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trip was uneventful, much to our relief, the small ice-filled cooler a true pirate’s chest, with our 2 sheets of Woodstock and 1 sheet of double-dose Lucky Charms. 300 doses of LSD, as you may recall. After we got back home and settled down, Shaun gave me about 20 hits, my walking-around acid, I suppose you could say. He set off trying to sell the rest. Turns out those 20 hits were my complete earnings for the effort, I never saw another fucking penny. I stupidly even sold a couple hits at a club to some chick I never knew before, probably just to be cool.
Later that month, Shaun finally chased down that hippie guitarist from Blue Dixie who of course had spent his $50 in California on just whatever. However, supposedly to make up for it, he told Shaun he had the lead on some…liquid.
I was just about a year into my LSD experience, while Shaun was truly a novice, at less than 6 months. Neither of us had even heard rumors of liquid, let alone tried any or actually possessed any with intent. Of course, Shaun not only had zero experience, he also had zero capital to expand our little psychedelic enterprise. With dollar signs dancing in his dilated pupils, Shaun handed over a full sheet of the Woodstock in exchange for a little vial of what we could only assume truly was liquid lysergic acid diethylamide.
“Uh, Shaun, where’s the blotters”
I was wondering how the fuck he was going to retail our product without “official” blotter paper. It was a good thing he didn’t find anyone with blotter paper or he would have bartered off the rest of our supply from the Dead show. He figured well, graph paper has little squares, so I’ll douse some of them. It didn’t sell for shit, naturally. I told him why didn’t he tell folks it was a new kind of acid, called “grafix”. But well, we were 17/18 year olds, not MBAs in marketing.
So what do you want to do?
As the summer dragged into fall for our freshman year of college, Shaun seemed to be ingesting product on a near daily basis. I was dosing occasionally, usually by myself with the Gospel of Mark open and Gates of Eden in my headphones. I even re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance hoping that would prepare me for a possible philosophy major or minor. Shaun on the other hand was fading fast. I heard through mutual friends that he would go into a “situation” half or fully-baked, and be easily duped by some sleazy cocksuckers who swore they had paid him.
He started hanging out with Alan, this kid I had known since 2nd grade. Alan was my age, but a year behind us in school. I always thought Alan and his sister looked like hobbits, they had some kind of dwarfism that made them about normal height but with fucked-up proportions. Anyway, Alan actually had the nerve to turn his (just say) nose up at my dope stash that I flashed him in our high school parking lot the year before. However, at some point, he got over those hang-ups and made the switch from white-house women to rainy day women. By August, he had begun dosing with Shaun.
There was some other guy hanging out with them too, but I didn’t know him well enough to even forget him when we parted ways. They were hanging out at Shaun’s parents’ basement one Saturday afternoon, bored as only adolescent stoners can be. Shaun had a brainstorm at some point, why didn’t they split a sheet of his “grafix” (patent pending) and see what happens.
Well, needless to say, the reports of what followed are hazy at best. I guess at some point they were all three laid out on the bed, frozen in absolute acid panic. The other two wondered what they should do with Shaun. “Let’s kill him!” and they attempted to move towards their target, but could not communicate any commands to their muscles. At some point Sunday morning, though, they had gone their separate ways, which pretty much meant each to their respective parents’ house. His dad was a preacher so his folks and sister were at church, of course. Alan must have gone into his room, taken all his crap off his walls and out of his drawers, piled it in the middle of the room, and perched upon it like a guru on a mountainside, lost completely in the “Om”.
Shortly thereafter, his folks walked in on him and immediately sent him to Charter Hillside. I’m not sure why the entire framework of our venture didn’t come crashing down at that point. Perhaps they did figure out that Shaun was the primary source of their son’s chemicals. If they did call Shaun’s parents, his dad for one would not even blink, especially now that Shaun was 18. And his mom, well, whenever we couldn’t find weed, Shaun would just break into her safe and steal it from her. My parents on the other hand surely would have had the same reaction as Preacherman & wife did. I was still 17 and while obviously a stoner, not as much of an apparent waste as Shaun would inevitably evolve into. In any case, there was not even a blip on the radar, though we were taken aback when Alan was sent to the State Mental Hospital for “observation” beyond the rehab center.
