You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

PEYOTE

Seth found me working at my drafting table. He came with a request. He explained, “A friend of mine, a psychology major named Linda, asked me if I could help her with her term paper. The paper is on the effects of psychedelic drugs, specifically Peyote.” He explained, “She wants me to find another person to join us and take peyote to explore its effects. “When she asked, I thought of you,” he said.

This encounter occurred when I was twenty-four and had claimed that I would try anything once. It is an attitude that I abandoned after my harrowing experience of skydiving. The idea of experimenting with peyote seemed harmless. I agreed to join them.

Several days later, Seth called, saying neither Linda nor he had the $27.00 needed to order the Peyote. He asked if I would do it. Linda will pay you back, he assured me. I agreed and sent my order to Smith’s Cacti Ranch in Laredo, Texas. A few weeks later, I received a card from the campus post office informing me that a package had arrived for me at there. When I went to pick it up, I was handed a flat box, roughly 16” by 14” and 2 inches high. The box was clearly labeled, “PEYOTE, 100 ASSORTED BUTTONS.” In 1962, peyote had not yet been declared illegal.

The buttons looked like fuzzy balls ranging in diameter between that of a nickel and a half dollar. I let Seth know that the buttons had arrived. I had not yet met Linda. Neither Seth nor I had any idea of how to prepare peyote. We contacted Linda for instructions to prepare the buttons. Though preparation should have been part of her study, she was of no help. Seth and I decided that it would be unpleasant to eat the fuzzy balls, so we chopped them up and dried them on a cookie sheet in my oven. The result was a tray of b-b-sized nodules. I bought a box of large gelatin capsules. We stuffed them with the dried peyote. This process produced 78 capsules of peyote. We asked Linda what her research had shown about how much of it we should take. She had no idea, nor was she willing to try to find out. I asked my dad, a physician, about dosage. He looked it up and could only find dosages of the principal psychoactive ingredient, mescalin. He had no way of determining how much mescaline was in a button. We decided that we would each take half of our share of the capsules, or 13 capsules each. In terms of peyote buttons, that would be 100/6 or a dose of 17 buttons each.

Standing in my kitchen, we counted out 13 capsules for each. We were about to start taking them when Linda said she needed to use the toilet and would take hers in the bathroom. With a large glass of water each, Seth and I swallowed our capsules. When Linda came out of the bathroom, Seth went in and vomited his pills. At that point, I thought Linda had taken hers.

We sat around the apartment for a couple of hours waiting to start feeling some effect, but nothing happened. When it was 5:00 PM, assuming that the peyote would have no effect, we decided to go for a Pizza at Tino’s.

Tino’s Pizza was a family-run business in a house that had been converted into an Italian restaurant. Dining was at small tables in what had been the living room and the dining room of the house. We took a table in the living room section and ordered a pizza. While waiting for our pizza, a family passed through the living room heading to the other section of seating. Their whining five-year-old son followed the couple. However, instead of walking across the room, the boy entered the room, walked up the wall next to the door. Upside-down, he walked across the ceiling and down the other wall. Before following his parents through the second door. He was complaining all the way. I described what I saw to Seth and Linda. Neither of them saw anything strange. About then, the pizza arrived. It was placed on our table. I looked at it. The curvature of the salami and mushroom topping appeared, to me, to be a swarming, crawling mass of entangled worm-like creatures, all alive and moving. I described what I was seeing and told my companions, “We have to get back to my apartment”. While I paid for the food, Linda and Seth obtained a box for the remaining pizza, and we went out to my car.

The drive back to my apartment was bizarre. Fortunately, the drive was on a one-way street and only ten blocks distance. Apparently, I was driving slowly because the cars that passed me appeared to be floating by, as if elevated off the pavement and rocking like small boats on rough water. I parked on the street and we climbed the stairs to my apartment. Standing was difficult for me, so I sat in an overstuffed chair looking at the Park. I stayed in that chair for the next six hours.

