I was sixteen the first time I ever had a major “blackout” from drinking too much. Previously, I’d had a few nights where I couldn’t remember an hour or two, or had a few events relayed to me later that were humorous, but nothing on par with that time when I was sixteen.
First, let’s setup the scene, because a story is only as good as its backstory, right?
My mom was dying from cancer. I’d just listened to her cry for several hours, whimpering and asking me to end the pain for her, before she was mercifully knocked out by some much deserved morphine.
Needless to say, the night was already going badly for me.
I called Rob, one of my best friends at the time, and told him what was going on. Without even asking, he said, “I’ll be over in a few to pick you up. Be outside.”
Sneaking out was pretty easy; I had a fire escape ladder that I could just sling out my second story window, and climb down to the ground. It was nearly ten o’clock, the house was asleep or preoccupied, and I was leaving by whatever means necessary. At that point, I’d had it. I was done.
Rob arrived shortly after that, and found me standing at the end of the driveway. I hopped in, we exchanged our usual nod, and we were off. I asked him what he wanted to do. He said, with no reservation and no bravado, “We’re going to kill the pain.”
I knew what that meant: we were going to have a lot of booze. We were going to do what we did best. We were going to go completely crazy and have no reservations whatsoever.
I nodded and said, “Cool. Did we want to go pick up Tim, too?”
“Sure.”
And that’s what we did. We stopped at a payphone, called Tim and asked if he was up for partying. It was a Friday night, after all. He agreed, we picked him up, and headed back to Rob’s place.
Rob’s parents were our main suppliers of alcohol and drugs. They were hippies, didn’t especially believe in rules or boundaries, and generally were just very cool people to us sixteen year olds. Would I trust my sixteen year old with people like that? Hell no. Luckily, my parents didn’t know what kind of people Rob’s parents were.
We arrived, and the drinking began. Of course, this is where a lot of the memories start to get pretty fuzzy. I remember distinctly that I finished at least 15 shots of vodka within a few hours. I remember that it was right around eleven o’clock when we started taking acid.
In my mind’s eye, I can see the sugar cube (with four drops of acid) and I can see that I placed it in my mouth. I chewed it, and washed it down with some rum. I remember that I kind of gagged for a moment, probably on the rum, and then everything was fine.
About thirty minutes later, the walls started to distort, warp, and the hallucinogenic effects of the drugs were starting to kick in. I remember glancing over at Rob, who was also tripping, I opened my mouth to say something… and that’s where my memory ends. Nothing. Absolutely nothing remains of that memory. At all.
The next thing I remember was nine or ten hours later. The mystery of what happened that night has vexed Rob, Tim, and me since then. We have no recollection of any events that transpired between 11PM and 9AM or 10AM the next day.
I woke up in a ditch that next morning. I was covered in water (or at least, what I hoped was water), and my car was about 30 feet away from me, up an embankment. I was freezing, because it was the middle of January and I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
My head hurt like hell, I was muddy from head to toe, and for the life of me, I had no idea why I was so far from my car (which was parked in a small gravel area about 20 feet off the main highway).
Apparently, at some point in the night I’d stumbled out of the car, fallen in to the ditch, and simply never climbed back out.
I couldn’t get my bearings, had no idea where I was, and decided I might as well figure out what the hell was going on.
I got up, walked back to the car and climbed in to the driver seat. Everyone in the car was asleep. Rob was sitting in the passenger seat, Tim was in the seat behind me, and male unknown passenger #1 was in the seat behind Rob. That’s right. There was someone else in the car. And I had no idea who the hell it was.
I woke Rob up, which in itself took about ten minutes. He was completely out. Tim and the unknown passenger were still fast asleep in the back when I finally got him conscious.
“Rob, what the fuck happened last night?” I asked. By then, I was starting to panic. I hadn’t even looked over my car to see if there was damage or not. I was confused, and I just wanted an explanation on how we got to wherever we were, and under what circumstances.
He glanced around, looked at me, and I shit you not, the first thing he said to me was, “What are you doing in my room, man?”
Of course, after he figured out that I hadn’t broken in to his house to wake him up, he was as mystified as I was as to what the hell had happened the previous evening. He didn’t remember how we got there. In fact, neither one of us even knew where “there” was.
We both got out of the car and walked around it, inspecting it for damage. After we decided there wasn’t any blood or body parts attached to the bumper, and that there wasn’t any scratches that weren’t already there, we got back in to the car. We decided we might as well wake Tim up and find out if he remembered anything.
When Tim finally came around, we were dismayed to find that he didn’t remember a thing either. He did have a vague recollection of us planning a road trip at some point in the night, but that was all he had. None of us could remember how we got the unknown fourth person.
Reluctantly, we woke up our mystery passenger to see if he knew what the hell had happened, or at least give us an idea of where we were. He provided us with some details that seemed rather eerie when we all considered them later.
At some point in the early morning hours, we had picked up this gentleman at a rest stop just south of Weed, California.
Yes, you did read that correctly. We had driven in January through a notoriously difficult mountain pass, with no snow tires or traction devices, to California, picked up a hitchhiker, and were now in some unknown location.
Unfortunately, our passenger had fallen asleep shortly after being picked up because, as it turned out, he had gotten very stoned just before we met him at the rest stop. Wonderful. I asked if anyone knew how I’d ended up outside the car, or why I’d spent the night in the ditch. No one knew.
The only decent explanation I’ve ever come up with was that I had had to pee, went outside, and at some point felt like I was going to pass out or throw up. At that point, I must have laid down on the ground and fallen asleep. To this day, I have no idea if that’s correct or not.
Since we didn’t even know if it was just the next day (Saturday), or if we’d gone on a several day binge, we decided we should find out pretty quickly where we were and what day it was.
We got back on the road and started driving. Besides being fairly hung over and very sore from spending the night on the ground, I wasn’t in too bad shape. My passengers, on the other hand, were horribly hung over and we had to stop fairly frequently for them to throw up at the side of the road.
After wandering along on the country roads for almost an hour, running dangerously low on gas, we finally figured out where we’d ended up: Sacramento. Eight hours south of where we’d started.
Our hitchhiker was overjoyed, as that was where he’d been heading. We can only assume that that’s why we went in that direction. I don’t think I’ll ever know.
We drove back that day, almost crashing two separate times in the Siskiyou pass going through the snow, all the while wondering how we’d managed to traverse the same path the night before.
To this day, I have no idea what happened that night, or why we decided we were going to travel to California. My favorite explanation is that we were kidnapped by aliens, and they made it look like we’d driven there under our own volition.
I wish this particular story was an isolated incident, but alas, a good portion of my life is nothing but a blur and for similar reasons.