Everything in this story really happened. Names and minor identifying factors have been changed for the usual reasons.
“Hey, man,” said Sid Garrison, his thin face breaking into a wide grin, “Joe has hits of acid for five bucks, you want some?”
It was a Saturday night at the Y-Not, a college bar just up 21st street from Wichita State University, and though early in the evening, with plenty of summer sunlight still streaming in whenever the front door opened, the interior was already dark and noisy and smoky. I wasn’t sure I heard him right.
“I don’t know, man,” I replied hesitantly. ” I’ve never dropped acid before.”
“Well how about this? We drop together and then you can keep an eye on me, and I’ll keep an eye on you.”
In the end, that was all it took to decide it for me.
Mind you, I had long been interested in psychedelics, having read extensively about their history in my considerable study of 1960s-70s counterculture as a teen. But I had been a good kid when it came to experimenting with drugs myself — I drank alcohol a bare handful of times before the end of high school and never smoked pot or even cigarettes until college days. Now, a year after moving to the “big city” and more or less immediately dropping out of WSU, I was drinking and smoking both tobacco and weed regularly.
And now here was Sid, the slightly older townie rich kid who had taken me under his wing, telling me I could try the fabled LSD — right here at the Y-Not, right this minute, for only five bucks.
We approached Joe, an impossibly good-looking Cali surfer dude who had somehow been supplanted to Kansas, perfect blonde hair and huaraches and puka shells intact. He was perpetually stoned and smiling with teeth that glinted white even in the haze of the bar, and though he seemed out of place, he never for a second gave the impression he was anything less than entirely comfortable. Sid chatted him up sotto voce while I glanced nervously over my shoulder, and a moment later we were walking back to our seats with our bounty: the cellophane from a package of cigarettes, inside which were two tiny squares of off-white blotter paper, adjoined at a perforation. He fished them out, tore the two apart and dropped one into my palm.
“What do I do with it?” I asked. Sid popped his into his mouth.
“Just kind of hold it under your tongue for a while,” he replied. “It absorbs right into your mouth, then you can swallow it.”
Into my mouth it went.
“Buckle up, dude,” Sid said, smiling from ear to ear.
Then, for a while, nothing happened. I started wondering if it was going to work at all. After all I had read and heard about the astounding power of psychedelics, it seemed hard to believe that the quarter-inch square of paper in my mouth could possibly produce such profound effects. Sid and I hung out at the bar, drinking and chatting up some of the regulars. I had only a few months before experienced alcohol poisoning in this very room, so on this night I was sticking with Coca-Cola — but Sid was hammering down Flaming Dr. Peppers like nobody’s business. Normally I would have been working the door, taking cover charges and checking IDs, but I had specifically asked off so I could enjoy the band That Statue Moved, who would be playing later in the evening. It was sure to be a full house — and now I was set to go on my impromptu maiden psychedelic voyage as well. Bonus!
The sun went down and more people streamed into the club. The background cacophony of jukebox music and loud-talking drinkers started taking on a different timbre, like a guitar signal run through a phaser, and a strange physical sensation emerged from my chest. I looked over at Sid and his grin was at full Cheshire Cat. He motioned to me to follow him and I did — into the men’s room, where it was quieter.
“You feel it comin’ on?” he asked, chuckling as he spoke. I nodded. “Hey, check this out,” he said, swatting at the light switch. The room plunged into complete darkness and before my eyes appeared a background wallpaper of geometric patterns, faint but pulsing gently in the sudden black. And then an orange streak crossed my vision left to right, leaving a persistent line hanging in midair behind it. I realized it was Sid waving his cigarette around and I held up my own lit smoke and did the same. Holy moly! Wherever I moved the glowing tip of my butt, a line in my vision remained long after. I made a heart shape with it and guffawed.
A blast of noise and light erupted as the door opened, breaking our reverie. With a loud click the light came on and I was surprised to be reminded that we were in a public men’s room. I had forgotten entirely.
“What are you queers doing in here?” asked the intruder into our space. It was Sid’s pal Shamus, a very large and almost albino-white bodybuilder with a face like a Campbell’s Soup Kid.
