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Three Fools

It was in the autumn of nineteen ninety-one that we three musketeers stumbled into our great adventure. The really crazy schemes are never planned out from the start; they hatch and develop a life of their own, some great cosmic conjunction causing the stars to align in a strange pattern. We nearly went to prison, almost made a fortune, and gave some serious thought to dosing all the residents of a small town in northern Wisconsin with hallucinogenic mushrooms. If I haven’t caught your attention by now I suppose I never will, and you can go back to watching Jeopardy and finish that rotisserie chicken you were eating.

We were an odd trio, the three of us; the only thing that held us together that summer was our sense of adventure. I suppose greed and a shared interest in getting high from time to time probably helped, but it was that desire for adventure that had a grip on us.

Nathan was from a nice family in a suburb at the edge of the city, both his parents intelligent and well educated. He was six feet tall, well built and about as pretty as a man can be without a dress on. Curly blond hair and a nice tan, even perfect teeth, and smart as a whip. He was partying it up for the summer before he went off to college in Florida and wanted to make some extra cash to buy a motorcycle. He had a few thousand saved up and when he saw how I could make money multiply it piqued his interest right away, visions of zipping around Florida on a fast bike with a cute college girl on the back floating around in his head. I called him “Golden Boy” for most of the summer except when I was high, which I suppose was more often than not in those days. When I was high he was simply Goldilocks. Jaime never stopped laughing at that, it got a chuckle out of him every time I said it.

Jaime had been a ward of the state for a couple of years now, and was in an independent living program getting a monthly check from the state. He was seventeen, and in a few months when he turned eighteen the checks would end. He wanted the big score as badly as Nathan did, I could see the dollar signs in his eyes. He was Mexican Indian by birth, punk rock kid by choice, and an adventurer by nature if I ever met one. When an idea came up he always gave it some thought, no matter how strange it was, and he had no inherent prejudices at all, every suggestion got equal consideration from him. If it sounded like fun after a few moments of careful thought he was all for it, no matter how crazy.

Me? I was the dealer, a natural entrepreneur and master capitalist, doing what I was born to do. With two hundred dollars I could make a thousand by midnight, maybe more if the right people were answering their phones. I was seventeen, and having the time of my life all summer, making money when I needed it, bringing the party with me wherever I went. Everybody loves a dealer, the guys all want to know you and the women all think you’re a big shot. When it comes to meeting women, playing in a band or driving a fast car is nothing compared to being the dealer. In the right circles you’re the ultimate big shot, the guy to know. The risks aren’t worth it, but the lifestyle is addictive, and getting a straight job is tough after you’ve done it for a while. I was just coasting for the summer, with no plan, and no interest in finding one, I just wanted to find some good times, and have some good stories to tell at the end of it.

We were sitting on a porch at a party one night when I told the two of them about the Mole Lake Blue Grass Festival, and of the stories I’d heard about it. A few people I knew in northern Michigan had come back from the festival the year before with treasure troves of psychedelics and stories of massive quantities of drugs they had seen for sale. We should’ve joked about going to make a big buy and laughed it off, as any sane person would have, but I saw them both slowly raise an eyebrow after the story was over. As it turned out the stars had begun to align before I even told the story.

“I talked to John today,” Jamie said, catching my attention instantly, “He’s running low on cash and wants us to help him turn what he’s got into something a little more substantial.” John was a fat slob in his mid forties who had been living off a small inheritance from his mother’s death for the last few years. I couldn’t imagine him holding a job. He also smelled like cheese. Trust me it’s more disturbing than it sounds, never could understand it, but I can’t trust a guy that smells like cheese. His first foray into investment a few months earlier had been disastrous, giving a crack head money to buy crack and resell it is never a good idea. The guy bought a crack rock the size of a softball and smoked almost all of it in three weeks, repaying John only twelve hundred of his five thousand dollar investment. There’s no way to get money back from a crack head, if they don’t have it in their pocket for you to physically take back from them you’ll never see it, not a chance.

