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THE ACID KIDS
IF YOU THINK LSD IS HISTORY, WHAT HAPPENS AT THIS SUBURBAN TEENAGE PARTY MAY BLOW YOUR MIND
August 17, 1991
By Laura Blumenfeld
About This Story
A Washington Post reporter was allowed to attend the LSD party described in this story on the condition that the identities of the participants would not be disclosed. Accordingly, the students are identified only by their first initials.
They are golden children, lying in the grass, bathing in the midsummer sunset. The orange light repaints the large white house, gilds its windows, sends shadows into a neighbor's yard where a suburban Everyman pushes a lawn mower. The sky is periwinkle. The lawn mower is buzzing. The cicadas are buzzing. The 17-year-olds are buzzing.
"I saw God," J brags, rolling up onto his knees.
"What's He look like?" asks V. She puts down her copy of "Walden Two."
"I saw Him in the woods," he says. "He's like a tree spirit; He's like the Earth."
They laugh. A car pulls up. A mother is driving.
"Hi!" A chorus of sweet voices greet the mother. She sees strong arms, soft eyes, clean brows.
What mother would suspect they had just taken LSD?
R sheepishly gets out of the car. He settles next to a group of friends in the grass.
It is suburban Maryland. It is another summer vacation twilight for the group of student leaders, A and B students, sports team heroes. They wear thick cotton T-shirts and stone-washed cutoff jeans, the uniform of comfortable youth. They are handsome, "apple pie kids," as one of them puts it, headed for their senior year at a Montgomery County high school. It is V's party. She is willful, bold. She has a Botticelli face and light brown hair that ripples down her back. Her father, a doctor, her mother, a mother, are away on vacation.
"Bye, kids!" R's mother says cheerfully and disappears into the evening.
J resumes his account of the day he saw God. It was the end of 11th grade. He was tripping on LSD.
"I dropped two around lunch," he says, "and by the time I got to English -- the teacher was wearing this black and yellow outfit -- I thought she was a bumblebee!" His gray-green eyes search his audience. They aren't impressed. Some of them say they have taken as many as five hits of acid at once. And the ones who haven't dosed before don't believe him.
The light is nearly gone from the sky. It's been almost an hour since they popped onto their tongues the small white squares of paper printed with blue stars. The drug dissolved; the stars melted like grape candy, staining their pink tongues purple.
The night is lit by a half moon. Before tonight is over, the teenagers will say they see faces in rocks, skeletons in hedges. Rose bushes will dance and blossom on command. Flowers will dig for corn. Light bulbs will balloon, turn green. Lamps will chase them up stairs. Before the 12-hour acid trip is over, they will wander the streets of their parents' middle-class subdivision, picking up cigarette wrappers and broken glass. They will believe that the scraps are rare treasures.
Lysergic acid diethylamide. The kids rattle it off like the name of a new rock group.
"It takes your brain cells, throws them up, and when your mind comes down it's in little pieces," explains G, a lanky 17-year-old with a Keanu Reeves haircut but John Lennon sunglasses.
These kids are '90s-'60s hybrids. The sneakers are Reebok but the ankle bracelets are beaded. The T-shirts are Champion but the accessories are rainbow macrame.
G proudly reveals that he has done 50 hits of acid in the past three years. "I heard that after seven hits, you're legally insane," he says. He isn't worried.
Neither are his friends. They haven't been scared by the bogus horror stories that circulated in the '60s: that acid would scramble your chromosomes, deform your children. That acid made you stare into the sun until you went blind. But they also haven't been scared by the real perils of the drug: that it's unpredictable, that the strength of cheaply manufactured doses varies drastically, that adverse reactions can include panic attacks, terrifying hallucinations, flashbacks; that LSD can accentuate mental illness, violent tendencies and, if taken in large doses, trigger convulsions.
G believes acid is benign. He explains its pharmacology: "It's like turning up the power source in your mind, like turning up the volume in your head."
Montgomery County authorities say there is no significant LSD problem in local schools. "It's infinitesimal. It's not something the kids are doing; it was never something high school kids did," says Ed Masood, director of the Board of Education's division of health and physical education. "There's no LSD use by any kids in any school."
What about an acid party?
"That would seriously surprise me," said Lt. Thomas Evans, commander of the drug enforcement section of the Montgomery County police. "We hear nothing about kids using LSD."
Maybe they're just not listening. Nationally, the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that LSD-related "emergency room episodes" -- nationwide admissions for psychotic reactions, self-mutilation, unconsciousness -- have increased 100 percent since 1985. Most victims are white and under 20. More than a quarter of those are 17 or under.
Peter Luango, director of the Montgomery County Division of Addiction and Youth Treatment Services: "There has been an increase in {LSD use} the past 18 months although I don't see it as an overwhelming drug of choice. We have no new strategies to combat it." The police, he said, "haven't started" focusing on it.
At the high school that V and G and the others attend, LSD usage has increased alarmingly, said one teacher, especially among the wealthier white students.
V, the party hostess, tries to explain: People her age, she says, have no identity. They had no defining war, no Watergate; they were born the year Gerald Ford took office. Searching for cultural touchstones, they have adopted the icons of the 1960s, she says.
"Tripping has a natural kind of '60s image and that's really in today," she says. V has embroidery on her jeans. She has a 3.5 grade point average. She calls herself "Miss Activities." She has tried acid twice so far. She says the kids who experiment with LSD are frustrated with a world that defies understanding.
"We always have conversations about society," she says. "It makes no sense. The government makes no sense. School makes no sense. Why don't people have enough to eat? Why do we have to stress ourselves out and kill ourselves in jobs?"
The kids who don't try acid, she says, are sheep.
"They're like, 'Mommy says no. Society says no.' They don't have the guts to question authority," she says.
Socio-philosophical explanations aside, she also offers the most common reason given for flirtation with LSD: "It was something new to do that sounded neat."
The New Rules J is sweating. He is panting. His face is flushed, his pupils gigantic. The dark hair that frames his face is sticky. He is off on his 30th trip, he says.
"Oh wow! I'm starting to feel it," J says, pulling off his T-shirt.
The party moves inside the big white house. There are about 20 partyers now. They rollick over hardwood floors, Persian rugs, through bedrooms, past book-lined, framed-art walls. They are still "in reality," they say. No hallucinating yet. One guy heads for the bathroom in the hall. He leaves the door open, his proud yellow arc for all to see.
On the wall near the bathroom door is taped a red and white sign in rounded teenage girl writing.
