Melting Under Acid
How many books can be written by a single author at the same time? I ponder this wholly in my mind gently as I lay across a cold leather couch. I am staring up at the cracks moving around in the ceiling on their own, like worms under the plaster and paint. My mind mulls over the scientific meaning of the chemicals I have ingested. My nerves are on fire with passion as my heart quickens. I could see radiant colors emitting from the whiteness of the walls. I walked onto the balcony, staring out upon the flatiron rock in front of me as people golfed on the course below. When I hear the television inside, it is as if the voices are there with me on the balcony. My senses heightened as I look out upon the grass, patterns of eyes looking around popped out of the golf course grass.
“Come inside.”
A voice from the room within beckoned me from my vision. A radiant face within the field in front of me smiled with ambiguous pleasure.
As I walked light refracted around me in radiant trails of gold and purple, sometimes green. I looked at her, hair flowing itself onto the bed around her face, framing it’s utter perfection like a waterfall, the striations of her genetics moving and living with her. Her eyes ocean blue with the waves breaking in the middle, looking to me with urgency and need. Glowing aura surrounded her naked body and her lips pouted around her glowing white teeth. I lay next to her and she pulls me close, holding me like the imminence of the apocalypse is near.
Another experience much like this was the very first time I dosed on LSD. I had begun my day much like every other day in a shabby teen drop center I would go to when I needed food, they provided a free lunch everyday. Upon arriving I had met two of the most peculiar traveling kids. Jerry and Monica. Monica was your run of the mill punk lesbian LGBT activist, and her friend Jerry whom was special. Jerry was a boy who had developed breasts early on in life. At the age of 15 Jerry had developed to bigger than double D size breasts… they had hitchhiked from New York. A young couple of kids in my city wouldn’t last very long in the seedy city I grew up in, so it was decided they would be staying with me.
I had a soft spot for the gutter punks, and Jerry was the epitome of the gutter punks, abandoned by his paternal caretakers because of his condition. I had a feeling they weren’t even from New York, or at least that he wasn’t, and had met Monica on his journey. Jerry wanted to see old town, he wanted to be a part of the LGBT movement, and he wanted to be accepted. Quite honestly you never could have met a more polite homeless kid, it was as if someone had brought about Oliver Twist directly from the movie and given him the figure of a well endowed woman.
I took them to old town with me.
I had travelled to old town often because grass was easy to find there. The town was over-run with transient hippies that pretty much bled marijuana, among other things. The Dead family was in town. I could never recall a more kind bunch of people considered to be a dangerous criminal gang, however the “dangerous” and “criminal” parts were a product of police propaganda. But whenever these people had been in town, hallucinogenic agents were around.
My friends Jerry and Monica posted up on a street corner and scored a burrito out of a trash can from a local burrito shop that only had one bite taken out of it. I decided I was going to find some weed. As always it wasn’t long before I was approached by some young guy with red hair. He smelt of body odor and wore a suit vest over a t-shirt and jeans.
“You wanna buy some LSD?”
The inquiry made my heart race, many of these agents are sometimes police officers, so I ask to see it. The tall boy produced a small patchwork of about 20–30 red “windowpanes” as he called them in his left hand. They looked like a honeycomb that had been stretched. I pulled out my wallet and gave the guy a twenty dollar bill. I was rewarded with three and a gram of weed. I thanked him and walked off to my friends, boasting of my ventures.
“See? I better take it so I can’t get caught with it.”
“How long did the guy say it would take to kick in?” Jenny inquires.
“He said 30–45 minutes, which should get me back to the train at least.”
This was our night of anarchy, of debauchery, and to make the world see how we felt inside. How the pain of rejection and lies was tearing us apart; and yet we were all still children. As we walked to the bus station I put some of the weed in a small pipe and smoked on it. Always smoking a cigarette afterwards I began to ponder when this drug would take hold. Almost as soon as the bus started moving I could feel it, as if I were lighter and the lights began to make everything colorful and shiny. My friends sat in front of me on the bus as it rode home into the night, I put my headphones on and let the music take me away, to that place in my head where heaven exists, to the highest most interesting fields of moving paisley and dotted patterns, detailing the structures on the bus.
When we got back to the city I looked at my friends faces, they had changed and I couldn’t stop smiling. Their pores were breathing. We had to transfer off the bus to the train at the next station. In a hurry we walked to the train where everyone was getting on. Every single douche from the college bars in the area was getting on the train with us… and to make things worse I had the two most susceptible-to-scrutiny-by-a-white-upper-class-Douche with a capital D kids by my side. And to make things worse I had taken on a Mohawk and had recently shaved my head. As Drunk, Disorderly and Douche piled into the train I began to pray to the dark lord Satan himself that he may deliver us from our current predicament without being talked to by either them, or a security guard, much less the police! But communication with such Neanderthal beings is inevitable when the damn brutes are intoxicated on such things as “Fireball whiskey” and “Jagermeister”. Suddenly two eyes of the most douche-bag Chad, slightly chubby, weighing in at about 230lbs and six foot tall lumbered over to us tripping over his own feet.
