That Time I Jumped From a Moving Train

A Memoir

As I leap from the moving train, wind in my hair and the weight of a thousand caucasian eyes bearing down on me, a record player scratches so violently that it freezes time and allows me to turn toward the reader and say, “You’re probably wondering how I got here right now.”

“Well buckle up your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen, because this one’s a doozy,” I say in my most charismatic and narratorly 90’s voice.

The year is 2014. It’s a warm spring day in the May of our junior year of high school. Flowers are blooming, Barack Obama is still president and fears of SATs and colleges congest our conversations. We’re too young to drive but old enough to be curious about drugs. So it’s on a bike that I arrive to Violet’s house one Friday after school to take mushrooms for the first time.

I’m a good student, but definitely an adventurous one. And from what I’ve read about mushrooms, it seems like an experience that could be useful. And fun. It’s tough to say which is the greater selling point.

But as I arrive, no one’s warned me beforehand that the psilocybin mushrooms we’ll be eating are the most foul-tasting thing on God’s green earth.

As we sit in her entirely-too-cluttered living room and separate the purpled fungi, Violet grabs some honey and chocolate sauce to help things go down more easily. Violet’s house isn’t a particularly great one to take psychedelics in for the first time.

It’s not so congested that it belongs on Hoarders, but the clutter is inescapable enough that the house is difficult to navigate even on its best days. Plus, Violet’s two little sisters are at arm’s length at nearly all times. They’re young enough not to understand the crushed fungi sitting at the center of the living room table but old enough to know that our constant, curious glances toward them mean that we’re up to something.

“What’s in the bag?” the older of the two asks with a look that’s equal parts naive and suspicious.

“Nothing!” retorts Violet hastily. She’s a kind person but has reservations when it comes to the sisters she’s constantly tasked with watching.

The house smells of soup; it usually does. Whether it’s steeped into the walls at this point or emanating from the kitchen that’s little less cluttered than the rest of the house is unclear. There are two precarious piles of plates on the counter and a few more loose plates and cups beside them in the sink.

A sliding door leads into an unkempt backyard with tick-laden grass, a trampoline, and swings. A couple of her cats amble freely in and out of a little flap built into it. The deck is a few shades shy of fresh but still a few years short of rotten.

Damp leaves from last autumn line the undersides of patio chairs. But in all of its imperfection, this house had always felt like a second home for us. So many of our angstiest and most enlivened middle school nights led us here.

On Friday nights, we’d skate at the local rink and amble in unruly groups toward this famed sanctuary home. The girls wore jeans a few shades dimmer than their hair and a few inches closer to their skin.

The boys wore skate-themed sweatshirts and carried gaping Monster Energies clumsily at their sides. Our jeans, too, were a little too colored and a little too tight, and whether more than a third of us actually skated was dubious. The 2000s were alive and well.

And on swampy August nights, we’d leave the local pool and file far too many kids into Nasir’s mom’s van and make the short drive to Violet’s house. In a comical, clown-car-Esque feat of maneuvering, twenty of us would emerge from the van meant to seat eight and make our way into the cluttered home that could hardly house five more. There was always something intimate about Violet’s home.

After a few minutes and a well-defended battering of twenty questions from Violet’s sisters, Nasir arrives. We’re still waiting on Isaac, but he’s on the way from practice so he told us to just go ahead and take the mushrooms without him.

With my life-long aversion to chocolate, I opt to dip the mushrooms in caramel. But as the gooey gob of fungus enters my mouth, I quickly understand that I’m in for an adventure — and not of the psychedelic variety. Not yet.

The journey at hand now is getting down an entire dose of these heinous mutant spores with only this dipping cup of caramel at my disposal. The task ahead is a trying one. On the drooping sofa in the oak-brown room, I spend the next few minutes laboring desperately to swallow the moldy white mycelium mounds.

I dip the shrooms in the golden brown dessert but find that the caramel only makes matters worse. The molasses-like-goo only prolongs my agony. I choke and cough and wretch and agonize and gag but, after five minutes that seem to stretch into a hundred and with tears streaming silently down my face, I’ve finally finished the mushrooms.

As I look over to Nasir for support, he’s already gotten all of the fungi down with ease. I feel as though he’s beaten me to the top of a Himalayan mountain without any climbing gear. How he could have managed such an inhuman feat with only chocolate sauce and without tears is beyond me.

I have a running theory that psilocybin mushrooms are the cilantro of the fungi world: depending on who you are, they’re either inoffensive in their flavor or the most heinous, fecal, fungal, terrifying taste to be foraged within even the creepiest, darkest forests. If you ask me, I’d say that even the deepest abysses and swampiest miasmas are home to better flavors.

I’m not sure whether it’s my furious coughing and desperate water chugging, whether eating these really did take the better part of an hour, or whether this relentlessly sticky caramel has actually had a time-dilating effect, but I’m beginning to feel something. I walk gingerly from the dimly lit room and out onto a suburban street increasingly colored by the setting sun.

