Day 32 of 100

“Did you get enough?”

“I have three boxes.”

I was graduating high school in a few weeks and finals were just finished. Yet the most important thing in my life and the life of my friends was a trip to Disneyland for Senior Night.

High school seniors from around California all got in buses and headed down to Disneyland where it was open from 11pm to 6am just for seniors. All the rides ran and there was even a performance by Information Society.

The only thing my friends and I cared about was not falling asleep. Well that and everything else you could imagine that a kid would want to do away from home, in a hotel, at Disneyland at 3 in the morning.

It seemed that everyone was bringing something that they shouldn’t, including Rhonda who brought two suitcases, one with clothes and the other with booze. It weighed a metric ton on the way down and was light as a feather on the way back. Me? I bought three boxes of NODOZ 200mg caffeine pills that you can still buy at Amazon.

After an eight hour bus ride, we all rushed into our hotel rooms. We were staying at a motel across the street from Disneyland that had a McDonald’s in the parking lot, and almost as if we were moving in protest, we quickly switched the rooms from unisex to coed and hunted Rhonda and her suitcase down.

The next night we got ready to head to the park, I broke out the NODOZ and handed them out. Everyone got one pill; I got five. And we headed across the street as a group.

If I would have described the night as glorious, I would be underselling it. It was most fun I ever had. After a couple of hours, I took a pill and nothing seemed to happen, so a little while later I took another and then few more.

Something I learned at the age of 17 was that you can overdo caffeine. And not just a little bit. I started to hallucinate and hear my name called all over the park. I saw dead people. And while I was scared that it would never end, something in me loved every minute of it.

The night ended in the morning and we found ourselves in the McDonalds in the parking lot of the hotel eating egg McMuffins and slamming cokes. No one was injured, ended up in jail, or got in trouble for anything we did. We piled back into the bus and I slept hard for the eight hour ride home.