How To Keep Cool While Your Mind Is On Fire
The night air in California is always cool. The atmosphere can not hold heat without help from the sun, and so, the warmth of day dissipates and scatters like it’s afraid of the dark. Save for July and a few weeks in August, nearly every night in California is crisp. This night in question was in June, so the air had a tiny bite to it, if you were on a bicycle, like I was. And if you were bent on psychedelics, like I was, you might imagine the air had teeth. This night felt like it could bite.
Roaring through that darkness, in single file, we skirted the sharp edge of calamity, pushing our bikes as fast as the pedals would allow. Our front and rear tires were often inches apart. Single-file. Our bikes and bodies churned against the cutting night breeze. We were going so fast that if anyone suddenly stepped out in front of us, the crash would’ve been loud, ugly and painful.
About the acid: when someone offered it to us — my two friends and I, bored at a lackluster house party — we decided to take it, to spike the night’s intrigue. Of course, there was one tiny problem—all three of us were terrifically drunk when we took the acid. Two drops each. Over the moon, and down the shadow, on we rode to El Dorado. And literally, we rode. Since no one wanted to lose their license, and since we’d always ridden bikes on summer nights before we’d gone off to college, we stuck with what we knew — we decided to ride bikes that night. And now, having left the party, we were three drunks on acid, riding bikes around our hometown, feeling like adults.
Pushing pedals on a bike while high on psychedelics seems like it would be a good idea. It sounds like a perfect fit. You don’t go too fast, so you’re not really a danger to yourself, or others. (Unlike say driving, which I don’t recommend if you’re on acid.) On a bike, you roll through your distorted world as the hallucinations unspool before you. Yet it feels safe. Or, it did to us.
Having grown up with bikes under us, we soon fell into old habits. We began to ride fast. Then, we rode faster. And faster. Soon, we were pedaling at a full sprint. At the college campus, we followed the bike paths through the university. We were a three-man roller coaster as we shot out of the campus proper and went racing through the park that followed the boundary-defining creek. Looking down at the dark green water, there we were, reflected in rippling flashes, sliding along. Mixed in with the stars above, it looked like we were riding down the sky.
At the far end of the university park there was a botanical garden and wooden arboretum. We had to make a choice: we could stop and trip out on all the super strange-looking flowers and giant plants of the Seussian garden; or we could keep riding and loop back from whence we came. We chose neither. Instead, we opted for leaving the safe dark of the park and headed for the wide smooth blacktop of the university streets. We wanted to ride faster on the empty summer streets of a college town. Our greed for speed was our mistake. Each one of us knew we made the wrong call as soon as we saw the cop’s lights flash behind us. Fuck. The police…
We pulled over to the side of the road. He was a youngish uniformed cop in a cruiser, working by himself on a Saturday night. He was a university cop, not a local one. That also meant the dude was a state cop. Crimes committed on state property, which we were on, are sometimes treated differently. Like, some local misdemeanors are state felonies. I wasn’t sure, but I was of the opinion that the nearly full ounce of pot in my backpack should only be a misdemeanor. And I was fairly certain the acid in our systems would be a felony. That is, if they could prove it.
Maybe it was the adrenalin, but when I looked at the cop car, the hallucinations kicked hard. Riding the bike I’d enjoyed a sort of crystallization of my night vision. But now, staring at the swirling red and blue lights of the cop car, it was a fight not to start spontaneously laughing. We were so fucked …it was actually funny. Like we ahaha are ahaha so ahaha fucked!! Ahahaha!
Before the full mirth hit me, I remembered cops tend to hate it when you laugh in their face, even if it’s for no apparent reason. They tend to assume they’re the joke, or the punchline. They’re not there for your amusement. Far from it.
We stood there stopped along the side of the road, each straddling a bike, with one foot on the curb. The cop parked just behind us. After taking his sweet time, he stepped out of his car. No, it was like he raised up out of the bowels of his car. He was fucking huge and muscular and Teutonic and how some black people in my family picture the devil — a good-looking white guy with a toothpaste ad grin. He just kept getting bigger and bigger as he stretched up out of hell.
One of my friends, apparently seeing what I was seeing, pulled his bike up on the curb, turned and just rode away. He bounced and clanged his way down a bumpy hill of grass and right into a grove of trees. He disappeared with a few screams of pain from the low pine tree limbs that whipped him as he rode into their protection. When I turned back, the giant German cop was standing next to me. We were all watching the same thing, like it hadn’t really happened.
