The roadman called it “getting well.” Sometimes the medicine cleans you out before it can heal. We weren’t to leave the fire—if it happens, let it, we’re all friends here.
I was the first person to get well. I was also the first person to get well twice. I got well on the gravel in front of my blanket. I got well in front of a circle of strangers who were not yet even a little high. I tried not to get well on my friend Nick’s feet. And when I was finished, the fire-tenders scooped my well-spawn onto pieces of wood and calmly bore it away.
The ceremony would last till sunrise.
*
Peyote is a sacred plant, an ancient medicine, a Schedule-1 controlled substance, and a psychoactive alkaloid. US law permits members of the Native American Church to ingest peyote for religious purposes, and indigenous peoples have been consuming the divine cactus in ceremony for centuries. Effects of peyote (also known as mescaline) include euphoria, nausea, profound insight, vomiting, hallucinations, and softened ego.
When Nick invited me to a spiritual drug ceremony in Topanga Canyon two months before the election, I asked him a series of questions: Is it a cult? Is this cultural appropriation and/or racist? How much does it cost? These were all performative, as we both knew I’d say yes. A peyote ceremony is not the kind of thing I’d ever seek out. But the direct invitation to do something I’d never done before was irresistible.
“More concerned about the ‘ceremony’ part than the drugs,” I texted. Nick and I aren’t spiritual, but we’re writers struggling to carve out careers in LA. The crust had hardened over our egos. I’d just hit my one-year anniversary of moving to Los Angeles—a lonely year of way too many weekends staring at screens or walls. Autumn found me stuck in the election’s teeth and numb with panic.
Earlier that summer I lost control of my breathing while on the phone with my mom. I had visited the “Issues” page of Trump’s campaign site. Where Clinton provided fact sheets and comprehensive policy guides, Trump offered mantras. Under “Unifying the Nation,” it read: We will be united, we will be one, we will be happy again.
Sinking to the asphalt outside the Giant Laundry Center on Venice Boulevard, I repeated these words over and over. “It’s fascism,” I hyperventilated, “so why isn’t everyone terrified?”
When I agreed to the ceremony, I wanted to jolt my mind and body awake. I wanted to see miracles in the fire.
*
On the day of the ceremony, we arrived early enough to assist in erecting a tipi by the side of a mountain road. We were instructed to bring an offering of tobacco and cash, to be presented to the roadman. The roadman, the person who conducts the ceremony, was Huichol, but the event was organized by a white guy—a Hollywood model/actor who found enlightenment on an ayahuasca trip in Peru.
“There is a difference,” Enlightened Model explained to us, “between a medicine and a drug.”
We learned that medicines heal, while drugs help one escape reality. Cancer meds, diabetes meds: drugs. Indigenous tribes in Peru did not have diabetes. Diabetes and cancer were the Western body’s rebellion against psychological problems. He explained that he used to be addicted to drugs and ego, but now he had superior insight into the universe.
“Pregnant women in the jungle take ayahuasca, and then their babies don’t even cry.”
“Unless they need something,” he added.
The roadman called the ceremony “sitting up.” This is literal. You sit upright around the fire and you take peyote and you don’t leave till dawn. The tipi was overbooked. I was squashed between Nick and a Hawaiian woman who’d smudged us with sage, my knees digging into neighboring thighs.
There was a pregnant woman, a mother cradling an infant, and one small, sleepy girl. Bonds of family and community united the native participants; the rest were hippies and tourists. White-bearded gents back from Burning Man. Some guy sent by his chiropractor. A golden-haired Dutch pair who were either siblings or lovers, we never did find out. A reiki instructor who told us it would “probably rain tomorrow, thanks to this ceremony.” A lady named Moonshine.
There was definitely not enough room in this tipi.
The roadman began by describing the ceremony as a tradition of the grandmothers. “A woman’s space,” he called it. He talked about peyote as a sacred medicine, and said he welcomed outsiders to the ceremony, because if more people took the medicine the world would be a better place. He said the medicine would work differently for everyone.
We sat up. The fire-tenders passed tobacco as the roadman spoke. Then we ate peyote. First, in plant form: a juicy, bitter “button” that tasted of melon and spite. It’s not so bad, I thought. And after more chewing: Well.
“Look into the fire,” the roadman said. “Empty your mind.”
Nah , said the medicine.
It didn’t take long. In the still, firelit moment that followed a water blessing, I hurled my cactus. It was neither quick nor quiet. Everybody stared. One of the fire-tenders burned some cedar. “For you, sister,” and wafted toward me the cleansing smoke.
Nick (telepathically): Dude. Seriously.
Me (telepathically): Everything’s super fine and I definitely did not just vomit in front of everyone but also if you were my real friend you would have vomited with me.
