The clocks reported that our particular method of measuring time was reaching two o'clock in the afternoon by the time Lois and I knocked on Joe's front door. We stood outside, shivering for a second as one of the town's famous harsh cold winds whipped past our reddened ears, when the door opened and there stood a new presence.
"Hello!" she said in a tone of voice which seemed to define exuberance. A bit shorter than either of us, her straight blond hair curled around her shoulders, one strang hanging near her smile. Thick socks covered the feet which stepped onto the cold pavement, socks hidden underneath long and loose jeans and a huge sweater. She said, "I'm Sunshine. You must be Kent." Bounded up and threw an arm around me. I was dumbfounded for a second, and slowly wrappped my arms around her. She turned to Lois. "Hi!"
"Um, hi, I'm Lois, I'm a friend of Kent's," she stammered, and Sunshine threw her arms around Lois.
"Come on in. Lunch is just getting started. Oh good you brought something!"
"Um, yeah, we baked some bread," Lois said, and we followed Sunshine--who reminded me in a funny way of one of those high-bounce balls you get in the grocery store on the way out for a quarter in those machines that also sell tiny handcuff keychains.
A thick smoke assaulted our noses as we stepped in--nicotine, incense, and some unfamiliar green smell, heavy and sweet. My breath caught for a second. Watering eyes surveyed the room, quickly, though, as Sunshine was rocketing back through a hallway already. The first entry room was a living room, couches pillows, soft lighting leaning over towards the red end of the spectrum, and filled with ragtag hippie types. I spotted the source of that unfamiliar odor, a slip of paper wrapped up and smoldering at one end. I had seen it many times in movies, and in those DARE pamphlets and high school health books--a marijuana joint. The gravity of the situation approaching that evening began to weigh on me. I'm going to take a powerful illegal drug tonight, I thought. Tonight I start down that path that I've always been told leads to ruin and chaos and heroin addiction. I shook these myths from my head and reminded myself o the good research I had done, of the names of scholars and intelligent men and women who had used the psychedelic drugs, reassured myself.
But we were already in the kitchen, laying down the bread pan beside other dishes. The kitchen was empty except for a voluptuous red haired girl, chopping vegetables. Sunshien strode over and kissed the back of her neck. She turned around and their lips met. "Hey Rain," Sunshine said, "this is Kent and Lois. They're the ones who are going to be tripping with us tonight."
Rain smiled and looked over at us. "Oh yeah?"/
"Yeah," Sunshine continued, spitting out a stream of words with excitement, "and not only is this their first time tripping with us, but it's their first time tripping ever."
Rain laughed for a second and said to us, "You're gonna have a great time!"
"Okay, you keep cooking and we're gonna go find Joe and Mark, you seen them?"
"Yeah, they're back in Mark's room."
From behind me came a sudden appearence, bellowing happily. "Hey there lovely ladies it's so fine to see you again on this cold wintery day, surely a warm pool of chaotic entropy among this freezing world of crystalline order confronting us outside these very doors!" I turned to see a very hairy man--thick brown beard and wild hair dancing in every direction imaginable and then some, wrapped in a colorful Mexican blanket and beaming out good...energy in all directions. Yes, good energy. Not a word I could use then, before I understood the flow of energy through emotional and interpersonal interactions, but I did feel the hum of his happiness.
"Animal!" Sunshine screamed and lept into his arms, planting her lips full on his. "Hey Animal," Rain said when it was her turn, kissing him too.
I suppose it was then I was first touched with the longing that eventually, more than anything else probably, brought me into this group. These kisses weren't what I suppose you'd call amorous, no, though love did motivate them. This was a group of friends who genuinely cared for each other, and was very close. These were kisses of friendship, a concept that seemed so strange and yet so perfecty natural to my head then. And that's not to say that these were asexual kisses--the sexual tone of the contact was certainly there, but it was because this handful of people were in touch with their own being and their own bodies. This sense of calm, togetherness, self-knowledge, this is what I was seeking from the evening.
After Sunshine had introduced us to Animal, another of the people I'd be tripping with that night, she led us back through a hallway to a bedroom. Marijuana smoke poured out and in there sat Joe with a couple of other guys and a girl, and they seemed to be having a rather heavy discussion. Speaking when we entered, sitting in a chair in fron tof a desk facing a wall, that had been turned around so he could face the room, was a blondish-brown haired face with round rimmed glasses circling his eyes, staring intently and motioning emphatically. His voice wasn't touched by the same slang-hipppie-accent as the others, and he looked more straight-laced, more clean-cut, except for his clothes--just as I-just-fell-out-of-a-VW-microbus as the rest of them.