RULES:
1. No smoking in the house.
2. Put all trash in cans.
3. Must share all beer, alcohol and drugs with occupants of the house.
4. Must not drop/drink/smoke and drive.
Someone had taken a black felt pen and crossed out "not."
Before V's parents left for vacation, they lectured her: No smoking, no beer, no boys. V has a great relationship with her folks, she says. It's just that they are a little strict.
"No one allowed to take more than three {doses} at my house!" she commands as her friends scatter.
"I'm taking four!" J yells.
"I'm taking six!" his friend outbids him.
It is a birthday party. One of the girls is turning 17. Pink streamers and tie-dyed purple ballons decorate the dining room. An orange construction paper "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" is taped to the den door. The block letter loops are filled with peace signs.
"This is my birthday present," the birthday girl says, in a voice that sounds younger than 17. "It is my first time tripping."
She has light blond hair that coils like her friend's. She has light blond skin and middle-of-the-ocean eyes. She wears a teddy bear T-shirt and a rainbow anklet. She gets A's ("and one B"). She is a virgin. She is pretty. Popular. Part of the right clique.
In the den, kids are taking turns on the telephone. They shut out screaming friends and blaring MTV, and dial their parents to check in. First to the phone is a barefoot girl with polished pink toenails.
"Dad? Hi. Get Mom." Pause.
"We're going out to dinner."
While Dad finds Mom, she squeezes her friend's hand -- her friend is drinking a beer -- and mimics her father's voice, a singsong rebuke: "You're just running around, you're out of control."
"Hi, Mom! We're leaving now. I'll call you tomorrow morning. I'll be ready to go home."
"Bye."
She hangs up the receiver and says to her friend, "That woman is crazy." The girls run out back and land on white patio furniture. The boys follow. The acid makes them hot, they say. Some have sweated through two T-shirts already. They need air.
The birthday girl, stretches out on a white lounge: "Oh, whoa, I'm disoriented."
The boom box is pumping out "Groove Is in the Heart" by Deee-Lite, a '90s group with '60s packaging. Kids are yelling, drinking orange juice ("Vitamin C enhances the trip"), smoking cigarettes, laughing. J is dancing in the middle of the toss of bodies.
"This tripping is {expletive} awesome! My body feels like a rubber band!" J says, and his shirtless, lithe body does look elastic.
He calls himself an "acid baby"; his parents took LSD in the 1960s.
A guy scoops up some birthday cake and then pie-faces the birthday girl. She squeals. A chocolate icing smear-fight breaks out.
"This is out of control," V laughs, surveying the mayhem on her deck.
"OUT ... OF ... CONTROL!" echo the delirious partyers.
V is opening and closing her hand in front of her nose, transfixed by the "trails," the afterimages she says her fingers are leaving in the air. "I feel like I'm not here," she says dreamily. "My face is tingling."
"It's not fair; I think I'm immune to it," another girl whines.
R is sulking. His mother dropped him off too late. He missed out on taking acid. "I want to trip my {expletive} off," he says.
"I'm starting to feel shaky," the birthday girl says. Her voice betrays alarm.
"I want to totally lose it," R says, tuning her out. He has a shy smile and an earnest dirty-blond crew cut. He's wearing white shorts, white sneakers and a gray Champion T-shirt. He is skinny. He is reminiscing about the thrill of taking acid and driving.
"The lights come at you real fast," he says. His father is a lawyer. "He'd kill me if he found out."
R's prayers have been answered. A car just pulled up around front with a fresh supply of acid. G and a bunch of other guys have gone off to buy some for the latecomers.
"Acid car!" Everyone runs to greet the returning heroes.
"I'm taking four!" someone cries.
High Tide G and his cohorts are sitting around V's kitchen table. They are popping Pepperidge Farm goldfish, breaking the "No smoking in the house" rule, recounting how they scored. The boys cruised for a while. They found a Deadhead, a guy with curly blond hair and a nose ring. He took their $60 and promised to return with 20 hits of acid. The dude never came back.
So they found another dealer. Easy.
"Right now it's high tide," one boy says.
These days, acid is easier to buy than pot, he says. Partly because the Grateful Dead and its trip-happy fans were in D.C. in June, and partly because acid is "in," he says. Get this, the kid says: He went out earlier to buy some beer and discovered that the store manager also sells acid.
G usually buys LSD from a 21-year-old friend. The dealer has an arrangement with a phony video company in California, G says. Mails them $3,000. Gets back 100 sheets of acid-soaked blotter paper, 100 hits per sheet. Sends out high school kids to sell the stuff at $5 a hit. Bags $50,000 cash.
G doesn't deal anymore. But he is considering selling a couple of sheets of acid to make extra money for school. He says he used to spend $50 for a 100-hit sheet at a Grateful Dead concert. He would sell the stock at $5 a hit, making $500 in sales.
"That's 1,000 percent profit," he calculates. "My job at the mall -- I make $4.50 an hour -- that's kind of lame."
Selling LSD is a felony, but the prospect of jail doesn't scare him.
"Nothing is illegal unless you get caught," G says, then immediately looks sorry that he said it. "I guess that sounds criminal. I guess it is criminal." He pauses. He thinks. His 17-year-old confidence is faltering. Finally: "I don't like any kind of authority. And besides, I don't see any reason society should inhibit the use of any part of our minds."
The prospect of blowing someone's mind with too much acid doesn't worry him either.
"I'd sell it first to a guy I didn't like and let him test it," he teases. "Maybe I'd give it to my dog."
Entrepreneurial
G's friend, M, also says he was involved in LSD distribution. He says he financed two 11th-graders from Bethesda who manufacture the drug in their basement. M has tried acid twice ("it's good for exploring") but he says he generally is against drug use. He backed the teen drug dealers for "strictly financial reasons."
"And I wanted to make my father proud," M adds.
He is serious.
M turned 17 this month. He is a 140-pound demi-adult with Superman sheets on his bed and a taste for Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He tells his story freely:
His father, who like his mother has a PhD, owns a small, successful business. M wanted to be an entrepreneur like his dad. He had been working for him every summer since he was 12, loading boxes.
"I was sick of working with my hands," he explains. "I wanted to be a white-collar worker."
So when he got to be friendly with two guys at a Montgomery County community center and they pitched the LSD financing scheme, he agreed. Last November, he withdrew $120 from his savings account. He put the money in an envelope and hand-delivered it to Bethesda. The envelope was printed with his father's business logo.
A week later, the guys gave him $240, doubling his investment.
