LSD - A Chilling Echo

LSD-  A Chilling Echo
John and I were best friends. We did everything together. I remember going to nightclubs trying to pick up chics and sitting in his escort drinking, talking about how we were going to be musicians and take the world by storm. He used to inspire me and together we created a friendship that nothing could penetrate. We first met in primary school but never really clicked until we got to high school and both found a passion for guitar. His girlfriend used to say I was a bad influence and she was probably right, but we didn’t care, we had our own world and that’s all that mattered.
          One time we took our guitars out to Keri Keri and we met Tim Finn on the beach. He seemed old and obviously didn’t want to be recognised. These were the kind of experiences that tied John and I together. So when he told me about LSD and how it ‘explored unexplored regions of your mind’ and that their were psychic truths for those game enough to ingest it, I was up for a go. Why not? I could handle it and the adventurer/astronaut in me said give it a whirl.
For many months we didn’t talk about the subject until one night, at a mutual friends 21st in a city nightclub John was a getting a drink at the bar when I noticed him talking away to a guy. Afterwards he sat down and said ‘Y’know that guy I was talking to, he’s tripping on acid; and guess what he gave me one for free.’ I felt nervous chills up and down my spine. ‘Yer up for it?’ he said. ‘You bet,’ I said cautiously. ‘Follow me.’
We went into the toilets, into a cubicle and John pulled out the tab and a knife he had attached to his car keys saying ‘I always knew this would come in handy.’ I looked closely at it. It looked like a piece of cardboard. There were no markings, only covered by a transparent film. What lay in store I thought, this inconspicuous medicine; I was still nervous in anticipation. John cut it in half and handed me my portion before advising: ‘Chew it slowly for a while before swallowing it.’ ‘Thumbs up.’ I ingested the LSD tab wondering if I had made the right choice. Immediately I wanted to get out of the toilets for fear of getting caught with a class-A drug.
We went and sat down at the table waiting for something to happen. Rachael, the birthday girl, came and asked us if we were alright and said she and some others were going to an Irish bar upstairs and wondered if we wanted to come. We obliged and entered the upbeat atmosphere of ‘Murphy’s’ – guiness on tap, guaranteed to ‘get you pissed cheaply and effectively.’ We stood round basking in the energy and while I was talking to John I began getting inspired like I never had before. My mind was clear and I voiced deep philosophical trains of thought that came out of me, wave after wave. Suddenly I realised that I had lived in an illusion all my life, that drugs were ‘bad’; this was so amazing. I said with surprise to John ‘How could this be illegal?’ He smiled saying. ‘This will be good for your philosophy.’ (I was studying it at university at the time.) We took in the music singing a version of ‘Patti works on the railway’ in muddled Irish accents and it was then that we saw some old friends from high school, including one old flame of Johns. We stood in a circle and I began to see beautiful colours in the air, everywhere, and we communicated with our bodies in a circular motion rhythmically, one after the other. The birthday girl then began dancing vivaciously taking one guy after another casting each away then choosing another. It came my turn and I took control having more energy an excitement than I had ever dreamed possible. John was to say later that I may have let on I was on something. My actions were rigid and exaggerated, but I had a lot of fun.
When it came time to go home we drove to John’s house and went to his bedroom which was separate from the main house. It suited John fine, giving him a quiet place to compose his music. We talked for hours, I don’t remember the details, but at one point it began to turn nasty. I recall John pointing at a stain on the wooden floor and saying it was blood, obviously to scare me. I called his bluff and pretended to be catatonic making him freak justifiably. It became six o’clock in the morning and John announced that he wanted to go to bed. His olds would be up soon. He said this with a look of concern as though he was hurting me somehow by asking me to leave. I didn’t want to go. ‘Can’t I just stay the night, John?’ ‘What would my parents think?’ he replied. ‘But can’t we go somewhere and sleep in your car?’ I pleaded becoming increasingly anxious. He regretfully refused saying, ‘You’ll be alright.’ I left his room and walked cautiously down an alleyway leading to a street that I lived not too far from. As I walked I had insights which I later wrote down. When I got to my door I hoped like hell the door was unlocked as I didn’t have my key and lord knows I didn’t want mum and dad knowing I was on acid. Thank God it was unlocked. I went into my bedroom and wrote on a piece of paper in colored pencil the following, which I still have eleven years later:
Where do I begin?
I walked the dark desolate plains
Of this hypereality trying to come to grips,
To take hold of, what I was attempting to conceive
And then it dawned on me that this dark surrounding(?)
Was the existentialist’s nightmare
A reality the essence of what it means to be
Left isolated from the outside world,
Sartre in his unfaltering manner
Professed belief in an(?)
Semi-absolute idea of freedom
Sartre fucking Sartre! Here is your freedom –
The dark desolate stony (* infinitum adjectives) of
(Marina View>into Luckens(the street between our houses))
The deep pit where the wind howls and the earth lay still
Refusing to breathe, where the soft shimmer of a whispering
Thought glistening off…into the sunset
The continuous looking behind one
Sickening effect of being afraid of ones shadow
Not to mention the lingering thought of
Am I ever going to get out of this moment alive?
But a hope away leaming, looming
Towards me ooh baby!
The freedom to be how you are
When you are is some may say (Satre)
In this scheme of things
Is how it will be for the existentialist 


