Here, Have Some Pills

January 10, 2010 // 1:48 am

maddriver
by Michael James Nelson

After graduating from college, I made the decision to move out to Los Angeles. I had a car but I knew, and my mechanic certainly knew, that it would not make it through the cross-country journey from Florida to California. “It’s a piece of shit,” I believe was the professional diagnosis the mechanic gave me as he slammed the hood harder than it had been built to withstand. We had a long moment of silence. “I don’t like your shirt,” he then said, eyeballing the fraternity collard shirt I was wearing. As the man cleaned his dirty hands with an even dirtier washcloth, I wondered if the constant handling of filters ever gave him the hint to actually use one. But, in the end, he was the car expert, so I had to take his call seriously, regardless of how much I wanted to drop kick him to the face. Luckily, I arranged to hitch a ride with my buddy Matt, who was also heading out west. I packed my bags and had absolutely no idea that this drive would be the most psychedelic and intense drive of my entire life.

On the way to Los Angeles, about four hours outside of Orlando, we stopped in our old college town and had a very long night, a sort of a final hurrah. The next morning we were so hung over and didn’t know if we could even make it an hour on the road. As we packed the car, a buddy of ours handed us a small bag. “Here. It will help you with the hangovers. Happy driving.” We opened the bag and there, smiling back at us, were eight pills of Adderall.

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Adderall, Wikipedia will say it is a psycho stimulant composed of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, which is thought to work by increasing the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. So, basically, it is cocaine. If you take enough of it, you will constantly have the adrenaline rush that you get right before you skydive or execute a highly secretive covert operation with Seal Team Six. It will wake you up like no cup of coffee or power drink can and it gives you the focus of a rocket scientist. In fact, when you take it, you want to perform ambitious acts like building a rocket and/or solving time travel. And if you have it without a prescription, you can go to jail for possessing a controlled substance. I had never taken Adderall and was like, “whatever.” I didn’t know what my buddy had in mind and I really didn’t know why we would need these pills. I think I treated it like an old man giving his apprentice an object that meant nothing at the time until the end of the movie when the object actually would save the day. Whatever. We hit the road.

While driving along Interstate 10, there is plenty to look at until you hit Texas and then it is just infertile land that looks like it was abandoned by God. Driving at a comfortable speed, listening to music, we settled into a desert induced trance and maybe noticed the occasional gas station, but for the most part, nothing. And then it happened. He came out of nowhere and when you first see him, sitting on the side of the road, lights atop the car, painted a dark color with a gold star on the door, your heart drops. We didn’t see the cop. But after we did, we saw that our speedometer was at ninety. “Holy shit!” Matt jerked his gaze to the rearview as I turned around in my seat like a copilot searching for a Mig 22 that had just zipped behind us. His lights illuminated and dirt sprayed from behind his back tires as he accelerated onto the two-lane road. I knew it wasn’t possible, but I could have sworn I heard that ford engine roaring to life. He was gaining fast.

“The pills!” I realized we had eight pills of a controlled substance with no prescription. “Dude, if he searches the car and finds this, we are done!” And the last thing we wanted to do was spend time in a Texas jail. The laws of the United States tend to get a little lost in Texas. The cop was getting closer. “We have to eat them! We can’t throw them out, he’ll see us do it!” We were screwed. We had no other choice. We could hear the siren and see his mustache. I think I caught the reflection of my cringed face in his aviators. “Fuck it, we have to eat them. Four pills each.” We each grabbed four pills apiece and swallowed them. He was right on our ass and our hearts were racing. He then pulled up next to us, looked over, and continued on. “YEAH!” We were in heaven. We were so happy. But then, we froze. We had both just swallowed four pills apiece, each pill around 20mg of Adderall. I don’t know why we didn’t pull over or try to vomit the pills; I think we were just in shock. We slowly looked forward and said nothing. Absolutely nothing.

That much Adderall is like going on a five-day cocaine binge. Thirty minutes later we started to sweat profusely and grind our teeth constantly. We rattled off abstract stories and theories about the universe being nothing but a small marble on a board game that two aliens and Jesus were playing in a city that existed on a floating mountain in the Atarian galaxy located under God’s beard. At one point, I remember having an out of body experience, looking down at the car from above as it was driving down the vacant road. The car passed on through a translucent plasma wall and I looked back to the east to see a giant dragon circling a volcano. What? Come to think of it, who knows if we were even on the highway. We could have been forging our own road through the desert. I have no idea. But, we did know that we were involved in a colossal chemical. So, we pulled over to buy tons of water to try and delude the Adderall and we also purchased loads of chewing gum to save the enamel on our teeth. After the supply stop, we were pounding water and chewing ridiculous amounts of gum. Our jaw muscles were being overworked and our brains didn’t even notice the distressing nerve signals being sent from the jaw muscles, screaming for help. Our brains were too busy thinking about the next story to tell.

The hours went by and so did the cities and states. The sun went down and it came back up, but our energy stayed the same. Every topic known to man was discussed and every dream and aspiration analyzed. We rejoiced our greatest achievements and broke down in sobs while explaining our biggest failures. We imagined what it would feel like to fly. We speculated if dead relatives watched people jerk off. We wondered if the moment was real or if we would awake in a cocoon on an alien ship, hooked up to some machine. My head was pounding and my face was hot. I fell into a vortex where light met sound and an old man dressed as a knight was telling me, “only the penitent man shall pass.”

About twenty-four hours later somewhere in Arizona, we started to energy crash and decided to get a hotel room. After awaking to find that an entire day had passed, we were still exhausted and felt a little weird. The drug felt like it was still hiding in different little pockets in our bodies. So, we delayed our exit and got out the Nintendo 64 and started playing Mario Kart for hours. Of course, this is what we thought was happening. Maybe a local was watching us both sit in front of a bush in the middle of a field, using leaves as controllers. We had no idea. We had never felt like this before and wanted to just chill and relax and let the drug make its way out of our system.

We got back on the road and the small trucker town disappeared behind us. The rest of the ride was quiet. No big dreams or ideas or stories, just music and the ambient of the driving car. Soon enough, downtown Los Angeles revealed herself and suddenly we found ourselves in her traffic, barely able to keep up with the surrounding cars. We were tiny and insignificant on the ten-lane freeway that was absolutely packed. BMWs and black Range Rovers bellowed their horns as they angrily sped around us. But, we were not going to speed. Oh no. The last time we broke the speed limit, it led to a nightmare so we decided to just follow the speed limit and not draw any attention to ourselves. I had a weird feeling so I turned around to look for the Mig 22 and just for one split second, in the center of shifting traffic, about a hundred feet behind us, I could have sworn I saw a a dark cop car and grinning behind a mustache and a pair of aviators was a giant Adderall pill.