Missed Armageddon, Pt. 2- The Knowing

My name's Raleigh Epps, and sometimes I see things. 


I wasn't around when Charles Manson was in the headlines. Jimi Hendrix died before I was born. So how do I know Manson was the Antichrist, Hendrix was in line to be the second coming and they both got so high that they threw Armageddon off kilter? Drugs. Duh.


Do you know what Ayawaska is? Look it up. It's a drink, kind of like a tea, that contains a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of DMT. DMT is dimethyltryptamine, the chemical which humans, and other things, produce a surge of at their moment of death. A mild hallucinogen, it's probably what makes people think they see heaven when they have near-death experiences. Because Ayawaska and dying produce the same effects, its name literally means "spirit vine".


When I left (fled) Louisiana, I spent some time in Peru, where I met an Australian expat named Paul. Paul learned how to make the drink from a bunch of the natives and, when he found out my proclivity for mescaline, he gave me a bottle for my birthday.


I didn't touch the stuff for months. It scared me. Don't get me wrong. I love drugs, hallucinogenics in particular, but I read Carlos Castaneda. Even before all my experiences in New Orleans I realized drugs had a heavy spiritual component that I could only scratch the surface of, and which could fuck you up of provoked.


One day, not quite by accident, I found my Ayawaska guru. Jorge Cápac told me he was one hundred and six. While he looked every day of it, I didn't believe he was a any age over seventy. He let me call him George instead of Hor-Hay, though, so I never called him on his bullshit. 


I met him at an Arepas stand trying to con the vendor out of a silver dollar-sized sandwich. Three hours later, we were in my shitty little white apartment with the bottle and two bowl-sized teacups. 


I remember, at first, the only difference was clarity. I could see all the cracks in my walls as if they'd gone into high-def. A minute later, my consciousness fixated on places where the cracks ran into the baseboard and I knew, for a fact, that those were where all the damn insects came from. Colors came after that, a symphony of them, streaming off anything that moved. Waving my hand in front of my face created a cascading rainbow; startling and trance-inducing.The colors took me for a while, absorbing my attention the way psilocybin mushrooms do when you don't take many. 

And then the ghosts came.

That's not true. It was just one ghost, but he did come and he took me on a very Christmas Carroll-esque trip into a hypothetical 1970s. The Ghost of Armageddon Past? The Ghost of Armageddon S'posed-to-be? I don't know, but I came away from the experience with Ebeneezer Scrooge's absolute certainty that what I saw was a solid possibility- one of history's great near-misses.

The kind we're all thankful for but don't know it.