This really happened. Names and minor identifying factors have been changed for the usual reasons.
The autumn of 1991 found me kind of spinning in the aether. It was clear my college career was long dead, my band had broken up, and there was nothing at all on my radar when it came to future plans. To make matters worse, Wichita had suffered a major marijuana drought all summer long, and we had taken to dehydrating banana peels just like The Anarchist Cookbook directed, hoping to catch any buzz at all — and failing, of course, as we didn’t have the internet to debunk this nonsense. In July I had sat through nearly the whole length of the first Lollapalooza straight as a board, finally managing to catch a couple puffs of reefer off a nearby stranger in the crowd halfway through Jane’s Addiction’s big finale. Shaky times.
But on the upside, I had only recently broken a protracted streak of quasi-homeless couch surfing by moving into the smallest room at the legendary Funeral Home, a ramshackle Victorian manor that had been converted into artist/student housing some decades before. My unit — located on the back of the adjacent carriage house, and colloquially known as either the “doghouse” or the “lean-to” — consisted of a single room roughly seven feet wide by twenty long, with little cubbies to the side for a toilet and a shower and a built-in workdesk. There was a refrigerator from the 1950s, an apartment-size gas stove, a desk chair and a twin bed in an unusual “extra long” size, which caused my lone fitted sheet to distort awkwardly and pop loose unprovoked any time someone sat on it — which was often, as there was almost no other place to sit. The place was tiny but womblike in a way that suited me at the time. I felt very much at home there in its knotty-pined embrace.
Plus I was working steady, tending bar several nights a week at Kirby’s Beer Store just around the corner. I didn’t make a lot of money, but my rent was only $125 a month — with all utilities included! It wasn’t like I needed much to get by. Most of my days started around noon, when I rose from my slumber and trotted across the street to WSU, where I would drink bottomless cups of subpar coffee with friends who were still enrolled at the university. Kirby’s opened at 3:00 in the afternoon, so I would head over there and have a Polish dog, a basket of locally-made Art’s potato chips (before Mary got equal billing on the bag) and a glass of ice cold soda water with a twist of lime. If I happened to be working that day, this meal was complimentary. Sometimes on other days, whoever was behind the bar would cede me their free shift wiener. I truly appreciated that.
The college radio station, KMUW, had only recently killed off our beloved “After Midnight” program, too — plunging Wichita’s freak scene into icy cold radio silence. In such a decentralized urban sprawl as ours, this one late-night student radio show had been our most vital bulletin board, a virtual meeting ground for a nebulous community in the absence of a physical one. Now there was just quiet and isolation and my depression grew incrementally day by day, filling my insides until I felt I might pop.
It was more than simple depression, though. I had not at all worked through the trauma of my friend Steve’s murder two years before, and had been in and out of psychiatric treatment that yielded little improvement. I suppose at least I was no longer the nigh-catatonic shell-shocked husk of a being I had been during my time rooming with Adil. And my low-pressure lifestyle was helping bit by bit, too. Baby steps.
It was around this time that I had a short fling with a young woman named Mitzi, who had moved to Wichita from the Great Lakes region to attend WSU. We had fun together, and remained friends after, but our affair petered out pretty quickly. In retrospect I am sure my murky mental state didn’t help matters.
Apparently that cloud hanging over me was apparent to everyone. Another friend, concerned I might be reaching the end of my rope, mentioned to me that I could turn myself in to a local hospital that had a psychiatric wing, and maybe that would be a good way to get some more effective help. I called the hospital and talked to somebody about what that might entail. Figuring I had little to lose, I made a plan to check in there in a few days. I asked Mitzi if she would watch my cat while I would be away, and she agreed.
“I’m glad you are going to get some help,” she said.
But just a couple evenings before I intended to admit myself to the hospital, I ran into my buddy Jim at Kirby’s, and he suggested we go over to his place to smoke some weed. The months I had spent living on his sofa prior to getting my apartment at the Funeral Home had brought us pretty close together as friends and I enjoyed his company a lot — plus I was definitely up for getting high. We squeezed ourselves into his tiny little Honda CRX and headed west down 17th Street from Kirby’s.