Old John was a little skittish after that first experience let me tell you, and understandably so. After meeting me however he had come to the conclusion that I might be a better business partner than the crack head. I took this as the smallest of compliments. I hadn’t really paid a lot of attention to him when we’d met. He seemed fairly worthless, certainly wasn’t any fun, and anyone who gives five grand to a crack head is borderline retarded and much too stupid for me to really waste my time on. Anyone that stupid should just be given a bowl of ice cream to play with and someone else should take care of his finances. At the news that John had four grand for us to play with we all started to give it some serious thought, and there was silence except for the muffled noise of the party inside until Alex walked up.

Alex doesn’t figure in this particular story much, but he was the fourth musketeer for much of the summer and played a part in a multitude of other odd happenings. In fact Alex was an odd happening all by himself. Some people bring the party with them wherever they go, but Alex usually brought a circus. He was intelligent in his own way, but most of it had to do with books and movies, if you sent him out to get a bag of weed he invariably came back with half an ounce of stems and seeds if he didn’t get ripped off entirely. The important thing about Alex for the purpose of our little story is that he had a car. A perfectly workable four door sedan, capable of making it all the way to the Mole Lake Bluegrass Festival, and hopefully back to Ann Arbor as well with our horde of psychedelics stashed safely in the trunk. It was gray, fairly new but not too nice, as innocuous as a car can get, perfect for our little adventure. Trust me if your going to drive nine hundred miles with enough drugs to send half the red army to wonderland you don’t want to do it in a bright red corvette, and you seriously don’t want to do it in a Volkswagen bus. Those damn busses are stopped and searched by the highway patrol every two hundred miles I swear to god, and every three hundred miles they break down by the side of the highway and you have to get the tow truck dude high so he’ll keep his mouth shut about what you have in the back. No for a trip like that you want an inconspicuous little car that looks like a responsible family man could be driving it. We invited Alex right away to join us on our little trip if we decided to go through with it, but he had to decline.

“Gotta go to my cousins wedding that week, but you guys can use my car if you want,” he replied with his head cocked to the side just a bit, a dead giveaway that he was wasted. It immediately occurred to me that Alex had been eating stupid cakes with coconut moron frosting if he was really giving the three of us his car for a road trip, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Really?” came the reply from Jaimie, clearly thinking the same thing I was, but Nathan handled everything perfectly.

“Thanks man that’s really cool, we’ll bring back something fun for ya.” That was brilliant. There was nothing Alex liked more than interesting drugs, if you could find a weird vine from the Amazon rainforest that made everything look like a pencil drawing when you smoked it Alex would happily trade you his sister for a couple doses. The sad part was that he would do the stuff, get high as a kite with a big goofy grin on his face and do a bunch of absolutely ridiculous shit that no sober person would ever dream of, and tell you the whole time that he wasn’t really impressed with the stuff. “I can kind of feel something, but not much.” He would say, while wearing socks on his hands, playing with sparklers in the closet and giggling like a retarded kid at the county fair. Did I mention he was odd?

Anyway, even when he sobered up the next day, the promise to bring back a special present outweighed his obvious second thoughts about loaning his car to three nutcases with a bunch of cash and a crazy scheme. He even gave me five hundred bucks to get him something big while we were there in addition to his present. Did I also mention that he was an idiot?

In the three weeks before we left I managed to scrounge up twenty five hundred bucks, and Nathan had almost four thousand in his college fund to play with, leaving us nearly eleven thousand after Jamie got four grand out of John. Cash. Three kids, none of us yet eighteen, driving nine hundred miles in a borrowed car with eleven thousand dollars in cash, to a place none of us had ever been, where we didn’t know a single person, intent on buying massive quantities of hallucinogens. Now that’s how you start out a road trip.

We left at noon on a Wednesday, planning to stop in my hometown in northern Michigan and stay at my parents’ house, arriving at the festival in Wisconsin on Thursday night. The drive was great fun, with spirits high and expectations even higher, and somehow the idiocy of what we were doing never occurred to us even for a moment. With eleven thousand dollars it’s hard not to start spending money and we bought a little something at every stop on the way, from three pairs of junk sunglasses to a 30 pound candle shaped like a seashell, we bought anything that looked interesting. After food and gas we were well below eleven thousand by the time we got to Mole Lake, but we had full stomachs, our eyes were well protected from the sun, and if there happened to be a competition for the largest candle shaped like a seashell any time during the festival we were virtually guaranteed the blue ribbon.

