(The author at that age)
It was a day late in May so egregiously bright and wonderful, I felt like a fluffy Persian kitten who’d trained the universe to rub my furry belly. Sure, mom had abandoned us without a forwarding address and dad admitted he was trying to starve me out of the house. But as I sat on that cemetery tree branch with the sunshine giving my soul a blow job, I felt as if all my problems were only dandelion petals I could fit in one palm and send softly fluttering into the golden wind.
Yes, I was THAT high on acid.
So was my friend Steve, who looked like me, only with a bigger nose and curly red hair.
On that fine day, enabled by the LSD, I would accrue psychic abilities that led me to correctly predict that a stranger wandering below us in the cemetery would soon pause from his walk and begin touching his penis. It took my booming and deeply threatening VOICE OF GOD imitation, delivered under cover of the tree branches, to send the errant graveyard masturbator scurrying away in panic and zipping himself back into frightened chastity.
Peaceful as a pair of pink seals, Steve and I floated our way out of the cemetery, onto the subway, and into downtown Philly, where we enjoyed the world-famous three-dimensional colors of their hoagies and the easily identifiable fractal patterns emanating from their cheese steaks. We caught a mid-evening screening of Citizen Kane, which proved to be far more psychedelic than I’d remembered.
Around midnight, after a day of making sensible choices, we decide to start hitchhiking home toward the suburbs.
A rusty old Chevy pulls over, and two passenger’s-side doors pop open. Two drunken Italians step out and motion for Steve and I to get in the car. I sit up front, sandwiched between the generically Dago driver and a greasy bulldog who calls himself Cosmo. Steve sits between two oregano-scented flesh lumps in the back.
Cosmo says they won’t hurt us if we rob a liquor store for them.
I refuse and act like it’s sort of a silly idea.
Cosmo’s fist smashes my nose while the car’s still moving. CRUNCH! I can hear the bones in my nose breaking. It’s the hardest I’ve ever been punched. Then another punch. And another. And another. And another. And another.
I can hear they’re beating up Steve in the back.
My blood is spraying everywhere.
And I’m still high on acid.
The driver pulls into an abandoned dumping ground.
Cosmo drags me out of the car. I wriggle free and race home, blood showering from my nose with each desperate stride. I just fucking left Steve there. It doesn’t occur to me to try and help him. Despite all the delusional positivity acid inspires, 4-2 odds still don’t seem reasonable.
By the time I get home, I’ve bled so much that my jeans are more red than blue. I catch a horrified, acid-drenched glance at myself in the mirror. My face doesn’t look like my face anymore. My nose is the size of an orange. It looks like a twisted, inflamed scrotum.
I rouse dad from his drunken stubbly slumber.
LOOK AT ME! TAKE ME TO THE HOSPITAL!
“Why should I take you to the hospital?” he asks with half-soused nonchalance. “You didn’t clean your room. You didn’t do the dishes. I shouldn’t have to take you to the hospital.”
There I stand, my nose falling off my face, and dad wants to pick nits. After five minutes of my earnest pleading, he seems to realize my nose is falling off my face and reluctantly gets dressed.
He scolds me all the way to the hospital. As I receive stinging black stitches under wincingly bright lights, dad tells the doctor all about his son, the failure.
On the way back home at 4AM, he is overwhelmed by a compulsion to stop at a local diner to have some eggs. STILL mildly tripped-out and with my face all swollen and stitched and bandaged and bruised, I decide to stay outside in his plumbing van while he eats his fucking eggs. As I lay amid rusty copper pipes, I conduct some weird psychic-genetic divorce ritual between me and dad. “My flesh rejects him,” I remember thinking in my own psychonoautical Terence McKenna-ish way.
Those are the sort of thoughts that occur to you when you’re young, pretentious, high on acid, you’ve just endured a savage beating, and your father’s acting like a jerkoff. You think things such as “My flesh rejects him,” and it makes perfect sense. With maturity and sobriety and at least five years since the last time I got punched, it sounds gay as hell to me, but under those conditions it made sense.
Leave a Reply
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like if something really bad happened to me on while on acid. I don’t think I would take it as well as you did. I would have bad tripped the fuck out.
03.13.09 at 11:00 am
i’m your dad and i’m still pissed as heck mister
03.13.09 at 11:00 am
haha just kidding i’m steve i kicked those dude’s asses myself and wrecked their car by hitting it for 90 seconds like street fighter 2
03.13.09 at 11:02 am
Copper doesn’t rust. Rust only happens to iron.
