Chapter 23 - Techno-Shamans (Winter 2009)

Later that week, I stopped by the club to handle some business with Charles. Before I left, he told me that he took Dave and his girlfriend to the clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. I didn't know what to say, I was shocked, but it didn't really seem like there was any hope for that child or any better way to handle the situation. We thought that maybe Dave would start making better decisions after being faced with something like that, but the very next week he got in trouble for drunk driving. Not long after he was released from jail, he violated probation and then fled the state and went into hiding. Dave was one of those people who meant well but couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. He had a huge heart and a lot of love to give, and for that reason, it was tough to be mad at him, but he was spiraling out of control, and it was best for everyone involved that we parted ways. We didn't need someone so reckless on our team, and he needed to focus on getting his life back together instead of partying and selling drugs.

After Dave skipped town, I got a text from Amber on a strange number asking what happened to him, since he was hustling for her too and he was the one who introduced us. I hadn't heard from her since the last bust when she was the one who went into hiding, but apparently, she didn't go far. She was just an hour down the highway in DC and she said she wanted to meet in person. We both knew better than to talk business on the phone. When we met up later that week, she apologized for her disappearance, and explained that things at Galaxy got way too hot, so she had to cut ties. She told me that she switched up her operation and started running nitrous tanks from Philly to DC, since they were easy to get up north and hard to get down south. This, of course, meant that she could buy it for cheap, and sell it for a decent mark-up, thanks to the law of supply and demand. Plus, nitrous carried a much lighter sentence than the pounds of molly she was working with before. She also mentioned that a drum and bass crew called 3D started doing parties at a club near her apartment and she heard they had some open dates. I was looking to spread my wings and get involved with other venues, so I started tracking down Dominic Detetta, the owner of 3D Productions. I was familiar with the crew, they were doing drum and bass shows with big headliners in DC for the past few years. I didn’t know Dominic all that well personally, but I do remember that he showed up for my party at Ground Zero and made sure to give me props on his way out. We had plenty of mutual friends, so it didn't take long to find his number. When I called him, he seemed happy to hear from me and asked about how things were going at Galaxy, which gave me the perfect opportunity to ask about his new spot. The place was called Club 42 and he told me that the rent was cheap, and security was relaxed, but the owners were a huge pain in the ass.

Dominic said having another promoter doing shows in the club would probably help his events out too, so he was happy to introduce me to the owners but warned me again that they were not easy to deal with. Later that week, Dominic arranged a meeting with the owners, where I was able to book a date and get a tour of the building. It was a fancy club, filled with expensive furniture, lighting fixtures and hardwood dance floors. I really wanted to make this a success, so I started spending a lot of time in DC trying to build an audience in the area. I was still doing shows at Galaxy, but the place was on shaky ground, and I knew that it would be better to build relationships with as many clubs as possible.

Since Amber was already in the DC area, she assembled a promotional team for me, and they were some of the coolest ravers I ever had the pleasure of meeting. All of them were “woke as fuck,” as the kids today would say. They said they wanted to help me out because I was using my platform to make a difference. One day, I took a trip up to Philly with them to get their tanks filled. We spent the whole ride talking about how we could change the world by throwing raves. It may sound ridiculous, but we wanted to make it hip and trendy for people to be informed and care about what was going on in the world. Since we had a bit of power to influence the culture, this seemed like a realistic goal. On the way back home, we talked about our plans and sucked down balloons as Amber navigated carefully down I-95. When we got back to Amber’s apartment and unloaded the tanks, she told me she wanted to show me something and led me to her room. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a glass container filled with tan powder.

"Have you ever tried DMT?" she asked me.

“Yeah, a few times. I can never seem to break through. It just makes me feel a bit strange for a few minutes. I never get that experience that everyone talks about,” I said.

“It’s harder for some people than it is for others. Have you ever tried snorting it?” Amber asked.

I laughed, “I never heard of anyone doing that, that doesn't sound legit,” I said.

“Neither have I really, but I had the same problem you did until one day I just decided to put it up my nose. It stung a bit going up, but it sure as hell worked,” she said.

“What gave you the idea to do that?” I asked.

“Well, I was reading that book “The Spirit Molecule,” about those scientific studies they did with DMT, and I learned they injected people with it. I don't fuck with needles, but I figured if they were shooting it in the lab then maybe snorting it would work,” she replied.

“That’s brilliant! You say it worked? Maybe I should give it a try,” I said.

“Yeah, the thing is, you got to put a whole lot of it up your nose for it to work, a key bump ain't gonna do. Here I'll cut you out a serving,” she said, as she poured the powder onto the table and cut out three massive lines.

“So uhh what, is one of them mine?” I asked.

