This Is What Happens When You Drop Acid for the First Time the Night Before Taking a College Entrance Exam

Part 1: Getting the Call

Ultimately, it was just a matter of contradictory plans. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about concerning the proverbial LSD trip and my parents wanted me to take advantage of all of the benefits the honors program at my Catholic high school had to offer. From a commonly held point of view, that’s understandable. Unfortunately for my 14-year-old self, I didn’t have one. I wasn’t born with a dullard’s perspective or the ability to watch my tongue. Thusly, my parents and I were often at odds when it came to practically any topic, and indefinite avoidance of our points of contention was not an option. Not that I ever left a room unread; under the pressure of sidestepping consistently the misdirected antipathy of adults, you get good at interpreting micromovements and glances. I got in plenty of spankings that put the fear of God in me. That’s because I was a fairly smart kid with a mouth too big for my britches who had to contend with the emotional volitivity of my father.

I think I was born with a smart mouth since—according to my mom—I taught myself the alphabet by saying the letters aloud to myself by the time I was 18 months old. Regardless of my possible genetic predisposition towards talking shit, this sardonic nature and contempt for authority continued to coalesce and harden the older I got. Around 6th or 7th grade is when I developed a real taste for rebellion. My top-of-the-class teacher’s pet routine crumbled like zombie flesh under the duress of over a decade of pressure that had been building in my subconscious like the molten rock of a volcano. Once I realized all my attempts to fit in were in vain and I’d never be popular, the pressure inside me finally exploded like an atomic bomb. Rebellion was an imperative that had comparable strength to my budding sex hormones—which is saying a lot for a kid going through puberty, you know? My rage against the machine was irradiated lava-hot, and it was heated by me repeatedly having experiences where I felt like I wanted or needed to express myself, but could not. All the pain that had accumulated had grown foul over a small lifetime of pushing down my emotions about being ignored or scolded in pursuit of being thought of as a good kid. I was constantly frightened by my father’s irate eruptions—he’d be mad as a wet hen and screaming bloody murder from the little league stands because I swung and missed a fucking baseball pitch—and lowkey humiliated by a modest mountain of consistent experiences of rejection from the other kids. Even my own younger sister didn’t really fuck with me past the age of 6. I guess if you get rejected young, it doesn’t matter who does the jilting. I was emotionally scarred by the thoughtless actions of an adult child of an alcoholic and the experience of being forsaken by an objectively backwater community— not unlike the ones Modest Mouse sang about in their songs about rednecks from the trailer park—and it still had a profoundly shitty effect on my self-image. A lot of my early chilhood exclusion was due to my neurodivergence, and that shit can stick with you for a long stretch. Not only that set me apart, but I was fairly young when I became deeply curious about altered states of consciousness.

Neither of these aspects of my personality and/or temperament made sense to my parents, sister, or extended family members. They were simply not the type to celebrate a maverick’s spirit or appreciate the idiosyncratic attributes of a neurodivergent whiz kid. It was presented to me as a positive that I was smart because it would one day help me get a high-paying job, but when it came to my personal identity, they were just straight up not on board with any of it. In fact, whenever I tried to get permission to express myself, they usually had a counter-ask that was borderline offensive. At the very least it communicated a total miscomprehension of my convictions. I wanted to dye my hair, paint my nails, and skateboard; they wanted me to play organized sports and do whatever it took to fit in. They wanted me to go to college, and I wanted to play guitar. I wanted to make art, and they wanted me to be a doctor. Or a lawyer. Something prominent. They wanted me to “just say no” and I wanted to take a bunch of Coricidin Cold & Cough pills and robotrip my little balls off.

