My parents dropped me off at Tommy's apartment. I had been here before, but this morning I was particularly nervous, answering my mother's questions statically and probably unconvincingly. "Yeah, we're going down to the parade. I might be home late." If she couldn't hear me lying, I sure as hell could. She drove off and I went upstairs. Tommy greeted me at the door, spastic and hyper, as though it was going to be a new experience for him too. His girlfriend Laura was behind him getting ready to go out. "So this is your first time?" she asked. "Nervous?" I felt I didn't know her as well as Tommy, although she was always present whenever he was. I also felt slightly embarrassed and unable to tell this near-stranger that I had yet to even be drunk, not to mention that I had no experience with anything more extreme. She was tall and slender with sandy naturally curly hair, yet she looked small next to Tommy, who looked to be about 6'4" and over 200 pounds. We went to Denny's for food before we started. Tommy was still hyper-chipper. "Better get something filling. You won't feel like eating later." I felt like I was preparing for a track meet. I ordered up spaghetti with meatballs, remembering about the nutrition lessons in health class. I needed lots of carbohydrates. Spaghetti: great idea. Had I not thrown myself into a drug induced gastro-disaster, the greasy Dennys spaghetti probably would have yielded similar results on its own.

We went back to Tommy's. He and Laura were cutting up the hits as though they were coupons. Tommy looked at me with an almost apologetic expression. "They're really not very strong. Laura and I are taking 7 each. You better take 4 if you wanna feel anything." I felt little reassurance in this. About 30 minutes later Tommy and Laura were smiling back and forth at each other then smiling at me as though they were waiting for their dinner guest to compliment the cooking. I felt nothing aside from a little nervousness, which was starting to fade, due to a suspicion that the acid really wasn't strong enough to work, even though Tommy and Laura seemed to be enjoying themselves. In a few moments this doubt would be shattered. It didn't creep up on me at all. At once I felt as though I had been suspended over a huge pool of "whatever was supposed to be happening" and was plunged headfirst into it. This was a factor I was totally unprepared for and it made me panic a bit. Friends before me who had taken LSD had described it as no big deal. "You don't really see shit." I kept hearing it echoing from most everyone I knew who had tried it and didn't consider that they probably didn't take much. My mental response to them: "PFFFT!! You don't really see shit? FUCK YOU!"

   My world had been taken away from me. There was little if anything I could relate to as "real." I figured I would see some funny stuff, maybe have a laugh, or maybe feel a little disoriented. What I experienced was a complete lack of feeling anything that I had ever felt before. I had no point of reference. I always thought of myself as an intelligent person, in control of his own thoughts and emotions. I found out how mistaken I was. With nothing at all I could relate to, I was alone. I felt as though I had put myself into a world that I didn't know how to escape. Worse yet, I was in a world of real people and situations that I would have to interact with , despite my inability to reason as a sane human being. I had rendered myself retarded. My mind was destroyed. The rest of my life would  be spent, not in creative endeavors, but in simple day to day tasks such as brushing my teeth and making it to the toilet in time. Eventually I would have to deal with my parents, who would either  institutionalize me or would have to live out the rest of their lives giving me sponge baths and feeding me strained carrots. I felt horribly ashamed of the grief I would bring them.

