The Seduction of Orpheus (Part Three)
I couldn’t tell the difference between laughing and throwing up but I wasn’t throwing up so I must have been laughing.
***
“You really should have some,” Leslie said to me hours earlier, quaffing the last of her mushroom tea from a cheap plastic cup.
“I don’t know… shouldn’t I be the responsible one tonight?”
Les took in our surroundings. The guests at this sparsely attended affair danced, or sat talking with friends, or else laid about in what must have been a shroom-induced state of torpor. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
***
I was disappointed thus far. Not only was the chunky, bitter brew disgusting, but I wasn’t feeling anything. “You feelin’ it?” I asked Les, “Cause I’m not.”
“Me neither.”
A papier mache head of a troll, as tall as a man, stood in a nook by the chill-out room. It began to sort of, well, rock back and forth and for a moment I let myself believe my moment of revelation had arrived. That is, until the people around me confirmed that the head was indeed rocking rhythmically to and fro. A friend of ours crept up to the troll head, bending down and opening the fully articulated jaw. She spun around and giggled. “Oh my gawd… two people are fucking in there!”
Word of the mystery couple’s doings spread around our little encampment and soon everyone erupted into fits of laughter. Occasionally a random party-goer would wander through our area, do a double take, and approach the head to investigate. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” someone would say, or else, “If the head is a rockin’ don’t come a knockin’!”
What a mind-fuck it all was.
The rhythmic motion ceased abruptly. “We just witnessed a pivotal event in the history of the West,” I told someone. “I am certain that hundreds of years from now scholars will look back upon whatever just happened here and say this was the moment everything came to a head.”
When the man laughed I noticed dazzling seventies-style floral prints creeping in at the periphery of my vision. The patterns soon overtook every object in the room, making it seem as if everything in my field of view was crawling with life. And yet faced with this undeniable proof of the fallibility of my senses, all I could think was: This is such a cliché. I closed my eyes, and upon opening them again the scene was recast in glowing pixels, as if I were standing with my nose pressed up against a plasma monitor.
Post-millennial visuals for a post-millennial trip… I was satisfied.
***
Oh, I get it.
The music, the decorations, the tents, the floor-to-ceiling columns of light — they all finally made sense to me. I stepped out onto the roof to take a leak. My piss ran in rainbow colors, as did the chain link fence, as did the brightening sky.
Oh, I get it.
Wandering around, I found Leslie and took her hand. “This is much more agreeable than acid,” I said to her. “I still know where I am, I still know who I am, but I’ll be damned if I’m not tripping my ass off. For example, I know that’s just my friend Jim standing over there but right now the simple fact that he exists blows my mind.”
***
A wave of euphoria washed over me as the black car ferried us back into Manhattan. I thought about the odd series of events that conspired to make the weekend what it was, how I couldn’t have made it up if I tried and certainly never could have engineered it. And I’m pretty sure I laughed, even if it felt a little bit like throwing up.
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