Authors: Joe Putignano
Shadow-sketched concrete trees and pencil-drawn branches lined the road, as a dry rain sprinkled fire and ash on the windshield. We arrived at the void where dreams are created, the place every child knows, under the orange cloud where rainbows bend, and we drove right through it. A stop sign sparkled in its divine statement. I was living the video game I had always dreamed of. Everything became a mystery, and driving was impossible, but I did it. Cars that passed by became huge beams of light traveling on rubber wheels, nearly colliding but irrelevant since they were mechanical instruments without our life force. And all the while Tara spoke in whispers, creating a soundscape with the power of three humans harmonizing.
We parked the car and sat near a glow of light that felt sacred and safe, laughing, smoking, and listening to music under the galaxy. Deeper and deeper into each other’s souls we went; no two humans had ever been more spiritually close. We blossomed from fuzzy caterpillars into butterflies, with wings stretched out and our true selves exposed as we pledged our endless friendship. For the first time, we both understood that life is not meaningless. I felt so awakened, and never wanted to sleep again.
As the sweet sounds of morning came closer, our laughter slowly began to weaken. Even laughter needs sleep. It was the most amazing time of my life. I had changed. I was no longer the same individual as before, and that tiny piece of paper contained a religious spiritual essence, which converted my Catholic vengeful God into a power of goodness and love that only wanted harmony and peace for each life form on our planet. I understood that the Earth itself, as a planet,
was a living, breathing being. That experience awakened in me a desire for knowledge. I thanked Tara for the life-altering journey and dropped her off at her house, where it had all begun.
I drove back to my father’s house with the residual effects of acid bouncing around in my vision. Nature had never looked so alive as it whispered final farewells along the way. I got home and took a hot bath and cried. I cried for my past, for the boy I was, and for the man I would become. My tears were the baptism of my new body and soul.
T
HE CRUCIFIXION USUALLY DEPICTS
C
HRIST ON THE CROSS WITH NAILS THROUGH THE PALMS OF HIS HANDS
. M
ANY SCIENTISTS AND DOCTORS DISAGREE WITH THIS, BELIEVING THE NAILS WERE DRIVEN BETWEEN THE SMALL RADIAL AND ULNA BONES OF THE WRISTS
. N
AILS THROUGH THE PALMS WOULD BE INCAPABLE OF SUPPORTING THE WEIGHT OF A HUMAN BODY AND WOULD TEAR BETWEEN THE FINGERS
.
What is faith? I had faith in my ability to do gymnastics, but beyond that it was water dripping through my fingers. I could not hold onto it, and I only felt it for brief moments. It was the day before Good Friday, a day that always confused me. What was so good about Jesus getting crucified?
I was raised Catholic, but never made my First Communion and went to church only on rare occasions. Secretly, I was scared of entering churches: the huge arches rising into the sky, stained-glass windows depicting bloodshed, loss, and resurrection, and a man hanging on a giant cross as the centerpiece. One could not look away from that human, though what we were told of his life wasn’t very human at all. I knew people didn’t rise from the dead. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around that belief. Considering the same macabre feelings I loved while watching horror movies, you would expect me to love church with its stories and supernatural elements that choirs sang about so angelically. Their voices stretching over the pews reminded me of the ending of
The Exorcist
or
Rosemary’s Baby
. What were we as humans trying to say to each other about religion? It wasn’t that I
didn’t
believe in something; it was just that I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Religion seemed to result in hatred, animosity, and war rather than increasing peace, love, and light. Could that be faith?
Catholicism also posed a great threat to my eternal soul. What if the kids at school who called me a fag were right? What if I was gay? Would I go to hell because of the way I was born? While I didn’t know the answer to this, I knew that the chapter that said a man cannot lie with another man also said that a man may stone a liar to death. So maybe I could join the stoners to balance out my lying. While I tried to keep an open mind to the belief in some higher order, I could not find faith in that religion.
