When it came to being irresponsible I was the king of never again. I just could never say no. If anyone dared me to guzzle 151 Rum I would give it my best shot until my throat and stomach were on fire forcing some of that near pure disgusting alcohol out my nose singing the nasal cilia hairs. I might be upchucking for the rest of the evening and consider stomach pumping because it bordered on alcohol poisoning but I‘d try it. You say did three Quaalude’s? I’ll do four. You took four oxy’s washed down with beer? I’ll do six and a bottle of vodka. “Yo JT, I bet I could do three hits of this barrel acid.” Big deal bro, I can name that trip in five barrel hits. That’s not exactly the way it went down but I did end up taking five barrel hits of LSD one night. Just chalk it up as another never again moment. I’ve had way too many of those moments with my head spinning and my stomach threatening to throw up my pancreas along with the chef salad of pharmaceuticals and liquors I consumed. Well at least this time I’m saying never again not because I’m puking up my internal organs but because I am over hallucinating after ingesting five count em five hits of Barrel Acid. WTF was I thinking? One is sufficient for your basic economy no frills trip but two will take you on a full color visually enhanced upscale acid journey. Taking three hits is unusual and far above the daily recommended allowance which can bring one dangerously close to going over edge of sanity to never return. But three barrel hits of LSD is not unheard of. Five?! That’s just fucking insane man, bordering on suicide of the mental capacities. Something that even the most seasoned tripper stacked to the brim with frequent flying miles wouldn’t do on purpose. But there I was going over Niagara falls in five barrels of insanity.
In my defense it wasn’t the usual idiotic dare that led me there it was a desperate attempt to conceal the fact from my Mom that I was in possession of LSD to begin with. What was idiotic was to lay all five hits on my desk. I was alone in my room, my normally parent-free sanctuary, and I had laid this weekends recreationals for me and my two best friends on my desk to admire. Five cute looking hallucination inducing barrels. Five barrels of fun. Two hits for me, two for Ray-Ray, and one for Bobby who did everything conservatively because he got high way too easy. I copped them from the big “Drug Dealer” in school and we would all trip this Saturday. The best laid plans turned asunder because my mother broke the cardinal rule of parenting and walked in my room unannounced. Before even weighing any options all five hits made a desperate sprint into my mouth. The very second my Mom asked me if my brother Jack was doing drugs I swallowed. “Wait, what? Jack doing drugs? No way Mom, why would you say that?” My mom held out a packet of EZ Wider rolling papers, “I found this in his dungaree’s while doing the wash.” Oh oh, Jack is busted but maybe I can save my older brother, Lord knows he’s saved my ass a number of times. “No Mom, no way, he smokes cigarettes and buys this rolling tobacco called Bugler.” Better he gets caught for cigs than weed, only thing is I need to remember to tell him before he see’s Mom. “Well, I hope so. You don’t smoke that Bugler stuff do you?” Bullet dodged, the lie came too easy off my lips, “Of course not Mom, no please, I have to do my homework.”
I was feeling pretty damn proud of myself, thinking so quick and coming up with that Bugler tobacco lie and….Oh shit! I just ate five hits of barrel acid. That’s when panic filled the room like a mountain fog. The thought hit me over and over. I’m about to go on the trip of a lifetime and I may never return. I called Ray-Ray and Bobby and they both acted like they were talking to me for the last time but I promised I would give them a full report if I’m still alive and sane tomorrow. Nothing I could do but wait it out and listen to the travel advisory’s in my head.
An hour passed in slo-motion until the cid began to kick in. What to do? May as well make this trip as hippie-worthy as possible and try to enjoy it. First things first, I lit some patchouli incense and turned on my blacklight to make my psychedelic posters burst with colors and movement. I pranced over to my cheap ass stereo to choose an album for listening pleasure Being in a Jimi mood I put on Bold As Love, side A. It starts off with a funny UFO spoof then quickly kicks into a typical Jimi Hendrix guitar explosion. The album was awesome and a premium tripping audio assault. I laid back on my bed and began seeing some very strange visions. The ceiling was normally a white blank but because of the LSD I perceived it to be full of images most of which were moving like a film strips. Popeye strangling Brutus, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote running in circles like a dog chasing its tail, and that sort of thing. High def bright and very colorful hallucinations that feigned reality to my numbing brain. I had to keep reminding myself that they weren’t real. Then I focused on one in particular of Wimpy humping Olive Oyl. The back stabbing hamburger eating freak was pumping away to the music. Popeye, Brutus, and an array of cartoon character I don’t even remember were all watching and cheering them on. Olive was panting and moaning her skinny and boney legs way up in the air, and Wimpy had lost some weight and was unbelievably in time with the music thrusting along with the chords. In the middle of pounding Olive Wimpy pulls out a trail of hamburgers and begins eating which made me laugh. Uncontrollably! Other characters were clapping, Olive was screaming “Ohhhh Popppppeye!!!“ and Wimpy kept saying “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a good fucking today” still pumping away as Olive squealed. I laughed out loud until I realized something strange. Not that the scene wasn’t already strange enough but this was scary strange. The music Wimpy was humping to was not the album I put on. As a matter of fact it was music I’d never heard of before filled with really weird electronic sounds. When I jumped up the hallucinations disappeared of the ceiling and my stereo began laughing at me. I made a mad dash across the room to investigate. The album was over and I had no clue how long ago it ended. I was audio-hallucinating which for me was new.
