Rock All Night(80)

I think my problem with darkness is more about feeling safe. My apartment at night is tolerable.

New York City streets at 2AM? No.

A strange, alien landscape getting swallowed up by shadows as the sun dipped below the horizon?

HELL no.

And the lower the sun went, the more rapidly the temperature fell.

By the time the sun was gone and the sky was a haze of pink and orange, I was starting to shiver.

I should have been totally geeking out on the beautiful colors in the sky.

But it wasn’t possible, because I was cold, and it was getting dark… and because of one other factor which nobody had warned me about.

I had thought that taking mushrooms was going to be like special effects in a movie. A bunch of amazing sights – CGI on steroids – but nothing more. I would otherwise be in my right mind, totally in control of my emotions.

Not so much.

I began to get paranoid, for one thing. I kept imagining Santa Bob racing up the road with an FBI SWAT team, and all of them screaming at me to get on the ground.

How I was going to explain it to my parents, I had no idea.

More than that, though, I lost my sense of time and reality.

This one is really hard to describe, because we take it so much for granted. But I’ll try.

For instance, if you wake up in the morning, then go to work, then go out for lunch, then work some more until quitting time, then go to the grocery store, then fix dinner, you could tell me the exact order in which everything had occurred. More than that, you would know what order it happened, on a deep, experiential level. You could feel it in your bones, the same way you know 2 + 2 = 4 or the sun rises in the east. It just is.

I didn’t have that anymore.

For one thing, the things I imagined seemed almost as real as actual memories. As my paranoia built, I pictured myself running out into the desert, screaming in panic – and I kept thinking, Oh my God, maybe I already WAS out in the desert screaming, and I just don’t realize that I already did it. Or worse, maybe I’m running out in the desert this very moment, and I just don’t realize that I’m actually DOING IT RIGHT NOW. I only THINK I’m still back here on the road, when I’m REALLY out THERE, running around and screaming.

That’s not a fun place to be in mentally.

Time was gone, too. There was no past, there was no future, there was only the present. The furthest back that seemed real was the car ride here… and in my mind, I felt that I had been on the road forever in that 1969 Mercedes, and that nothing before had ever really existed. I could remember my parents, and my brothers, and my entire life… but they were like fleeting memories of movies I had watched and half-forgotten. What seemed more likely was that I had been travelling eternally up until a few hours ago, and now that I was here, this was all that would ever be until the end of time.

It was f*cked up.

It didn’t help any that Killian’s guitar playing became weirder and weirder as time went on. More disjointed, more atonal, more… strange.

I felt like I was hearing the soundtrack to my own private horror movie.

Then there were the odd fragments – movies I’d seen, things I’d read – that suddenly became vitally important to retaining my sanity.

When I was a senior in high school, we read Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It’s about an Englishman in the late 19th century who is hired by a trading company to journey on a steamboat deep into the heart of the Congo to retrieve the mysterious Mr. Kurtz, a company employee who has gone insane and declared himself a god amongst the African natives.

After we’d read the book, we watched Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola – the same guy who directed the Godfather movies. It’s a 20th-century retelling of the same story, where an Army captain played by Martin Sheen gets sent by the military on a riverboat deep into the heart of Vietnam to assassinate the mysterious Colonel Kurtz, a special forces officer who has gone insane and become a sort of god to the indigenous peoples.

One quote from the movie kept playing in my head again and again:

Don’t get off the boat.

There’s a scene where one of the crewmembers named Chef wants to get off the boat. Martin Sheen won’t let him go alone, so he accompanies him into the jungle. They walk and talk… and then all the birds and insects go quiet. The soldiers think that the Viet Cong might be out there, so they ready their guns and wait…

And then a tiger leaps out of the jungle and almost kills them.

They fire off their rifles and run for the boat, screaming all the way. Once they’re safely back on the river, Chef keeps repeating, “Don’t get off the boat! Never get off the boat! Don’t get off the f*ckin’ boat!”


That became my mantra:

Don’t get off the boat.

Killian and Derek kept wandering off the road into the desert. I would get freaked out, go and grab them, then haul them back to the path.

“Don’t get off the boat,” I would whisper.

They thought it was absolutely hilarious.

Derek knew what I was referring to, and would start quoting the movie:

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like… victory.”

“Charlie – don’t – surf!”

“The horror… the horror…”

And for awhile, he and Killian would stay on the road… but then they would invariably wander off it again. I would go after them and haul them back, telling them in all seriousness, “Don’t get off the boat.”