My best qualude experience was at a cemetery.
I was really fucked up and I went to an old cemetery with big bitchen memorial headstones in marble. It was night and cool but not cold, southern Calif weather. 1975. I had a VW beetle, light blue, and I was coming home from a party. I decided I should stop.
I found the graveyard to be peaceful. I felt no fear. I did not see any ghost nor did I feel any strange bursts of warm or cool air. I simply walked into the cemetery and walked among the headstones, read the names, marveled at the number of infants and children and sat thinking about mortality. I couldn't make sense of it. It seemed that if you made it though childhood, you could grow old. I saw no teenagers buried there. I myself was a teen.
My presence in the cemetery scared some other people who saw me walking there that night. They believed they had seen a ghost. I know because I heard them talking. I said nothing. I just walked and I kept my head down, reading the stones. The cries of fear, the sound of footsteps running... I remember these. There was nothing I could do. I knew if I reached out to the poor motherfuckers who had seen me there, and the fact that I was wearing a white flowing dress and that my hair was down must have made them sure I was the Living Dead. I didn't want to scare them further. I could hear the people shitting themselves as they fled. I was sorry, but unable to control the situation.
I sat and wondered about their fear. I wondered about life. I wondered when I would die. I knew one thing. There are no ghosts. There are only drug addled living souls who like to be an old cemetery on a dark night for the peace that is there.
I also knew it wasn't my time yet to be there. Eventually I got in my VW and drove home.
I am visiting my parents for the holidays and even though I'm 52 I can't smoke weed around my father. I don't want to have the same fucking argument we used to have. He can make me go home now and I don't want to get sent packing so I can't smoke at their house unless I take my mom and go somewhere. She likes to smoke.
Now all these years later there are two female figures in the cemetery at night. I make sure to wear my hair long and wear my skirts and naturally, my cape. It's safe in the cemetery. I realized it then. I appreciate even more now. No words are spoken, just the sound of the lighter and inhales and exhales. The sound of life in the dead, old cemetery.
I know some stuff now though. Let us hear kids walking though the adjacent park. We walk slowly until seen then stop out of the line of vision. We hear the kids stop. Hear them talk. Then I walk across the lighted area again into the darkness. Now I hear screams and the sound of footsteps running. We smile and we go back home.
I've never been afraid of a cemetery since my qualude experience in one. I've never believed in ghosts either. But that's just me.
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