Fortunately, the other two experienced no effect from the peyote. Seth felt no effect because he had vomited his capsules. Linda also remained unaffected. Apparently, she had flushed her capsules. I continued to have hallucinations. The first ones were similar to those in the restaurant. They were based on reality. For example, I was fascinated by the beauty of an ordinary light located among the shrubs in the park below. That light which had not seemed special in the past now appeared to me to be the most magnificently beautiful thing I had ever seen. Over the next four or five hours, the hallucinations became more abstract, more colorful, and more intense. In one, I was drifting in space high above scattered clouds, admiring our spectacular planet. Then I noticed, far below, a lush green meadow in a forest. I was attracted to the beauty of this meadow. My hallucination followed my interest. I zoomed down towards the meadow. As I approached the meadow, I saw the bright yellow-orange colors of a dandelion flower. Still following my interest, I was transformed into something small, and I passed into the center of the flower. I lingered a moment among the spectacularly varied colors of the blossom peddles. Then I was smaller still, and progressed further into the heart of the flower until I was at the level of its cellular structure. I was not aware that these experiences were hallucinations. It all seemed absolutely real.

However, in addition to producing beautiful hallucinations, the peyote had a dangerous physical side effect. I would stop breathing. Seth spent most of the evening sitting next to me. At times, when he would see that I had stopped breathing. He would shake me back to consciousness. He asked that Linda prepare a cup of tea for me, something tangible for me to hold on to. This kept me in the real world for a few minutes, but then I would drift off again into some beautiful experience, only to be shaken and reminded that I had to force myself to keep breathing.

Eventually, sometime after midnight, I had regained consciousness to the degree that Seth felt he could leave me alone. Before leaving, Seth helped me get onto my bed and put a blanket over me. Linda had left hours earlier. I never saw her again. And, by the way, she never offered to pay my back for the peyote.

I couldn’t sleep. Alone in the dark bedroom, the hallucinations returned only by this time they were not in spectacular colors. They were shades of gray. In one of the especially vivid sequences, I was walking on a crowded sidewalk. Every 30 seconds or so, someone ahead of me would turn to look at me intently, and I at them. I remember seeing their expressionless faces extremely clearly. Every wrinkle, blemish, hair, and even detail of their iris was clearly in focus. These faces were expressionless. After staring at me for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time, the head would abruptly turn and disappear into the crowd. Then I would find myself following another person who would, again, turn to stare at me. These faces were always men, and strangers, not resembling anyone that I had known. The experience was both fascinating and frightening.

This phase of the trip was followed by one in which faces became death masks emerging out of darkness. Then they became horribly distorted. Some with skin falling off. As before, the hallucinations were always faces and always in shades of gray. But they were no longer male. Rather, they were sexually indistinguishable. Unlike previous faces, which were unchanging. These faces would become twisted as I watched them disintegrate. Some were like a time-lapse vision of a head decomposing. The experience of this phase was terrifying. It was not so much that I was afraid of physical harm, but rather I was horrified at the images. Unlike the previous experiences, by this time, I was becoming aware that these were hallucinations. It made it all the more terrifying, realizing that these images were creations of my own mind.

I couldn’t sleep. Every time I tried, hideous images would return. I decided to do something real. At around 3:00 AM, I took my hamper of dirty laundry and drove to a 24 hour laundromat. As I waited for the washer and dryer to complete their cycles, I noticed that the rectangular floor tiles were shifting shape as if they were chocolate squares melting on a wall, gravity distorting their edges as they slowly dripped to the floor. I was still, occasionally, experiencing this kind of effect two days later.

Years later, I learned that those participating in native American rituals would take two or three buttons. Experienced shamans would take no more than 6 buttons. The amount of peyote that I had consumed, 17 buttons, was six times the traditional first dose and three times the maximum dose for a shaman. (Drugs.com/peyote)

An interesting aspect of these hallucinations is that I remembered them clearly afterward. Had they been dreams, I would have no recollection, or at best, I would have remembered only the last bit as I was waking. As a result of this experience with peyote, I have become aware of the power of the human mind to create “realities” which don’t exist in fact. This has had a lasting effect on my understanding of religion and sanity. The impact on my life, by living this experience, as opposed to being told of it, as you have in reading this story, is like the difference between seeing a photograph of Chaco Canyon and of being there, climbing among the Kivas.