"And then there's alpha-methyl-tryptamine," he was saying, "which is the alpha-methyl substitution. It lasts twelve hours and gives a good psilocybin-tryptamine feel at a hundred and fifty migs, y'know? Ken Kesey calls it the Rolls Royce of psychedelics. I can't wait to get a copy of TIHKAL. What I wonder is whether or not the alpha-substitution can be doubled, so that you have alpha-dimethyl-tryptamine, which would be the alpha-homologue of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, our good friend DMT. For that matter, it would be interesting to see alpha-alkyl substitutions along with tacking on those alkyl groups at the amine--or any nitrogen I guess. Man oh man, there's some neat stuff that can be done with the tryptamine molecule!"
I could tell most of that was way over everyone's head, but attention was still focused on him. We held silent a bit longer as a question was asked--Joe, searching his memory and graspong for a straw of conversation, asked, "Aren't some of those phenethylamine thingies alpha-substituted?"
"Well, amphetamine is basically alpha-methyl-phenethylamine, which you shorten to call phenisopropylamine. In fact," he said, pausing to recall for a second, "I don't remember exactly, but I think Shulgin had an idea of how to play aorund with that. Alpha-methyl substiution on TMA, doubles the potency so he tried to tack another carbon in that alpha position, making alpha-ethyl-mescaline, but it didn't work. But I don't remember, we could ask Rain or I could look it up if it is really that important." Silence descended for a few moments as we were noticed.
"Hey guys, this is Kent and Lois. They're new here."
Everyone waved and introductions went around the room. The one who had been talking was Mark, and this was his room. He nodded and his demeanor seemed to transform from the enthusiastic speaker to a more reserved attitude. Joe hugged us, told us he was glad we could come. Lunch began wshortly thereafter.
.oOo.
As we hovered and mingled, we learned more about those with whom we--I--would be tripping that night. Mark, Rain, Sunshine, and Animal each managed to introduce themselves to us and talk to us a little, aiming for some shared sense of comfort and displaying a genuine curiosity in learning about us.
Mark was a chemistry minor, botany major. He was studying ethnobotany, his dream to eventually head to some rain forest and work with the shamans to find medicines in all of the plants around. He was quiet I discovered, and I guessed--accurately so--that he was the type that was quiet until you got him talking about one of his favorite rants--plants, drugs, chemistry, that type of thing--and then you couldn't shut him up. Nor did you want to, for it was so fun to watch him get excited. Rain was a biochem major. Rough route. She didn't live in this house, needing plenty of time from the constant chaos which is the impression I was given that life in this house was like. Spent a lot of time studying. She hoped to eventually go into medical school. Sunshine was a psych major, most interested in, of course, altered states of consciousness and personality theory. Animal wasn't in school. Had dropped out, couldn't stand the hassles, instead choosing to work, and as he put it, "Live live live the life that other people dream of, that people read about, not only write stories but write my life like it is a story, you dig? I mean you are the author of your own existence and can write the script of your life and the world surrounding you and you can live in whatever kind of story and script and movie you want to live in--"
If you base your opinion on the intelligence of people on appearence and stereotypes, you'd probably overlook most of this crowd. There is definite weirdness here, the kind of weirdness that comes of being too smart fo ryour own good, too quick. I think a lot of intelligent people have that weirdness--I consider myself intelligent, and I know, at the time, all the oddness in me was screaming for an outlet. Maybe it's because intelligent kids are often sort of shunned or scorned, so they never get a chance to learn how to be cool, instead just doing whatever they damned well please, which of course takes them further from being cool and it just spirals wildly from there. I mean, I'd always noticed that there was something...different...in the way other people thought or acted...I just usually assumed it was everyone else who was different until recently, and then looking at these people in this house, it quickly dawned on me that they had fully embraced their quirks and thrived on them, feeding off of each other. This was my first introduction to the concept of novelty, a word which would be introduced to me late rin the course of the "funkier part of my education," as such periods have been called in various obscure epics.
The day progressed and by about five thirty, everyone had left except for those who would partake of the LSD that evening. And they suddenly turned into cyclones, preparing the setting. Lois and I washed dishes and helped clean as they transformed the house from a living space into a space ship. Candles lit in the living room, CD players in different rooms carving out audio environments, cushions on the floor, art supplies, black lights in some rooms. And when these tasks had been completed, we all gathered in the living room, incense curling up our nostrils, mingling with the smoke from the marijuana pipe that was being passed. (I declined marijuana all day, having never read about it--such the intellectual!)
