The Spot by Nick Porisch

The Spot by Nick Porisch

The house is more ragged in my memory. The house that I know has chipped plastic siding, stained concrete sidewalks, and a different front door. This one doesn’t have the patio my dad labored over for hours one summer, fueled by Bud Light and Marlboros, or the shed he built with my uncle to store his sons’ useless shit.

The things we choose to maintain and improve, and the things we don’t.

I’m looking at the house, my house, or what will be my house or maybe no longer is, from next to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. It’s night, and the driveway isn’t paved yet, even though I remember the sour smell of liquid asphalt being poured far clearer than the crunch of soggy gravel on a rainy day.

I didn’t expect this to be one of the Spots. When I came home for break, or, rather, for suspension, I figured I’d run into a few here and there. Maybe I’d find a Spot in the toothbrush aisle at Wal-Mart or the parking lot of an elementary school I didn’t go to. But I didn’t expect to find one here.

I see the strobing lights of an action sequence on the TV through the living room window. I wonder if my mom’s there, or my dad, or both, and if they’re sitting on the couch, holding each other and laughing and locked so fortunately to the present — their present, now.

If I step one foot in any direction, it will all disappear.

Randy cracks the translucent capsule open with the handle of a scissors on our coffee table. Dust and crystals pour out — not a lot, maybe enough to cover the surface of your fingernail in a thin layer. The drug is a gentle pink, like Himalayan rock salt.

“We can split one dose,” Randy says. “Just to try it this time. It’s supposed to be pretty wild, and we can always take more.”

“Sure,” I say and Randy divides the drug into two neat, miniscule piles.

Outside, the sun’s rays are scattered by the gently rippling leaves of the tree in our apartment building’s front yard. It’s a beautiful day. The kind of day to do the kind of drugs you don’t tell your parents about.

Randy, wild-eyed and energetic, desperate to experience capital-L Life, sits back and exhales.

Then, we take it.

The drug gets us high, as advertised and expected.

It’s all there; the tingly feeling in your throat as it kicks in, the euphoric body high, the odd thoughts about the connected nature of existence, and the rambling conversations about reincarnation and movies. When I close my eyes, the darkness behind my eyelids is briefly occupied by faint, swirling helixes and hexagons, and a warmth spreads through my body, like the sun’s own glow is radiating from my liver. It runs through my veins and wraps itself around my heart — just for a moment. Then, the feeling gradually shrinks back into itself and the geometric patterns fizzle away as quickly as they arrived.The drug is a drug, nothing more and nothing less.

About forty-five minutes in (designed to last three hours), I rally my energy to embark on a hazy quest to the riverside park a few blocks away. Randy decides to stay in the apartment, enamored with his blanket and the popcorn ceiling above him, but he’s adamant I continue “the journey that’s right for my soul” and that our roommate Patrick will take care of him if anything happens.

So, I stuff the extra capsules into the pocket of my jeans with the “just in case” attitude of a user not quite ever satisfied with their drug experience and set off.

In the park, I listen to the river babble and notice the patterns in the maple tree’s branches.

I take another capsule.

I touch the grass. There’s other people in the park, and they may or may not be giving me strange glances, but that’s alright. They’re on their own journeys, too.

Near the park is a pair of benches nestled against the base of a walking bridge that crosses the river. I haven’t been there in a while. I shouldn’t go there. Not in a headspace like this. Not while tripping on psychedelic drugs in the middle of the afternoon.

I go to the benches.

The second capsule starts to kick in, hard, and I look out at the water as I sit down. The ripples of the river are oddly geometric, aren’t they?

I shouldn’t be here. I haven’t been here in a while. I haven’t been here since things ended.

I shouldn’t be here, but the sun catches the water just right and sends a flash of light directly into my eyes, and I blink, and it’s night time. Night time two years ago. The stars are bright and clear. My chest is full of warmth, and I realize I’m tracing the route from my childhood home to my high school in the lines of Amy’s palm and she’s laughing and I look into her eyes and she blinks and we’re kissing and I’ve found my first Spot.

I read once that when you recall a memory, you’re actually only recalling the last time you remembered it. In other words, you get one chance to remember something for the first time, and every time after that it becomes a memory of a memory, and a memory of a memory of a memory, and so on. That’s why memory becomes so distorted over time, like a copy of a copy or a screenshot of a screenshot. Is that true? I’m not sure. I hope not. It makes me sad in that kind of way that sits in your stomach like a bad taco.

After a couple hours, I’m sober. The body high is gone, replaced by achey sluggishness. The sprawling, creative thoughts of a psychonaut in their element have given way to a numb, tired static. I don’t tell Randy or Patrick about what happened at the benches. Instead, I quietly add the drug to my “try it once, never again” list and move on with my life.

Some things always linger, though.

