Posts Tagged MDMA
Bonnaroo Part 2: This is Hamsterdam (concl.)
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on June 6, 2010
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.
Bonnaroo Part 2: This is Hamsterdam (cont.)
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on October 26, 2009
For the full story, read these first:
Part 1: Border Fuzz
Part 2: This is Hamsterdam
Greg had a rule about buying drugs at Bonnaroo.
“Always buy from people who are fucked up,” he said. “If they are, it means the shit is good and they aren’t a cop. And you can negotiate a better deal.”
It made sense. If you were looking to get drugs from complete strangers, asking people who were on what you were looking for was a good place to start. Even if they weren’t selling, they would at least be able to point you in the right direction — provided they still knew which way was up.
Best of all, you didn’t have to worry about whether or not the shit you bought was fake when you had an living, breathing, tripping testimonial right in front of you.
Unfortunately, Greg and Matt ignored the rule when a man who was definitely not tripping offered them an entire sheet of acid for an astonishingly low price. The deal seemed too good to be true and it began to look that way after Matt ate seven tabs from the sheet, then ate three more when he didn’t feel anything. An hour later he wanted to eat the rest of the sheet just to be sure.
We ate the rest on Saturday, hopeful that Matt’s experience the day before was simply an anomaly.
“Better give me 10 to start this time,” Matt said.
“How many do you want?” Greg asked me.
“Not 10.”
“Give him a few,” Matt said, “it’s probably not going to do anything anyway.”
I held the strip of four tabs in my palm. “So what do I do here, eat it? Do I chew?”
“Whatever you want. Chase it with a beer.”
Greg offered some tabs to Heather. She declined, “I’m going to stick with just weed today.”
Matt was skeptical. “Really? Weed makes a great side-dish, but where’s your main course? Maintaining a balanced drug diet is important.”
I finished my beer chaser as the paper snaked its way down my throat. “How long does acid usually take?”
“Well the stuff I took yesterday still hasn’t hit, so…”
A group of girls sitting in front of their tent overheard our conversation. “You guys know where we could get some acid?”
Greg looked over. “We bought a whole sheet yesterday. We can sell you some if you want.”
“Yeah? How much?”
“Cheap,” Matt said.
“Yeah, for cheap,” Greg continued. “It’s not very good though. Matt ate like seven of them and didn’t feel a thing.”
“I just felt like I swallowed a bunch of paper.”
“Yeah, so we’re pretty sure it’s fake. We’re about to eat the rest of it to see if anything happens.”
I laughed, “this is the worst sales pitch ever.”
We finished the sheet and lay in a field for two hours watching clouds do absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The acid was definitely fake. We cursed our relative sobriety.
Greg leaned up and turned towards Matt, “we should do that 2C-B we got.”
Matt tilted his head slightly. “Not yet. In a bit.”
None of us had any idea what 2C-B was. We had even less of an idea when Greg and Matt bought some a few hours earlier. It was next to impossible to decode most of the drug slang used by the dealers pacing through the campgrounds, offering nuggets, headies, reds, tabs and everything in between to no one in particular. These dealers traveled to Bonnaroo from all over North America, so in order to efficiently navigate this diverse marketplace of illicit substances, you had to be familiar with many different drug dialects. For all we knew, 2C-B was just another word for high-grade cannabis.
The dealer selling 2C-B — a burly man with a shaved head, a sleeveless shirt and a fondness for body art — likened it to a cross between LSD and mescaline. Greg and Matt were curious.
“How long is the trip?” Greg asked.
“One dose should last 4-6 hours.”
Matt wasn’t sold. “What if I took two?”
“Two?” the dealer chuckled, trying to see if Matt was serious. When it became obvious Matt wasn’t fucking with him, the dealer said, “I wouldn’t recommend it. One hit can get pretty intense.”
“Can we see it?”
The dealer reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a ziploc bag containing dozens of small red pills. “$30 each,” he said.
They pulled out the money. The dealer handed them a dimebag with two pills and bowed respectfully. He was definitely on something. Matt turned to me. “You in?”
I shook my head, “no thanks.” Tripping was still a foreign concept to me. It was something I wanted to try, but with shrooms or acid; drugs I had heard of before two minutes ago. The prospect of a bad trip loomed large on my unexpanded mind. I didn’t trust 2C-B.
A dreadlocked woman happened by a little later selling shroom chocolates out of a mini cooler slung over her shoulder. I bought one. I was going to trip today, fake acid be damned.
Bonnaroo Part 2: This is Hamsterdam
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on October 19, 2009
For the full story, read Part 1: Border Fuzz first.
