strange days
Searing heat billowed from the desert floor as night fell. It was time. The shaman approached with open arms, his feathered hat pulled down to shade his eyes. From his belt hung a wizened, hollowed-out gourd. The shaman bowed in ritual before me.
'You ready?'
I nodded.
The shaman extracted six small, shrunken buttons from the gourd, the dried fruit of a peyote cactus. I held out my right hand. No further words were exchanged. I had been schooled well in the days leading up to my first journey and talk was by now unnecessary. The shaman placed the buttons on my palm. He bowed once more, turned and walked off across the mesa. I watched him go, his silhouette dying slowly into the heat-haze.
The six buttons lay nestled in my hand. Taking one, I held it up to the last of the light. A dark sun surrounded by a shadowy penumbra. It was indeed time. Placing the button on my tongue I began to chew, biting through the hardened husk into bitter flesh below. My mouth burned and my first reaction was to gag. I wanted so badly to spit out the evil-tasting thing but I forced myself to carry on.
Two more buttons then a short swig from my water-bottle. I sat to eat the remainder.
I remember hearing the call of a crow nearby and then the blackness hit. Deep, deep, terrifying darkness that sucked all meaning from my world. I was utterly alone in a silent, empty universe, unable to move a single muscle in my body. Suspended in an immense black pit of infinite nothingness.
It was the green exit sign I saw first. A surreal reminder of the everyday, mundane life from which I had so recently been separated. Feeling returned gradually to my body and I reached out to grasp hold of a rail to the side of a short flight of steps beneath the exit sign. The steps led to a door and beyond the door lay a stage lit by dancing flames.
I clambered up, made my way through the fire that now encircled a blackened body and walked to the opposite side of the stage where a bright-coloured roundel was set into the wall. It yielded easily to my touch and another world beckoned.
I stepped back just in time. A huge green, phosphorescent turtle scuttled through the newly opened portal. I knew immediately it was a diabolo, a dark shaman who had taken on the form of an animal. During my period of instruction on the mesa I had been warned of these devilish creatures. Keeping my distance I walked on past yet another wall of flame. A smiling man beckoned me across to join him, but I was not to be tempted.
The diabolos were strong here. A second, in the form of a primitive early shark, swam through the darkness in search of prey. I stood motionless, hands out-stretched in supplication as I had been taught, and mercifully the diabolo passed.
The mescaline had taken hold. Stripped of all sense of time and identity the world became a series of strange, twisting patterns. A small insect circled my head, transformed into a repeating series of clones connected by their feet like an endless paper-chain of chirping cicada. A cactus grew legs and walked toward me. As it approached it too transformed, this time into a green and black striped wave.
A final transformation. The striped wave resolved into the back-drop to a convict's mug-shot, blood-stained and gurning into the darkness. A man stood beside this horrific image. I recognised him dimly from the past.
The peyote journey neared its climax. I found myself back on stage, this time enveloped in the wall of flame. I was trapped. Waiting for the next shaman to open the portal and step through onto the boards.
Strange days, my friend, strange days.
