|
|
psychedelicadventures.com
Pamela The
board-game with pieces that moved on their own
One night that summer, there were four of us women sitting around doing
nothing, and they convinced me to try some. I was very nervous about it, so I
took just a half a tab. While we were tripping, one of my ex-roommates, a girl
from the East Coast, showed up with her boyfriend, a med student at a school in
Manhattan. We didn't tell them that we’d just taken some acid, and they hung
out with us for the rest of the evening.
The apartment was virtually an artist studio. There was no furniture in
the living room and easels and paintings everywhere. The other women were
promoting my creativity, so I started doing some artwork, which I’d never done
before. The four of us were painting on two reams of paper on the floor. I was
making a collage I eventually entitled “Acid Indigestion” on which I pasted
a cigarette and some ashes, among other things.
I thought it was a marvelous work and my roommates thought it was just
terrific, but the med student poo-pooed it, saying, "What are you doing? It
looks like a kid's drawing." “Leave her alone,” my roommates defended
me. “She's being creative.” So I paid no attention to him and stayed at it
for hours, blocking out everything else. The next day, I looked at the results
and thought, "What the hell was I doing?" Still, the trip had been a
burst of creative impulses which totally absorbed me, and I felt good about it.
A couple of months later, I got up the courage to take a whole tab. At
that point, Philip, an ex-roommate’s brother, was staying with us until he
found an apartment. He was a very studious classical musician, a couple years
older than me. He was an uptight sort of a guy, but he had wacky, dry sense of
humor, and we were good friends, as I'd been close to his sister since high
school.
Philip had never tried acid before either, so we decided to do it
together. I was still nervous about it and wanted somebody I could trust to be
with me. I had visions of jumping off a building or doing something drastic if I
went outside. We figured we’d start early in the day and spend the whole day
in the apartment, where we’d protect
each other in the event one of us did something crazy. My roommates gave us each
a tab and left for their art classes.
We took it on a warm summer day and almost immediately I felt much
stranger than I did the first time. I tried very hard to remain in control. The
idea of “going with the flow” made me nervous. So I spent the first hour
trying to act normal.
I insisted that Philip play backgammon with me, to focus our attention on
something safe and grounded, but the pieces jumped all over the board and I
couldn't concentrate on it. Still, I forced him to play anyway and tried to hold
my ground, staring at the board, trying to assure myself, “I can do this, I
can do this.”
Eventually I really craved a cigarette, but I was all out of them. There
was a newspaper stand at the end of the block where a pack could be bought.
I’d hoped that Philip would brave the real world and get it, but he said there
was no way he was going outside the apartment, so I said, “Alright, I'm gonna
do it.” Then it took me an hour to build up the confidence to venture outside.
I took a five-dollar bill with me and stepped out on the street. As I was
walking down the block, an old woman with an unopened umbrella came along and as
she passed me I could have sworn that she said, "I'm gonna get you" or
"I'm gonna kill you" or something hostile like that. I told myself,
"This is the acid This is not really happening." But I still wondered
if she’d really threatened me. There were plenty of bag people around the
neighborhood. She could have been a mentally disturbed homeless woman and
actually said what I thought she did, but I couldn’t be sure since I was so
high.
I made my way to the corner and got my cigarettes and returned to the
apartment, boasting to Philip that I’d caught the guy at the newsstand giving
me the wrong change. He’d given me the balance of a dollar (cigarettes were
still under a buck back then) instead of a five. "No, no,” I spoke up.
“I gave you a five" to which the cashier said, "Oh, you're right.
I'm sorry" and then handed me the remaining four dollars. "Isn't it
amazing I caught the mistake and then had the presence of mind and grace under
pressure to demand the correct amount?” I was very proud f of myself.
Then we started listening to music. Philip was given to classical,
playing harpsichord in a quartet, so he took out a recording of a piece written
for orchestra and organ music from his extensive LP collection and blasted it.
It was a very somber composition, like ancient church music. We lay down on the
floor to listen and I began to have the most profound auditory experience of my
life. Never have I heard music with such clarity and precision.
Normally, when you listen to a symphony, you experience it more or less a
whole, hearing basically just the instruments -- the strings or the horns, for
instance -- that carry the melody. But I could pick out every instrument and
isolate it, even if it was playing very softly. I’d say to myself, "Now I
want to hear percussion.... Now the oboe” and so on. I’d concentrate for a
second and then I’d hear my selection very loud to the exclusion of everything
else. Prior to that I'd never had that much appreciation for classical music,
but now I felt I could listen to it all day. Listening to Gregorian chants
later, I was able to pick out the individual voices.
At certain intervals throughout the day, I said to myself, "Just go
with it. Stop being so uptight about this” and would then see hallucinations.
At one point, I went into the bathroom and the sink turned bright orange. I
looked at myself in the mirror and the image looked jumbled, like pieces of a
puzzle that didn't fit together quite right. As we lay on my bed, a mattress on
the floor, the flowered sheets undulated and came toward me like waves.
Inanimate objects changed appearance, but I could always stop the distorted
images at will. I’d shut my eyes a minute, say, “Stop it” to myself, and
when I opened them it would look normal again. I tested myself this way
throughout the day.
Suddenly the doorbell rang, startling the shit out of us. It was
Philip’s mother. We buzzed her up, panic stricken. We almost had a heart
attack. We felt we had to get rid of her quick, before she sensed we were high.
We knew she was in town, but we weren't expecting her. She just decided to pop
by unexpectedly. It would have been very awkward for me to leave or shut myself
up in my room, because she’d known me since I was thirteen, when I began
playing with her daughter.
We tried to hold a normal conversation. Fortunately, she’s a real
chatterbox and just kept talking, so we didn't have to say much. “Uh huh. Yes,
uh huh. Right....” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but pretended
to and just kept nodding and affirming. Philip and I were afraid to look at each
other, because we thought we'd burst out laughing or say something silly, so we
avoided eye contact.
She was completely clueless about our state of mind, which we couldn’t
believe. We were very relieved when she finally left after about a half hour
that felt like much longer. It took a humungous effort to act normal. I was
terrified that I might say something that made no sense.
"Oh my god, what were we saying? How was I acting?"
"I don't know. How was I doing?"
We didn't start coming down until evening. For the next two or three days
afterwards, I was forgetful and felt like somebody had taken my head and shaken
it. I felt jumbled, addled, not quite with it. "That's it,” I decided.
“If I feel the effects three days later, I'm not going to do it.” I’m the
sort of person who’s willing to try everything once, so I felt adventurous yet
still satiated.
I later tried to listen to the same music we'd heard that day to see if I
could hear it the same way, but I couldn't, which was a little disappointing. I
remember thinking that I would probably have had a much better time if I’d
just relaxed and gone with the flow. I'd spent so much effort trying to not be
high, I'd probably ruined a lot of it.
If my parents knew about this, they'd have coronaries. As a teenager, I
was a good Midwestern girl, getting good grades and not staying out too late. As
a nurse today, I don't know anyone anymore who did such things. All my
colleagues went to nursing school when they were nineteen and had relatively
sheltered lives. I don't talk about dropping acid with them. As for discussing
my drug adventures with my kids, I'm still at the “let's just lie and deny it
for now” stage. |
|
|