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For the full story, read these first:
Part 1: Border Fuzz
Part 2: This is Hamsterdam
Part 2: This is Hamsterdam (cont.)

Matt had one goal at Bonnaroo (beyond the music): he wanted to get more fucked up than he had ever been before.

The benchmark was set back in 2006, Matt’s first Bonnaroo: shrooms, hash, opium, and four tallboys of Bud, all at once. “It was like an orgasm, only I was vomiting,” he said on Thursday night, backlit by the Silent Disco as we wandered past, getting acquainted with Centeroo.

“That’s going to be difficult to top.”

“And I’ve done a lot of drugs since then, so my tolerance is much higher. But if I’m going to try, this is the place to do it.”

It was an intriguing prospect — finding that line, searching for that one moment of pure chemical bliss before your stomach hits the eject button. We were only on MDMA and I already felt at peace, infused with a childlike energy that made me want to dance to the beat of the world. The idea that it got better than this was certainly enticing.

I took a deep breath and laughed as the fresh air tickled my throat. “This is incredible.”

“That’s just the drugs talking.”

My teeth clenched reflexively, “I know, but still: the lights, the music, so many colours… it’s so good.”

Matt nodded. He knew we’d pay for all of this borrowed enjoyment (something I found out when I woke up the next morning). But the blanket happiness was worth the emotional hangover. It was therapeutic, almost cleansing. I didn’t mind the jaw stiffness or the incessant need to share everything on my mind with everyone in earshot. Those were minor inconveniences because for once, genuine or not, everything felt wonderful.

The giant flame of a nearby art piece flared periodically, igniting the midnight air. Its heat washed against us with the rythmn of a crashing wave. “Good call grabbing those pills for the re-up. You still have them, right?”

Matt tapped his pocket, “right beside my phone. And I never lose my phone.”

“Never? You’ve never lost your phone?”

Matt shook his head, “not once.”

I laughed. “Bullshit. There’s no way, in all the years you’ve had a cell phone, you’ve never lost it.”

“Motherfucker, my phone and I could be kidnapped, sent to opposite sides of the world, sold into gypsy slavery and used to prank-call foreign dignitaries, and through a combination of wit, martial arts and convenient international shipping errors, it would be sitting at my doorstep the next day.”

Matt lost his phone on Saturday. He woke up and it was gone. He began a frantic search, shaking his sleeping bag and turning the inside of the tent upside-down. I got him to stop searching by suggesting that our time in Tennessee would be better spent doing drugs and listening to music than rummaging through the same bags over and over.

He vowed to return later, a promise he remembered late in the afternoon, while we sat on the grass watching Wilco.

“Is this really the best time to go back and take another look?” I said. Matt and Greg had popped 2C-B before Matt and I split off to head to What Stage. That was almost an hour ago.

“I’m not tripping yet. I could talk to my mother right now.”

“But it’ll probably kick in pretty soon.”

Matt stood up and motioned to leave. “We’ll see. Who knows if that shit was even real.”

Normally, the time between ingesting a drug and feeling its effects is one of anticipation, looking forward to the oncoming high. The fake acid from earlier in the day ruined any of that anticipation for Matt, who grew increasingly agitated he wasn’t tripping with each passing minute. By the time he could see our tent, he had convinced himself the 2C-B was fake too.

Matt attacked the campsite with a determined fervor, diving into the tent and tossing everything out. Waiting outside, I tried to calm him down. “Don’t worry. It’s around here somewhere, probably buried in that pile of bags.”

Matt tossed another bag on the pile forming on the grass and continued wrestling with whatever stuff was left in the tent. At least, wrestling is what it looked like from outside, where I sat in a camping chair rolling a joint and drinking warm beer.

I wasn’t as upset about the fake acid as Matt was, mostly because I wasn’t the one who bought it. And on the whole, the drugs going around at Bonnaroo were real, that much was clear. When we were on our way to the tent, Matt pointed out a guy dressed in what looked like a white housecoat. He had long brown hair and a goatee. “I’m surprised that’s the first Jesus I’ve seen here,” Matt said. At first I thought he was finally tripping, but then I looked, and I too saw the Jesus. Nobody dresses up like that unless they’re on something serious.