"Okay," Joe said, producing a small tupperware container, fogged in the sides from having been in the freezer. He unwrapped some foil and pulled out tiny square pieces of paper, which he emptied onto a plate.
"What's that?" I asked. I'd never seen acid before. Fingers of the other voyagers reached out and took one or two of the squares and placed them on their tongues. "Is that acid?"
Joe smiled. "Y'know, I never did like the word acid. Acid corrodes, y'know? It eats things away. It sounds so harsh. They used to call it Vitamin L. I like that...it's a vitamin for your brain. But yeah, this is LSD. The blotter paper has been soaked in it. How many do you want?"
"Um...what's the dosage?"
Eyes turned to Rain, who shrugged her shoulders and said, "About ninety or a hundred mikes. It's good stuff."
"How about two?" I was thinking of how Leary said you should start with 300-500 micrograms but that seemed like a lot in this situation for some reason.
Joe nodded. "That sounds like a good starting dosage." He handed me two, and instructed: "Just put them on your tongue and hold them there. After a few minutes the LSD will be absorbed, then you can swallow the tabs." I did it. Tasteless.
"What about you?" he asked Lois. "You still just want to observe?"
She nodded. "There will be other trips if I want to do it, right?"
Joe laughed. "Of course!"
"Hey, Kent," I heard Rain say. I looked into a mischevious smile, the kind of smile I could see Coyote wearing when he stole the fire from the gods. "It's too late now."
A brief silence, then Sunshine grabbed my hand and said, "Let's go watch the sunset!" and pulled me to Mark's room. Lois followed.
We watched and chatted for awhile. The conversation grew a bit more difficult, as Sunshine stared out the window and grew spacier. Ah, the acid--the L--must be hitting her already. Why aren't I feeling anything?
I checked the clock. Probably half an hour had passed. A shiver moved through me, I felt myself fidgeting more--something was beginning, but was it the excitement at this new adventure, or was it the drug, or some combination thereof? Couldn't tell yet, no effects that were definitely drug-effects, until, after about fifty minutes had passed, and the conversation had definitely shifted to the giggly and bizarre, with Sunshine fixated on the fading red glow of sunshine in the horizon, when I noticed how brilliant the color outside was, reflecting off the snow, glinting, shimmering brightly full and I turned to Sunshine and
something had shifted. I cna't tell exactly what but something is different, different like when I used to meditate and for a moment feel like I could really see into things, like I could see into the Kantian numinous, the Platonic forms, into that real reality which underlies what we perceived, those determined shapes, as though I had briefly taken a wand and wiped away th Illusion of Maya, and everything seemed fresh and new, and I was seeing it for the first time, and I looked over at Lois and said,
"Um, I think it's starting," and the voice didn't come from my own mouth, but far away, someone else's mouth, someone else had vibrated my vocal cords in my throat and this struck me as absurdly funny as I thought, hmm, mild depersonalization, and
I laughed. Giggled. Whooped. It just passed through me, like a stream of bubbles through a fish tank burbling to the surface and I couldn't help but keep laughing. I laughed at all my intellectualism, at my pristine ivory tower of inexperience, at my armchair philosophy--I laughed all the knots out and looked over at Sunshine, radiating with her aura, and she asked
"Are you okay?" and oh that smile is so so beautiful and stretches across all eternity, she glows, she really does, she glows with the light of humanity and all the Buddhas and saints, and she glows with the beauty of this MOMENT, right HERE, right NOW, a fine MOMENT to be in, and the concept of past or future is certainly ungraspable now, and I manage to spit out, "Oh yeah, I'm doing fine. This is very..."