My father covered my contemporary conditioning by encouraging me to invest long-term effort toward a career that would make me financially prosperous. Nothing ostensibly wrong with that sentiment. Every caring parent in a capitalist society wants their child to be occupationally successful and scholarly in their knowledge of how to generate income—passive or otherwise. Striving to be better than the other guy is the driving force of effort in a society obsessed with competition. Winning is the only way to achieve a life worth living. Typical consumer market enjoyer talk. Simpleminded stock market-obsessed sycophant of the SMP500 convictions. My mother, on the other hand, was largely unconcerned with the golden calf trappings of the “greed is good” decade I was born in. She covered my Catholic conditioning by insisting that a lack of faith in God was the primary cause of my emotional problems. I can’t say she didn’t bow down to the monolith of modern medicine, however, because before Kindergarten I had an ADHD diagnosis and a Ritalin prescription. They weren’t unsupportive towards my creative pursuits either; they indulged me by buying stuff like computers, guitars, and painting classes with local artists. They did their best. They threw what money at it they could, but they were the average modern middle-class couple of their era in that they had been suckered into normalizing needing two incomes to support a household with several children. Plus, my dad wasn’t just doing what he had to do—he was a workaholic. That only leaves you with the ability to be so present. They also couldn’t help that they saw my dreams more as hobbies and felt as though they were just being honest about my chances of hitting it big. They didn’t want me to be disappointed. To their credit, they weren’t wrong. “Ok, but how are you gonna make money?” was something I’d always heard a lot from them. What they failed to understand is that my likelihood of material success was irrelevant.

I remember a story Dave Chapelle once told to James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio about having an early conversation with his father concerning his desire to make a career out of stand-up comedy. His father warned him about the dangers of Hollywood, and that he might not make it. Dave replied with something to the effect of, “Well, that depends on how you measure success. You make X amount of dollars a year as a teacher, and if I could make the same amount doing comedy then I feel like I’ve won.” To his dad’s credit he clapped back with, “If you keep that attitude, you’ll probably be alright.” Dave went on to explain how his dad told him to name his price in the beginning—before all the madness. “Then,” he said, “if the cost ever becomes more than that price, you get the hell out—no questions asked.” It was then that Dave turned to James and charismatically murmured, “Thus, Africa.” This wasn’t shot all that long after the Comedy Central incident. After my extensive experience as a young adult atrophying in the ether of my unrealized dreams and doing hard drugs to quieten my desire to live my truth as an artist, I can confidently say that to encourage anyone to do anything but follow their heart is a profound unkindness. The idea that you can happily ignore your heart in service of being practical is a fiction. Speaking from experience, if you attempt to follow the maxims of pragmaticism as a person born to be creative, you’ll certainly be ushered into an indefinite winter of discontent—even if you’re bad at it. The strength of the snowstorm may vary from person to person, but it's always at least vaguely unfulfilling. One may just sometimes fantasize about taking a pottery class on the weekends and never do it. On the other end of the spectrum, the storm could be deadly serious. A fatal slurp from the old Doomsday Daiquiri—to borrow an evocative term uttered in a monologue by a character named Maestra created by the maverick-championing author Tom Robbins—that delivers a brain freeze one never recovers from may occur if the only way one knows how to cope with their disillusionment is through drug addiction. Again, I speak from experience.

Throughout my weathered memories of my 20s are yellowed stacks of various instances of that one dejected moment I lived over and over again. A plethora of wasted opportunities to be creative are piled up like the dust-covered boxes of a forgotten record collection in an old mothball-scented attic. Perhaps you’re familiar with this moment. It’s when you finally have a day off from your soul-crushing service industry job and you want to create something, but you don’t have anything to say or more importantly any motivation to say it. Then you tell yourself you'll start tomorrow and take a little (a lot) of your OxyContin stash to numb the pain, and it’s lights out for the creative agenda. Sorry for sounding so bleak, but I’m just being honest. If you want to blame anyone for how disheartening this seems, blame Purdue Pharma. I often nodded off wondering what might have happened if I'd gone to art school when I was young like Dave did. Instead of what I might have become I was a strung-out New Orleans bartender who was kind of funny, but kind of a dick.