“Trippin’ balls,” Sid replied with a laugh.
“Oh shit, for real? Who’s holdin’?”
“Surfer Joe.”
The two of them went off to see Joe and I returned to my seat at the bar and ordered another Coke. Every surface I looked at seemed to crawl with vibrating patterns, revealing a hidden underworld of secret life, revealing itself now to me for the first time. The crowd in the room grew denser and the noise level intensified and I was looking at and hearing it all from inside a cocoon, a submarine, an egg sac, a jelly jar, one of the pods from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was in it but not of it, inside a 3D movie, on the Holodeck. I kept hearing laughter above the din, and I would look in its direction and see open mouths and flashing teeth and heads bobbing, eyes squinted in alcohol-fueled gaiety, and I smiled too. I felt a warm, pleasant buzzing sensation all over, and when I took a sip of my soda pop it crackled with life inside my mouth, so cold and sharp with bubbles yet greasy with the sweet slickness of corn syrup. No cola had ever tasted so cola to me in my life. I sat there a long time letting everything wash over my little bubble.
This sense of isolation was suddenly and perfunctorily shattered when Tina, a regular at the club, leaned down to say hi to me. I must have jumped because she backed up a little and put her hand to her chest.
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I scare you?” she asked, her face a mask of contrition.
“A little,” I replied. “It’s not your fault, I’m kind of… up in my head right now.”
She laughed and ordered a drink and we made some small talk for a few minutes and I was rather pleased to learn I was still capable of it. She didn’t seem to know that I was on LSD, so that was probably good, right?
And then the band started playing. I got up from the bar and walked over to the other half of the building where the stage was and found a table toward the back of the room. I was wishing my friends were there, but Karl was on a trip to Texas and Bob and Steve were chilling downtown drinking cheap beer at the duplex Steve and Karl shared. I half-expected to see Harvey but he did not materialize. Sid had wandered off with Shamus, having clearly already forgotten our agreement to keep an eye on one another. This was looking like a solo mission.
Maybe I’m better off alone anyway. As it turned out, I was enjoying myself and none of the horrors of LSD as depicted in ABC After School Specials appeared to be on the horizon for me. This was an experience to soak in and learn from, and I was here for it.
That Statue Moved played all the alternative rock hits of the day, which meant a solid playlist of songs by R.E.M., the Smiths, the Cure, the Cult, the Replacements, the English Beat, Psychedelic Furs and other darlings of the 120 Minutes set. This was my exact favorite music in the world at the time, and these guys were really good at it. They were the first professional musicians I really knew up close and personal, and hanging around them helped demystify for me the idea of playing in a working band; in fact the very first time I played on a stage in my own band, maybe a year later, was as their guest. And on this particular night, they sounded fantastic.
I had of course read plenty about the effects psychedelics have on listening to music, but it’s really something one has to encounter in the first person to fully understand. I could hear every single individual element of the sound — each sssst of the hi-hat, the zzzhhhhht of a nylon guitar pick sliding on a wound steel string (and then the digital delay repeating that sound quieter each time for another second and a half), every thd of the kick drum, all the parts of the bass line disassembled in three-dimensional space around me like an exploded diagram. Before long I saw some pretty young women I recognized on the dance floor, and was compelled to join them.
So then there I was, dancing my ass off on the packed floor, sweat flying my from long stringy hair as I shook my head, my love beads bouncing in time beneath my open vest. (I dressed like a hippie in those days.) I might have been a gawky, goony, tubby gangle of country boy — but I loved to boogie, and this was the peak dancing moment of my life to date. The band played one smash hit after another and I just keep moving, grabbing the hands of people I saw around me, smiling and laughing and drawing them into my wild, free choreomania.
And then I saw a face I knew, completely out of context. Was that really Jinx Blanton from my old hometown standing over to the side of the dance floor? But wait… Was that Clem Grimes, my pal from elementary school days, right next to her? I stumbled through the tangle of wild jiggling limbs around me to reach them.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here!” I exclaimed over the music. I really couldn’t. I hadn’t seen either of them since high school let out two years before, and though I could easily imagine free-spirited Jinx hanging out in a club like this, the more button-down Clem was clearly out of his element. Jinx gestured to the pair of Black girls at her side, who I had noticed but didn’t realize had come in with my old friends.
