Chapter 1
It’s almost impossible to get off two days in a row. I could feel the effects of the LSD, but I wasn’t exactly tripping. It was almost like I’d taken a shortcut past the peak right to the calm contemplative hour or two toward the end when everything seems beautiful, like you’re looking at the world for the first time.
I couldn’t bring myself to cross the street to the pool hall. The neon sign in front looked ominous. All the beeping and buzzing of the pinball machines and the cold inhuman stare of the owner seemed like something to avoid at all costs.
I decided to keep walking. Suburban houses look even more like prisons when your tripping, I thought. I made it just two blocks when I remembered why I had gone to the pool hall. I was out of cigs. This was like being out of oxygen. A mild panic set in. After fingering the empty pocket of my black t-shirt one more time, I took a deep breath and headed back toward civilization.
A lot of stuff happened in the summer of 1994. The Grateful Dead made their last full tour of the country, apparently leaving good acid wherever they went, and Kurt Cobain put a bullet in his smack-rotten brain.
But it was two chance occurrences that night in August that altered the course of my life the most.
I found Chas pacing around in the parking lot across from the pool hall. I recognized him from freshman baseball two years earlier. Chas was the tall lefty first baseman and I the generally sure-handed middle infielder. But it might have been a thousand lifetimes since we last interacted.
I could tell right away he was fucked up. Maybe a bummer. “Hey man, Chas right? What’s up?”
He stepped into the light. Yep. He was running from his shadow pretty bad. I could see it in his eyes. I tried to imagine how I appeared to him, through the lens of what I guessed was his first trip. He said nothing. Just sort of nodded and grunted.
“You got a smoke, man?” He had one burning away idly in his fingers. “Can I bum one?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, man.” He made no move to offer me the pack though.
“You drop one of those Jesus Christs that were going around?”
“Two.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, I took two.”
“Those are pretty heavy, man.” I wasn’t sure I wanted this guy tagging along with me all night. What if he started bumming me out? But another glance at the unease in his face convinced me that I couldn’t leave him pacing around under that buzzing streetlight for the rest of his trip. “It’s all good though. Let’s walk, man.”
He followed me without hesitation. Maybe his tripper’s intuition told him I could be trusted.
We made our way toward Shove Park where’d I’d spent much of the last two days writing poems in this notebook that I carried with me everywhere that said “BIOLOGY” on the front cover but had long since been cleansed of linear entrapments like classrooms and scientific methods.
By the time we reached the park I’d pretty much talked him out of his paranoia. Turns out he had ditched the guys he had dropped with. Thought they were plotting against him. Same old story.
“You should read the Psychedelic Experience, kid. It’s like this manual for how to really break on through. And avoid bummers.”
“Oh, I couldn’t have used that tonight, man,” he said and then laughed, more to himself or the universe generally than to me.
“You don’t think so? They talk about like set and setting -”
“No, man, obviously I could have used that. I was being sarcastic, dude.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that almost everything Chas said was sarcastic.
He was handing out smokes pretty much on demand now. The outfield of the Little League field looked like a dark ocean or maybe the edge of the known galaxy from the visitors’ dugout where we’d plopped down.
“So you sound a bit like a Doors fan, dude.” He bobbed his head a little, causing his clumpy black locks to bounce.
“Yeah, man, my favorite. But Morrison is just the tip of the iceberg,” I said, “You gotta check out some of the early Floyd bootlegs I picked up near S.U. campus.” He nodded his head excitedly while I grabbed a smoke from the pack that was placed in neutral territory between us on the bench.
I had only dropped acid for the first time back in the spring but the more we chatted and the more he eagerly listened and agreed in wide-eyed excitement, the more I felt like a guru imparting wisdom upon my first disciple.
Our excitement grew as the night wore on. Chas was a poet too. Or wanted to be. And he knew some other guys that were starting a band up and maybe I should hook up with those guys and sing or something. The possibilities seemed endless. I think both of us would have stayed there all night watching the moonlight ripple out in the ocean in right field if his pack didn’t run out.
But of course if it hadn’t, I never would have laid eyes on Jenna.
