- And what I had really wanted to do for a long time
was a lot of drugs.
I had been high before, but I had never been
"don't squish tiny horses" high.
And I definitely wanted a piece of that action.
[dark electronic music]
♪
[muted, echoing voices]
[rattling]
[intense music]
[dramatic note]
[raspy, echoing voice]
[cheers and applause]
- Welcome to "This Is Not Happening."
I'm your host Ari Shaffir,
and tonight the topic is "psychedelia."
[cheers and applause]
Please help me welcome this first comic,
absolutely hilarious.
I've been watching him for years.
Please give it up for
Mr. Dan Cummins, everybody.
Let him hear it! Dan Cummins!
- It was 2011 and, uh,
two grown men are lying face up.
It's Super Bowl weekend, Saturday night.
Two grown men are lying face up, fully clothed,
on twin beds at the MGM Grand hotel,
and they're focusing really hard on their breathing,
and they're listening to Enya,
'cause that's the only thing... [laughs]
they've been able to figure out that keeps them
from completely just freaking the fuck out.
One of these guys is comedy booking agent Stu.
Doesn't want his last named to be revealed for this story.
But it sounds a lot like [bleep].
[laughter]
It sounds exactly like that.
[laughter]
Right now Stu is really worried that the other guy in the room
has a knife and wants to stab him with it,
and the other guy in the room doesn't have a knife.
He also doesn't care about telling Stu
that he doesn't have a knife,
'cause he doesn't think Stu is a real person.
[laughter]
He's currently convinced that Stu
is a psychological construct
that's been planted into his subconscious
by some kind of evil scientist
that's been studying him in a coma,
trying to get secrets,
and he doesn't want to reveal those secrets.
Uh, that man is me.
And, uh, this is about the night my agent and I
tried to recreate "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
[laughter, whooping]
Yeah. Yeah.
I've thought a lot in the years since
about why at 33 I decided to head to Vegas
with a bag of drugs, including nine hits of acid--
like, I had never partied quite that hard before or since.
And a lot of it was the movie,
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
Like, I saw that movie, finally.
I was really fascinated that
Hunter S. Thompson and his lawyer
just went to Vegas for work, like,
technically they're there for work,
and they just blew off all responsibilities in life
to burn through a literal briefcase full of drugs.
And I found that strangely, uh, inspiring.
Like, I've always been so worried about consequences,
and I thought, "How fun would that be?"
Just for, like, one night, at least.
Just to do whatever I wanted to do,
no matter how terrible of a choice it was.
And what I had really wanted to do for a long time
was a lot of drugs.
I wanted to know how it felt to have that mind just, like,
brutally altered to the level that their minds were.
And so, uh, I think it--
and especially acid.
I feel like acid was a big part of that movie for me too,
'cause I'd been fascinated with acid.
It was on my bucket list ever since a buddy of mine in college
told me this story that I'll never forget
about how he dropped acid.
He went to this party,
and he got stuck in the bathroom for a couple of hours,
where he was perched up on the the toilet,
and he was afraid to get down,
'cause he had noticed that a lot of tiny horses
had sprung up from the tiles.
And he thought they were beautiful,
and he didn't want to risk hurting one of these...
like, you know, really gorgeous creatures.
And I had been high before, but I had never been
"don't squish tiny horses" high.
And I definitely wanted a piece of that action.
So it's--you know, it's 2:00 in the afternoon.
We get to the MGM.
We check in, and we pop some codeine,
smoke a little weed, have a few drinks,
just to put our brains in a peaceful state
to ensure that we have a nice, soothing trip.
And we each take a hit of acid,
and then we go to the Circus Circus,
where Hunter S. Thompson hallucinated,
to go play some poker.
And we get there and the acid still hadn't kicked in,
and we got really nervous.
We were like, "Aw, man, I think we got a bad batch."
And we decided to take a second hit of acid.
[audience groans]
Yeah, exactly.
Not bad. Not a bad batch.
I sat down at the poker table,
started having some very new thoughts.
Like, I remember thinking that the guy sitting across from me
had the most chips.
Like, he was doing the best at poker
specifically 'cause his face had too many angles.
Like, I didn't know how many angles a face should have.
I was like, "This fucker has more than that."
And I felt like it gave him a strategic poker advantage.
And I also had a thought that Stu
has no chance of winning at poker,
'cause he has a teeny, tiny head.
I'd never noticed how truly tiny it was until that moment.
Like, not "Beetlejuice" head shrinker dust tiny,
but pretty goddamn close.
And I'm like, "He can't win."
