Years of driving past billboards with tiny lethal doses of Fentanyl on them next to piles of cocaine or whatever, years of that and the fact that I had two kids who told me to ‘come back’ whenever I left for a few days had me kind of worried about the drugs aspect of the trip. But the fear and anxiety and all of that were secondary compared to the fact that no one seemed to have access to any of this shit. Everyone said buy it on the dark web, but it felt too traceable.

Robbie, who in years past was always holding, was no help on this front. His connections had either washed up or he had burned them all. He probably burned them, because he was in the process of burning his crew since I had met him. Nothing personal, he was just slowly circling around meeting this girl. The same thing had happened to his brother. Like all girls, Robbie’s girl wasn’t into Robbie’s friends. Like most girls, she wasn’t all that into drugs, either. Around the time that she moved into Robbie’s apartment, the last of the fake-ecstasy-slash-meth somehow disappeared. Robbie started eating mushrooms when he went out to clubs, because girls, even Hunter’s girl, are somehow more comfortable with ‘natural’ drugs.

We hit up old friends we hadn’t talked to in years and asked them for drugs. It was embarassing, but we had no alternative. I considered buying a Bolivian Torch cactus and shipping it to my brother, John, to figure out how to get the mescaline out of it. I looked up how to make DMT. We got nowhere. Two weeks before the trip, it looked like we were going to eat dinner and drink wine and go to a show like civilized people.

A week before we were set to leave, I was on the phone with the New York State Police. They were looking for a project manager to implement some crazy thing and they were having no success with it and the county police commissioner was yelling at me. It was strange. I felt a kinship with him. I felt he was angry at incompetence, and I was highly sympathetic to that. The recruiter, being an incompetent recruiter, which I’m sorry to say is the norm in my experience, had failed to mention that I would be working for the police in this role and that I would need to take a drug test. It was pretty funny, because the role paid twice my salary at the time, and I was worried that they would offer the job to me right before the trip started.

I hung up the phone with the police and my phone vibrated and there was a text from Hunter, ‘One thing’s for sure…there’s a whole lotta drugs in here…right now.’ There was a picture of capsules full of little crystals and ten tabs of LSD.

A few days after that, my brother John scored some magic mushrooms down in Delaware. He came up and we ate a couple grams and watched Fear and Loathing. At some point we stopped the movie and went outside to smoke weed next to a stop sign.

“The philosophy of this sign is merciless,” I said. I felt it was telling me not to go on the bachelor trip, that I should stop everything because it was clearly a bad idea. And then I thought it was telling me to stop thinking about things like that. And then I thought it was telling me to stop figuring out what it was trying to say to me.

After a while, Hunter said, “I don’t think he likes this stop sign,” and moved our smoking circle to his bright-as-hell front stoop. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was upset that no one was enjoying my clearly mind-blowing stop sign revelations. 

I think we finished the movie, but I’m not sure. I think the TV was still on when I laid on the floor in the fetal position and tried to go to sleep. I was freezing cold and Hunter put some kind of long weird skinny drape over me.

I woke up three hours later and got the kids out of there. We went back home and brushed our teeth. I got the one on the bus and the other to the daycare. Then I went to work.

I was glad we had done the mushrooms together because I was thinking I had better shut the fuck up about stop signs in the future. I felt I had talked too much and what I needed to do in the future was just blast music. My family’s tendency is to talk about everything endlessly. It’s the thing we like to do. Especially my dad. But with these drugs, it was best not to talk.

A week or so later, I needed to go to Walmart to pick up random stuff for the trip, like a pair of briefs that I could stash the molly in so that I could get into the club. You just never knew how hard they were going to search you at the Brooklyn Mirage.

Hunter had found a strain of cannabis called White Widow at our local store, which was strange because my brothers and I had been looking for that strain for years, ever since I had first smoked it with this half Asian half Jewish chick on a bench in SoHo. It was the one strain I ever smoked that hadn’t immediately put me onto a time dilated hell path leading straight to sleep.

So I decided we should test that out, too. I smoked it on the way to Walmart. It was only once we hit the parking lot that Hunter said to me, “Smoking weed and going into Walmart is not the move.” He said it was  something about the fluorescent lighting.

“Well, shit.”

We went in there and started looking around and we were walking down this one aisle full of men’s clothes and suddenly it flipped into the women’s section. It was trippy as fuck. We were walking down the aisle and the whole store just flipped around us. I don’t know.

It took us like 20 minutes to find out where they kept the underwear, and come to find out they had it all under lock and key. Which totally made sense because back in the high school cross country days, my friend used to go into Walmart and take tank tops out of their packages and toss them over his shoulder and walk out. He always had fresh tank tops and my shit was always dingy.

So we started looking for an associate, and they were all acting kind of strange and not looking a hundred percent like employees. Hunter found out about twenty minutes later that the store had been closed for half an hour. So we left, which was bad, because I didn’t have another time when I could get all this shit and the trip was coming up fast.

I ended up going back to Walmart the next day while talking to a coworker on the phone about this crazy project that was going to be due in a few days. Kids were arguing over shovels and I was pacing the clearance aisle, talking about SFTP servers.

The work deadline was really fucking with me in the beginning. Not only that, a friend’s girl had called me out of the fucking blue that morning, the same friend, in fact, who used to shoplift tank tops. The last three times she had called me, people had died. I’m sure this was no exception to the rule, but honest to God I just didn’t have the space for it then, and I still don’t, and I am to this day letting that shit ride.

