Hale Bopp

Spring time, a giant ball of rock and ice is hurling towards the sun; it's called Hale/Bopp - after the scientists that found her - and it was the subject of great hysteria. On Art Bell, there were a lot of people claiming that Hale/Bopp had a space ship orbiting it.

At my house, there was a group of friends who had grown interested with the Amanita Muscara mushroom, and being the good host I am, I offered to "baby sit" their trip, and hang out and see where it took them.

They had heard of Hale/Bopp too, and were remarking on the auspicious nature of it's arrival, and thereby decided to take the shrooms on the day it would come closest to the earth. What followed from their trip was life changing, horrific, and extremely traumatic.

To preserve their identities, let me name these people: Jim, Robert, Jeremiah, and Julie.

They were Jim's shrooms. He had them ground up, and then put them into a mixture of milk (don;t know why milk) and they downed these drinks *as* the milk curdled - because of the compounds coming off of these "death's head" shroom caps. They were huge - the size of pie plates, dark red with white specks. They started feeling them kick in, and so we went outside, where they passed out - one by one - in the hot sun.

Jeremiah woke up, and was telling me about how the shrooms were rocking and felt extremely strong. Jim and Robert woke up, and they started tripping hard. Robert was having a very detailed religious trip. He claimed to be seeing god, and god was PISSED. Meanwhile, Jim was stripping naked, and walking around the neighborhood. Julie vomitted in her sleep.

I couldn't keep Jim from running off into the neighborhood AND keep Robert from throwing himself through a plate glass window alone, and my other sober friends were freaking out due to the general weirdness of everyone's behaviour. So Jeremiah, in an uncanny last-chance measure - DRANK HIS OWN PEE in a crystal tea cup.

Ancient wisemen would drink the mixture known as SOMA - so that they could experience the "death trip". Soma was supposedly the Amanita Muscara and when they took it, they'd trip, and then later, as they pissed it out, their disciples would take the urine and then drink it, trip out much more mellowly, and on down the line: transmitting the original knowledge along.

It actually brought him down from the trip - he was the only one who didn't experience the "death experience". Jim had now reverted to a primordial ape form; Robert was on his knees pleading to "Jah" not to destroy him (Robert had became - like so many white kids fleeing their christian origins, only to find themselves steeped in even more dogmatic undertones - Rastafarian); Julie was in the bathtub, cleaning up, and had passed out.

It took me and Jeremiah, and my room mate all our effort to keep Rob & Jim from trying to get into the tub with Julie - it was as if they had become pure instinct at a certain point. Slowly, they came back down. Except Robert. He had gone down the downward spiral and was in hell, shrieking, convulsing, foaming at the mouth. It was like the worst parts of the Exhorcist and Altered States.

The entire experience lasted 14 hours and required 5 sober adults to keep it managed and safe within city limits. After the trip, all but Jeremiah kind of changed. Jim's house - that night - had a leak in the roof, and as a result, it had caved in, and he made a shit load on insurance - this turn of events and others lead him to leave town and sell everything. Robert left town, left the county, and dissapeared into a wing and a prayer style life he still leads. Julie vanished - I only saw her once more later - with 2 kids and totally changed: she never had done drugs again after that experience and had become very religious.

The had died, but had been fortunate enough to come back from death's domain - scarred, broken, and never the same afterwards.

In that springtime, a few new-age religious types killed themselves, wrapped in purple robes, hoping to beam up to the ship. This group was called Heaven's Gate. (http://www.rickross.com/groups/heavensgate.html)

It seems ironic that my friends would choose to take the death trip the same day that the people from heaven's gate took their lives - and for the same reason - which was Hale/Bopp.