I felt his fingers on my shoulder, tapping. “Sarah.”
I stubbornly kept my eyes shut. He was interrupting my fun. I was busy behind my eyelids. Honestly, having jet fuel pour out of every cell in your body as you shoot into the stratosphere, where you make crazy loop-de-loops with supersonic ease, almost but not quite exploding from the immensity of this freedom, this weightless flight, with your cape flapping behind you, is not the moment when you want to be nudged.
“Sarah!” He tapped me again.
I opened my eyes. His head lay on the pillow beside me. He was looking at me and I didn’t know who the hell he was, and besides, his eyes were swimming all over his face like trapped tadpoles. I glanced down at our two bodies on the bed, and they were running away too.
We were in his dorm room on a yellow spring afternoon at Sarah Lawrence, where I double-majored in music and promiscuity. My bedmate had transferred from Princeton, one of a handful of male students being inducted experimentally to this single-slut institution of higher learning. The fox entered the henhouse; the hens made mincemeat of the fox. Some of my schoolmates openly resented my bogarting the best guy, forcing them to queue up for the inferior ones.
He and I had whiled away many such afternoons, prone on sex-scented sheets and taking mescaline. But on this day, when I opened my eyes, I had no knowledge of him, or, for that matter, my own identity. I had no knowledge, period. I was reduced to a state of pure instinct. And my instinct told me that things were going hideously wrong.
He moved his lips with difficulty, as if speaking underwater: “This isn’t mescaline we took. It’s acid.”
I stared at him uncomprehendingly. A second ago, I was flying around the heavens. Now I was dying.
“That fucking shithead sold me acid instead of mescaline,” he continued. “This is going to take a while longer than we planned. You’ll have to cut your harmony class.”
Not one word he spoke had any meaning. What was acid? His tone was serious. So “acid” had to be something…fearful. Terrifying. It explained why the walls slithered, the ceiling bulged, and everything, everything was rushing away so fast, beyond the reach of understanding: my flesh and bones, my name and address, my mind and its contents. Anything of significance no longer signified anything. Which left nothing.
I felt whirled away in a mad current. Panic took hold and I began to gulp for air. With nothing left to define me, I hurtled headlong toward the falls, to extinction.
I could hear his low voice speaking, its mild cadence, and while the words had no meaning they seemed meant to calm me. The tide carrying me away slowed. Fear gave way just enough so I could breathe.
Then breath itself fascinated me. This simple in and out, rise and fall, accept and deliver, buoyed me out of my body, and I emerged in a place of simplicity. For what could be simpler? than to be.
I have sometimes been, in my life, so happy I couldn’t stand it. This, though, was happiness I could stand because there was no I anymore to contain it.
The ineffable, without words to describe, can only be met with laughter. I laughed a long time, until my ribs began to ache. I’d forgotten about ribs: those hard hoops for restraining breath and laughter and heart from leaping completely free. I felt them now, and little by little I shrank back into my body. Back too came the walls, the ceiling, the bed and the sophomore beside me, whatshisname.
Later we remembered to put on clothes before leaving the room. The rest of the eight-hour trip we spent in a hammock, exclaiming with that coming-off-acid smug certainty, wow, I’m one with the universe, I can see through my hand. We admired fluorescent flashes in the shrubbery, and then I yammered on about Ken Kesey until my companion told me to shut up.
I only took LSD a few more times, but in minor dosage. Short commutes. The last time was a bare four years later, on the opening weekend of my documentary Marjoe in New York. I stood with a hippie friend across the street from the theater, watching the line form for the 7:00 show, and when the “Sold Out” sign went up we both cheered and split a tab of acid. Eventually I wound up alone in my hotel room, flat on my back, watching the ceiling bulge with colors, and I thought, this has gotten old. Bored, I took a Quaalude and slept through the rest of the trip.
I never sought to repeat the bliss of my first. That afternoon was too precious to me, the time my soul blotted out everything including my self. It became my touchstone: whenever I got too knotted up in my earthly so-called sufferings, I would remember the simplicity place. I’d recall that the answer in the back of the book is a blank page.
I figured I’d get back there permanently when, at the end, death would replay the moment, like a long-lost reel discovered in attic dust. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait that long. It came again, without drugs, in middle age, on another bed. I’d encountered ghosts and poltergeists; now the time had come for Spirit.
(To be continued.)
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