Remembering LSD in innocence part 1

I took LSD for the first time on Jan 10, 1969, 18 months after most of the West Coast got off at the Monterrey Music Festival (which transitioned into Haight Ashbury’s Summer of Love in 1967) and 6 months after I first smoked dope. Dropping acid was not a hard decision: I had never heard of a “bad” trip; my friends who had taken the drug were encouraging me to get higher; and I had a sense of belonging in this. I didn’t want to be a part time drug taker – I wanted to be electric. I wanted to be what Jimi Hendrix called “beautiful.” His “are you experienced?” line was not asking if you sucked on a hookah, but was about psychedelics, in fact the longer I had followed the progression of the counter culture, the more I realized that true, blood initiation lay through what Aldous Huxley called “the doors of perception.” You tripped – turned on, tuned in, dropped out, Tim Leary kept instructing us – or you dabbled, behind closed doors every other weekend, with a hot date you hoped to “ball,” without any expectation that something important and meaningful could be found in drugs.
We were curious; we wanted our lives to be different; we were bored with heavy drinking and rooms layered with marijuana smoke. And we wanted to share this experience with the nascent community of freaks coming together at Tufts. Were we stupid and naïve? Of course, but for many of us - jaded by alcoholic homes, parental pressure to be the best and brightest, and a fatalistic vision of a life numbing future - this was the way out/in. It might have been stupid, but it was also blissfully inevitable. By the time we woke up, months or years later, challenges were much greater and the consequences of blasting our minds apart were more obvious.
But this was January 1969, and acid didn’t hurt your head, destroy your prospects or lead to more serious drugs. It was Alice in Wonderland, and our friend and trip master Chuck Monroe had volunteered to be our guide. Dan Reddy, Bob McCann, Sandy Clarke and I dropped half a tab each of a bright orange pill we had bought from the dorm’s resident drug dealer for $1 and waited in Dan’s room for it to happen. It was 10 o’clock on a Friday night, and we didn’t have to wait long to get off. There is little fakery taking LSD. You may not be as drunk as you pretend to be or as stoned as you think people expect you to be, but LSD usually hits like a freight train and blows you out of your chair.
In the young days, when the drug was given to everyone at Monterrey, and Hendrix broke every musician’s heart when he played at that festival (hopelessly stoned on 2 hits of Stanley (Bear) Owsley’s most recent batch of LSD), pure lysergic acid was put on stamps and blotter paper. The vehicle that took the drug into your system was neutral. What you got was pure acid, which is more of a mind drug than anything else. LSD suppresses the transmissions of signals from one synapse to another synapse in your brain which slows down your mental processes – visual and auditory hallucinations are sometimes side effects. You could see walls breathing and ceilings swarming and, of course, tracers moving behind things in motion. Trips were long (up to 12 hours) and life changing. There was wide eyed wonder when you took early acid.
But shit. It was 18 months later, and we were three thousand miles away from the West Coast. I never saw blotter or stamp acid during the time I was tripping. Considering the small amount of LSD it takes to get beautiful, the pills we saw were obviously cut with something. It could be some innocuous baking soda, or it could be, and normally was, speed. The acid might be poor, and in a low dose, but the experience would be enhanced by another drug, with other side effects. Which meant that when we four got off, we had shimmering LSD brain activity and a fucking lot of energy. Wide grins, but bigger pupils, blown apart by speed. We hadn’t planned what to do on our trip, but it was quickly apparent, by the rapid pacing in, then outside, the room, and our furious chain smoking, that we needed a focus. Tripping without a focus can be some really bad tripping.
By 10:45, we really needed direction. “Let’s go get Chuck, man,” - spoken through clenched jaws – was our conclusion. Chuck was a sophomore at Tufts, living with a senior, Bruce Munson, on the top floor of the Delta Tau Delta Fraternity off Professor’s Row, a few steps, a quarter mile, five miles away - the distance dependent on how stoned you were. We walked the five miles fast, shivering because we were wasted and were in sweaters on a 10 degree night. Couldn’t find our coats – didn’t care to look for them at the time. I never understood Chuck and Bruce living at Delta Tau Delta. These two were high profile freaks, some of the founders of our tribe at Tufts. And the Delts were very straight and very preppy, things Chuck and Bruce may have been once but certainly weren’t now. We knew the Delts in their drawing room in this meticulously kept house were less than delighted when four whispering freaks slipped into the house unannounced and stumbled upstairs, intentions unannounced. But they knew who was responsible: “Fucking Monroe and Munson. How do we get them out of the house? This is just too much.” Perhaps our paranoia heard the words, but I have no doubt someone down there was speaking them.
Up to the top. Tapping on the door; “Chuck . . . Chuck,” we almost whispered at the closed door. Don’t want to bother the guy this late – it was now somehow 11:30 at night. “Who is it?” a voice croaked from behind the door. Who do you think it is man? It’s those guys from Miller Hall who are looking to “have a magical mystery tour.” Help us, we are royally wasted and don’t know where to go from here.
But we said: “Hey, it’s Dan, Bob, Nick and Sandy and we’re tripping.” It was like we had let out some marvelous secret. We are tripping. We have done it; we have taken the chance, cut our ties, set sail to Haight-Ashbury. We were in the promised land. Please Mr. Chuck, show us around nirvana.
“Hang tough,” he coughed and then opened the door.
Chuck looked like shit. I mean, he looked bad, but we took that far along – he looked like he was dying, in fact we’d better get out of here because he might keel over on us. How would we explain that to our parents. “Sick Delta Tau Delta dies surrounded by suspicious looking ‘freaks’ stoned on LSD. Foul play suspected. “ We could not talk our way out of anything at this point. We couldn’t begin to answer anyone’s questions coherently, certainly not the police’s.
“Now what is your name, Mr. Park”
“What was the question again?”
“Ah, Chuck, is there something wrong with you?”, we asked. Chuck couldn’t make a sound. He was red and sweaty. He was dressed in drenched underwear and used the door to prop himself up. Most of what we saw was his head, which was leaning out the cracked door. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and hacked another room shaking cough. A voice behind Chuck responded.
It was the stunning Gail Gasperini, one of the world’s great beauties, silhouetted in front of a dim light next to their bed. She had an oversized T-shirt on, probably Chuck’s, and I strained to see her form under it. I was getting a little randy. Sex on LSD?; I’d never hear of it.
Gail had coupled with Chuck soon after they arrive at Tufts, which was a mystery to every guy I knew. It was really something that proved the existence of a merciful god, for although Chuck was a nice guy, a great leader, a concerned friend and trip master, he was not the kind of handsome you’d expect on Gail’s arm. Gail behind Chuck in his bedroom dressed in his T shirt gave hope to homely men everywhere. Her even speaking to us directly was a blessing.
“Guys, he has walking pneumonia. He’s got a fever and needs sleep. There’s no way he’s going anywhere tonight. I’ll try to get Bruce to drive you around.”