Volume 4, Issue 3: Scott Spiezio

"His substance abuse issues have cast a pall on his post-playing career."

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There was a time in my life when I was into hallucinogenic mushrooms.

This is probably not the type of thing I should write a whole newsletter about, and it’s certainly not the type of thing I should introduce one with. My mother-in-law reads this thing! (Hi, Toodles!) The prevailing societal attitude about drugs has changed dramatically over the last decade-plus—I’m in Los Angeles right now, and it seems like all the places that were video rental places when I lived here in 1997 have turned into dispensaries—but people are still weird about this stuff, often with good reason. I’m old enough now that a lot of human beings I care about have had their lives ravaged by drugs, and just because more soccer moms and Widespread Panic Dads these days are popping a Delta-8 gummy rather than having a glass of wine with dinner doesn’t mean that the pain that drugs can inflict has stopped existing. You want to be cautious of people’s attitudes on this. Everyone’s a little different.

Drugs aren’t my thing; my brain is too active and busy, and even narcotics tend to speed it up and rewire it into a machine that can go off spinning too many different directions at once. (Besides: I enjoy drinking too much.) But there was a period when the conscious-expanding aspect of drugs was something I very much wanted in my life, because there was nothing more important to me during that period than expanding my consciousness. That period was college. It’s probably good that it was college, and just college.

All I wanted to do in college was learn. The number of things I was introduced to in my life in college—cultures other than my own, live music, basic tenets of philosophy, the fundamentals of journalism and writing, the addictive joys of being published, viewpoints and political theories I’d never even considered, how to understand and be compassionate to people who had experienced pain I’d never had, drinking, smoking, the sudden appeal of having no one to bug you about basic hygiene and cleanliness in the space where you live, among a million other things—are difficult to overstate. I wanted to soak it all in, because it was all so new to me. I wasn’t particularly close in college to being the human I would ultimately become (which is a good thing, I think), but when I look back at the kid I was now, I see an incessant sponge: I wanted to know everything, I wanted to meet everyone, I wanted to see every corner of the planet—I wanted to experience all of it. Every day felt like a new download from the Matrix was being plugged into my skull.

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Drugs were a part of that, but, specifically, mushrooms were a part of that. It was my senior year of college, and my girlfriend, who had considerably more drug (and life) experience than I did, suggested psilocybin would be a fun activity for the two of us and my two roommates, who worked at the newspaper with me and with whom we were always getting into some kind of trouble. I was up for fun activities, and I would have done anything that woman told me to, and besides: It was a place of exploration, a world to dip my mind into and have it come back out expanded, man. Also, I was 20 years old. I didn’t really think a lot of things through.

We picked an evening over the summer, when none of us were particularly busy; I know most people go away over the summer when they’re in college, but for what it’s worth, staying in your college town over the summer, while not particularly helpful in a professional sense, is a terrific way to have three months to just be a young, gloriously listless idiot. She brought the mushrooms out and warned us that they tasted terrible. I ate a few, didn’t feel anything different, ate some more, still didn’t feel anything, ate some more. Classic rookie mistake.

The effect was … explosive. That’s the right word for it. Some people experience profound visuals and hallucinations when they take mushrooms, and while occasionally the patterns in the floor would shift a little bit, that was not what happened to me. What mushrooms did for me was give me a key to a door that, at the time, seemed to contain some sort of vast knowledge and understanding of the universe that had previously been denied to me. I know this is going to sound hilarious when I say it, but know that in the moment it was profoundly, almost destructively true: I got it, man. Mushrooms made me feel like the way I had navigated the world up to then was pointless and dumb and completely beside the point; I’d been in the dark about everything. The greater truth, whatever it was, was over here, just outside of my grasp but tantalizing close. It made me believe that I had discovered something incredible, and—and this is key—that it was my responsibility to bring it back and explain it to the rest of the world. It felt like the very reason to become a writer in the first place. When the experience was over, when I cam down, I was certain that it was the most earth-shattering experience I’d ever had, and I wanted to do it again as soon as possible.

The next time I did it, I was prepared. We were at a party in Springfield, and out came the mushrooms, but while my girlfriend and our friends spent their time jamming out to the band playing in the living room—because this is the sort of thing that happened in college in the ‘90s, you went to a party in a random town where you didn’t even know anyone and you took drugs and some dude’s band was just freaking playing a set in the living room—I sat in a backroom with a Steno pad and wrote down every thought I had. This was my mission, perhaps my holy purpose: To visit this world, to chronicle what I discovered there and to report back my earth-shattering revelations. I sat in that room for five hours, as normal people danced and laughed and reveled outside, feverishly scribbling all my insights. (My primary memory of this night is my girlfriend walking in and rolling her eyes at me.) I came out only as I started to come down and the insights began to fade. I’d gotten what I needed.

The next morning, I went through my notes. What had I brought back from the great beyond? What would shake this world to its very foundations? Well. First off, almost every page was completely illegible; they looked like a ferret had dripped its claws in blue ink and repeatedly scampered back and forth across the page. The only section I could read was a two-page screed in which there seemed to be some sort of thesis about tissue paper, granular absorption, gravitational pull and the defensive coordinator of the 1992 Phoenix Cardinals. The sentences were disconnected from one another, as if written by different people entirely, people who had never met and would not like each other if they had. The phrase that kept appearing in the margins: “REMEMBER THIS.” The pages were useless. I threw them away immediately, before anyone else could see them. My friends asked me what I came up with that night. I lied and told them someone spilled beer all over them. It was a believable lie.