“These are the twins, Pam and Sam Jenkins,” Jinx told me, and I gave each a little nod and handshake. They did not look like twins — one petite and thin, the other tall and heavyset — but they were both clearly amused by their surroundings and I was happy to make their acquaintances. “We were bored tonight and decided to drive up here and see what you were doing.”
“That’s funny,” I replied, “because I what I am doing is acid!”
The group in front of me made four different faces, ranging from tickled to confused to alarmed to skeptical in varying proportion. We did our best to chat a minute, then Clem and the Jenkins twins went off to get drinks and Jinx and I hit the dance floor. Within seconds I was right back in the zone.
In the middle of one of my favorite jams, the Stones Roses’ “She Bangs the Drums,” another face appeared: It was Vince, one of the other guys who hung around and sometimes worked at the club. He steadily wormed his way through the thick crowd on the dance floor until he managed to lock eyes with me. He held a hand up to one ear, miming the sign for “telephone” with his pinky and thumb.
“Phone for you!” Vince shouted above the roar of the band. Jinx shot me a quizzical look, and I just shrugged and followed Vince back over to the quieter side of the bar where the house phone sat. I picked up the handset, stuck a finger in my other ear against the noise and said, “Hello?”
“Hey, man, it’s Steve,” came the tinny voice over the line. “Bob and I are bored and want to come see the band but we’re too drunk to drive. Can you come get us?”
Within minutes Jinx, the two sisters, Clem and I all hopped into Jinx’s tiny little Pontiac T-1000 — an analog to the Chevy Chevette — heading down to Mathewson Manor to pick up my boys. When we got to the duplex I bounded like a puppy across the lawn to the front door, which opened immediately. Steve and Bob had their shoes on and were ready to rock.
“Dudes, I’m on acid,” I said as we walked toward the car.
“Get the fuck out,” said Steve. He stopped short and turned to look at me, very close, squinting into my eyeballs. He then waved his hand back and forth in front of my face. “Well, you’re not dead. Can you get us some?”
On the way back to the bar there were seven of us crammed into the wee Pontiac, some piled on the laps of others. Bob and Steve were well-lubricated with Milwaukee’s Best Light and most likely a fair amount of Mexican schwag weed too, and the conversation among friends old and new was bubbly and hilarious the whole way back to the club. We spilled out of the car like clowns and stumbled inside the bar and I went immediately to find Surfer Joe.
Here is where I made a huge mistake.
I had been on this acid trip at this point for probably two hours, maybe three, and it was going great guns. But I figured that since Bob and Steve —both also psychedelic virgins — were about to drop right now, I should drop another hit now too, in order to come down at the same time as them. As it turns out, this is not how acid math works. I hit up Joe for three hits — one for Bob, one for Steve, and one more for me.
Soon my friends were dosed up too and as the evening wore on, it was all laughs and warm fuzzies and the ultimate surround-sound musical experience of my whole life. I was so hot and sweaty I could feel the heat coming off my body in an aura of redorangeyellow waves. I was positively drenched with sweat, my hair and clothes sticking to me like a man caught in a downpour, but I didn’t care. I was lost in bliss, and I danced without stopping until the end of the night.
The band played its last encore and the club started emptying out. My friends from the old hometown bid their adieus and left, and I spotted Bob and Steve at a table all the way at the back of the room. Steve was nonchalantly chugging from a pitcher of beer. Bob was sitting motionless, staring at his palm intently.
“Let’s go down to Cliff’s place and hang for a while before you try to drive us home,” Steve suggested. The bar was about a block south of the apartment complex known as Shadow Lake, where we partied from time to time with this weird dude Cliff and his brothers. I decided I would move my car down the block right then, so it would be ready for us when we decided to go back downtown to Mathewson Manor. Steve nodded and said, “OK, Bob and I will just walk over and meet you in a minute.”
