. She charges off to her room for a few minutes and comes back in a bikini with a couple towels in her hand. I'm still wearing my jeans, boots, and colors.
"I'm not wearing underwear so you're in luck." I wink and she laughs.
She struggles to think of something witty to say but only manages to stand there and grin. She takes my hand and we quietly head out back. There's a moldy old lawn chair and I sit down, proceeding to disrobe when I get my first good look at the hot tub in question. It is more inflatable than I had hoped for. Now it's my turn to be dubious. It doesn't look like it's run in a month or better. "Is it hot," I ask her?
"Umm, well. It's warm."
We reluctantly climb in and it isn't. My judgmental grandmother is warmer than this damned hot tub. "This isn't a fucking hot tub. This is a cold tub." She looks at me so sheepishly that I can't stop laughing. Then she starts laughing.
Here we are, chilling in the cold tub, enjoying the tepid water, nevermind that it 60 degrees. Not quite shivering. We've got an excuse to put our bodies close together at least. The kissing just happens and it quickly escalates to a frantic, gasping pace. She throws her hips forward and lifts so I can remove her tiny bikini. I see in her eyes that the only reason she bothered to wear it in the first place was so I could take it off. I'm as hard as a coffin nail and starting to feel the world shimmering pleasantly from the psilocybin. My right hand is in her hair and my left thumb is inside her. We are staring into each other's eyes as we rock back and forth together, me gasping and her cooing as we struggle for air between every kiss. Despite the bite of the cold water, every sense is warmed by our embrace. Every touch is satin and every taste is Dove chocolate and every smell is warm vanilla. She closes her eyes and I pull her closer. I kiss her on the tip of her nose. She moans with pure sensual pleasure as I run my fingernails down her spine and then clutch her ass cheek firmly in my hand. The moment has arrived. I reach for myself with my left hand in preparation. She is wetter than the ocean. I don't penetrate her so much as I haplessly glide inside. Her eyes immediately FLY open and she gasps.
A short pause that lasts an eternity...
"Who are YOU?" she whispers. I just silently stare into her eyes and freeze in anticipation of her next words.
I'm the guy who's about to get the fuck out of here, I'm thinking to myself. The world bulges and swims, pulsing with alternating patterns of fear and death. Good and evil. Which am I? What is happening?
"Are you serious," I ask her, pulling back and more than a little freaked. Was this a literal or philosophical question? I was not about to cross any moral lines. And then she says it.
"Who am I ???"
Well, there it is. That about wraps this up.
For the next hour or so I split my time between getting us both dried off, getting dressed, contemplating my place in existence, and trying to get her to climb in her bed and warm up. She's shivering and waxing philosophical. Not quite ranting. My head's full of ideas but it's on straight and I'm functioning in this plane of existence, while she's clearly not. All this, on ONE cap?? I wasn't so certain. She was somewhat difficult to handle, but I managed with my elevated insight to navigate the nuances of her condition and help her as much as I could. It was almost as if I could read exactly what needed to happen in each moment, just a single moment before it needed to happen, so we got by.
She's going on and on about how we're in different vibes. Boy howdy, aren't we though! Through empathetic conversation, she spills it that she had also popped some benzos. Different vibes indeed. Eventually I get her settled. Not calm, but at least settled. As she lay in her bed snug and warm under three comforters, I'm looking around for my phone so I can call a cab and get back to the motel.
As fortune would have it, my phone is as dead as my libido. And of course she doesn't have an Android charger. Why would she? She's an iPhone girl. What self respecting twenty-something blonde bombshell has an Android?.
"Can I borrow your phone for a minute?" I ask.
"Don't leave me!" she blurts, spitting out the words in rapid fire. "Please! I need you to go downstairs and wake up my boyfriend."
I'm the guy who should have already gotten the fuck out of here, I think to myself. God, I'm an idiot.
"Let me text him, so I don't surprise him," I say.
This makes sense to her. It kinda shocks me though. How did I think to say that? It just popped out of my mouth, smooth as the Jif peanut butter. Almost like a higher intelligence planted the sentence in my head, to be delivered oh so casually, to save the situation. Maybe some higher vibe is at work here after all.
She gives me her phone. She's struggling to communicate the unlock code without using colors and existential ideas to describe it, but after a few minutes of me struggling to get on the same vibe, I pick up on what she means and I'm in. Where's the Uber app? God damned iPhones. I don't get it. Oh, ok I see. That's stupid. Whatever. Pull it up and request a driver. Ok, that's done.
"Ok, everything is fine. I smoothed things over with your boyfriend. Get some rest." I have no intention of trying to wake up her damned boyfriend. Is she fucking nuts? Yes. She is. So am I.
What the hell is wrong with me? Who gets themselves into this kind of shit?
She says she'll be alright, so I give her another kiss on the tip of the nose and quietly make my way out, boots in my hand. I stand in her front yard, the twilight of dawn just beginning to light the sky. Somehow now I feel less present. Like this night is beginning to be the past. The world was cool and the grass was cool on my bare feet. Each breath felt serene and full of light. Each breath, in and out, brought more light to the sky as it brightend then dimmed; rose brighter still and then dimmed. For a moment I was sure I was the sun.
When the Uber guy showed up, he told me I didn't look like a Jessica and I assured him that I was, in fact, Jessica. So that was her name. Jessica. It was nice.
"Hippie parents," I muttered.
He laughed out loud. I thanked him profusely and tipped him cash for getting me out of there. He said I didn't have to do that. The ride was on her. I tipped anyway. I was feeling wonderous and grateful. As we pulled into the motel, I saw the sun beginning to peek over the buildings and that's when I realized I wasn't the sun any more.
My friend was having a cigarette on the balcony and she saw me come in. She heard a snippet of my conversation with the driver as I sat in the front seat pulling on and lacing up my boots, and so she wouldn't relent without having goaded the tale out of me. She and I laughed and laughed.
I was terribly thirsty and dry mouthed. I wanted Coke for breakfast. I went to the vending machine, popped in a buck fifty, and pressed Coca-Cola. Out comes a Coke Zero bottle. Typical. I cracked open the bottle and there was actually Lipton iced tea inside. The world is so fucking weird. I thought maybe it was a mild hallucination, a lingering after effect of the sacred fungus, but my friend tasted it too and she confirmed that really was tea, and that I was ok; that this was in fact just a really bizarre night.