«Il nuovo trip, l’unico trip, è the Natch»

«Il nuovo trip, l’unico trip, è the Natch» is the declaration through which Mucho Maas presents nature as the replacement for psychedelic drugs. It first appears as a sudden conversion spoken in the street; later, it names a deepening commitment that unsettles his friends and draws a political rebuke from Zoyd Wheeler.

A conversion after the doctor’s visit

The saying follows a bizarre medical encounter. Mucho, whose brain is described as battered by drugs, is led through a wax-museum-like display of surgical films and refrigerated specimens. The doctor’s tour includes a necrotized sinus; Mucho staggers through it with twitching eyes, a throbbing nose, and a severe head cold. Exhausted, he signs an equivocal pact with the doctor in blood, his nose frozen by a hypodermic. At the time, he treats the agreement as a joke and doubts that anyone could expect him to honor it.

As Mucho later tells the story, however, the visit proves to have marked a turning point. Crossing Ventura Boulevard afterward, he is nearly hit by a brightly painted Volkswagen van full of long-haired desperados. Recognizing him, they loudly ask for psychedelic drugs. Mucho answers in an artificial, oracular voice that the new and only trip is the Natch, then proclaims nature. The abruptness of the reply gives the expression its force: a drug-seeking encounter becomes the occasion for a public renunciation of the very culture the van represents.

From street declaration to lasting credo

The episode is not presented as a passing joke. Though Mucho later moves to the capital of psychedelic rock, his devotion to nature grows deeper with time. In some neighborhoods, he becomes a source of discomfort when he brings it up, suggesting that his conviction is persistent enough to strain ordinary conversation. The van’s departing “Oh,” accompanied by a comic speech bubble emerging from its exhaust, gives the first declaration a deflating response; the later account nonetheless makes clear that Mucho himself does not abandon it.

His creed also reverses his former identity. Zoyd reminds him that not long before, Mucho had been the “King of the Heads.” The expression therefore records not only a change in what Mucho recommends, but the distance between his earlier place in rock-and-drug culture and the person now preaching against drug abuse over lunch at the mission.

Zoyd’s political counterreading

Mucho’s sermon prompts Zoyd to challenge the voice behind it. Zoyd argues that the government needs people to imprison and that the pursuit of marijuana intensified after Prohibition was repealed, when federal agents needed new work. He attributes the invention of the marijuana menace to Harry J. Anslinger and tells Mucho to ask Hector Zuñiga about the matter. These are Zoyd’s claims in the exchange, not a neutral explanation supplied by Mucho’s expression.

The disagreement makes the phrase carry more than a simple rejection of drugs. To Mucho, nature is the sole legitimate trip; to Zoyd, the anti-drug message risks repeating the language of the state and its machinery of incarceration. Their argument turns a compact slogan into a measure of how far the two old rock companions have diverged: Mucho offers a personal conversion as a moral prescription, while Zoyd insists that the politics surrounding that prescription cannot be ignored.