Crandon Wisconsin, population 1969, was the nearest city to Mole Lake and we pulled into Crandon in the early afternoon, impressed with the number of loud motorcycles roaring up and down the streets and hippie busses broken down along the side of the road. I told you those damn VW busses are the worst vehicles ever made, the tow truck guys in Crandon must have been high for a week after the festival was over. Poor Crandon was clearly overwhelmed, with both (yep, two of them total!) members of their police force simply standing on the corner watching the freaks move through town and hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with any of them. We stopped for gas and some supplies and quickly headed out, following a pack of Harleys fifty or sixty strong for most of the 6 miles to the lake. As we looked for a place to park amidst the pine trees and campfires I was in awe of the whole set up. Thousands of people, virtually no local police force, and a huge campground that was all private land, so the police couldn’t even show up unless they had a damn good reason. It was clear from seeing them in town they had no interest in finding one, they just wanted to survive the week and get things back to normal.

We found the first spot available and parked the car, hoping to walk around and get the layout of the area before darkness fell. Unfortunately the first spot available was next to a large fire fueled by a number of kitchen chairs and some two by fours making us a little nervous about the welfare of the car. Then we heard a rumble from behind us and the madness began.

“Holy shit,” Jaimie exclaimed, his mouth hanging part way open, “check that guy out.” I followed his line of sight over to the fire at my left and saw that the rumble was a six-wheeled amphibious vehicle, which had pulled up on top of the fire and was sitting there with a crazed looking man covered in tattoos sitting on top of it giving it gas.

“Wow.” Was all I could think to say, and started the car back up.

“Um, guys?” Nathan said, “isn’t gas explosive?” He sounded a little nervous; in fact I’d never heard the golden boy sounding meek before that, but his wit stayed with him at least. “I mean I haven’t even started college yet, but I swear that I heard once that gas is explosive, and I tend to remember stuff like that pretty well.”

“He must know what he’s doing,” Jaimie interjected, but I was having none of it and was already backing the car out to go find another space.

“Does he LOOK like he knows what he’s doing?!?!” I replied. The nut case on the six wheeler sneered at us in an odd way, his eyes getting big and his mouth curling to one side and revved the engine. Something in that sneer made me think he might play the banjo sometimes, and that maybe he thought my long hair was pretty. Unnerving to say the least. As we drove off he popped the clutch and the tires spat burning pieces of chair all over on the road behind him as he rode down the other side of the fire. I told you shit was going to get strange. Didn’t I?

We found another parking spot under a huge pine tree, and stalked off to explore our surroundings. Of course we only made it about a hundred yards before we had a problem. I noticed an awful lot of people staring at Nathan for some reason. I

“Dude I think you’re gonna need to change your shirt, pink isn’t in style this year at the prestigious Mole Lake Fashion Show.”

“It’s Salmon.”

“I don’t care if you’re gay, and I’m glad you have an excellent grasp of color coordination and the subtle differences between various gay color schemes, but if you keep wearing that pink shirt these bikers are gonna buttfuck you, tie a piece of clothesline around your neck and drag you around behind that six wheeled thing.” My comments were meant to be funny, but as they rang in our ears we all three looked around and feared there might be some truth to them. It’s amazing how quickly the very real possibility of being violated by a gang of redneck bikers takes the smirk off your face.

“I’m not gay and it’s FUCKING SALMON!” he said, as he turned back to the car to get a new shirt.

Most of the area around the lake appeared to replanted pine forest, fairly straight rows of huge pine trees and a thick bed of needles crunching under our feet. There were little groups of vehicles and campfires everywhere, but no sign of where the real festival might be, if indeed there was such a thing. The roar of engines was somewhere off in the distance, but it was hard to pinpoint a direction with the sound bouncing off all the trees. After being pointed in three different directions, and getting a number of odd stares from grizzled old bikers we found what we were looking for. Jaime was impressed.

“It’s like a fucking redneck circus.”