“What’s wrong with him? He have priors?” the cop asked, calm as a bomb squad captain.
“He doesn’t like cops,” I said, hoping the truth might be funny to the cop. It was not.
“You guys been drinking?” the cop asked, getting as close as passengers on a morning subway.
“What — drinking? Come on, Officer, we’re not old enough for that,” I said, carefully, as I confessed we were underage.
That’s one problem I have with psychedelic drugs — they make me painfully honest. Like, I have no idea how to lie or really any understanding of why someone would want to. They are my truth serum, but people only like the truth when they’re laughing at it, or if it’s not about them. My self-protective mechanism was functioning well enough that I could still hide the truth from the cop.
“Where you guys headed?” the cop asked, still sniffing for alcohol, which I was sure he would soon smell emanating from me, if he hadn’t already. I kept my distance and stayed downwind from him. When I looked up at the cop to get a sense of how suspicious he was, his face was melting. He looked like the icing of a birthday cake left in a hot car. His cheeks were smears of color pulled down by gravity. Shit. That was going to be a problem.
I told myself, “It’s cool, some times cop’s faces melt from all the pressure, he’s nervous, too. He doesn’t want to die right now… all you’re worried about is prison. Just keep staring at his melting wax lips and smile when he smiles… and shit, I wasn’t listening, what’s he saying?”
“…You go to school here at the university? You guys headed home? Or out to party?” the cop was still talking, and now he was turning to check out my friend who’d stayed.
Jesse and I had been doing drugs together long enough that I knew he could handle his shit. And I could see that he was. Jesse was just barely gripping his shit, like he was holding it with his fingernails, holding on to it like someone was trying to steal his shit from him. But he was handling it. Go on, Jesse. I nodded at him and then spoke up to get the cop to focus on me, “My friend and I, and that dude who just rode away, we’re just out riding around. Were we speeding?”
This was no joke. Due to acid delusions, I thought it might be totally possible that we were riding faster than 35 miles per hour, and that we could’ve been technically speeding.
“Ha! Speeding? That’s funny. No, that’s not why I pulled you over,” the cop said, offering no further information.
I stared at his watercolor-in-the-rain, finger-smeared face and asked the eyes in the middle of that mess, “So, um, then, what seems to be the trouble, Officer?”
It came to me in a flash, I remembered people talked like that in movies. That seemed like the perfect thing to say. Jesse giggled a little, but not loud enough the cop was bothered by it.
“Whatcha got in your backpacks? Any weapons, drugs, paraphernalia, beer, I need to know about? Now’s the time to tell me,” the cop squinted deeply into my eyes to see if we were lying.
“Officer, you saw, we were just riding our bikes when you felt the need to stop us and — “
“You don’t have bike lights.” he said, cutting me off. “And you don’t mind me looking in your bags, do you? You got nothing to hide.”
“No, well, you can’t look in our — “ I started to say, but my silent partner suddenly spoke up.
“Sure!” Jesse said, pulling his backpack off his shoulder, knowing his was free of contraband.
Since he’d volunteered his bag for search, I felt like, now, I had to open mine or else look suspicious. If I denied the search, the cop would likely detain me “for my safety.” This is what they did to drunk college kids — it was an arrest without any formal charges, and they didn’t have to fill out much paperwork. Good for them. But you still spent the night in county holding. If it was a holiday weekend, you could go in on a Friday night and not come out until Monday morning. I had no plans of being locked up in county jail on acid.
After the cop finished searching my friend’s bag, he turned and asked to search mine. The splashes of red and blue light alternating on his face pulsed with a creepy menace. Instead of my bag, I handed him my license. I’d pulled it out while he was checking Jesse’s backpack.
“Here, you can run my ID … I’m clean,” I said, hoping to steer the cop away from my bag.
I knew my record was clean, just as much as I knew my bag had pot, beers, and a pipe. It was like a ticket to the anti-amusement park called county holding. But my record was clean. I wanted to focus on my record, distract him with my past so he overlooked my present. The cop looked at my proffered license and called it in on his shoulder-mounted radio. Jesse handed over his ID.
“Wait here, and don’t get cute like your buddy,” the cop said and then went back to his cruiser to wait for our reports.
I looked at my friend and could see he was peaking hard. His eyes were circles of black, which was off-putting because his eyes are very light green. His pupils were consuming his eye.
“Can you believe fucking Chad just rode off, that motherfucker’s a genius — like, seriously, what the hell were we thinking — like, do you wanna ride off now — no, wait, he has our IDs, shit…” I was talking fast and low and making as much sense as someone reading a Lewis Carroll book out loud but skipping every other word.
