I’ve seen the Flaming Lips perform lots of times, but only once did the drummer, Steven, send me psychic messages to marry him. I felt lust recumbent in the dark, smoky air. His brainwaves were overpowering— during “It’s Halloween on the Barbary Coast,” they visually matched the colored laser beams that twirled through the club’s thick fog. I sensed that each colored ray was an attempt on Steven’s part to get my attention. Meet me backstage, a blue light said. I am in need of a wife, a red light suggested. After the band played their last song, my friend pulled me toward the exit. There was no time to get sidetracked, groupie-style. We had a transaction to make.
I was on a business trip to Boulder, Colorado, delivering these psychedelic mushrooms called Psilocybe semilanceata, a.k.a., Liberty Caps. This was a lucrative deal during the fall months, following heavy rains. I lived in Eureka, a small city in the California Redwoods. Every November the city held a mycology festival, and people really got into hunting mushrooms. Since the psychedelic varieties were coveted, a fierce competition arose as soon as the rainy days arrived. The clouds would pile up, the sprinkling would begin, and the first thing I’d do was run to my bedroom to set the alarm clock. If I slept in on hunting day, the patches would be stripped, and my chances for earth-flavored mushroom tea and a few hundred bucks would be as decayed as the fungi’s rotting, fleshy caps.
There was this great spot out toward the coast, a clump of shrubs that enshrouded perfectly perky brown shrooms every season, batch after batch— they were so good and fresh, plus the ground my friends and I had to slither across was so dirty in a delicious, pure dirt way. It was the kind of place where we could yank out a carrot and not rinse it off before sticking it in our mouths because the dirt added flavor and minerals.
This special dirt was on private property, so we had to crawl under a wire fence. Everyone would fold up their T-shirts to make a kangaroo-style pouch on their stomach, fill it with mushrooms, then tie it back with twisted T-shirt knots on either side, the kind of knots little girls make when they’re imitating Daisy Duke or the Dallas Cowgirls. Since we were belly-bound, we scooched up the pouches like puffy mushroom bras so they wouldn’t get crushed. If there were stray mushrooms left on the ground, we filled our hands as we started to crawl away. On the way out, we chucked some leaves over the gap we’d made under the fence, as if we were bunnies sneaking out of a veggie garden. This part was similar to a Peter Rabbit story, but if we’d got caught it would have been more serious, so we didn’t fool around.
The limit was three people to a trip, two guys and one girl. I think the guys assumed girls might ruin something. I felt honored when I was along. Gathering shrooms was my favorite thing to do. Plus, on some hunts, I went along with this guy who knew all the species; he’d teach us about Death Caps, the brown ones that looked magic but weren’t, the furry, shaggy Ink Caps, and the stunning, red-and-white polka-dotted Fly Agarics (the kind gnomes sit on). I saw caterpillars or titmice hopping around in the branches above our heads, so there was critter magic down there under the tangled twigs. Mushroom world is fairy territory.
Occasionally we drank mushroom tea before we left so we would be more in tune with the shrooms and they could call us to them with their fungus mental telepathy. The guys believed if you drank the tea you could think like a mushroom, which would cause you to gravitate toward the patches. Once I actually thought I had spores so I pictured where I would have dropped mine to reproduce. I imagined what it felt like to live my whole life hidden by leaf debris. The mushroom-thought theory worked so well that I wondered why anyone would go searching in any other state of mind.
The day after the Flaming Lips show, my friend Jim and I took a trip to the Denver Natural History Museum, where we saw Aztec daggers used for cutting out human hearts. One knife had a mushroomshaped handle with a little frog crouched on its tip.
“Look at that crazy frog. It’s so weird. It’s, like, sitting on a mushroom,” I said.
And Jim said, “Cool.”
The conversation, which could’ve been educational and enlightening, was a dud. I felt like an ignoramus for not knowing what kind of mushroom the handle was fashioned after. The Aztecs were expert botanists; I was sure the mushroom on that ceremonial tool bore great shamanic significance. I was a poseur, a hippified stoner with a mushroom-amulet necklace (the swirly colored kind on hemp rope) who knew nothing about mushrooms except how to trip out on them. The only minor mushroom knowledge I had, beyond identifying three psychedelic species in the field, came from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms,” which has a mysterious, sinister tone. It’s about a mushroom colony breeding beneath the ground’s surface. Plath’s mushrooms grow Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly. By the end of the poem, they’re powerful, almost evil, when they tell the reader: We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot’s in the door.
