I took LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) for the first time during the summer of 1985 with my friend DC. It was paper blotter, called "Paradise" and was the genuine thing: LSD-25. We bought it from JN, so we trusted him. I think we bought 5 hits at $3 per hit. Reflecting back on that first time in comparison to later times, I would estimate each hit was about 200 mics. We split our purchase into 2.5 squares each. Then we each folded and ripped off 1 of those squares and placed them on the tips of our tongues. We chewed them until the paper was fairly dissolved and then swallowed it. Later I learned that you can just swallow it. Even then, sometimes it gets stuck to the side of your throat. Or, even worse, you THINK that its stuck to the side of your throat...for the next three hours. Luckily this was not to be our destiny that night.
As I mentioned, we each took 1 hit. This left us each with 1.5 hits. Another aspect to early experience with LSD is the occassionally compelling desire to finish all the acid you have on you. We didn't know how long it would take to really come on. So, after about 1 and a half hours of feeling the hint of something, but not really "seeing" much, we decided to take another 0.5 hit each. In later years this would have been a BIG mistake for me. But because it was my first time - and I was still a virgin to the full-blown psychedelic experience - the drug treated me more gently than it would after I really got to know it. Still, then, after another half hour or so of incredible things coming on, we each took our last hit. Thus, we were about to cruise on about 500 mics each! This was also the most I ever took.
I can honestly say that it had been my intention to try LSD for quite some time, even since the time I was fairly young, about 12 years old. Since 1980, after John Lennon's death and my subsequent fascination with his life, I really saw what a difference there was in him, The Beatles, to music in general, to visual art, fashion, politics...the list is endless...after being introduced to LSD. The transformation to our planet's concept of music alone brought about by the Beatles' experimentation and inner explorations with LSD along with their application of those discoveries to their music, is a well-known historical anomaly. Through their music (and that of other bands) the spread of thousands of new musical and lyrical ideas into all of society really inspired me in ways I am still discovering. And they most certainly determined my life's path. Music seems to provide such a perfect backdrop to the history of the 20th. Century. And the music of ca. 1966-1976 was perhaps more full of this than the music of any other period, because of the new dimensions that psychedelics were allowing arists to access and then transfer into their art.
DC and I were both musicians in a band. We played the music of these other bands, though we were more interested in the New Wave and Punk of our own decade. Still we were groomed by learning their music. Also our band had just won the "State Rock-Off"; becoming one of the most popular groups in the state. Even in high school we got permission from our parents to skip school and play at bars and other events all over Maine. I just had to hide my braces when we were at bars. Later that summer, one of our songs was put on a Polygram record (vinyl and cassette) album; something unheard-of for a high school band at that time.
And in the small, neighboring towns where we all went to school, we enjoyed an almost celebrity-like status. It was simply the sum of all school boy fantasies come true. I wish I could have enjoyed it more happily when I was there doing it. After this night in 1985, this unusually fortunate start would turn my own world more inward for me, leading to the desire for a less public life. I hope to make it public again, but the time isn't right yet. Still, there we were at the top of our game and about to have the most profound experience of our lives. I'm sure if asked today, DC would completely agree.
It was a gorgeous evening, late spring, and the tiny rose bushes around the edges of this guy's yard were in bloom. They gave the air a scent that was like incense. The sky was brilliant orange fading into a deep pink, by the bright, western horizon. That early nightfall was dreamy even without drugs. It was a party that would have been lost to my memory without what was about to occur though.
Thankfully, we didn't have to transport beer because it was a kegger. We walked in the house of the guy having the party and filled up our cups. Inside, were all kinds of people. Seniors in high school (we were Juniors) were running the bash, but they all greeted us kindly. As with so many other events, I saw many faces from our town and the surrounding towns that I recognized. Of course, I sucked at remembering names anyway but with the rushing feeling of being pulled up the chairlift alongside the LSD mountain beginning to form in my mind, I was forgetting everything! But I was SO euphoric that it didn't matter to me. I almost felt like I was being selfish by not explaining the wonders I was beginning to see.
