58 – Trip to nowhere
Our small tree glistened
in the corner of the barren living room overloaded with tinsel, still glowing
with the unnatural light from the mescaline trip. Nothing seemed right after
that, even though I hadn’t gone off the deep end the way Louise and the others
had. I felt strange, changed, unable to think straight. Somehow taking that
trip had steered me down some alternative path like had not meant me to take,
and I couldn’t figure out how to get back onto the right one – if I could get
there at all.
I was on a path that seemed thick with obstacles, potholes
and roots of trees that I feared would trip me up if I did not pay close
attention to where I placed my feet, roots and potholes like Dan and before him,
Tim.
I kept thinking Louise was eyeing Dan as my possible
replacement the way she had eyed me as her replacement for Tim.
We gave him the spare room with the large closet and windows
that looked out onto the stairway up from the street, a bright little room we
had no other use for anyway, but for which Dan seemed grateful. After he stowed
his things in the closet, he asked for use of the shower, and existed the bathroom in only his tight white
briefs.
Louise found the sight of him amusing, and our cats rubbed against
his bare legs, accepting him as yet one more orphan Louise had adopted.
That’s when I noticed most how much he resembled my friend
Hank from back east, a boney figure with a long face, set back eyes and
hollowed cheeks. His hair was straighter than Hank’s falling down either side of
his head to frame his face and emphasize his elongated features.
He wasn’t handsome; but he wasn’t ugly either.
He went back into his room, and then after a change of
clothing, he looked much more presentable – and healthier, not at all like the
street urchin I had first mistaken him for near Hollywood and Vine.
“There’s only one rule if you’re going to live here,” I told
him. “No dealing out of the apartment.”
I kept thinking again of Hank back in the apartment in the
Lower East Side in New York and the small pill box he had kept in the freezer
with tabs of acid.
“I don’t feel comfortable with strangers coming in and out,”
I told Dan.
“Agreed,” Dan said. He wasn’t stupid. He knew when he had a
good thing and how such things as dealing drugs could spoil it for him. Drugs could
stay on the street. “But what about my own stash? I tend to like to have a bit for
my own use on hand.”
That seemed like a reasonable request.
“I would like to get more masculine,” Louise said, glancing briefly
at me for a reaction. I cringed.
“I would sure like to try some of that again,” she said.
“Not an easy score,” Dan said. “That stuff is rare these
days. “There’s mostly acid on the street.”
“Maybe we can try some of that,” Louise said, again glancing
in my direction and again getting me to cringe.
Again, I thought of Hank and the last time I saw him in New
York when he strolled around mid-Manhattan. And with a jealous twinge, I again
thought of Dennis and the colors Louise had seen, and how she had mistaken him
for God.
I was jealous for a different reason. Louise had managed to go
someplace on her trip that I had not, whether because I got a bad dose or I had
stubbornly refused to let go, setting myself up as a sentry to protect Louise
from Dennis’ advances. Secretly, I ached to see God, too.
“I’ll be back,” Dan said, and left the apartment, leaving us
to wonder if he would come back at all, although his bag decorated the closet
of his room, heavy with the few icons of his life – meaningless covenanters
even Louise’s parents would not have bothered with.
When he returned, he showed us the micro dots he had
purchased from a dealer near the Golden Cup coffee house, some gay guy he trusted
not to rip us off.
“There’s some really bad shit out there,” he said, then emptied
the plastic bag onto a dish on the table, three tiny purple tabs he said he’d
been told would get us off.
“You have to put the tab under your tongue,” he said. “That
way it gets into your blood.”
Digesting the LSD, he claimed, diluted it, and made the trip
less powerful.
I picked up the tab and held it between my thumb and
forefinger, studying its shape, wondering how this thing, this tiny pill could
do all that people said it could, sending people into an alternative reality,
changing their lives in so many unpredictable ways. I kept thinking of Hank
back east, and how much he loved the experience, and how he had become
something of a priest in his attempt to spread the faith, not a pusher, but a
prophet, although I still had my doubts about him selling to kids from the
local high school.
Louise picked hers up, looked at it only briefly, and then
stuck it under her tongue the way Dan had advised. Dan did the same. Only I
hesitated, recalling too much of the night with Dennis, thinking that if this
trip was many times more powerful than that, how could I control it, or protect
Louise as I had tried to protect her that night.
Finally, I did what Louise and Dan had already done, putting
the tiny tab deep under my tongue, and waited for it to melt. It had a chemical
taste I would later associate with nothing else, but would recognize immediately,
here, and later in New York where the impact was even more significant.