03.13.09 at 11:11 am
i remember thinking a can was following me home from my friend’s house once when i was high. i kept looking every few minutes and there it was, right behind me on the side of the road. i crossed over to the other side of the road, walked faster, then looked behind me and sure there it was. i got in trouble for hiding all of my mother’s canned goods and the steak knives. i still don’t remember why i hid the knives but my brother told me that i had one in each hand and kept saying “the knives aren’t very sharp, are they brother?”
don’t be so hard on your parents. most of us had miserable demons for guardians. the joke’s on them and all of that.
03.13.09 at 11:15 am
My friends were all on one side of a wall and I was on the other side. I started yelling that they were all communists in West Berlin and I was a freedom fighter and a fucking American. That also made sense at the time.
03.13.09 at 11:26 am
trucker fags in denial is one of the best comics i’ve ever read. and i’ve read a fair amount of comics.
03.13.09 at 11:32 am
Thanks for sharing, Goad. I’m always entertained by a great tale of the disastrously wasted.
Does your nose whistle now and again like you’ve snorted a line of styrofoam pellets? Mine sure does.
03.13.09 at 11:32 am
What happened to your friend?
03.13.09 at 11:36 am
once on acid, I climbed up in a tree, sat there for a couple hours and ate two sticks. like, actual twigs I pulled off the tree. I chewed them up, swallowed them, and shit them out a few days later.
I sure hope you started cleaning your room and doing the dishes after that.
03.13.09 at 11:55 am
RE: your friend. What happened to?
03.13.09 at 11:58 am
I once took on 5 Italians in a pizza shop parking lot (Aurelio’s in Homewood, IL). All I’d done to piss them off was throw a snowball that landed a few hundred yards from their car. They all had mustaches and wore satin jackets. I was with a couple of my buddies, but they didn’t do shit. I got my ass kicked…big time. I still have a scar over my eye and another under my chin. I even have one on my big toe from the motherfucker that kept stomping it with his cowboy boots. The toe alone required six stitches. I think I got 27 in all plus a break here and a fracture there. Thanks for the memories.
03.13.09 at 1:29 pm
this is the internet; shorten it up.
03.13.09 at 1:37 pm
^^^fuck off^^^
03.13.09 at 1:47 pm
^^now you’re getting it. nice work.
03.13.09 at 2:07 pm
I want to know about the friend!
03.13.09 at 2:18 pm
goad what the fuck happened to your friend you pussy!
03.13.09 at 2:40 pm
what happened to STEVE???
03.13.09 at 3:23 pm
This story is awesome cause the EXACT same thing happened to me almost.
Except I wasn’t high on Acid.
And my buddy wasn’t with me, I was alone.
And I didn’t get beat up.
But it was still almost the EXACT same thing.
03.13.09 at 3:25 pm
I’m touched at the outpouring of concern for Steve’s well-being.
As Steve told it, he wrestled loose and ran away (we lived in opposite directions from the trash dump) about ten seconds after I did. Those Wops were good at punching, but not so skilled at holding on to their prey.
He later experienced a prolonged spate of homosexual panic under acid’s influence. He’d do things such as completely disrobe in front of other guys, then accuse them all of being fags. I was, thankfully, not present for that incident, but while buck naked, he reputedly asked them:
“Are you going to take your clothes off, or do I have to do it for you?”
Stellar question. Years later, I mutated it for the back cover of ANSWER Me! #2:
“Are you going to kill yourself, or do we have to do it for you?”
During another tripping-his-wheels-off moment, Steve fell under the impression the Greek Mafia was trying to kill him.
Steve is now a high-school English teacher in Jersey with a wife and two kids. I don’t think they know about the homo panic or the Greek Mafia.
03.13.09 at 5:31 pm
Excellent story.
03.13.09 at 6:31 pm
What a total fucking scoundrel. You left your buddy behind? I’m glad to hear he was at least okay.
03.13.09 at 6:42 pm
@ CSDBD
Anyone worth a shit as an artist always puts their ego aside and is as honest as possible about what went down. I commend the author for stepping outside of our accepted and phony ideas of bravery and telling it how it was. Bravo. Besides, aren’t gingers supposed to be drowned at birth or something?
03.13.09 at 6:46 pm
Is it true that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged…by Italians?
03.13.09 at 6:48 pm
Your parents should have been arrested for neglect. Obviously, they didn’t teach you the first rule of being Irish in Philly; never, ever take a ride from Italians.
03.13.09 at 6:50 pm
Bonjourno. I heard that after you get stitched up from being mugged by Italians, they send you to the delousing room for a mandatory hosing of all your major cavities and crevices. Any truth to that?