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"I was like a cartoon character with dollar signs popping in my eyes," M says. It became a routine. He would invest $200. A few weeks later he'd get back $400. Over a six-month period, he made $1,000.
"It didn't really seem illegal," he says. (It is. Knowingly financing a drug deal is a felony.) "I didn't think about the legal aspects." And if he were caught, he reasoned, it was his first offense and he was still underage.
"I thought, who are the cops going to trust, a preppie dude like me or some acid freak, Deadhead deadbeat?" he says. "I'm a good boy."
M bought himself a tie at Banana Republic. He bought his mother flowers. He felt independent. He decided it might be time to buy his first razor.
"There was no guilt factor here. I thought if I'm not doing it, someone else will capitalize on it," he says.
One April afternoon, he decided it was time to show his father what a good businessboy he had become. His father was sitting in the living room reading the paper when M walked up to him and spilled it. His father looked as if he'd been punched. He sent M to his room and hardly talked to him for weeks. The connection with the dealers was terminated immediately.
"My dad called me a hoodlum and a drug dealer," the boy says. "He used the word 'disappointed' with me, and that's the worst word."
He still keeps the envelope with his father's business logo on his desk.
In the Blood J, the "acid baby," also told a parent about his involvement with LSD. His mother, who took acid several times during the late '60s, says she doesn't approve of his use but sees no way to stop it.
Besides, she says, there are advantages: She and her son are "more on the same wavelength" since he tried the drug, she told The Post.
"It changed his perspective, opened up his mind," she says.
But she worries. She has friends who have fried their brains on acid.
Today's children, she says, "see it glamorized. There's a kind of a hero worship when they realize, 'Oh, my parents were at Woodstock, I want to experience some of the things they did.'
"They think they're immortal -- drinking, driving fast, swimming in deep water -- kids do all kinds of stupid things."
She says she hopes J stops "before he loses his faculties." In the meantime, she says, he needs a guardian angel. "When you're a parent you say a whole lot of prayers."
The Argument
The smell of cinnamon fills V's kitchen. The breeze from an open window circulates the sweet flavor. The kids are chewing Wrigley's Big Red gum. They put the freshly purchased squares of blotter acid on the cinnamon gum and pop the sticks in their mouths. The new blotter pieces are imprinted with pictures of tiny blue unicorns.
R finally is taking his coveted dose. He retrieves the pink wad of gum from his mouth and examines it, worried that somehow he "lost" the acid. J contravenes V's three-hit limit and takes three more hits of LSD.
The hostess and the birthday girl, forever twins, split a hit.
V instantly regrets it.
"I have a feeling something bad is going to happen at my house," she says.
They wait for the new doses to kick in. They paint each other's faces with fluorescent markers. They make statues out of multicolored clay. They play board games. They watch music videos. They stare at a painting of a girl and argue about what they see in it:
"A mermaid grabbing trees."
"A panther."
"A dove. No, a dragon."
"It's a pink and purple and orange planet."
"I see a lady strangling her cat."
"There's a baby with an evil screaming face."
The phone rings. V takes the call and then announces: "The maid's coming tomorrow, you guys!" Her voice is hoarse from all the yelling. "So if you wake up tomorrow and there's a black lady standing over you, don't be freaked out!"
R, the latecomer, is a little freaked out already. His stomach hurts. ("From the strychnine -- that's rat poison, it makes the acid stick to the paper.") His chest feels tense. He is crushing an empty container of Minute Maid. He can't let go of the plastic jug. He hears the blood rushing through his brain, he says.
"Can't handle it, he's a pussy boy," taunts a classmate.
J glimpses himself in the hall mirror. He sees a wolf. He flashes elongated canines and growls. V checks herself next.
"I look like a dead woman," she says. "I'm the Devil."
The birthday girl is leaning against the staircase railing. She has been gripping a paper palm tree in her left hand for the past hour.
It's on fire! She suddenly exclaims and scampers outside. Her friends follow. She is standing on the deck, fanning the paper palm tree. Pink Floyd's album "The Wall" is playing. The birthday girl and her palm tree start to dance.
"My birthday is freedom, mad, wild," she announces. "I want to fly forever."
By now, about 30 teenagers are wandering around V's house. Many aren't tripping. None of the handful of black guests has taken the drug. The "reality dudes," as they call the ones who aren't on LSD, are getting drunk on Budweiser. The trippers say that being with "people in reality" makes them nervous. A boozed-up boy starts lecturing them on the evil nature of drugs. A guy who's had four hits of acid, and is twice his size, socks the drunk kid in the jaw. Everyone is screaming. Girls start to cry.
"I'm going to go insane!" V shrieks, her cheeks crimson. "All people who aren't tripping, get the {expletive} out of my house!"
She rants. She begs. Finally, the non-tripping teenagers leave.
It's close to their parents' bedtime. A couple of kids go inside and shut the den door, silencing Pink Floyd. They call their moms and dads to say good night.
The Sky, the Stars, the Deck
R has settled in a deck chair. He is examining his hand with binoculars. V is standing in the grass, whirling her cigarette against the dark sky, hypnotized by the orange trails of fire she says she sees. J is on his knees, staring at the knots and knurls and bumps on the wooden deck.
"Oh my God, there's a lady in the floor," he says. A bunch of kids join him to inspect the wood. Her face. Her breasts. Look at all those people trapped in the wood. "I'm stepping on the souls of every person that ever lived," J says.
Up next for scrutiny is the sky: The sky is contracting. The stars are swirling. The stars are melting. They see red, white, blue flashes of light.
"It's the Fourth of July up there," the birthday girl sums it up.
A boy comes running around from the front yard. He is frantic, flailing his arms. He has bad news. He saw Little J. Little J is here!
"I saw him on a truck! He's drunk!"
No. He must be hallucinating. Little J couldn't possibly be at V's house! They drift around front to check.
A large van, with a boy lying on the roof, cruises by the driveway. The crowd is stunned. Scared.
"I'm never doing this again," V says, stricken.
"I want to go home," says J.
The van loops around and rolls by a second time. Little J is on his back, propped up by his elbows on top of the van. He isn't wearing a shirt. His straight brown hair is flying. He averts his eyes from the gathering on V's lawn.
Death's Visitor
Two weeks ago, Little J nearly died tripping, his friends say. No one could forgive him for losing at their new game.
It was going to be a blast. C's parents were out of town and that meant: party! Little J took a hit of acid before he left his summer job.
He is a slight boy, 17 but much smaller than his buddies. More studious. They call him a worrier. But that night he was feeling bold.
