Trippy Mane: An Excerpt from Chapter Heath Spencer

Now that I was a criminal in the eyes of a lot of the community, my days of throwing big parties for all of the school were over. Now was the time for having dirty people over to just get drunk and fuck shit up. 

One of the dirtiest of these people was Anthony. Heath and Anthony go back a long way, so I won’t say too much about the guy. I don’t particularly like him, though. He was the type that had kept me from being around heath during high school.

I would party with them anyways. At this point, who was I to say I was better than anyone. Anthony would bring over bottles and we would all get crazy drunk. He would also bring other things which I didn’t agree with, but Heath liked to try things. Quite a few different substances came in and out of both my garage and Heath’s house.

One of the funniest times I had with those two was the night that they took mushrooms. Anthony, Heath, our buddy Dexter and I were all out at Heath’s house. They all took these chocolates with mushrooms inside of them. I was still too scared to start experimenting with that sort of thing, so I told them I would babysit.

They had started acting weird and (being the only sober one) all I could do was watch them. I had no idea what was going on in their heads. Heath was going back and forth to the sink to wash his hands. He thought he had something stuck to him I believe. He would look over at me every once in a while and ask me if I was mad at him. I was not at all, but he was so concerned about it.

The shrooms had finished their peak, and they wanted to go outside to smoke a bowl to calm themselves down. I wanted to smoke with them, but I was basically sober at this point. I had no idea what I was in for.

If you’ve done shrooms you know that when you take them they almost completely negate the effects of weed. You can get the little uplifting feeling and maybe a little bit of calm from it, but it’s not going to get you “High”. I had never done them and didn’t know.

I had smoked my fair share and thought that I would be able to keep up. Even sober any of these guys could smoke me under the table, but I was determined to try to keep up. They loaded up the bowl and sent it around. Before I knew it, it was back to me. The bowl went around and around while they talked about randomness and the way of the world. 

When they finally looked up, we had smoked about five bowls back to back in maybe fifteen minutes. I was crumpled in my chair so high I could barely keep my eyes open. They weren’t even phased and had forgotten that I was in the circle. I went inside and passed out hard on the couch.

The next time I encountered mushrooms was a few weeks later when Dexter came into town. He and Heath had come over to my house for the night, and I was going to babysit for them again. I still wasn’t adventurous enough to try them.

They drop the shrooms and we end up going over to the airport. The airport is right across the road from my grandma’s house. So close you can see the spot light go over the yard at night. It’s walking distance no matter how smashed you are.

We go over to the airport and wander around for a while, keeping an eye out for security. We climb the spotlight tower. I’m acting all cocky climbing on the bars around the outside freaking them out. We go to the top and look out over the world and come down pretty quick.

We end up laying on our backs in the middle of the runway in a circle. We’re just talking and messing around. Heath is taking a video on his phone of us on some bullshit. At the end of the video you hear us talking and then you hear one of us say, “Oh shit, is that a car?!”. The video goes blurry and ends as Heath stops the video and we all take off running.

Heath and I are about to cross the road and be home free when we realize Dexter is a good way behind us. I’m not sure if his shoes were messing up on him, or if he was just bad off on the mushrooms. We stop and wait for him up against a fence by the road and grab him as he runs by. We get our shit together for a minute and make the rest of the run back to the house.

Later that night Heath gets a call from our friend Roy. One of his oldest friends, Big Mike, had died. That night Heath got lost in his mind and didn’t come back out.