As we drove, I lost myself for a minute in the memory of the last time I had been in Jim’s car on this stretch of road, maybe a month or two before, when the DJ on T-95, the local FM rock radio station, had come on and made a shocking announcement.
“Hey, here’s new music from a brand new band coming out of Seattle. They’re called Nirvana, and this song is called — I’m not kiddin’ ya — ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.'”
Jim and I both just about snapped our necks turning to look at one another in astonishment. Nirvana? Like “Negative Creep” Nirvana? How was it possible that a grimy little trio of nobodies from the Pacific Northwest had managed to get a song on T-95, rubbing shoulders with the era’s ranking cock rockers, such as Great White and Warrant and Tesla?
The song kicked in and I was shocked at how much bigger and cleaner and fatter it was than anything I had heard from the group’s previous record, Bleach. The intro had both of us bobbing our heads, but as soon as the verse part kicked in, all subdued bass and drums with just those little guitar accents every four bars, Jeff wrinkled his nose. I knew immediately that it wasn’t rockin’ hard enough for his taste.
“Eh,” he said dismissively, “the first part is pretty good anyway.”
Jeff cleared his throat and I snapped back to the present as we passed under the Canal Route.
“Hey, man,” he said in his laid-back cadence, born of a childhood in the Ozarks, “I’m going to visit Rosamund out in Ohio here in a couple days… Do you want to come along for the ride?”
I was completely caught off-guard, but delighted at the proposition. I had become friends with Jim’s girlfriend Rosamund — a fierce young intellectual and poet, formerly known as Tess — while I was living on the couch in their shared apartment, and had missed her since she’d been away at a tony liberal arts school. It would be a treat to visit with her, not to mention just getting a change of scenery from the corner of 17th & Hillside. I had very little money, but wouldn’t really need much — just enough for cigarettes and food for five or six days. I agreed without giving it a second thought.
The day came and I packed a couple t-shirts and pairs of socks and drawers and not much else into my little military surplus bag and dropped by Mitzi’s house to remind her about my cat. When I told her I was going to Ohio with Jim rather than checking into the hospital, she made a stinky face.
“What!? I thought you were checking in at St. Joe?”
“Well, that was the plan,” I replied sheepishly, my eyes cast down to her feet in her doorway. “But I honestly think this could be a good mental health opportunity, too.”
(I really did, you know.)
Mitzi rolled her eyes and sighed and said OK and the next thing I knew, Jim and I had our meager baggage loaded into his tiny car, with one bonus passenger along for the ride: Rosamund’s rat, Idi Amin Dada, who had been left in Jim’s care when Rosamund left for school. The friendly rodent’s glass aquarium home was carefully placed into the compact rear hatch space of the CRX and packed with blankets to help insulate against the autumn chill.
It was supposed to be about a 12-hour drive to our destination, the little town of Sulfur Falls, home of Palmyra Academy. We farted around long enough that it was practically dinner by the time we finally hit the highway headed north to Kansas City, but we assumed we could probably reach Sulfur Falls by 6:00 in the morning at the latest, then crash on arrival. Jim figured there would be less traffic after dark — and hell, we were night owls by nature anyway. No problem.
We were making good time when we stopped at Beto Junction to take a leak and get something to drink. While Jim put gas into the car, I stood off away from the pumps and smoked a cigarette; the air was notably colder here, and I had to fasten my old grey London Fog thrift-store overcoat, the single piece of outerwear I had brought along.
Back in the car and en route to KCMO, Jim popped a Black Sabbath cassette into the stereo.
“Hey,” he said, “I have one hit left of that acid from Paul’s bachelor party. Do you want to split it? Just do a half-hit each?”
Now, I had been just about the only person I knew who had missed that party — because I was on shift at the completely empty Kirby’s that night. But I had heard from several attendees that this particular strain of LSD was pretty damn good, and I was sure sorry I had missed the fun.
“Well, it’ll keep us awake, anyway,” I replied. “And it’ll reduce the chances that the drive is boring.”
Jim produced a piece of folded cellophane, the outer wrapper from a cigarette package, inside which were two little half-squares of blotter paper, printed with a bit of some inscrutable image. I put one in my mouth, Jim did the same with the other. We drove on, Ozzy wailing, “Oh no no please God help me!“
The daylight surrendered to an impenetrable dapple of headlight glare and oblique shadow.