Like the Mona Lisa in one of those “you can’t unsee it” magic eye images your aunt might repost on Facebook, once you can recognize one Spot, you can recognize them all. Most aren’t as dramatic or even interesting as that first one. I find them in the dusty reference book aisles of a university library or on a subway car in a city I’ve never been to. If you know how to look, these Spots where time tends to slip are everywhere.

It usually starts with a peculiar sensation, like the smell of a rarely opened anatomy textbook or the feeling of cold metal brushing your exposed ankle. Then, some kind of visual phenomena occurs. Colors get more saturated, or light gets brighter, or your vision is suddenly overcome by static. So, you blink, and everything’s different.

The books on the shelf are brand new now, and there’s a fellow student in the aisle in clothes that went out of style fifteen years ago. They’re looking at a book on oncological studies and they don’t notice you as anything out of the ordinary. If you’re there now, you always were.

One day, I try to ask Randy if he’s experienced a similar after-effect to the drug. It goes something like this.

“Hey,” I say while we wait for pasta water to boil in the kitchen, “does time ever get slippery for you?”

Randy’s expression gives nothing away. “What?”

“Nevermind,” I say and pour too much rotini into the not quite yet boiling water.

Telling someone that, in the months following the use of a potent psychedelic drug, you’ve developed the ability to notice and utilize Spots where time is more fluid to get glimpses of the past is a statement that can get you in a lot of trouble. Like, psych ward trouble. Or worse, rehab. So, I try to keep it to myself.

I also try not to go back to any one Spot too many times. Like memory, they tend to get murkier and more distorted the more they’re revisited.

There’s a Spot in a local college bar that I find wedged between two old pinball machines. The bar dates back to the 1970s, and supposedly it was a frequent stop for blues and jazz acts traveling between Minneapolis and Chicago back in the day. Now, the stage has been disassembled for decades and replaced with a musty pool table and a pair of cheap, plastic dart boards.

I’m there tonight with a few friends. It’s Friday, specifically the Friday after midterms, so we’re hammered. Maybe a little high, too. I don’t know. It’s the Friday after midterms.

Half clocked on discount beer, burnt rum and cokes, and cheap weed, we stumble to the back of the bar.

“Pinball!” Randy exclaims, similar to how a toddler might yell “candy!” or “dog!” More a declaration of recognition than statement of coherent thought.

All the same, I dutifully respond, “Pinball!” and dig quarters of out my pocket.

One gets loose from my fumbling hands and careens to the floor, rolling under one of the machines.

“Quarter!” Randy says, distressed, and I nod.

I squeeze between the machines and bend over, feeling along the sticky floor for my rogue coin. Inches away from the machines’ mechanics, my ears are assaulted by a cacophony of dings, rings, buzzes, and bells. My eardrums start to shake. The floor starts to become not just sticky, but sticky sticky and I decide to abandon ship on my mission.

When I stand back up, I find myself caught in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. The pool table, with its beer-stained felt and chipped wooden siding, is gone. The dart boards are gone. Randy is gone.

Instead, the stage is back, exactly how I imagine it when the old bartenders tell their rambling stories about better days. College kids in denim crowd around the stage’s edge, chatting and passing around pungent, filterless cigarettes. A few feet above everyone, a four piece jazz outfit settles into place.

The horn player lets out an abbreviated blurt and the drunken rumblings die down. The drummer counts off and, just like that, the set begins.

I watch for twenty minutes, entranced and fixed into place.

There’s a deep warmth to this moment. It’s in the musicians’ expressions as they play, in the quiet reverence of the otherwise rowdy audience, in the eyes of the young couple next to me as they sway. I don’t want to let it go.

After the group‘s fourth song, someone bumps into my shoulder and knocks me off balance. I catch myself just one step to the right, but it’s already enough to send me out of the Spot. Randy is there, the pool table is there, the dart boards are there, and a contemporary country song crackles from the bar’s tinny sound system.

There’s another Spot at that bar, too.

I find it on a different night, when a stranger offers me a cigarette and we step out into the thin alleyway between the bar and the late night falafel shop next door. It smells a little like moldy pitta and tahini soaked in stale beer, but it’s a convenient location to smoke away from the judgment of those who choose to be nicotine free.

The generous stranger who gave me the cigarette is telling me about his club volleyball record. I take a deep inhale from the cigarette and let it soak into my lungs’ alveoli. It tastes like death and feels like electricity. I shift my feet, listening to the stranger talk, and mud squelches beneath my shoe, sending a shiver up my calf.

“Assists really mean more than kills, anyways,” the friendly stranger says. “It’s a team sport, you know?”

I nod, and the shiver turns into a creeping, cold sensation that crawls up the outside of my leg. My head swims a little and I feel as if I’m starting to slide, like a sled at the precipice of a snow hill in that exact moment before gravity takes hold and pulls it down, down, down.