On the airplane back to California, I decided if I was going to be into mushrooms, I had to start learning some hard-core scientific information. I purchased David Arora’s seminal All That the Rain Promises and More … a book known by every real mushroom connoisseur. The cover shows a bearded man in a tuxedo holding a cluster of oyster mushrooms and a trombone. Inside there’s a picture of a dog whose hair has been dyed with yellow “shroom mush.” Right after I got this book, a girlfriend of mine found some Witches’ Butter, a rubbery orange fungus that’s ruffled like lace and has the chewy texture of seaweed, growing on an oak log. We used the book to identify it. Now we both snap photos of any shelf fungus we locate and mail them to each other for our fungi photo albums.
Thus, my knowledge of the plant kingdom Thalophyta can be attributed to that trip to see Aztec daggers. For example, I know that the clumps I used to dig up are known as thallus, and the reason the guys told me to pull the mushrooms out by the stems or stipes was to preserve the hyphae and mycelium below, from which new mushrooms can bloom season after season. I also discovered that psychedelic mushrooms are most potent when in a mature stage of fructification and the caps, or pileus, are darkbrown and tender.
Clients often ask me what makes mushrooms psychedelic, so I’ve memorized the molecular structures of psilocybin and psilocin (the chemical that psilocybin breaks down into). Psilocin causes the psychedelic high; scientists think its chemical similarity to serotonin, a natural human neurotransmitter, is what makes psilocin cause hallucinations. Oddly enough, serotonin occurs naturally in the Panaeolus genus of mushrooms. Humans share molecules with mushrooms! Perhaps depressed people could eat Panaeolus instead of Prozac or Xanax.
Here’s a diagrammatic breakdown of the principal active constituents in entheogenic psilocybes. All mushrooms containing these chemicals will produce a blue stain when laid on paper.
Rereading Sylvia Plath’s poem now, I feel I should reinterpret her words correctly through a mycological lens. The “toes” and “noses” that “take hold on the loam” are the carpophores and basidiomycetes, or the fruits and the spores. Her “soft fists” that “insist on heaving the needles” describe gilled fungus in the button stage hidden behind their universal veils. In a new and exciting way, I love the way Plath’s mushrooms Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow, / Bland-mannered, even though that is only a half-truth; saprophytic fungi actually require nutrition derived from decaying organic matter, just as the lignicolous mushrooms (the kind that live on wood) need that special dirt and log vitamins to thrive and reproduce.
I sometimes wish I could write Plath to explain my discoveries.
One recent Friday night I had some mushroom tea brewed from dried Psilocybe cubensis and spent the evening alone.
I can step into a vortex of minutiae. My apartment has teal green walls covered with miniature paintings and small tchotchkes stowed on every shelf. My current favorites are a half-inch-tall ceramic Jawa mounted on a broken cuckoo clock, and a quarterinch plastic Fly Amanita resting beside a one-inch squirrel holding a mini acorn. One night alone with a mug of mushroom tea can turn this situation into a microcosm of amazement.
After I’d examined the squirrel’s hair patterns (the way they swirled in bristly waves over his hindquarters) and its nose, which was smaller than a pinhead yet meticulously tipped in black, Sylvia Plath’s book (the one with the mushroom poem in it) started glowing yellow on the bookshelf. It looked as though it were pushing itself off the ledge into my hands. I opened it and proceeded to listen while the poem was read to me in the voice of a woman whom I believed to be Sylvia Plath in the afterlife. Her voice had a low, Lauren Bacall quality. As the poem’s lines were recited, I visualized each stanza while making scientifically accurate associations. Each word in the poem—bedding, hammers, earless, crannies, nudgers— began to seem like the microscopic reproductive units called spores, which are discharged from mushroom gills and dispersed on air currents. The letters that formed the words became akin to mushrooms themselves, which, by the way, are actually the fruits of the fungus—a thing that gives birth to other things.
Life forms such as mushrooms appear immortal because they are basically impossible to eliminate. When you pick a mushroom, the spores that float away will encourage more mushrooms to grow. Dead mushrooms generate life. Look at letters arranged on a page, and they too become a growing puzzle: of words, that is. The more I eat mushrooms, the more I feel related to mushrooms. We both communicate with the dead, in a way.
Sylvia’s ghost deduced from my half-formed thoughts that I wished to share my fungi learnings with her. She in turn taught me that words, like mushrooms, are capable of communicating to the living what the dead are trying to say. Don’t write to the dead, Plath taught me. We’ll come for your thoughts when we want them. Though I don’t sell mushrooms anymore, I do read books written by deceased authors. One can learn a lot from a ghost, and vice versa.