Poppers, Peyote, and a Broken Windowpane

My mischievous older brother

Encephalitis had destroyed my brother’s short-term memory years earlier, but we had fallen out of touch, and I didn’t know about it until the summer of 2017. He was like Guy Pearce in Memento, and could remember very little of his life after the late 1960’s.

The most painful part was the way he behaved when I visited him. Instead of the dominating and condescending older brother I had remembered, he seemed beaten. And elated to see me. He’d hug me when I arrived, ask me to sit next to him at the dinner table, complement me, reminisce about our lives in Iowa when we were little, and hold me close again before I left. It was all I could do to keep from falling apart in his presence.

I wanted the brother I’d always known back, but the closest I could come was to write about him. I wrote this piece, looking back on our times together through a softer lens, as I grieved for his loss and our wasted opportunities.

1972. My brother Skip, two-and-half years older than I, used to find it entertaining to lead me astray. When we were growing up, it seemed to me that unless we were fighting (I always lost), he was having fun getting me into trouble with him. It might have been that I followed him into all sorts of mischief just to be accepted by him, but it might also have been to escape boredom. Our family moved seven times when we were growing up. After each move, we only had each other until we managed to make new friends. The thing is, I was fat through fourth grade and didn’t manage to make many friends.

As I remember, the mischief first began with him waking me up early one morning when I was not quite three to play barber. While our parents slept, he, then five-and-a half, put me in the highchair, draped a tea towel over my shoulders and cut off all my curls. A few months later, he woke me to play fireman with matches, started a fire on the kitchen floor that got out of control, and sent me to go wake up Mommy and Daddy.

Then there was the time when I was six that I let him con me into saying that it was I, not he, who had gotten into Daddy’s tools. “Look,” he said. “Daddy says we can’t go on the picnic this afternoon until one of us confesses. We both know I did it, but I’m not going to confess. So, if you want to go on the picnic, you’ll have to say you did it.”

I was ten when he showed me how much fun it was to play on the floor with mercury from a thermometer (that he had just broken). When it was time to dispose of the evidence before our parents returned, we carefully herded all the little balls we could find onto a piece of paper, watched them coalesce for the umpteenth time, and then dumped the blob in the toilet.

That was when we discovered mercury cannot be flushed. Skip finally remembered from his science class that mercury would attach to silver, so he collected it under the water in the bottom of the bowl with a dime. (That was in 1957, when dimes were still made of silver).

Then there was melting our parents’ old 33–1/3 LPs into cool-looking waves on the radiator at eleven… and him making me laugh in church by catching flies by the legs.

All this time there were, of course, the typical evening fights over whose turn it was to dry the dishes. But when I was twelve, that fight became quite fun (for the one whose turn it was to wash). We had moved to a new house — one that had added the use of a vegetable sprayer powerful enough to reach clear across the kitchen to our after-dinner warfare.

Fortunately, Skip left me out of his failed attempt to prove that a can of gasoline (not two feet from our house) will not burst into flame if a match is lit above the opening. He was extremely lucky… because screeching sirens and the arrival of a hook-and-ladder fire truck, two chemical cars, and the police never roused our father from his Saturday afternoon nap. He’d heard the commotion, of course, but assumed everything was happening somewhere down the street and didn’t bother getting up.

Except for the time I made a dress form of my figure so I could sew my own clothes more easily (he laughed and said it looked like I had mounted it upside down and backwards on the stand), we started having fun together when I was in junior high. We’d take the train to the Riverview Amusement Park or downtown Chicago with his friends and go out for milk shakes after Sunday evening church youth group, but the best times were the summers of 1963 to 1965.

Our family moved back to Virginia the summer of 1963. Skip had already been accepted at the University of Illinois, but he spent summer breaks with us in Virginia. He was engaged to Katie, his high school sweetheart, and I was planning to marry Paul, so neither of us could date. But rather than stay home on a Saturday night, we’d go to a local coffee house and listen to music or ride around town on his Cushman motor scooter, or I’d ride along as he drove dangerously fast around the curves of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

In 1965, Paul had shipped out on tour and sent me a bikini from Hawaii. Skip suggested I put clothes on over it and we go play photographer and model in the park — breaking a very specific parental prohibition — so I could send a picture of me (at seventeen) in the bikini to Paul (“Absolutely NOT!”) on his ship in Vietnam.

I didn’t see much of Skip after I left home until Paul graduated and we moved to Illinois. Skip had graduated from college and married Katie by then, so we started getting together as a foursome. It’s lucky for Cindy that we did. It wasn’t well known then that pregnant women should not drink alcohol. I always overindulged at my brother’s house but waking up with a combination hangover and morning sickness about two months into the pregnancy put an end to my drinking for over a year.