“Yeah,” was the best reply I could come up with, but my inner smart ass recovered from the surprise after a second or two. “I don’t even want to know what they have instead of a kissing booth.”

“Incest is a terrible thing.” Jamie muttered, smirking

We were on a hill looking down at what did honestly appear to be some sort of redneck circus, Jaime’s first impression striking me as powerfully accurate. There were rickety booths set up along one side and a large stage on the other, accented perfectly by the motorcycles tearing up and down the midway between them. The only sign we could read was simply “Vodka-Aid” in large letters on the front of one of the booths.

“I get the strange feeling none of those bikes are Hondas,” Nathan said. I know this is starting to sound unreal. In fact looking back on it I can hardly believe it myself, but it happened. We weren’t even dosed yet. Stone sober, I swear it. And it wasn’t over.

Jaime led the way, and fearless as usual he stomped down the hill toward the midway. Nathan’s suspicions were proven correct as every bike that roared by was American made, most of them Harley’s, the distinctive engine sound ripping the air around us. We headed right for the Vodka-Aid stand, and even though it was clear to anyone paying attention that we were not old enough to drink, we were promptly charged nine dollars for three glasses of, well you can guess. Vodka-Aid. Cheap vodka, red kool aid, and a few chucks of ice, in a red plastic cup. We weaved our way through the motorcycles like a badass game of Frogger, a few of them buzzing by us, but not close enough to be truly intimidating., and worked our way toward the stage.

“Doesn’t sound much like bluegrass to me.” Jamie said, his keen sense of the obvious waking my inner smart ass from its stupor.

“The ‘Mole Lake Bike Week and Drug Dealer Convention’ would probably attract too much attention from the authorities.” Where the original Three Musketeers had swords we had sarcasm, taking shots at each other constantly was how we bonded.

“Let’s get some more of this tasty beverage and head back to the car.” Jamie said.

“We gonna set up the tent before we get too drunk?” I asked. The golden boy looked surprised at the question, and reminded me right away how stupid it was.

“I don’t think we’re gonna be sleeping tonight dude, unless the acid you brought sucks as bad as the last batch.”

“No, it’s pretty good actually.” Jamie said, coming to my defense.

We found a few people who didn’t appear to be insane on the way back and I gathered information as best I could. Apparently magic mushrooms were all the rage this year, and a guy with a cooler was walking around to all the campsites selling them to anyone and everyone. And they were cheap. Once we got back to the car, and took a couple tabs of acid each, I was off on my own looking for “the shroom guy”. I found him after about an hour of wandering around, getting higher and higher from the acid. It’s always good to make the world look like a badly drawn cartoon before doing business transactions involving big quantities of cash and scary bikers, just a good general rule. If you’re an idiot. By an astounding streak of luck things went off without a hitch, and I exchanged $9500.00 for thirteen pounds of potent psilocybin mushrooms. I bounced happily back to the car with a garbage bag nearly half full, and even sold an ounce to some hippy kids on the way back for a hundred and ten bucks, our first return on our investment.

Both my partners were pleased with my purchase, but of course they had to be tested. Forget that there was no chance they were bad, that all three of us could identify psilocybin mushrooms on sight, and that we had already taken a hearty dose of LSD, we wanted to try them out. After choking down a few foul tasting freeze dried mushrooms and locking the rest of them in the trunk, we were off to explore the area.

I have to admit things get a little blurry for a while here in my memory, those shrooms were awful good, and the vodka-aid stand was open all night. We all agreed in the morning that we had met a professional arsonist at some point in the night and that truth was reinforced by the business card in my shirt pocket. Printed on it were simply a name, a phone number, and the word firestarter. I also recall being given a few Demerol pills by a mostly naked hippy girl, which may account for some of the memory loss, but at the time in my life (and most times since) I don’t turn down a Demerol or a mostly naked hippy girl so there was really no way around it.

We woke up to a chainsaw about fifty feet from the car, certain that one of the crazy rednecks was coming to chop us into bits and mix us in with the hog feed. The chainsaw was in fact fifty feet away at least, but with a hangover and some remaining hallucinogens in our system, our abnormal surroundings got the best of us. Nathan was sleeping in the passenger’s seat, and he was round eyed and scowling at the same time when I looked over at him, the harsh buzz of the chainsaw almost drowning out my words.