My mind was so distracted by the feelings and extra-sensory information of the trip that after only about 10 minutes inside my only wish was to go outside. Besides, the beer was going through me in quick procession, in a vein attempt to calm myself down, building up to the prospect of a big piss. When you trip, the effect of alcohol is like nothing at all in comparison. So you can down beers like water. Gone, was the usual, dizzy feeling and poor coordination of beer. It did keep all its socially lubricating aspects though.
Every guy knows that the best bathroom of a house party is the backyard. So I worked my way back through all the familiar, but nameless, faces in the house. Opening the front door and stepping outside into that natural beauty stunned me. It seemed like a sudden immersion into some jellified, infinite plain of shifting greens, utterly surrounded by a sunset that literally took my breath away. I gingerly stepped down the front porch and walked around the corner to back yard.
I found a quite bush and commenced to water it. After pissing for about 300 years (that's "trip years" - more like 3 minutes), I was flushed out, entirely reborn, and ready to head back into the unknown.
Coming into the clearing of the back yard, I caught up with DC again. And, hell, there was KC with his VW van opened up like a campsite. He had his own pony keg, and was selling "additional" beer. We told him we had just taken some acid. He smiled, leaned forward and looked deeply at each of us, straight into our eyes... "Whoa!!" he said, "You guys are still on the way up!" DC and I looked at each other's eyes and the irises were but shining, small rims around what looked like voids in space. We just completely lost it when we actually looked at each other! We laughed so hard it was painful.
This attention to the eyes became a regular motif in the months and years to come. Every person who trips on LSD has had the experience of the standard eye examination by someone who isn't tripping. Constantly being subjected to this would eventually lead me to doing LSD in very small amounts, without telling people. Our good friend and fellow bandmate who was with us that night, JL, decided not to take the stuff but was endlessly fascinated by what DC and I were doing and acting like. In later months, only half-kidding, he would walk up to me every time we saw eachother and stick his face in mine; reaching up to open one of my eyes with his fingers. And in his formerly urban, New Hampshire accent he'd say, "Yo...man...yo...you trippin? You trippin, man?" Then he'd smile and go, "HA!" Of course most of the time I wasn't, but sometimes he did catch me.
SW, the older brother of our friend BW, showed up with his entourage. He was the ultimate in coolness (at least he seemed like it that night). He had an aggressive New York accent and was into body building, with blond hair, cut in the super-short "Top Gun" style that was just becoming popular. He told us about the time he first took LSD and the ritual that the guy who gave it to him put him through. He asked us if we would want to try it. Dumbly, we just kind-of "...uh-huh"ed an answer.
So, he sat us down beside each other on one side of the picnic table, and he sat down facing us on the other side. He said "I'm gonna show you why they call it 'tripping.'" He had us put our faces down upon our arms, on the table. Then he began to talk about building a picture on the emptiness we saw. I don't really remember much of what he brought us through, but I do remember that is was an amazing thing. Like walking through the world of a fairy tail. Later, he was kind of a critic about how often I would dose. But I was stupid in that devil-may-care age and circumstance--and he was probably right. After our picnic table trip, DC and I seemed to become linked telepathically. Even the next day at our jam session, we were finishing each other's sentences. That first night though, I found that not only did images trail on behind everything that moved, or that I passed by, but that the psychic "image" of other people's presences also lingered in the mind. We decided we wanted to hang out in the car and smoke butts for a while, just to chill out and listen to the radio.
My car was parked safely off the road and pinned in by other cars. So - theoretically - we weren't going anywhere else. There were people milling about, puking in the bushes, fucking out on blankets...all around the car. We had the best seats at the party. And no one got in fights, no one ended up falling through the china cabinet, it was just very... well... friendly. I think a lot of other people were tripping too. Trippers aren't violent unless industrial quantities of alcohol are consumed by them, with other stuff too. Infrequent tripping makes you want to paint a perfect social picture with your friends whenever you do get around to taking it again. LSD was a hint of what "Ecstasy" (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or "MDMA") would provide for young people in the coming rave culture of the 1990's. Note the overlap in history here. I lived in the Northeast US where more progressive cultural novelties take longer to pass through the puritanical filter. Some say that even in 1985, London was pounding out all-night syncopated, musical, drug fests that will never be seen again. Regardless, I can only go by what I've experienced.
