This Is What Happens When You Drop Acid for the First Time the Night Before Taking a College Entrance Exam
Part 2: The Trip
Adam lived in a sleepy neighborhood directly behind some abandoned soccer fields that had once served a league I’d played in as a kid. Even though we regularly had teams competing in state championships, the league was still closed down somewhere around the dawn of my adolescence due to a lack of funding and interest. It was just as well to me because once I was old enough to opt out of organized sports, I did. By the time I was 14, the fields had become a loitering spot for bored teens because it was unmonitored and directly behind the rear parking lot of the town’s only shopping mall—which was the only other public location juveniles had to wander around and get into mischief. They were just as good a place as any in this Podunk town for us to drop acid.
I can’t speak for Adam, but my willingness to do something so mind-bending so young was born from a forge of fiery adolescent angst that only became hotter the more it was met with social opposition. It had been slowly warmed to scalding temperature by the intolerable friction of my elementary school rejection, and the religious oppression that dominated every aspect of my young existence. Throw in some unbearable late 90s boredom, and you have a recipe for a kid with a smoldering ambition to fuck shit up. Once I was exposed to punk and grunge enough to realize rebellion was an option, I was in. I started wearing a chip on each shoulder like a couple of comically oversized epaulets. Instead of hoping and wishing for approval, I squeezed my eyes into angry slits every time I walked down the high school hallway in full goth dress. I carried around a rage against the machine that was essentially a self-generated frustration rendered ineffectual by the nature of the fact that my enemies were largely sociological. Widely accepted thought structures that were ethically wrong abound, and their influence was so ubiquitous that conceptualizing the sheer amount of suffering they’d caused could easily become overpowering. There was only so much wearing some black nail polish, and a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt could do to assuage my craving to metaphorically howl at the full moon in werewolf form. Thanks to all the anti-drug propaganda I was force-fed, I knew jumping headfirst into drug use would further position me in counter-cultural opposition to the norm. Plus, I was regularly sad and bored. I’m from a place where the Blues was born, and it makes sense why this shithole would inspire the creation of an entire genre of music exclusively devoted to expressing melancholia. In a small Mississippi town like ours, the young people would do just about anything to cut through the thick fog of listlessness that seemed to saturate every conscious moment. Often all you could hope for was to kill said boredom for an hour or so. That’s one thing you could say for LSD—it was definitely going to eat up our whole fucking evening in a way that promised to be interesting. It was going to be a new experience, at the very least. We were always sorely in need of those.
After my mom dropped me off at his house, Adam and I wasted little time with pleasantries and got down to business. We split the tab of acid and then walked out to the former soccer field pavilion. We figured we’d lounge around on the perforated picnic tables under it and smoke cigarettes while we waited for the psychedelic to kick in. As the acid dissolved on our tongues, we lit some up and climbed on top of the tables to lay on our backs and try to disregard our exhilaration. Adam seemed to be pretty nonchalant, but I was failing miserably at being chill. Every minor change in perception prompted me to silently pose the question “Wait—am I tripping yet?” to myself. Cringe. We stared at the ceiling of the pavilion full of tacit anticipation, but after chain-smoking a couple of unremarkable cigarettes without much change in consciousness we decided to start walking back to Adam’s. His parents had gone on some sort of romantic vacation for the weekend, so we had the house to ourselves. We’d planned to just stay there for the rest of the evening so we could trip our little balls off without incident. Or as much as we could by splitting one hit.
It turned out that it was more than you might expect, and that started to become evident after about an hour to an hour and a half post-ingestion. In terms of how long it felt like it had been, it might as well have been an entire epoch more or less. The anticipation of trying it for the first time was stretching out every second of every minute into a thin linguine string of spacetime before the LSD really started to kick in noticeably. Those pavilion cigs took fifty million years each to smoke, approximately. I experienced the same time dilation later in life the first time I tried other drugs that take a while to kick in, like molly. Before I learned anything about meditation or mindfulness in my thirties, monitoring my conscious attention for evidence that a buzz was about to begin was the most “in my body” I’d allow myself to be. I don’t think I was even all that present for sex before I got clean.
