“Grout!” The Musical

It was from Mrs. Knibb, our middle-school health teacher, that my classmates and I first learned about drugs. We knew drugs existed beforehand, of course – we were harangued by various figures that we should say “no” to them from the time we were very young. Local cops and their puppets visited our classroom to warn us, as did motivational speakers whose journeys through addiction, gang-related homicides, and prison revenge killings planted oddly specific lessons in our developing minds. Even on TV – that ancient, grainy medium – the First Lady repeated it like an anthem: “Say no to drugs.”

But it was Mrs. Knibb who taught us the specifics. She was a woman of 50 or so whose long, floral dresses seemed to be from a different time, one when paw rode out onto the prairie to make trades with the Chippewa. She spoke slowly and nothing seemed to jar her. Her face carried the same polite grin whether she was telling us about gardening over the weekend or showing us crime-scene photographs of overdose victims. 

Mrs. Knibb introduced us to the various types of drugs like marijuana, heroin, and PCP,  ranking them equally in harmfulness. She taught us the secret language of nicknames that we might need to procure these substances on the street, and then opened a box of props – a bit like Carrot Top – to show us the different tools we’d employ to use said drugs. At one point, she grabbed a rubber tourniquet in her mouth and cinched it tight around her arm while taking a moment to make eye contact with each of us. “This,” she mumbled through her gritted teeth, “is how you shoot heroin.”

The drugs that left the biggest impression on my imagination were hallucinogens. Mrs. Knibb told us stories about them, and boy, were they doozies. There was the guy who – after taking some LSD – thought he was covered in spiders and bashed his own goddamn skull in with a hammer. And then there was the mother who hallucinated her baby was a demon and put it in the microwave to destroy it. I don’t know if these stories are true but based on my own experience, I have my doubts. In fact, I’ve used psychedelic mushrooms exactly three times, and during each, I wound up cleaning the grout on my kitchen counter while performing entire musicals that I wrote on the spot.

The first two musicals were dystopian themed and in each, I was enslaved by some kind of corporation and cleaning the grout was my assignment. In the first of those I was assigned to the maintenance crew – the lowest caste – at the corporation’s headquarters where I developed a forbidden romance with a young female executive trainee. Through our love we woke each other up to the evil of the corporation and we used her access to the executive level to bring the corporation down. It was called “Grout!”

In the second musical I was a shell-shocked veteran assigned to a clean-up detail returning to the rubble of my home country after a war I had fought in myself years before. Throughout the assignment, my cleaning triggers painful memories of my life before the war, and by piecing them together I become aware that the conflict was sold under false pretenses. In the second act I turn my cleaning crew into a small band of rebels that destroys the corporation. That one was called “Yellow Ribbon.”

The third musical was a Cinderella story in which a humble street cleaner discovers that he is the true son of an exiled king and avenges his family. This one was objectively the most contrived of the three, but it does contain a shocking twist I probably shouldn’t spoil.

As for the cleaning, it felt great. It was joyful, deep cleaning. I sang. I laughed. I lost track of time and worked late into the night, squirting cleaning products onto the counter and chiseling methodically at the grime with a variety of sponges, brushes, and scrubbers. It was the most fun a man could have cleaning between tiles. And by the end, the grout was spotless.

After each experience I stepped outside at 4 am or so and smelled the coolness of the redwood forest in the predawn and felt each second of silence pass through me with a gentle force like a swell on the sea. One time an owl hooted from a nearby tree and the sound burst through the stillness like a whale breaching upon the surface of the dark blue ocean.

So why did the mushrooms trigger this response? I think they opened my mind to how dirty the grout was. I had settled into accepting that dirtiness is the grout and the grout is dirtiness. The mushrooms woke me up to the existence of an alternate status quo and helped me see that the barriers to having clean grout were only inside my mind. They invited me to take control of my future and reach out and create the better world I sought. 

I’ve been told by a friend of mine – a more experienced psychedelics user – that based on my experience I should probably eat more mushrooms next time. Maybe if I eat more, he said, I’d go outside and lay on my back and look at the stars and explore in my mind the vastness of the universe and come face to face with the thing that some call god and god would reveal unto me that all life is connected in a great web and that the differences I see between myself and those around me are products of my own insecurity and that life is meant to be short and death is not meant to be feared but revered as the returning of our matter to the universe in a form free of our own pain and suffering and as our atoms return to the stars we will in fact become sources of light for others. He said that I would experience those things not in addition to cleaning the grout and singing musicals – but instead of.

Instead of? I thought. Have you seen my grout lately? It’s getting pretty dirty again and I happen to have a few grams of mushrooms here in a baggie that my neighbor Gary gave me after I helped him carry an old mattress out to his truck and it might be exactly enough for a decent night of cleaning. Standing face to face with God sounds interesting, but I doubt it would do a lot for my kitchen.