It's worth mentioning that last week was my third anniversary in New York City.

I arrived March 5, 1998 to an empty apartment. To this day, I have no idea whether my roommate was in New Jersey or Arizona, as he was working in both cities at the time. I slept on my roommate's bed for two days, as the contents of my apartment in Seattle had not arrived yet. By the time he steered into town on a Saturday morning - fresh from clubbing at Twilo and accompanied by a variety of club kids - , a bed, clothes, art, and books were doing time on the floor of my room. At least I had a place to sleep. (I wish I had $1,000 for every time I've uttered those words. I also wish I had $1,000 for every time I've heard someone say, "You know, you really remind me of Janeane Garofalo." If either of those wishes came through, I would have my college loans paid off by now.)

I had also shown up with a small container of gel caps full of pureed hallucinogenic mushrooms. I think there were 24 in there. Each one equalled a highly entertaining trip. The pills came from a guy named Franklin, a fucked-up, fried, middle-class, college-educated, drug addict. Franklin lived in the hippie house on 17th street, the one I used to hang out at all the time. He didn't work, didn't need to for reasons that were unclear to all of us.

Kelly said he had a car accident a few years back, and he had a settlement which supported him. Mollie said he came from money, so a trust fund kept him going. All I knew was he didn't have to work, had never worked a day in his life beyond volunteering at a homeless shelter for a year (Not that I didn't respect him for that, because I did.), and after that, he just kind of hung out at the house, gardening, cleaning, cooking meals, and smoking pot. (It's important to note that before he moved to Seattle, about three years previous, he hadn't done any drugs and rarely drank. The amount he had consumed in two and a half years had completely wasted him. I never had the opportunity to know him when he was sane.)

The house was never truly clean. There were always dishes in the sink, some of which got a little stinky if Franklin and Kelly and Mollie and whomever was living in the house at the time were doing an excessive amount of drugs. (Drugs meant pot, mushrooms, and acid, though when things were flush and/or exceptionally boring, crystal meth and X floated around. You would never see coke. Seattle was not a coke town then, though I can't speak for it now.)

But Franklin took responsibility for flow in the common areas, a necessary task. Coats were hung on the rack in the foyer. Mail and phone messages were distributed appropriately. Lonely Birkenstocks somehow wound up in their owner's bedroom. Franklin was a part of the house, just as Mollie and Kelly and Kelly's female dog, Barney, who consistently barked at guests who wore hats. He didn't talk much, but you were always aware he was around.

The last Thanksgiving before I left Seattle I spent the day with Franklin, Mollie, and Kelly. They were all vegetarians, which I ordinarily appreciated. (I weighed at least ten pounds less when I lived in Seattle and I had much better legs because I hiked regularly.) On Thanksgiving, however, I found it tiresome. All we could eat, all we ever ate, was either pasta or some creative treatment of tofu. Thanksgiving was no exception. At least we had pie and three bottles of red wine.

After an early dinner, we smoked a bowl and took a walk. Franklin had been studying quite a bit on the subject of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he had spotted some prime vegetation in Seattle. He felt festive. He wanted to share his life with us, so he showed us where the mushrooms grew.

We walked towars the campus of Seattle University, a Jesuit college. On the borders, near 15th Street, he started pointing out pockets of mushrooms. He knew which had potency, and which didn't, and he taught us quickly.

We delved behind bushes that lined low-level, compact office-buildings, keeping an eye out for passers-by and slow-driving cars. It was a quiet, lonely day because it was a holiady, but we were aware we could be arrested for our activities. We all had small bags we wore slung over our shoulders. Our eyes darted. We were nervous.

It was an Indian summer. The sun was approaching a beautiful pink sunset. Our stomachs were full of spaghetti sauce made from cans of canned, skinned tomatoes, dried basil, salt, pepper, stale parmesan, and chopped onions and olives. There may have been greeen peppers. We walked slow, felt full and comforted, and still, we were nervous. We were committing a crime in public.

After a half-hour of picking, Franklin took us to a location he had been scoping for weeks. He knew there was a great deal of potential, but, for a variety of reasons beginning with his fear of arrest and ending with his distaste for organized religion, he had been cautious. Today was his day, though. He brought us to strike; to pillage; to pick.

It turns out there was a wealth of mushrooms sprouting on the lawn in front of Seattle U's chapel. Some were near the dirt surrounding the gorgeous, heavy trees, but more were splattered on the far side of the lawn, close to unnamed campus buildings. Franklin spoke quietly and told us which mushrooms were potent, and which were not worth our time. We worked fast, but we were subtle. We were just a bunch of kids on a walk during a national holiday.

He got the most mushrooms, of course. He had the eye. He was the teacher, and we were the students. This was his life. He was an addict to altering his reality. Kelly and Mollie, they weren't so bad off then as I think maybe they might be now. (Maybe they're not. I don't know. I still love them anyway, because they are without anger, and they still maintain a sense of humor. I strive for that, though I doubt I'll achieve it in this city.) I was simply out to explore.

