Mind games
Jeremy Clarke
Times have changed. At the party I passed out at last week someone had gone to the trouble of putting the magic mushrooms in an orange-flavoured vodka jelly. The jelly was presented in a rather lovely Art Deco china howl. You took a dish and helped yourself with a spoon. If we had been glue-sniffing no doubt the Bostick would have been presented in a sterling silver tureen with a silk scarf to drape over our heads. Odd how some people go to great lengths to gentrify even their most primitive practices.
I don't know if you know our native species of magic mushroom. Psilocybe semilanceata? I wasn't familiar with them myself until I got a job potato picking. This pikey in the row next to mine started talking about these magic mushrooms. He said he knew a secret place where there were hundreds of them, 'Magic mushrooms? Rubbish,' I said. So at lunchtime he took me in his car and showed me. It was just the edge of a field of long wet grass beside a dripping copse. 'So where are they then, these magic mushrooms?' I sneered. He got down on his hands and knees and started delving amongst the long wet grass. 'Here's one,' he said. He plucked it carefully and held it up for me to look at, It was the least magical-looking toadstool I'd ever seen, Small and slender, dark and slimy, its only distinguishing feature was a nipple at the apex of the cap. Before I'd had a chance to get a proper look, he popped it in his mouth and was on his knees again looking for another.
I got down and had a look for myself. It took me several minutes of assiduous searching to find my first magic mushroom,
which, when I chewed it, had something crunchy dwelling in it. But by eating them where I found them I sort of tuned in to them and they became much easier to find. After I'd found and eaten my first 50, I swear they were calling out to me. 'Hi! Over here!' they piped, and I'd look, and there they'd be, all pleased that I'd found them. Some were standing in little troops, others were all on their own. And when the late autumn sunlight, more like moonlight really, caught them in a certain way they did look strangely beautiful.
We grazed the field on all fours in perfect silence. Time stood still. My eye was so intent on ground level that my perspective altered to the extent that I comfortably thought I was no taller than a magic mushroom. I looked up once and my pikey friend was a distant speck seen across a vast grassy plain. I looked up again and his face, with its black drooping moustaches, was right in mine. His face astonished me, too. I'd had him down as a credulous, unintelligent man before this. Now wisdom, humility and above all compassion seemed to shine out of his face. He looked like Aristotle himself. 'Don't rip them out by the roots,' he whispered. 'Snap them off at the stem.' The next time I looked up, he'd disappeared altogether.
You wouldn't call even a hundred magic mushrooms apiece a substantial meal. He'd only gone to fetch our packed lunches from the car. Any additional magic mushrooms we found, we put in our sandwiches. So I had cheddar cheese, brown pickle and magic mushroom sandwiches that day. Then we drove to a golf club and parked as close as possible to the first tee and sat in the car and watched a succession of golfers teeing off. We didn't speak or comment, we watched in appreciative silence. For my part, watching the golfers tee off was a very interesting exercise because the effect of the magic mushrooms on my mind was to make me feel like I was an alien from a distant galaxy who was seeing human beings for the very first time. I was watching with no assumptions and absolutely no previous knowledge. Seen in this unusual light, my overall impression, just for the record, was that humans are complex creatures, though overly concerned with infinitesimally small gradations of power, which renders them predictable. What the pikey was thinking, I have no idea. He might have simply been enjoying the golf for all I know.
I wouldn't touch magic mushrooms with the steam off my urine now, even if served up in a vodka jelly and eaten with a spoon. I've known or heard about too many people who have gone into a state of permanent mysticism after taking magic mushrooms. A friend of mine, for example, ate about 400 a decade ago and still thinks he's a sacred tree. So I passed fondly over the magic mushrooms — and the ostentatiously long lines of white powder laid out on the mirror — and helped myself to a small glass of chardonnay.
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