Nine guys took LSD at C's house. (The blotter sheet had a "Star Trek" theme: A man in a spacesuit. An energy field. And across the bottom, the message "Beam me up, Scottie. There is no intelligent life down here.") Some of the guys were dosing for the first time, some for the 30th. They played guitar. They sat in the yard, watching hallucinatory lightning streak the sky, feeling imaginary tremors in the rocks beneath them. The guys drifted inside.
"I was upstairs talking to someone and then all of a sudden I just lost it," Little J remembers. "Something freaked me out."
He started worrying about making it to work the next day. How much longer would the trip last? He wanted a watch. He wanted to shower. He wanted his car. He wanted his mother. He wanted to leave. He was afraid to leave.
J, ever the audacious one, had tape-recorded his LSD trips before. He persuaded the rest of the guys to set up a tape deck in the den to record their experience. It turned out to be a record of a nightmare:
"I don't know where I am," Little J can be heard saying, stumbling around the den while the other guys relax on the couches, chatting. "I don't want to do this anymore." He approaches each guy, addressing each, surreally, by first and last name, asking: "How many hits of acid have I taken?"
They tell him he's had two. They tell him he is fine. They throw snap firecrackers at his feet. They tell him to shut up.
He rambles on. He can't understand them. He can't see straight. There are translucent squares floating through the dimly lit room. The ceiling looks like bedsheets undulating on a clothesline. A glaze covers the lamp, the chairs, his friends' faces.
"Get these pieces of acid off of me," he cries, scraping his arms to remove invisible scraps of LSD paper. "Don't give me any more acid."
The guys laugh. Little J is getting desperate. It's hard to stand up. "I think I'm going to die," he says.
C, the host, suggests dialing a drug crisis hot line. Little J staggers out the front door. C grabs him.
"Call 911," Little J implores.
"You have a scrambled brain," J says. "Why don't we handcuff him?"
Remember N? The guys remember. He had a weird trip on prom night and flipped out. They're getting nervous. They are trying to deal with a terrifying crisis, but they are 17 years old, and they are tripping on acid.
"Call 911 on the phone," Little J persists.
"No way are we going to prison!" someone says.
"I'm going to die," Little J is pleading.
"So what, man."
"I feel bad for him," says a guy who's on his 10th trip. "He got the bad side of the drug. We got the good." The guy says he wants to stop the tape recorder. It will be too weird to play it back.
"People write books about this. ... Ever hear of the book 'Kool-Aid Acid Test'?" asks J.
Another boy, an A student, says soon he'll be making his own acid. He's going to study chemistry in college.
Little J is yelling now: "Find me my MOM! I think I'm DEAD!"
Acid has seeped into his clothes, he believes. He pulls off his Nike Air shirt. Down go his pants. Off with his underwear. His naked body is drenched in sweat.
His friends consider the alternatives: Knock him out. Kick him out. Send him to the hospital.
If they take him to the hospital, they'll put him in a straitjacket for the rest of his life, argues one kid. He saw it happen in a movie at school. C suggests they make their own straitjacket.
"I'll strangle the mother {expletive}," someone says.
"Jesus, are we going to be arrested? That's all I have to say," says a guy who has, in fact, not spoken up before.
"Let me GO!" Little J is thrashing around. "I'm totally INSANE! Find me my MAMA!" He is running around the room. "I'm STONE COLD DEAD!"
His friends try to dress him. He's wailing. He's spitting. He has six hours of the acid trip left to go.
"I DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM! I'M DYING!" he screams. "DIAL 911!"
Most of the partyers have moved outside, away from the bad trip scene.
Little J runs into the hall. He backs into a wall and falls over. He can't feel anything. He is banging his head on the yellow tile floor.
"My God! My God!" gasps C.
Little J is lying face down, his body convulsing.
They drag Little J into the living room. Spasms contort his body. They watch his skin turn a dark, frightening color. He goes rigid.
"Our friend's gonna die on us," says the boy who was worried about getting arrested.
C is cradling Little J. "I can hear him breathing," he says. Someone knows CPR. They lay him on his side. Keep his tongue out of his trachea.
Somebody mentions 911 again.
"He had too many worries, man," J diagnoses. "Too much mental stress. ... It took over his body."
Somebody checks for a heartbeat. They cover him with a blanket. Guys drift out of the room.
Little J comes to 15 minutes later, looking drained. Three hours later, at 3:30 a.m., he tells his friends: It's okay, I've come down. They go into the kitchen and nuke a pizza.
By morning, he was overwhelmed by embarrassment about his fit. He was exhausted. His back ached ("because acid drains your spinal fluid and it doesn't exactly go back"). He vowed to never again drop acid, smoke pot or even drink beer. The only reason he had dropped acid in the first place was that he was bored, he said.
"We needed a new form of entertainment. You can only see so many movies," he said.
He was thankful his friends ignored his plea to be hospitalized. The doctors would have strapped him down, he said.
"I remember saying 'call 911' 'cause I thought I was going to die, but the hospital wouldn't have helped me anyway," he said. "And they would've called my parents."
A Disappearance
On this night, no one is feeling sorry for the frail, shirtless boy on the van. The kids in V's driveway want the Kid Who Almost Died to go away. They want the bad trip to disappear.
The van leaves. The trippers immediately distance themselves from his terrifying experience.
"He has a feeble mind, that's why it happened," J says.
"He made himself have a bad trip. The drug doesn't do it to you," adds V.
G's adage about bad trips: "Fear causes hesitation and hesitation causes your worst fears to come true."
The group returns somberly to the back yard. They head for the reassuring flicker of lightning bugs in the grass. But nearly everyone who has used LSD before has an "almost bad trip" story: From a tree branch, the Grim Reaper summoned one boy. A giant black spider chased another guy. R once was pinned to his car, paralyzed. Snakes wrapped themselves around G's ankles.
J says he saw his best friend die; the room went dark with blood.
"My fingernail is alive, all my energy is in my nail," says the birthday girl. She is running her thumb over the pink nail polish on her index finger. "I can't stop feeling it. I want to cut off my nail and kill it," she says to V.
V is quiet. She is far away. She is thinking. Peering into a vast, black pool of thoughts. Everything dark and unknown to her is floating at the bottom of the pool. She doesn't want to look. She can't help herself from looking. She feels utterly alone.
The kids are quiet now. They gather by a weeping willow. They are silver children, lying in the grass, bathing in the midsummer starlight.
