Comments about Tripping from other Tribes

whenever i dropped acid or mescaline or whatever - your distinction between the pure stuff like blotter or windowpane and the "cut" product most of us took most of the time is an important one - within the first thirty minutes of coming on, i'd remember in vivid detail all my previous trips. (odd, that i wouldn't retain it that well after coming down. sure, i could recall events and incidents and such, but the visceral knowledge of the feelings experienced tended to disappear.) and in those first thirty minutes, i would also remember why i had decided i wouldn't do it any more. too late. yet i think if the opportunity presented itself tomorrow to trip again, i might take it just to recapture those intense memories. but i would do it alone, in an empty house with the phone turned off.some eight years ago i mentioned to my son that i'd never done ecstasy - it not having been around in my day - and that i was sort of curious about it. so one afternoon he gives me some. and i pop it right there, on the spot. i think he was kind of shocked. then i went about my day, paid some bills, did some chores, ran some errands. this surprised him even more. but it was fairly mild, what he'd given me, though pleasant enough. a little like mda, if you remember that.i never did have a bad trip in college, but i was usually careful not to take so much as to render me completely helpless or vulnerable. i did experience bad episodes within trips, but managed to get out of them. friends were tremendously important, not as guides but as tripping companions. the worst time i ever had lasted about an hour because i was separated from the friend i'd started the trip with. i didn't know what to do with myself, kept going from room to room only to realize once i got there that it wasn't where i wanted to be. it got worse and worse. finally i retreated to my room. i put on a record to comfort myself, but the music i normally loved was mocking me. outside the window the naked tree branches - it was a warmish afternoon in late february - those branches shimmered and buzzed at me with psychotic malevolence. i put my head down on the seat of a wooden chair. it was an old and worn, and the scratches in it did the same thing as the trees outside. finally, i went to a friend in the room next door. he was doing homework. i sat down and told him i thought i was losing my mind. he stared at me, nodded and said quietly, "yeah." i told him again, no, i'm losing my mind. inside i was screaming, seriously, man, you don't understand. this is horrible. you've got to help me. he stared, took a slow drag on his lucky and said again, "yeah." it was like he hadn't heard me. yet i couldn't keep repeating myself. i went back to my room. so this is what it's like, i thought, to be crazy. how could i explain it to anybody, my parents, my family, friends? there would be no connection any more between myself and anything, ever. not from where i presently was. my life was over. nothing to look forward to but unendurable and unending psychic pain. more than pain. horror. disconnectedness.there was a knock at my door. the guy from next door came in and said that david (the friend i'd dropped with and gotten separated from because he saw his girlfriend across the quad and went running off after her), david was in some trouble in his room downstairs. it was unclear to me what he was trying to tell me, but something bad was happening to david. i went downstairs to his room. it wasn't a single like mine, but a large room david shared with two others. it had its own bathroom. (this wasn't a dorm, per se, but an old house the university owned on the edge of the campus.) the two roommates, who weren't high at the time, were there looking very alarmed. david was in the bathroom sobbing, they told me. i could hear him in there and immediately started feeling a little better myself. there's nothing like having to deal with someone worse off than you to kind of put you right. a reassurance that you aren't the sickest man in the boat. you've been spared that at least. then david came out of the bathroom, hearing that i was there. his eyes were swollen and red. he managed to get out, "i'm just so happy..." before bursting anew into tears and retreating back to the bathroom. the roommates looked at me. they were verging on panic. "it's okay," i told them. "david's okay." and he was, too. i knew to take him at his word. he'd just spent time with his girlfriend liz whom he loved deeply (intensified by the acid), and he was literally crying from happiness. couldn't stop. well, eventually david did pull himself together. we smoked some dope, went zooming even higher and spent the rest of the evening and night together wandering around the campus, dropping in on friends, listening to music and smoking more dope and staring at candles. the usual stuff.i don't know why we never dropped in the morning so that perhaps we could go to sleep at a somewhat reasonable hour and not have to face the dawn after an all-nighter, utterly drained. it might not have mattered, but it didn't make the coming down any easier, and that's why i decided after every trip not to do it again. not because it had been bad, but because it had been good. it had been "beautiful" as hendrix promised, a deep spiritual oneness with your tripping partners, a connectedness that was impossible to maintain in real life and, therefore, always left me dispirited and depressed afterward. coming down. that, and the understanding that i'd done something very risky. i'd learned how a trip could go very bad, yet this time i had managed, once again, to escape that outcome. it was no-win, really. when it was good, the aftermath was hard. if it were bad, you were really fucked.four or five weeks after that trip with david, i stayed home after spring break to undergo surgery. i got a call from david's roommates that he'd taken a bunch of sleeping pills. liz had broken up with him. now he'd been unconscious for close to 36 hours. they didn't know what to do. i couldn't advise them. they did nothing. eventually david woke up and went on with his life.