WYSIWYG: Sex On Shrooms (Pt. 1)

Last night I read at WYSIWYG: Worst. Sex. Ever. It was my first time reading for a crowd. I've performed, but never read for people that actually paid money to have words read to them. So I was a little nervous. But I also felt good, because I used to read in class all the time. In fact I was a fairly dominant reader in grade school. Always had the hand up strong, confident, just thinking, "if you want the shit read right, call on this motherfucker right here. Don't call on the stupid motherfucker who might get left back over there." So anyways, I think that background helped me get through the experience in one piece. I think there will be video of the performance, and if/when I can get my hands on it, I'll post it. In the meantime, in between time, I'll post the story and the song/epilogue (that I didn't get to perform) here. Thanks to the TAN supporters that were in the house, especially whoever was yelling "Holla!" in the beginning, that always helps a negro feel at ease.

Here's the video of the reading.

I'll be posting the story in segments, since it's sort of long for one big post.

And for the record, the following is a true story based on a sort of true story.

I went with a straightforward title on this and called it, "The Time I Had Sex On Mushrooms" Or alternatively "How I Got My First Wife, But Not Really"


An underestimated part of the assimilation process is the drug culture.

It’s always been interesting to me that rappers and street thugs are stereotyped as the “drug dealers,” “drug lords,” the “proud purveyors of proscribed paraphernalia and potent, perniciously poisonous product.” But when I was growing up in the Bronx, all I ever saw was weed. That was it.

Then when I went away to boarding school (choate) and college (trinity), it was a different story. This was when I had my mind opened - pot, coke, Ritalin, qualudes, lsd, mushrooms, MDMA, and that’s just the bare essentials. Maybe I was a naïve boy, but this is when I saw real drugs. And real drug users. At home in New York City, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, sure we had crackheads. But then I’d go away to Connecticut, presumably getting away from the toxic environment, and now there’s motherfucking crackheads going to school with me. My freshman year in college, we had crackheads all over the place. Motherfuckers had money, but they were still crackheads.

Anyways, the universal pervasiveness of crackheadedry isn’t the point today, it’s just a little preamble to demonstrate I didn’t know anything about mushrooms until I went away to school.

So this particular episode started out with a big group. It was freshman year, and just one of those classic college weekends where twenty whipper-snappers get together on a Saturday afternoon and decide they’re going to get wasted. We were going to trip all day and drink all night.

There was an electricity in the air, that feeling of kids about to do a lot of wrong shit. Many of the veterans were breaking off into groups, planning different activities to do during the trip. For me, it was only my second experience with shrooms, and most of the activities sounded too advanced for someone planning to be insane for at least the next 6-8 hours. Based on my first experience, I was fine with just hanging around in the dorm staring at walls and floors. So I ended up with a group that stayed in the dorm. Three or four of us went to a room, and eventually I ended up paired off with this girl.

This girl, let’s call her Kate, was pretty. We lived in the same dorm, and saw each other around, but didn’t really know each other. So we ended up hanging out, and when you’re tripping and meeting someone it can either go horribly or swimmingly. And she and I were like effortless laps in the English Channel (this particular line was thrown in specifically for literary peeps, and because it was a "reading series," which is amusing because it's not phenomenally "literary"). We developed this trippy thing where we’d talk and then both of us would get thirsty at the same time and go to the hallway for a drink. Then we’d laugh and note our “thirst synchronicity” and start a new tangent.

After bonding for a couple hours, eventually some other friends from the group barged in on our connecting-session-for-two and announced they were going across campus to North, another dorm, and I was to join them. I wasn’t eager to leave Kate, but these were my guy friends, and I couldn’t diss my guy friends for some girl I just met while tripping. So I left Kate, and our connection, and our trips to get water, to go across campus with the fellas ...

continue Sex On Shrooms (Pt. 2)