What’s in Those Shakes? picks up the morning after a Full Moon Party mushroom shakes trip gone sideways — half-remembered chaos, an ex-flame, and a confession that changes everything.
The next morning always hits you as a sort of surprise. You’re somehow still alive. There are greenish-brown flakes all over your clothes and the bed. The room is dark. There’s no view of anything from behind those curtains besides another guesthouse. I look and see Jacky’s golden-brown hair fanned around a pillow wearing my t-shirt and boxers.
Flashbacks of the night before creep back into my head. I turn and see someone’s half-dreaded tangle of hair in a bed across the room. The dong-joint, which we had attempted to roll out of Vietnamese currency for lack of rolling papers, lays there dead and badly singed. More weed lays crumbled around the dresser. Jergen comes out of bed in women’s panties. I look under the blanket and gasp. None of us seem to be wearing proper underwear.
“Oh. My. God. Take off my knickers!” Jacky screams. “Actually, wait. Keep it on. Keep it on!”
“Can you stop yelling? My head feels like it’s going to explode,” Jergen mumbles.
“Where the hell are we? What country is this?” I cry.
I find myself drifting back to the Full Moon Party. Fire shows and fire dancing all around us. We decide we are weary of alcohol and agree to do mushroom shakes instead. We let Maya guide us into the trance, each of us taking a cup and downing it and noting that it tastes sort of like vanilla ice cream, only there’s a grainy feeling at the end. “Get all that in; that’s the psilocybin,” Maya motheringly coaches. “That’s where the spores are. Remember, stay positive. Align your chakras.”
Everything seems to be going well. We think nothing of it, just another mysterious drink we have collectively decided to toss back like Kool-Aid at a Jonestown retreat, no big deal. Get in touch with your spiritual side, your other side, the parts that lurk in the night. The DJ senses our chemical change and plays the same reggae song over and over again. Not only do we enjoy the endless repetition; we demand it. We sing the lyrics all wrong and are struck by how these words somehow describe the moment, the feeling we have been searching for all night.
I’m going to put on my iron shirt
And fly to outer space.
The singer’s voice is a raspy Jamaican. We can’t be sure what he means. There’s a huge circle of dancers, and everyone just goes in the middle and acts like a fool. Some dance by jumping around on one foot to the other. Others move their arms in waves and twist their hands as if casting a spell. There is openness and safety in this place. There is a pregnant moon above us. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone is perfect just the way they are. I can see their souls in their eyes. I feel the fellowship of these gentle spirits, and I wonder how anything that has ever happened happened, and then forget, because of this overpowering feeling of love. The love is so strong I grab a stranger’s hand and kiss it for no reason at all. I do this several times.
I’d been doing nothing but drinking mysterious beverages for the last 24 hours. This thought comes sweeping past me as I suddenly feel my stomach a gurgling as though replaced by a cauldron filled with a bubbling brew. There’s a breakout of cold sweat, a panic, and I quickly dive into the bushes down towards the water away from the party. I pray no one is making love nearby as I lower my shorts just a second too late and then grin and bear it as the evacuation process begins. The sound of the river mutes this sickening chorus of liquid and mushrooms. Everything I have ever eaten, drank, thought about eating or drinking, has now exited the rocket ship and gone off into space. The river accepts my offering with her endless song, and I stand there alone and in the dark, feet wet, shorts around my ankles, which are from what I can guess, slightly shit-stained. There are flashes of fire in the air. Flashbacks of LSD programs in the dark. I see fire, torches, and tortured faces like melting ice cream distorted in the hellfire of war and savagery. The night lights up with chemicals trailing comet tails and falling stars, flares above the trees. There are screams in the night. A shadow agency dosing soldiers strapping skulls to movie theater seats. I watch traumatic moments of another life over and over on repeat. I am an animated deer. Hunters shoot my mother. I never even see who they are. I just feel myself running and feel her fall behind onto the earth. Her body is wet. Rice paddies light up with napalm. An orange vapor creeps into the jungle like cancer and instantly decays all that it touches, the country a forest of death. The world becomes filled with ghosts. Howling zombies invade a village, burn it to the ground, shoot fathers and brothers and sons, all blindfolded with their hands behind their backs, bullets and then a hole, the screams of mothers, wives, and daughters as dicks harden in the open air and the procession begins. A little sister cries out. I gnash my teeth and try to save her and find the back of my head smashed by rifle butt. I feel nothing. The film replays again.
My chakras feel nauseous and sick. The feeling passes and I find the resolve to come back to camp. Like an animal moving in the darkness, I simply act. I wash my ass with water, my feet, my ankles, and give my shorts as an offering to the river goddess, which takes them and sends them floating down current into the impenetrable darkness where these evil thoughts will stay. I stare into a fire. The all-consuming dance of a flame. Why do they dance, the life of a fire, the life of a soul, dancing as they die? But only we know they’re dying. Only they know how glorious it is to dance on fire and die.
“Oh my god, where have you been?! What are you wearing? Is that a. . .?” Jacky begins hooting with laughter, then suddenly stops and continues her plea. “He’s here! What am I going to do?”