They plan another party for late August.
washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/08/18/the-acid-kids/2b5d4ee1-3162-46c5-ac7d-96a1970ba9f5/
IF YOU THINK LSD IS HISTORY, WHAT HAPPENS AT THIS SUBURBAN TEENAGE PARTY MAY BLOW YOUR MIND
August 17, 1991
By Laura Blumenfeld
About This Story
A Washington Post reporter was allowed to attend the LSD party described in this story on the condition that the identities of the participants would not be disclosed. Accordingly, the students are identified only by their first initials.
They are golden children, lying in the grass, bathing in the midsummer sunset. The orange light repaints the large white house, gilds its windows, sends shadows into a neighbor's yard where a suburban Everyman pushes a lawn mower. The sky is periwinkle. The lawn mower is buzzing. The cicadas are buzzing. The 17-year-olds are buzzing.
"I saw God," J brags, rolling up onto his knees.
"What's He look like?" asks V. She puts down her copy of "Walden Two."
"I saw Him in the woods," he says. "He's like a tree spirit; He's like the Earth."
They laugh. A car pulls up. A mother is driving.
"Hi!" A chorus of sweet voices greet the mother. She sees strong arms, soft eyes, clean brows.
What mother would suspect they had just taken LSD?
R sheepishly gets out of the car. He settles next to a group of friends in the grass.
It is suburban Maryland. It is another summer vacation twilight for the group of student leaders, A and B students, sports team heroes. They wear thick cotton T-shirts and stone-washed cutoff jeans, the uniform of comfortable youth. They are handsome, "apple pie kids," as one of them puts it, headed for their senior year at a Montgomery County high school. It is V's party. She is willful, bold. She has a Botticelli face and light brown hair that ripples down her back. Her father, a doctor, her mother, a mother, are away on vacation.
"Bye, kids!" R's mother says cheerfully and disappears into the evening.
J resumes his account of the day he saw God. It was the end of 11th grade. He was tripping on LSD.
"I dropped two around lunch," he says, "and by the time I got to English -- the teacher was wearing this black and yellow outfit -- I thought she was a bumblebee!" His gray-green eyes search his audience. They aren't impressed. Some of them say they have taken as many as five hits of acid at once. And the ones who haven't dosed before don't believe him.
The light is nearly gone from the sky. It's been almost an hour since they popped onto their tongues the small white squares of paper printed with blue stars. The drug dissolved; the stars melted like grape candy, staining their pink tongues purple.
The night is lit by a half moon. Before tonight is over, the teenagers will say they see faces in rocks, skeletons in hedges. Rose bushes will dance and blossom on command. Flowers will dig for corn. Light bulbs will balloon, turn green. Lamps will chase them up stairs. Before the 12-hour acid trip is over, they will wander the streets of their parents' middle-class subdivision, picking up cigarette wrappers and broken glass. They will believe that the scraps are rare treasures.
Lysergic acid diethylamide. The kids rattle it off like the name of a new rock group.
"It takes your brain cells, throws them up, and when your mind comes down it's in little pieces," explains G, a lanky 17-year-old with a Keanu Reeves haircut but John Lennon sunglasses.
These kids are '90s-'60s hybrids. The sneakers are Reebok but the ankle bracelets are beaded. The T-shirts are Champion but the accessories are rainbow macrame.
G proudly reveals that he has done 50 hits of acid in the past three years. "I heard that after seven hits, you're legally insane," he says. He isn't worried.
Neither are his friends. They haven't been scared by the bogus horror stories that circulated in the '60s: that acid would scramble your chromosomes, deform your children. That acid made you stare into the sun until you went blind. But they also haven't been scared by the real perils of the drug: that it's unpredictable, that the strength of cheaply manufactured doses varies drastically, that adverse reactions can include panic attacks, terrifying hallucinations, flashbacks; that LSD can accentuate mental illness, violent tendencies and, if taken in large doses, trigger convulsions.
G believes acid is benign. He explains its pharmacology: "It's like turning up the power source in your mind, like turning up the volume in your head."
Montgomery County authorities say there is no significant LSD problem in local schools. "It's infinitesimal. It's not something the kids are doing; it was never something high school kids did," says Ed Masood, director of the Board of Education's division of health and physical education. "There's no LSD use by any kids in any school."
What about an acid party?
"That would seriously surprise me," said Lt. Thomas Evans, commander of the drug enforcement section of the Montgomery County police. "We hear nothing about kids using LSD."
Maybe they're just not listening. Nationally, the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that LSD-related "emergency room episodes" -- nationwide admissions for psychotic reactions, self-mutilation, unconsciousness -- have increased 100 percent since 1985. Most victims are white and under 20. More than a quarter of those are 17 or under.
Peter Luango, director of the Montgomery County Division of Addiction and Youth Treatment Services: "There has been an increase in {LSD use} the past 18 months although I don't see it as an overwhelming drug of choice. We have no new strategies to combat it." The police, he said, "haven't started" focusing on it.
At the high school that V and G and the others attend, LSD usage has increased alarmingly, said one teacher, especially among the wealthier white students.
V, the party hostess, tries to explain: People her age, she says, have no identity. They had no defining war, no Watergate; they were born the year Gerald Ford took office. Searching for cultural touchstones, they have adopted the icons of the 1960s, she says.
"Tripping has a natural kind of '60s image and that's really in today," she says. V has embroidery on her jeans. She has a 3.5 grade point average. She calls herself "Miss Activities." She has tried acid twice so far. She says the kids who experiment with LSD are frustrated with a world that defies understanding.
"We always have conversations about society," she says. "It makes no sense. The government makes no sense. School makes no sense. Why don't people have enough to eat? Why do we have to stress ourselves out and kill ourselves in jobs?"
The kids who don't try acid, she says, are sheep.
"They're like, 'Mommy says no. Society says no.' They don't have the guts to question authority," she says.
Socio-philosophical explanations aside, she also offers the most common reason given for flirtation with LSD: "It was something new to do that sounded neat."
The New Rules J is sweating. He is panting. His face is flushed, his pupils gigantic. The dark hair that frames his face is sticky. He is off on his 30th trip, he says.
"Oh wow! I'm starting to feel it," J says, pulling off his T-shirt.
The party moves inside the big white house. There are about 20 partyers now. They rollick over hardwood floors, Persian rugs, through bedrooms, past book-lined, framed-art walls. They are still "in reality," they say. No hallucinating yet. One guy heads for the bathroom in the hall. He leaves the door open, his proud yellow arc for all to see.
On the wall near the bathroom door is taped a red and white sign in rounded teenage girl writing.
