In 1978 I was 16, so before I even got a driver's license and learned to drive, heheh, I dropped acid for the first time.
6 months prior, I had bought Peter Stafford's book The Psychedelics Encyclopedia at the head shop where I would go to get stuff
for my pot smoking hobbyist activities. I was quickly completely obsessed with everything the book went on at length about,
it was just so fucking interesting, all of it, all the details of each substance
the whole history and everything about Marijuana, Psilocybin, MDA, MDMA, Ayahuasca, DMT, Ibogaine, and of course LSD.
I would read it over and over again, pretty much memorized the damn book when I began to feel
nothing less than trying these substances myself would do any more.
I remember I most wanted to take mushrooms but mushrooms weren't widely
available in the suburbs of Los Angeles then, or not to 16 year old nerds like myself anyway.
I can't remember how I figured it out, but one of the guys at school was selling acid but really
hush about it. He really did not like me at all, so I don't know how we got to the point where
he told me he was selling acid. I remember sitting in the smoking area at school, which was a kind of
look the other way place that school security guards would let us smoke cigarettes and pot
and even would smoke there with us and that was the only place I would see the guy and talk to him
and he would take the piss out of me pretty severely and pretty much constantly, while huffing down my joints, he didn't think I was the kind of
person who should be with all the cool kids and the bad kids getting stoned at school
so he was there to do me the favor of smoking my pot for me, which I suppose he felt I had no business having.
So, in the mean time I had been propagandizing my buddies day after day at school about all the stuff Peter Stafford's book was saying about
LSD and psychedelics and gradually brainwashing them probabaly so that they too felt like, "Yeah we gotta take acid or eat some mushrooms
for sure, dood." Oh yeah, for sure. That was this stoner thing that stoners used to say back then all the time,
every time you had a chance, you had to work in a "for sure." Or "Oh yeah, for sure," instead of "uh-huh" or "yeah"
just to signal that you were following what someone was saying in a conversation or that you agreed with them. For sure.
For sure, dood. Fir shir. You even said it to your Mom after awhile and called your Mom, dood. "Will you please do the dishes?" "Oh yeah, for sure dood!"
We liked smoking pot a lot
but we did not think of ourselves as stoners did not find that those people accepted us, so "Oh yeah for sure," was
kind of ironic or sarcastic at first and then it kind of gradually set in as part of the furniture in your at school
with your buddies parlance. One of my buddies was half convinced everyone smoked pot in Los Angeles, clearly
all of the teachers at our school were complete stoners, and he always had these moments he'd share from
Mr. Freiburger's trigonomtery lecture or Ms Kovac's chemistry class that clearly indicated they were stoned
while teaching at school, the cops were all stoners, everyone's parents were, "No, dood, this is the 1970's.
Everybody smokes pot, everyone! All the time! Everywhere! We're not even burn outs or stoners and we smoke pot all the time.
Thats what its become dood!"
So I finally scored three purple microdot hits from the guy in the smoking area. He thought it was completely hilarious
that someone like myself, so studious, and whacky was going to take acid. He wouldn't even sell me any
at first. "No. man, you shouldn't take acid, its not for everyone and definitely not for you." But he soon caved
in, wanted a few extra bucks or something. So he handed me the makeshift notebook
paper origami envelope he had taken such care to package the three purple microdots with and sold them to me for 6 bucks or so.
And I remember he emphasized again and again "But don't take all of these yourself ok!? You would completely freak out, its too much.
You said You're going to take these with Leonard and Jon right? OK. Do that. But look,
I don't ever take more than two of these myself, alright? One is enough for me. I think you should break these up and try and take
half of a hit. But Really, you shouldn't even take any man. You'll probably have a freak out and tell your Mom you got them from me."
I got the hits from him on a Friday at school, phoned my buddies and we agreed to meet at one of their houses.
I didn't take Mr. Smoking Area's advice and take a half, I thought he was just being a cunt as usual saying I should take half.
But I'd read Peter Stafford's book enough times to respect LSD and not take too much. So, We each dropped a hit at my friends house. His Mom didn't
didn't give a fuck what we did, so we'd always party at his house, in fact we could even invite half the school to come over and
his Mom would just go upstairs to her bedroom and leave us to it. So 3 of us dropped at about 2 pm at his house there in our drugs safety zone and we
hung out for a bit, did not smoke any pot for some reason, and then went out to this large pretty major park near his house
about 5 minutes walk away.
As it turned out, at the park that day, there were these AYSO soccer games being played. AYSO, if you don't know it, was or is a kind of national organized
soccer league in the U.S. that kids at the time could get involved in, maybe still do, dunno. So each of the fields had these bleachers we could sit down at, and we did.
I don't really remember any come up if there was any, but we were all suddenly not feeling like walking around, so maybe that was the come up.
So we just sat there watching these little kids playing soccer for awhile, maybe only 6-7 years old, they were pretty small and young so
it was actually quite amazing even before we started coming up, we were pretty impressed at how good they were for being such
small kids. But after a while they had suddenly become hysterically funny to watch, and at some point we looked at each other and it was like, "Oh. Oh yeah.
We're high as fuck. This is acid. This is great!" The hilarity just kept building
we are laughing our heads off and the kids had morphed into these weird exaggerations of themselves and
the way they looked, just so utterly apopleptic and driven and self-important about something so absurd as their little kids soccer game,
and we were just sitting there howling with laughter at them without stopping for an hour, it got a bit out of hand,
I'm surprised no one came over and asked us to leave, no doubt no one likes being laughed at when they are trying to win a soccer game.
