This Doesn’t Feel Right At All.
Gregg and I woke up one day and still had some acid left.
At $3 a hit, and because I had not yet built up any resistance to LSD, leftovers were common.
“Can we just do it again, please?” I asked Gregg. I just wanted to be high.
“Okay,” he said. We had the high drama moment of putting the tabs on our tongues and then … waited.
I started to shake. My heart started to race. I saw little trails behind my closed eyelids, but nothing else happened.
I wasn’t happy with the heart-racing thing. “This doesn’t feel right at all,” I said. I wasn’t high. I was just … jittery. “Why am I shaking?”
“That’s just the Strychnine,” Gregg said.
“Strychnine?!?”
“Yeah, they use it to make acid,” Gregg said.
“Well I want it to stop!” I nearly screamed.
“It will,” he said.
As if.
It didn’t stop for at least two hours. Meanwhile I did not have any kind of fun. I just sat around panicked. I was afraid to smoke because I was on poison, and my heart wouldn’t stop racing, and I was pretty sure I would kill myself if I even lit a cigarette.
Eventually when my heart stopped its incessant pounding, I walked to the bar, where I got drunk and forgot I was not-high on Strychnine.
Another day, though, I decided that streaking was a lost art. “Let’s all streak to the mailbox!” I yelled, tearing off all my clothes and racing to the mailbox, feeling the wind in my hair, my breath strong in my chest, my feet grazing the pavement as I ran.
I ran two blocks – and back. It was awesome. “Who’s next?” I asked upon my return.
Everyone just stared at me. Running on LSD was awesome, and running naked was awesome. I have no idea why nobody else wanted to try it.
Another night, Gregg and I went out with Barry and Kim, the neighbors who lived in the apartment next door. Barry and Kim were getting married the next day and they wanted to do something really fun, so we all went out together and got wasted in a parking lot by a lake.
The party ended when Kim found me having sex with Barry in the front seat of the car, which I had never done before and certainly hadn’t wanted to do the night before their wedding.
But I did.
Barry and Kim still lived next door to me after they got married, but Gregg and I didn’t party with them anymore. Another two acquaintances disappeared from my life.
Little things were happening that separated me from the other people in the world. I had no idea that my daily “normal” was “beyond wasted” for most people. I didn’t know that some people spent time sober. I didn’t know that everyone wasn’t doing exactly what I was doing … except that these little things kept happening.
I lost my keys. I left Kitty outside in the snow. I tried to make chicken marsala but drank all the wine. I puked on the walls in my kitchen. I puked in my bathtub and slipped on it when trying to shower. I burned my couch, my mattress, my carpet, my pillow. I slept through a job interview. I went to a job interview without shoes. I went to the bar without shoes.
As long as I kept drinking, these little things kept happening.