"Euphoric or ecstatic I believe are the words you're looking for," she said as she giggled and I giggled and yes, euphoria, feeling good, feeling pleasure, not happiness, just pure pleasure and ecstatic, no not yet, maybe later tonight because I can feel this roller coaster taking me away
echoing from the other room came the jumbling of guitars and thumping bass and hissing cymbals in some sort of mess and Sunshine jumped up and said, "Oh good, the Grateful Dead!" and she grabbed me and pulled meinto the cnadlelit room where Joe stared out through those laser 3-D spectacles that you get at toy stores and Rain flipped around a kaleidoscope, she too staring intently at the drama unfolding before her eyes, and tittering in the corner were Mark and Animal and marijuana and the sound resolved itself into a song, a song which somehow emerged, organizing itself from the random pluckings of bass and guitar strings, from the chords of the electric organ, and I watched as the walls began to crawl, energy spilling through them into the carpet, into the people, into rainbow patterns which spiralled around in fractal shapes, and after every movement, rich afterimages suspended in the air resolved themselves into twisting colors which melted into the darkness and flickering candlelight, and this must be what they call tracers
so this is the Grateful Dead, huh? I guess I'd heard them before but never really understood, and then when that hautning high pitched voice called out, from beyond the grave it seemed,"Daaaaaaaaaark star crashes--" oh yes it does doesn't it? the dark star, the pulsating neutron star crashes into a supernova behind my closed eyes, in rich reverie--
"Pouring its light into ashes--" the flickering flames and what they leave behind
"Search light casting for faults in the clouds of delusion--" oh the delusions we inhabit in every day life, and they are being wiped away, and no longer am I confused by what others tell me is real and what isn't real but I see, and I see all the cracks in what had been real to me before, cracks which grow and split apart, fissures in the Real, tears in the phenomenal, oh I see Animal, we are living in a story which we can author, and out here the only book is Life
"Shall we go? You and I while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds..."
And the music takes off, and I dance, or rather am danced, danced in the same way I was laughed, and I'm not really sure whose body this is anymore, or whether what had previously been called "I" still exists, because I am certainly not separate from the rest of these entities in this room and I find myself looking into Rain's kaleidoscope and staring through Joe's eyes and even slooking at Lois and I sit down, it's so overwhelming, how can this be happening, is this really happening, am I really seeing the Clear White Light? oh that's such an inadequate thing to say, you see, it's more of am I really being the Clear White Light?
Yes, yes I am, and it's then when Lois asks, "How are you feeling?"
I look at her, oh Lois, how can I tell you? this is not like anything you've ever felt, ever known--maybe if you'd meditated, I could come up with some comparison, but no, it's not something that can be expressed in language to someone who hasn't been there, it's like describing trees to Saharan nomads who scarcely even grok the concept of water, oh this is what it means to grok, you ol' devil Heinlein, to fully understand and open and see and drink
there is no separation, there are no boundaries, the Buddha was right, and we are all Buddhas, we just need to wipe away the grime, the dirtiness, our silly notions of separation and individuality and realize we are interacting in a great organism--
yes organism, I am life, I have DNA I am connected by breath and food and waste to all living things and it's such a delicate balance, isn't it?
but suddenly I feel cut off, and I am not part of the balance, I have spent my life ignoring the balance, and no longer is everything flowing, but I am I and the room has turned sinister and haunting, and has the music stopped? why has everything stopped? across the room they have all become puppets, all become dead corpses oh no, is this the way it really is? am I dead? are we all dead? does it matter?
a piercing tuitar riff slips into my ear and wraps around my brain, coaxing it, relaxing it, and oh now I understand why Jerry Garcia was called a shaman, how he led me out here with his music and is going to take me back, and the song begins again, and the Dead have not let the Earth die, and I am so Grateful, and I begin to dance again, dancing the Dance of Shiva--
And though an eternity is passed, it hasn't even been a full hour since the effects began.
.oOo.
A lot of weird things happened that night. I spent some time just observing--physical reality broke apart, and I saw that everything is composed of intelligent patterns of energy, energy when enters my sense organs and is transformed, transduced as they say in psychology. But the world of saolid matter is an illusion developed by the brain in order for us to function with other energy patterns, other wafeforms.
I found myself on the banks of the Ganges, listening to the droning sitar, chatting with Buddhas and Indian gods. I lazily slipped through the mud of the Amazons as the tribal drums played, a slimy salamander, a great anaconda, a swimming pirrhana. Language escaped me, I was incapable of speaking for the longest time.
Speech came back again probably about five hours after I took the drug. For a moment, I thought the trip had ended. Suddenly, the visuals had stopped, and I felt perfectly normal. I looked around. What just happened? "Is it over?" I asked.
"No," I was told, "you just came down from the peak. You won't be done tripping for many more hours." And then it started again, less intense, but crawling, moving, living, and conversation was now possible. Lois had long since gone to sleep in Sunshine's room. I didn't talk much, listened mainly.
But as I thought over what had happened, I realized I had achieved that which monks only dream of...a few hours of Enlightenment.