I had set up the cassette player on a small table, playing
some innocuous melodies by the Four Seasons – a band from New Jersey that had
made it big, but did not fit in well with the new musical era, a kind of
throwback to the 1950s – which was one of the reasons I liked them, a more
innocent time in our lives.
Dan, Louise and I sat on the big pillows around the low
table, we had purchased as part of our Asian theme, avoiding the usual chairs
and tables of a more western culture. Dan sat across from me, his eyes growing
glazed, even sleepy, as a cigarette hung smoldering from between his lips,
which he puffed on and then lifted to flick the ash, only to puff again harder.
He looked like an old man, though he was only two or three years older than I
was, maybe barely older than Pauly or Hank – my friends from back east.
The effects of the acid came on gradually – to imperceptivity
for me to know at what point I fell into that psychedelic pool until I was well
over my head, the world I knew, the walls and pictures and furniture all
melting into a smear of color, with the Christmas Tree lights in the corner of
the room stark and brilliant, almost blinding, making me blink in an attempt to
get a clearer vision that just would not come.
Paranoia did instead, as vivid as the colors, haunting me
with the same dread I’d felt when Dennis had brought mescaline here for us to ingest.
I studied Dan’s face, convincing myself he was up to the same things Dennis had
been, although Dan seemed less a threat than Dennis had, something showing behind
is dilated eyes that did not speak to the same primitive lusts. He was too laid
back for that, too caught up in his own trip, having made his way out of the
nightmare of the east to find a life of ease, a sponge, but not a pariah.
Hank back east had talked about acid as being a key, part of
a gateway to whole new universe, a new existence and a different way of thinking
we could not have achieved without it.
I told Dan this, and Dan laughed.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” he said, “though that’s
too intellectual for people out here. We just falling into a new groove.”
By this time, Dan’s pupils were so dilated, there was no
other color in them but black. He looked alien, and when I glanced over at Louise,
she looked alien, too, making me wonder if I had become an alien as well.
The lighting in the room had changed, growing darker in the
corners where the illumination from the small Christmas tree could barely reach
and where I imagined dark things resided, shapes that would not materialize completely,
stirring yet not enough to be defined. Some of these were our collection of
cats, their eyes catching bits of light while their whiskers and claws remained
hidden. But there were other shapes, other things moving, elemental things that
I would not have caught a glimpse of prior to this, things that existed in the
cracks of the universe unnoticed in the day to day life we had just abandoned,
things we saw only now for the first time as we entered their realm, yet could
not touch, we passing through like early astronauts launched only for a few
precious moments into space before returning to the world below.
A deep chill went through me. My head hurt just thinking
about it all, and I was grateful when our moment in space subsided and we
settled into a less terrifying orbit, and could function a little better.
“I think we all need some coffee,” Dan suggested.
“We have instant, I think,” Louise said.
“I was thinking we should go out and get some,” Dan said.
“Out?” I said. “As in outside?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “I think we need a walk and to see other
people.”
I was less certain, still grateful that Dan had advised us
to take less than a whole tab each, which was even too much to my thinking, much
more potent than the mescaline Louise and I had taken with Dennis.
Louise kept talking nonsense, or at least nothing I could
make sense of, something about purity, about how she felt inside unexpressed to
anyone else, how she felt like a little girl and how much her father (or step
father) would disapprove of this, me and the world we lived in, about how her
step mother mistreated her, and forced her step father to punish her for things
nobody else would be punished for.
Louise wouldn’t come near me when we were out on the street.
She seemed scared of me and the outdoors where the three-storied houses along
McCadden seemed to lean in towards us, their shapes uncertain, their walls
seeming to wobble with each step we took, stucco walls filled with hints of color,
while along the street on both sides, the line of palm trees wavered as well,
like flag poles in a high wind.
After a block or so, Louise’s fingers slipped through mine
as if she needed desperately to hold on to something or someone, and I was all
she could find, and only later, after a few cups of coffee at the Palace, did
she seem to calm down, as we all did, though the trails – as Dan called them –
went on for the rest of the night, cars leaving them, people walking around us leaving
them, even the movement of our own arms and legs seemingly repeated in a series
of still photograph so we seemed more like centipedes than human.
We watched the world outside, the parade of people who made
their way along the Boulevard, each stranger than the last, all unaware of our
studying them, until eventually, we faded back out of our trip into their
world, and made our way home to sleep.
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