It was a beautiful spring Sunday in 1969. I was in my junior year at Charlotte Hall Military Academy. Newt said he would have some LSD for us to try. He promised to be back early Sunday AM. We would have the whole day to trip.
Other than morning mess and church formation, cadets pretty much had Sundays to themselves. Sundays at Charlotte Hall were some of my fondest memories of high school.
A popular activity for the cadets still on campus was to take a blanket from their footlocker and spread them at the fringes of the pucker brush behind the New Barracks. Someone would throw up a window and turn their stereo up to wow. Good times. Other than some tight ass Officer of the Day pulling a recon and sneaking up on us from behind to break our balls, we could get away with almost anything.
Stuck on campus on a Sunday lent itself to all manner of rule breaking. We smoked cigarettes. We blasphemed. We smoked pot. We blasphemed some more. We drank what alcohol was available and blasphemed a lot. We huffed Carbona, a spot remover we bought at the campus PX.
Today four of us would experience LSD for the first time.
After collecting payment, Newt handed each of us a hit of Strawberry Fields. They were small little red pills. He called them “microdots”. I remember a heated discussion over the size of them. Snake claimed his cousin had Orange Sunshine for cheaper and the pills were much bigger.
Newt said nothing except, “Drop the pills boys. You’ll be fine in forty-five.”
It was all very ritualistic. Each of us lifted the pills like glasses ready to toast. Newt spewed some hippie mumbo jumbo and we each swallowed our pills.
Newt was wrong. I was fine in 30 minutes. I remember lying on my back and studying the various cumulous constructions being erected in the brilliantly blue sky over me when I suddenly burst out laughing. I did not stop laughing until I ran out of tears. When I did manage to collect myself, through my spent tears I noticed everything around me was distorted dramatically or moving in very mysterious ways or both. I had gotten off and it was glorious. There was nothing finer in the whole of Existence than LSD. Of that I was sure.
That day I watched ants with my head inches off the ground. I scrutinized the crusty, rusty metal dinosaurs from wars long past that were scattered around campus. I was stung by a wasp when I held it near my ear to listen. Damn ear swelled up and hurt for a week. There were other adventures that day and none of them were anything but wonderful.
I had a grand time and vowed when I was lying awake in bed two hours after Taps that night; there was no doubt in my mind that I would drop LSD again.
I stopped counting 185 trips later.
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2 comments:
That is a lot of acid
A Unique Title For Me - Yes, it was. And that was not the end of it. I counted my trips with mushrooms and Peyote as part of it. I stopped tripping a lot in my late 20s. My last episode was over a decade ago. I have lots of good and bad stories wrapped into my use of hallucingens. A really interesting tie-in to this is Owsley Stanley, the man responsible for the early commercial success of LSD, went to my high school, Charlotte Hall, for a year. Ijust found out this past year.
Thanks for stopping by.
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