Shit. Let’s start over. Where the fuck were we. Good Christ, how did a structure sneak into this document? The point was there we were, wearing blankets and shit like that, standing on a Ford Bronco. How was it a Ford Bronco and not a Jeep? I don’t know. The back seat was sick because you could look up at the sky, but the seats weren’t comfortable, like to the point I didn’t even know how to sit. Or was that the drugs? At that point, I could taste MDMA on my face every time I licked my lips. And I had never put MDMA on my face. I don’t think. Shit. Anything’s possible.

And that was the point, man, that’s what I learned. Anything is possible. Shit.

For a couple thousand dollars and a million text messages you could get ten guys together in New York, walk into a 200 year old steakhouse and make fun of the rich. We tipped the waitress $600 and went outside passing baggies around and jamming them in our underwear. Like I was telling you, I bought these technicolor high-waisted briefs for the occasion. I got them at TJ Maxx the day after the failed trip to Walmart.  One of the best purchases I made. And shit, I made a lot of purchases. A dash cam for $99 off eBay so we could have evidence in case we got into an accident. Bear spray. A fire pan off Amazon so you could have a fire where there is no fire ring. If you don’t know about camping in the desert, well you’ve got a lot to learn. I mean you don’t, because for instance, we saw a girl walking in the desert with barely any clothes on and not carrying any water and I assume she survived. In the middle of the goddamn Mojave they have a visitor’s center. But for some reason you have to go to Barstow to get anti-venom for Sidewinder bites.

Shit.

When I came home from the trip I wanted to lay in bed thinking and thinking. Then I wanted to write this memoir and go out and do it again. I saw my kids for about ten minutes and I was ready to go again. It’s true I had missed the fuck out of them. But shit, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and they are still here. The work deadline was looming only a few days away at that point. It was an incredibly useless exercies, but it was also a puzzle. And puzzles are kind of my thing. I always say Drugs, Music, and Driving. But I should add puzzles in there. But then again I don’t even know how to do a Rubik’s Cube.

But let’s start over. Shit. Jesus. I’m wilding tonight off this coffee and coming down from that work deadline and immediately planning my parents 40th anniversary party that’s happening this weekend. I’m going to get a bullhorn, just like Hunter S. Thompson. Start yelling at people. But what was I saying?

Shit. I’m in a loop. Our friend Mike was in a loop for a very long time. We’re all in a loop, I guess. I told my son he shouldn’t be scared of dying. Look at the plants, I said. They die in the winter and they’re reborn in the spring. It’s the cycle of life. He asked me if a human’s life cycle is to die and then come back, as if he was asking me about a caterpillar or some shit. I said how the hell should I know. Sure. Why not. Everything really is a loop. He told me death would hurt because all your bones would break.

So I always wanted to write some dumb shit like this, but I didn’t have anything to say, really. Naseem Taleb blew my mind when he wrote that most writers write their whole lives trying to find something to say. I think I stopped writing for a decade after I read that. Like Truman Capote’s critique of Jack Kerouac, I felt that really I just enjoyed typing. But I also read a book about Jack Kerouac called, The Voice Is All. Apparently, Kerouac would go around writing things as if he was sketching scenes in a sketchbook, where you normally would keep sketches, only it was words in a notebook, which is where you keep notes. And he just really got good at capturing the essence of a moment off the cuff and that’s how he would write. And I read On the Road maybe a hundred times you know. I didn’t find it until I was…Jesus how fucking old am I now. But I didn’t find it by the usual route, the old summer reading list. I found it in a bookstore called ‘Books for America’ off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. Jesus fuck I am old.

That bookstore was the fucking shit. It is gone now. It died before Covid. Fucking hell.

So yeah. I wanted to write some shit about my life, but I didn’t know anything, really, and nothing had happened. I couldn’t seem to explain anything new about being a dad. Sure, my kid says psycho shit that would make most parents, I imagine, curl up in the fetal position and call in a shrink, but I mean on the whole he’s fairly normal. Not to me of course. But he goes to school and comes home and his teachers say he’s a joy to work with and he tells on his classmates if they do something wrong, like use a tissue for a napkin or whatever the fuck. And yeah I got this job at an ad agency after working in restaurants for decades and everyone was like, holy shit you are really good at working in an office, which was because I had read a bunch of books about management and shit like that when I was a young kid so I could be good at Amway. 

It all seemed interesting enough. But it wasn’t compelling. Like if I could explain it in a way, maybe it could be interesting to someone else. If anyone ever gave me a drink and asked me questions, which did happen every five to ten years, actually, I would go on and on about my whole life. And those were the times that I realized I was my dad. Shit. So yeah it was interesting to talk about, but not to write about and/or bother anyone else about.

But then shit man, we pulled off the craziest trip I have ever heard of. It was so crazy, that when I was sitting at a restaurant called Nacho Daddy in Las Vegas watching a music video, the only thing I could think was that these rock stars didn’t even know what it meant to take drugs. Vegas itself seemed like a Busch Gardens version of a German village. It was a fucking joke. Sure it was cool and we had a great time. But the idea that Vegas wanted to steal our money and chew us up and spit us out and all of this shit I had heard while researching for the trip…was a fucking joke.

We pulled that shit off with, well there’s no other way to say it, with aplomb.

Shit.

And then suddenly I felt like you know what, that’s some shit I could hang my memoir on right there. The goddamn universe had given us a message, and I could count myself among those people able to type and think in a somewhat straightforward way and remember shit…what the fuck am I saying? I could bring back a message of some kind. And of course that was folly and I knew it all along when I was there. I knew there was nothing from the experience that I could bring back. 

But maybe I was wrong. I hope I was wrong.