Synesthesia

My first years of experimenting with drugs were quite memorable, perhaps because my long-and short- term memory had not yet been fucked. In my later teen years, after I left school, I had my first run with drug dealing. I had a hook up that was better than anybody else in town and had pounds, yes, pounds of mushrooms at my disposal and in my possession. I also had as much acid as any several people could handle. And I had pockets full of the best home-grown weed available, directly from the source. Nothing good could come of this.

But I had some good times. One day in particular, I dropped acid with a buddy and we took the bus out to the Mall of America to enjoy the indoor smoking and a lackadaisical security staff of the late 1900's. We actually did this fairly often because people watching is already intense there, and acid only amplifies things.

When our bus arrived we stepped off and if anybody was looking they would have seen that our smiles already went to the back of our heads and our eyes watery with mischievous intent. We rarely made it inside the building before the incontrollable laughter set in, usually spurred on by one of us catching a glimpse of the others face rearranged by synesthesia. Off to the playground we went.

If you've never taken hallucinogens then you probably aren't familiar with the term synesthesia. It describes the effect on the brain when your senses are mixed up. Like seeing a sound, or tasting the waves of colour that your own hand just turned into. Well the sense of taste is dramatically effected by acid, almost always in a negative way. We wandered into a candy store after roaming aimlessly for a bit where I stole what appeared to be a giant, extraordinarily vibrant blow-pop, the sucker famous for having gum in the middle, normally a delicious treat. We then proceeded to the parking lot and to the top floor where we usually smoked our joints.

It was a beautiful Summer day. I remember that, and very little else pertaining to the elements. I was focused on the streaks, lines, and ant races that I thought I saw on the ground. We lit up, smoked a massive doobie, and laughed at nothing. Then I opened up my treat and stuck it in my mouth. It tasted exactly like a lemon, nothing else. I immediately spit it out over the edge of the railing toward the ground 50 feet below. Just then a kid burst out of the doors below us yelling for his mother to wait for him. It was perfect timing. About ten feet out the doors he was rocked by a projectile from above that took his legs out from under him. From my view of course it looked like a bloody explosion happened on his forehead. My friend saw the same thing and we exploded with laughter, the kind that you know is going to make you hurt for days.

Tears streaming down our faces, laughter uncontrollable, we went back inside the mall where people were staring at us. All of them. I can't imagine what they thought of us. We were a mess. And I was so distracted by their stares I walked directly into a family. Yeah, a whole group of people that were walking toward us, I didn't see them. I trampled a small boy, knocked bags down, unintentionally hugged Dad, and then fell down myself. Of course this only made things funnier for us. I was on the ground rolling around and my friend was hiding (very poorly) behind a fake tree. Every time we caught eachother eyes it just got more intense. 

And still, no security, no escort off of the premesis, nothing. We just kept walking around being annoying and destructive for hours and nobody seemed to care. 

It was that night, after we had come down, washed up, and our minds a little more clear, that we went to our respective jobs as overnight cashiers at competing gas stations, and pulled off a daring crime that will forever remain a secret to only us... Unless I get a book deal :-)