The idea that I might one day make a living through something creative was too pie-in-the-sky for my parents. They were careercore and 9-to-5-pilled. I’m being sarcastic with my word choice, but they actually were a bit brainwashed. Their unspoken ethos toward my education and eventual introduction into the workforce went like this: any of my intellect or aptitude in information retention that wasn’t applied toward science or math and the eventual goal of a prestigious career was as good as fucked off. When I was young, I wasn’t so concerned with what I’d do when I grew up versus the perceived impact it would have on others. I wanted a job that I could help people with or at least a job that didn’t require me to fuck over my fellow man just to make a profit. Ironically, I think I got my empathetic inclinations from my mother. She was an underpaid Kindergarten teacher for like 30 years or something. I’ve always been able to tell how much she cared about doing her job well and the welfare of the kids, and I respect that immensely. There’s incredible honor in educating children from the heart, which she certainly did. Of that, I am positive. That’s why the cognitive dissonance of it being something of a pointless chore to attempt to come to some sort of understanding with her concerning my socialism-informed moral compass is strong as shit.

The cognitive dissonance involved in any political or theological discourse with a couple of Southern Republicans is always pretty intense. To be fair, my dad made way more political sense. Starting with a leadership position at McDonald’s while still in college, He’d always been in business management. You expect a feller like that to see the poor as either a customer base or labor force to exploit to expand the profit margins of his employers. When I was a kid, though, all I remember being cognizant of is that my dad was gone a lot. I got the impression he was an important working man who was to be left to his duties indefinitely. That and he tended to be in a shitty mood when he was home. If he was obviously agitated, he was best to be avoided. Any time I tried to rebel against his will, he’d just apply the pressure to do what he wanted by being verbally or physically threatening until it wore down my wherewithal and I did it whether I wanted to or not. What’s more, our respective standards for what constituted worthwhile knowledge in this world were diametrical, which meant our thoughts regarding how I ought to spend the upcoming weekend couldn’t have been more antithetical.

One of the so-called benefits of this honors program I was a part of was being granted permission to take the ACT 3 years before the actual test. You’d be allowed to take it again when you were 17, and keep whichever score was higher on your permanent record. Generally speaking, scholastic endeavors were mostly a snooze-fest for someone like me who was smart but stricken with a severe case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. School hadn’t required much effort from me, and I never studied. It’s hard to imagine that being an intellectually stimulating situation for anyone. What drove me to excel is what would drive most people: the fear of punishment. In terms of what I was truly interested in, I’d say the list is probably similar to any other kid back then. I liked playing outside, exploring the woods, building tree forts, and doing backflips on trampolines, plus I had a strong penchant for Japanese roleplaying games on the Super Nintendo that was born of a love of music and stories. That and a recognition that I was being told these stories in a way that had never existed before. Throughout elementary school, companies like Square Enix—erstwhile known as SquareSoft—were pumping out blockbuster content that history would prove to be evergreen. Titles like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger captivated my imagination and made the pain of being unpopular in elementary school a little bit easier to swallow for me. A great story can be an incredible salve to the sting of childhood rejection, and as a kid that was the most relevant reason for me to engage with anything.

At the dawn of my puberty, I started to feel unwaveringly drawn to diving headfirst into examining the nature of reality through my direct experience. I wasn’t gonna be just another Christian sheep or some clueless mark in the consumer market. After all, I smoked weed and listened to Nirvana. That ignorance might masquerade as haughtiness if you’d forgotten to consider that most 12 to 14-year-olds are far from aware of the awfully staggering number of things they will never comprehend. For good reason, probably. Sounds like a huge bummer of a piece of information to receive before your balls fully drop from where I stand. Out of all the things I might come to know with the proper application, I was not super interested in seeing how I fared against precalculus equations when I hadn’t even finished geometry class yet. Getting fucked up, however, was something I was supremely interested in. How does acid fit in with taking the ACT? Why the urgency to take the LSD? Why not wait until another weekend when I wasn’t taking an extracurricular test? It was partially because I was extremely curious to try it, but also because acid was hard to come by back then. It was hard to get any tabs worth a shit for kids that were a more correct age for buying drugs, so chances were beyond slim for me—a know-nothing little jit giving Stevie from mid90s energy. At this time period, I absolutely was that kid 100 percent. The only difference is I didn’t have an older sibling to model any of my personality after—or attempt to buy acid off of, as the case may be. This all meant that if I ran across a hit, I'd better jump on the opportunity to drop it because no one knew when it would come around again.