She laughed, “Nah, I'm sorry, you gotta do all three of them as fast as you can. We’ll stay on earth in case you need help,” she said.

“Shit… Alright,” I said, taking a 20 dollar bill out of my wallet and rolling it up.

I sucked the first line up my nose and felt immense pain radiate through my sinuses then let out a scream.

“I know it hurts but you gotta get the other two down as fast as you can, use the other nostril if you gotta,” Amber said, urging me to take the pain and push on.

I shut out the pain as best as I could and followed her instructions sniffing the remaining powder up my other nostril. My entire face was now throbbing with pain, so I found the mattress in the corner of the room and laid down. As soon as I closed my eyes, I was instantly transported to another world, propelled through a spinning tunnel of bright and flowery geometric patterns, showing me colors and shapes that I had never seen before. My life flashed before my eyes, and I was shown many of the good and bad actions that I had taken throughout my life, my highs, and lows, my victories, and my regrets. After an intense barrage of flashing images, the mental display that I was witnessing slowed down and showed scenes of me and Caylee together and happy. I was filled with love and really felt like I was in my hallucination, it seemed real, and it did not seem like I was sitting in an apartment in DC. At one point in the short episode, my closed eyes were once again filled with bright and unimaginable colors that created what appeared to be a computer-generated landscape. In the vision, I was approached by wire-framed entities that were emanating light. People often report encounters with entities during DMT trips, and they are sometimes described as elves, angels or aliens. However, in my vision, they just looked like the outline of human beings, with no features and bright wire-frame structures consisting of multiple exotic colors. As the beings drifted toward me and began to surround me, I received a message. The message didn’t come through text or words or a voice, but directly through some type of telepathic thought, as if an idea was implanted into my head. This telepathic transmission told me that I needed to write a book but didn’t tell me how or what it would be about.

My out of body experience was interrupted by the loud hissing of a balloon being filled in the next room, and suddenly I was back in Amber's apartment. My visions had disappeared, and the pain in my face returned ten times worse than before. I shot up off the mattress and began pacing the floor muttering “water...water..drink.” Amber and her friends scattered around the room until one of them found a bottle of water and handed it to me. I took a few gulps of water and set the bottle down and began pacing again, still feeling intense pain in my head, nose and face from the thick crystals that I sucked up in that bill. I ripped off my shirt and began blowing my nose into my shirt, which was not a pretty sight so I will spare you the gory details. I started crying and collapsed to the ground, shouting frantically about how I wasn't ready to die and how I still had so much work left to do.

My mind was still trying to piece together what was happening, I seriously thought that I was dead. I couldn't figure out whether I was in a trap house or the afterlife, and my memory of how I got this way or who these people were around me was still fuzzy, but slowly coming back to me. I huddled on the bed in the fetal position continuing to blow my nose in my shirt. Every time I closed my eyes, flashes of those strange, exotic colors would fill my head. It was beautiful, but also overwhelming. Everyone in the room stood over me with concerned expressions, talking amongst themselves, wondering if I was going to be ok. Although it felt like hours, within ten or fifteen minutes, I was fully functional and coherent. I had come back to reality but was still trying to make sense of what I just experienced. Something like that is impossible to put into words, but after seeing what I saw that day, I became convinced that there is much more to this world than most people think. I was left with the impression that there is a higher spiritual force at work in this world, and that as humans we are getting fractions of information through our five senses, never seeing the full picture. I would never be the same after that day, and I would never look at the world the same way again.

Later that night, we went out to a local club called Ibiza to hand out flyers for our party and get rid of some pills. That place was cool and all, at least the building was anyway, but the vibe in there was lame.

Security was following me around all night, and I was only able to make a few sales. There wasn’t a dress code, but most of the crowd was in formal attire, so I stuck out like a sore thumb, which is probably why we were getting so much attention from security. We left a few stacks of flyers with some friends and got out of there as soon as we could, we knew that we were risking a shakedown every second that we spent there. We were hardly there an hour. A few of us went back to Amber’s apartment for an afterparty, and I hung around to let my buzz die down a bit before I drove home. Oddly enough, that was the last time any of us ever saw Amber, she left town again, but for good this time. She didn't even tell anyone before she left, but I guess she wanted to keep a low profile. Apparently, she was stacking her loot all this time and had a small fortune that no one really knew about. She had enough money to live comfortably for the rest of her life, so she decided to retire and travel the world. She set up some kind of front business so all her money and traveling looked legit on paper, it was really some next level shit. Every now and then, she would call me from unknown numbers to check in and let me know that she was hanging out in some random country having a great time. She was smart, she did it right, she cashed out while she was ahead, which is a trick that many hustlers never learn.