Just as we reached the first hinterlands of Kansas City — Gardner heading into Olathe — we ran into the southern edge of the massive winter storm system that had been pummeling the Great Lakes region for several days. Somehow we hadn’t counted on it moving this far south. Snow on the road drifted deeper as we went, and conditions got dicier. I saw an odd huge mound of snow piled on the right-hand shoulder, and as we approached, I detected the hazy glow of red hazard lights dimly blinking through from underneath.
That’s a fucking car.
Oh, and right about here is where the acid started taking effect. The swirling snow blew in impossibly-complicated fractals horizontally across the entirety of my field of vision, across the car’s truncated red hood, across the ever-rushing highway, strangely bereft of traffic, as though most everyone else had got the memo but us. I looked at Jim, his eyes locked onto the road like twin laser beams. Friends sometimes tweaked him about his resemblance to John Lennon, with his long, sandy blond hair, thin face and little round spectacles, but at this moment, in the acid-tinged darkness, he really looked like the late Beatle. I almost said so, but he was concentrating so hard on getting us across the frozen labyrinth of asphalt that was Kansas City, I didn’t dare break his focus.
And suddenly we plunged out of the sprawl and into the blackest, whitest night I have ever seen.
The drive eastward across Missouri was positively dreadful, its only concession toward grace being a general absence of traffic on the road. Even at an average speed of only perhaps 30 or 35 miles per hour, our sure-footed, low-slung, front-wheel-drive little Honda had trouble maintaining traction. The normally-smooth asphalt, transformed into a relief map of hard ice formations and crooked ruts in the ever-drifting snow, jerked the wheel unpredictably left and right against Jim’s iron grip the whole time. I had been a little bummed at the start of this trip that I wouldn’t be driving — my license was suspended — but now I was quite content to be the passenger, especially considering the acid trip was just reaching its peak.
Jim was one of the most resourceful people I ever knew in my life, that rare strain of artist talented in both aesthetics and mechanics, and I marveled as he rolled a perfect joint in his lap with one hand, never taking his eyes off the road, in the dim and cramped evirons of the CRX. How does he do that!? I would have been hard-pressed to roll a smokable doob using both hands, in full-spectrum daylight, in a laboratory setting, stone sober, with a gun to my head. Jim fired up the spliff, took a deep toke and handed it to me.
“Maybe this will take the edge off.”
We smoked probably half the joint; Jim stubbed it in the ashtray to save for later. The Butthole Surfers’ “Cherub” chugged and clattered ominously on the cassette deck and we rode in silence as the fresh high from the weed washed over us. Neither of us spoke. Without warning, Jim’s right hand suddenly snaked over to the volume knob and turned the music off.
“That’s too much, man,” was all he said. He didn’t have to explain it to me.
The unrelenting north wind blew colder and colder as we drove, and our windshield kept fogging over, even with the defroster blasting. A thin layer of ice began forming on the outside of the glass. If the acid wasn’t already giving us tunnel vision, we were sure getting a dose now. Jim found he could activate his windshield washer squirter and the wipers would clear off at least the better portion of the encroaching ice, but just about 100 miles outside Kansas City, the reservoir ran dry — putting us suddenly in very real danger of losing visibility altogether.
“There’s a giant truck stop up ahead here somewhere,” Jim said. “Hopefully they’ll have some washer fluid.” And sure enough, just a minute later, we saw a sign advertising the Midway Travel Plaza, about 20 more miles ahead. Jim redoubled his resolve, and after what seemed like an interminable grind across the tundra, the lights of the absolutely massive truck stop complex appeared before us.
Jim pulled up to a gas pump and I opened my door to get out. The terrific Arctic wind whipped snow into the interior of the tiny car, each little crystalline flake biting right into the skin like tiny Chinese throwing stars. While Jim gassed up, I trotted toward the front door of the building, nearly blown off my feet which each unsure step on the hard icy concrete.
