Dr. Hoffman's Folly
Bill stood on the
kitchen table, his arms raised in a grand, sweeping gesture, shouting
"I am Jesus Bill! I am Jesus Bill! Hallelujah!" in the
bombastic oratorical tones of a holy-rolling tv evangelist. He
leaped about on the flimsy table like a demented, drug-addled
Peter Pan, and I was afraid it would collapse under his weight,
but I was unable to do anything except stare at him with a big
dumb grin on my face, because the acid was kicking in big-time
and turning the clockwork gears of my thought processes into a
water-slide filled with raspberry jello.
There were four of us
scrambling our brains that evening with what was supposed to be
lsd, but could have contained just about anything that was poured
into the kitchen sink where it was most likely concocted; drain-o,
rat poison, douche vinegar, who knew?
Our blinkered band of
blind pied pipers consisted of my friend Dave, his friend Bill,
my first wife Terri and myself. We were all young, none of us
over the age of twenty, and we were gathered in the small apartment
where Terri and I had lived since our untimely teenage marriage,
precipitated by the unplanned birth of our daughter Diana the
year before.
Diana had been put to
bed an hour earlier and we had sprawled on the living room carpet
waiting for the drug to take effect. And as we sat hovering in
that twilight zone between everyday consciousness and righteously
fucked up, I glanced through Bill's journal which he carried with
him everywhere he went, a key prop in his emerging literary persona.
I read through some of his latest poems, expecting Bill's usual
mix of zen philosophy, dada nihilism, and absurdist theatre, and
was shocked and taken aback by the extremely violent anti-christian
sentiments I found expressed in them. There was stuff about Jesus
sucking diseased cocks, having the cross shoved up his ass, and
lots of nasty scatological references.
Dave, Bill and I were
all Jewish by birth, but gravitated towards eastern theologies;
zen buddhism, hinduism, taoism. We practiced yoga, and had disdain
for pretty much all western organized religions, and certainly
no love for christianity, but this was really over the top! There
was some serious rage in that notebook, and wherever it was coming
from, christianity was the target. It was a side of Bill I hadn't
seen before. He had always played the part of the mystic, serene
and wise beyond his years, or else the clown, the witty court
jester who amused everyone with his surrealist wordplay and eccentricity.
Now I was seeing one of Bill's darker characters, one filled with
volcanic repressed anger, and it scared me; not so much for myself,
but for Terri, who, although seriously strayed from the flock,
had been raised a catholic, and I was nervous about how she would
react if she should read the products of Bill's poison pen.
I knew that Terri was
volatile and prone to extreme bouts of irrational over-reaction,
but what neither of us knew at the time, and wouldn't know until
years after our divorce, was that Terri was suffering from a serious
dissociative disorder; the result of a highly abusive and traumatic
childhood in an extremely dysfunctional family filled with alcoholism,
addiction, incest, physical abuse and mental illness.
I think it would be
safe to say that taking acid was not a good idea for any of us,
but what the hell did we know.
So now Bill was dancing
on the table, gesticulating wildly and shouting "I am Jesus
Bill! Praise Jesus Bill!" at the top of his lungs, and Terri
stared at him with a googly-eyed expression of uncomprehending
confusion; she looked like she didn't know whether to laugh, cry,
take offense, or wind her watch.
My stomach knotted;
this was not going to be a pleasant trip. Truthfully, though,
I didn't really know what kind of a trip I had wanted it to be.
I don't think any of us really knew what we were after. Enlightenment?
Revelation? Kicks? Transcendence? Escape? Wonder? We had failed
to heed Dr. Timothy Leary's advice to honestly examine one's true
expectations and motivations before taking lsd.
Terri laughed hysterically
at Bill's antics; the kind of bone-chilling laugh that one rarely
hears outside of the locked ward of an asylum, the kind of laugh
that makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck, and your
scrotum, should you possess one, shrivel up like a raisin. Dave
and I looked at each other wide-eyed. The first note of bad trip
paranoia had been sounded. Once again, Tim Leary's words came
to us too late: set and setting, set and setting--we were fucked.
Terri continued to laugh
like Woody Woodpecker's evil twin. We thought she was going to
have a fit. Even the normally implacable Bill was alarmed now
and had climbed down off the table.
"What's wrong with
her?" he said.
"I don't know,"
I said nervously, "maybe she shouldn't have taken any acid."
