What is being posted I put up first about a year ago. This is a story originally told to me by a friend of dubious character. As such I neither endorse anything in it nor adopt the world view of the narrator. However the tale was a bit of a hoot and so I acted as the scrivener because the details had to be captured in print. The details are a tad bit off center and it seemed necessary to write in down in his first person voice. While resting around the house I decided I needed to get some new content up on the blog. Because of the period of inactivity my surgery has caused it seemed right to revisit this and several other pieces.
The reason the earlier draft did not stay up is the reason the current one will not stay up long. The tale has a number of components that are problematic when looking at the world I live in to leave lying around anywhere, especially in cyberspace.
Among those of my generation that chose to read both popular and classic, certain writers seemed to be touchstones. Vonnegut, Didion, Thompson, Pirsig and Wolfe stand out as key parts of the then modern cannon. Whether right or wrong, emulation of the realties reflected out of the pages penned by these new apostles of hip and cool was oft attempted by my peers. It didn’t matter that these writers were chroniclers of iconoclasts who would have had no use for their books. It seems that imitation is an easier choice than forging a strong personal style based on true individualism.
Tom Wolfe in his appreciation of the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, went on at length about a number of parties staged at Ken Kesey’s La Honda ranch. One of the wildest of these modern bacchanalias involved Kesey’s Pranksters hanging a huge banner out on the edge of highway that said WELCOME HELLS ANGELS not knowing if the wild bunch would show. But they did fully clad in their leathers and just oozing the insanity. Make no mistake the Hell’s Angels were not nice people, not then and not now. However in Tom Wolfe’s recounting that night was serendipity to the maximum. Terrible and frightening monsters interacted with the generation of love, peace and astral projection and it ended all right.
I had read the Acid Test when I was enjoying the summer between 7th and 8th grades. It probably wasn’t the best choice of reading for such an impressionable mind as mine. The image of Neal Cassidy flipping his hammer again and again and trying to go further, to go beyond and break the barrier that exists between true now and perception was electrifying.
As I remember and it has been years since I have read the book Cassidy was always trying to live in the now. He believed that the time it took our neural networks to convey optical and aural information to our brain separated us from true now.
The implication that I drew from Wolfe was positive one, not a cautionary one. Seemed the right route to me when Cowboy Neal was eating every drug he could find to break the barrier down and move him as close to the now as was possible. Maybe he got there before the end. Four days short of his 42nd birthday, Cassidy was found dead next to a railroad track outside San Miguel D'Allende, Mexico. He wandered out there in an altered state and died of exposure in the cold high desert night.
With what I had read in the Acid test (and the mantra of the Grateful Dead’s The Other One playing nonstop in the background) it was about a year late as a freshman in high school the first time I took LSD.
There had been a plan to make the experience as positive as possible. I was supposed to spend the weekend with some friends who were all ready to dip their toes in that swirling cosmic water for the first time together. One of these friends had just returned from Berkley with a belt filled with about a thousand hits of orange sunshine. Sunshine was good clean shit and about the best that could be found anywhere at the time. I paid my money down and waited for the appointed weekend.
Ain’t it how it goes that the best laid plans of adventurers get way laid? Due to my parents’ intervention I was not going to get to experience tripping in the Leary way. Set and setting, friends, music and a controlled environment has been all planned out. Well, it turned out that I had been signed up to go instead on a Baptist youth retreat with a hip young minister. My friends we not willing to wait an additional week to share their getting “experienced” with me so they gave me my hit to take with me and to do with as I pleased. In retrospect my choices made at this juncture were probably more in line with Kesey’s tactics than what was opted for by my friends.
This particular church retreat ran Friday and Saturday night at the beach home of one of the scions of our church. A big old early 20th century cedar shake covered place it had a large porch and faced the Ocean which was about ½ block away. At night after the traffic died down and the rowdies went to sleep you could hear the ocean’ waves from the house’s open windows
My memory is not strong but I think there were about twenty people on the trip excluding the hip young minister and some chaperons. The agenda was to spend some time on the beach, have a snack, hear a sermon and then go to the boardwalk for good clean Christian fun. This was Ocean City NJ mind you and there were no bars and no open intoxicants visible from the street were permitted.
What to do, what to do? I had the power of the universe wrapped up in a small pill inside my pocket just waiting like an E ticket to be used at Disney. On the other hand fire and damnation wrapped up in a fringe leather jacket was awaiting me in the speech of the relevant young minister. This would be followed by a quasi altar call; acid or salvation, the lady or the tiger? About mid-evening on Friday night as our speaker was telling us about the evil of heroin, (he took it once and puked), I dropped the tab. Quality control in the manufacture of LSD has always been a spotty affair. What I was about to discover was that I had taken enough acid for four people.
