By Steve Otto
LSD revelations- divine inspirations
“A man of knowledge had an ally” - Carlos Castaneda on the teachings of Don Juan
My best acid trip was in 1977. I opened my small white refrigerator and from the freezer, all crusted with ice, I pulled out a small piece of foil. I got it from my friend, Seth, while working on campus. He was a short guy with long brown hair, who usually wore a tie-dye T-shirt or some hippy type clothing. He got me a piece of blue Window Pane, which was a tiny, thin square that looked like a piece of blue tinted plastic.By 1977 acid was rare. Few people liked to do it. There were only a few young people around who liked to experiment with it. The acid fad had passed and it was no longer the “in drug” on campus. One Thursday night, just for something different to do, I cut the little square in half on my brown wooden table, with a razor blade, and took it. I then headed out my door for the Harbor Lighthouse, a bar on Massachusetts Street the main drag of Lawrence. I figured I’d be the only stoned person in a bar full of drunks. I didn’t have a car at the time, but I did have a one-speed, black Schwinn bike. When I got to the Lighthouse, I chained my bike to a lamppost and went inside. By now the acid was just beginning to work.The Lighthouse was laid out like a typical bar, with pool tables in the back, and a few beer ads on its brown wooden walls. It had a long bar on the left side of the room and brown tables and chairs on the right. At first it seemed a typical night with the bar being a little less than half full of patrons. I walked to the long bar and ordered a Bud draught. Then I notice a few strange things. A short man, with black stringy medium length hair and dark glasses, sitting at the end of the bar, ordered a bag of Lay’s Potato chips.“Bartender! I need some chips,” he said. “All I’ve had to eat today is four reds and a pitcher of beer.”When the bartender gave him the chips he opened the bag and stuffed them all into his mouth at once. While chewing a mouthful of chips, he picked up a pitcher that was sitting in front of him and started guzzling the beer out of it, trying to wash down the bag of chips in one gulp. I immediately realized this was not a typical night at this bar.By now the acid was beginning to kick in strong. As I looked at the pool table, a man’s pool cues seemed to be moving back and forth when he was still setting up his aim for a shot. I felt that urge to giggle that comes from taking acid. A lady came up to me and looked into my face. She was thing, had medium length red hair, a freckled face and was wearing some overalls over a T-shirt. At first she just stared for a second or two then asked me a question.“Do you want some acid?”“I already have some,” I said. “I just took it.”She looked at me even more puzzled.“Did I already give you some?” she asked.“No. I had some of my own tonight.”“Oh! Well have another hit.”
She handed me a small, purple colored pill. This was really strange because I never dreamed I would run into people using acid on the same night I decided to. I had been to that bar many times and never saw anyone using acid there before. Many of the people in the bar were equally stoned.I put the pill in my pocket for later use. The girl came back and gave me a second hit. Some of these people would show up into my future adventures. The guy eating reds was Crazy Dan, a future friend of some dealers I would get to know. The girl was a friend of Connie’s, an exhibitionist I would later sleep with. After a night of meeting strange new people I decided to go back homeI unhooked my bicycle and rode it home from the bar. I went through an alley between the buildings on Massachusetts Street and those behind them. I rode passed the trash containers and the little loading doors the businesses all had in back. There seemed to be little stars glowing and moving around all over the gray pavement of the alley as I rode my bike. I kept looking down and laughing as I rode past street light after streetlight, until I got to the road that led to my home.When I got home, I sat out on my wooden porch. I watched the stars in the sky as they resembled white Christmas-tree lights that blinked on and off. I went inside, sat down on my couch and turned on my brown RCA color TV set. I was changing the channels when I came to a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. Normally I would have turned that off, but the acid made it look so strange that I decided to watch it. That was the fist and maybe only time I could get into one of those old time Fred Astaire musicals.I didn’t use acid very much. I didn’t even use it much during the early 1970s. It wasn’t a very relaxing high. But I don’t regret the times I did use it. It occasionally seemed to give me some type of revelation. That night, I got the feeling that I was going to have sex soon. While I was high, it felt like a certainty, as if it was just about to happen and I could anticipate it. So could I trust the intuition of this drug experience?The Aztec Indians, of ancient Mexico, believed they could foretell the future with the use of magic mushrooms or Peyote. The ancient Druids of the English Isles believed they could do the same with a “Rite of Inspiration,” using nightshade. Shamans from various cultures have used various drugs for thousands of years to do just that. Could LSD do the same thing as nightshade, magic mushrooms or peyote? I had to wonder about that.
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