“Get us out of here before they kill us!”

“I’m on it, shut the hell up for a second.” I replied as I started the car.

It may seem odd to someone who has never met him, but Jamie just laughed like a maniac. I considered myself an adventurer before I met Jamie but he was the very definition of the word, a punk rock Indiana Jones, laughing at the situation out of shear joy. Sure he was nervous, but nothing could outweigh the strangeness of the situation in his mind, and that was all that really mattered, a unique experience. We bounced along the two-rut road for a few minutes before hitting the main highway into town, and by the time we got to town Nathan and I were both smiling as well.

“Those shrooms are really good or I’m an idiot, cause that shit seems really funny and it probably shouldn’t,” I said, as we hit the main road. I realized as I said it that I was setting myself up, this was the wrong crowd to leave myself that wide open.

“I’ll go with a little from Column A and a little from Column B,” Nathan replied, and was immediately backed up by Jamie from the back seat.

“Yeah I’d split it right about in half as to where to lay the blame in this case,” he chimed in. “You’re definitely an idiot, but these shrooms are also fantastic. When you think about it, it’s amazing that you haven’t run us into a tree or something, you drive like shit even when you’re sober.”

We stopped in town to get some food and while backing out of the gas station I managed to back into the passenger door of a car that had pulled in behind ours. This little misstep didn’t do much to quiet my critics, and I quietly endured a never-ending stream of snide comments about my driving for the rest of the trip. Of course the woman in the car I backed into wanted the police to come and take a report for her insurance company. Our first chance to talk to a police officer and we weren’t even ten miles from where we bought the shrooms yet, not a good omen. I think we were too high to panic actually. In order to be truly nervous about something you have to believe it is real and we were having trouble believing anything was real at that moment, so we calmly filled out the accident report with the nice police officer, and went on our way. The only way he didn’t know that we were higher than a giraffe’s ass was that he was a small town cop. Any cop that had been around hallucinogens before would’ve gotten himself a hell of a bust that day simply by recognizing our condition and searching the vehicle. One would imagine that thirteen pounds of Psilocybin mushrooms would be a pretty big story in a little town like Crandon. Instead we were soon on our way, discussing what we should tell Alex about the car when we got home.

The next part of our plan was to drive back through good old Escanaba and unload as many shrooms as possible in small quantities at a high markup. Buy low, sell high, The American Way. I knew that everyone in the drug culture in that town knew one another, and as soon as we sold a bunch of our product to someone they would be off selling it to everyone else. We could move more product if we played on the natural tendency of drug dealers to keep a source for themselves, so we set up to meet everyone in different places all within an hour. I was right about all the small time dealers not wanting anyone else to know their source, no one had talked about us coming into town, so they each thought they would be the primary source for all their friends. I could picture every dealer in the county getting together every available dollar waiting for us to call him on Sunday night, thinking of the jackpot they would score when they had their few ounces of shrooms to sell. We went from place to place, weighing out ounces on a triple beam scale with the name of some middle school embossed on it. The irony was never lost on me when I used that scale. I even thought maybe when I was done dealing I’d have to find that school, tell them how useful their scale had been, and return it to them.

Nathan kept track of the sales in a little notebook we found in the glove compartment that Alex had previously used to record his gas mileage and time between oil changes. It had a more important purpose now; we could replace his notebook once we had made our fortune. Every dealer in the county spent nearly every dollar they had on our mushrooms that day, all under the assumption, I am certain, that they would unload most of them to other dealers and their customers. We never told anyone they were the only person we were selling to, there was no active deceit involved, but we didn’t discourage anyone from believing it either. In little over three hours we sold more than three pounds of the shrooms, split up amongst 27 different customers, netting us right around seven thousand dollars. After some quick calculations I informed my business associates (though I referred to them on this occasion as goldilocks and the backseat bitch) that we had now broken nearly even and still had almost ten pounds of shrooms left to sell.

