Let's Go Mad

by Rob Binkley

  “Just kill me now,” I said. “I can’t take another bad squid experience.”

  After dinner, we ventured out into the dimly lit streets of Varanasi. Vendors were everywhere selling silk, pot, jewelry, soft drinks, and anything else you could possibly want. Brian exchanged some US dollars into rupees at a silk vendor stand. We watched the silk vendor try to sell his wares to a lady tourist by burning the edges of a scarf to prove it was real. “Real silk. For the lady, two hundred rupees,” but the lady tourist was not interested. After a long day of travel, we were too tired to buy anything so we turned in early.

  We awoke the next morning refreshed and ready to unlock the mysteries of India. Brian started the day brimming with excitement. “Jerry Garcia’s ashes were spread here, man. Let’s go smoke some grass and get in a drum session by the river!” Brian whipped out his small drum he bought in Australia and started playing it terribly.

  The first thing we did was what everyone does when they get to Varanasi—we walked up and down the many ghats (or steps) that led down to the sacred Ganges River.

  I read aloud from the Book while we walked the ghats. “The Book says Varanasi was founded in the twelfth century BC and is a most auspicious place to die. Everyone from India makes pilgrimages here because, according to Hindu scripture, this is where one should die for a beneficial rebirth.”

  “Will you put the Book down already? Let’s get crazy.” Brian said he was ready to take a dip in the holy water, but I wasn’t sure if “the germophobe” knew what he’d be getting into, hygienically.

  He’d already seen the sea of feces running through every street, but was he ready for all the dead bodies? I’d read about how seriously the Hindus take this sacred river but it was bizarre—even to me who was prepared for it—to see them shitting and pissing all over the place.

  After getting a good look around, Brian finally said, “Soo, they’re bathing, defecating, and peeing in same river of holiness that others are washing their clothes in?” He frowned. “I’ll hold off on the swim.”

  “That’s not the worst part …” I said, pointing to a dead cow floating by, followed by a succession of half-charred human bodies. He stared at the floaters going by. I could see the bliss leave Brian’s face. “There are corpses … on parade.”

  He sighed and put down his drum. “There will be no drumming today, but if we die here, which is a distinct possibility, I hope to Shiva we aren’t reincarnated as a pile of rancid cow dung.”

  Our first day on the Ganges, we witnessed death ceremonies going on everywhere. Up and down the West Bank, Indians worshipped and bathed all day and night on the steps.

  “Everyone here seems to be waiting to die,” Brian observed as we sat on one of the ghats and watched more bodies being carried out in colorful robes for burning.

  We watched them build the funeral pyres and I found out why some are larger than others: the higher the woodpile, the wealthier the man. A larger woodpile makes a stronger fire, which means the rich man’s body would probably be burned into ash. As for the poor man with the small woodpile? His body may not even get all that warm … Nevertheless, they all end up in the same place: thrown into the Ganges.

  While the death rituals played out around us, packs of stray dogs would run up and tear at the flesh of the bodies while they were being barbequed. Goats and cows were surrounding the area, crapping everywhere. Brian was exasperated by it all.

  “I guess if we have to go we should just pinch a loaf in the river?”

  I said, “Just pop a squat downstream from the kids, okay?”

  Brian whipped out some hash he found stashed in his pack. “Lookie here what I found—hallelujah!” We needed to get stoned to tolerate the death show, so we did.

  Now mildly sedated, we sat back and watched some destitute man who was chipping in and helping throw the dead bodies in the river after they’d been charred on the spit. Another guy was in charge of keeping the dogs that were scavenging flesh away from the corpses.

  We lost our reasoning ability in a marijuana fog. I said, “This is a perfect picture of total chaos.”

  Brian added, “With bonfires roasting people as the centerpiece … Someone should really tip those guys.” Brian pointed to the guy who was shooing away the scavenging dogs. “I’m going to give him some chocolate.”

  I would find out later that Brian had been handing out these little squares of hash chocolate to everyone who was “nice” to him.