You can't win with a tiny head at poker.
That's just--I know that now.
And I'm having a lot of fun thoughts.
I'm laughing at these fun thoughts.
Stu's laughing at this fun thoughts,
and then we decide to take our great time
and ruin it by making
easily what was our worst decision of the night.
We decided to go back to the hotel
and take the rest of the acid.
Taking the rest of the acid is just a bad premise.
Right, like, it implies you've already taken an amount of acid
you thought would be enough
when you didn't already have a head full of acid.
And now you're taking more than that,
'cause you're quite literally insane.
So we take 2 1/2 more hits each. There's a half in there.
We were so greedy with our drugs,
we couldn't let one guy have one more hit than the other guy.
We actually tore a little tiny tab in half, and we had 2 1/2--
and then we decided we need to reconfirm
picking up some coke and ecstasy in a little bit,
and before we go get the rest of the drugs,
we need to go get some pizza across the street.
[laughter]
We're really planning this out as best we can.
And it should have taken us about 15 minutes
to make it across the street to get some pizza.
We estimated later it took us roughly an hour and a half.
'Cause by the time we hit the lobby,
the acid was kicking in so hard
our brains were just disintegrating.
Stu's new reality became, once we got to the lobby,
that there was a security team tracking us
trying to catch us doing the drugs
complete with dogs.
He thinks dogs are following us.
Like--like that's ever gonna happen in Vegas.
Like they're just gonna let, you know,
drug-sniffing dogs loose on the strip.
They would bark at almost every fucking person
they came across.
And--but he thinks our best course of action
is to hide in the MGM parking lot behind some cars
so the dogs don't find us, and so we do that.
We go out, and we're hiding behind a car.
It's not even dark out.
We're two men in our 30s just hiding behind random cars.
And then we would-- he would get nervous
that the dogs were closing in,
and then he would decide we got to, like, head down,
scurry to the next car
to not looks suspicious.
That looks so suspicious.
And I'm following him knowing it's a bad idea,
but I have to stay close to him,
'cause I have a new reality as well.
My new reality is that
everything that's now really, really close to me
that I look at starts to drift back and away
and up into the air, including Stu.
And I actually am thinking that if I don't stay
within grabbing distance of my friend,
he could drift into space.
And I can't handle that right now.
I just cannot risk that, and so he's--
We're just scurrying, and I'm chasing.
And finally we make it to the pizza place
where I decide to order us two pepperoni pizzas,
which--I don't even really like pepperoni pizza,
but another real thought I'm having
is that I'm convinced that some things
that I've always thought were real are real,
and some things that I've always thought were real are not real.
I love Canadian bacon pizza, but you know what?
It's fucking fake pizza, you guys.
It's never real. It's never existed.
And you can't eat things that don't exist.
[laughter]
So pepperoni pizza, it's super-duper real.
It's the most real pizza.
And by God, that's what we're gonna eat.
And... [laughs]
and all this makes perfectly-- sense to me at the time.
It makes really good sense.
And they have this, like, you know like
the individual little boxes in the little trays on the shelf?
And I go to just grab us two pizzas from the counter,
and, like, millimeters before grabbing it,
my fingers crumple and my wrist bends
like I hit something, and it really hurts.
And I'm just like, "What the fuck is that--happened?"
And I just look at Stu, and he's off worried about security.
He's in a bad place.
And I just keep trying to grab it,
and it just keeps crumpling over and over.
And I'm like, "I cannot for the life of me get this pizza."
I went back the next day to see what the hell--
there was a plexiglass barrier...
[laughter]
Between product and customer
that I'm unable to visually process.
I remember at one point actually digging
at the fucking force field
like an insane badger just desperate for pepperoni.
And they take pity on me. They give us the pizzas.
I wish they would have given us security camera footage
of that interaction.
I would--that'd be priceless.
But we were somehow able to eat these pizzas.
And then we hop on a taxi to go find the rest of the drugs.
And I have a piece of paper
I'd put down in my pocket earlier
with the address written down,
'cause I knew I'd be in a bad place.
And I read what I think are the words
on the paper to the driver.
I'm reading him what I think is an address.
He hears, what I'm guessing, is just drug-fueled gibberish,
and he wants more information.
Essentially, he wants an actual address.
And he wants--or references, what part of town is it?
You know, nearest intersection.
I can't answer any ques-- I'm only mentally capable
of re-reading what I think it says
louder and more aggressively.
I don't know what I was yelling, just some--
I'm sure it was some just gibberish-y address-y kind of--
"7-6 Street Durango 7-6!
