HUMOR|MEMOIR

The Worst Shower of My Life and Why I Loved It

The Dippin’ Dots machine at the center of the universe

The year is 2015 and two friends and I are on our way down to New Jersey for a few days in Ocean City. It’s a humid July night and Aaron is a newly licensed driver. With a weekend's worth of sleeping supplies, an aux chord, and a spontaneously purchased bag of psilocybin mushrooms, the three of us are packed rather tightly into his blue Ford Fusion. The song “License to Drive” by Work Drugs is playing, a proud anthem of these early driving days.

I still don’t have my license, but there’s a vicarious thrill in having freshly licensed friends. Aaron has never driven this far before. He didn’t make a big deal of the drive beforehand, but he’s struggling a little to fully conceal his nerves now that we’re all in the car. Having tried my fair share of parallel parking with my driving permit, I’m sympathetic to the struggle.

I’ve rarely ever gone on a weekend anywhere with just my friends before; it feels like a pretty enormous amount of freedom to have. The fact that we have to find and pay for a hotel room all on our own only solidifies this.

For each of us, this weekend feels like a lot. But each of us tries our best to hide it as we play the part of college-bound adults. We’ve just graduated high school and are going away to college next month.

Even just getting our hotel room paid for feels like a trying task. A few too many papers and bureaucratic terms at the front desk leave us stifled before our journey can even begin. As I stand there watching Aaron deal with the woman behind the counter, I begin to fear we’ll need to turn around and go home. But to my shock, Aaron perseveres. He walks back from the counter with a key in hand and a slightly smug grin on his face

It’s a small bed and breakfast with only three floors and we’re staying on the second. The hallways are bland and narrow, the elevator’s broken, and the stairwell is even slimmer than the hallway.

Our door opens into a bedroom equipped with two beds and a drawer. A tiny bathroom with a shower separates the first bedroom from the second. We’ve arrived late enough in the night, though, that we do little now besides unpack our bags and fall into bed. I claim the second bedroom and I’m pleasantly surprised not to get a little more pushback on taking the solo room.

After spending the next day on the boardwalk, the bag of dried psilocybin mushrooms that we impulsively purchased begins singing out to us. Whether we’d actually eat them was something that we were all feeling ambivalent about as we arrived last night. With the sun beginning to set and the boardwalk starting to light up, though, our decision quickly becomes clear.

Learning from my last experience gagging down psychedelic fungi, I put the crushed mushrooms onto something flavorful enough to actually conceal its heinous taste: a buffalo chicken cheesesteak.

With the mutant mushroom chunks sprinkled atop a hot hoagie too long for my liking, I shovel down the first half with relative ease. But as I realize I won’t be able to make it all the way through the second, I’m faced with an unfortunate challenge: carefully maneuvering the saucy mushroom bits onto one side of the sandwich.

I get a judgmental sneer from a man in a suit as he passes by. He thinks I’m a child playing with my food. Really, he’s not wrong. But my reasoning is sound.

With the moldy mycelium plowed onto a corner of the sandwich, I do my best to labor it down. With all of the fungus now condensed into these final two bites, they take more effort to swallow than the entire first half of the sandwich. After a few minutes, we’ve all finished our mushrooms.

As they begin to take effect, we‘re mesmerized by the lights all up and down the boardwalk. A cluster of carnival lights enthralls us as a growing crowd of people intimidates us. We’re caught between a rock and a hard place. The lights are alluring enough that we stumble happily up the boardwalk as the shrooms continue to intensify. After thirty minutes or so, though, we decide to head back to the hotel for a bit to gather our bearings.

After an indiscriminate length of time sprawled out on our bathroom floor immersed in deep conversations and with a bong passed steadily between us, it’s suddenly the middle of the night. That we decide to redose on mushrooms with a bag of beef jerky as we watch YouTube videos on the tile floor hardly helps our perception of time.

Aaron and I decide to leave the hotel again and make our way back toward the boardwalk. But for some reason, Jake decides to stay back. Aaron and I don’t think too much of it.

We clamber down the hallway that in addition to being oddly narrow, is now suspiciously lopsided. On the bright side, the off-white walls are far prettier than I remember.

For Ocean City, the night is shockingly quiet. But the air is sultry, salty, and alive. We walk past towering beach homes that sit in eerie silence. Few of them even have lights turned on. In the ones that do, silhouettes move with a concerted purpose behind closed curtains.

“You know what’s a crazy thought?” I ask.

“What’s that?” Aaron asks.

“That all of the people in these houses are just living their own lives right now…” I say with an airy sigh and a deep inhale as I airplane my arms childishly through the humid air. “Jobs, salaries, lives,” I continue, walking carefully along the curb between the sidewalk and the street. “Hopes. Fears,” I conclude, nearly falling over. It occurs to me that right now isn’t the best time to test my balance beam skills.

Aaron laughs at me as I clamber to my feet. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of my statement quite as much as gravity’s effect on me. Me, I’m in awe at the realization. I look at every house captivated. Even the vacant ones have life spattered on their walls.

“I feel like… everyone’s just open to love,”

He still doesn’t appear to be with me.