Today, I’m only having physical flashbacks
So that was the immediate fallout on Alan’s side. Shaun, on the other hand, basically seemed like a Romero extra for the next several months. I rarely saw him, we were in Philosophy I together, though it seems he would only show up every week or so. His previous sharp wit was obviously dulled. He would only smile beatifically as I took my universal determinism into anti-Christian diatribes. “How do you know it wasn’t pre-determined for you to believe exactly what you believe now based on a series of causal antecedents? It isn’t a god showing you the light, it is the sequence of events, the very pattern of your life coming to fruition in what you are right now.” Anyway, I didn’t get along well with my prof very well, probably due to my lack of concentration (er, heavy hallucinogen usage that semester). However, the prof did turn me onto Nietzsche, saying it would gel well with my budding naturalism.
I remember running into Shaun in the Commons once after he hadn’t shown up in class for a bit. “How are you doing, Shaun?” “Better, at least I’m only having physical flashbacks, not mental flashbacks.”
At the time, I was dating a white trash chick from the same town that inspired the Patrick Swayze movie Roadhouse, of all things. She often told me that if one person in that town got AIDS, half the fucking town would die. She was a metalhead, while I was trying to convert her to my own, ahem, “discriminating” taste. I had gained infamy at my high school with my record reviews slamming Guns n’ Roses and Gilmour-led Floyd. It reached a climax when I had to point out to the principal where I had put “jacking off” in one of my columns (he wasn’t an avid reader of the school paper). The context for that was “all those dweebs jacking off to Guns n’ Roses…” if you must know. But well, Karma is a bitch, as I found out that fall staring into Axl Rose eyes whenever she was on top in bed.
But I digress. I guess it was inevitable that I introduce my supposed best friend to my girlfriend. And, I should have realized how much more compatible they were than I was with her (listening to Iron Maiden at Shaun’s request and him telling me I was born with an acoustic guitar). I was done with her, what I missed most was “it”, but nothing beyond that. However, the night I drove past her parking lot and saw his “Starmann Ghia” (a karmann ghia that he had painted red, white & blue with stars and stripes in Merry Pranksters fashion), he became dead to me. I saw him a couple times after that, once at my dorm room door when he tried to score dope from me and once in the diaper section at Target. At the first meeting, he told me he had smoked crack recently, saying he was “only going to try heroin once” (every junkie’s famous last words). At the second meeting, I just remember him looking taller than I had remember, all Hells Angeled out in leather jacket and black Levi’s. I know he did some time for gun running and now is back in our home town, doing gods know what.
It’s like I’m tripping all the time!
But this story (& accompanying mix) is not about Shaun, it is about Alan. For you see, after Alan got back from the looney bin, he got on the lithium, finished high school and was getting ready for college. I saw him I guess one time that year. We drove around town smoking dope and listening to music. At some point, I put in Damn the Torpedoes. “Holy shit, is that Dylan?” he excitedly asked me as the first snarls of Complex Kid came on. I didn’t know Alan was such a naif at music, figuring he had grown up in a typical hippie-ish household, in spite of the Christianity. But well apparently he really didn’t know shit.
At some point in the conversation, we were talking about the parties I hosted while my parents were out of town, just before my senior year of high school. It was a big place in the country, so plenty of room to get in trouble, the house would overflow with a wide cross-section of my high school. I am not sure how I didn’t get in major shit for the stuff we did, but well, I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I told him with all those fuckers out there, the only thing I noticed missing was my Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits on cassette. I didn’t really care, except that I was a completist and that was the only one missing from Bob’s 60s ouvre. Alan reached behind my seat and pulled out that same cassette, admitting he was the one who had nicked it the year before. So putting aside all the bollocks, we actually got along well for a couple months there.
