The Mushroom King
Resurrected From a Spring 2023 Profile Writing Class
“So what about aliens?” On a crisp Monday morning in April, Professor Taylor—a Hegel-obsessed, enigmatic, and at times controversial creature—poses this absurd question to our quasi-quantum religion class, Hippie Physics: From Counterculture to Cyberculture. A deafening silence falls over the room. After an excruciatingly long pause that seems to transcend space-time, one brave student offers a response: “What about them?”
The class erupts into laughter. Even Taylor himself slaps the table with a certain jocularity often obscured by his serious disposition. The source of this merriment and whimsy: Clark*, an ex-Marine in the Columbia School of General Studies. In addition to studying Psychology and Philosophy, he’s pretty much an expert in all things psychedelic—both in and out of the classroom. On the first day of class, he made sure to introduce himself as “a Marine who also does and studies psychedelics,” so that “the marine part doesn’t play as influential in classmates’ decisions about me.” He fears being labeled a nationalist, so he makes sure to establish his identity in vague totality when meeting new people. In a memoir piece he shared with me a few months ago, he writes, “[psychedelics] fascinate me so much that my close friends have now crowned me the ‘Mushroom King,’” a title that he “humbly and happily accepts.”
Clark is transfixing. Dreamy, even. His eyes are a piercing ultra(marine), his hair a golden blonde, and his jaw molded by a modern Michelangelo. His voice is a wonder in its own right—monotone yet somehow also soulful, possessing a sort of sublime musical resonance of unknown origin.
Clark is a man of method. He’s mature. Organized. Predictable. He always arrives to class 15 minutes early, sits by the window, and furtively takes notes on his iPad. Halfway through each class, he excuses himself to go to the restroom, always taking great pains to ensure that the door does not slam upon exit and entrance. At the end of class, he makes sure to exchange a few words with Professor Taylor before heading out. His wardrobe consists exclusively of plain fitted T-shirts—all neutral colors, of course—paired always with black or blue trousers. He also knows how to accessorize: A bulky black watch adorns his left wrist, a Minnesota Twins baseball cap sits on his head, and he finishes off his look with some nondescript, black square glasses, placed neatly atop the hat.
Clark’s a dedicated student. He would never be the first to open a discussion, but his comments are always the most memorable. His posture is pristine, and he holds it for the entire 75 minutes of class. When he raises his hand, his arm bends into a perfect 90-degree angle—a human protractor. He laughs loudly, toothily, and often. It’s an alluring laugh, hearty and twangy. He rapidly shifts from levity to seriousness. At times, his comments are somber reflections on his time in the military—like the river Styx, a melancholic current always flows in the background. But in other moments, he glows with joy and love. He is easily entertained and roars jubilantly whenever a student cracks even the slightest of jokes. He makes people feel heard and appreciated. When a fellow classmate stated, “I guess I have a pessimistic view of the world,” Clark laughed immediately, a validating chuckle that cut through the darkness of her statement and brought out its light instead. In one of our first conversations, a palpable woefulness wafted into the room quite early on. “Before psychedelics,” Clark told me, “I’d never thought about how worthless I’d viewed myself.” A pause. Me: a heartsick exhalation. He: “Yeah, kind of intense.”
Despite new studies demonstrating their usefulness in mental health treatment, most psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, and peyote, to name a few) are still considered Schedule I drugs, meaning they are thought to have no medical use and are classified as the most dangerous substances with high abuse potential. However, this view is beginning to change, and the veteran community might be the ideal group to facilitate psychedelics’ public acceptance. Nonprofit organizations like Heroic Hearts are building out programs to aid military veterans suffering from war trauma with psychedelics, but since they are presently illegal, the substances are difficult to acquire, even for legitimate medical purposes. If voters on both sides of the political spectrum can come together in support of veteran’s issues, then psychedelics can take a larger seat in the scientific and cultural discussion, and researchers will be able to conduct broader investigations into the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs. Clark hopes to one day be one of these researchers—he’s in the process of applying to Ph.D. programs so that he can ultimately realize his dream of dedicating his life to psychedelics and consciousness research.
Clark was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, a place he describes not-so-affectionately as “Smalltown, USA.” His “super religious” Christian family had strong views about substances: “Drugs were always this bad thing, with crazy people.” It was not until adulthood that Clark learned that his grandfather wasn’t as straitlaced as the rest of his family, a realization that rattled his world, at least momentarily. According to Clark, while in the Navy, his grandfather “smoked weed,” was a “hippie stoner,” and “started the first Frisbee golf course on Black’s Beach”—the renowned San Diego shore where nudists enthusiastically flock. Learning of his grandfather’s background “planted the seed” for Clark’s shifting views on drugs as the years passed on.
Clark’s childhood was tumultuous and the enduring memories are tinted traumatic. Born out of an “unexpected teen pregnancy,” his parents separated when Clark was young, and his father dedicated his life to the Navy. Clark grew up with his mother and stepdad (“It wasn’t great”). In a scene seemingly out of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Clark’s mother “decided to regularly lock [him] in the basement.” Clark said that he was never able to understand why his “siblings got to sleep upstairs with my parents” while he lay “awake, terrified and alone, in the damp, creepy basement.” No amount of “pleading” with his mother or siblings “through the crack underneath the door” would grant his freedom. Clark was “too terrified to move” in these moments. “I would just peer through the crack underneath the door pleading with my mother or siblings to let me out,” he said.
