Getty Image / Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection
The first time tripped on mushrooms was a magical experience. The second time was a life-altering event that would culminate in me never being able to look at Tom Hanks the same.
I’m not here to wax poetic as a ‘trip guide’ and give you pointers on how to have the best trip. I’m just going to share with you the time I sat through You’ve Got Mail while tripping so hard the walls were melting all because of the comfort that ‘America’s Dad’ Tom Hanks provided at that moment, for better or worse. See, the thing about taking mushrooms for your second time is you barely know what you’re getting yourself into because you only have the one experience to compare it against.
My first time eating mushrooms was while kayaking a completely secluded stream in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains in the middle of the day. Leisurely paddling along with my older brother who led me through the journey, laughing maniacally the entire way with the birds chirping and fish swimming by. I shit you not, a deer came up to drink from the stream just a few feet away. It was like a scene straight out of a hippie movie.
The second time I tripped balls on mushrooms was on my own terms. I managed to secure some shrooms from a friend’s older sister who had apparently waded through cow shit all night in a pasture, picking mushrooms. Instead of eating those poopy shrooms our plan was to boil them up into tea which would’ve been the right decision had we actually used tea bags. Instead, we boiled the mushrooms and drank the nasty piping hot mushroom water without adding any flavors because we were young and morons.
The plan was simple. We were going to sneak into Varsity Blues at the movie theater by purchasing tickets to another movie and ducking inside when security wasn’t looking. Did I forget to mention this was a loooonnnnnnggggg time ago? I don’t know why we thought that eating mushrooms and going to a packed movie theater would be a good idea but like I said, this was only my second time eating shroom and the first time was such an overwhelmingly enjoyable experience that it seemed to me like there were no bad ideas when it came to choosing an activity whilst tripping.
Things were going great for a while. We started getting the yawns shortly after getting to the mall where the movie theater was. We walked around for a while as they kicked in and went through the phase of unstoppable giggling into seeing vision trails. That eventually progressed into tripping so hard it seemed like the world was moving a thousand miles an hour and really I just needed to get to that movie seat and find some stabilization.
I’d started to build up this idea in my head that I was losing control of the trip but all I need to get things back on track was so sit my ass down in the movie theater seat and everything would be okay. Eventually, we purchased tickets to You’ve Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks because we couldn’t get tickets to Varsity Blues but thought we’d be able to sneak in anyway. We were wrong. There was a security guard planted right at the door checking every ticket and we were sent scurrying away like two lost puppies.
My friend at the time proposed the most reasonable idea possible. He said we should just continue to walk around the mall and look at cool shit. This was a good idea. Mine was not. I was tripping so hard I’d started staring at my hands which were moving in different directions. My two biggest rules of tripping are (1) never stare in a mirror and (2) never look at your hands. You’ll get lost in weird patterns moving around your skin and it can start to get a sense of the thousands of microorganisms living on your skin at any given moment. It’s just not a good idea to go down that line of thought while you’re trying to stop the world from spinning. To recap here: going outside, surrendering to the flow, and seeing the world = good idea, forcing your buddy to sit through You’ve Got Mail while tripping balls because America’s Dad Tom Hanks is a comforting presence on the screen = bad idea.
One thing I didn’t account for in my addled brain was pupil dilation. When you eat enough psilocybin mushrooms (or most psychedelics in general) and trip your face off your pupils will expand to the size of quarters. Pyschedelics.com states “According to the NIDA, “excessive pupil dilation” is a common sign of psilocybin abuse. This effect is likely to occur whenever anyone abuses hallucinogenic drugs. However, it is especially clear when someone abuses mushrooms, partly because of the potency of this particular drug.”
What this meant for me at the moment when I walked into the theater I had the night vision of a goddamn hawk. I had perfect 20/20 vision in pitch black conditions because my pupils were the size of the silver dollar coins. Navy SEALs would KILL for the natural night vision I was rocking in that moment.
Unfortunately, it also meant I could see the movie screen better and more clearly than anyone in the history of mankind. In those scenes where Tom Hanks was sitting at his computer screen typing away to his secret AOL Instant Messenger friend Meg Ryan I could see that Tom Hanks’ skin pores were the size of craters on the moon. Now, instead of getting lost staring at my stupid hands, I was being sucked into the vortex of Tom Hanks’ face and never before had I taken notice of someone’s skin so closely. It was like I could literally see his pores producing oil in real-time.
Meanwhile, my friend Paul was tapping me on the shoulder every 60 seconds asking ‘can we get the fuck out of here already????’ which was pointless. I was so deep down the craters of Tom Hanks’ face that I was lost and gone forever. This was my new life. Stuck living in a world where only Tom’s enormous pores and my psychedelic-fueled brain existed.
This is the shit I was forcing us to watch while we were peaking on shrooms. The second trip of my life. The first of his. THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE.
Thankfully for everyone involved, the ‘peak’ on mushrooms comes down as quickly as it spikes. Unlike LSD which can last 12-24 hours, the trip on mushrooms is often much shorter and significantly more intense with the right dosages.
I eventually snapped out of it and realized that forcing my friend to watch You’ve Got Mail was actual torture. It never occurred to me at that moment that it would make for an enjoyable story down the line. Nor did I realize that I’d never be able to look at Tom Hanks and his gigantic pores the same again after that fateful night.
I sincerely doubt that my buddy who was with me on that fateful night is a BroBible reader but if you’re reading this, Paul, I just want you to know I’m sorry for forcing you to chug mushroom tea and watch Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fall in love when we could’ve literally been doing anything else on the planet at that time. Seriously, we could’ve just sat on a bench and stared at the sky and it would’ve been 100,000x more enjoyable. That one’s on me, my bad.
For storytime next week, I’ll tell you gentlemen about the time I ate mescaline at a Mars Volta concert and ended up playing Ouija Board with the band before finding myself standing in the bushes at Trump Towers in Columbus Circle (NYC).