Matt kept repeating it on the way to Bonnaroo. “This is Hamsterdam.” He said it when we stopped for gas and greasy food at a truck stop in southern Ohio, he said it while we sat on the balcony of a motel two hours from Manchester, Tenn., and watched rain so heavy it turned the canopy into a waterfall, and he said it while we idled in a 6-mile line of cars on the interstate shoulder, waiting to finally enter the festival grounds.
I put the car in park and took my foot off the brake. The line wasn’t going anywhere. Another state trooper on motorcycle appeared in the side mirror, approaching quickly on the left. Up ahead, an off-ramp was blocked by two cruisers with more troopers beside them, watching our snail-flattering progression.
Matt stared back. “Heavy police presence. You’d think we were being herded off to some prison camp.”
“Hey, Matt, pass the pipe.” Heather’s hand reached out from the back seat.
Matt turned around. “No, you’re not serious. Now of all times?”
“Just one more bowl. Why not?”
The bike trooper rumbled past.
“That guy.” Matt pointed at the bike trooper. “Him. That’s why. We already smoked once here and got away with it. I don’t want to tempt fate.”
“Those guys aren’t looking for drugs. They’re here to make sure nobody cuts out onto the highway trying to get ahead and causes a pile-up.”
“It doesn’t matter what they’re here for, I don’t feel comfortable smoking around all these Tennessee state troopers. We’re not in Toronto. Pot’s a serious thing here. And even if we were in Toronto, this would still be too many cops. Why can’t you just wait until we get inside? It can’t be that much longer.”
And once we were inside Bonnaroo, every recreational drug imaginable would be essentially legal for the next four days.
This wasn’t the first time these troopers had escorted tens of thousands of hippies, hipsters and frat boys into the Bonnaroo grounds. They knew by now what goes on inside and how much contraband they would find if they searched a few cars at random, yet they didn’t seem to care about any of that. They were strictly on traffic duty, tasked with ensuring the stoners enter the designated drug-use area in an orderly fashion.
We didn’t smoke another bowl until we were parked. As we unpacked the van, people were already walking around looking to buy weed. There was no way we were selling what we had. We were nearly extradited to Syria for bringing that pot across the border. You can’t put a price-tag on that.
We dropped MDMA as the sun set, the storm clouds turning its yellow light a bluish grey as they slowly converged overhead.
“How many do you want? Two?” Greg asked.
I shrugged, “one should be fine.” I had never done MDMA before. The myths about it creating pinholes in your brain matter and the association with glow-stick waving, pacifier-sucking ravers kept me far away from it in high school. All I really knew was proper MDMA worked like a filter on your brain that makes everything wonderful for around three to four hours.
“Trust me, you’ll need two,” said Matt, grabbing an extra one from Greg. “You’ll want a re-up.”
The lightning struck with the MDMA. Jagged stabs of white illuminated the sky with a light that echoed off the clouds. Big, thick raindrops fell fast and relentless, drumming on the canopy beside a neighbouring tent while we sat underneath, waiting for the downpour to end. The drumming was so loud it drowned out everything else. Its rhythmic constancy calmed, soothed, made everything okay. It was almost wonderful.
Everyone sounded slightly distant, as though they were talking through tin cans attached with string. I took a deep breath and listened to the sound of the storm, now louder than ever.
“It feels really good to breathe,” I said to no one in particular, discovering that MDMA also removes any ability to think before you speak.
As soon as the rain let up Matt took off, anxious to explore Centeroo, “get a feel for the place,” he said. I tried waiting for everyone else, but after a while I couldn’t resist the inviting smile of the shimmering lights on the other side of the wall.
Centeroo was separated from the campgrounds by a large yellow wall. There were only two known points of entry, both called Shakedown, because Centeroo was a drug-free zone, technically. Shakedown wasn’t air-tight. 
A little weed in a shoe or a tab in a wallet would make it through unharmed — assuming the weed doesn’t reek of foot — but you had to take the effort to conceal it.
I found Shakedown and headed into Centeroo. After driving 1,400 kilometres to get here, I still wasn’t sure what Bonnaroo was. I knew there would be a lot of music, but that was about it. I wasn’t prepared for the incredible nocturnal carnival that surrounded me. A ferris wheel rotated slowly in the distance, bulbs flashing. Lights were everywhere, colours of every hue, backlighting silhouettes of people casting long shadows on well-worn dirt paths as they wandered between one attraction and another.
Matt appeared beside me as I walked.
“So yeah, this is a pretty cool place,” I said.
Matt smiled, “this is Hamsterdam.”
I finally understood.
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