Briarpatch

In July of 1968, eleven full-time members of the Briarpatch commune, as well as several itinerant hippie drifters and various hangers on, were gathered around a bonfire, singing a favored song by the psychedelic combo The Crystal Asparagus. Lydia, (sometimes called Gossamer) a frail, beautiful nineteen-year-old girl was watching big Goran Muth smoke a joint. The joint had been poorly rolled and was canoeing rapidly, twists of smoke escaping into the acid-charged atmosphere. The smoke curled into shapes as vivid and ceremonial as cave paintings, and Gossamer tried to memorize each one before it turned invisible in the dark air. She saw faces and bodies writhing together as if squeezed from a tube; swirling cartoons with a sweet aroma and a two-second lifespan. And the stoned folks around the fire sang:

       

       Inhale the sonic waterfall

       Sweep up the crumbled rainbow

       Sprinkle the cosmic colors

       On ancient ivory gravestones

    

     Their voices were ragged and overlapped but they adhered to the beat. Three Briarpatch men pounded out a primitive rhythm on a hollow log, using thick sticks. The driving, percussive sounds that emanated from the dead wood seemed to match Gossamer’s nervous heartbeat and she started to worry about what would happen to her if they stopped. 

      Big Goran Muth noticed Gossamer staring at him and he extended the joint to her, now reduced to a smoldering roach. Gossamer shook her head. “No thanks,” she said. The acid she’d eaten was more than enough. In fact, it was too much. Big Goran Muth moved away. Without smoke to look at, Gossamer looked up at an active sky filled with spilling stars. They looked close enough to scrape her scalp. The peek of infinity they surrendered left her breathless and awestruck. And just as her mind had made crooked sense of the smoke, it now assembled the stars into complex patterns and designs of immeasurable mathematical complexity. And then the stars began to move and she saw horseback armies galloping across the galaxy, clashing against opposing forces with swords of white light. She saw crustaceans scuttling and floating through seas of milk, pursued by primordial predators. The visions were strong and Gossamer felt distressed by their violence. What did they say about her nature, her essence? Did she have a violent inner self? Was the LSD unleashing a warlike spirit? She took a hesitant step backward, afraid to continue looking and afraid to turn away. The stars were too much, the acid crawling up her spine was too much. She moved her gaze to the bonfire and thought she was dying, turning to liquid and pouring into Hell. Hell is also something the mind cannot measure. She slapped a hand over her eyes, but the churning monstrous faces that she saw behind her eyelids were even worse. She gasped and turned away from the heat, finding solace and safety in the blind darkness. The music, the beating of the log, ceased. Then started up again. This time the assembled throng sang “Blue Children of the Mushroom” also by The Crystal Asparagus.

     “You okay, baby?” someone said and Gossamer turned toward the sound, still lost in darkness.

     “Who’s there?” she said and with the question came sudden clarity of vision. There was a man standing in front of her, his bearded face disguised by flickering, splashing shadows cast by the fire. The shadows were black eels writhing.

     “My name’s Bob, baby.” He was holding a can of beer.

     “Hi Bob. And my name’s not Baby. It’s Lydia. Gossamer.”

     “Are you all right, Lydia? Gossamer?”

     “I think so. I just freaked out for a minute there.” Bob moved closer and she saw his face in sudden, excruciating detail. Shifting sands of expression.

     “But you’re okay now? What freaked you out?”

     “This!” She waved her hand, indicating the Universe. “I

feel like my dreams have seeped into the world.”

     “Maybe they have.”

     “Yeah, maybe...”

     “I’ve been where you are,” Bob said. “Many times.”

     “Oh yeah?”

     “Yeah.” Bob stepped closer and placed his hand on her arm, his fingers were tentacles. “One time I dropped acid in the rain and I saw the face of God in every drop. And then every raindrop showed me a snapshot from my own suicide.”

     “You’re suicidal?”

     “Sometimes. Sometimes the world is so full of heaviness and woe it breaks my heart...” He slid his hand to her shoulder and tried to lean in for a kiss.

     Gossamer pulled away from him and said, “I’m sorry Bob, I can’t fuck you.” And then she walked away, disappearing into the folding dark.

     Bob returned to the bonfire. He’d heard from The Underground that the girls at the Briarpatch commune were loose but Lydia’s was his second shootdown of the night. He didn’t understand it, his raindrop suicide rap usually worked on stoned hippie chicks. He eyed his next prize, a pale, blackhaired chick staring at the fire as if hypnotized. He approached her and said, “Pretty far out scene, huh?”

     He didn’t get anywhere with her either.

OHIO

I have a wound on the back of my head (golf injury) and bits of food ooze out of it. The food is pinkish red and tastes like bubble gum and ketchup and it’s packed with energy. After I eat a few of the little pink morsels I want to go outside and run around. I don’t think eating it is healthy but I can’t help myself. I dig the morsels out of the wound with a pencil (#2). The hole produces more and more. I’ve begun to freeze the excess in plastic bags. I don’t think it’s brain matter but it’s tied into the brain somehow because my memories are growing blurred and indistinct. I have forgotten my Aunt Rae entirely and must construct new memories using photographs and the testimony of my family. It’s too bad because I’m told I really loved Aunt Rae.

I Have a Runny Chest

I have a runny chest this morning. I can feel it, hear it dripping like a leaky tap. I have this shunt that drains fluid from my skull into my stomach. When it works it sounds like murmuring voices. Like voices from my past, recorded in fluid. I once knew a guy who was determined to drink himself to death. He owned a restaurant where I worked as a cook. His name was Bob. He would open the restaurant at ten a.m. and begin drinking screwdrivers. He would drink screwdrivers for the next twelve hours, then down a double shot of straight vodka and go home with an unopened quart. The next day he’d start all over again. He averaged (conservatively) a gallon of vodka a day. His skin was yellow, the flesh of his face and hands swollen, deformed by years of alcohol addiction. He had a frightening smile. He was quite a character and I wondered what caused his bottomless pain. I lost track of him after I quit my job in 1992 but I found out a few years ago that he’d finally succeeded in dying. Now I can hear his slurred, murmurous words in the thunking, shunking draining of my shunt...

Ben Made Heads

Ben made heads. He made them out of foam rubber and latex and he made them to resemble his friends and family. It was Art. It was personal. It was a statement about identity and mortality. He kept the heads in his bedroom, twenty in all. He was seventeen when I knew him (I was 16) and I let him make a duplicate of my head. He poured goop over my face and made a mold. I had to breathe through straws in my nostrils. I felt smothered and claustrophobic under all that goop. When he’d finished there was my severed head in the pile with the others. I felt strange and fractured, looking at my own face. He’d even captured the little blue vein in my temple. The hair was painted on. All the heads had closed eyes. They looked like they were sleeping. Peaceful heads. His parent’s heads were there. His grandparents were represented. The only head he was missing was his brother’s. His brother Justin was twenty-two and refused to let Ben copy his head. He thought the whole enterprise was creepy and morbid.

     So it was quite ironic when Justin was decapitated in a car accident.

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.