"Place! Street!
[yelling] "7! 7! 7! 7! 7! 7! 7!"
[laughter]
I'm freaking out, uh...
Like a lot of people,
the driver doesn't like being screamed at by a maniac.
He becomes very upset,
and now he's screaming at me,
and this freaks Stu out.
Stu's really freaking out.
Now, I found out later that at this point in the evening,
Stu becomes convinced that this driver
is part of the security team,
and he's driving us straight to prison.
Like, not even a-- not processing,
not police station, not jail, just prison.
We're going to some kind of drug prison.
And at the next intersection at the red light,
he just leaves.
He just opens the door mid-fare
and just starts running away from the taxi,
which I didn't know was an option you could do in taxis.
I grab an unknown amount of cash
and just throw it at the driver
and chase him,
and we just run for a long time.
I don't know. We couldn't track time.
I do know--I remember, like, being in alleys.
I remember a lot of scurrying and hiding.
Finally we're able to actually
see the MGM tower in the distance,
and we were, like, we navigated like savages.
We just, like, would see it visually
and we're moving somewhat towards it
like two monsters following the moon.
And we finally do make it back to the room,
where I decide we got to lay down,
we got to focus on our breathing,
and we got to calm the fuck down,
'cause shit's getting real weird.
On the way back, Stu started talking a lot about a knife,
and he was real worried about getting stabbed.
He's asking me over and over about the knife.
I don't even care about answering him,
'cause he's the Canadian bacon of people to me right now.
I don't--like, you're not even a real thing.
You're just so annoying right now.
You're a fake, annoying thing.
And I just think that, like, if we could just lay down,
focus on our breathing,
and maybe listen to some music or something,
'cause things are-- it's getting so dark.
You know, like, I-- every time I look around,
I'm convinced there's a wall of blood
behind me in the background.
I need some kind of music, but unfortunately,
I listen to a lot of hard rock and metal,
and Rage Against the Machine, Queens of the Stone Age--
not what I fucking need right now.
Not gonna put me in a better place.
And luckily I think back
to an album I used to fall asleep to in high school,
and I'm able to type four letters into the keyboard,
which is really hard 'cause my keyboard's melting.
I can't look at it for more than a few seconds
without it starting to melt,
but I'm able to get in E-N-Y-A.
[sighs] Oh, sweet Enya.
I have never loved her more than that evening.
If you don't know who Enya is-- you've heard her.
She's that sweet, like, New Agey spa music,
like wizard music.
Like, if elves were real,
Enya would be number one on the elf charts
week in and week out.
Right?
Like, to me she's not even a real human.
She was never born.
She just, you know, just sprang up
from some mystic Irish pond fully-formed--
[vocalizes]
I'm like, "Please, Enya,
"turn these blood walls into waterfalls.
I need you now more than ever!"
[laughter]
And we laid down and listened to her soothing rhythms,
and it worked.
We rode Enya through the peak,
and things got a little bit worse for a while,
but then they got a lot better.
Stu stopped talking about the knife.
I started thinking he was real.
And we were able to stand up,
and I looked out at the skyline, the strip,
and it was the most beautiful skyline
I've ever seen in my life.
It was, like, pulsating and trailing
and just truly beautiful.
And I remember thinking, like, I knew
that I shouldn't have done any of the things
I'd done so far that night.
I knew that I definitely shouldn't,
after all of that, still go find coke and ecstasy,
but I was going to.
I mean, I--you know, it's bad choices.
You know, it's like, I got responsibilities,
got a mortgage, I got two kids.
Not with me that weekend.
Let's not get too fucking judge-y right now.
They were safe away from me.
But, you know, I don't regret it, you know?
It's, like, I finally just did a night
just truly for me.
I got my own story.
You know, I didn't see tiny horses,
but I now definitely know how it feels
to have your mind terribly altered.
And if this story that I've just told
actually inspires you to go on your own drug binge,
I got to say, uh...
No. Don't fucking do it.
It was terr--I was in the Devil's brain
for a good six hours.
Like, it was terrifying! It was truly terr--
I feel like I was one hit away
from still wandering the strip today,
just like, "7-6! 7, 7, 7, 7!
"You can't eat pizza that's not real!
Ha ha ha ha ha! Okay!"
So close to being that guy forever,
but if you're gonna do it-- and I can't stop you--
bring your own snacks.
You don't want to deal with force fields.
Bring a little bit of Enya,
and never take the rest of the acid.
Two is more than enough.
Thank you, guys. Be safe out there.
[dark electronic music]
♪