Trying acid for the first time
Not long after that I dropped acid for the first time. I guess I felt I had a lot of growing up to do. It’s a mystery why I thought that would do the trick.
Lovegod and I and some of the other artists from the farm met a guy named Jim at a club in New York one night. This was a very in club at the time. They had light shows. Jim was one of the light artists. Everyone at the club was tripping on something or other. In the late sixties there was a lot of press about the drug scene. But mostly the press focused on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury. The flower children. That made them sound sexy and cool and as if they were on the cutting edge of some wonderful new cultural awareness.
In reality they were a bunch of unhappy lost young kids many of whom died of overdoses or just got completely strung out and couldn’t rescue themselves. The ones who survived from that era were the ones with real talent and some kind of grounding. Besides the psychedelic drugs made famous by Timothy Leary and The Beatles, there was plenty of heroin on the streets. Heroin was a real scary drug that I never went anywhere near. But I knew plenty of people who did. And there was a lot of talk in those days about marijuana being a gateway drug. I refuted this whenever I had the chance.
But there I was one day at the farm with Jim the light artist visiting and that’s the day I tried acid.
I did it inside in my living room. Soon I was awash in a sea of swirling bright colors and patterns that covered everything. It was enchanting. I was enchanted, some Egyptian goddess with hieroglyphics covering my body and my black cat, Siren. Jim stayed with me the whole time. The theory among us neophytes was that to have a “good trip,” you needed a guide with “good vibes” who would be there with you through thick and thin. This was not supposed to be a spouse or lover or anyone too close to you. Clinical detachment was all important.
What science we based this on is a mystery. I think it had something to do with the I Ching. Or maybe the Third Eye. These were Eastern concepts that floated freely among the psychedelic sub culture.
But I think Jim was just after my body. He had spent a lot of time hanging around before this, encouraging me to find my real self through exploration of this other realm. He said it was very spiritual. Later he introduced us to Timothy Leary and Babba Ram Das at a big old estate farm in Millbrook. Tim was a tall, aristocratically good looking ex-professor from Harvard. Ex because he had really revved up the flower power generation by trying all sorts of psychedelic drugs, starting with the organic ones like peyote and mescaline and moving rather swiftly past pot and into LSD, which could be manufactured easily and inexpensively by anyone with access to a lab and certain chemicals. Timothy could get to the lab, Harvard being a major institution with all sorts of rooms and anterooms, and I guess the chemicals were not much of a challenge either. Ram Das was a spiritual name assumed by a friend of Timothy’s. I think he came from the Bronx, did Ram Das. Tim Leary went on talk shows and argued on panel shows and hit the news a lot over a couple of years there. Finally the attorney general of the state of New York went after him and, after a lengthy trial that made big news and gave Tim Leary a venue to really expose his views, which boiled down to the simple three phrase mantra, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Years after he got out of jail he was still dropping drugs of all kinds, but by then he was doing it as a testing procedure for drug companies. He was still saying we were moving toward a totally chemical culture where everyone would rely on drugs for survival.
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During that first trip I wandered outside to the huge vegetable garden on the farm. It was June. A bright sunny day. Clear and not humid at all. I walked through the rows of staked tomato plants and began picking ripe red ones from the vines. I still remember the heady way they felt, how dense and rich as if I were feeling the very essence of them through my fingers – the souls of those full, ripe tomatoes. And then I began to squish them in my fingers and to taste them and it felt like I was eating the sun, warm and succulent.
The trip lasted a good five hours. I don’t remember the rest of it. It was odd and pleasant and something I am lucky went well for me.