We did mushrooms a couple of more times, in a far more casual, typical-college-student-fashion—lying on the Quad, smoking cigarettes and staring up at the sky, giggling—and then next thing you knew it was graduation. I moved to Los Angeles one week after graduation and waited for my girlfriend to accompany me. She ultimately did not, and I ended up living with my two co-workers at U. The National College Magazine in Santa Monica. They became my closest friends and confidants during what then felt like an extremely difficult time but now I find myself constantly wistful for. This is a very strange human thing that happens.

One day, right before our one-year fellowship at the magazine was about to end and we’d have to go enter the real real world, one of them asked, “Have you guys ever done mushrooms? We should have a big goodbye on mushrooms.” So we did. We choked down the awful things and then walked across Neilsen Way, past Davy Jones’ Liquor Locker, into Venice and on the beach looking out upon the Pacific Ocean. We laughed and told stories and tried to imagine what the world outside of this beach, and this specific time in our lives, would be like. I remember it warmly.

We then went back to our apartment to wind down. I was telling a story about my family, about how funny they were, how I missed them but appreciated them giving me the space and rope to figure out who I was and what I was doing. It wasn’t a particularly emotional conversation, or at least it didn’t feel like one. Then one of my roommates stopped me.

“Oh my god, Will, are you OK?” she said.

“Huh?” I said. “I’m fine. Why?”

“Will, I’m so sorry, how can I help?” she asked.

I looked at her like she was wearing a hat made of plastic fruit. Maybe she was? “What are you talking about?” I said.

“Will, you’re crying,” she said. “Do you not realize you are crying?”

I had not realized that. I was pretty sure I had not cried since I was a child. (I’ve probably cried maybe twice since?) I put a finger in the air: “Give me one second, please.” I then went to the bathroom, wiped my face, came back out, lit a cigarette and said, “let’s try to forget that happened.” She laughed. “Drugs are so weird,” she said. That was it for that.

In May, it will be 25 years since that day, the last time I did hallucinogenic mushrooms. I don’t remember the insights. I don’t remember the feeling. I don’t remember any of the conversations. I just remember not having control over myself or my emotions. For a very brief period, that was their entire appeal. Now I cannot think of a period in my life that feels any further away. I’m going to be back down on that beach tonight, having dinner with an old friend, looking out onto the ocean and wondering what’s going to come next. I am going to stick to wine this time.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. My Interview With Chuck Klosterman About His Book The Nineties, GQ Magazine. I have known Chuck for a very long time—we actually met at an orphan Thanksgiving in Brooklyn in 2004—but I’d never actually interviewed him before. Only about a third of our conversation made it in this piece, but I enjoyed it greatly. The book is excellent.

2. Is the NFL Going to Get Away With It Again? The Washington Post. Glad to be back in the Post, making fun of the NFL.

3. When’s the Worst Decade Age to Live Through This Pandemic? Medium. Sixties? Forties? Teenage? I try to look through the pros and cons.

4. The Most Los Angeles Super Bowl Imaginable, Los Angeles Magazine. No link here, but it’s in the print version of the magazine, if you happen to be in Los Angeles and want to grab a copy for me.

5. The Major Personalities of This Super Bowl, GQ. It is fun to make fun of Stan Kroenke.

6. A Super Bowl Unlike Any Other, New York. I’ll be filing to New York right after the game this weekend. GQ too, I think.

7. Player of the Week History: Luis Quinones, MLB.com. One tiny little slice of baseball history.

8. Is This the Last Semester of Masks in Schools? Medium. I have to say, I hope so.

9. Baseball Birthdays: October 28, MLB.com. Just trying to stay busy!

10. The Friday Five, Medium. Been a while since we got to 10 over here, good to see.

PODCASTS

The Long Game With LZ and Leitch, we did three shows, one a Super Bowl preview and then a compilation of stuff we did while at the Super Bowl, including an interview with Keyshawn Johnson and Kraig Washington, the grandson of the first Black player in the NFL. We’re having fun. We also spent the whole week promoting the crap out of this show at the Super Bowl.

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Moonfall” and “Jackass Forever,” as well as making some very-wrong Oscar nomination predictions.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week, back next week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Celine Sciamma’s Quest for a New Feminist Grammar of Cinema,” Elif Batuman, The New Yorker. Some great film profiles coming out of The New Yorker lately, and this is a great one about Sciamma, who made Portrait of a Lady on Fire but made something even better in Petit Maman, which was Grierson’s best movie of 2021 and one I fall a little bit more in love with the more I think about it.

I also loved this New York Times Magazine piece about Bob Odenkirk, and not just because it will send you down several Mr. Show rabbit holes.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison. Because it’s the Super Bowl, everyone’s watching Prince’s incredible halftime performance again, which led me back to this notorious face-shredding Prince solo at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s honoring of George Harrison. Literally some of the most famous musicians in the history of American culture on stage, and Prince just pops up and sends them splaying in all directions. I know the Super Bowl show will be what everyone is watching this week … but honestly, my god.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Have a great weekend, all. Enjoy the Super Bowl, Super Bowls are fun.


Best,
Will