RULES:
1. No smoking in the house.
2. Put all trash in cans.
3. Must share all beer, alcohol and drugs with occupants of the house.
4. Must not drop/drink/smoke and drive.
Someone had taken a black felt pen and crossed out "not."
Before V's parents left for vacation, they lectured her: No smoking, no beer, no boys. V has a great relationship with her folks, she says. It's just that they are a little strict.
"No one allowed to take more than three {doses} at my house!" she commands as her friends scatter.
"I'm taking four!" J yells.
"I'm taking six!" his friend outbids him.
It is a birthday party. One of the girls is turning 17. Pink streamers and tie-dyed purple ballons decorate the dining room. An orange construction paper "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" is taped to the den door. The block letter loops are filled with peace signs.
"This is my birthday present," the birthday girl says, in a voice that sounds younger than 17. "It is my first time tripping."
She has light blond hair that coils like her friend's. She has light blond skin and middle-of-the-ocean eyes. She wears a teddy bear T-shirt and a rainbow anklet. She gets A's ("and one B"). She is a virgin. She is pretty. Popular. Part of the right clique.
In the den, kids are taking turns on the telephone. They shut out screaming friends and blaring MTV, and dial their parents to check in. First to the phone is a barefoot girl with polished pink toenails.
"Dad? Hi. Get Mom." Pause.
"We're going out to dinner."
While Dad finds Mom, she squeezes her friend's hand -- her friend is drinking a beer -- and mimics her father's voice, a singsong rebuke: "You're just running around, you're out of control."
"Hi, Mom! We're leaving now. I'll call you tomorrow morning. I'll be ready to go home."
"Bye."
She hangs up the receiver and says to her friend, "That woman is crazy." The girls run out back and land on white patio furniture. The boys follow. The acid makes them hot, they say. Some have sweated through two T-shirts already. They need air.
The birthday girl, stretches out on a white lounge: "Oh, whoa, I'm disoriented."
The boom box is pumping out "Groove Is in the Heart" by Deee-Lite, a '90s group with '60s packaging. Kids are yelling, drinking orange juice ("Vitamin C enhances the trip"), smoking cigarettes, laughing. J is dancing in the middle of the toss of bodies.
"This tripping is {expletive} awesome! My body feels like a rubber band!" J says, and his shirtless, lithe body does look elastic.
He calls himself an "acid baby"; his parents took LSD in the 1960s.
A guy scoops up some birthday cake and then pie-faces the birthday girl. She squeals. A chocolate icing smear-fight breaks out.
"This is out of control," V laughs, surveying the mayhem on her deck.
"OUT ... OF ... CONTROL!" echo the delirious partyers.
V is opening and closing her hand in front of her nose, transfixed by the "trails," the afterimages she says her fingers are leaving in the air. "I feel like I'm not here," she says dreamily. "My face is tingling."
"It's not fair; I think I'm immune to it," another girl whines.
R is sulking. His mother dropped him off too late. He missed out on taking acid. "I want to trip my {expletive} off," he says.
"I'm starting to feel shaky," the birthday girl says. Her voice betrays alarm.
"I want to totally lose it," R says, tuning her out. He has a shy smile and an earnest dirty-blond crew cut. He's wearing white shorts, white sneakers and a gray Champion T-shirt. He is skinny. He is reminiscing about the thrill of taking acid and driving.
"The lights come at you real fast," he says. His father is a lawyer. "He'd kill me if he found out."
R's prayers have been answered. A car just pulled up around front with a fresh supply of acid. G and a bunch of other guys have gone off to buy some for the latecomers.
"Acid car!" Everyone runs to greet the returning heroes.
"I'm taking four!" someone cries.
High Tide G and his cohorts are sitting around V's kitchen table. They are popping Pepperidge Farm goldfish, breaking the "No smoking in the house" rule, recounting how they scored. The boys cruised for a while. They found a Deadhead, a guy with curly blond hair and a nose ring. He took their $60 and promised to return with 20 hits of acid. The dude never came back.
So they found another dealer. Easy.
"Right now it's high tide," one boy says.
These days, acid is easier to buy than pot, he says. Partly because the Grateful Dead and its trip-happy fans were in D.C. in June, and partly because acid is "in," he says. Get this, the kid says: He went out earlier to buy some beer and discovered that the store manager also sells acid.
G usually buys LSD from a 21-year-old friend. The dealer has an arrangement with a phony video company in California, G says. Mails them $3,000. Gets back 100 sheets of acid-soaked blotter paper, 100 hits per sheet. Sends out high school kids to sell the stuff at $5 a hit. Bags $50,000 cash.
G doesn't deal anymore. But he is considering selling a couple of sheets of acid to make extra money for school. He says he used to spend $50 for a 100-hit sheet at a Grateful Dead concert. He would sell the stock at $5 a hit, making $500 in sales.
"That's 1,000 percent profit," he calculates. "My job at the mall -- I make $4.50 an hour -- that's kind of lame."
Selling LSD is a felony, but the prospect of jail doesn't scare him.
"Nothing is illegal unless you get caught," G says, then immediately looks sorry that he said it. "I guess that sounds criminal. I guess it is criminal." He pauses. He thinks. His 17-year-old confidence is faltering. Finally: "I don't like any kind of authority. And besides, I don't see any reason society should inhibit the use of any part of our minds."
The prospect of blowing someone's mind with too much acid doesn't worry him either.
"I'd sell it first to a guy I didn't like and let him test it," he teases. "Maybe I'd give it to my dog."
Entrepreneurial
G's friend, M, also says he was involved in LSD distribution. He says he financed two 11th-graders from Bethesda who manufacture the drug in their basement. M has tried acid twice ("it's good for exploring") but he says he generally is against drug use. He backed the teen drug dealers for "strictly financial reasons."
"And I wanted to make my father proud," M adds.
He is serious.
M turned 17 this month. He is a 140-pound demi-adult with Superman sheets on his bed and a taste for Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He tells his story freely:
His father, who like his mother has a PhD, owns a small, successful business. M wanted to be an entrepreneur like his dad. He had been working for him every summer since he was 12, loading boxes.
"I was sick of working with my hands," he explains. "I wanted to be a white-collar worker."
So when he got to be friendly with two guys at a Montgomery County community center and they pitched the LSD financing scheme, he agreed. Last November, he withdrew $120 from his savings account. He put the money in an envelope and hand-delivered it to Bethesda. The envelope was printed with his father's business logo.
A week later, the guys gave him $240, doubling his investment.