And then I was inside, and the door shut behind me, and I was on a movie set, or aboard a starship, or mounted on a glass specimen slide under some immense microscope, or maybe all of those at once. The air was sharply still in comparison to outdoors. It was just impossibly bright in there, and strangely both noisy and quiet too. Kathy Mattea keened overhead — Eighteen wheeeeeeeeeels and a dozen roses… Ten more miles on his four-day run… An earthy deep male laugh erupted from some unseen corner of the room, then subsided into a murmur of indecipherable speech. The chuff of ice being dispensed into a foam cup, the shllrsllshh of the soda that followed. A tinny, scratchy National Weather Service radio feed droning on about the conditions outside. A beeping cash register, the ambient woosh of the HVAC system, the jangle of a set of keys dropped onto the hard tile floor — a smorgasbord of sounds, all smothered in a healthy ladling of 60-cycle hum from the flickering banks of fluorescent tubes overhead.
There were more people in that one room than we had seen on the road the whole way from Kansas City, like probably a dozen or 15 bodies within view of the front door. I was surprised to see so many folks out at this time of night, especially given the weather, but most of them looked to be over-the-road truckers taking shelter. Sure better in here than out there.
I went into the bathroom and found a secluded stall. A thorough pee shiver shook me head to toe as I luxuriated in a long, healthy piss. I wondered where I was; I mean, I knew my location on the map, but the acid had my mind extrapolating physical space into multiple dimensions beyond this vale, rendering the flat X and Y of simple cartography quaint. My senses — the olfactory perhaps more than any other — told me my material form was pissing in this truck stop toilet in the vicinity of Columbia, Missouri — but where was I?
“Hey, man, you in here?”
It was Jim’s voice. I flushed the toilet and exited the stall just then and saw him standing near the door across the long, stark bathroom from me. He waved, then headed over to a stall himself, looking much farther away than I realistically knew he was. I opened my mouth to speak. I’m not even sure now what I said, but I remember being surprised by the sound of my own voice, a booming honk that echoed off the countless hard surfaces in the men’s room and took what seemed like minutes to decay into silence. My reflection in the nearby mirror flinched at the sound, and I turned to look at myself there for the first time.
Observing oneself in a mirror during a psychedelic trip is generally acknowledged as inadvisable, and I did my best to just check for obvious crumbs in my facial hair or other dishevelments before averting my gaze to the sink below. I turned on the water and let it get almost unbearably hot, then rubbed my soapy hands together a long time under its sultry flow. The sensation was sumptuous and I didn’t want to stop, but we were already literally hours behind schedule — and we weren’t even halfway to our destination yet. That storm outside wasn’t going anywhere, either. We needed to go.
I bought the biggest cup of hot coffee the truck stop offered, doctored up with powdered non-dairy creamer and sugar, and a packaged honey bun pastry on the side. I figured I better get one more pack of smokes, too. Jim and I looked at one another, sighed in perfect synchronicity, then charged together back into the ripping black bitterness outside. A minute later we were back on I-70 and heading straight into the absolute worst of it.
The road turned into a vast sea — apt, perhaps, considering this is the same weather system that The Perfect Storm was later based on — and from Columbia to St. Louis, we crawled along at the speed of a pedalboat. Any time Jim thought maybe he could pick up the pace a little bit, a huge semi-truck would pass us on the left at great speed, its trailer listing to and fro in the wind like a vast ocean freighter, threatening to capsize our teensy little dinghy. One big rig roared past scarcely a half-yard off our port side, causing the CRX to lurch in its wake — then we watched in horror as it slid off the road ahead and came to a stop well off the shoulder. Along the way we saw several others sitting motionless on the side of the road, the countless lights marking the edges of their rigs straining in vain against nature’s dark, frigid fury.
Jim had refilled his windshield washer reservoir back at the truck stop, but the squirter nozzles froze over, rendering them inoperable. We finally adopted a more caveman-like approach to de-icing the windshield: Each time it started getting bad again, I would roll down my window, hold the gallon jug of washer fluid outside, and splash it as best I could across the glass while Jim ran the wipers. It wasn’t a great solution, but it did get us down the road. Hours passed, and bit by bit, the wind slowly subsided, almost in sync with the effects of the LSD. As the first glow of sunrise appeared on the horizon, we were relieved to know St. Louis loomed just ahead.