I heard the Teutonic cop rise back up out of his police cruiser. When I turned back to the cop with the melting face, I prayed that this time his face would no longer be a waxen nightmare.
The cop handed Jesse his license, said he was still waiting on my record.
We were so close to getting away with it, no time to fuck up now. So, I focused on the cop.
“You guys work a ton, huh?” I asked, clumsily, like a bartender with poor people skills.
“Yep. Well, it feels like it,” the cop said.
“I bet. But you guys get vacation time, right?” I asked.
“I get two weeks paid. Last two years, I just cashed my time in.”
“Cashed it into what?” I asked, my drug-thinking excited by his potential answer.
“Just money. You can cash it out if you don’t use it in the fiscal year.”
“Oh, you just turned time back into money,” I said, obviously disappointed his answer wasn’t like, ‘cashed it in for a used muscle car.’
“Money makes the world go round,” the cop said with all the enthusiasm of a bedridden child, watching the world go by in his bedroom window. It was sad, like actually depressing to hear. Of course that could also be the acid. Money never seems so silly as when you’re on psychedelics.
“I hate that expression. Money has nothing to do with geodynamics. Like, that sucks, man. You know stress kills you, right? You have a very stressful job. You should, like, take more vacations than most people. Like seriously, man,” I said like I was selling a time-share.
“Yeah. Tell my wife,” the cop said, getting lost in thought.
“I will, do you wanna call her? I’ll tell her you need to go right now,” I said, trying to give him all sorts of subliminal suggestions.
“Yeah, she’d be the first to agree with you. She always wants to get away.”
“Dude, I hate to say it, but she’s right. Okay! If you could go anywhere, like, if you had a magic wand and could send yourself anywhere — where would you go? Really think about it…” I said.
“I’ve always wanted to see where they filmed Jurassic Park,” the cop said with boyish curiosity.
“Hawaii. Yeah. I’ve never been there. You know they have planes that will take you there. My sister went, she finds these deals… Okay, I don’t know your wife, but if she’s better at shopping than you are, make her a deal, tell her if she can find a trip for two to Hawaii for less than — I don’t know how much that shit costs, but tell her a number, I bet she can find you guys tickets and all that shit, hotels and hikes and horseback rides, and she’d get you registered, and then boom — you two go and enjoy a vacation like normal people. Can’t spend all your time tense, that’ll kill you, man.”
“Thanks, Zaron. That’s actually really helpful. You know what? I’m going to do it. When I get home. She’s going to think I’m drunk.”
When the cop said my name he nearly surprised the shit out of me. Like, literally and figuratively. But then I remembered that he had my driver’s license in his hand. The big Teutonic cop with red and blue flashing melting face grinned at me. I didn’t need that sort of visual, but somehow it felt like a win. If I could hold it together.
Even though I hadn’t recovered fully from the shock of the name-drop, I started talking anyway. “I didn’t think you were really listening to me, to be honest. I figured you were just humoring me because you do such a lonely job and, like, you probably never get to talk to anyone who sees you as like this real person.”
“It is a lonely job but I don’t—” the cop paused and listened to the fuzzy voice emanating from his shoulder radio, the one that said Burnett was clean.
“You know, I should probably write you both up for not having headlights, but I’ll let you go with a warning. Tonight. Just this one time.”
“Thanks, man,” I said, seeing the first glimpse that we might actually get away with it.
And that’s when our third friend, Chad, rode back into the scene. He’d grown scared out there all by himself, tripping balls in the dark. He decided he’d rather test his luck with the Teutonic cop. Again, the three of us watched him—this time he rode up the grassy hill and then acted like nothing had happened.
“Hey, guys!” he said, obviously stoked to see us.
“You’re lucky you have such good friends, otherwise I’d take your ass in for running off like that,” the cop said. Chad’s eager smile fell hard and fast.
“You guys stay out of trouble, okay?” the cop said, and walked back to his patrol car. He folded back into the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut, flipped off the lights, and drove off.
For the first time in twenty minutes, the world stopped looking like a crime scene. I was still totally hallucinating, but at least it was pleasant again. The stars replaced the red and blue, those soft familiar pricks of light streaming through holes in the blackness above. I literally thanked my stars, not knowing which was the lucky one. By helping the cop with his fears, and ignoring mine, I figured how you keep cool when your mind’s on fire.
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