Tripping on Acid

I was in good (and safe) company, and I have never tried LSD before. I figured, what the fuck -- why not? Jenny popped her MDMA cherry, I'll pop mine for LSD.

I hit an eyedrop as we left my club. As we worked our way out, I felt the acid start working its magic almost immediately. The music started to sound distorted, like a run-down fun house, but I like weird, and I was liking the weird of this trip. As we wound from one blurry, geometrically impossible hallway clad with posters to another the distorted thump thump thump gave way to the sensation of the empty night air feeling my lungs. Thumpp...... thump.... in the distance. "How many lines of coke did I do jake?" He replied "Fourt". "What fucking fort?" I tasted the dirty night air outside my strip. I turned to Jake and Jessica as I tried to walk as straightly as possible toward the limo - and away from the pink spiders. "You know, I built this shit."

I built the entire strip and I was fucking proud of it with its bright red lights, the glitter of gold and the allure of desire, the promise of seduction, that dream of cumming in a stranger. There are so many reasons why people come to my strip. They give me money to be frustrated by strippers, to get free drinks from men, to beg a one-armed bandit for a free meal.  In the end, I'm doing the fucking, I'm the one cumming. They're just dreaming.

This trip. Shit. Everything was a bastard child of image and afterimage. I saw jake's hands like a strobing stop-motion video point up into the air. "Shit, what is love?" he asked with a metallica tinge. His voice was breaking in and out like he was talking through a broken walkie talkie. Jessica let go of my arm and looked up in the sky. The sky's beautiful. Meteors tonight. Bright flashes in the air. Jake said something about where was his cell phone.

Then, bam! It was fucking beautiful. A blast of unearthly sunlight lit up the night air in one heavenly moment. The drugs burned an afterimage of beauty into my retinas -- a glowing white hot ball of healing light illuminating the entire night sky a fantastic green-blue hue. LSD is some fireworks. All I could see was that beautiful ball reaching out into the night air for ten, twenty, thirty seconds... minutes? Was it a day? A dream? Am I the imparted other?

And then I felt a limpness as the white ball of light wrapped me up completely like a blanket and I started shaking and there was just so much light. I could feel my arms and legs flail of their own free will. I could hear noises, popping and crackling, spiders chirping, birds screaming and shouting and making noises, car alarms or were they watch alarms? All like distant memories filtered through a broken walkie talkie. My ears began to ring and deafen out the noise, and I continued to feel myself thrashing around involuntarily. Fuck. I'd never had a seizure or tried eyedrops before. Eventually all I could see was a fugue-white color, sort of a beige. The acid felt absent, absinthe, absinthe, alliteration. That's what this moment was, it was wormwood.

Sarcophagus sleep shit shit shit shit on a stone tablet. I was laying on my back, on the hard pavement. Numbing pain all over my body. Fuck drops. What's with this shit? Why does it have to be the crackle of fire and distant moaning. What the fuck. I tried to shout, but it came out as a raspy whisper. "Fuck you fuck you fuck you." I can't get up.

While laying on my back I tilt my head painfully and see, not spiders or angry cats, but the empty once-windowed doorframe of Vanguard's exit, a warm fiery glow dancing on the top of the top of the walls inside the building. The stars in the night sky are so unusually bright, and it's so dark here except for the fires. I briefly paused to admire them. I could make out constellations I had never seen before, and the night sky was a marvelous moment of relief.

The windows to my limousine were barely available, and it looked like they were missing all their glass too.  I can't feel my legs. This shit has some kind of numbing affect. Fuck me of all people to make an anti-drug PSA. "Jake?" I tried to ask, but it was still a whisper. I took a deep breath, and my chest hurt. The air smelled like fire and ash mixed with diesel and gasoline, but there was something nasty, adrenal and sour hanging over the air that I couldn't recognize.

I tried to place my arms at my sides to prop my torso up and look at the vistas. Glass is falling out of my hair. Fires everywhere -- in the club, across the street, in the cars that partially lined the streets, in the vast hotels and office buildings miles away. A bobcat is snarling angrily at me, and wants to eat me. There's fucking broken glass fucking everywhere, too, given a faint sheen by the firelight. And fucking more bobcats and lions. They're circling. They know I'm down, I'm weak. They were in the road, down the sidewalk, inside the entrance to the club. And every window I could see didn't have any glass, and every inch of the ground. Some buildings were missing and everything was fucked up. My legs are fucked up. was it the lions?

I saw some other stuff I don't want to describe. I figured out where Jenny (Jessica?) was but I couldn't find Jake. "Jake?" I asked again. I laid back down on my back and gazed at the night sky. The stars were so much brighter than usual. I had nothing else to do, so I stopped and admired them. There was an amazingly bright patch of four to five stars with four hooking arms of stars flanking them. Or was it three? I connected the white dots into a man on his hands and knees, but it occurred to me that the stars looked more like an origami swan... or was that a swastika? I laughed, but then my chest started to hurt again.

The fire in my club was getting brighter. Is it real? I looked over and it looked like it wasn't making it over to the sidewalk. Just the circling animals. And I can close my eyes, and see these strange, surreal, fractal patterns all at once as I'm terrified of being eaten by an animal. This trip is really bad I think I'm hurt, I can't move, something's really wrong. Only the perfect lines intersecting at a  point comfort me. "Jake?" I asked. I wanted to see my friend Jake.

It was then that I heard his familiar voice. From my back, I saw him standing over me now, in his carefully groomed black suit, with his carefully combed hair, his BT. "I'm sorry," he said. Voice clearer. Pain sharper now. "Cell's not working, looks like an EMP sir." Fucks an EMP? Jake had a lot of presence, and he wanted me to calm down.

"Am I going to be OK?" I asked Jake. He had a deeply pained look in his eyes I had never seen before. "Yeah, you're going to be fine." I'm not buying it. I whispered "What the fuck do you mean?" in an unusually polite tone for those words.

"You remind me of President Clinton," he said. "I don't fucking care if I--" "You're having a bad trrripr. You need sleeps." He reached into his right suit pocket. "Jake what the fuck are you--" and then Jake got on his knees, and he lifted me and held me in his arms. A drop of something wet landed on my head. "Listen, I love you boss man, and I'm sorry you're in the shirt." "Jake, what the fuck are you--" I asked one final time and he cut me off again. I didn't see the pool under me until now. Fucking lions. We had never been particularly close, but Jake held me like a child. I felt comfort... I felt him touch the side of my head, and I saw another bright light.

That's how I got to this moment. The LSD is gone, and all that's left is just a bright light. Clarity. Illumination. No matter what happens, I'm only certain of one thing - when this is all over, I'm leaving vegas for good.