By this time it was nearly 2:00 in the morning and a surprise chill in the air had produced a gumbo-thick fog that rendered everything invisible beyond only a few yards. After being in the loud enclosed environment for so long, walking out of the club into the dark and opaque silence was jarring. I made my way to where my 1963 Rambler station wagon — painted like the American flag — sat parked at the curb. I got in, engaged the ignition, pushed in the clutch, moved the column shifter into first and started down the block. What a wild scene it was inside the car, all my senses revved beyond redline. I smelled the ancient horsehair in the seats, the acrid tang of exhaust, the somehow weirdly comforting essence of gasoline. I could hear every single explosion inside the engine block, thousands per minute, purring in cadence, a disciplined cadre of cats in lockstep formation. The car floated forth effortlessly down the block and I was where I intended to be within seconds.
I got out of the car and looked back up the road toward the club, rendered entirely invisible in the white shroud that engulfed all around me. Streetlights managed to illuminate small spheres in their immediate vicinities but all else was obscured, and the silence grew louder and louder in my ears. Was that something coming my way? Someone? Yes, the shadow of Steve’s tall, slender frame materialized from the miasma and grew closer until we both stood on the little wooden footbridge outside Cliff’s apartment building.
“Where’s Bob?” I asked.
“I dunno,” said Steve. “He was right behind me a minute ago.”
I jumped up and down on the bridge and it wiggled beneath me and Steve chuckled and started doing it too. Soon we had a rhythm going and the thing wobbled and bucked beneath our feet and I started singing:
“Callin’ out around the world! Are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s here and the time is right for dancin’ in the street!”
Steve laughed out loud and joined in the chorus, clomping up and down on the bridge and singing along. “All we need is music! Sweet music! There’ll be music everywhere!” Looking back I am sure people in nearby apartments could hear us, and we quite possibly woke some up. But at that moment we were the only two beings in the world, two infinitesimal dots bobbing along cloaked in the quiet, cool womb of a cloud.
Two? Weren’t there three of us?
Just then emerged a slow-moving, lurching, hunched figure from the impenetrable veil of fog. It was Bob — and it seemed clear he was in distress. We trotted over to meet him and give him a hand and I came to the sudden realization that an emergency situation had fallen upon us at this most inopportune time, and we were going to have to do our best to play it straight despite all three of us being on our first acid trips.
It would take us a while to piece together exactly what happened, but the gist of it was more or less this: As Bob and Steve were on the way out the door of the bar, another patron, dressed in redneck gear, had insulted Steve’s haircut as queer, and Steve had shouted something no doubt withering back in his direction. The cowboy stalked the two, and catching up to Bob first, knocked him down and kicked the shit out of his head and ribs with steel-toed boots. Steve, lost in his own foggy lysergic reverie, didn’t even know it had happened.
The next thing I remember is being behind the wheel of the Rambler, hoping beyond hope that I wasn’t driving erratically as we made our way quickly to the nearest hospital — where, coincidentally, Bob’s father happened to be a practicing physician, though fortunately not on the night shift. I was on twice as much LSD as my two friends, but somehow the gravity of the task at hand gave me a laser-like focus on the road, and before I knew it, we were pulling into the ER parking lot.
Inside, the lady at the admittance desk told us only one person could go into the treatment room and sit with Bob. Steve opted to accompany him, and I took a spot alone in the fluorescent-lit waiting room, where my only companion was a small TV mounted up on the wall, its tuner set to CNN Headline News. I heaved a sigh and set in for a wait.
Over the next several hours, the following things happened:
U.S. Speaker of the House Jim Wright, embroiled in an ethics scandal, came out of his house on the TV and when confronted by reporters shoving microphones in his face, he looked straight at me personally and said, “You’re on acid.”
A bunch of cops and paramedics swarmed into the building, rolling a gurney right past me. On it was an unconscious young Black man with a bloody knife sticking out of his head. It was horrific enough on its own, but the fact that the knife’s handle had been broken off, leaving only the metal tang with two loose rivets dangling from it, somehow lent it an extra measure of malevolence.
