I still wonder what it was like for him in those last minutes—lying there alone, the nylon walls close against him in the dark, the only light coming from the kaleidoscope in his own head. I wonder if he was scared; did he know what was happening to him was the end, or was he just too out of it to realize? And if he did know, did he kick himself for it?
His death, after all, can in great measure be chalked up to his own stupidity. You can argue all you want about the fundamental nature of justice, you can point out that the punishment didn’t really fit the crime, but the bottom line is that although other people were obviously responsible for his death, he damn well helped; somehow, this clueless seventeen-year-old boy managed to be both victim and accomplice.
I barely knew him, so it’s probably nuts even to speculate, but at the moment I can’t seem to stop. Maybe that’s because lately I’ve come across so many kids just like him, or because I’ve spent so many hours trying to walk in his patched-up Birkenstocks. Either way, right now his last hour or so on earth is incredibly vivid in my imagination. And I’ll tell you the truth: I really, really wish it weren’t.
But it is. And I picture it like this:
He crawls into the tent, strips down to the childish white underpants they’ll find him in. He’s full, probably uncomfortably so; the coroner will find a gigantic amount of food in his stomach—falafel and veggie chili and peanut butter cups he put away a couple of hours before, probably in an attack of the munchies from all the grass he smoked that afternoon.
A different sort of guy might want company, but later his friends will say that wasn’t his style. He likes to be by himself, savor the moment—open his mind to new realities, I suppose he’d say. He prefers to lie by himself in the dark and wait for the universe to open up and swallow him, to take him on some dopey journey of the imagination; the next morning (or more likely afternoon) he’ll tell his friends all about it over a whole wheat bagel with extra honey.
So he pins a sign to the tent that says—no kidding—TRIPPING, DO NOT DISTURB. He zips up the flap and lies on top of his sleeping bag mostly naked, since the late-August heat is all but unbearable, even if you’re in your right mind. He pulls his long corkscrew curls out of their usual ponytail and wraps the elastic around his flashlight. He lights the candle on the milk crate beside him, but only long enough to let the scent of sage waft over to him. He blows it out after a minute or so, not only because he craves the dark but because he knows you’re never supposed to have an open flame inside a tent; later, when his friends are called upon to eulogize, they’ll say he was a kick-ass camper.
He’s happy, at least that’s the way I imagine it. He’s utterly in his element, a skinny little fish gliding in his favorite pond. Within a few hundred yards are most of the people on the planet who really matter to him—guys he’s been skateboarding with since he was ten, girls he’s danced with and gotten high with and screwed, and no hard feelings afterward.
The night feels alive around him; it’s loud with laughter and bits of conversations, all of them important—some pondering the next band on the playlist, others the fundamental meaning of the universe. There’s music everywhere, coming from so many sources and directions it’s impossible to separate them, innumerable voices and bass lines and drum beats going thump-thump-thump inside his chest.
He closes his eyes, because even before the candle goes out there’s no need for vision. His other senses are on overload, and he likes it. If he’s feeling this much even before the drug really kicks in, he knows he’s in for one hell of a ride.
This is the moment he likes best, when it’s just starting and he’s not quite sure which world he’s in. At first, the sensations are slow, sneaky, subtle—fictions masquerading as fact. The beginning of a trip is like crossing a river, he’s always said; you can try to stay on the rocks of reality, but the closer you get to the other side, the wetter you’re going to get.
I have no idea how long he balances in the netherworld between here and elsewhere; for his sake, I hope it’s a while. But eventually, he segues into something infinitely wilder—and since my personal experience with mind-expanding drugs is essentially nil (my head being kooky enough without the addition of psychotropics), I have a hard time imagining it. When I ponder the usual stereotypes—shooting stars and melting walls and talking rhinos and such—it just seems pathetic, and I know he didn’t see it that way. To him it was something profound, something worth stretching yourself, maybe even scaring yourself, just for the sake of the experience.
But was it something worth dying for? That much I seriously doubt. But there’s no arguing with the fact that that’s precisely what happened.
At some point, quite when I don’t know, things start to go wrong. His mouth goes dry. He gets a raging headache. Maybe his stomach starts to hurt; then it starts to hurt bad. He can barely breathe. Eventually, he can’t breathe at all.
I wonder if he thinks it’s all just part of the experience—that he’s taking some dark spirit journey to the edge of his own demise. (And, okay, I know that sounds like your typical druggie-hippie crap; it just goes to show you how much time I’ve been spending with these people.) How nasty a surprise must it have been to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy version of death, but the real thing?
But there’s another possibility—one that’s even more unpleasant, if such a thing is possible. From what I’ve been told, physical well-being is essential to the enjoyment of your average acid trip. The symptoms he must have experienced, then, could very well have sent him spiraling into the same mental purgatory that keeps cowards like me limited to gin, Marlboro Lights, and the (very) occasional joint.
This seventeen-year-old boy, in other words, may not have died in just physical agony; he may have died in mental agony as well. Serious mental agony. Through the magic of chemistry, his was an anguish not necessarily bounded by the normal limits of the human mind. It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, to tell you the truth. There’s plenty of pain in the conscious world, after all; how much must there be when the pit is well and truly bottomless?
When they finally found him, he was in the fetal position—curled up tight, knees against his chest, stringy arms wrapped around each other. The doctors say this doesn’t necessarily mean anything about his last moments, but frankly, I don’t buy it. As far as I’m concerned, it means he didn’t go peacefully.
Because, after all, neither did any of the others.