“With the tranny?” I ask, my voice traveling some vast distance of space, mesmerized by the flame, somehow knowing who and what we are talking about and answering via radio waves.
“No, some other bird. Oh, wake up! Snap out of it! I need you to walk with me. I can’t let him see me alone. You said you would be my friend; now come on!”
Something tells me I may not be the best man for the job, but damn it, I’m all she’s got. Searching for Maya, Paprika, or Jergen is out at this point. I have a terrible feeling that if I go in among the dancers, I may never return.
“What do we do?” I ask nervously, my fear growing in-sync with hers. I break my eyes away from the hypnotic flame and look at her. The wreath of flowers from a love-fest sits fresh in her hair, but it looks like she somehow managed to escape.
“We’ve got to get back to the guesthouse. We’ll stay there and regroup. I can change and you can, well, you do whatever you want. Do you have the keys?”
“There are no keys.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Which direction is it? Where are we? The mushrooms were poisoned! I can’t see anything!”
We run blindly for what seems like a very long time, but mustn’t have been that long because we bump straight into Jacky’s old flame with his new bird, as Jacky would say, probably hoping for a bump-in just so he could display his sexual and emotional wellness to her. This Jacky piece by piece surmises for us later in the room.
“Antonio!”
He’s a lot different from what I imagined. I sort of pictured him to be a strapping Sicilian with thick brown hair tied in a ponytail wearing white linen shirts to ripple over his muscles as he zips around on his Vespa. It certainly seemed that way when she had recounted her days in Rome. “Italians are lovely. Some of the most hospitable people in the world.”
“You mean waiters and guys who are trying to get you into bed? Those Italians?”
“You’ve got to go.”
He looks like he has a unibrow with a hooked nose and eyes filled with superiority. In another life, he would have been a conspiring Roman senator. All this I perceive through first impression, but the more I concentrate, the more he seems to look like an ostrich in a Versace shirt with an Ethiopian supermodel beside him.
“Hello, Jacky. Where you running off to?” the ostrich opens its beak, smiling.
“Off with my boy,” Jacky says nonchalantly as I stand there and stare open-mouthed at the African girl’s body wrap, which is decorated with tropical flowers in respiring bloom tendrils curling and uncurling over her boobs. She in turn, amusedly, and then disapprovingly, returns my stare.
“Hello boy,” Antonio says condescendingly. “Doesn’t speak English, does he? Must be nice to finally hear yourself talk.”
“He speaks. Go on, speak!” Jacky commands, elbowing me now.
“SQUAWK!”
“Very nice, Jacky.”
On a better day, he wouldn’t have caught me in a Vietnamese rice-hat and oversized novelty sunglasses. Worse still is the Beer Lao shirt I am now wearing like a diaper.
“Have fun, Antonio,” Jacky says coolly and leads me away slowly, and then in a mad dash to escape.
“Oh my god, that was the worst thing that could’ve happened!” Jacky cries as we sprint blindly through the trees. “Why didn’t you say anything? Actually, no! It’s better you didn’t say anything! We’ve got to go back to the guesthouse. There’s the road. Oh god, we look crazy. Am I all right?”
We stop beside the last torch, which separates us from the all-encompassing darkness and the menacing carnival of streetlights ahead. The blue-green planets of her eyes burst into flames.
“You’re fine,” I lie.
“I can’t believe he’s in Vang Vieng. He must’ve followed me here. What a psycho! Well, I hope he’s happy. It’s sad that he came all the way here. Are you even listening? No, of course you’re not. You’re staring at the bloody wall.”
We’ve managed to reach the room somehow running through a delirium to the door. Pornographic visions of Gandhi and lost children and even more lost adults and dogs. Face-paint, neon colors, savage howling, laughter echoing eerily in the alleys.
“Stay off Instagram,” I reply from an ethereal distance trying my best to be helpful, but finding it difficult to concentrate as vines and tendrils and lotus flowers grow like mystical spider webs along cracks in the plaster. “Jealousy is a fruitless emotion. It never achieves anything but the sacrifice of your happiness and well-being.”
“Me? Jealous? Of her? Please! If he’s happy, then good for him! What do I care? How can you compare me to her?”
“Did you see her aura? She was like a neon goddess.”
Jacky gives me a look, and then sighs and rolls her eyes.
“Bloody hell. Maybe I should’ve drank my shake after all.”
“You didn’t?”
She smiles guiltily.
“I barely even sipped mine.”
“What? But back there. . . You were all . . .”
“I felt something before, but I’m sobered up now after seeing him. To be honest, I’ve never done drugs before. I don’t even smoke grass. I thought I’d try the shakes once here, but I don’t know. I changed my mind. I’m not really a drug person. I just wanted something that would make me feel . . .”
“Transcendent?”
“I don’t know. Christ, I’m zonkers.”
“Wait! Don’t move! The light in your eyes! I can see your soul!”
She cocks her head, but doesn’t move, standing in front of the bed where I’m now sitting, the light above her head forming that halo not unlike the one I first saw.
“You remember when we first met?”
“You mean yesterday?”