I was hungry, having only eaten a single slice of Drago’s pizza over the previous 12 hours or so, and bought a box of Lemonheads candy out of a vending machine. When I returned to my chair and opened the box, inside the end flap was printed SAY NO TO DRUGS. Even the candy knows…
I went to take a pee and afterward washed my face and hands in the sink. I saw myself in the mirror for the first time and Jesus Christ did I look like shit. I was a fat and greasy kid, zits, long and limp hair that had been soaked in sweat all night, bad posture. I had heard people advise not to look at oneself while on hallucinogens, and now I knew why. And just as I was staring at my own face really hard, the bathroom door swung open, and in walked a cop. Once again I surprised myself with my ability to keep it together considering my mental state, and when the officer said hi, I readily engaged him and we ended up chatting a minute. He asked why I was there and I told him some pud had sucker-punched my buddy outside a bar and he empathized.
I was starting to feel like I was naturally good at being on acid.
Finally, at around 5:00 in the morning, Steve and Bob emerged from their inner sanctum, still wide-eyed and buzzing with energy. Bob’s injuries, it turned out, were painful but minor, and the only treatment he received was some over-the-counter pain medicine. Exiting the hospital, we found the fog had mostly lifted. We piled into the Rambler and minutes later were safely back at our home base, the duplexes at Mathewson Manor. I pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition and heaved a big sigh of relief.
And then, no sooner than I exited the car, I felt a curiously overwhelming wave of nausea rise from nowhere. I was surprised to find myself vomiting — just once, a single unexpected eruption. I looked to see what had come up and noted there was little substance to the foamy, lemony emesis that had spewed from my mouth into the grass next to the driveway. Just as quickly as it had come, the churning in my gut went and did not return. Most curious.
Though we had all been up a good 20 or more hours at this point, none of the three of us was ready for sleep. We sat on the edge of the front porch in the pre-dawn gloom with cans of Milwaukee’s Best Light, and Steve dragged one of his immense old 1970s stereo speakers over to the door opening and put on a CD of Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos — loud. We talked amongst ourselves, the two of them filling me on on their own private adventure inside the ER, and me telling them all the stuff that had happened to me on my solo journey in the waiting room. As the sun started peeking over the horizon to the east, we noticed just how crooked the ancient garage of the home across the street had become as it succumbed slowly to gravity, and our conversation turned to predictions of the structure’s inevitable date of complete collapse.
And through/over it all was the Bach, with cellos and violas and violins and harpsichords bubbling and fluttering over one another, conjuring an ever-changing, pulsing, living impressionist painting across the landscape of my consciousness. Though I had never spent much time absorbing classical music, the gorgeous sounds washed over me and through me and when I closed my eyes I entered a fantastical movie of the mind, my own private Koyaanisqatsi in which I floated disembodied along a rushing country stream, beautiful clouds slipping by overhead at great speed, perfectly safe and profoundly serene.
Just then a police cruiser idled down the block and came to a dead stop in the street in front of us. The cop rolled down his window and hollered, “Hey, fellas, it’s six in the morning, why don’t you turn down the Beethoven?”
Steve lifted his beer in a toast to the officer and replied, “That’s Bach, my good man.”
The cop chuckled. “Beethoven, Bach, Johnny B. Goode — take it down a couple notches, all right?”
We all laughed and the cop drove away as Steve got up to lower the volume on the stereo.
It wasn’t long thereafter when Bob and Steve both started yawning in turn. They were coming down and growing tired — but I was still tripping pretty hard. Bob eventually drove back to his place; Steve was already home and put himself to bed. This was during the period when I was living back in my old hometown and spending weekends in Wichita, so my reserved sleeping spot was right there on the couch in the duplex’s living room. But I wasn’t ready to crash.
I got down on the carpeted floor and sat cross-legged in front of the stereo, a stack of mismatched 1970s and ’80s components inside a rather ugly modern plywood cabinet with a glass door, and plugged in the pair of big old-school headphones I found off to the side. Thumbing through the various CDs, cassettes and LPs there I came across a vinyl album by the hardcore punk band Bad Posture, which I put on. Knowing they were most famous for their song “G.D.M.F.S.O.B.,” I dropped the needle on that track and settled in with the album cover in hand. This music had more or less exactly the opposite effect of the Bach — it started rather slow but very heavy, ominous, threatening, and the brutal drawing on the album cover only served to multiply the sense of malice pulsing into my ears through the cans. A crudely-rendered figure in a loincloth with red-rimmed eyes, large dangling earrings and bared teeth raises a bloody knife toward the viewer — and I flashed back to the knife sticking out of that man’s head at the hospital the night before. Only a few hours had passed since then, yet it felt a million miles away and long, long ago.
