My friend Jon and I weren’t heavy into drugs, but dabbled in hallucinogens. Like many college students, we were game to try anything that would make you hallucinate, as long as it wasn’t expensive, and didn’t involve a hypodermic needle.

We’d read somewhere that raw nutmeg had hallucinogenic properties, when consumed in sufficient quantity. So, on a Friday off we went, to the nearby food co-op to get our entirely legal fix.

We’d only ever seen nutmeg ground to a powder, in a shaker for sprinkling on coffee, or used sparingly in desserts. The co-op carried raw nutmeg: knuckle-sized balls that we’d never seen before. Jon was the last to see the source text, but he couldn’t remember, or it was never specified, just how many knuckles of nutmeg were required for a noticeable effect. We bought a dozen.

The nutmeg balls were awful-tasting, and hard to chew. I think Jon forced down one; hell-bent on experiencing a transcendent trip, I chewed - with difficulty - one after another, ultimately consuming six before the urge to gag stopped me.

We waited, listening to music and talking, for a few hours, until night came and we resigned ourselves to being duped, like the desperate potheads that were surely smoking banana peels somewhere else in the college dorm. I left Jon in his dorm room and caught a bus back home to the suburbs, to the basement where I lived mostly alone. (I can elaborate another time…)

An hour after getting in I started feeling light-headed, and cold. The photo above doesn’t quite do  it justice, but my complexion was pale and waxy, and my eyes were sunken, with dark circles around. On any other day I could tell you I looked like a corpse, but in my altered state I was half-convinced I was a corpse.

But hey, I was tripping.

Within an hour of that I felt a cramping in my stomach, and then ensued about six hours of torturous vomiting, which in my mental state felt nothing short of an angry fist reaching down my esophagus, grabbing my colon, and pulling me inside-out.

One factor I hadn’t considered in the timing of this was that the week before, I had agreed to ride with my uncle Ron from Crystal to Grand Forks, to see our relatives there, on Saturday morning. Ron and I had been at the same family functions, many times a year, but the three hour drive was the most time we’d ever spent together without anyone else to carry the conversation, and I was still a rebellious youth who the grown-ups “just didn’t get.” I had been up all night heaving and was still cringing from the settling debris of a bad drug trip. And I wasn’t sleepy.

It was a terribly, terribly long drive. My uncle liked jazz, and even that got hard to find on the radio north of Saint Cloud. I had a Walkman with a Front 242 cassette in it, but I was couth enough not to completely ignore Ron.

After I returned home from the holiday, I did some more research, and learned that while nutmeg is reported as having hallucinogenic qualities, it also had been know to cause heart attacks when taken in quantity. I stuck to LSD after that.