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"I was like a cartoon character with dollar signs popping in my eyes," M says. It became a routine. He would invest $200. A few weeks later he'd get back $400. Over a six-month period, he made $1,000.
"It didn't really seem illegal," he says. (It is. Knowingly financing a drug deal is a felony.) "I didn't think about the legal aspects." And if he were caught, he reasoned, it was his first offense and he was still underage.
"I thought, who are the cops going to trust, a preppie dude like me or some acid freak, Deadhead deadbeat?" he says. "I'm a good boy."
M bought himself a tie at Banana Republic. He bought his mother flowers. He felt independent. He decided it might be time to buy his first razor.
"There was no guilt factor here. I thought if I'm not doing it, someone else will capitalize on it," he says.
One April afternoon, he decided it was time to show his father what a good businessboy he had become. His father was sitting in the living room reading the paper when M walked up to him and spilled it. His father looked as if he'd been punched. He sent M to his room and hardly talked to him for weeks. The connection with the dealers was terminated immediately.
"My dad called me a hoodlum and a drug dealer," the boy says. "He used the word 'disappointed' with me, and that's the worst word."
He still keeps the envelope with his father's business logo on his desk.
In the Blood J, the "acid baby," also told a parent about his involvement with LSD. His mother, who took acid several times during the late '60s, says she doesn't approve of his use but sees no way to stop it.
Besides, she says, there are advantages: She and her son are "more on the same wavelength" since he tried the drug, she told The Post.
"It changed his perspective, opened up his mind," she says.
But she worries. She has friends who have fried their brains on acid.
Today's children, she says, "see it glamorized. There's a kind of a hero worship when they realize, 'Oh, my parents were at Woodstock, I want to experience some of the things they did.'
"They think they're immortal -- drinking, driving fast, swimming in deep water -- kids do all kinds of stupid things."
She says she hopes J stops "before he loses his faculties." In the meantime, she says, he needs a guardian angel. "When you're a parent you say a whole lot of prayers."
The Argument
The smell of cinnamon fills V's kitchen. The breeze from an open window circulates the sweet flavor. The kids are chewing Wrigley's Big Red gum. They put the freshly purchased squares of blotter acid on the cinnamon gum and pop the sticks in their mouths. The new blotter pieces are imprinted with pictures of tiny blue unicorns.
R finally is taking his coveted dose. He retrieves the pink wad of gum from his mouth and examines it, worried that somehow he "lost" the acid. J contravenes V's three-hit limit and takes three more hits of LSD.
The hostess and the birthday girl, forever twins, split a hit.
V instantly regrets it.
"I have a feeling something bad is going to happen at my house," she says.
They wait for the new doses to kick in. They paint each other's faces with fluorescent markers. They make statues out of multicolored clay. They play board games. They watch music videos. They stare at a painting of a girl and argue about what they see in it:
"A mermaid grabbing trees."
"A panther."
"A dove. No, a dragon."
"It's a pink and purple and orange planet."
"I see a lady strangling her cat."
"There's a baby with an evil screaming face."
The phone rings. V takes the call and then announces: "The maid's coming tomorrow, you guys!" Her voice is hoarse from all the yelling. "So if you wake up tomorrow and there's a black lady standing over you, don't be freaked out!"
R, the latecomer, is a little freaked out already. His stomach hurts. ("From the strychnine -- that's rat poison, it makes the acid stick to the paper.") His chest feels tense. He is crushing an empty container of Minute Maid. He can't let go of the plastic jug. He hears the blood rushing through his brain, he says.
"Can't handle it, he's a pussy boy," taunts a classmate.
J glimpses himself in the hall mirror. He sees a wolf. He flashes elongated canines and growls. V checks herself next.
"I look like a dead woman," she says. "I'm the Devil."
The birthday girl is leaning against the staircase railing. She has been gripping a paper palm tree in her left hand for the past hour.
It's on fire! She suddenly exclaims and scampers outside. Her friends follow. She is standing on the deck, fanning the paper palm tree. Pink Floyd's album "The Wall" is playing. The birthday girl and her palm tree start to dance.
"My birthday is freedom, mad, wild," she announces. "I want to fly forever."
By now, about 30 teenagers are wandering around V's house. Many aren't tripping. None of the handful of black guests has taken the drug. The "reality dudes," as they call the ones who aren't on LSD, are getting drunk on Budweiser. The trippers say that being with "people in reality" makes them nervous. A boozed-up boy starts lecturing them on the evil nature of drugs. A guy who's had four hits of acid, and is twice his size, socks the drunk kid in the jaw. Everyone is screaming. Girls start to cry.
"I'm going to go insane!" V shrieks, her cheeks crimson. "All people who aren't tripping, get the {expletive} out of my house!"
She rants. She begs. Finally, the non-tripping teenagers leave.
It's close to their parents' bedtime. A couple of kids go inside and shut the den door, silencing Pink Floyd. They call their moms and dads to say good night.
The Sky, the Stars, the Deck
R has settled in a deck chair. He is examining his hand with binoculars. V is standing in the grass, whirling her cigarette against the dark sky, hypnotized by the orange trails of fire she says she sees. J is on his knees, staring at the knots and knurls and bumps on the wooden deck.
"Oh my God, there's a lady in the floor," he says. A bunch of kids join him to inspect the wood. Her face. Her breasts. Look at all those people trapped in the wood. "I'm stepping on the souls of every person that ever lived," J says.
Up next for scrutiny is the sky: The sky is contracting. The stars are swirling. The stars are melting. They see red, white, blue flashes of light.
"It's the Fourth of July up there," the birthday girl sums it up.
A boy comes running around from the front yard. He is frantic, flailing his arms. He has bad news. He saw Little J. Little J is here!
"I saw him on a truck! He's drunk!"
No. He must be hallucinating. Little J couldn't possibly be at V's house! They drift around front to check.
A large van, with a boy lying on the roof, cruises by the driveway. The crowd is stunned. Scared.
"I'm never doing this again," V says, stricken.
"I want to go home," says J.
The van loops around and rolls by a second time. Little J is on his back, propped up by his elbows on top of the van. He isn't wearing a shirt. His straight brown hair is flying. He averts his eyes from the gathering on V's lawn.
Death's Visitor
Two weeks ago, Little J nearly died tripping, his friends say. No one could forgive him for losing at their new game.
It was going to be a blast. C's parents were out of town and that meant: party! Little J took a hit of acid before he left his summer job.
He is a slight boy, 17 but much smaller than his buddies. More studious. They call him a worrier. But that night he was feeling bold.
