Tripping on Acid with My Dad
The Arab Spring brought my father back to America, and LSD helped us make up for lost time
All the familiar paranoias emerge on a bright summer day in Big Sur, as my older brother and I watch my 70-year-old father come up on LSD for the first time in…maybe ever? His eyes are closed, hands folded on his lap. The light shines through gaps in the redwoods and lands in dapples on his face.
What have we done?
Here is a man who has fought in wars, who was once institutionalized by the Egyptian military, who had a heart attack at 54. A man beloved back home in Egypt, where he is an actor and humanitarian. A man who is a devout Muslim with unshakable faith in the world as he sees it. A man with people who depend on him for their livelihoods. A man who has seen some shit.
This is it, I think. We’re going to forever be known as the sons who made their father lose his mind.
It’s an inevitable role reversal, children taking care of parents. Being responsible trip sitters, we tried to control for set and setting. The setting, the oasis of my literary heroes Kerouac and Miller, is on point. But my dad’s set is something my brother and I had neither much access to nor inclination to fine-tune. He told us he took LSD in the 1960s, but I suspect…
