It Was My 19th Birthday

It was my 19^th birthday and two of my friends and I had dropped acid. Mick and I were sitting in his Gran Torino. It was snowing. The snow was coming down in multicolored arcs straight from outer space. We were parked in Joe’s driveway, waiting for him to come out. All three of us had taken the little blue tabs (Man-On-The-Moon) separately at a prearranged time so we’d be coming on as we gathered. The music pouring from the radio was a syrupy cacophony of voices and ethereal sounds, all twisting together like a stream polluted with oil. A black miasma of sound. And then Joe’s face was doing rubbery figure-eights on the window, vaporous and so distorted his eyes appeared to be melting into his nostrils, drool dribbled from his distended mouth. He sucked at the glass like a fish in an aquarium. His eyeballs bulged. Then he was a lizard, his purple fibrous tongue mashing against the glass like a slug, leaving a trail of slime across the window. Joe seemed to be devolving, teaching us a primal lesson about what it means to be human. We are made of ALL the creatures on the planet, not just related to apes. People are part of a single protean organism and, and Joe’s face was a crab and then it was an eel and then a squid, and and...

     And then Joe laughed and opened the door. Mick said, “What the fuck did you do that for? We’re on acid.”

     “That’s why I did it.”

     And then we drove to the mall and the adventure continued.