I remember the radio in the car sounded like it wasn't coming out of the speakers, but rather from all directions at once. It was not "stereo," it had become "unieo." We just kept looking at each other with our jaws dropped in amazement at how strange things were becoming. And DC and I, as band-mates, seemed to understand without discussing it, what it might be like to PLAY music, while dosed. We chain-smoked cigarettes while we pointed to different things and agreed about what they looked like.
Looking westward, into the place where the sun had gone down, the branches and leaves of the trees were now framed in millions of stained glass, tessellated hexagons. The middle of each tiny hexagon was a window to the sky behind it. And the sharply defined edges of each was a simple, thin line, changing in thickness as its associated branch/leaf system swayed in the summer breeze. And there was a marked impression of SEEING the breeze itself. It was very much as if we were able to catch another part of the electromagnetic spectrum; one that revealed the invisible actions of nature. And not only was this synesthesia of "viewing" the wind occurring, but it was also audible as a kind of speech. Somewhere behind what I was seeing, someone was whispering to me. The movement of air through the trees was like the vocal chords of this hidden person. And the trees continued these whispers as the now-visible breeze drifted off of their tips like spiralling, paisley, mist. I saw people wave, all I could do was nod back to them. Then the fact struck me in a way that was completely undeniable: This experience was the embodiment of the first two verses of my very first song (written 3 years earlier)...
As the mist rolled in the sunset
Bringing shivers up my spine
The trees were springing whispers
The world was silent for that time
My mind took off in one direction
I motioned figures to the west
Destination isn't clear yet
My mind fell in to peaceful rest
Watching those trees in the warm, dry, air, and having the first of many such self-prophecies (something slightly different from "self-fulfilling" prophecies) was truly, one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced.
I noticed that there was also a strange tension between things that moved and things that remained relatively still. The moving things (trees, people, birds, the lights of cars out on the road, etc...) were becoming solidified somehow; as if they were slowing down to a creep. And as we began to peak (about 3 hours after dropping), relatively still images (the interior of the car, the sky itself, the ground, etc...) began to drift and then break into pieces, recombining, in ever-more intricate patterns, folding themselves inside-out; all of it occurring as if each transformation had to surpass the last in intricacy. We no longer need to speak to each other to know exactly how the other person was doing.
JL ran up and jumped in the backseat of the car. "What's up!!!" he squealed. We were at a loss to explain how fucked-up the world was for us at that point, but we still tried. Dan was better at getting the words out. JL raised his eyebrows... "OH...MY GOD! You guys are totally wacked." This freaked us out even more.
I was starting to think - as every great tripper does during the first trip - that we had taken WAY too much. In the backs of our well-indoctrinated minds were (what I would in later years realize were just) all the negative comments, lies and propaganda pumped into us by the new anti-drug campaigns in education. I believe it was that very spring before we got out for the summer that we went on a field trip to hear from "drug survivors." And there is always the urban legend about the "guy who took acid and then smoked a joint and never came down." Yep, that's a classic once used by the "just say no" people to try to scare you "straight." The unfortunate thing is that we all did LSD anyway, and all that story ever did was cause bad trips. What would the world be like without the use of fear by the establishment?
It was at that time, as the streering wheel began to recede away from my view, on its own, that JL said, "Let's go to 7-11!"
Other cars were pulling out filled with occupants on their way downtown to cruise Main Street or find other house parties, of which there were plenty in those days. Before taking LSD, I had imagined that it was only swirling colors and hypnogogic images...I didn't realize it was seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting everything as they swam between the different senses. I couldn't tell whether I was smelling smoke or shit. I couldn't tell whether I was hearing or seeing things. And all colors became flourescent.
The change that I was going through was so intensely different from how I thought it would be that I truly began to question whether I might be losing my mind (another typical trick that the ego plays on the tripper). DC seemed to be concerned in the same way, though to a lesser extent. I have always been the one over-thinker, over-worrier. This was an unfortunate trait that would bring me a lot of trouble later on. On this night though, I had a damn good reason to begin getting paranoid... JL wanted me to drive!
I said, "There's ...no way... that I can drive."
JL, said "We can do this! I'll tell you what to do, DC can steer and you push the gas or the brake, depending on what we need."
[To be continued...]
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Remember to wear your soul on the outside.
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