It was that next summer that Alan apparently drifted off his meds and into some kind of hallucinogenic. We had kind of drifted apart again, so I’m not even sure what crowd he was into. But at some point, I heard that he had been admitted into the University Health Center’s mental ward. Now that I think about it, I found out about Alan’s latest hospitalization through a mutual friend, Amy. Amy and I had become really close, watching tons of films together and generally just hanging out. She didn’t mind me smoking dope, but she didn’t even really drink. An older friend who worked with both of us, Don, kept pushing me to make the moves on her. When I finally did one night in my dorm, I told her “so this is what incest is like.” We had a few awkward sex sessions, but soon realized we were truly more compatible as friends.
With that in mind, I made it up to the section of the hospital where they kept Alan. He came out to visit with me, dressed, as you might expect, in pajamas and slippers. His mouth was moving about a million miles a second. “man, they’re giving me some shit in here it’s like I’m tripping all the time. So, I hear you’re fucking Amy, how’s that, man? I’ve had some of that too. Oh, man, I just love Mr. Tambourine Man, did you know Dylan wrote that? It’s the best…” and on and on and on and on and on. I pretty much just nodded knowingly, especially at his continued musical ignorance, though I did cool at his mention of our mutual friend.
So that seems to be the way it would go for Alan for the next few years. Get out of a sanitarium, back on his meds, back to college, start a new major (nursing, art history, whatever), get bored with the meds, find some new psychotropic drug, end up back in the rubber room, get out, back on meds…
I eventually moved away and pretty much just heard tales of Alan through my mother who was in touch with his. Eventually his parents bought a small farm with (or for) him and started raising organic vegetables. I even ran into him at the local farmer’s market and we eventually found ourselves quite on common ground. It seemed like he was easier to talk to than he had been in years. Unfortunately though, the years of pharmaceutical usage (legitimate or otherwise) had taken their toll and his liver was unreliable, to say the least.
After a real brush with death, he did get married at some point and even has two little hobbit children, his genes running strong in their blood. I even stopped by to visit his (now run-down) farm last year. He seemed, to me, to be a little “off”, after experiencing so many sides to his personality in the decades before. Perhaps he had to have his meds scaled back due to the other health problems. He actually told me he had invited Shaun to the sweat lodge they had built on the farm. Alan had pretty much forgiven Shaun, though Shaun eventually kind of freaked out with the intensity and high-tailed it back to town.
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Now that I think about it, this anecdote is not really about Alan either. It is the tale of the tabs, the ultimate destiny of our acid stock. As I said, Shaun had given me a portion to deal with as I saw fit. The guy who worked with Amy and me was a real 60s relic. His closest claim to fame was selling his house on Hashbury to Big Brother & The Holding Company, pre-Janis. Don had also seen the Velvet Underground in 69. It was someplace in the Midwest and he says Lou introduced the next cut with “you folks out here in the sticks won’t understand this song, this is a New York song.” And with that, the band started into Heroin. Don told me half the audience was shooting up (he still had a hole in his arm, you know, where the blood “shoots up the dropper’s neck.”) Needless to say, Don was filled with “history”. He had done 10 years in the state pen, for selling 182 hits of acid back in the 70s.
Anyway, at some point after we made the score, Don said he and his wife were going to take their boat out on one of the smaller rivers. It was their anniversary and they wanted to have something different than just the dope and booze they usually ingested. He asked if I knew where to find them some acid. I told him I just happened to have some prime Woodstock, they bought two hits. Unfortunately, his wife came down some kind of weird reaction to something and so they had to cancel their trip. They bagged the acid and threw it in the freezer.
In the meantime, with the metaphysical absence of Shaun, I found a new friend named Bobby. Bobby was obviously a reformed jock who was trying so hard to be a freak. He had recently discovered mari-ju-ana, in tandem with Robert Zimmerman. I admit I didn’t have much respect for him, a year older than me, but about 5 years “behind” me. You might say we had a tempestuous friendship, my lack of respect combined with his pseudo-hippie leanings didn’t bode well for us.
