Mushrooms

We’re on a raft of logs in the middle of a river just yards from terra-firma when David hands me the dried piece of mushroom.

“You’ve got at least 15 minutes before it kicks in,” says the ‘fun guy peddling the fungi’, the nickname he gives himself as he passes the baggie around our small group.

When we land on the island, we scatter like geese, scaling boulders, ducking into caves and crossing the rickety suspension bridge to the old fort. I find a spot on a warm rock, partially shaded by a sycamore tree, and watch as the raft floats away, leaving us stranded. Perhaps I should be scared, but instead, I watch with detached curiosity while my back melts into the stone as if it’s one of those beanbag chairs in Link Thrower’s wood-paneled basement back in High School. But instead of staring up at ACDC and KISS glow-in-the dark posters, I am looking at clouds that are rapidly mutating into sheep and unicorns. Along the riverbank, the colors begin to change. The water morphs into a rainbow as little elves jump from adjacent rocks onto my rock. One elf steps on my hair. “Ouch!” I cry.

“Sorry!” it squeaks back as it scampers through a shrub. Seriously, this place is crawling with little people, running wild and squawking like parrots.

Some of my friends join me on my perch. We point at the animated leaves in the trees and are awed by the actions of the elves. Our giggles  turn to uncontrollable laughter at the fantastical scene around us, but I soon come to believe their laughter is directed at me. Maybe my friends don’t like me at all. Maybe this is whole thing part of a plot to leave me stranded on the island and they planned for the raft to depart. Maybe they are all in on the escape plan.

             As the laughter gets louder, I fear that I forgot to get dressed this morning and am naked on this island with my now former friends and strangers. I feel for my clothes. They are indeed there. Ahh, but maybe my false friends only invited me because I work for Disney and I could get them in for free?

         Tom Sawyer’s Island is an odd place to hallucinate. When children wearing tiaras and mouse ears are running and shouting all around you, and you are sure that they are elves or fairies and likely not the benevolent kind, and the giants following them around look incredibly judgmental, it can take you out of the pleasure that comes from rainbow rivers and talking birds in the branches of giant oaks. With its caves and dark corners, Dead Man’s Grotto can be a scary place.

I remember watching Johnny Whitaker and Jodie Foster as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher in the Reader’s Digest movie when I was a kid. I loved that movie and would have watched it over and over again had VHS tapes been invented. My brother and I plotted how we might inspire kids to do our chores the way Tom did, and we shared our nightmares about Injun Joe. I dreamed of going to my own funeral and hearing the eulogies and lamentations of neighbors, praising me for the very things I did that annoyed them when I was alive, which of course I still would be, hiding in the choir loft by the organ.

Over an undefined period of time on Tom Sawyer’s Island, I begin to think I might die there. I am starving, and I am so thirsty that I am sure that I’m withering with dehydration. I hope the people who gave me the mushrooms will say kind things about me if they live to tell the tale. Somehow though, another raft appears on the Willie Wonka-esque Chocolateish Rivers of America and we find our way to the brightly colored Toon Town just as the euphoria part of the psilocybin kicks in. The place is copiously colorful and I try to express to my friends, who are now my very best friends forever, how we might be in a real cartoon or at least be moving about our lives under a very real dome, but my tongue is numb and I am talking like Elmer Fudd, and clearly, we actually are cartoon characters.

By the time we get to Pirates of the Caribbean, I am certain that Michael Eisner has seen me, realizes I am on drugs in Disneyland and it matters not one bit how driven I’ve been to be the most dynamic, synergistic sales promotion executive The Walt Disney Company has ever seen, I will be fired when I go back to work on Monday. I spend the rest of the evening looking over my shoulder for the Disneyland police until the shrooms wear off and we all drive home.

As shared at Story Salon on November 7, 2024.