“I think it was the day before. I lied when I said I didn’t see you. I saw you coming off the bus. The sun was rising. You were stretching and then you started walking off into the woods. There was this moment when the sun touched your hair, and these two white butterflies came out of nowhere and were fluttering around your head like a halo. You looked like a forest spirit or a goddess or something. I wasn’t even sure if you were real.”
“I’m the spirit of the road,” she says and touches my face and points my eyes up at hers. The ceiling is filled with shadows, the faint recollections of a night under starry reflection, the feebleness of a canoe, knowing you are out there in vast infinite space, a tiny thing so fragile and helpless, in the arms of a beautiful, loving universe. Her eyes look into mine, black holes swirling and taking in everything of a moment, afraid to lose it, taking it and turning it into another world where imagination designs the outlines of things that once were.
“I’m going to shower up. Are you coming?”
She stands at the doorway in her mud-stained bikini, preparing to undress, looking at me.
“Yes,” I agree slowly. “I suppose I should.”
“Come on then.”
I rise from the bed and follow her into the bathroom. The room is yellow and smells like jungle fungi and strawberry shampoo. I stand and watch as she starts the water, reaches out and touches it, letting the water pour off her hand. She turns and takes off her bikini top, then, with the same nonchalance, removes her bottoms. She is shaved.
“Did you do that for me?” I ask, not sure how, but finding I am now standing naked before her. My diaper has slipped magically away into the forest never to be seen again.
“Don’t be absurd,” she replies, and brings me into the water. We stand below the poorly working shower under a drizzle of naked and wet, standing face to face like animals meeting suddenly in the forest. Not threatened, but startled, curiosity warming with attraction, the water warm and cold at once drizzling slowly down one side, half her side and mine. She pulls me against her and kisses me with lips that softly taste, then take with passion my lips and tongue. I feel the grit wash away from our bodies and smoothen the layers of dirt and savagery that we are. I feel her reach down and guide me and water drifts down my chest to my stomach and I feel suddenly enveloped in blissful warmth all over.
“I’m inside you,” I gasp in bewilderment as the thing which is happening is happening.
She slaps me across the face and kisses me hard, holds her arms around my neck as I lift her like a caveman and race with madness back into the room; she sits on top of me, dripping wet, straddling me now on the bed.
She rides me with a passion fueled by longing, regret, heartache, and, fuck it, revenge.
“Do you love her?” Jacky asks breathlessly, pausing now, biting my neck.
“Fuck! Yes!”
“Do you want to be with her?” she coos, and digs her nails into my chest.
“What?” I look at her with fear.
“Do. . . you . . . miss . . . her?” she shouts, pounding the emphasis of each word with her body.
“. . . Yes! . . . Fuck! . . .”
“Close your eyes. Pretend I’m her. Fuck me like your tranny girl!”
“She wasn’t. . . a tranny!”
I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and slowly count to 10. . .
I can still hear the sound of the motor from the rigger bouncing us up and down against the chop, the water clear and sparkling turquoise blue, a color that would always stay with you once you had seen it, swam in it, felt its warmth against your body, swimming out to the distant buoy, resting against a blazing screen of sapphires. The lazy hot air and the cool Pacific winds. She came to tell me my friend had left the night before. I decided to stay. She had smooth, dark legs. A beach bungalow all to myself and the hot sand and palm trees and sparkling sea, its waves lulling hypnotically. She worked the bar on that tiny island.
“What was her name?” Jacky asks me as I lay on top of her now, kissing her neck as she holds my head in her hands, my face buried somewhere in her golden brown hair.
I remember how she looked in the moonlight, in the hammock, staring out at the ocean. You could hear the waves in the distance. Her silhouette in silver. She went back to her bungalow around sunrise.
“Do you want to come from behind?” Jacky asks.
“Yes, please.”
Jacky gets on the bed and arches her back, hands and knees, turning her face up to me in that moment of welcome and longing, wincing and biting her lip, crying and forming words that won’t come out. Her eyes turquoise as the ocean, the bungalow, the moonlight descending through the open window, the sound of a crashing sea. I feel myself holding on tightly, so tightly it feels like I’ll break. My hands, my fingers, her hair gripped between my knuckles, I grit my teeth and shout as she cries out louder, louder, and watch as snow begins falling from the skies, falling upon the sand, glittering the paradise shores with a crystal white, the moonlight turning everything silver, snowing harder, harder, harder, and harder. . .
“I’M SAM IAM! I’M SAM IAM! I’M SAM. . . I. . . AMMMMMMMM!”
My True Love looks at me from the hammock where she lies, looking out at the open window at the sea bathed in moonlight, her face in shadow. We run through the sand glittering with crystal snow. She takes a handful of the stuff and marvels at it in awe, then with a cry of delight rubs a handful on my cheek. I feel nothing. I see nothing. I close my eyes and try to see My True Love’s face. I see darkness. I see moonlight, her naked body on the bed.
That final scream into the dark is where this chapter of What’s in Those Shakes? lands — one of the rawest travel memories in the whole journey. If this resonated, you might also like The Search for Waldo, the night that led here.