We fell into a bunch of magic mushrooms later that year. Bobby of course had never tried them and didn’t know quite what to expect, though they worked exceedingly well for me that night. I remember they were my shrooms and I was going to sell the extras to somebody. Later in the evening, somehow Bobby convinced me in my Shaun-like state to give him some more. I can still remember the paranoia I felt as I handed them over to him, something just didn’t feel right about the “deal”. Anyway, the, er, high point of the evening was when one of his friends (who was definitely not my friend at the time) brought over some dope. We put it in my steamroller (a glass pipe that looked like Glinda’s dildo). I got into a laughing fit and accidently blew out instead of sucking in and the ample bowlful of the other guy’s dope went spraying across the room.
We went camping one time with another friend of Bobby’s, I think his name was Tony. It was there that I had the germ of the poem that became
The Fate. Bobby was an amateur photographer, and fancied himself a future director. I was trying to tell him what shots he should take. Finally, I realized how annoying that was, I told him that “it would be like someone telling me to write a poem about Nebraska”.
Bobby and I went on another camping trip alone, with a big bag full of shrooms to try to make up for the last time. We made a big pot of sugar cubes, limes and psilocybin fungi. As we ladled it out into our two cups, I made sure that he got more shrooms since I was getting more liquid. He saw that as a disparity and started passing me more fungi which basically meant that when it was time for our “hike”, I was gone. I literally just laid on the hood of my car the few hours he walked about. When he got back, he told some of some mystical (of course) revelations he had while on his journey, that he had come to the realization about the ego battles in our friendship. Much to my dismay, he finally saw me as guru-like. I knew the end was near.
When we got back home, we started making plans for his first acid trip, after a few ventures along the fungal trail. This was the June after the August Shaun & I had gone to the Dead show. I was mentioning to Don at work if he knew here I could find some acid. He said he still had those two tabs of Woodstock from the year before sitting in the freezer. I gladly bought them back from him (money-back guarantee, I s’pose).
Anyway, Don and his wife were going out for the weekend, so it provided the perfect place and time for me to take Bobby on a little trip. I remember when we got out there, Don had left about 4 or 5 big fat buds out on the dining room table for our smoking pleasure. We had rented a sackful of VHS from our favorite video store: the Concert for Bangladesh, Roger Corman’s The Trip, and I don’t remember what else.
At that point, we took the doses and settled down to watch the concert first. As the acid started to kick in, I suddenly stood up, chanting “this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy” and walked past Bobby out the back door. This was out in the middle of the country, mind you, with only the moon providing light in the meadow, none really near the house. I wandered around the house, out to the meadow, and laid down for a while. I heard Bobby calling me, his calls getting more and more panicked as the drug kicked in, his paranoia rising. Here he was, a real city boy stranded in a strange farmhouse in the middle of basically nowhere. I ignored him, preferring to be influenced by what I had read in Tess of the D'urbervilles. I just remembered Tess laying in a field at some point and talking about letting your eyes focus on a point, a star, in the sky until your body lifted off into the cosmos. Not such a great leap in my current state of mind, of course. It is unfortunate I did not compose my essay on Tess right then and there since my paper ended up rather mediocre. But anyway, at some point, I soon began to wonder whether I should rape and/or murder Bobby. My only concern was how to dispose of the body.
I knew he was still inside, crying in his warped solitude. I finally eased myself out of those thoughts and wandered back inside. I don’t remember much of what was said between us except that I told him of where my mind had taken me.
At that point, I thought it best we try to go to sleep. I know he was up all night, in full-bore freakout, between the drugs themselves, my abandoning him and now the thought that his “friend” might really be visiting the true depths of his ethos. I on the other hand had the most fantastic dreams, that I was a being consisting of a million galaxies flowing hither and yon through the infinite plane, without a concern for this world.
Needless to say that night brought an end to a few things, namely my experiments with acid and my friendship with Bobby. I had tripped 20-30 times by the time I was 18 or so and figured that was more than enough, no reason to aim for Lennonesque levels. And with Bobby, I remember the uncomfortable space between us the last time I saw him. He had not gotten into film school and so was taking a year off to wander the country. I’m thinking that decision had been made before the night that ripped us apart. Tony and I, his closest friends, both wrote dedications to him in his journal. Tony quoted from Wild World, which seemed more than a little odd even to Bobby. My passive aggression shone through the line I offered:
take what you have gathered from coincidence.
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