Lo and behold, that Friday night before the ACT I got a call from a guy I’ll generously refer to as my friend and he said he’d scored a tab of acid from his older brother, Lance. Here are a couple of odd pieces of information regarding the older brother's name that tangentially bears mentioning: First off, I can’t recall having met a Lance before or since. It seems common enough, so where are all the fucking Lances? The other weird thing about it was his dad was some sort of truck driver and vending machine attendant that delivered and restocked snacks and potato chips, and some of those snacks he delivered were literally Lance brand. I particularly remember their little rectangular packages of orange peanut butter cracker sandwiches, because they belonged in a fucking garbage can. They were so dry it was like eating sand. I honestly pray the name thing was a coincidence. For Lance’s sake, not mine, goddamnit! My tone came off as sardonic, but the sympathy is authentic. Imagine being named after a company that makes fucking crackers, man! Then imagine carrying around a shameful secret that bloody preposterous. Named after a cracker you’d only eat when you were waiting to be picked up from school and had no other options. I’m just trying to put myself in Lance’s Doc Martens. Honestly, go ahead and name your kid after a potato chip company for all I give a shit. Name them after Starbucks if that’s what you really want! Like Bobby Brown said, “That’s your prerogative.” Why not? What difference does it make to me? I’m not the one who has to answer to the damn thing. Just remembered he was actually his stepfather, so forget everything I just said.

Anyway, Lance’s shithead little brother Adam had decided we were either going to split the tab of acid that very night or he was going to take the whole thing himself. Classic Adam. That’s why I couldn’t just buy a tab and hold on to it. He was the type of dickhead to apply peer pressure in a situation that didn’t really call for it. Adam was a scrawny ginger kid often rocking oversized black band tees with fishnet stockings on his arms and Jnco jeans draped over his Doc Martens or Airwalks. He liked to wear eyeliner and carry around novelty lunch boxes. He had orange hair that was parted down the middle and kept a length that was long enough to reach down to his weak chin when he tilted his head down diagonally. It had no volume so the thin strands just kind of laid down flat against his scalp like a narrow layer of topsoil in the Amazon rainforest. He’d have fit in fine with current-day Gen Z, honestly. His complexion was freckled, and the kind of pale that would never be capable of responding to the sun's UV radiation by producing a single melanin molecule. Don't give him your sympathy prior to investigation, now. This 100-watt fluorescent lightbulb of a kid did a lot of borderline sociopathic shit. He knowingly went after the first girl I'd ever kissed and dated my first girlfriend immediately after I did. I mean, it was a small town. I get it. The dating pool is only so large, and young love is fickle. Regardless, he always gave me the uneasy impression he enjoyed it when he treated me horrendously. He was also often engaging in even more disturbing behavior that crossed the line from your average tween betrayals into serial killer territory. He’d randomly do things like scratch the arms of his so-called friends with his spellcasting knife or burn us with cigarettes. It's rather telling that by the time I was 14, this felt less insensitive to me than my typical classmate was. He also harassed his cat in a way that was too uncomfortably close to animal torture to just brush off. He'd do things like hold it down for way too long while it hissed like crazy and scrambled in vain to get away and whatnot. Shit made me extremely uncomfortable. By the by, Adam—the 14-year-old goth kid with a sadistic streak who scratched people with his coke nail for shits and giggles, did black magic, and smoked crack while playing Super Smash Bros with his 35-year-old neighbor on more than one occasion—did in fact go on to become a doctor. His grades were also dogshit. All this potentially spells portentous things for the patients currently being treated in his office. Or it may just mean he didn't buckle down until he got to college. Anyway, I already wanted to trip; I didn’t need to be convinced of that by this ginger little shit. I simply also wanted to not get in trouble for skipping out on something that my parents thought was really important. In an ideal world, these two events wouldn’t have overlapped with one another. Alas, their timelines were indeed intertwined and the opportunity to alter my consciousness was much more imperative to me than testing the grade level of my reading comprehension and the extent of my mathematical knowledge.