We stood in a circle
around Terri and arranged our faces in ways that we hoped would
seem kind and soothing.
"It's okay, Terri,"
I said, "everything's going to be alright."
"Yes, everything's
groovy," said Bill, "think about butterflies and bunny
rabbits and shiny daffodils..."
"You've done acid
before, haven't you?" Dave asked Terri. Terri looked at me.
"Not really,"
she said, "when we did that sugar cube--that was my first
time."
"Oh shit!"
I said.
Terri was referring
to an afternoon, shortly after we had first met, when I had shown
up at her house with some sugar cube acid while her parents were
out, and we tripped and had sex in her bedroom while side two
of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band played over and over
on the turntable--we must have heard it thirty times--and Terri
was menstruating and her blood got all over the sheets, and she
was flipping out and getting hysterical and I kept telling her
"No... it's beautiful... it comes out of your body... it's
natural..." like some drugged-out flower child at a Manson
family orgy.
So Terri hadn't had
as much experience with acid as I thought she had. Not that we
ever got good acid anyway. The days of Owsley and orange sunshine
were long gone. All of our late 70s suburban acid was heavily
cut with speed and god knows what other kinds of garbage, and
our trips were usually psychologically akin to the act of peeling
off one's own skin with a pair of tweezers. I honestly don't know
why we continued to take the shit.
"I think I'm freaking
out," said Terri, her voice quavering.
"You're not freaking
out," I said, trying to be the voice of reason while my brains
were sliding out of my ear like runny eggs. "We only took
one hit. It's not that much. You're going to be okay." I
tried to sound confident and upbeat but Terri wasn't buying it.
"I... I need to
be alone," said Terri.
"Are you sure that's
a good idea?" I said.
"Yes... no... I
mean... I don't know... maybe..."
And she removed herself to the bedroom, shutting the door behind
her. Dave, Bill and I looked at each other uncomfortably. A pall
settled over us, replacing the earlier hilarity of Jesus Bill.
"What do you think
she's going to do?" said Bill, "She's not going to hurt
herself, is she?"
"I don't know,"
I said, as I watched the carpet and the walls breathing in and
out. "I think you freaked her out with that Jesus Bill stuff.
She is catholic, you know."
Bill just stared at
me blankly.
"And whatever you
do, don't let her look at your god damned notebook."
Just then, Terri came
rushing out of the bedroom in a panic.
"I... I'm going
to get in the car and drive... I have to get away..." she
said in a shaky voice.
"That's not a good
idea," I said slowly, trying to maintain my composure.
"No... not a good
idea," my friends echoed, with barely concealed alarm. We
got up and once again surrounded Terri, fencing her in with our
bodies. With soothing baby-talk and paternal cooing we gradually
herded her away from the door, moving slowly so as not to frighten
her.
All of us were tripping
pretty heavily at this point, and it was getting hard to keep
track of what was happening when. Right now, yesterday afternoon,
and five minutes ago were getting jumbled up and re-arranged like
chips on a scrabble board in a scrabble match played by monkeys.
All kinds of Lucy-in-the-Sky visual effects were pre-empting my
usual neural-retinal schedule: colored silly-string motion trails,
shifting kaleidoscopic patterns plastered over every surface,
chairs and tables shooting up to the ceiling on rubbery legs like
in an episode of Little Nemo in Slumberland. And in the middle
of this phosphene brain-gasm, a part of me was trying to figure
out how to keep Terri from snapping her tab and slipping her wig,
and that part of me was a little man in a little boat in a toilet
bowl getting sucked down into a fluorescent day-glo whirlpool.
So Terri and I decided
to take a bath together thinking it would chill us out, but when
we shut the door to the bathroom, the walls began to close in
on us. The water running in the tub sounded like a deafening waterfall
with eerie voices murmuring underneath the roar, and the flowers
on the wallpaper seemed to be staring at us with accusing eyes
as we got undressed. I felt as if I was slipping down a dark tunnel.
I was paranoid; the toilet hated me. Whatever nasty things the
acid was doing to Terri's head were now infecting me as well.