One dreadful day, Clark was again locked behind a door—this time, the door to the whole house “in the dead of a freezing Minnesota winter.” Clad in a dangerously inadequate outfit (a thin jacket, boots, and shorts), he stared at the door longingly, knowing that his siblings were squealing inside “mocking [his] misery.” His closest thing to a coat was Sadie, his Black Labrador (“She curled in my lap while tears froze to my face.”) At the age of 15, Clark moved in with his grandparents, when his mother “delivered me as damaged goods”’ to their doorstep. But the arrangement was short-lived, and due to household power struggles, his grandfather “kicked [him] to the curb” just two years later.
From there, he spent a brief stint with his aunt, but then, in his junior year of high school, he “decided to join the marines,” and thus “was on [his] own from seventeen onwards.” Since he was underage, Clark needed his parents to sign off on his choice to join the military. His birth father, though absent for most of Clark’s upbringing, thought “it’d be awesome” for his son to join the military, and eagerly signed the papers when the recruiter visited Clark’s father. His mother’s response was quite different. Clark recounts their conversation with subtle but unmistakable contempt: “When I told [my mom], she was like, ‘Wouldn’t that be too hard for you?’” He clicks his tongue. “As soon as she said that, I was like ‘Fuck you. This is what I’m gonna do.’” A breath. “Of all the motivators, that was probably it,” Clark said.
“I was pretty, excuse my French, but I was pretty fucked up when I went in,” said Clark. He explained how “Because of the household [he] was brought up in” the intensity of boot camp and the experience of “drill instructors yelling” was “not a big adjustment.” Quite the opposite: “I think that aspect was good for me.” The military gave him “purpose,” “structure,” “discipline,” “brotherhood,” and “a lot of confidence.”
During his first semester at Columbia in the fall of 2019, Clark “started to have these panic attacks,” brought on in part by the culture shock of his new hyper-academic environment. He “considered dropping out of Columbia,” but luckily had “a community of veterans who were like, ‘No, it gets easier. Just stick with it.’” Then, “right when COVID happened,” a veteran friend of his took doses of ayahuasca and psilocybin, to extremely positive results. Clark was struck by the rapid change in perspective that he noticed in his friend, and immediately became intrigued. Clark himself was “going through a difficult time” while “trying to stay afloat at school,” and his friend’s story gave him hope. “So I ended up taking mushrooms,” said Clark. His first experience was a positive one, and he was inspired to start “reading the publications out of Johns Hopkins, and things like that.” Though he finds the therapeutic aspect of psychedelics “cool and all,” he is more interested in examining the deeper realizations about human consciousness and selfhood (“There’s this idea that the self is like this nugget that doesn’t go away”) that the psychedelic experience can elucidate.
His second experience with psychedelics was particularly profound, one that drug lore might call a “bad trip.” During the trip, he “basically relived a bunch of traumatic experiences, and all the mental pain that it caused me over the years was converted into physical pain.” Clark’s veteran friend, Michael, who agreed to trip-sit him during this experience, had put on Clark’s soundtrack of choice: war drums, a fitting score for the experience (“It was kind of weird, it was like, I’m at war with myself”). Face buried in a Memory Foam pillow (“How I maintained oxygenation is beyond me”) and “curled up into a ball,” Clark found himself screaming “Stop!” at the top of his lungs, though the sound, as well as the entire experience, was only happening inside his head—Michael had no idea of Clark’s desperate cries—in reality, the room was silent. At that moment, “everything just stopped, and I felt a sense of love and warmth … I was now like third-person watching myself, and I just felt, like, a love and a compassion for myself that I had never felt before. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.” He also heard a voice:
I imagine someone with a philosophical or a theological framework would say [the voice] was God. I would say it’s the self…[it] was a voice that felt as if it were my own, who, as I’m watching it, said something to the effect of: “These are all the things you needed to experience in order to get to where you are today… And the person that you are today is better, even though those experiences were like, really shitty.”
As soon he “got what [he] needed out of the experience,” Clark lifted his head, gasping “like [he] had been “underwater for hours.” Michael was there waiting to usher him back into reality: “My friend came over, he grabbed my hand, and was like, ‘I’m right here,’ and I just started crying.”
I ask Clark if he believes in God. Right away, he vigorously shakes his head no. He is extremely skeptical of religion, and tells me that he thinks any religious text is a “way to control people in exchange for giving them answers for the questions that they have.” Though he has a handful of religious friends, he believes that organized religion promotes a “bad ideology,” but he understands why people fall into it: “The only alternative is the world is meaningless,” and “that, for some people, can be, you know, prima facie, it’s very scary, you know?” With a giggle, he proclaims that “the world sucks in that respect” but at the same time, “there’s kind of a beauty in that,” because it means that we humans have the power to make it meaningful.
For Clark, embracing the unknown is necessary to make the most of one’s existence on earth: “I think it’s okay to say … I don’t … I don’t know what knocked the first domino [of the universe] over. I don’t know what … love is. I don’t know how quantum works. Like, call it God, call it, call it Bob!” At this, I let out a cackle, and so does Clark. “Like, whatever!” He continues. “God is just a filler word for what we don’t understand. Just my personal opinion.”
Walking home from talking with Clark, I pass by St. John’s Cathedral. Its stately splendor is hard to miss—I don’t think I’ve ever walked home without at least glancing at it for a second or two. I take a few breaths of icy air, attempting to embrace the magic of the day’s frigidness. Then, smiling, I close my eyes for a brief moment and whisper a prayer to Bob.
*Names have been changed