Oxymania

Rax King gets oxygenated in New Jersey.

I had my first underage drink in an oxygen bar in Ocean City, MD. That’s the most white trash sentence I’ve ever written, but it’s God’s honest truth, and so I’ve always had a soft spot for oxygen bars, where wellness-heads pay a dollar a minute to suck down the same substance that’s available in the atmosphere for free. The second-to-last time I visited an oxygen bar was in 2008, and the man oxygenating in the chair next to me kept asking if I was a cop. The last time I visited one was last Saturday.

In the intervening years, I quit drinking—hence my renewed oxymania. I’m always looking for alcohol-free activities to do with my friends. That’s the part I’d be willing to admit in an AA meeting, but I’m also always looking for activities that imitate bar-hopping, minus the intoxication. Drinking was never just about drinking. It was also about my fundamental belief in alcohol. To me, drinking was a private alchemy that could turn my self-hatred into confidence. It never worked that way in practice, of course. The confidence metabolized back into shame as soon as its master, the booze, left my system. But I believed in the magic of drunkenness; for years, that was enough. A year after my last drink, I still struggled to fill the sober vacuum where that belief used to live.

Oxygen enthusiasts say that oxygen treatments clear out your “toxins” and help your body mimic the conditions of life 200 years ago, when the atmosphere was supposedly more oxygenated. In online communities like r/OxygenTherapies, devotees suggest that oxygen improves athletic performance and cures psychosis. But I hoped that sitting in a recliner with a cannula up my nose and my friend Tommy by my side might remind me of doing the same thing on barstools only a couple years ago. When you drink with a friend in a bar, all three elements—drinking, friend, bar—contribute to your eventual belief that you had a fun night out. Could I substitute oxygen for alcohol, a storefront in New Jersey for a bar?

We arrived at an oxygen bar that appeared to be thin-blue-line-themed, as cop memorabilia was everywhere. The friendly proprietor welcomed us into the lobby where a mystifying mishmash of stuff was for sale: weed grinders next to “Try That In A Small Town”-branded bobblehead dolls; a vast array of CBD vape cartridges next to advertisements for pet portraits; a virtual fireplace. Plus, somewhere, oxygen.

The proprietor had our tanks set up in a private room. A TV played an endless, soothing loop of an animated beach scene. Signs on the wall advertised the benefits of oxygen and chlorophyll and advised us that we were now on island time. We settled into our recliners and picked flavors to enhance our oxygen experience. (The flavors came from herb-infused steam, not oils—the proprietor made us promise never to fill our lungs with oils in a way that strongly suggested she’d been unable to obtain the same promise from past customers.) Tommy selected Bliss; I picked something called The Beach.

I hooked my cannula into my nostrils and over my ears, feeling like a patient in the ICU of Margaritaville. “How do I look?” I asked.

“I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re sober,” Tommy said philosophically. “At the end of the day, you’re still spending money to put weird shit up your nose.”

The proprietor checked our blood oxygen levels with fingertip oximeters. Mine was “great”; Tommy’s, only “fine.” No matter: she said our blood oxygen levels would improve from the half hour treatment, though she never came back to check them and we weren’t sure we were allowed to touch the oximeters ourselves. She also stressed that we would not get high, but that after our sessions, in some unquantifiable way, we would feel great. Plus, she promised, we could be assured of a wonderful night’s sleep.

The oxygen was nice and cooling in my nostrils, not unlike the cocaine I hoped it might replace, though I couldn’t be sure whether I was smelling The Beach or the plastic of my cannula. Tommy had walked in with a headache that he said disappeared within minutes of starting his treatment. Other than that, it was hard to tell if anything was even coming out of the tank, even as it chugged and burbled steampunkishly.

As we left the oxygen bar, though, I did feel buoyant, and I didn’t think it could hurt to attribute that buoyancy to the oxygen. It may well be pseudoscience, but as long as you don’t expect recreational oxygen to do anything important like cure cancer, surely it’s harmless pseudoscience. I could choose to have faith in the pleasant properties of this experience even if I wasn’t sold on the wellness ones. I had struggled to enjoy sobriety because, on some level, I still didn’t believe I could have fun sober. Now here I was, enjoying sobriety, because I’d gleefully bought into something. Maybe I really would sleep like a baby, just like the lady promised!

I floated all the way home. That night, I had the worst night’s sleep of my life.

The Dirt: Oxygen truly is a breath of fresh air.