I shook my head trying to get straight and flip the album over. I was standing yet I couldn’t feel my legs, they felt like long pillows. Using all my resources I attempted to reassure myself, “Its just a trip JT, you’re tripping and everything’s okay. Only a trip, it’s the acid, none of this is real.” Feeling only slightly convinced my pillows walked me back to my bed. By the time I finally figured out how to lay down someone had stopped the album. When I looked over it started again then happened once more. I was certain my asshole brother had come home, knew I was tripping and thought it would be funny to goof on me by plugging and unplugging the player. Hey cut it out man, that’s not funny!” No response. I looked around. No sign of Jack, no one anywhere, but the music was now playing normal. I turned to get back to my bed when one of my posters, an American Indian chief with tie dye colors all around him began moving. His eyes narrowed as he glared at me breathing hard and flexing his muscles. Chief Crazy Brave was holding up a tomahawk in what I felt was a threatening manor. “Holy fuck! This isn’t fucking real man, it can’t be.”
The full force of the five hits of acid were attacking me now. I closed my eyes tight but someone or something kept popping them back open. The Indian chief climbed out of the poster as the walls began breathing. In and out they were breathing like a wave at a sports arena making eerie wind noises. I reminded myself I was tripping so I wouldn’t flip out but I had to do something, needed to get away from the breathing wall, errant stereo, and wherever he was hiding the tomahawk wielding Indian chief. I needed to get out of my room but could’t possibly risk running into Mom or Dad so my only alternative option was to regroup in the bathroom.
So I retreated to the bathroom hoping those walls hadn’t begun breathing yet. One of the odd things about tripping is it intensifies every feeling you have. If you have sex its like the first and best you ever had, if its hearing music the sounds pull at your soul and make it dance, and if its laughing it’s the funniest possible thing you could ever imagine. Even mundane things like taking a pee take on a whole new aura, it can even feel better than that life relieving pee you take during a long road trip in between rest tops. To be honest I don’t think I even thought about it but since I had arrived in the bathroom I just naturally started to pee. It had an oddly reassuring quality to it, helped me to forget the walls, the Indian chief, and the tomahawk. But there is another oddity when tripping and one thing we are always warned about is staring at ourselves for too long. When you see an image of yourself on psychotropic it often appears distorted so you need to focus and look away before you begin to freak out thinking its how you really look. As I turned from the toilet bowl I was confronted with a full length mirror that had a most frightening and imposing figure staring. Me!
Everything seemed to come to a halt, even time itself. I was staring at a foreboding image of myself painted like a warrior of some sort complete with a bizarre war paint. Split directly down the center of my face and body was a line, on the right side everything yellow except two stripes of dark brown war paint on my forehead angling upwards, a semi circle around my eye, and two more stripes on my cheek in a downward angle. My left side was a dark brown yang to the bright yellow yin. I must say I looked fierce. Fierce enough to take on that tomahawk carrying poster image that was lurking about somewhere. I stared for a few seconds trying to intellectualize the event and put it into perspective but my perspective had hopped on a train out of town and I wasn’t sure it would ever return. The war paint began breathing, or pulsating and changing colors. War paint of dark brown, bright yellow, and dayglo orange were spinning around my face. My cheeks were drooping, my nose twisted and my forehead protruded immensely. I was hideous, a nightmarish looking ghoul that went beyond anything in The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. I issued a long slow drawn out “Ohhhh…. My….. God” forcing myself away from the image. Like I was a Piccaso portrait escaping from a Salvador Dali landscape Nothing was real, I had never come close to hallucinating this hard. I trembled and forced myself to head back to my sanctuary feeling like I was stepping on feathered mattresses repeating “its not you it‘s the acid, It‘s just a hallucination. That wasn’t the real you.”
“Shit man, I gotta get a hold of myself here and start enjoying this again. Each step I took required concentration, my eyeballs must have been hanging out of their sockets, my cheeks were melting, and I was walking with Gumby’s legs. When I reached my room I started laughing uncontrollable when I heard someone say “What are you laughing at?” Not able to contain myself I answered in between laughs and breaths, I have no legs, hahaha and my tongue is made of cotton, hahaha.” Still in a fit of laughing I looked around expecting to see my brother Jack but it wasn’t him who answered me.” Well if you think that’s funny just wait until you see reality.” When you’re on a trip like this you don’t need anything to be funny you just find everything funny so I doubled over at the most recent statement. Once recovered I answered, “What do you mean until I see…Wait! What? Who said that? Jack are you goofing on me because this is not the time.” I looked for Jack but nowhere to be found. I surveyed my posters afraid the Indian chief had come alive but no. I looked to my stereo believing maybe the sound was coming from the speakers. “Oh Jesus now I’m hearing hallucinations.” I laid down and tried meditating when a butterfly fluttered in weird patterns in front of my eyes leaving trials of butterfly wings all over the place until it landed on my chest. I stared in confusion when out of nowhere it began to speaking to me. I say speak but it wasn’t actual speaking it was more like it communicated to me. I mean it didn’t actually move its lips to form words and there were no like butterfly sounds coming from it. It communicated directly to me in an unspoken language it called the language of the cosmos. “I am the Monarch of the universe and I have come to take you to worlds not yet even dreamed of, worlds where physics and logic have never existed. I am taking you to world of the Butterfly King.
TBC