After my daughter, Cindy, was born, we resumed our partying, but by then, Skip was divorced from Katie and entangled with a younger druggie-type girlfriend.

He reached into his shirt pocket one evening, retrieved two neatly hand-rolled joints, and set them down with a great show on our living room coffee table.

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to, but I thought you might like to try it.”

I hadn’t had any particular interest in pot, but since he had been nice enough to bring it and was obviously hoping I’d try it, I didn’t want to disappoint him. Cindy was not yet two and already asleep for the night in her crib upstairs. Paul and I looked at each other with a sort of “Why not?” expression and lit one.

After that, getting stoned at my brother’s house turned into a sort of regular Saturday night thing — especially after we noticed that Cindy, approaching her terrible twos, was always amazingly well-behaved and happy there. She usually hated her playpen, pitching all her toys over the side, then reaching for them and screaming. But at Skip’s, she just sat in the middle of the playpen with her toys all around, perfectly content.

Skip, of course, was first to figure out why she was being so good. “She’s getting high from the smoke in the room!” he said, as he blew some directly into her face.

One evening when my brother and his girlfriend were at our house, Mother Nature provided an incredible rainstorm for our stoned-out entertainment. But after about an hour of o-o-oohs and a-a-a-ahs at the thunder and lightning, Skip came to.

“Uh… Edie… I think we should…uh… prob’ly… head home.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I just realized… our basement… might… be flooding.”

Oh, man. We’d dealt with that before. His township’s sanitary sewers had somehow been illegally connected to the storm sewers. He discovered that when the storm sewers overflowed in a heavy rainstorm… and a foot of raw sewage water came up through the drain on his basement floor! We had spent an entire weekend helping him bail. Even with face masks, a twenty-minute shift was all any of us could take without a break.

“Call us when you get home, so we’ll know you got there safely,” we said as they ambled out the door into the downpour.

He called the next morning. “Wow. I didn’t know we were so stoned! I shouldn’t have been driving. I was so high it felt like the street was moving under the car! I’ve never felt anything like it before. It was totally weird!”

He definitely should not have been driving there then, not because he was messed up, but because the street was! We knew because of the pictures in the paper the next day. Strong rains and forceful flooding had lifted a fifteen-foot section of North Avenue’s blacktop off the base. They must have driven over it just as it was sliding off into the ditch.

Even though he wasn’t as high as he’d thought, it did seem to me that the pot was somehow getting stronger. The next time we were together, I asked him about it.

“Well,” Skip confessed, “It’s probably been laced with something.”

“Huh?”

He poured some grass out of the baggie and spread it around on the glass top of his coffee table. “See those little dark brown oily spots?”

“Yes…”

“That’s probably ‘hash’. I got this from a friend of mine who likes to add a little.”

I was still high the next morning, and I didn’t like it. The next time we were over, he served brownies. I didn’t come down until noon the next day! It was fun to get happy for a few hours at night, but still feeling like I’d lost my brains the next morning was scary. No more hash or brownies for me.

“You want to try mescaline?” he asked a week or so later, in his most innocent voice.

“I don’t know. What is it?” I asked, already skeptical.

“It’s a hallucinogen that comes from peyote,” he said, now the educator.

When I gave him a quizzical look, he elaborated. “Peyote’s a cactus. You know, those little short fat round ones. Native Americans have used them forever to get high. But this is synthetic. Mescaline. Same thing. Just made in a lab.”

“Oh. Okay.” Pretty soon, I was lying flat on my stomach, arms and legs splayed, holding on to the floor to keep from falling through. Vertigo… nausea… a feeling of endless falling. Not fun!

“U-h-h…,” I moaned. “How long is this going to last?”

“It can last up to twelve hours,” he said. “That’s why we asked you to spend the night.”

Oh, no. That meant I’d have to take his stairs up to the guest room. Stairs would have been challenging enough in my state, but his were not normal stairs. Skip was remodeling his 1940’s home but had not yet tackled the staircase. The right front corner of the foundation had crumbled, and his house was visibly tilted. The interior staircase ran along the inside of the right exterior wall and had twisted to such a steep angle that using it was difficult even while sober. The right side of the upstairs hallway was also tilted and had a house-of-mirrors destabilizing effect on me. It was daylight before I felt ready to go up to bed.

Everyone but me seemed to have had a great time. Believing I must have missed something, I tried it again a few weeks later.

From the living room floor of my brother’s house, where we all were, as usual, we could see through a large framed opening into the sunroom, and then through to the eerie shapes of the trees outside in winter.