"Don't look in
the mirror!" I said in a panicky voice, expecting to see
a vision of our flesh melting off our heads, leaving Mexican Day
of the Dead sugar skulls blinking back at us. We got in the tub
and sat facing each other, and as I watched her, Terri's skin
took on a greenish glow, and her eyebrows curled up into a sinister
pointiness, and her teeth became fangs, and the freckles around
her nose turned into rough, bumpy scales. She had transformed
into a dangerous, frightening lizard-woman, and I could tell by
her look of trepidation that my face was doing bizarre and unpleasant
things for her benefit as well.
"Is my face scaring
you?" I asked. Terri nodded.
The trip was taking
us from a colorful Peter Max black light poster into a medieval
Heironymous Bosch demonic nightmare.
"Okay--let's get
out of the tub then," I said, my voice small and tremulous.
"Don't look at me and don't look in the mirror."
We quickly got dressed
and rejoined our friends in the living room. They were watching
tv, but the screen was broadcasting nothing but static, since
all the stations had signed off for the night.
"We're watching
the snow," said Bill.
"It's really cool,"
said Dave.
"Look--it's thousands
of people waving flags..."
"Oh yeah,"
I said, "I see it too... people waving flags..."
"Look--now it's
millions of Chinese people with conical hats..."
The novelty of the tv game did much to take the edge off of our
fear and paranoia, and soon we had forgotten all about the bad
trip bathtub. The four of us sat huddled around the tv for what
seemed like hours, ooh-ing and ah-ing over the imaginary scenes
and hallucinatory characters that our lsd-feuled sense organs
were projecting onto the tv's visual white noise. The distraction
seemed to calm Terri down, which in turn calmed me down, and everyone
was able to relax. Eventually, the drug began to wear off, and
the tv static lost it's animated funhouse appeal and reverted
back to plain old boring static.
"Come into the
other room with me," Terri whispered in my ear. We excused
ourselves and shuffled off into the bedroom. Terri shut the door
and flopped herself down on the bed.
"I'm horny. Come
here and fuck me!" she demanded.
"Now? What about
Dave and Bill?" I asked, somewhat anxiously.
"What about them?"
Terri said, as she stripped off her clothes.
"Well, they...
they'll hear us..."
"So what?"
I was rather uncomfortable
with this idea. I knew that both Bill and Dave hadn't gotten laid
in quite a while, and I also knew that it would be pretty unpleasant
for me to have to listen to my friend having sex in the next room
when I was feeling horny and frustrated.
"Come on,"
Terri demanded, "put that thing in me!"
I did the deed as quickly as possible, all the while worrying
about Dave and Bill overhearing Terri's squeals and moans of pleasure.
It was very hard for me to enjoy myself and I felt rather like
a concubine in a male harem, or a stud animal corralled into a
breeding arrangement.
When the servicing was
over, I quickly returned to the living room to check on Dave and
Bill. The vibe I got from them felt kind of strange and I could
tell that the quickie had been clearly broadcast through the apartment's
thin walls. Dave had an ambiguously crooked smile on his face,
half amused and half embarrassed, and Bill was standing on his
head in a yoga posture. Our two-year-old daughter Diana had awakened
and wandered into the living room and was staring saucer-eyed
at Dave and Bill as if they were gooey green martians with antennas
and six eyes and drippy slobbering fangs. I picked her up and
tucked her back into her crib, and by the time I got her back
to sleep, Terri was snoring in the bedroom and Dave and Bill were
feeling sober enough to drive, so we said our goodbyes.
I sat on the couch and
reviewed the night's adventures. It was clear to me that Terri
and I should definitely not do any more acid together. Lsd is
not a recreational drug. It is a powerful substance that needs
to be approached with caution and reverence. It can be a gateway
to expanded levels of consciousness, or a pandora's box loosing
all the screeching demons from the dungeons of the subconscious.
Luckily, we got through the evening without anyone burning their
hands on the stove or jumping out of a window. We were on the
ground floor anyway, so a jump would not have been fatal. And
besides, those once-familiar tales of acid trips gone awry are
most likely urban legends. But the experience underscored the
wisdom of the unfairly maligned Dr. Leary who warned people not
to take lsd unless it was in a highly controlled environment with
an experienced guide. And one should definitely not feed acid
to people indiscriminately without knowing anything about their
state of mental health.
It's no surprise to
me that the 1960s magical mystery tour through the summer of love
ended up on the side of the road with a blowout and smoke pouring
out of the hood, and a lot of misguided, psychedelicized basket
weavers sitting on the grass, gibbering and babbling and twiddling
their thumbs and toes.
David Aronson
November 2006