The first time I noticed I was tripping I’d already started falling in and out of this mental phantasmagoria of personal epiphanies. This was the type of shit that would more than likely not just randomly pop up in the normal thought processes of some 14-year-old bumpkin in the 90s. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. They were just suddenly appearing out of the ether fully formed with no effort from me. A third-person image of myself as an unpopular, sad, and somewhat traumatized kid whose father was an adult child of an alcoholic abruptly started shimmering in my consciousness. I saw the generational trauma as a stream of searing sparkles trickling down to me from my father, and his father, and from our unknown ancestors obscured by the mists of time beyond him. I had a moment of derealization sitting on the floor of the kitchen as the countertops launched into their best skyscraper impression. “Impressive,” I thought as they towered impossibly tall above me, then just as I focused my attention on the perception it vanished again. I casually mentioned to Adam in a tone you might comment on the weather, “My teeth feel too alive inside of their sockets.” He had no response and just sat at the kitchen table staring at his pack of Newport cigarettes laying on top of it. I still to this day get this bizarrely specific tactile sensation of being hyperaware of the way my teeth feel every time I come up on mushrooms or acid. In fact, I look for it as an indicator that it’s good shit. Anyway, my sentence pierced the silent air in slow-motion and the sound it produced was somewhat alien to several of my senses. They were temporarily synaesthetically blended, and the soundwaves were rippling in a red and orange aura. The whole thing was exhilarating if I’m being honest. I had the most basic bitch reaction typical of any Erowid.org nerd who’d looked forward to trying drugs before they actually did. Some real “Wow… so this is what a real drug experience is…” type shit. Embarrassing, but who isn’t when they’re recently pubescent? “Wait—” I hissed in a perplexed whisper, “is that what I sound like when I’m talking?”—Do me a solid and remind me to never write a story about what I was like when I was 14 again. God.—Adam had a bit more experience with drugs than I did and calmly suggested, “We should smoke a cigarette in the backyard.” Somehow, in less than an hour I’d completely forgotten all about the concept of cigarettes, and smoking one sounded like an idea the likes of Albert Einstein might come up with. We silently skulked into the backyard and sat down with our backs against the house in this small area between a shrub and his bedroom window where we liked to secretly smoke cigs when his parents were home so we wouldn’t get caught. You forget how much sneaking around you had to do just to do something as simple as smoke a Newport in broad ass daylight once you become an adult in the eyes of the law. It was dusk, so there was no logical reason for us to be surreptitiously smoking—especially with his parents gone—but we still hid when we didn’t have to out of habit. Also, we were on acid so that added to the tension. So much of being an addict is about ritual and the solace of repetition.
And just like that, with a flash of my Bic lighter a complex web of information exploded in my brain as if I’d always known it. It suddenly occurred to me that existence is an incomprehensibly immense and undulating field of energy that we can only perceive a very small percentage of. It’s so big in comparison to us that to think about it for too long probably isn’t the best idea for individuals who are unprepared to bear the weight of the implications. It followed that human beings draw little lines around repeating parts of it with our pattern-finding brains to transmogrify it into some sort of workable sense so we can function in the natural world and look after our daily concerns. Nevertheless, all the lines are just imaginary mental structures. Some of them were necessary, some of them not so much, but all of them were a barrier to my comprehension of the ultimate reality I would later learn the Buddhists call Nirvana. the vastness of consciousness was well beyond human reason, that was just our familiar stronghold. A battered ship against the storm, if you will. Paired with this portentous realization was the fear that foolhardily abandoning all logic to jump into that kind of unknown could potentially be so withering you’d go catatonic. It seemed like something that perhaps a shaman could handle, but for some white kid from the suburbs trying acid for the first time, it seemed like a conceptual hot stove not worth the risk to touch. I wanted to retreat so far back into the delusion that what really mattered was Toonami finally airing the next Dragon Ball Z saga and the possibility of hooking up with my high school crush. Now, it’s funny as fuck—but it wasn’t then. I wanted to comment on it to Adam, but what I said instead was, “I want to draw a fat smiling man with a mustache called Tickle Burns. He hands out sparkles from his pocket.” No idea where the fuck that came from, but saying I actually had the idea versus it having me was a matter of semantics. Either way, it happened. Adam—who was always in a secret contest with everyone around him regarding who could be the most quirky and offbeat—countered with “I want to draw a big piece of Broccoli with a rabbit for a hand.” I always saw through his too-intentionally random antics. His bizarre persona was contrived, of that much I was confident. What reason he would have to ham it up other than some perceived social status in our heavily goth-inspired clique I couldn’t figure out, all I knew was he was full of shit. He might have been a sociopath of some kind, but he wasn’t this selective mute or autistic person he often played the part of. What do the British say when they know someone is telling tall tales? “Come off it, mate.” That’s what l always wanted to say, but I was too desperate for the crumbs of friendship I could get as an actual neurodivergent kid in those days. “Good man! Good show, old sport!” I exclaimed in a bad British accent as I started to laugh with an odd intensity. I was starting to become aware of things feeling funnier than they should be. It wasn’t that goddamn amusing, just a clumsy reference to the Absolutely Fabulous reruns we’d been watching a lot of recently. Nevertheless, I was losing my shit at my own unfunny comedy. I don’t think I’d ever laughed that hard. I’m not sure if any other Americans do this, but whenever I watch British shows, I always borrow their accent in my head afterward for like a week. Is this article ever going to stop becoming more embarrassing? Probably not.