After the long, slow intro, the song kicked into overdrive, with the lyric “Goddamn motherfuckin’ sonofabitch!” repeated over and over on top of the double-time roar of the band. The palpable hostility I felt from the record suddenly shifted to humor, and I guffawed out loud at the absurdity of what I was hearing. At the end of the song, I switched up the vibe to something more consciously psychedelic — the Dukes of Stratosphear compilation CD Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, which was packed end-to-end with modern songs performed and recorded in the style of vintage 1960’s UK psychedelic acts like early Pink Floyd, Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles, the Small Faces, etc. It was a perfect match for my mood and headspace, and I listened to the entire thing before I budged from the spot.
I had brought with me a couple pairs of clean underpants and t-shirts for the weekend, and took the opportunity to enjoy a hot shower in Steve and Karl’s bathroom. It seemed as though every single drop of water hit me separately — one hot, one cold, multiplied by thousands and millions in a never-ending torrent of giddy, tingling sensation.
The day slipped by quietly with Steve slumbering away in his bedroom and me poking around the living room unable to sleep at all. By early afternoon, the more intense visual and experiential effects of the acid had receded almost entirely, and I was finally starting to feel sleepy — but my brain was still firing away like crazy. I took a long walk around the neighborhood, ultimately parking myself for some time on a swingset in an empty nearby schoolyard. I smoked cigarettes and looked at the sky and swung lazily to and fro, wondering what was coming next for me.
In the past nine months or so, I had moved away from my childhood home only to fail as a college student and slink back to my grandma’s house with my tail between my legs. I did not foresee trying school again, and had literally no prospects at all for work, outside of checking IDs at the door of the Y-Not, which barely paid me enough to drive up and spend the weekends with my friends in the city. As it did so often, the idea of suicide presented itself — but having long lived with that ideation, I swatted it away.
And then something happened: I found I was looking at my thoughts from a remove, observing them without investing in them in a way I had never imagined before. I considered the idea that maybe even without school I could still be a successful writer, or musician, or publisher. Or maybe I’d end up another anonymous schlub, letting my talents go to waste as I worked some bullshit job for the rest of my life, struggling to make ends meet. Maybe I’d hit the lottery. All paths were potentially open, and in a true moment of Zen, I examined all these and more without getting upset, or sad, or feeling hopeless. Maybe that was the greatest success I could hope for. It would be years before I would eventually fall into Buddhist practice, but right there on that playground I believe a seed was planted, and that LSD played a part. I returned to the duplex feeling better about my life.
Steve finally woke up in the middle of the afternoon. He had consumed much more alcohol than I had the night before and was hungover in the extreme. I was getting really tired by about that time and told him I was going to go ahead and head back to Ark City. We embraced on the porch on my way out.
“That was quite a fucking ride, my friend,” Steve said. I had to agree.
Before I left town I had to swing by the club to pick up some cash I had coming to me, and I walked in just in time to meet an older local artist fellow who chatted me up and was even kind enough to buy me a burger from the Sonic across the street. This was most especially appreciated, as I hadn’t eaten anything in 24 hours but that lone pizza slice and the box of candy I threw up later. The fellow and I had a nice talk, only marred by my waning energy level.
“I hate to eat and run, but I am fading fast,” I told him. I shook his hand and said bye to the lone staffer behind the bar, walked out to my Rambler and pointed its nose toward Cowley County. It was a miracle I stayed awake down the lonesome empty Sunday evening backroads but I made it back to my grandmother’s house in good time, all in one piece. I gave the old lady a peck on the cheek and told her I was turning in early.
I fell into my soft, cool sheets and sank into a deep and dreamless sleep that stretched well into the middle of the next day. I woke a changed boy.