This time I didn’t feel like I was falling, but when I turned to look through the windows, all the trees had morphed into the same giant crickets I had been having nightmares about ever since Cindy was born. I saw them through the windows, looming menacingly above me, their huge ugly black bodies leaning toward me as if ready to jump, their spiny legs and thorny-looking pincers moving in the moonlight. I screamed.

I realize now that what I was seeing were roaches, not crickets, but that is what I called them then. It’s also interesting to know now that nightmares of roaches are common. There are varying opinions about their meaning, but I agree with the theory that they indicate severe anxiety and a sense of impending doom because that’s what I was feeling most of the time.

My brother talked me down in a soft voice, reassuring me that they were only trees.

“Now, let’s have some fun!” he said, as soon as I was calm. “Try turning them back into crickets.”

“I’m afraid to,” I said.

“It’ll be okay. You know you can turn them back into trees, if you need to, because you just did it. Scare yourself a little with the crickets. Then turn them back into trees. Try it. It’s fun.”

I turned them back and forth a few times and then grew bored.

“Now you know how to control your mind in your dreams,” he said. “You’ll never have those nightmares again.”

I didn’t believe him, but the following years proved him right. Still, that was it for me with the mescaline.

While it is true that I never had another nightmare about roaches, I did continue having nightmares of other things. They’re less frequent now, but occasionally one will be so intense that the scream only brings me to semi-wakefulness — to the point where I realize I was only dreaming but am still caught in the terror for several seconds.

“Want to try a ‘popper?’” he asked a few months later. We had made our way through to the kitchen, such as it was. He was still rehabbing the house, and we could hardly get through it with all the tools and debris. He opened the fridge and pulled out a 4″x6″ brown box. A dozen or more little glass ampoules, each encased in a thick fabric mesh, lay nestled in cotton padding. They looked like the little bottles of smelling salts they used to put in first aid kits.

“What is it?” I asked, assuming he wasn’t offering us a hit of ammonia.

“Amyl nitrate,” he said. “They give it to angina patients to dilate the arteries. Gives a great rush! It’s called a popper because of the sound the glass makes when you break it open and inhale.”

Just the name — amyl nitrate — sounded dangerous to me, like something used to make a bomb. “No thanks,” I said, but Paul thought it sounded fun.

I couldn’t talk him out of it, so I stood guard in case something bad happened to him — like a heart attack. The instant he broke the glass, blood started filling his head as if it were a water pitcher. Starting at the base of his neck, a level of deep red grew higher… up through his chin… quickly rising past his cheeks… and his forehead… until his entire head was a horrifying red.

“Please don’t do it again,” I said, near tears as Paul reached for another one… and another one.

The last time I experimented with drugs was when my brother’s girlfriend brought over a tiny piece of windowpane acid [LSD] and offered to share it with me. It was a paper-thin little square of clear hardened gel so small I didn’t see how she could split it. Using tweezers to set it on the kitchen stove, she broke it in two with a razor blade. My half was smaller than a grain of salt.

This time, it was Paul who thought my brother’s offering was a bad idea, but I didn’t believe anything that tiny could possibly have much of an impact.

When I first felt the effects, I looked to Paul for help. I had watched over him when he took the poppers, but he just said, “I told you not to do it,” and went on with whatever it was that he was doing.

For four hours there were no colors… no melting clocks… no visions… no thoughts.

My brother and I used to play a game when we were kids: Try to Not Think About Anything — You Can’t. I learned that is only true if you are not on acid. I could not form a complete thought. I could not put more than three words together to speak. I had no sense of time. The only thing I was aware of was that I was a total zombie. This, too, was anything but fun. Sleep would have been good, but I couldn’t do that, either. I just sat staring at nothing…

One thing I did continue to do quite frequently, thanks to my brother, was smoke half a joint after I put Cindy down for her afternoon nap. It felt like I’d lounged around for hours and hours when she woke, and I was renewed enough to cope with the never-ending naughtiness of a two-year-old.

Depression, anxiety, insomnia, and nightmares were becoming an increasingly serious problem. I saw a doctor who, after an interview and appraisal of my symptoms, prescribed Stelazine. YES! Finally, I felt calm.

Interestingly, it was my brother who put an end to that drug. “Stelazine?! That’s an anti-psychotic! They use it to treat schizophrenia!! Why did he prescribe that?”

I didn’t know…

***

I don’t know why I kept trying everything my brother offered. Maybe even after so many years, I was still just trying to win his approval. But now, knowing I’d finally won his love and approval only brings more tears. My brother died in his sleep last April (2021).