What is being posted, I shared first about a year ago. This is a story originally told to me by a dubious friend. As such I neither endorse anything in it nor adopt the narrator's world view. However, the tale was a hoot and so I acted as the scrivener because the details had to be captured in print. The details are somewhat 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 updated 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. In the world I live in today, there are a number of components in the story that should not be left lying around anywhere, especially in cyberspace.
Among those of my generation that read both popular and classic works, certain writers seemed to be touchstones. Vonnegut, Didion, Thompson, Pirsig and Wolfe stand out as key parts of the modern canon. Whether right or wrong, my peers often attempted to emulate the asserted truths reflected in the pages penned by these new apostles. It didn’t matter that these writers were chroniclers of iconoclasts who had no use for their books. It seems that chronicling another's journey is an easier choice than forging ahead with a truly individual life.
Tom Wolfe in his appreciation of the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, talked on about a number of parties staged at Ken Kesey’s La Honda ranch. One of the wildest of these modern bacchanalia involved Kesey’s Pranksters hanging a huge banner out on the edge of the highway that said WELCOME HELLS ANGELS. This was done not knowing if the wild bunch would show. But the Angels showed fully clad in leathers and oozing insanity. Make no mistake the Hell’s Angels were not nice people, not then and not now. As Tom Wolfe recounts, that night was serendipity at its maximum. Terrible and frightening monsters interacted with the generation of love, peace and astral projection and it ended well.
I read the Acid Test during the summer between 7th and 8th grades. It probably wasn’t the most appropriate choice of reading for my impressionable mind. The image of Neal Cassidy flipping his hammer again and again and trying to push further, to reach beyond and break the barrier between true now and perception was electrifying.
As I remember, and it has been years since I read the book, Cassidy always tried to live in the now. He believed that the time it took our neural networks to convey optical and aural information to our brains separated us from the true now.
The implication that I drew from Wolfe was positive, not cautionary. Seemed the right route to me when Cowboy Neal ate every drug he could find to break the barrier down and move him as close to the now as possible. Maybe he got there before the end. Four days before 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 later as a freshman in high school the first time I took LSD.
There was 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 into that swirling cosmic water for the first time together. One of these friends had just returned from Berkeley with a belt filled with 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.
Isn't it funny how the best laid plans of adventurers get shattered? Due to my parents’ intervention, I was not allowed to experience tripping the Leary way. Set and setting, friends, music and a controlled environment were all planned out. Well, it turned out that I had been signed up for a Baptist youth retreat with a hip young minister. My friends were not willing to wait an additional week to share their getting “experienced” with me. Instead, they gave me my hit to take with me and do with as I pleased. In retrospect my choices made at this juncture were probably more in line with Kesey’s tactics than what my friends chose.
This particular church retreat ran Friday and Saturday night at the beach home of one of our church scions. A big old early 20th century cedar shake covered building had a large porch and faced the Ocean which was about ½ block away. At night after the traffic died down and the rowdies fell asleep you could hear the ocean's 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 chaperones. 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 like an E ticket at Disney. On the other hand, fire and damnation wrapped up in a fringe leather jacket awaited 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 told us about the evil of heroin (he took it once and puked), I dropped the tab. Quality control in LSD manufacture 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 submission to God’s will, the walls of that old beach house started to breathe. The breathing was slow at first but quickly picked up in pace. Suddenly, the textures of everything in the room took on an odd blurry but patterned quality. My tactile sense became confused. The carpet felt like gritty and sand filled soft butter. Raising his hands high the forceful zealot shouted “Are you ready to commit your life to the love and care of Jesus Christ our Savior?" About this time my brain screamed 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 anymore; 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 crested over me I did not give in to the altar call. Therefore, I 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 sports car. The green machine sat low on 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 sometime in the past. He told me that 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 I would never take it again. The snake at this point in our conversation looked at me bemused. 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 one. There was this gyroscope thing that had nine carts twisting in circles. Three groups of seats would spin in a small circle and the massive machine would spin three sets of these seats in an even wider circle. As I stood watching this machine lurch into faster and faster movements, lightning bolts and color traces fired out everywhere. Surely all aboard that hell-forged contraption would die. Most likely I would go with them when it crashed to the ground if I remained where I then stood. I staggered out onto the boardwalk's center section. I tried to move forward while sweating and being cold at the same time.
It was at this point that reality came completely unhinged for me. Suddenly and without warning I was floating seven stories above my body. I could see for miles over the ocean. I could look down and see my body moving along the boardwalk. It suddenly became apparent to me that I had to control my body much like a puppeteer manipulating a marionette and boy that sucked. I wanted to watch the seagulls circling so close that I could touch them. I focused my energy and felt my body slowly ascend until I was soaring among the seagulls. I could feel the power of the wind beneath me. I was free. Suddenly I was everywhere and everything all at one and it made total sense.
On the other hand, as a puppeteer, I was failure. I stubbed my toe and suddenly 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 on my way to the house. “Hey chaperone 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. This did not work. 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 bit a young woman, fully clothed as she was, on the ass. 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 slipped into a restive semi-catatonic state. All I remember of this period was mentally watching Macbeth's witches stir phosphorescent orange cauldrons and they were pieces on a chessboard. When I came to (or reengaged in linear thought) sometime in the morning I headed to the beach and watched the sun move across the sky. Inanimate objects were no longer breathing but I was pretty sure the sun as it rose in the sky was the remnants 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 was one with the universe. However, 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 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 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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