At any rate, we headed back to his bedroom and got out a few sheets of paper and some pens. Then, Adam pulled out a Tool CD—Definitely not—from one of these thick black binders filled to the brim with CD-Rs that we all used to have back then. He played the song Third Eye from their album Ænima on his parents’ good sound system. A loud heartbeat started pumping rhythmically. A charismatic voice boomed through the speakers as it began to present its case with the smooth conviction of a televangelist consumed with avarice by boldly declaring, “See, I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: Go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, all your CDs and burn ‘em. Because you know what? The musicians who’ve made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years? …rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreal fuckin’ high on drugs.” Adam and I chortled along with the canned laughter in the song and as I was laughing, I started to lose the sensation of having a body. I was pure laughter for several seconds until the distorted sitcom fodder suddenly cut out and more atmospheric sounds started to sliver out from their hiding places in the mix's background. The paper I was drawing on shivered slightly as I started drawing this peculiar cartoon man I’d thought up. Drums stumbled in odd time signatures as Bill Hicks started—as far as I was concerned—proselytizing the word of God from the inside of a fucking tin can in his best newscaster voice, “Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration,” he paused for a breath before going on, “that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there is no such thing as death; life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.” Sparkles started flying all over the sketch paper as Danny Carey pounded out a tribal rhythm and Hicks went on in the voice of an airline pilot that was delivering a pre-flight monologue over the intercom, “It’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on personal freedom, is what it is. Ok? Keep that in mind at all times, thank you.” That was easy to oblige seeing as how I was already tripping balls. After a few muted whispers from Maynard James Keenan about dreaming of a blue face and wiping webs and the dew from his withered eye, he subsequently let out some guttural screams that heralded the peak of this entire experience. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever truly heard music before this moment. He subsequently crooned in octave overdubbing, “So good to see you, I missed you so much… So glad it’s over, I missed you so much…” as another cavalcade of new concepts I’d never considered before came to my conscious attention. The walls were starting to breathe as I thought, “Why would they make it so difficult for people to access something that’s revealed so much to me in a matter of hours? It’s so obvious that psychedelic experiences could provide incredible insight and help a lot of people.” I didn’t have the foresight to think it could be used to improve my or anyone else’s mental health because—even though I’d been taking Ritalin since I was 4 years old—I was barely aware of the concept, but it still seemed incredibly suspicious that LSD would be outlawed by the government, nonetheless. I meditated on this for a moment as Maynard’s screaming made my chest feel like it was pleasantly on fire and various objects undulated in my periphery.
My attention turned back to my sketch of Mr. Burns, who looked like an Italian Buddha in a two-piece business suit if you can picture it. Let me try and draw what I remember of him.