Looking back I quite like the freedom of expression in these words.
Afterwards I thought I’d better get some sleep. I lay down and tried to rest but my brain was racing and it was then that I became really paranoid. I kept hearing a creaking upstairs and no matter how I tried my body wouldn’t rest. Time went by and I had the thought: when am I going to come down? I was under the assumption that it would last for about eight hours, but what if I never come down was trapped in this paranoid world forever? I began panicking; I needed to speak to John. Come eight o’clock and there were stirrings in the house. My Aunty and uncle were staying in the next room and that’s where the telephone was. Lord knows I didn’t want them knowing. I stayed in my room until I couldn’t handle it anymore. I went upstairs and noticed my sister was on the upstairs phone in mum and dads bedroom. ‘Rita’ I interrupted her conversation pleading with her, ‘Rita, you’ve got to ring John, I’m still tripping from last night, I won’t come down.’ She freaked and rang John right away. John got me on the phone and said ‘How are you?’ ‘Not too good, get over here right away.’
He drove right over. I jumped in the car and we headed to the local marina. Boy I was glad to see him, although not enough to quelch the anxiety I was experiencing. We parked up and John asked me what was wrong. ‘John this is horrible, I can’t handle this,’ I said before breaking down into tears ‘GET ME OUT OF THIS WORLD.’ John was affected and did his best to calm me down. It was then that I had a vision out at the periphery of my thoughts that all the trippers around the world were involved in a war to spread LSD to as many as they could get and for me at the time this was an insane nightmare.
John suggested we get out of the car. So we went to the Marina shops and he shouted me a pie which we ate in silence. We then played some video games which had a calming affect. John then took me home. We went straight into my bedroom and my little nephew Cody, barely 1 year old came crawling into my room. He made soft noises and quietly observed us and what we were doing. ‘He knows.’ John said and I agreed with him. Somehow children are a lot more intuitive than adults. John did his best to calm me down but then left vowing to ring me. 
I spent the day with Rita, having to baby-sit me. We got out a video which happened to be an action thriller about how there were two realities, one on top of the other and one man was stuck in one having travelled from the past. So this did no good for my condition. Later mum and dad got us fish and chips. I couldn’t eat feeling queasy. I noticed for the first time a different perception in my relationship with my parents and in fact that they somehow didn’t like me. Maybe that had been true for a while and I was just becoming aware of it. I didn’t want to come to any conclusions at that time preferring to ride the trip out. Come late in the evening and I finally got to sleep.
The next day I woke feeling a lot better. I took it easy and stayed home from university. John rang during the day and was pleased that I was in a better state. For a few days I was feeling fine but by about the third night after the trip I had trouble sleeping, there was this overwhelming fear of being affected for life. I thought I might end up in a mental institution. The insomnia continued until I decided to see the university doctor to try and get some sleeping pills. She was sympathetic and suggested  counselling as well as the pills. My sleeping became better after that, BUT What really helped was putting my thoughts to music. I wrote a song about the experience, the lyrics of which go:

You said you wanted to explore unexplored regions of your mind
The pain in my heart rivals the pain in your eyes
And now you’re captive in a world of tortured thought
A life suspended I never meant it to be

CHORUS: Look at yourself, can you see who you are?
Tortured and torn, lost the soul, life has past
Look at myself, can I see who I am?
Tortured and torn lost the will, beaten man

Gave him a taste to cure the haste of a wondering boy
And what he found was too profound for any joy
I now know what I didn’t know then our reactions aren’t the same
A friendship been and gone
Who is to blame?
                  CHORUS:
Please tell me the answer, I pray to the God on high
Y’know, depends on the answer if I live or wanna die (repeat*)

Locked up to die 3 deaths to survive at another time
Left me to fight my sleepless nights for your crime
And now we’re captive in a world of tortured thought
Our lives suspended we never meant it to be
                  CHORUS:

I let John read the lyrics and he was concerned thinking I blamed him for what went wrong and I still believe he shouldn’t have left me alone knowing the effect it could have. When we went out with mates who had all tried acid and preached the goodness of it, I rebuked them saying acids not a good thing. John was still concerned. It came to a head weeks later when I picked him up for an indoor cricket match that I was supposed to organise. I was stressed out and John said ‘What’s going through your mind.’ The cricket manager then came out and yelled at me for being late. I had to go in and tell him that we didn’t have a team. Luckily there was no confrontation and I went home and had dinner with my family. They noticed something was up and asked if I was alright. I told them about the cricket meet and they did their best to soothe me.
Eventually life got better but one day John dropped a bombshell. He had been offered a job in the States and he had decided to take it. Before he was to leave we went out for drinks and all went well until I felt this intense wave of emotion come over me and I began crying. I guess it was because he was leaving. A week later he left the country.
We kept in touch for a while and one day ten years later he rings me up out of the blue saying he was back in New Zealand and couldn’t wait to see me. He came over and we went out for drinks like old times and talked and talked til the wee hours of the morning. It came out that he left New Zealand because he couldn’t deal with my reaction to the acid experience and what we went through. I never thought that it had affected him that much. We still have our issues and the last I heard of him he was living in Australia. I miss him. Since taking that first trip I’ve had about thirty tabs over the years and have had nothing but positive reactions with powerful insights and deep awareness. I look back at those days and agree with Aldous Huxley’s assessment of mescaline(Substance similar to LSD in it’s hallucinogenic effects): ‘…the man who comes back through the door in the wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.’*
As per the song I did end up in a mental institution for four years, though it was unrelated, in my view, to the trip. It was prophetic then; and in writing this I have, in a way, re-experienced that night and the weeks that followed, it astounds me to even feel the same body sensations, the gripping stomach and fearful thoughts. It does justice to the belief that art is therapy and going back in time can only be the answer. As for John and me? After it’s all said and done he’s still one of the best friends I ever had.