Maybe the parents just thought we were just superfluous idiots anyway and it didn't matter so they let it ride. I know that I had soon become really
completely blissed out from the body high and all the laughing. I felt very nearly orgasmically blissed out. The sky was swarming with star shaped beings
that looked amazing. Then audio distortions set in, there was this one coach who
was completely manic and just out of his seat and shouting to his team and he began to sound like some kind of bellowing
walrus, The parents as well, like a flock of beached elephant seals it was just another level of insanely funny shit. The coach literally just sounded like he was shoutng
this walrusian monosyllable again and again, this "Mrope! Mrope!... Mawp!" Mrope!" I couldn't stand it. One of the guys was
like, "I'm fucking gonna get a hernia if I don't stop laughing man. Serious, we gotta get out of here, I'm losing my mind! And I'm getting a hernia dood!"
It was this bizarre mix of alarm and hilarity that had set in, he was looking really pretty worried and like he might freak out
so we decided to leave. But also too, we had clicked into LSD philosophical revelation mode as another layer to what we were going through
on the bleachers and I remember we all seemed to get it that we were the same way, were no different from these kids and their bellowing walrus coaches and parents,
we too were just these giant inflated bobble headed, Mr Potatoe headed stubby legged maniacs that would kill practically
for something as trivial as getting a ball away from someone. Referring to the LSD, referring to the
game and human life itself shaking our heads still laughing in turn each of us kept saying to one another, "This shit is ridiculous man!"
We left and decided to walk about 5 miles across town to this one art/revival movie house, they were showing a whole bunch of
live concert movies, Yes live, an early Pink Floyd movie, Cocksucker Blues (I think) which was a documentary about the Rolling Stones and some
other films of other bands. At one point we should have been arrested probably. This wall around this house really sucked us in
we were tripping even harder and it just looked amazing. I've checked the wall out since many times, the bricks were mixed with something
that made them froth up like lava or they actually were lava mixed with regular brick material. And there was some big moss tufts
and some ivy growing on the wall in places. Anyway, we were mesmerized just standing on these people's front lawn gawping at their
wall like zombies for about half an hour. There were dragons and demons, lizards and castles and fish and all kinds of things emerging and disappearing
and reemerging from the wall. One of the guys who was a budding ceramicist, sculptor and clay artist was like, "Dood, if I could
do clay like what this wall is doing I'd be a millionaire." It was so amazing we didn't even seem to care we looked completely insane
and we were lucky the owners probably weren't home or there could have been a problem. Youre 16 though and you are used to pissing
everyone off all of the time because you are this big moose eeddjit busting everything in the China shop all the time so you think nothing
of standing there slobbering, saucer eyed staring at a brick wall for an hour.
As we continued to walk it got to be a bit dark, which helped a lot getting me absorbed in these visions of the whole cosmos and my ceramicist friend
began getting a bit vociferous about the eternal truth of things he had just discovered. All of it happening as we walked and walked. Me and the other guy were not really understanding him
but I began questioning him about what he was saying, and it got a bit chippy, he got pretty contemptuous of me, "You have no idea what I am talking about anyway. Man...just...I don't know..." And the other guy
was just laughing at both of us. By the time we got to the revival movie house and the movie started he was still deeply absorbed in some kind
of revelations of eternal wisdom, and things would happen, trivial things like, change back for the movie ticket was 33 cents and he would be like,
"You see there? Thats exactly how it is. But no, you don't, do you, you don't see it." Or some passerby would say something to someone else and he would
interpret it as deep and indicative.
And me and the other guy would just give him an eye roll, we had come down a lot and I think our other friend was still way out there. He was dismissed
for the day in my mind when the Yes movie started and he began to see God or something looking up at the screen in tears with intense reverence. The acid had done the
opposite for me Yes just seemed contrived and tacky. I felt like I was seeing through some scam they were pulling, they seemed like these total charlatans.
A few years before I was very into them, bought many of their records, memorized a lot of Jon Anderson's lyrics and could sing along. I had sort of outgrown them
and was into Iggy, David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, the Clash and the Sex Pistols by the time we dropped this day.
The other guy and I were like, "What a pompous ridiculous band." They were hilarious. And we started in laughing
like hell at everything again. Yes was pure comedy and my friend with the hotline to the universal truth got up and left and sat somewhere else.
There were only a few people in theater for the Yes movie, so again we managed not getting into problems with people for laughing and making fun
of everything in that movie quite loudly. I don't remember how I got home or what happened after the movies.
All three of us were amazed by our first experience and to this day after maybe 50 trips in my life, a good number of them heroic doses, this first one was one of my favorites.
We bought more acid off Mr. Smoking Area a month later, it was some blank white blotter and we hung out at the one guy's house for quite awhile and did art for a bit. But he was having some kin dof
weird affair with this dirty old lady in his neighborhood, and she called him up and he said he wanted to go hang with her. Maybe he also didn't want us laughing the whole time
he was making his ascension to Neptune and ruining all that again, so me and the other guy split to go look at the wall we were blown away by the first time and I remember it was
just as amazing if not more so, more colorful too or something, but I don't remember much else of this second trip. I think we just walked around town
and checked everything out. It was a blast of a trip too. I never seem to have bad trips, only bad patches during trips sometimes and I sometimes seem to have trouble integrating trips.
I get blown out of the water and spend a month sort of shell shocked. Its sometimes like what i experience on psychedelics is so incredible and wonderfull that coming down and being back to
normal is the bad trip. So I have a two week long bad trip of a kind of psychedelic depression or something.