We were getting better at these ambulatory trips, though still had difficulty with the street drugs. I had tried my hand at scoring acid, but in my inexperience had come home with a bag of something that looked more like chocolate Meth. Rod sniffed it dubiously.
"Might be worthwhile."
"I don't know. It's not blotter, it's not windowpane, it's certainly not Sandoz. It's more like Nestle's Quick."
"Well, I gave it a shot."
"I hope you didn't pay too much for this shit."
"Ten bucks. He said it was acid."
"No telling what it is."
"Does that mean you don't want to try it?"
"Well, if it's chocolate Meth, at least we'll get a rush off of it."
Perhaps he didn't want to make me feel bad. Down it went, mixed with milk.
"Yep, that's Nestle's."
But in a short while, we were rolling on the floor laughing in agony. It was impossible to stop laughing, even to catch a breath. Laughingly, we struggled for composure. Horse laughing, Rod staggered to the bookshelf and yanked down Tart. He handed me the book. Guffawing, I flipped the pages. God! How my diaphragm began to ache! I found the relevant bit.
"Almost dying of an overdose of rat poison is indeed an altered state of consciousness, but sometimes one goes beyond almost."
Holy shit.
On the same sort of confusion of initials, a barbershop quartet rehearsal went south because the DMT we allegedly had turned out to be more like PCP. We spent six hours crawling around on hands and knees looking for the pitch pipe. I remember staring at the score before me, then going down like a rock.
"Me and my hash oil
floating down the avenue.
Me and my hash oil,
taking time to take a toke or two.
And when it's twelve o'clock,
we sit and stare.
We see many things,
but nothing is there.
Just me and my hash oil,
all alone and getting blown."
If we lived, we'd be great.
Now and then, the drugs we had managed to acquire worked as expected and we managed to have a meaningful experience. Such was the case when, having heard the rehearsal in the afternoon of the Ives Fourth Symphony, following along in the huge score spread out in my lap, we returned a few nights later having ingested some purple dragon. Symphony Hall is a fine setting for an acid trip. We made our way up the red carpeted steps to the space in the peanut gallery our impoverished student economies had afforded. We all wanted to sit together, but there was an elderly woman in our midst. I turned to her and said,
"We'd like to sit together. Would you mind trading seats?"
"I've been sitting in this seat for twenty-five years. I'm not going to give it up now for the likes of you!"
Her face was instantly consumed by cobwebs as her idea that she'd been sitting there for an entire quarter century hit home. Her skin melted and blew away in foetid dust. Her skeleton crumbled also, and she ceased to exist. I had disappeared her. I had to turn away. I sat beside her mortal remains and stared at the stage. It was a ways off, but that always useful microscopic vision trick zoomed in on it nicely. Concert Master Joseph Silverstein emerged and tuned the orchestra. Then out came Micheal Tilson Thomas (Tilly) and we sat back for a rendition of Bernstein's "Serenade." Silverstein had my soul in the tips of my fingers. I had my red ticket stub in hand. In my absorption in the music, into my mouth it went. All of a sudden, I was tasting delicious strawberries. The paper dissolved eventually. As for Ives, the score was/is a miracle. On acid, and without it, there is so much to enjoy and savor. The magnificent fugue that goes out on 'repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy,' is enough to stand in for an act of God. The polytonality of the last movement, the piling up of dissonances and sonorities and manipulations of the overtone series somehow keeps a narrative going, but adds startling effects such as the roaring of crowds at the ballpark. Nowadays we'd make a collage with virtual tape. Ives does it better with wood, metal, horsehair and catgut. In the end, as the symphony died away, I was too awestruck to clap my hands. The woman beside me sat mute as well. She might have hated modern music. I was way forward in my seat. Into the ear of the patron in the seat in front of me I whispered,
"Ah, Charles Ives."
On the way down the stairs, Bou Bou asked how I liked it.
"It was so good, I ate my ticket."
Another catch phrase, as if we needed one.
On a solo acid trip, I strolled the icy city, heading back across the Harvard Bridge from Cambridge. As I walked the span on the Eastern side, walking over the ghosts of the many smoots, I saw a Cadillac barreling ass down Mass Ave. It leapt up the incline to the roadway across the bridge, which was a solid sheet of ice. The car had much momentum, but when it hit the ice it began to drift. Behind the wheel, an African face in an elaborate suit, wearing a sequined hat, bedecked with much, as we would say now, bling, had widened its eyes considerably. It was a pimp! I could see as it careened past that he was turning the wheel frantically from one extreme to the other, but since the wheels had no purchase, the gyrations of the steering wheel had no effect. The car hit the guard rail aft of me and then started across like a ping pong ball to the other side. All the way down the bridge it went, eventually disappearing down the far ramp and then reappearing having regained traction. In my expanded mind, I replayed the incident in a loop. For a moment in time there, the pimp's world had lost its moorings. No friction, no sex. No sex, no car. No car, no suit. No suit, cold world. Cold world, sold girl. No facts, no fiction. No friction, no heat. No heat, no sweat. No sweat, no problem. No problem, no love song. Glory, glory, Harry Lewis. Get it on, get on with it.