It was with that slightly iconoclastic hierarchy of priorities in mind that I said yes to Adam's ultimatum—I mean generous offer—and double-booked my Saturday morning with a college entrance exam and an acid comedown. Don’t shake your head at me, I saw that! I’ve never been great at admitting to myself that I can’t have both of the conflicting things I want. I’m an American for fuck’s sake, it’s who I am. It’s who we all are. I’ll have the eggs benedict and fried chicken and waffles. Plus, I was an ADHD kid all of 14 years old, so my impulse control was dogshit. Look, in terms of self-soothing with the pleasure of a dopamine hit: I’m working on it; that’s all I can promise. I’m writing this on Thanksgiving Day and I've yet to fill my second plate, so I assume it goes without saying that I’ll start trying again in earnest tomorrow.

I mentioned being unorthodox, but how I divvied up the significance of my ambitions would only be considered unconventional for the bumfuck part of Mississippi I'm from. Before I even made it out of elementary school I was being socially crucified by my entire Christian community for interests like punk rock, atheism, and Satanism. All of which were comparatively par for the course for the bohemian families raising their children in places like New York City or Northern California. From what I’ve gathered, most folks who didn’t grow up in the Bible Belt regard interest in those ideologies not as some sort of genuine cause for alarm, but as a silly intellectual frivolity of certain ornery teenage boys that’s somewhat annoying. Holden Caulfield, much? Atheism and Satanism were a rite of passage into more mature forms of disturbing philosophical thought, like existentialism with religious training wheels, or nihilism with less oomph. It’s something worth ignoring, like when a teenager invests their entire persona in the first appealing subculture they come across. If I had been raised by the crunchy granola weed farmers of the west coast, they probably wouldn’t have given half a shit about my rebellion and might have even handed me a book or two on philosophy. Folks who grew up around those parts have different childhood horrors than overly religious communities ostracizing them and stifling their intellectual curiosities.

Any overview of the priorities that were getting my pubescent self out of bed in the morning certainly did not include going to college, being in the gifted program, or taking my college entrance exams early. Weed, video games, and masturbation were my top 3 if my memory serves me. I was an aspiring psychonaut inspired by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and a frequent reader of Erowid.org trip reports and drug synopses. Before I even put the phone down, I was so ecstatic at the prospect of dropping acid with Adam that I’d almost forgotten about the test completely. That my first trip would be with one of the worst human beings I'd met up to that point was window dressing. My heart leapt wildly at the prospect of hallucinating. Meanwhile, appeasing my parents was my only reason for taking the ACT. I think some part of me that had yet to be proven wrong unconsciously thought that if I could make unimpeachable grades that it would please them enough to take some of the social heat off of me. Being treated like a pariah in your hometown is one thing, but to also be reprimanded for it at home is another entirely. According to almost everyone around me, nothing about me was acceptable. At least not outwardly. My hair and clothes were too weird, my ideas too blasphemous, and my music too loud and disturbing. One thing you could say for Adam is that he never gave me any shit for being weird. Lamenting my persecution could wait, though, because my primary concern after I put that phone down on the hook was convincing my dad to let me stay at Adam’s house the night before the test. No point in hesitation, so I just went for and asked him. "Dad," I muttered my plea, "Adam just asked if I could stay the night. Can I go? Mom can take me to the test in the morning." My dad clapped back with, “That don’t even make sense, boy. The test is tomorrow, why don’t you just stay the night after the damn thing?” This is where a salesman would tell you to create urgency. “Because Adam and his family are going out of town Saturday morning! This is the only night we can hang out this weekend!” I retorted with a bald-faced lie in the breaking, bellyaching voice of a hormone-addled adolescent that wants permission to do something. This back-and-forth went on for a while, then my mom got involved and it became even more torturous. Finally, after an eternity of no’s and but’s, they gave in to my wishes reluctantly. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure whether they let me go over there that night because they accepted that their child had a hard time making friends and figured they better allow me to socialize when the rare opportunity presented itself or because they just got fed up with the argument. At the time, I probably thought I was just being very persuasive—which is goddamn hilarious, honestly.