Friday, February 2, 2007

When Was Your Last LSD Trip?


It was my twenty-seventh birthday the final time I dropped acid. It had been seven years since I'd quit that crap, but it seemed the proper time and place to gobble a hit. The Oregon Country Fair had become a sort of "family" reunion by that point, an orgy of overcrowding, bad hippie music, smelly damn porta-johns and strange sequences of events for friends all over the West.
I'd been fired from the bakery in Seattle because I took a day off to attend mi amigo's funeral, so I borrowed a Honda Prelude from my cool, new, under-the-table construction boss and packed my StumpJumper and a month's worth of food stamps (converted to a portable sandwich shop) into what was essentially a two-seater. I stopped only once to wedge in a couple of hitchhikers from Portland.
The fair the next morning seemed just too crowded and expensive to my friends and I. Granted, we did eat about a gram of mushrooms each for breakfast, things were very colorful but kind of overwhelming. So we set up shop under a cluster of small pine trees and proceeded to sell beer, made-to-order sammiches and drugs to all comers just outside the gates of the fair. 'Twas a wonderful, profitable day in the sunshine with many poorly remembered deep conversations with complete strangers. As the shadows lengthened and the 'shrooms wore off, we decided those last few unsold tabs of acid could start the evening right. We packed our little mini-mart and discussed a plan of action for what we should already be doing when the drug took hold of us. Someone mentioned the Oregon Dunes for sunset and there was an instant consensus amongst Hoss, Dina and I that this was where we needed to get.
We consulted a map and a watch and discovered the Dunes were 68 miles away, and we had 80 minutes until sunset.
Those little Preludes sure can go, when everything is in high-def and you can actually hear the colors of the road through your fingertips. I kept the speedometer pegged for minutes on end through the most beautiful curvy mountain highway I'd ever seen.
We found a spot to park with ten minutes to spare, then scrambled over the dunes to see the most spectacular sunset lighting the endless stretch of the Pacific. The water was purple and sounded like Rachmaninoff. The sky was Vivaldi orange, yellow and red, with endless stretches of brightly glowing cloud.
Of course the clothes came off, and I sprinted straight north along the waterline until the daylight died with my junk happily flapping. The dune buggy people were gone for the day so I was alone but for my friends, who I believe were fucking up in the dunes somewhere as I ran full tilt into perfect synesthesia. One of the best hours of my life, despite the long, tiresome comedown later that night. The next weekend I accidentally cut my foot off, but that's a whole 'nother story.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

i sense another good story coming on, how did you cut your foot off?

liberal redneck said...

Never mind that, when was your last LSD trip???

Anonymous said...

1994 it was stupid, and I didn't do it again....whoopee

Anonymous said...

i never did lsd

Anonymous said...

did i ever mention to you that im the father of anna nicholes baby???

Anonymous said...

1989. Next question?