The roadman then passed around the traditional instruments and encouraged us each to lead the group in song.
The initiated knew these refrains by heart. Others improvised. Nick and I developed a Morse code of knee squeezes, bruise-inducing signals whenever another white guy heya ’d .
“There are peyote songs on YouTube,” the roadman mentioned, after Nick and I had declined the instruments for the third time. “It’s not hard to look them up before you come.”
More peyote came around the circle. In cactus form, as powder mashed in chocolate, as tea: All it did was get me well as fuck. But others fared better as the medicine took effect. An indigenous woman spoke powerfully of suffering and celebration. Her throaty hymn was worth a thousand ayahuasca-surrendered egos. There were tears, laughter. The ambiguous Dutch duo spent the entire night in rapturous giggles.
Nick and I, judgmental knee-squeezers, were no doubt the most miserable. I won second-place vomiter, ceding the title to the pregnant woman, who later described the ceremony as “a very physical process.” After every testimony—wherever it fell on the powerful-to-wtf spectrum—the group chanted Aho! (Navajo for “amen.”)
Watch, listen, vomit, eat, repeat.
Drenched in cedar smoke and nausea, I willed the fire to rupture the order of things. I watched the flames, thinking about ceremony and community and transformation. I still had hope. But then the Enlightened Model would share his many insights, or Moonshine would promise to “only ever say positive things,” or a man would announce that the womb was “the crown of knowledge.” Then the roadman would talk about how mental illness is a lie and humans don’t really need sleep. Then I’d throw up. This continued for hours and hours.
Because I love you soooo much , droned a singer . BECAUSE I LOVE YOU SOOO MUCH.
Empty your mind, the roadman exhorted.
*
It had begun that afternoon, an unspoken tension at the edges of our conversations as we milled around the tipi. When Enlightened Model said that people who harmed you—“rapists, even murderers”—were just walking their own path. It intensified at twilight, when a tall, ponytailed dude didn’t “feel” vaccines were safe. That certain illness-of-ease when your favorite lefty radio station starts praising Trump’s friendship with Putin. When everything you’ve tried to escape turns out to be crouched in your hiding place, armed with claims that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would expose the vulnerable to harm. In the flame-lit huddle, it crested to a vomitous climax. The call is coming from inside the tipi.
If American conservatives had gratefully emptied their minds of reason and empathy, had these spiritual tourists not done the same? The contempt for science, the dismissal of mentally ill people, the fawning gender essentialism. It was the same assault on facts and social responsibility that made the election interminable, and it lived here, among the radical. Proud ignorance, obtrusive whiteness. We will not say we are depressed, we will only say positive things. We will be united, we will be one, we will be happy again. Fascism wears many faces, and one of them is a white lady named Moonshine.
My closest consolation was the familiar heave-and-splash of wellness.
And here, the lone cold comfort granted by the fire: These cactus-eaters are exactly the same as me. Here is communion. Here is the stealthy hand that digs out your filth and leaves only a shallow hole, the grave of your ego and his. Can I side-eye their cultural appropriation as I take up space, songless, in a tipi? Scoff at their magical thinking as I conjure marvels from the flames? I came for the same transcendent experience they all sought. And no matter how I vote or which campaign I donate to, I’m a white American. Forever vomiting on ground that isn’t mine. Part of the system that produced twenty-first-century fascism, responsible for my country and its crimes. I too thought magical things. I too believed October would pass and we would be happy again.
*
I stopped taking peyote. It seemed less likely that peyote was clearing the way for visions and more likely that my stomach was rejecting literal poison. Dawn broke. Nick and I gave the roadman our offering, and the anti-vaxxer invited us to the sweat yurt: “Like crawling back into the womb . ” We fled.
Peyote is a toxic cactus, a spiritual portal, a purgative. But is it a “drug” which helps one escape? Or a medicine that heals?
I will say this: The slump ended. Suddenly I was waking at dawn to run, meeting deadlines, going “outside.” Peyote itself had offered me no refuge, only a cramped vomitorium. But the order of things had been ruptured; I felt transformed. Nick did, too. Maybe it was the intensity of the night, or the break in routine. Or perhaps it was the sense, so easy to believe then, at the end of September 2016, that soon the nightmare would be over. Soon the sun would rise.
“Many Native Americans believe that it is ‘wrong’ to use peyote for the purpose of having a vision,” reads a guide to peyote ceremonies on the website of Colorado College. “In ceremony, there is no indication for pursuit of visions, more introspection and praying for the ill individual.”
Maybe it was peyote’s revenge. The roadman did say that the medicine would give each of us what we needed. Maybe the medicine knew I needed to struggle with it, philosophically and digestively, in order to see.
That makes no sense, of course.
Fucking peyote.