What we didn’t count on was the whole population of that city being stuck on the highway on their way to work that morning — in the immediate aftermath of the biggest winter storm in years. We intended to take I-270, the local spur that routes traffic around the north edge of the city, but when we noticed the sign for the exit, there were so many cars piled up so deep in every lane, we couldn’t get over there in time. We were forced to stay on the main interstate, all the way through the center of town. For nearly four hours we sat mostly motionless on I-70, occasionally moving forward a few car lengths, then stopping again. The sun burned off some of the cloud cover and it was pleasant enough that we were able to put our windows down and smoke cigarettes in the fresh air as we sat there on the highway. A couple times we chatted briefly with people similarly stuck in adjacent lanes. This dragged on and on, with no hope of escape in sight.
Around ten in the morning, the gridlock released us from its grip and Jim took the first exit where we could use a public bathroom. My bladder was positively bursting and I’m sure his was too. We rolled up to the McDonald’s in Collinsville, Illinois and stepped out of the car for the first time in something like six-odd hours. My legs were aluminum beneath me as I stood up and clanked clumsily toward the building, and I could tell just where the metal fatigue was setting in. So I guess the acid hadn’t entirely worn off.
Inside the restaurant, the ambient sound was so strange, like listening with a cardboard wrapping paper tube over each ear. The constant hissing, whooshing sounds of air conditioning and vent hoods and fryers combined into a single out-of-phase wash so loud it was almost overwhelming. Jim and I relieved ourselves in the men’s room then headed to the counter to order some food. I was delighted that we had made it just before Egg McMuffin cutoff time, but when the young woman behind the register asked me for my order, she sounded like an adult in a Peanuts TV special, and I laughed out loud. To make it even more awkward, when I responded, my own voice sounded alien, too, like someone had been messing with the graphic equalizer in my head. I was trying not to laugh again but I turned to look at Jim, and that was all it took for both of us to crack up like a couple naughty schoolboys. The poor cashier just looked at us like we were nuts.
I ordered both an orange juice and a coffee, but only really had room for one drink in the car, so I took a moment outside the door of the McDonald’s to chug the whole cup of juice — and I swear to God, the second it entered my body I felt it permeate my cells, my molecules, my atoms. A warm, robust, golden glow of goodness and healthy energy emanated from my throat, spreading through my entire head, down through my stomach into my torso, my limbs, my digits, every single iota of me. I had never felt so instantly invigorated in my life.
We drove across the street to a gas station to fill up, and Jim used a pay phone to call Rosamund, who must have thought we had died by that point. Then it was back in the car, and back on the road. We had now been traveling for so many hours, still awake from the previous morning, still riding the tail end of the LSD comet — and we had maybe six hours yet to go. But the weather was vastly improved over the night before, and we made quite good time across Illinois and into Indiana.
By the time we stopped again for gas in Indianapolis, Jim was looking beat. I told him I was willing to drive, even without my license, so he could get some rest. What was the worst that could happen? I get a ticket? So I took the wheel for the remainder of the trip into Ohio, while Jim nodded in and out of sleep in the passenger seat.
At this point it had been a minute since I’d been behind the wheel of any car at all, and I found the zippy little Honda quite a blast to drive. The weather remained amiable the rest of the way, and at about two in the afternoon, I pulled into a parking spot on the Palmyra campus. Rosamund found us and we groggily unloaded Idi Amin Dada, who had endured all this quietly in the hatch of the car. As we dragged ourselves inside the women’s dormitory building, I saw several gray squirrels darting around the grounds, a different species than the ones I grew up with in Kansas. I chuckled as they scurried from one spot to another, burying nuts against the coming cold.
“Buckle up, fellas,” I said under my breath. “It’s lookin’ like a rough winter.”
Fifteen minutes later Jim was off with Rosamund in her dorm room and I was drifting off to sleep on a sofa in a lounge down the hall. We had several days of exploring central Ohio ahead of us, but after 20 hours fighting our way across the howling frozen Midwest in a Hot Wheels car, getting some rest was the one and only thing on our minds. I believe we earned it.
Please stay tuned for part two, coming soon.
