Special note to any teenage children I may one day have: Anyone who does drugs is a moron. Don’t do drugs. They will kill you and make your boobies fall off. It happened to your aunt Rebecca, and that’s why you’ve never heard of her. But we keep her boobies in a box to remember her terrible lesson, and if I ever even smell pot on you I will put them on you while you are sleeping, and you will wake up with a dead woman’s boobies on your forehead. Now, skip to the next chapter, because I’m about to start writing about having sex with your father.
PREFACE: There isn’t really a preface. I just wanted to see how many paragraphs I could fit in before actually starting a chapter.
PREFACE ADDENDUM: Four. The answer is four.
I was eighteen the first time I did acid. And it was awesome. And horrible. And also I was kind of an idiot, because I’d managed to unintentionally wait until one week after I could legally be charged as an adult for drug possession.
My friend Jim had been doing acid since he was fifteen, and I was captivated with his stories of LSD experimentation, including his recent drug-induced epiphany that the one thing that brought all of mankind together was our common possession of nipples. “I mean . . . we all have them, right?” he asked me feverishly. “And what possible reason is there for men to possess these useless body parts unless it’s an undeniable sign that men and woman are all one in this giant, cosmic soup that we call the universe?! Men and women . . . we’re all the same! It’s all relative!” He’d called his epiphany “The Theory of Relativity,” until someone pointed out that that already existed, and so he grudgingly changed it to “Jim’s Theory of Relativity.” At the time I thought it was brilliant, but at the time I was also drunk.
I was both terrified and fascinated by the idea that there was a whole world known only to acid users, and I was completely intrigued by the accompanying drug lingo that Jim so naturally bandied about. I longed to “have a connection” in the drug trade, and I felt that the only way I’d be able to use this phrase in good faith would be to sleep with a pharmacist or to meet someone who occasionally sold speed. The latter seemed easier and less likely to end with VD. And also I didn’t know any pharmacists.
Jim once told me about the time he was waiting at his house for some friends to pick him up so they could drop acid together. He decided to get a head start and took three hits while his mom was watching TV in the other room. Unfortunately, his friends had also decided to take acid a little early and found themselves completely high and driving to Jim’s house, which would have been extremely stupid and dangerous except that they were actually sitting at the dining room table just thinking that they were in the car, so it was less dangerous and more just really stupid. And they stayed at that table for the next four hours, because none of them were willing to get out of the car, since no one knew where the brakes were. It was basically the longest car ride in the world that didn’t actually involve a car. Meanwhile, Jim began doodling on a phone book in his bedroom, and he’d just finished drawing a little stick figure when the little stick figure dude came to life and said, “Dude. Draw me a fucking dog.”
This is when Jim realized the drugs had kicked in, and when Jim’s mom walked in a bit later and an enormous eagle flew past her and landed on his bed. Jim told me that the stick figure started screaming, but Jim ignored him, because he was high, but not so high that he didn’t realize that talking to a drawing on a phone book would probably look suspicious.