And then I am slipping, slipping through time, and I can’t hear the stranger’s voice, and I’m on the ground, shaking in the mud, on a night some time in the past.

I’m cold and damp, and my stomach is full of a feeling that twists confusion and shame into a tight braid. My sight fades and appears, fades and appears. Every time it returns, I feel an electric shock rush through my frontal lobe.

When my vision is intact, I see Amy and Patrick. Amy is on the ground with me. She rubs my back and her cheeks are coated with wet, anxious tears. Patrick paces behind us, his hands gripping his phone with white knuckles.

I remember vaguely that it’s Amy’s birthday. Just a few minutes ago, I think, we were in the bar, and dancing, and laughing, and she was smiling with that big, awkward smile that I love, or used to love, but definitely love now. I wish she was still smiling, but her jaw is clenched tight and her eyes are full of fear and anxiety… and disappointment, too.

I turn my head to the side and vomit. Its watery, acidic smell mixes in the air with moldy pitta bread and tahini.

I want to apologize, I want to apologize to her so bad and tell her that I’m sorry that she’s crying on her birthday and I’m sorry she’s sitting in the mud in the alleyway instead of dancing with our friends and I’m sorry that she’s so scared, that she’s so scared on her birthday, that she shouldn’t be scared like this on her birthday, that I’m sorry, Amy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I don’t because I didn’t then so I can’t now.

Patrick says something about calling the cops on that guy in the bathroom who sold me this shit, but his voice is distant and grainy, like it’s coming from an antique gramophone. All static and echo.

Amy looks down at me and my eyes meet hers. They’re glistening and dark, and her voice trembles as she tells Patrick that she thinks they need to call an ambulance.

My stomach cramps and my eyes squeeze shut and I can’t see Amy anymore, or Patrick, and my hand shakes so hard that my free cigarette tumbles down into the cold, damp mud at my feet, immediately extinguished.

“Oh, shit, dude,” the kind stranger says. “You want a fresh one?”

I don’t smoke next to the falafel shop anymore. Instead, I return to the Spot between the pinball machines.

At first, I can’t put my finger on what draws me back to this Spot, over and over again. I’m not a particularly big fan of jazz, or crowds of sweaty jazz fans.

There’s a feeling in life, though, that’s rare to come by. A warm feeling. I imagine it’s how a tired, lonely old woman feels when the choir at her Presbyterian church in North Dakota hits that exact right note and she can feel God next to her in the wheat fields. Or maybe how a marathon runner feels when they cross the finish line, and they didn’t reach a new personal record, but they did their best, and their mom’s there, and their best friend is there, and their partner is there, and they did their best, goddammit. The kind of warmth you feel when the breeze hits perfectly on a sunny day. The kind of warmth you feel when you wake up slow with someone you love. The kind of warmth you feel when the mushrooms start to kick in.

In that old college bar, between the pinball machines, I find that kind of warmth.

I go back there frequently.

Over time, though, the Spot begins to change. The musicians miss notes they didn’t before. Members of the audience give me strange looks, and the warmth in the room gets a little colder. The details of the moment begin to get fuzzy, like the last minutes before you blackout. I start to notice strange, wiggling things in the bar’s shadows. The couple next to me don’t sway in quite the same way, and where they used to gently hold each other, they now grip as if the other might try to escape at any second.

One night, I cram myself in between the pinball machines like usual. I’m craving the warmth of that moment again, the warmth that seems to slip further and further away but is still just barely within reach. I enter the Spot, and it starts good and right. The best it’s been since the first, maybe. That feeling, that warm feeling, it’s all there.

Then, midway through the set, something odd happens. Something bad. The band is in full swing, the energy is alive, and the piano player’s hand slips. It crashes down on the left hand side of the piano, generating a jarring blast of noise that sends the entire song to a screeching halt. The piano player looks up from the keys, and they look right at me, and their face… isn’t there. It’s gone. A blank slate, a void. But they see me. All of me. I know it. The audience and the other band members turn towards me, and their faces are gone too, and the couple next to me are digging their fingernails into each other, and the moment is cold. Cold, cold, cold.

A memory of a memory of a memory.

I stop going to that Spot, too.

There’s a drive-in diner, like the kind from the mid-20th century, in Kewaunee, Wisconsin called The Spot. Amy tells me about it on that warm summer night when we sat together at the benches and the stars were bright and clear. She traces the route between it and her childhood home on my palm.

She tells me that Kewaunee has a few drive-in diners like that. They’re nostalgic and gimmicky, and the food’s not very good but no one’s allowed to say it. Locals argue over which one is the best, but their opinion seems to mostly be shaped by what part of town they grew up in; north or south, closer to Lake Michigan or further away.