We returned home when the sun started to set. We had a substantal journey home, and we weren't dressed appropriately for the inevitable cold of the evening. It was a silent walk, punctuated by stoner giggles and drags off of cigarettes - American Spirits for Mollie, and Marlboro Reds for me. We were pretty sure we had something good, but we couldn't be positive until the next day. The next day was always about clarification at that time in my life, yet I was living for the moment for the most part. Things were blurry, but I was happy. (Had I done even fraction of the amount of acid, meth, or ecstasy that Franklin, Kelly and Mollie did in those days, I might well still be in Seattle doing absolutely nothing with my life. Thankfully I, for the most part, stuck to weed.)

When we made it back to the hippie house, we spilled our bags on flat surfaces. Franklin dug through the spoils, focusing his trained eye and pulling out the impotent mushrooms. After he passed judgement, he instructed us on the appropriate method for drying them out, specifically the lighting and the location.

I paid attention and considered his advice. There was a failed icebox in the kitchen of my studio apartment that I usually used to store bread. This would be the home of my mushrooms. It was perfect. I was set for the rainy, grey late fall and winter. I was going to be comforted by hallucinogenics.

I'm not going to get into the details here because it's worth another few entries, or a short story, or a novel, or something like that, but it was a lovely three months wherein I finalized my creation of a division of a company, finished up my editing and writing duties on a fun book of poetry and writing, and recorded with a band. And I ate a lot of fucking mushrooms, in lieu of a drink or a joint after work. Damn, that was a fun few months.

There is no way in hell I could do that now.

At the same time, Franklin puttered around the hippie house, upping his pot intake to (literally) about six times a day, seven days a week, rain or shine. He was running out of money from the anonymous source. He lost a lot weight. He started trading mushroom for pot. Money never exchaned hands. He just wanted pot, at least initially.

He would wake up in the morning around 7 AM and pad down to the living room. He would take a huge bong hit. (He had long since given up on smoking from a pipe; it wasn't a big enough hit for him.) Then he would make coffee or tea, and drink three cups over the next hour, perhaps eating a piece of fruit in tandem. He would brew an extra pot for his roommates, who would likely wake up hours later and need a jumpstart to their day. He was considerate like that.

He would take another bong hit when he was done consuming caffeine. He would scratch the house dog, Barney on the head, and invite her for a walk. Before he left, he would take another hit. He would walk with the dog for an hour. On a good day, he and the dog would make it all the way to Volunteer Park. On a bad day, Barney might get into a fight with another dog, growling and scratching and fighting and trying to draw blood. He would hustle her home, shaking his head and muttering to her under her breath. Sometimes she was a bad dog, and no one could ever change that fact.

Snacking followed. And more bong hits. Showers were infrequent, as was shaving, processing laundry, and communicating with anyone beyond his roommates. He weeded the garden. Later, around 8 or 9 PM, after his roommates and he ate a vegetarian dish usually sponsored by the local food bank and cooked by him, he would pass out. It was a simple life Franklin led. It would have driven me fucking nuts.

Sometime in the fall of 1997, after the mushroom trip I think, a friend of the house (and there were many; people passed through or partied there for days all the time and were touched by the generosity of the housemantes), dropped off a trash bag of pot clippings. The friend had been working in Northern California harvesting pot, and had been travelling with this bag of unsaleable, unsmokeable goods. He figured the residents of house would find it useful.

Franklin cooked with it for a couple of weeks and we were all sick. I would show up for meals (I dined there regularly, proffering red wine as my contribution), never knowing what part of the meal would be dosed with pot. Was it the spaghetti sauce? Was it the chocolate chip cookie I indulged on for dessert? What could I eat that wouldn't impact my ability to walk home? And would I make it through the night without puking?

Finally Franklin sorted it out. He needed to be able to measure the clippings in order to cook with it properly. I came over one morning and saw him hunched over the kitchen table with the tiny coffee grinder, turning the clippings into a soft green dust. Ten hours later, he was still there, finishing up the trash bag. He was a man with a mission. He made the drugs useful. The city of Seattle was functional again.

I'm not sure how much I saw him for the last two months I was in town. I think he was in his room a lot, eating things. The last week I was in town I was at the house and ran into him.

"I put out a book", I told him. "Poetry and stuff."

"I want one," he said, flashing me his glazed-over grin.

"Oh, uh, I'm charging for them. I'd give one to you but I spent some of my moving money to pay for them and I'm trying to make it back."

I knew he didn't have any money, and I felt bad.

"You want to trade?"

"Sure." I was a little hesitant. I was anxious by then to get the hell out of Seattle. I just wanted to go. Anything that made me wait seemed potentially disastrous.

He walked upstairs and returned shortly. He handed me a bottle.

"There's some trips in there," he said.

It turned out that he had determined that the worst thing about taking mushrooms was the taste. He had applied the coffee grinder theory to mushrooms, bought some empty gel capsules, and was now trading mushroom pills for pot, food, and cash. I had to admire his ingenuity.

I opened up the container. It was filled to the top. I handed him a book from the bag. He smiled. He was pleased with the exchange.

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