Instead, I decided to do something different. I was fearless in gymnastics, but not in my everyday life, where I still sought acceptance. Aside from my piercings, I didn’t make many changes outside of gymnastics. A new temptation hung from a branch, and I decided to take a bite of that apple.
I made one friend at City, Piper from my history class. I was instantly charmed by her threatening pose, slanted smile, and hip lingo. We shared the same style of big, baggy jeans that dragged on the ground and steel hoops through our eyebrows and lips. We were from the same tribe. She lived in Southie and invited me to a rave in Boston with her and her friends the night before Easter. Raves weren’t that popular yet and were kept quiet and underground. I didn’t know what she was talking about. She explained with bewitching enthusiasm that it was a party with loud dance music. The spell was cast.
She told me that I had to try this new drug with an enticing name: ecstasy. For some reason it scared me. In Boston and other parts of the East Coast it was called “E,” while the rest of the country called it “X.” I loved my acid experience, but something in a pill seemed deadly. After weeks of listening to her beautiful, intoxicating voice, I decided to see what it was all about.
I told Randi, my tattoo and piercing partner, about the rave and she said that she wanted to come. We got into my car and headed toward Boston and got off at the Southie exit.
Southie was like a giant party, with kids all over the place. It was an amazing drug hotspot, with too many dangerous teenagers to arrest them all, and a lot of the cops taking part in the same activities as the kids. This area was like an underground secret covered in broken bottles, deceit, and graffiti, and it shone brightly to me. The Pied Piper summoned me here and I was one desperate rat, willing to follow her song to my death, regardless of the shit I had to walk through. I thought to myself while approaching Piper’s large Victorian house overlooking a playground full of teenagers,
I will become one of them—the criminal, the dangerous one who lurks behind the shadows and wrestles with the darkness of his soul because then, and only then, nobody will tease him because they’ll fear him
.
A thick air of pot smoke led the way to Piper’s room upstairs, which was crowded with the neighborhood kids and weed. How could she smoke so much pot in her house without her parents flipping out? The kids were in a circle passing around three blunts (cigars full of weed), and we joined the circle like it was a pagan ritual that needed our blood. They were all heavily pierced like Piper, Randi, and me and wore the same brand-name baggy jeans. I met everyone with a deep fear in my heart and smiled in as manly a manner as I could muster, trying to create a version of myself different from the one God had made.
An hour later we piled into an SUV and headed to the rave. The rain pounded against the windshield as I listened to the kids tell stories of robberies and drugs I’d never heard of. I thought of my mother. I thought of her smile and warmth. I thought of her heartbreak if she saw me in a car full of criminals I barely knew.
We emerged from the car into a scene of thousands of kids looking like us walking up large stairs to a giant stadium. The rain had stopped and the stars came out to witness our fall into the abyss, through the cracks of right and wrong, into a place so deep that light never entered. The line was long, and the cold winter air forced us into a huddle.
A deep thudding sound from inside the building shook our bodies. Before life there was this sound, a pulse from the deities that ruled
this planet, and only this sound remained as their legacy—an eternal heartbeat that now shook our bones.
Admission cost thirty dollars, which was all the money I had. We walked through the entry into a large room filled with cops, security, and weapon detectors. Stoned and paranoid about mixing with the police, I shuddered in my skin, thinking they would arrest me for smelling like pot. They patted me down and I passed through without a problem. One of the kids had drugs on him and got stopped. They took the drugs and let him into the party. The sound of the music grew in intensity as we approached the doors, and it became impossible to hear one another.
The room exploded with energy and madness. It wasn’t just dance music. It was a massive entity made up of kids who danced to the same rhythm and became a part of the sound. The sound bypassed my brain and attacked my heart. It was so loud I felt my blood bubble. We looked down from the balcony at thousands of kids dancing as lights, mirror ball beams, fog, and lasers penetrated the spaces between us. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen; the music morphed the beats and bass bounced off our bodies.