“Like, we could literally just call out and befriend any of the people in any of these houses!” I say loftily. This statement is roughly 80% mushrooms speaking now.

“Ben, it’s 2 am. Don’t do that.”

But I feel too amazing to listen. Anxiety is foreign to me right now and the night air is enlivening. The dire humidity and thick salt in the air meld into a frozen moment. I see a couple of people chatting amongst themselves with beers in hand atop their rooftop deck and I can hardly resist the urge to call out to them.

“Hello, friends!” I yell.

As a look of shame spreads across Aaron’s face, the two men look toward me. To my delight and to Aaron’s chagrin, the two men actually seem receptive to friendship.

“Hey there!” one of them calls back.

“See!” I say to Aaron with a smug look across my face as we continue down the sidewalk. But he rightly doesn’t want to draw unwanted attention. To me, the night feels so suspended in time that I feel practically immune to consequences.

As we continue down the street and approach a stationary police car, though, it spurs my rat brain into motion. We spend a few too many minutes debating whether it’s safe to cross the street that he’s parked on. But we want to go to the boardwalk and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

So shroomily, we cross the road. We look nervously toward the police officer with every other step as we stealthily tip-toe across the quiet New Jersey street. Whether this was even mildly necessary is entirely doubtful. But as we make it to the boardwalk, we encounter an enchanting, commercial gleam in the distance. The neon lights call to us like gnats to a warm, electric glow.

As we approach it, the sign atop the vending machine comes into view. “Dippin’ Dots” I read as my heart jolts with excitement.

“They make Dippin’ Dots vending machines!?” I say in utter shock.

“Huh, I’ve never seen one of these before.”

Suddenly, this vending machine feels like the center of my entire world. That it would appear right now is no simple accident; this Dippin’ Dots machine was meant to be. Fated. This frozen ice cream treat is of cosmic importance. A divine coincidence.

This is the Dippin’ Dots machine at the center of the universe. It sits at the corner of somewhere & everywhere. It is at the very heart of everything. These brittle balls of desserty, creamy goodness could make my entire life complete. I could die a happy man with these frozen orbs of fructose melting in my mouth.

But as I reach into my pocket, I’m devastated to see that I have no money. “Money = a thing,” I painfully connect the dots in my head. But sadly, not the dippin’ kind. “Society is kind of weird,” I think to myself as my ice cream-centered universe crumbles to pieces. A gaping sugar-free void in my chest opens as I cry out in agony.

Aaron, too, hadn’t considered the idea of currency much throughout this trip either. But for him, the crisis is a tad less existential.

We make a blundering walk back across the town and, once again, spend a couple of minutes debating whether or not it’s smart to cross paths with the police officer still sitting motionless at the same street corner as before. But once again, the car sits there harmlessly as we look over our shoulders for the remainder of the walk.

As we arrive back at the hotel, there’s something about the silent lobby that’s absolutely hysterical to us. Environment changes on psychedelics can be emotional, it’s true. We fight crushing laughter in the innocuous B&B as we clamber up the too-narrow stairway to our room.

As we open the door, though, it’s to a shell-shocked, broad-pupiled Jake. He doesn’t appear scared — rather, he has the widened eyes of someone who’s had the universe revealed to him. He looks like a veteran who’s experienced all the lows of the Vietnam War and all the highs of the flower power movement.

There’s a thin sheet of sweat on his upper forehead, but a powerful serenity pervades his every word as he sits on his bed in the lotus position. Even just looking into his eyes fills me with a sense of equanimity.

“I feel like I’ve just… seen everything,” he says, searching for better words.

“I feel as though I watched my entire life unfold… but I feel like I saw you two, also. I felt as though I was with you on your walk. I was here… but also there… and I could tell that you were just about to arrive back!”

Whatever he’s gone through while we ventured to the Dippin’ Dots machine at the center of the universe was clearly profound. We regale him with the tales of our adventure. It’s a powerful reunion for a trio who’d only spent thirty minutes divided.

“We’re actually just about to head back out again if you wanted to tag along,” I say as I grab $4.00 from my backpack and prepare to leave.

“I think… I think that I’ll just stay here for now,” he explains meditatively.

And with that, Aaron and I are back on our way across town once more. After fifteen minutes, we arrive back at the celestial vending machine. It stands alone on the boardwalk as a beacon of hope. A lighthouse to ships stranded at sea. A savior to a world in disrepair — a glimmer of light in the expansive void of space! As I insert my $4.00 into the machine, I feel the power of the universe within my palms. “What flavor do I want?” I ask the ultimate question.

As I feel the energy coursing through my veins, I wonder. “Do I get the banana split… or cotton candy?” The decision isn’t an easy one. “OR do I get the chocolate chip cookie dough?” After no small amount of rumination, I pick the banana split, and the grand machine kicks into gear.

I stare captivated as the modern feat in human engineering spurs a robotic claw into motion. The NASA-esque machine arm then deep dives into a frozen vat and retrieves from it my ice cream.