Nine guys took LSD at C's house. (The blotter sheet had a "Star Trek" theme: A man in a spacesuit. An energy field. And across the bottom, the message "Beam me up, Scottie. There is no intelligent life down here.") Some of the guys were dosing for the first time, some for the 30th. They played guitar. They sat in the yard, watching hallucinatory lightning streak the sky, feeling imaginary tremors in the rocks beneath them. The guys drifted inside.
"I was upstairs talking to someone and then all of a sudden I just lost it," Little J remembers. "Something freaked me out."
He started worrying about making it to work the next day. How much longer would the trip last? He wanted a watch. He wanted to shower. He wanted his car. He wanted his mother. He wanted to leave. He was afraid to leave.
J, ever the audacious one, had tape-recorded his LSD trips before. He persuaded the rest of the guys to set up a tape deck in the den to record their experience. It turned out to be a record of a nightmare:
"I don't know where I am," Little J can be heard saying, stumbling around the den while the other guys relax on the couches, chatting. "I don't want to do this anymore." He approaches each guy, addressing each, surreally, by first and last name, asking: "How many hits of acid have I taken?"
They tell him he's had two. They tell him he is fine. They throw snap firecrackers at his feet. They tell him to shut up.
He rambles on. He can't understand them. He can't see straight. There are translucent squares floating through the dimly lit room. The ceiling looks like bedsheets undulating on a clothesline. A glaze covers the lamp, the chairs, his friends' faces.
"Get these pieces of acid off of me," he cries, scraping his arms to remove invisible scraps of LSD paper. "Don't give me any more acid."
The guys laugh. Little J is getting desperate. It's hard to stand up. "I think I'm going to die," he says.
C, the host, suggests dialing a drug crisis hot line. Little J staggers out the front door. C grabs him.
"Call 911," Little J implores.
"You have a scrambled brain," J says. "Why don't we handcuff him?"
Remember N? The guys remember. He had a weird trip on prom night and flipped out. They're getting nervous. They are trying to deal with a terrifying crisis, but they are 17 years old, and they are tripping on acid.
"Call 911 on the phone," Little J persists.
"No way are we going to prison!" someone says.
"I'm going to die," Little J is pleading.
"So what, man."
"I feel bad for him," says a guy who's on his 10th trip. "He got the bad side of the drug. We got the good." The guy says he wants to stop the tape recorder. It will be too weird to play it back.
"People write books about this. ... Ever hear of the book 'Kool-Aid Acid Test'?" asks J.
Another boy, an A student, says soon he'll be making his own acid. He's going to study chemistry in college.
Little J is yelling now: "Find me my MOM! I think I'm DEAD!"
Acid has seeped into his clothes, he believes. He pulls off his Nike Air shirt. Down go his pants. Off with his underwear. His naked body is drenched in sweat.
His friends consider the alternatives: Knock him out. Kick him out. Send him to the hospital.
If they take him to the hospital, they'll put him in a straitjacket for the rest of his life, argues one kid. He saw it happen in a movie at school. C suggests they make their own straitjacket.
"I'll strangle the mother {expletive}," someone says.
"Jesus, are we going to be arrested? That's all I have to say," says a guy who has, in fact, not spoken up before.
"Let me GO!" Little J is thrashing around. "I'm totally INSANE! Find me my MAMA!" He is running around the room. "I'm STONE COLD DEAD!"
His friends try to dress him. He's wailing. He's spitting. He has six hours of the acid trip left to go.
"I DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM! I'M DYING!" he screams. "DIAL 911!"
Most of the partyers have moved outside, away from the bad trip scene.
Little J runs into the hall. He backs into a wall and falls over. He can't feel anything. He is banging his head on the yellow tile floor.
"My God! My God!" gasps C.
Little J is lying face down, his body convulsing.
They drag Little J into the living room. Spasms contort his body. They watch his skin turn a dark, frightening color. He goes rigid.
"Our friend's gonna die on us," says the boy who was worried about getting arrested.
C is cradling Little J. "I can hear him breathing," he says. Someone knows CPR. They lay him on his side. Keep his tongue out of his trachea.
Somebody mentions 911 again.
"He had too many worries, man," J diagnoses. "Too much mental stress. ... It took over his body."
Somebody checks for a heartbeat. They cover him with a blanket. Guys drift out of the room.
Little J comes to 15 minutes later, looking drained. Three hours later, at 3:30 a.m., he tells his friends: It's okay, I've come down. They go into the kitchen and nuke a pizza.
By morning, he was overwhelmed by embarrassment about his fit. He was exhausted. His back ached ("because acid drains your spinal fluid and it doesn't exactly go back"). He vowed to never again drop acid, smoke pot or even drink beer. The only reason he had dropped acid in the first place was that he was bored, he said.
"We needed a new form of entertainment. You can only see so many movies," he said.
He was thankful his friends ignored his plea to be hospitalized. The doctors would have strapped him down, he said.
"I remember saying 'call 911' 'cause I thought I was going to die, but the hospital wouldn't have helped me anyway," he said. "And they would've called my parents."
A Disappearance
On this night, no one is feeling sorry for the frail, shirtless boy on the van. The kids in V's driveway want the Kid Who Almost Died to go away. They want the bad trip to disappear.
The van leaves. The trippers immediately distance themselves from his terrifying experience.
"He has a feeble mind, that's why it happened," J says.
"He made himself have a bad trip. The drug doesn't do it to you," adds V.
G's adage about bad trips: "Fear causes hesitation and hesitation causes your worst fears to come true."
The group returns somberly to the back yard. They head for the reassuring flicker of lightning bugs in the grass. But nearly everyone who has used LSD before has an "almost bad trip" story: From a tree branch, the Grim Reaper summoned one boy. A giant black spider chased another guy. R once was pinned to his car, paralyzed. Snakes wrapped themselves around G's ankles.
J says he saw his best friend die; the room went dark with blood.
"My fingernail is alive, all my energy is in my nail," says the birthday girl. She is running her thumb over the pink nail polish on her index finger. "I can't stop feeling it. I want to cut off my nail and kill it," she says to V.
V is quiet. She is far away. She is thinking. Peering into a vast, black pool of thoughts. Everything dark and unknown to her is floating at the bottom of the pool. She doesn't want to look. She can't help herself from looking. She feels utterly alone.
The kids are quiet now. They gather by a weeping willow. They are silver children, lying in the grass, bathing in the midsummer starlight.
They plan another party for late August.
washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/08/18/the-acid-kids/2b5d4ee1-3162-46c5-ac7d-96a1970ba9f5/