As I walk in solitude along the street, I bump into Isaac. We briefly greet each other, but he quickly gathers from my awe-inspired stare and unsteady gait that he’s missing out on something novel. So he hurries happily inside with me behind him and, as I look on perplexed, downs the mushrooms within minutes and without wincing. My jaw drops toward a lint-covered cat toy on the floor.

With all of our mushrooms consumed, we make our way toward a nearby park. It’s the overgrown remnants of my father’s old junior high school, lovingly referred to by locals as High School Park.

“Excuse me,” I say to a bush that lines the trail meandering through it. The sun has set completely now and after a little time, we discover that darkened parks are a poor place to let mushroomed minds run rampant.

So making use of the one friend of ours who’s happy to tout his newly minted license, we make our way to Glenside. There, we find ourselves inside the basement of my friend Ryan’s house.

It’s a warm room of happy memories. It was another refuge of ours throughout our angsty middle school years. During sleepovers, we’d make prank calls and late-night Wawa trips and watch scary movies till sunrise. We’d laugh hysterically and spend our nights so sleepless that I’d need to spend my next week compensating. To be here again now, in the throes of this experience, feels almost like a dream come true.

A few of our friends here didn’t take the mushrooms, but they hardly mind that we did. They look at us with captivated stares as they ask us, “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“It isn’t like that exactly,” I try to explain. But what exactly it is like is still something I struggle to put words to today.

After the initial curiosity wears off, they decide to make the night as amusing for us as they can manage. For me, this apparently entails burying me beneath a sea of a thousand pillows and blankets. As I feel the cushiony tide wash over me, a deep serenity takes over my being.

I’m deep enough within this velvety mound that my mind runs free through the warm darkness. It’s a sensory deprivation tank but without the saltwater and ethereal new-age music. Instead, it’s the happy laughter and chatter of friends who I love deeply that I hear now.

“A lot of the things you worry about in life are small,” I think to myself as I rustle about in my quilted cocoon. “You should try to be more present with yourself and the people around you,” I arrive at, as I let out a muffled laugh into a pillow.

“Remember to be kind. Love is really what’s important,” I conclude as I erupt from the heaping pile of bedding a changed person. Whatever metamorphosis I’ve just gone through I can hardly begin to describe, but I feel like a butterfly floating free through the warm glow of this timeless and friend-filled room.

It’s shortly after this that we decide to go to Wawa. Our walk quickly turns into a run and what exactly spurs us into a run, I can’t quite remember. But we’re not alone.

As we run down the street, we’re joined by three other animals alongside us: a deer, a cat, and a rabbit. Their motions seem almost synchronized as we run blunderingly down the suburban street in the early summer air. Enough members of the group are psilocybin-free to confirm that this isn’t a hallucination.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so one with the life all around me. I look toward the three animals, captivated, as they gallop gracefully off into a verdant night.

Arriving at Wawa, I quickly realize there’s hardly a thing in the store I want to eat with this culinary disaster still gurgling around in my stomach. But the candy aisles are still vibrant enough to hold my wide-pupiled interest.

As we make it back to the house, I’m one water bottle richer and a crucial $2 poorer. Following a couple of deep talks and riotous rounds of laughter, Nasir and I begin to make our way toward the Glenside train station to take the train home. After fifteen minutes pass, a train pulls into the station and brings with it an overbearing cold front. We board the screeching metal structure.

Sitting in the warm train seat, though, a sense of calm begins to sink in. As we make it to the first stop, I feel now as though I could practically fall asleep here.

But as a man begins making his way down the aisle, punching holes into tickets, my eyes widen in terror. I’ve spent my last $2 on water. The man continues to approach, a forbidding intensity embedded within his thick, black mustache. As he nears me though, I feel the train begin to kick back into motion.

One click at a time, he makes his way down the aisle. Whether it’s the masterclass in suspense building that this man is offering me now or the lingering mushrooms in my system is unclear, but I launch suddenly from my seat and make my way quickly toward the door on the other side of the train. The train is nearly in full motion now, pulling away from the station as I open the cold metal door and make a slick exit.

But I’m quickly blasted with a powerful gust of wind. The furious roar of the train lets me know instantly that this was a terrible mistake.

But I cross over the rickety, chain-linked platform and try to enter into the next segment of the train. To my horror though, it’s locked. In the panic of the accelerating train, I prepare to enter back onto the train cart I just exited from. But as I pull on the door — locked. Shit.

It’s at this moment that I make a dire decision. I put a shaking leg on the chain link metal that separates the two trains and, after a moment’s hesitation, I leap. As I soar through the air, I see a terrified cluster of suburbanites turn toward me in slow motion.

The jaws of commuters and mothers and board chairman and PTO members all suddenly drop to the floor as I pound against the pavement with a colossal crash and slink guiltily off into the night. They conclude rightly that I must be some raving, mushroomed lunatic to pull off a stunt so daring.

“Not even a twisted ankle?” I think to myself as I barrel through trees and bushes, thoroughly impressed with myself.

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