Miguel

high as balls

“Miguel” is a chapter from my work-in-progress memoir.

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Miguel

Nothing bad had happened to me since the motorcycle accident. I still had some scars and burn marks but all of the cuts and broken bones had healed. My memory had come back completely like it had never been gone. There was just this one little knot on my knuckle under the skin but it didn’t hurt unless I pushed on it and didn’t really bother me. I hadn’t even noticed it until my violin teacher in New York pointed it out at a lesson—he had noticed the bump because learning the violin requires a lot of hands-on interaction where the teacher might position a student’s fingers correctly or guide their arm. Anyhow he felt the bump and after he pointed it out I noticed it more often. Sometimes it seemed like it might be growing and sometimes it was a little sore, but since I had left New York I had hardly thought about it—it had been there for over a year and I figured it was just a part of me now, a part that I sometimes thought maybe I should see a doctor about but then I might learn it was actually a malicious and incurable form of cancer and even though I had a lot of worries, at twenty-four a fear of cancer wasn’t one of them and getting a diagnosis like that would seriously fuck up my plans, which, especially since discovering beer, included an indefinite amount of fucking off, having fun, and more fucking off if I could squeeze it in. But lately the bump had begun to bother me more and I started to wonder what in the world it was. I found that if I pushed it in just the right way it would move around under the skin, so I pushed it, fascinated, but Jesse said stop fucking with it you should just leave it alone, what is it anyhow and I said I don’t know, I didn’t notice it until after the accident, it’s kinda weird, right? Maybe it’s a wart. Cool, said Jesse, warts are good luck. Alright, I said, we’ll call it a wart, then. I think I’ll name it Miguel.

One day not long after we christened Miguel a couple of friends came to visit from the city. They brought some mescaline and we took it and set out to walk along the creek that ran from my house through the canyon. It was May and sunny and the wildflowers were going and the water ran clear and sparkling. The mescaline hadn’t hit yet and we were walking along and chatting normally when Jesse broke off mid-sentence and said “and you know what else? I’m high as balls,” and suddenly we were all high as balls. Wogart loped ahead as we walked, darting in and out of the water—he was full of joy and so was I. The mescaline had kicked in and seemed to heighten everything that was wonderful about the world which was and is a lot but somehow its alot-ness gets a little clouded by some mix up in our brains which the mescaline seemed to clear away for a little while. I can still see and revel in the beauty of life and nature but never quite so purely, so completely without compromise, or at least without my own nagging worries providing a kind of faint underlying rather ominous soundtrack just below the more cheerful sounds of birds and of the breeze that rustles the oats and carries the scent of butterscotch from the perfectly named butterscotch plants, and sage, and pine sap, as that one time when I was high on mescaline. But, as a close second, I can remember the feeling. Mescaline did something to our brains where our perception became suddenly clear, just absolutely crystal clear like the water we were walking beside, and we felt like we could actually see, like really see, everything we were looking at as its own beautiful self—all of the light, the colors, the intricacies of the plants and the trees, the shapes of the rocks, the glint of minerals in the dirt. We walked along and marveled, would you just look at the sky? My god, that blue! I don’t know what this drug does, man, but holy shit! Does the air always shimmer like this and we just never notice? It’s practically alive! We were tripping, just tripping with wonder but it wasn’t like tripping on acid where things can seem wonderful but also somehow distorted—on mescaline everything was itself as always and not like our perception had altered but like the quality of our attention had become both more focused and open.

So Jesse and our friends from the city and Wogart and Miguel and I all walked along the creek through the canyon and eventually came to a path we had never been on before. Let’s see where it goes! We followed the path and before long we came to a clearing in the trees where there was a grassy meadow. In the middle of the meadow were some ruins—the foundation of a house, gnarled old apple trees, a small family graveyard with dates from the eighteen hundreds on some of the tombstones. A rose bush. “What is this place?” I said. “I’ve heard about these,” said Jesse. “There used to be an old gold mining settlement out here called Rough and Ready and this must be part of it. I guess there are some abandoned homesteads out here. Sometimes claim jumpers use them if they’re still standing, but you want to stay away from them—those dudes are nuts.”

We made a lot of jokes about Rough and Ready because that’s what she said and continued on across the meadow. There were no roads in or out of the property, but when we got to the other side of the meadow and entered the forest behind it we saw a wooden cabin. There was smoke rising from the chimney, and as we watched the door opened and a grizzled old man came out onto the porch. He was wearing overalls. He had a long beard. He was holding a shotgun. We stood and stared. This was unlike anything we had ever seen, completely surreal. After all the talk about Rough and Ready and bygone days, it was as if we had summoned him, or had simply fallen through a mescaline portal to another time. The man started waving the shotgun around and yelling. Jesse started laughing in disbelief. The man yelled “leave now or you get shot!” But, to our horror, Jesse just kept laughing. He stood, looking at the guy and his gun, just laughing and shaking his head, high as balls. He couldn’t stop. We finally got him turned around—still laughing—and started walking back, through the trees and up a path toward what we hoped was a road, but suddenly Wogart stopped short and started barking his head off at something in front of us. We jumped and looked and saw 2 enormous must have been 6 foot long rattlesnakes doing a kind of dance-battle in the middle of the path. Wogart was barking and then he started to run toward them and we started screaming but the snakes were so intent on their battle they didn’t seem to notice or care. Jesse bent down and picked up a big stick and I said what the fuck are you doing but he said don’t worry, I got this. I said got what? And he said I’m not sure but I saw my dad do it once, hang on—and he walked up to the snakes and pushed one and then the other, somehow, off to the side with the stick and then we all continued on our walk. It was pretty sketchy going up the path past the snakes on either side but then again we didn’t have much choice because the other direction led to a wild man with a shotgun. We found the road but for some reason—being high as balls—we couldn’t work out how to get back to the house even though I knew right where we were and in the end we walked for miles in a totally unnecessary circuitous route before we made it home.

Home! Between the snakes and the shotgun we were pretty wound up but everything had turned out alright and the world was still beautiful and now we had these crazy experiences to talk about. The whole day had been a revelation. I felt excited to be alive, excited to know that the world, the true world as it really existed outside of my own fears or hangups was a unequivocally wonderful place that I had needed chemically-altered brain function to see clearly, but this knowledge in itself was something. Jesse and I lay on the bed, quiet, staring up at the sky through the skylight as we came down. After a while I felt my worries returning and felt a little sad. I had the urge to check on Miguel—we’d done a lot of scrambling around on our walk and I had banged my hand a few times and it was sore—and as Jesse watched I pushed on the bump and it suddenly exploded, pus everywhere, and a thin shard of glass about 1/2 inch long began to emerge. I pulled on it and it just kept coming. It was the most wonderful feeling, all that tension relieved; tension I hadn’t even realized I’d had. The glass had been trapped beneath the skin for almost 2 years and my body had protected me and created a space around it and eventually pushed it out. “I know I’m still a little high and shit,” I said, “but this feels symbolic”. I wouldn’t normally say stuff like that—left it to the crystal hippies—but I was high and unusually clear-headed and this allowed me to recognize that my body letting go of the last vestige of injury was like a letting go of the trauma of the accident itself. Watching Miguel bust open and expel something gnarly made me feel like I could let some of my worries go, even or especially the ones I didn’t think about. The body knows and the mind knows and with any luck you can bust pus bubbles and work through your shit and if you have a super nice boyfriend you can talk to about it sometimes that’s the best of all. Goodbye Miguel, see you never, I said fondly, but I didn’t feel sad.

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The first chapter and the next.