“What are you guys up to tonight man?” He smirked at me.
I stood up tall in my steel toed straight-laced boots and replied smartly,
“Acid bro, you want some?” I held up my water canteen and took a sip out of it. Chad looked around and laughed nervously at his friends who had gathered around to investigate the apparent freak show that had assembled for them.
“Oh shit you aren’t drinking brother?” He motioned to my water bottle.
“This is what you’re drinking! Haha check it out dude is fucked-up! That’s what you’re fucked up on my man! In that bottle!” His friends cheered with him at the sound of “fucked-up”. He then blurted out uncontrollable laughter, comical from his stereotypical appearance.
“You’re cool man, you’re cool.” He mentioned to his friends to reassure his weak ego that he had some small inkling of control and authority.
“Wouldn’t wanna be this guy, damn…” he then jeered with a chuckle towards Jerry. As I looked in his eyes I could see the finality in his fate to become a sad, lonely, desperate jerk-off and I honestly felt sorry for him, whereas usually when someone insults my friends, I feel anger.
Then the security guards came on the train…
“Come on people!” blasted an authoritative voice from the other end of the railcar.
“This train has to turn around! This is the end of the line, You guys are on the wrong train…” came the words and suddenly everyone: including myself, realized we were on the wrong train. The rest of the ride included being stopped by the rail security, being asked for our tickets. Thanks to Monica who had insisted we buy tickets, or thus be confronted by the police. The rest of the ride I watched the smorgasbord of visual stimuli. Like candy for the mind as my eyes could see the words in the graffiti along each wall move and transform into different words, the buildings seemingly alive and breathing. When we got off the train I had never seen the grass so green at the station, as if glowing under the light from the lamps we certainly had stepped off the train into a different world, where the mushrooms in the grass grew colorful and eyes grew between them, watching us and keeping us safe. 5317 was the code to get into my apartment complex. I lived in a tiny studio with a large balcony overlooking the train tracks on the third floor. I turned my key and began to open the door when,
“Surprise!”
My other gutter family yelled from the other side of the door when I entered. It was my friends Shit-bag Danny, Fish-bone as I had dubbed him, and Audrey all intoxicated and excited to see me. They had entered, found my door locked and inquired my downstairs neighbor to let them climb up onto my balcony from his. He had indulged them of this dangerous request and they had broken in. We put on the Misfits, and Black Flag, and the Sex Pistols. Turned up and loud we knew the police would arrive due to my neighbor, who would call the cops frequently on us for noise. When I was presented with beer by Shit-Bag I became relaxed, and we partied into the night, whooping and hollering and sharing war stories of heroin and train-hopping. I told Danny of my exploits and he played me a few songs on my guitar. Eventually a condom became airborne and hit Danny in his face, dangling from his ear, he sported it and began playing the guitar while wailing on about anarchy and free will. It was hilarious, I began to lose my mind in that room as all the stimuli formed a very comical appearance to my friend. Soon, tuckered out the kids began to lie down for sleep, we knew the cops would be here soon, right on schedule as we had continued this charade of disorderly conduct for about a month at this point. Fish-Bone turned the music down and almost on-queue a knock at the door, I opened the door haphazardly and to my amusement two police officers where at it. One backed against the wall as if expecting me to come bolting out like a bull with a rider at a rodeo. THis was not my course of action, in fact I could really not be moved at all by their presence.
“Good-evening officers, how may I… help you?” I stated as straightly as a kid who had just taken LSD for the first time could.
“We got a noise complaint… Wow you sure got a lot of people in there…” Officer Obvious over here…
“Yeah I like to help out the gutter-punks from time-to-time… I wobbled out of the doorway, my arm outstretched to show that there were about 6 people sleeping on my studio apartment floor.
“Well we just got a complaint of a lot of noise in here.”
“Yeah the party’s over, we are all going to sleep now.”
The officer shifted, knowing he didn’t want to deal with so many people at once, and turned to his partner.
“Well keep it down, next time we will be issuing a summons.”
“Will do officer.” I replied as I shut the door and saw as the skin of his face began to melt off behind it. I laid down and looked around, a smile on my face… I was safe. There I was with my headphones in, tears pouring down my face as the ceiling lifted away and the most radiant sky shone down in. Bleeding rays of different color and light down upon my friends, we were all safe. Here heaven had shone in, and illuminated us in its strange striations of paisley and gold, cushioning us in warmth and love.