  We kept wandering around the riverbank and eventually met two gals from London who offered to take us out for some bhang lassis. We didn’t know what a bhang lassi was, and they weren’t telling. Brian said, “I wanna bang, I’m in.”

  They said, “It’s a mystery date then! We’ll go for bhang lassis and dinner at the Shanti Lodge!” They said it was their favorite rooftop restaurant in town because it overlooked the burning ghats. The English girls were a lot of fun and a welcome distraction from all the death going on. They told us how they’d been traveling around India for a month and loved India’s spiritual side.

  Brian told them we had just bought a “chillum,” which was a trippy looking pipe to smoke our hash in. So we broke it out and the four of us got stoned in the street. No one cared.

  We walked around and could tell the girls were more desensitized to the madness of our surroundings than we were. The filthy streets, rampaging cows, and procession of corpses didn’t seem to bother them anymore. What did still bother them, they said, was the poverty, which was (and still is) outrageously bad in all of India.

  “Children are walking around with gangrene on their limbs or stumps, poor wretches,” the blonde girl said.

  “The sad part is,” I said, “most of these people could probably be cured with a simple dose of Western medicine.”

  “If only they could afford it,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, lads, you’ll get used to the squalor,” said the other girl, who was so high she laughed at our serious conversation and coughed a puff of residual smoke out that must have been trapped in there for God knows how long.

  I said, “Is that residual hash smoke, or the remnants of some Indian corpse you just breathed in?”

  She smiled. “Both. How did you guys smuggle that hash in from Cambodia?”

  Brian took another hit. “We haven’t been checked by customs in months,” then he blew smoke all over us.

  We roamed around looking for the Shanti Lodge in a “jolly good haze,” as one of the girls put it. We stumbled onto a government-run drugstore where they sold all kinds of crazy pharmaceuticals, and ran into one of our backpacker friends, Andy, who offered to buy some opium for us.

  “This will take it up a notch for you Yanks,” he said as he handed us the narcotic.

  “Why don’t they have these government stores in America??” Brian gave Andy some cash. “You really can buy anything here.” Brian stuffed the opium in his pocket and looked at his pipe. “A chillum won’t work with this; we need to buy an opium pipe.” He explained that opium pipes were long and thin and very different from chillum pipes.

  “Dude, you’ve never smoked opium,” I laughed.

  Brian said, “I saw it on TV.”

  We never did buy an opium pipe. We were too high to take it up any other notches.

  We didn’t need more drugs; what we needed was food. We finally found it at the restaurant the girls were looking for. “There it is,” one of the girls said as she pointed to the Shanti Lodge roof. “Let’s go get high as the sky.”

  “I love these girls!” Brian shouted. He put his arm around the really stoned crazy one like he might be ready to move on from Carrie, which I fully approved of.

  We climbed what felt like ten stories to the roof of the Shanti Lodge. We sat down and took in the view of the Ganges. Then we ordered a table full of food and four bhang lassis, which they promptly brought out first.

  “Indian milkshakes?” I asked, the girls just smiled. “It’s their specialty. Just drink.” and so we di
d. Brian loved not knowing what was in it “See you guys in nirvana!”

  It took ten minutes before we realized how extraordinary these beverages were; they were super-potent marijuana milkshakes the likes of which we had never seen. We downed the first one fast—too fast—while enjoying our conversation with the gals who were talking a mile a minute, giving us tips on how to backpack “properly” through India. After a while, I didn’t hear a word they said.

  At some point, the girls decided to order another. I looked at Brian, who was clearly in bad shape. “This restaurant’s revolving too fast around the sun.” He was giggling like a stoned schoolboy.

  I laughed. “Dude, what are you talking about, it’s night time!”

  Brian was smart enough not to order another one, but being the brazen man I am, I yelled, “Another round!” There was no way I was going to let these two little English girls out-bang me…. This was a huge mistake.