For Amy, The Spot is undeniably the best of them all. She tells me that her dad would take her there, in between shouting matches with her or her mom or her older brothers. He was an angry person, but, like any angry person, there was calm between the storms. He’s mellowed out in retirement, Amy adds.

But they would go to The Spot together, during those interludes of calm. He would buy her greasy burgers and cold milkshakes, and they’d listen to classic rock radio. The same songs that he listened to when he was a kid, he would tell her and she now tells me.

Amy tells me that going to The Spot is like time traveling.

The world around Amy flickers, and did she tell me that at the benches? Or was that a story she shared at her apartment? Or on a weekend trip to Kewaunee?

Was the river gentle that night, or loud and choppy? What was Amy wearing? What was I wearing? It was warm, right? Or was it cold, and that’s how my arm ended up around her shoulders? Amy looks me in the eyes. There’s love there. I think I remember that much.

The stars are bright and clear.

The stars are bright and clear.

The stars are bright and clear.

Were they?

I’m standing next to the mailbox at the end of the still gravel driveway.

The lights flick on in the living room and the TV’s flashing glow stagnates. Somebody must’ve paused the movie. My parents stand up, both of them, and I can see their silhouettes. They don’t dance or anything like that, my parents aren’t that type of romantic, but my dad gives my mom a peck on the cheek and she remains standing until he returns from the kitchen with something. Maybe a bowl of popcorn, or maybe a bottle of beer, but this is years before my dad grabbing a bottle of beer meant doom for any hopes of a relaxed evening. They sit back down and are out of my line of sight again.

I wonder if it’s a school night, and if I’m asleep in the bedroom upstairs that I shared with my brother. This is before the shed was built by the driveway, the shed where he would eventually teach me how to use a lighter and properly inhale smoke. I wonder if the version of me in this house right now has ever heard the words “marijuana” or “hallucinogen” before.

I can’t see my parents, but I imagine they’re smiling, or at least enjoying each other’s company.

I imagine my mom, less weary than the woman I know. The version I’m imagining doesn’t know yet that her own baby brother is going to die of an overdose a few months before the driveway gets paved, or that her husband will be reduced in a matter of years to a slobbering mess passed out on the couch most nights before eventually embarking on a haphazard and often rocky journey towards sobriety. This version doesn’t realize her own sons have that same sickness, or gene, or personality trait in them, too. She doesn’t know that one of them is standing at the end of the driveway right now, thinking about her. She doesn’t know that he’s there because a professor found him passed out on the campus mall at eight in the morning, covered in vomit and carrying a stomach and backpack full of opioids, and his university suspended him.

No, the version of my mom up there doesn’t know any of that. She’s watching a movie next to someone she loves, and her sons are asleep upstair, and this moment is full of warmth.

I could sit in this moment forever.

Wait.

Someone paused the movie again. The silhouette of my mom stands up, and then moves towards the stairs leading down to the entryway. She disappears and, a few seconds later, the front door opens.

My mom, this version of my mom, at least, steps outside onto the icy stoop wearing my dad’s jacket over her pajamas. She’s right there, a few dozen yards away, and I’m looking right at her, but she doesn’t notice me or can’t notice me because I was never actually here, at the end of the driveway. She closes the front door behind her.

And then, she pulls out a cigarette and lights it, confidently.

I didn’t know she ever smoked.

The tip of the cigarette glows as she takes a deep drag. Her eyes scan the dark, winter night and, in this instant, somewhere buried deep behind my ribs I feel like somehow she actually can see me, even through the impossibly thick wall of glistening snow and impenetrable years between us. I can’t see her eyes, but I think I can feel them occasionally meet mine for the briefest interludes between seconds.

Eventually, though, she snubs her cigarette out on the snowbank next to the front step and heads back inside. If she pauses or hesitates before entering the front door, I can’t see it from the end of the driveway.

Moments later, the TV flickers back to life in the living room.

I wonder if she saw me, even for a moment, or if she felt my presence – a pair of familiar eyes in the distance. I wonder if she will lay down in bed, once the movie is finished and the lights are turned out and the boys are checked on, and think about whether she really did see what she thinks she saw for a split second out there in the snow, until the memory is swept up in the static of sleep and by morning lost. For this version of my mom, who smokes cigarettes after her sons are asleep and doesn’t know what eruptions of grief and struggle lay ahead, life will continue ever forward, and that barrier between her and I will never be breached like this again.

There’s another version of her, though.

One that knows those eruptions, and has lived through them. One that’s waiting, right now, in the present – our present – for her son to return home after he abruptly let her know he was taking a break from school. A version that’s a little more broken, but that I can speak to and hug and try to make things right with. For that version, the only barriers between us are the ones we ourselves create. For her, I can be more than an invisible figure at the end of the driveway.

This moment is full of warmth, and it’s time to let it go.

I leave the Spot.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Nick Porisch 2025

Image Courtesy: kirahoffmann from Pixabay