I felt terrified and anxious. I didn’t want to participate or dance. The place was a drug in itself, and I definitely didn’t need anything else. I wanted to stand and watch from behind my protective window of isolation. This window broke when Piper came bursting through, grinning from ear to ear with her bright eyes peering through mine.
She smiled, grabbed my hand, and said, “Take this, it’s a present.”
I took the pill into my already-sweaty hand and asked, “What is it?”
She spoke with perfect mystery. “It’s called ‘white cloud.’ It’s ‘E’!”
“Piper, I really don’t need it—” She cut me off and said forcefully, “I just paid twenty-five dollars for this. Happy Easter, you better take it.”
Afraid of getting caught with it in my pocket, I bit half of it, and the bitter taste in my mouth was terrible. She demanded that I eat the whole thing, but finally allowed me to first see what happened with
the half. It reminded me of the long line of people at church receiving the wafers and wine that represented Jesus’s flesh and blood. I’d never made communion so never joined that line. I always remained an outsider, watching and wondering in guilt, uncomfortable in the pews, contemplating my eternal damnation. But that night, I took my First Communion.
I left to find Randi, who had taken a tab of acid earlier. I found her dancing in a storm of people, but if I wasn’t competing I had no self-esteem, so dancing was out of the question. I rehearsed my routines a million times; otherwise, I didn’t know how to move. It made me happy just to watch Randi dance. She smiled at me and kept moving.
Then the music changed, like it skipped a beat, and the room started to roll over onto itself. It wasn’t a slow change; it was quick and drastic, and I lost my balance instantly. On acid I had been in full control of my body, but now my muscles were mixed into this sensation and it was terrible. The lights got brighter and more intense, and then Randi’s beautiful face melted. The confusion happened so fast that there was no way to slow it down, and within seconds the most intense fear I had ever experienced ran through me like a blazing fire. It was too much. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move. How long had it been? The music fell into one big, awful sound, and then something inside me exploded. All of a sudden I felt good, then a little better, and then I felt fucking great. It all happened so fast, like falling off a giant cliff. It felt so good that I reached into my pocket and quickly chewed up the bitter other half.
I began to move with the music, back and forth, and then it happened. Heaven crashed into the Earth and spilled all of God’s peace and love over us. The music turned into angel wings beating in synchronicity as harmonies created the most pleasant hymns inside me. I not only felt the music, I
was
the music. I was warm. I was cold. I was love. I was . . . love. I looked around the room at all the other dancing beings in perfect sync with the music, and I loved them—all of them. These dangerous creatures like tiny delicate moonlit moths became my brothers and sisters, and I could see their souls, pure as sunlight, beaming out of their bodies. Without speaking a single word to
each other, we all felt it and we all knew it, and in that moment we advanced as a telepathic race transmitting the pleasure and sensations of harmony, unity, and empathy. I wanted to hug each of them and assure them everything was going to be all right.
Dancing became my religion; I was no longer human, I was something angelic, and “E” was my new God. Never in my entire life had I felt that good, and the best part was that I could breathe. All those horrible hours in the hospital fighting for air to fill my lungs, and suddenly the cure was this little white pill. I’d never breathed so effortlessly, and I inhaled life deeply. I felt it. I felt everything—the formation of stars, the evolution of beings, delicate dew petals, and my own heart as I fell into euphoria and magic.
This drug is the cure for asthma
, I thought. Feelings of elation and affinity washed over me, and each angelic beat vibrated my transforming body.
A million painted butterflies took all the fear, anger, and anxiety from my body and elevated me into the sound, leaving me with pure happiness. In that moment I found complete satisfaction. I no longer had to be the world’s best gymnast, and for the first time in my life I experienced relief and resolution.
No longer a geek on the dance floor, I was suddenly in the center of a break-dance circle doing backflips, and everyone went crazy. I left the circle feeling higher than ever and went upstairs to a different room, floating on a cloud. We were the new angels, creating our own heaven. Two giant TV screens displayed orgasmic visual sensations of fractal images that were intense and blinding. I wanted to die in that feeling, to have it take me in and absorb my soul.