As you can see, he sported a mustache and had his left hand pulling sparkles from a pocket full of them that was essentially infinite. He somehow mimicked the iconography of the Chinese Buddha even though I’d been raised Irish-Italian Catholic and was barely aware of the image or what it meant. He even had those crescent-shaped eye slits. In retrospect, it was a pretty odd occurrence that aspects of eastern imagery were what came to mind at a time when my third eye was being pried open by the acid, but I didn’t realize that at the moment. Maynard James Keenan was screaming about prying open his own, but I didn’t know what the fuck that meant either. It seemed vaguely spiritual, but it wasn’t something you could just look up on Google seeing as the internet was still an infant. All I knew back then is when it came to the adults, I wasn’t being told shit. Why do you think I jumped at the chance to drop acid? Why do you think I jumped at the chance to develop a smoking habit? Did sneaking around and smoking cigarettes take the proverbial edge off—for a little while, at least? In the immortal words of Omar Little from The Wire, “Oh, indeed.”
Took the edge off what, exactly? Growing up neurodivergent, firstly. The sting of betrayal that became increasingly painful the more I realized I was being sold some pretty unsubstantiated claims about what happens when we die in Catholic Mass week after week, for another thing. A third feeling that I firmly insisted needed consistent covering up was the one where I deeply believed I was some unlovable freak. That one doesn’t live rent-free in my head anymore, thank God, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t still have a key. Today, I’d be kinder with myself and say my caustically honest brand of socializing is an acquired taste that one has to logically assume at least a few people have already developed before we meet. That means they’re capable of loving me, even if they’re a rare breed. I’d also have compassion for the fact that I’ve lived on the margins of society long enough to acquire my own taste for being lonely. Or at least the peace and solitude that feeling always accompanies. My first experiences with rejection by my peers weren’t too long after kindergarten, and I didn’t know this yet, but—speaking as my 38-year-old self—there would never be a point in my life when people would stop disappointing me. My only real tactic to cope with it to date is to just avoid interaction so nothing bad can happen, which is an admittedly unsophisticated strategy. Not to mention neurotic. It’s so maladaptive it’s awkward to talk about, regardless of the fact that we’ve reached a point in history where it's very common. Hikikomori vibes, anyone? Why do I find vulnerability outside of my art so intolerable? If I had to take a stab in the dark, I’d say it all goes back to early childhood trauma that hasn’t been processed.
It all starts with distrust, which is often a result of a lack of safety when you’re in a vulnerable position. In the case of my own childhood and teen years, that’s an accurate description. As far as little Prizzy was concerned, most of what I’d been told about life—from Santa Claus to the Easter Bunny to the stories from the Bible—was just fan service for people who needed easy answers to function. Furthermore, a society that was capable of spinning such harmful yarns would only have more bullshit in store at their so-called centers of learning—which were starting to look more and more like places to get some brainwashing done. Some of this reasoning was admittedly rather pretentious, but in all fairness, my ability to use logic had just clicked on a couple of years prior and I was still just a runt. Also, the nihilistic implications of my first forays into rational thought were—due to the collective discouragement of my curiosity by my Catholic mom, psychiatrists, nuns, priests, and teachers informally assigned to field such existential concerns—met with nothing more than pat answers that were worded in terms that were unsatisfyingly ambiguous. Under those circumstances, it’s understandable that one might begin to develop a precocious disposition.
The only imperative in competition with my need for rebellion was my budding sex drive and an intense desire to socialize with other kids with similar issues. That manifested in spending a lot of time jacking off and talking to other teens online about depression and anxiety. I was typing love letters into AOL instant messenger instead of reading literature if you follow me. It’d be a year or two before I’d pull away from the computer screen long enough to end up discovering I actually wasn’t a crackpot through the works of authors like Kurt Vonnegut. Meanwhile, the patronizing and placatory parables that were being peddled to me by the pedagogs were not capable of providing enough philosophical satiety to prevent further quandaries about the nature of consciousness from spontaneously popping up in my everyday thoughts. After this acid trip at Adam’s house, my inborn curiosity started to progress from single thoughts to entire thought patterns. The unraveling of their worldview the first time a pubescent armchair philosopher has the thought, “Wait. What if none of this shit actually matters?” is an irreversible process. This is especially true if they grew up religiously repressed. For myself, drawing Tickle Burns during this LSD trip was the moment that banal thought pulled this proverbial thread in my head. If you want to destroy my sweater, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Adam had finally finished drawing his piece of anthropomorphic rabbit-handed broccoli, and hand-to-heart it was fucking garbage. It looked like a kindergartener had drawn it. How could someone old enough to have an adam’s apple draw that badly? Luckily, we suddenly abandoned the drawing to climb up on the roof—terrible fucking idea, so you know who it came from—smoke another cigarette, and philosophize about life, so I didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t a bunch of ugly chicken scratches. We started to discuss religion being the opiate of the masses, and how it’s all just made-up content. Adam and I sat there on his parent’s roof at a precipitous diagonal slant and decided since all religious iconography was arbitrary, there was nothing stopping us from creating our own out of random nonsense. We resolved to do so and use his Curious George doll—fucking Quirky McGee over here—as the monotheistic deity.