I was confident the shroom chocolate I had waiting for me at Greg and Heather’s campsite was real. Shrooms aren’t an easy drug to fake, because they don’t look anything like supermarket mushrooms. It’s much easier to make a fake pill, something synthesized, than it is to duplicate something that grows naturally and requires no processing beyond dehydration. It’s why the counterfeit raisins market never took off.

Eventually, Matt emerged from the tent and started combing the grass with his hands, “I know it’s here. Why can’t I find it?”

“I’m sure it’ll turn up by the time we leave, now let’s go. We’re going to miss Springsteen and I have some shrooms to eat.”

“No, I need to find it now.”

“What for?”

“What if something were to happen back home? A family emergency, a terrorist attack, my parents going through my room… I need to be able to respond.”

“You wouldn’t be able to do anything. Do you think we could pick up and leave, just drive out of here? Look around you.”

Matt was busy combing one section of grass over and over, watching the blades flick underneath his fingers. “This is the worst drug to search for things on. Everything looks like there’s something underneath it.”

At least now we knew the 2C-B was real. “Matt, look around. We’re boxed in.”

He stood up. A rippling multicoloured sea of cars and tents surrounded us for miles, blocking any possible exit route.

“I’d find a way,” he said, looking off to the left. “The tents are moving.”

“Listen, I’m sure we’ll find your phone before we go home, now let’s get our stuff back in the tent and go find Greg and Heather.”

We found them at their campsite and I went straight for their cooler to grab my shrooms, encased in a piece of chocolate and covered with tinfoil. I had heard a lot about how shrooms tasted like shit. I would have ate them straight, but it was nice to know my first shroom-eating experience wouldn’t be overshadowed by a cow dung aftertaste.

I took the chocolate out of its tinfoil wrapper. The cooler had no ice in it and provided little relief from the heat, so the chocolate was soft to the point of melting. It smudged my fingertips.

“So, I just eat it?”

“That’s usually how food is consumed,” Matt said.

“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” Greg offered, gazing into the glowstick he was waving around in the dusk.

“Oh, no, I want to, believe me. I just figured there was some sort of technique.”

“To eating chocolate?” Heather laughed.

I shrugged, “shroom chocolate.”

Matt was getting anxious, twirling an elastic band around his index fingers, “just eat it already.”

I took a bite. It tasted mostly like chocolate. There was a pungent hint of what I could only assume were the shrooms, but I was able to brush that aside like the smell of a faint fart.

A couple more bites and it was gone. “That was fairly edible,” I said.

“You weren’t eating it for the taste,” Matt reminded me with a smile.

Heather stood up. “Springsteen?”

“Bruuuuuuuuuuuce!” Matt howled.

None of Bruce Springsteen’s music would ever be confused for something the least bit psychedelic; it was pure coincidence that three of us would be tripping during his set. We couldn’t miss seeing a legend like The Boss, but it was Bonnaroo: so many drugs, so little time. We had to multitask.

The area around What Stage — Bonnaroo’s main stage — holds around 100,000 people, and it looked near capacity as we found a spot to sit towards the back, where the crowds thinned out. Matt lit a cigarette and watched it melt like ice cream in his hand as he smoked it. Greg purchased more glowsticks from a small girl who was dancing by with dozens looped around her arms. Heather rolled a joint using the last papers we had.

“I checked at the general store. They’re completely sold out,” she said.

“Yeah, I can’t find papers anywhere,” I said. “You’d think they would be prepared for the demand. It’s not exactly surprising that a lot of people are smoking weed at a music festival.”

“I heard the whole surrounding area is sold out,” Greg said. “You can’t find papers for miles.”

Matt carefully regarded his cigarette. “The great Bonnaroo rolling paper shortage of ‘09.”

I’m not sure when I first felt the shrooms. I was looking off in the direction of the stage and before I knew it, I started giggling. Life became funny. It was as if the universe shrugged and said “yeah, you got me. Perception and reality are entirely abstract concepts. There’s no here, no now, it’s all pretty much arbitrary. But isn’t it fucking fun? Here, stare at the ground for a while. It’s going to do some crazy shit!”

“You feeling it?” Matt asked. Still laughing, I turned to him and nodded with a grin that stretched twice the length of my face.

I looked skyward and found the stars dancing on top of the darkness, forming geometric patterns, turning space into a slowly rotating kaleidoscope. “Oh, there they are,” I mumbled, captivated. I hadn’t seen the stars since arriving in Tennessee, and these ones were putting on quite a show.