The Dopplegangers

Now, I've never been able to easily classify the level of the trip but after the sheer weirdness of it all the only level rating I can give it is a 4.

This story happened many moons ago. Close to 10 years, but I recall it having such a profound effect on my that I have never forgotten it. It started as such:

Jay, Kris and I had smoked a lot of grass in our time, dropped some acid, we were no strangers to the whole psychedelic thing. They'd eaten mushrooms in the past, I hadn't. Around here anything outside of street drugs and the vanillas (grass) are hard to come by and when mushrooms hit the streets they were usually in small quantity and gone in a matter of a couple of days. This time, Jay pulled some strings and got a 1/4 bag for free from a friend of his before they went out to the dealers en masse. He brought them over to Kris' where Kris and I were hanging out. He produces the bag, divides them among the three of us and tells us that they're powerful as all get-out according to his friend. We eat them. I had never tasted anything quite so vile in my life, but I choked them down and there they stayed, Jay wasn't so lucky. Now for the waiting game.

After a while, we put on the TV and shot the shit. The giggles hit not long after the onset of the shroom effects. Some friends of ours showed up and kicked it with us for a while. MTV was on, Liquid Television to be exact. My first mushroom trip was beginning as Invisible Hands played on the TV followed up by Beavis and Butthead: Frog Baseball. I sat across the room, separated by everyone else and watched the cartoon. The entire world was shut out. At this point, things were starting to happen on an epic scale. The room became only me, Beavis and Butthead. My attention was focussed strictly on the television and my peripheral vision was represented by what I perceived to be crudely drawn cartoons. I was surrounded by cartoons. I was snapped out of my trance when Kris came over to check on me. Apparently I'd been chewing on a finger and giggling like an lunatic at the cartoon. It freaked people out, and quite frankly, freaked me out a little bit that I'd disociated in such a way. But it didn't really disturb me. The effect was pretty cool. It did disturb the others who weren't really down with the whole drug thing and they figured us out and left in a bit of a huff because we were tripping.

I moved back to my seat at Kris' bar and went into a speech about time travel, the speed of light, theory of relativity and multiverses (moving sideways in time as opposed to forward and back). The silliness built and pretty soon we were all walking on the furniture or rolling on the floor in a fit of hysterics... until suddenly the pangs of nausea grabbed Jay and forced out the payload of mushrooms as well as a portion of his dinner. Kris was next. Witnessing Jay go up like that was enough to have him in a full-on technicolor yawn as well. We were outside, smoking and vomiting. I began to drift again, like inside with the television. With a slightly distant sound I heard the two of them horking while I was fixated on the sheer vastness of Kris' back yard. Had it always been so big? It always seemed like a leap from the back porch to the steps of the garage, which housed the bar. From where I stood, it appeared as though the trees were miles tall and the house was hundreds of feet away. I snapped back into focus. Jay suddenly stood up, his ears perked. He heard the horn of a passing train and took off down an embankment across the street which led down to the train tracks. We followed suit. Jay stood next to the track. He looked over at us and explained that watching the train go by was going to be a major power trip. He stood dead center of the tracks. The train was not far, it was making it's way out of town and was picking up speed which meant that the closer it got, Jay's window for escape got narrower and narrower at an alarmingly rapid pace. I got extremely nervous at this point. His eyes were wide, almost maniacal. They reminded me of a photo of Sid Barret I saw once. Horrifying lunatic eyes. I grabbed his arm and yanked him to the side. He didn't seem to struggle, just stared at the train as it went by and began to laugh. Kris followed his lead. I did nothing, just watched. I was enthralled. My vision had changed to that of a fish-eye lense. The train rushed past, on the periphery things seemed to be so far away but as they neared the focal point everything became so real and so close to me. I didn't want this to end but eventually, we ran out of train. Jay and Kris' laughter died down and we walked down the tracks toward town.

Near town we ran into some friends who were out skating on the streets in the projects. They were all on something too, you could tell by looking at them but they wouldn't give it up. Coke and speed had become quite popular among these guys so I wouldn't doubt that this was what they were on. We talked to them for a while, told them we had one hell of a ride on shrooms and they proceeded to "fuck" with us. You've seen this gag before. They waved their hands in our faces, tried to talk backwards, all that happy stuff. Finding them too grounded we traded a few caps for a joint off one guy and left.

We walked back down the tracks, it was extremely dark now. There was one light in the distance and it was projecting from a bridge over the tracks ahead. We walked, talked, discussed weird random thoughts and kept our eyes on that light ahead. From under the track, I saw three people come out and I immediately became very nervous. This was not the kind of place that you wanted to run into anyone. I thought we might get attacked. I shut up. In fact, all three of us shut up. We got closer and closer to these three people until we were all under the street light. I could make out their faces.

It was us.

On the opposite side of the tracks, the three people walking towards us, were us. Dopplegangers. Clones. Whatever. It was us. They stared at us. I stared at them. But we never stopped walking. We just kept going and they just kept going. We got under the bridge and sat down. No one had spoken since the three first came out from under the bridge. Kris spoke first. He explained seeing the same thing I saw. Jay concurred and then I did. The three of us had either seen complete duplicates of us walking the tracks or we had shared a hallucination, which I have never heard of. We sat there, in the dirt, under the bridge, our minds completely blown. Jay thought it would be a good time to fire up the joint. So we did. Things winded down here. We talked some more and Jay eventually left having to get up in a few hours for work. Kris and I sat there talking about what we'd seen and other anomalous activity, going back to my multiverse speech from earlier in the night. Eventually we got up, went back to his place and crashed.

I have never had anything like that happen to me again.

Call me RJ.