As I listened to exhortations for a submission to God’s will, the walls of that old beach house began to breathe. The breathing was slow at first but quickly picked up in pace. Then the textures of everything in the room seemed to take on an odd blurry but patterned quality. My tactile sense began to become confused. The carpet was beginning to feel like a gritty and sand filled soft butter. Raising his hands high the forceful zealot began to shout “Are you ready to commit your life to the love and care of Jesus Christ our savior?” About this time my brain in its own special way began to scream MAJOR MALFUNCTION. I needed to get out of that room and into the night air RIGHT THEN. There wasn’t a straight line or a right angle in that room anymore. The air wasn’t really air any more it was more it was more of a velvety liquid. It didn’t frighten me but it was way beyond what I thought was possible.
Clenching my rubbery knuckles I made it through the rap. Despite the waves of existence that were beginning to crest over me I did not give in to the altar call and thus did not have to do one on one prayer and counseling with anybody. Being this was a beach town the reward for enduring the impassioned sermon was that trip to the rides up on the boardwalk. We all gathered outside to get assigned rides, at least I think it was outside. As if fate were truly just trying to fuck with me, I drew a ride up to the boardwalk with the impassioned twenty something one time heroin using seminarian in his Triumph Spitfire.
A Spitfire is a two seater and sits real low to the ground. As a result it seemed to travel like a rocket even at low speeds. With buildings melting around me we flew down the road and the minister and I rapped. Listening to his tale about the smack again I confessed I had taken acid at some unspecific time in the past. He told me that the thought of dropping acid scarred him to death. As I watched the road in front of us that road turned into a snake, writhing and twisting and curling back to look me directly in my eyes. I remember muttering that LSD was scary stuff and that I would never take it again. The snake at this point in our conversation was looking at me with a bemused attitude. As we approached the boardwalk the car slowed and the snake evaporated.
Walking, well most likely shuffling up to the elevated boardwalk I took one look at the rides and knew I could not get anywhere near them, let alone on them. There was this gyroscope thing that had nine carts all twisting in circles. Three groups of seats would spin in a small circle and the bigger machine would spin the three sets of these seats in an even bigger circle. As I stood watching this machine lurch into faster and faster motions traces and lightning bolts were firing out everywhere. Surely all aboard that hell forged contraption would die and most likely I would be going with them when it crashed to the ground if I remained where I then stood.. I staggered out onto the center section of the boardwalk. Sweating and cold at the same time I tried to put one foot in front of the other.
It was at this point reality came completely unhinged for me. Suddenly and without warning I was floating seven stories above my body. I could see for miles out over the ocean. I could look down and see my body making forward progress along the boardwalk. It suddenly became apparent to me that I had to control my body much a puppeteer manipulates a marionette and boy that sucked. I wanted to watch the seagulls circling so close that I could touch them. Suddenly I was everywhere and everything all at one and it made total sense.
On the other had as a puppeteer I was failure for I stubbed my toe and the moment of “all being” was over. Back in my body and barely avoiding a face plant on those creosote soaked planks I realized that if I were to have any chance of surviving the evening I had to get back to the house. “Hey chaperon I have a stomachache so can I go back to the house?” At least that is what I think I said. Given what was going on in and out of my brain it could have been anything.
The rest of the evening had its moments. I tried to take a bath back at the house thinking cool water might help me hold my mental focus. As I sat in the bathtub for the life of me I could not figure out how to use the stopper. Once out of the tub I decided to read but I kept falling into the cover of the book I had opted to read. What I mean by this is that my consciousness was merging with the patterns on the book’s cover. And somehow before the night ended I wound up biting somebody on the ass. We were fully clothed and there was no sexuality involved but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The acid while of a high dose was clean. I think I fell asleep. Who knows I may have just gone into a restive semi-catatonic state.. All I remember of this period was that I was mentally watching the witches from Macbeth stir phosphorescent orange cauldrons. When I came to (or reengaged in linear thought) sometime in the morning I went to the beach and watched the sun move across the sky. Inanimate objects were no longer breathing but I was pretty sure the sun was what was left of a nuclear explosion. And I was still alive.
Fuck Tom Wolfe that was some pretty scary shit.
The bottom line was that I didn’t feel enlightened. Hell, I didn’t feel like I had become one with the universe, but I was different and probably always would be from that moment on. To this day I wonder if there is a remnant of what my conscious self from the night before I took that dose is left in my body. I am not sure but hey I am not unhappy with what I have become. But I may not have needed acid to get here. And you know what else; I don’t believe everything that I read anymore. And one last thing I am pretty sure if you are going to be a real individual it doesn’t come from trying to imitate someone else.
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