Minutes later, I find myself grinning ear to ear beside Aaron as I dip my wooden spoon feverishly into my banana split-flavored treat. We’re seated on a bench on the Ocean City boardwalk at 3 AM and I could hardly be happier. But as I near the end of the bowl, it begins to dawn on me how terrible of an idea it was to only bring $4.00 here.

But luckily, Aaron doesn’t have anything better to do than accompany his stupid, hungry friend Ben as he makes the circuitous bumbling walk to and from the hotel once more. With a fresh set of ones in my hand and another mile added to my hypothetical walking log, I settle on the cookie dough this time. We sit on a bench of the deserted boardwalk with waves crashing behind us as another horrible realization sinks in.

“Why the hell didn’t I bring more than $4.00 this time!?”

At this point, I’m stumped that I have a friend who’s willing to take this walk with me for a now-fourth time. To prevent it from turning into a fifth, I make sure to just grab a $20 this time. “A stroke of brilliance!” I think to myself. Jake is too enthralled in whatever solo experience he’s having that he can still hardly be persuaded with Dippin’ Dots.

“I wonder if he’s doing okay,” I say aloud as we arrive back at the glowing dessert machine once more.

“Jake?” he asks. “He looks like he’s doing amazingly.”

“Yeah… I guess you’re right. He’s definitely in the middle of an experience,” I acquiesce as I envision our friend rolling around in a blanket cocoon he designed himself.

So with a cotton candy Dippin’ Dots in hand, we decide now to sit on the beach. As we look out at the ocean, our night takes an abrupt turn from comical misadventure to brooding introspection. In the black ocean, our entire lives are stretched out in front of us. The infinity of it is simply stunning. So we say the hokey sorts of things that people say beneath starry skies as we sit here thoughtfully.

Waves crash silently to shore and retreat again. Hissing foam is concealed within the moonless night. Normally, Aaron and I are two friends that don’t do well in silence. We’re both anxious people who try our best to punctuate the pauses in our conversations. But right now, there’s barely a word that needs to be said by either of us.

We sit with feet stretched toward the churning ocean ahead and allow the night to wear on. In those moments we do talk, it’s in vague hopes and platitudes about the future ahead. We’ve both just graduated high school and hardly have a clue what to do with our lives. We both applied to some schools and both got accepted to a few. But the idea of picking a profession and committing four years and $100,000 to it is a terrifying prospect for both of us.

Still, we both got accepted to Bloomsburg University and decided on a whim that we would be roommates. As the night wears on and, wave by wave, the ocean continues crashing to the shore, we decide to make our way back to the hotel. We make one final, ceremonial tip-toe past the officer who I’m fairly convinced now is passed out beside an empty box of donuts.

It’s nearly 4:30 in the morning now but we’re still fully in the throes of this experience. That we decided to finish the rest of the mushrooms halfway through the trip only assured this.

Aaron and I are both so sweaty now from our night spent repeatedly walking the same six blocks in buffoonish succession that we decide to take a shower. Jake, too, has accumulated his fair share of sweat from his night spent rolling, roiling, and evolving in a sea of bed and breakfast blankets.

After a round of rock, paper, scissors, I win first shower rights. But shortly after I begin washing, my friends are slightly disturbed to hear a relentless deep-throated cackle emerging from the room. I’ve just now realized why this hotel room was so cheap.

The water vacillates without warning between searing hot and freezing cold. Getting a proper shower from this torturous showerhead is a challenging endeavor. Carefully timing the three-second intervals in which the temperature is neither third-degree burn-inducing nor frostbite-forming, I try my best to get some vague semblance of a shower.

The struggle is just about the funniest thing in the entire world to me. I laugh at the top of my lungs at my own comical misfortune. “Am I really in Ocean City right now taking a shower on mushrooms?” “Is this really the dawn of the rest of my life?” “Is it really possible for a shower to be this bad?” I struggle to keep myself from falling over from laughter as I lean against a wall for support.

“Are you okay in there, Ben?”

“HAHAHAHAHAHA” is about all I can get out. I’d almost completely forgotten about them. The image of them huddled outside my bathroom door debating about just what could have me laughing so hard only sends me further into my spiraling fit of utter hilarity.

“Ben?”

At this point, I’m practically rolling on the floor.

Once my body hurts from all of my laughter, I emerge from the shower to the very beginnings of a rising sun. “Wow. Are people really starting their day now?” I wonder earnestly to myself. But just as the thought occurs, I see a lone bicyclist on a solemn commute to work.

“HEY GUY!” I shout at the top of my lungs from my window toward him. His head turns suddenly from the gentle glow of the rising sun against the backs of oceanfront houses to staring face-first at the naked, waving, mushroomed man in the bathroom window of a cheap hotel.

I emerge from the shower as changed as Jake was from his night in quilted solitude. The two of them look at me with a combination of shock, horror, confusion, and anticipation. It’s clear I owe them an explanation. From how hard I was laughing, I think they might be expecting a novel-lengthed story now. The explanation that they do get is hardly one that answers questions.

To date, I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed myself so thoroughly in a shower and I’m not sure I ever will. And to date, I’m not sure I’ve ever used a worse shower.

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