  I finished my second “bhanger” (as we now called them) and was able to hold a conversation for a while. Then I lost all sense of reality. I started laughing uncontrollably at the girls, who were regaling us with some absurd tale about a “crazy man driving a bus” who was trying to kill them.

  I was laughing so hard and spinning so badly I had to look away. When I turned my head, the trip got worse. I saw everyone on the balcony staring at us, or I thought they were.

  I saw one of the girls lean over to Brian and say, “Has he gone bloody bonkers?” Then I heard someone say (in slow motion), “I’m wondering if there really is an emergency room in this towwwwn.”

  I stopped laughing and the table fell silent. I started seeing double then I left my body. I looked at Brian as I floated into space. I was hovering over the table. His eyes were tiny red slits. “Dude, grab my leg,” I whispered, “I’m too light.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d actually spoken that out loud until Brian replied, “Too light? You’re huuuuge!” Brian was no use. I gazed down on my body sitting at the table, frozen in time. I couldn’t believe what was happening.

  I flew away, high above the rooftop restaurant and felt the warm, night air blowing my shirt. Everyone on the roof was staring at my body while my soul kept floating up into the cosmos. I tried to concentrate on getting back into my body but I couldn’t.

  Then, terror struck. Would I ever come back to earth? Am I going to keep floating up to heaven? Or hell? I could hear myself say, “Is this howwww Jerry Garcia went ouuuuut?”

  After what felt like hours of having this crazy out of body experience, my three confused dinner companions decided to get the check. When it came, they pushed the bill toward me (or my body) and told me to split up the rupees we all owed.

  This must have been a sick joke by Brian. I wasn’t even back in my body, and he knew it. I couldn’t talk much less count; I was terrified. My body just sat there and didn’t move. A few minutes passed before Brian pulled the bill back, tallied it up, and paid for me (since I wasn’t moving). They all got up and walked to the staircase and all the way down the long stairs to the dirty streets below to do some “bull dodging,” as one of the girls called it.

  I was alone at the table. I couldn’t stay in my chair a second longer but I also couldn’t walk, so I slowly got on my hands and knees and crawled through the restaurant full of people who all stopped eating to stare.

  I got to the long, steep stairway. I looked back and every eye in the restaurant was on me. I knew there would be no walking, so I crawled down the stairs to escape. I cursed Brian for leaving me to the wolves. Once I got down the stairs, I motioned to Brian that I was going to kill him. But he just turned around and stared at me. He couldn’t talk either.

  I don’t know how long it took but I finally managed to stand up and ramble through the tight alley. Every cow that got in my face was a horrific nightmare; I think the beasts could sense my madness; it felt like they were all trying to gore me so I kept bobbing and weaving.

  I tried to look past the stock show, but all I could see was shit and dead people. We kept walking for what seemed like hours, days even—jumping over goats, sidestepping speeding motorcycles, leaping over dead bodies, yelling at touts, and everything else someone on the highest caliber acid trip could imagine.

  Where was I? Where were these insane people leading me on this most troubled night?

  We ended up back at the worst place a tripping person would want to be—the burning ghats, where we watched bodies burn and dogs try to eat them for the rest of the night. This was my own personal hell. I don’t believe in God per se, but I felt like he was punishing me. I told Brian, “This is crazy … I’ve never felt this insane in my life,” but I could barely register a whisper.

  I motioned to Brian to get me back to the Yogi Lodge as soon as possible. His face was morphing into some Neanderthal. He told me, “You’re juuuust trippinnn’, maaaan.” At some point we left and Brian, the Neanderthal beast, led me back to our hotel room where I crashed into bed and held on to both sides to try and stabilize my brain. Brian yelled, “I can’t believe they serve those bhangers to children!”

  “Everything is moving!” I cried.

  Brian, who was holding onto his bed too, said, “Hold on for dear life! If we let go we’ll be sucked into hell!”

  When the roller coaster ride briefly subsided, I felt an immense pain in my bladder. I must have guzzled four bottles of water to wash down the bhang lassis. I had to pee like a racehorse, but I couldn’t walk. Somehow I managed to crawl to the shared bathroom in the hall and pee for about twenty minutes.