 I looked up and realized that Tommy and Laura had noticed my silence. "Are you ok ?" I tried to suck it up and be stronger than the drugs in my tormented mind. "Yeah. I'm ok." I had to relearn how to speak in this new life, and the words came out somehow staccato and slurred at the same time. Tommy smiled at my effort. "Hey man, don't worry - it's just a mind fuck." His awareness that I was  worried made me extremely uncomfortable. I felt like a little kid with a huge skinned knee, with mother brushing off the dirt, "ohhhh it's not that bad," and it always WAS that bad. I started to feel  motion sickness and Tommy noticed that too. "Hey - if your stomach starts feeling bad, don't worry. It's just your mind doing that. It's like the drug is a poison and your body is trying to reject it. "Poison. This hit home. In my new body, I relearned how to stand, and made my way to the bathroom. The hallway swelled and pulsated like the esophagus of some huge organism. The bathroom was painfully bright. Then the "poison" exploded from my mouth and the sound reverberated around my head as though I had screamed inside a huge tiled temple. I felt huge bulges in my throat as  though the flesh of my insides had been raked out. I opened my eyes and looked down. Before me, in this sterile looking bowl of water was an oblong piece of white, bleeding meat. I gasped. It was a chunk of my stomach. I gripped my abdomen with a shaky hand. For the first time in what seemed like hours I felt as though I had returned to the real world. My mind was clear and I was looking at  a thumb sized piece of my body, bleeding bright red into the clear water. From behind me I heard a soft voice. "Mike?.........Are you alright?......" I opened my eyes, and facing me was Laura. Her face  was kind and beautiful. The blinding light of the bathroom made her look almost angelic. I felt something soft and cool against my chin. She was cleaning my face with a wash rag. "Are you ok? Tommy and I are worried about you." I finally felt some relief, almost forgetting that I must be seriously bleeding internally. Then the comfort was gone. "Do you need to go to the hospital?" Oh God.  She had seen it too. She had noticed what I had done. I said, "I'm so sorry to ask you, but could you tell me what's in the toilet?" She turned on her knee and tilted her head so she could see around the cabinet. "Yeah, Mike. That's spaghetti."

   I felt much better, having rid myself of “the poison" and Laura brought me out to the living room, where Tommy was messing with his records. I wanted to put on my Orb cd , which I had brought along for the pure trippiness of it, but they had no cd player. Upon hearing what I was itching to play his eyes got big and he went rifling through his records. He pulled out a beautifully decorated sleeve, covered in computer generated landscapes and organic looking abstract eye candy. He put the needle on the record and within minutes I was in love. My body and mind healed from the  "near death" experience, which seemed like hours ago, although in truth it had been about 15 minutes. Amorphous Androgynous. This was a group which I would someday find myself searching to  find everything that they could have possibly been involved with. The Future Sound of London. A groaning that seemed to match my own heartbeat and breathing was soon cradled into a twinkling acoustic guitar loop. This was quite possibly the closest thing I had ever had to a "religious experience" as the entire room seemed to pulse and move in time with the music.

   Tommy put on a record of a house song with a sample of Chuck D saying "power of the people to the beat!" The sample was sped up and sounded cartoonish. "Power of the people to the beat!"  This sample kept replaying and replaying in my mind. At this point I was starting to lose my grip on reality again. All I was hearing was "MMMPETE!" It was funny, and I was laughing but it was becoming more insistent. "MMMPETE!!" Somehow this yelling subconsciously implanted a meaning in my brain. I felt as though I was 13 again, trying to control the random erections that plagued my hormonally spastic body. Similarly I had no idea how this new chemical balance would affect me physically. Truthfully, my body felt as though it had been shot up with Novocain and the possibility of being aroused was remote, but the song kept yelling at me. "MMMPETE!!" which in my mind meant "WATCH IT! There are people around!" Tommy started playing something else, much to my relief, but the "mmmpete" stuck with me late into the evening.

 I watched as Laura's goldfish swam around its bowl. It seemed almost fake and robotic, but I watched it for a long time as it's lidless eyes seemed to stare through my head. They thought I had gotten upset again and Laura came looking for me. "Hey! C'mon in here!" So I followed her into the living room, where Tommy was sprawled out on the floor watching Fantasia upside down. I sat down on the couch next to Laura and they were both enthralled. I, however, had seen it enough times to be bored with it even in this state where nothing seemed boring. I put on my headphones and listened  to "Blue Room" by The Orb, sitting at an angle on the couch so I was half laying down with my legs going under Laura's calves. As I listened to what seemed to be physical things coming out of the  headphones, touching my ears, it seemed that my legs melted into hers, or perhaps went through them. I jumped up to inspect - to make sure this perceived blending hadn't taken place and I frightened Laura, who at this point had taken on the role of baby-sitter, despite me growing accustomed to this new state of mind.