It was then that Adam’s stupid ass almost fell off the ledge because he was scooting too close to the edge of the roof just to see if he could do it like a doofus with no common sense. Even though he almost fell off, he seemed wholly unperturbed at the prospect of breaking his arms, legs, or neck. I managed to keep enough of the fear of God in me to stick closer to the center and furthermore suggest that we get off of it. I didn’t want to have to explain to his parents why their dead kid fell off the roof with a head full of acid at an age where I still couldn’t grow facial hair; not that any of that would make sense to this praying mantis of a person I’d somehow befriended. Fortunately, he was cogent enough to listen to reason after a little coaxing, and we got down off of the roof before something terrible happened.
We were starting to come down in more ways than one. After we got back down on the ground floor, we promptly went back into the house and sat down on the living room couch so we could play Adam’s N-64 console. The cartridge in the system was this racing game called F-Zero X, and the acid was still having enough of an effect that playing it felt pleasantly unusual. I was starting to feel more normal by the minute, which brought up this new and peculiar melancholy of having to return to the real world that I would become all too familiar with as a drug-addicted adult. Adam, on the other hand, apparently hadn’t had enough of creating a problem where there wasn’t one. This guy who would go on to have a child and become a doctor started talking about how he thought that he could choose to trip forever and never come down if he just decided to do it, and that was what he wanted. He also said that I should follow suit, and at that point, I couldn’t have been less down for it. I was still a little pissed about the ridiculous bullshit he pulled on the roof, so it wasn’t hard to tell him that I wouldn’t be joining in. I’d been presented with a lot of anti-drug propaganda in elementary school, so I wasn’t even sure if acid could make you permanently insane or if it could be voluntary. All I knew is that I didn’t want to be a part of it. Eventually, we both came down completely despite his weird assertions, and my mom came to pick me up around dawn. I managed to make it home without her suspecting anything, thank God.
I was so sleepy, and taking the ACT felt like the last thing in the world I wanted to bother with. Nevertheless, as I was showering to get ready for the test, I noticed that I felt more or less like a weary version of myself again. I felt encouraged by this, so I figured I might as well see what would come of this test by completely half-assing it. By contrast, Adam actually was a different person after that trip. He was already kind of a piece of shit, but over the next year or so his sociopathic tendencies started becoming more sinister and malicious to the point I wasn’t the only one who noticed. I was used to being picked on, as well as always ending up the runt in any social hierarchy, but he was graduating from second to first-degree murder in terms of displaying calculated malevolence. Gone was the spontaneous and unnecessary sadistic behavior like trying to burn you with a cigarette while you weren’t looking and other shitty tricks that were foul, yes, but still had the simplistic cruelty of children. What had taken their place was the long-term plotting necessary to oust someone from a friend group or steal their girlfriend. The latter never happened to me, although he did date my first ex like two weeks after we broke up. I was totally fine with it though, because I knew firsthand how impossibly annoying she was. It was as if the few shreds of empathy he had left had slowly begun to vanish into the hot, humid, and honeysuckled Mississisippi air like his hair would go on to do in adulthood. His hand-selected Hot Topic idiosyncrasies that were once somewhat eye-roll-worthy started to devolve into some kind of legitimately disconcerting persona that was very derivative of the Joker. This acid trip was the beginning of the end for us, and we wouldn’t remain friends for much longer after it was over. I remember this kid so clearly because when I was younger, I had no spine whatsoever. I struggled with setting boundaries well into young adulthood, honestly. Regardless of all this, he was toxic enough that even someone with no self-esteem at all eventually got fed up with his bullshit enough to summon the gumption to tell him to fuck off.