After meeting up with all the dealers we saw a girl named Kelly that I knew from high school in the car next to us and stopped to chat. She’d never been anything special in high school, but now… Wow. The six months since I’d last seen her had been kind to her, and she had friends in the car. Two of them. Just like I had two friends in my car. It didn’t take the three of us any longer to do the math than it apparently took the three of them. We stopped and chatted for a few and then agreed to meet up somewhere, and somehow (like I said a few of these memories are a little hazy, and strangely colored as well…) two of them hopped in our car, Nathan took over driving and I moved over to Kelly’s car. We stopped for gas at some point, and with nearly eight grand on me I figured I’d pay for their gas for them, maybe convince them that I was always this loaded. Apparently Nathan didn’t realize that I was playing big spender with our money and assumed I was paying for the gas in our car. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

We failed miserably with the girls of course, they were headed to a party where we figured a bunch of people we sold shrooms to would be gathered, all realizing that everyone else had the same shrooms for sale, and maybe a few people would be a little displeased with this development. Anyone who wasn’t angry with us would be tripping harder than the Beatles; according to my quick calculations we had just saturated the town with enough mushrooms to make the entire population into a bunch of giggling fools with pupils the size of Lake Michigan. We voted unanimously to skip the party and head home before half the town caught fire as a consequence of hundreds of people being high on mushrooms all at once. Seemed like that would be a bad scene. I jokingly prayed for the safety of my family as we got on the highway headed back to Ann Arbor, the imaginary flames on the rooftops of the city flickering brightly behind us.

Before we even made it onto the highway my heart was in my throat. “Oh Shit,” Jamie exclaimed though more calmly than I would’ve expected. Spinning red and blue lights would’ve been beautiful in any other situation with all the hallucinogens in our system, but seeing them nearly made me sick. We were all stunned speechless until the officer walked up to my window, and I slid back into unreal mode. Another small town cop who had no idea how tenuous our grasp on reality was or how big a bust he was about to miss out on. Once he informed us that the gas station had called him reporting that we had not paid for our gas, we knew what had happened and filled him in. Our story was not only true, but also understandable (we were distracted by the girls as any seventeen year old boy would be), and our apology was sincere. We couldn’t possibly have been more sorry about anything we had ever done. I was certain I was going to prison when he walked up to the window, but less than a minute later we were following him to the gas station to pay for our gas. From the gas station, we drove exactly the speed limit back to the highway, and at some point soon after we left the city limits, I began to breathe again.

The car was fairly quiet for a few minutes until Jamie piped up from the back. “Would they have taken the car and all it’s contents as evidence?” He asked.

“Oh yeah,” I replied, “You two would’ve been walking home.”

“I knew that,” he said, “Just wanted to make sure they would take everything in the car too, so we didn’t have to take turns carrying that god damned seashell candle you bought”.

Epilogue

Nathan went off to school in Florida at the end of the summer, never to be seen again. He rode all the way from Michigan on a motorcycle he bought with his cut of the shrooms money. I would imagine he is quite well off by now and working an excellent job somewhere. No one has heard from him in years, which is not surprising. He’s a great guy, but he was never really one of us, and I think that summer was just his last hurrah before getting serious about college and a good job.

Jamie ended up with a degree in music from th University of Michigan, plays in a band, and does a radio show for the local college station on Thursday nights. He traded most of his share of the shrooms to some hippies on a bus for some “liquid LSD” that turned out to be old food-coloring bottles full of water. Upon discovering the actual contents of the bottles he became powerfully dissatisfied with the transaction but the hippies were long gone. I see him every few years and he hasn’t changed a bit.

I haven’t sold any drugs in almost 10 years. I play poker professionally now, and am pleased that no one knocks on my window at three a.m. anymore, wanting to get a bag of pot on credit until next Friday.

The Mole Lake Bluegrass festival was shut down a year later after a number of dead bodies were found hanging from the trees in the woods at the end of the weekend. To this date there have been no discussions about starting it up again. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it existed the first time.

I parted ways with the 30 pound conch shaped candle a number of years ago, though I believe it now lives in somewhere in southern Indiana with a girl who is huge Guns and Roses fan and has a fantastic body. I wish I could remember that girls’ name.