  Good times? I’m not so sure.

  I woke the next day around six o’clock in the evening and staggered down to the hostel communal room where I ran into the two English girls, which was slightly awkward because I had no idea what the hell I said to them the night before. Clearly I had been an idiot because they were just staring at me. I meandered over and said, “Oh … hi.”

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” They said they were extremely concerned for my safety and were “upset” about how I behaved the night before. I played it cool. “Girls, that wasn’t me, that was my stoned twin brother, who is now seeking treatment at a nearby facility.” They laughed nervously. After a while they realized I was fairly normal when I wasn’t having an out of body experience.

  That night, the girls used their feminine wiles to tempt Brian and me into round two of utter madness. We went to the Shanti Lodge again to have more bhangers. We were gluttons for punishment and obviously deranged since we agreed to repeat last night’s atrocity.

  The possibility of a little coitus will make a man do some crazy things in life.

  At least I was much smarter about my bhanger intake this time and only had three-fourths of one, which only resulted in constant fits of laughter. Every time I turned away laughing, Brian checked in on me. “You okay??” I laughed. “I’m thinking about my mom dying horribly! It’s the only thought that can make me stop laughing!”

  After dinner, we foolishly stumbled back down to the burning ghats next door, where they had five people simultaneously roasting on the same fire. “I only had one bhanger and I’m still tripping, hard,” I told Brian, who was way higher than I was for some reason.

  “I shouldn’t have smoked that hash after dinner,” he said as we stretched out to watch the show, again.

  Watching five people burn as a menagerie of cows, goats, and dogs walked past us was horrifying. Brian said, “The Fourth of July in hell must be just like this.” He sat up and pointed, “Look, dudes are drying their wet clothes over the bonfires. That guy just lit his smoke off a burning corpse. Satan is orchestrating all this. I don’t want to die Rob, I’m not ready, I’m Catholic!”

  I shushed him, “Calm down, you’re freaking out the … girls….” We looked around. We were alone. The English girls had skedaddled due to our insane highness long ago.

  “Where did the girls go?” I asked Brian. He just looked at me.

  “What girls?”

  “Were
there ever girls?” I asked.

  “What are girls?” he asked.

  “I need to rest, man,” I said. “Someone sane tell me where the hell we are?!” The fear was coming back.

  “I think we’re part of a video game that God and the Devil are playing,” Brian said. “And the Devil’s winning.”

  Brian’s surreal answers were not helping so I tried to take charge: “We need fresh air. C’mon, get up!” I tried to stand Brian up, but I immediately fell over on a dog that appeared to be gnawing on a charred hand.

  Brian was dying. “I need water … help me, God.”

  I screamed, “Stop talking about God, you’re freaking me out! I need to go home.”

  “Now you want to go home!?” Brian yelled, laughing uncontrollably again.

  “Reality’s hard to avoid when death’s shitting all over you,” I said, which was probably the most salient thought I’d had since I entered this maniacal country. “Just take me to the hotel.”

  We got to our feet and tried walking, but we were so high we couldn’t make it down the dark stairs without crawling. “This must be how the cows feel,” I moaned.

  Brian tried to carry me to the only light source in the darkness, which was, of course, more burning funeral pyres. “Crawl toward the light!” Brian shouted, then fell over in a spinning heap of madness. “Whatever you do, don’t drink the water….”

  And that’s all I remember. I have no idea how we got back to our room. A pack of wild dogs could have dragged us back.

  The next morning, Brian and I woke with the worst weed hangovers of our lives, smelling like roasted dead Indian corpses.

  “I feel terrible…. Who the hell is sleeping in my bed?” I held up a Barbie doll that was inexplicably under my sheets. “My first lover in ages.”

  Brian didn’t open his eyes. “We found her in a gutter on the way home. You said you wanted to marry her. You were out of your mind last night.”