  We went outside. It was hot as hell and very different than the last time I had been outside. This place was full of flexing street lights and puddles that reflect the sky so they look like a glowing hole  in the earth or look several feet deep, though they are only a few centimeters. Tommy reminded me, as a car whizzed by, "It's still real - and cars WILL kill you." We walked in the park near his house as the sun went down. I chased fireflies under the fractal tree, running though the geometric grass. Shapes seemed to rise and fall in the grass and I felt as though I was standing in an ocean of liquid shapes. At this point, The Orb cd was having its full effect. Tommy was usually good at breaking up these blissful moments. "Hey Mike! Let's go downtown. I think Laura is sober enough to drive." Tommy always had a way of making his reassurances sound more like threats.

   We were headed down Tates Creek road with Laura at the helm. I started being amused by the headlights and Tommy reminded me not to draw Laura's attention to them if I wanted us to get to  Jace's apartment safely. We parked in this pay lot on the opposite corner from BW3's and didn't pay. BW3's is this place that serves chicken wings and beer in a laundromat. I wasn't hallucinating that. That's just what it happened to be. Jace was the manager and lived in an apartment on the second floor of the building. On the way across the street I saw my friend Charles in a car. He saw me and I ran to the car to tell him about my experience. I remembered what Tommy had said about the real world "rock / scissors / paper" effect of cars when they meet with soft, fleshy objects like pedestrians. The light turned green and Charles was off, having heard little more than I was tripping. We got to Jace's and he was spinning records. He had a neon beer light in front of his dj setup so it gave the entire setup including him a nice red, white, and blue halo. Ahh, July fourth. Tommy and Laura wanted to go to this laser light show at The Kentucky Theatre. I was getting tired. I felt as though I had walked miles even though I had probably only walked the equivalent of around a city block. We went down to the theatre and there was a long line out front. A police officer was acting as security. He stopped about two feet from me and looked down the street. This had a notable effect on my heart rate, and I started wondering how big my pupils were. We finally got inside where there wasn't a laser show, but instead was a Grateful Dead cover band and a standard issue gel light setup like you'd see at any concert. In an attempt to make the situation tolerable, the headphones went back on. At this point I noticed that my molars felt as though they were several inches around. I imagined I looked like a "cut-away view" anatomical diagram, as there could be no possible way these huge teeth could possibly be hidden inside my cheeks. Then the unthinkable happened. The portable cd player which had sustained me all this time had run out of power. It was like watching an old friend choke out his last breath. I was forced to listen to The Grateful Dead, which is not how anyone should spend a psychedelic experience.

  We went back to Tommy's. He and Laura were sober and tired. I, however was tripping even still. What I thought would stay with me for five or six hours had, at this point, lasted for about fourteen with no end in sight. This was doubly bad since I had to work at 7:30 am the next morning, ironically catering an AA breakfast. Tommy and Laura went to bed and I stayed up, wrapped in a blanket, enjoying the visual splendor inside my head to the sound of Amorphous Androgynous on headphones. I had brought about a dozen cds, but had only listened to U F Orb before the cd player died. About 5:30 Laura came out and we talked until it was time for her to take me to work. I know we talked about how tripping could be a good or bad experience, and that for the most part it was a good one. Most of what I remember about the conversation was watching her talk to me; her face moving fluidly like a frame by frame blended slide show rather than animation making seamless movement.

  It was 7:00. Time to go to work. I was still feeling the drug, and was even still seeing flickering in patterns on the carpet, but I had to go to work, especially knowing that I was working with a server named Lora who was perpetually late and even more perpetually drunk. On the way to work there was a duck in the road. Laura saw it too, so I felt better. Upon arriving at work, I quickly clocked in and tried to get organized. I stood in the staff area with a packet of coffee in one hand and the funnel in the other. What was I missing? Coffee. ........Funnel...........hmmmm.. I looked at the clock. 7:25am......Funnel....Coffee..........WAIT! I turned the machine on and felt triumphant. OK.. let's see ......Coffee...Funnel......"MMMPETE!".....Coffee...hmm.. no..the machine is on. I looked at the clock again. 7:27am. The coffee had to be out by 9am. I had better HURRY. I probably could have remembered the filter had the floor not been so intricately tiled.  Lora showed up late, as anticipated. The breakfast went as planned.

The cd player never worked again. When asked how well I worked that morning, Lora replied, "Man, he was a trip!"