David Bowie

Space Oddity being one of rock’s quintessential drug songs, it’s fitting that it played a part in my first experience going out of my head. I was sixteen, and had been a very good boy for a very long time. Living in the dorm, feeling my oats, I decided it was time dip my toes in the warm waters of altered perception. Eric, my roommate, and Allen, our other best friend, had started sneaking out on the weekends to smoke pot. Simultaneously intrigued and repelled, I decided it was time I tasted the fruit of the tree of ignorance, so one day after dinner I announced that I was ready to try my hand at inebriation. Ever helpful, they sent me off that weekend to get drunk at a mutual friend’s room. I had a couple of rum and cokes but, for whatever reason, they didn’t affect me, while my host had to excuse herself to sloppily throw up in her bathroom.

The next weekend, Eric and Allen walked me out to the “airport”, a small, long-abandoned cottage tucked into the woods about half a mile from campus. I gingerly followed them there and shared a joint with them. Walking back, I felt perfectly fine – same as I always did – while Eric and Allen were reduced to screaming with laughter and leaping off into the woods on some mysterious commando mission. Bummed, I slunk back to my room, and waited for my buddies to return.

The problem, I figured, was my brain. Apparently it had a stranglehold on reality and would not release it, no matter how I prodded it. Resigned to a life of sobriety, I thanked my buddies for trying to help me see the dark, and settled back into my boringly predictable life.

The next weekend, on a bright and warm Sunday morning (Interlochen weekends are Sunday and Monday – don’t ask), I heard a soft knock at the door. Eric, never much of a morning person, snored on contentedly, so I pulled myself out of bed and opened the door. And there stood Andrew, with a smile on his face and a gleam in his eye.

“I hear your brain won’t let you get high,” he remarked, bemusedly.

“That’s right,” I nodded.

Grinning, he opened his hand, revealing a tiny little piece of paper with a cartoon character on it. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but the picture was of one of R. Crumb’s stable of comic characters, the bearded Mr. Natural.

“Put this is your mouth and suck on it until it dissolves,” Andrew instructed.

I looked skeptically at the impossibly small piece of paper and even more skeptically at Andrew.

“Go ahead,” he urged, and took another tiny scrap of paper out of his pocket and put it on his tongue.

“I appreciate the thought, Andrew, but you’d just be wasting it on me. Like I said, my brain won’t let me get high and besides, that’s so small, what could it possibly do?”

Andrew grinned and pushed his hand towards me. ”Go ahead,” he urged. “Take it and let’s go for a bike ride.”

I shrugged, took the scrap of paper out of his palm and set it on my tongue. Andrew grinned and nodded, then turned and walked down the hall to get to the bike racks. I quickly threw on some clothes and followed him outside, sucking on the tiny little piece of paper, which had started to get strangely slippery.

Andrew was a year older than me – a senior to my junior – and, along with Eric and myself, was a dance major; the three of us made up the entire male part of the department. He and I had become friends the year before, when we discovered a shared interest in photography and synthesizer music – he was the only person I had ever run across that also had a Synergy album. Andrew was an outrageous person, likely to say anything to anybody at any time, and his gleeful anarchy was very appealing to somebody as responsible and socially conservative as myself. Later, as we all grew to adulthood, his shameless behavior became sleazy and degrading and impossible to support – or even endure – but in high school, it could be quite entertaining hearing some blushing girl yell “Andrew!” with exasperation as he propositioned her in the cafeteria. He got slapped more than anybody I knew, but all that bashing didn’t abash him one bit.

After the long, cold, dreary Michigan winter, there’s nothing better than a bright, warm spring day, and it was a perfect Sunday morning as we rode our bikes off campus and down Diamond Park Road, curving along the shoreline of one of the lakes – Green Lake, a lake of some personal significance – that gives Interlochen its name. It was a spectacular Technicolor day, with the sun shining cheerily through a million new leaves and a gentle breeze wandering lazily through the woods. After about half-an-hour, we stopped at a small bridge and watched the water float through underneath us for a moment.

“How do you feel?”

“Fine. The same.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

Andrew got back on his bike and I followed him down the road for another couple of miles. As the road swerved away from the lake, the Academy visible on the other side, I began to get a strange electrical feeling in my stomach. Then I noticed that my hands were a little tingly too. Andrew stopped and abruptly picked up his bike and carried it out into a field. Puzzled, I stopped and followed him out, although I walked my bike instead of carrying it. When I caught up with him, by a tree in the middle of the field, I asked him what was going on.

“Oh, I just figured that my bike is probably tired of carrying me. I thought I’d carry it for a while.”

For some reason, this struck me as extremely funny, and I burst out laughing as the electricity that had been swirling in my stomach overflowed and danced through my body. Andrew started laughing, and the absurdity of standing out in the middle of a field with our bikes struck me as incredibly hilarious. After a few minutes of uncontrolled giggling, my sides hurt and I was able to stop enough to catch my breath. Now it felt like my skin had somehow come loose from my body and was just floating on top of it – I was in my body, but not of it. I looked down at my hands, and was surprised that I had never noticed how strange they were. Not how strange my hands were, but how strange hands in general were. I was studying them in detail, turning them over, when Andrew announced that he thought we should probably get back to campus. He picked up his bike and bounced across the field, carrying it on his shoulder. I collapsed with laughter.

Finally I made it across the field and got on the bike. We started riding back towards campus, but everything was totally strange. My body seemed like some kind of machine, pumping away by itself, and I began to lose the conceptual boundaries between my body and the bicycle. I was having trouble figuring out where my hands ended and the handlebars began.

“Wait a minute,” Andrew said as he pedaled next to me. “How do you ride a bike?”

And then he fell over.

I stopped my bike, and turned around, worried that he had hurt himself. Instead, he lay on the shoulder of the road, looking up at the astonishing clouds and weeping with laughter. That sent me off, and I fell down too, gasping for air. After a minute or two hundred, he got up and then noticed that his chain had come off. He fiddled with it for a moment and then got it back on, his hands covered with grease. I watched fascinated as he picked up a handful of dried leaves and rubbed them on his hands, trying to get the grease off.

“Rustle, rustle,” he muttered as he fondled the leaves and I knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that that was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.

Weak with laughter, I crawled over to my bike and tried to figure out how to get back on it. Looking at the bike, I was struck by what a strange piece of machinery it was. The longer I looked at it, the stranger it seemed. By now it was clear. My brain would let me get high. I grinned and hopped on the bike, knowing full well that riding such a contraption was perfectly impossible, and trusting that my body would figure it out anyway.

Even though we were clearly riding our bikes at close to the speed of sound, it took an eternity to make it back to campus. We parked our bikes, trying not to wet our pants with laughter. Now that we were back among the living, the stakes were higher, and we had to try to pull it together. We each took a couple of deep breaths, calmed down, and strode purposefully into the dorm. Andrew turned down his hall, I turned down mine, and that was the last time I saw him that day.