03.13.09 at 6:57 pm
dude anyone here would have run away and left the friend without even thinking about it maybe stayed in the bushes and waited for them to leave but trying to fight in that situation would just be fucking stupid
03.13.09 at 7:19 pm
Well put, Jim.
03.13.09 at 7:20 pm
Are you trying to tell me that there wasn’t any rusty copper pipe laying around that you could’ve used to set them dagos straight. Just think of the kick ass trails you would’ve gotten while swingin that rusty copper pipe around. Everyone knows that Philly’s so fuckin tough that even the copper rusts. It’s everywhere.
03.13.09 at 7:34 pm
The acid stories are always the best stories. I still consider my ability to take every ride at an amusement park while high on acid one of my greatest feats. I thought the gravitron did permanent damage. I’m fine.
03.13.09 at 7:46 pm
this was great, written very well and the steve follow up story was the icing on the cake
03.13.09 at 8:35 pm
I would have run too. He was tripping for fuck’s sake. Besides, letting the author get away meant that Cosmo and the boys didn’t plan on taking it any further. There’s an instinctual barometer that kicks in and tells you the gravity of a situation. All insincerity aside, I too enjoyed the story.
03.13.09 at 8:54 pm
Great story. LSD provided me with some of the greatest, and most overwhelming adventures of my life, good and bad. Even though though the trips eventually got really dark, I’d still recommend it as something everyone should experience at least once. I’ll never forget my friend’s shaman-like brother explaining to us the solution to every single problem in the world during my first trip. “All you have to do is dance“ he said quietly, and at that point in time it was the singularly most profound and significant piece of advice I’d ever heard. Of course that never really worked for me, but nevertheless, it took my breath away. Ha!
I also ate a quarter ounce of mushrooms once, on the advice of a friend, during the heaviest acid trip I’d ever experienced. Unless you want to be high for so long you write letters to your mother and girlfriend detailing how you will never be the same again, that is something I would not recommend.
03.13.09 at 11:07 pm
during our last trip together, i asked my best friend to tell me what reality was and she replied quickly “reality is a rooster and i’m your long lost dog.” she went missing a month later and was last seen attempting to hitchhike naked across the country. i don’t think she could stop tripping once she started. i’ve never met another like her, not even close.
03.13.09 at 11:32 pm
this was amazing! Thanks!
03.14.09 at 1:48 am
why isn’t anyone talking about the guy touching himself in the cemetary? because that seems relatively sane compared to being beaten up by spaghettios and technically incorrectly rusting state of cars?
03.14.09 at 2:26 am
^^^
The cemetery jackoff was easily the most inexplicable thing that happened that day. I’d never touched myself in a cemetery, I’d never heard of graveyards being sanctuaries for masturbators, and there was nothing in that jerkoff’s demeanor or body language that seemed shifty or horny.
Still, when he was a hundred yards away, I pointed at him and said to Steve, “That guy’s going to jerk off! I just KNOW it!” And he slowly ambled toward our tree, stopped right beneath us, looked around, flopped his cock out of his pants, and began tugging. Then I did the voice of God, and he ran away.
How the FUCK did I know he was going to jerk off? I’ve had plenty of suspicions and instincts, but that’s the only experience I’ve ever had that I’d classify as psychic.
For the record and before the tribunal: I was unaware that copper cannot rust. You GOT me! Technically, it oxidizes, which is the same process that causes iron to rust. And this was a dirty, oily plumbing van filled with used steel wool and old tools, so I was amid copper and rust, my friends. My acid memory insists that I was.
To be Frank (a common Italian first name), I’m disappointed that no one caught the three errors in this article’s subhead:
1) Feces is inanimate, so there is no such thing as “living shit.”
2) I was not kicked once during this event.
3) No doo-doo emerged from my anus during the beating, so I did not, in fact, have any shit, living or dead, “kicked” out of me.
03.14.09 at 7:31 am
MORE STORIES PLS JIM!!!!
03.14.09 at 8:58 am
jimmy boy give us more stories EH
we wanna hear a stooory
03.14.09 at 9:18 am
You gay, man, you gay.
03.14.09 at 8:55 pm
If you’re facing the person in the picture, you’re standing in the living room. To your right is the front door. To the left is the kitchen. If you turn around and walk a few steps, you will see the dining room to your right. Starting again at the original spot, on your way to the kitchen and to the right are the basement stairs and a side door. To the left there is half a bathroom. Upstairs there are 3 bedrooms and a full bath plus an attic. Pathetic.
03.15.09 at 7:38 am
Rusty penny. Has anyone ever tripped on microdots? First bad trip I’ve had. Plus your cock shrinks so much you almost piss all over your balls.
03.15.09 at 8:37 am