Jim noticed that his mom was staring at him warily, but at this point he was so high that he couldn’t remember whether he’d asked her a question that she hadn’t answered, or if she’d asked him a question that he hadn’t answered, but he thought it would be weirder to follow up whatever question he might have asked her with another question, especially since he couldn’t remember the question he hadn’t actually asked her in the first place. So basically they just sat there having this really awkward staring contest. Then the stick figure pointed out that if the eagle was not a hallucination his mom would know he was on drugs, because what kind of guy would be all, “Oh, it’s perfectly normal to have this eagle here”? Jim laughed nervously and tried to give his mom a look that he hoped said something like “Wow. The world is a weird place when eagles may or may not land on your bed, right?”
But in reality it must have said something closer to “Holy shit, I’m fucking high,” because the next day Jim’s mom sent him to the local psychiatric/rehab center, which helped him find God and introduced him to narcotics far more addictive than any drugs he could have found on the street. When he came back he was all about lithium and Jesus, and when I mentioned that I really just wanted to try LSD, he rolled his eyes at me as if he were some sort of wine connoisseur and I’d just asked the best way to unscrew a bottle of Strawberry Hill. Druggies can be surprisingly judgmental. It’s pretty much the only social circle where the same people you just witnessed shooting horse tranquilizers up one another’s butts will actually look down at you for not being as cool as them. Unless maybe there’s some sort of horse-enema-fetish social circle, which I’m not sure exists. Hold on, let me check the Internet.
Ohholyshit. Do not look that up, y’all.
Luckily, though, when you run with drug crowds you eventually run into the perfect dealer, and for me it was Travis. He was a long-haired blond guy in his late twenties who lived at home with his parents. He always seemed to know someone with drugs but seldom ever actually had any himself, which makes him not really a dealer at all, but whenever my friends and I needed pot we called him, because he was the closest thing we had. He was more like the middleman who protected us from the “real dealers,” who we imagined were large, angry black men with pierced ears and pagers, who would probably make fun of us. To death. Also, in my mind the angry black men were all badasses and they all carried switchblades that had names like “Charlie Firecracker.” (I didn’t actually know any black people at the time, which I probably don’t even need to clarify here based on this paragraph alone.)
A guy I knew had a house on the outskirts of town and offered to host a small LSD party for me and several other people in our group who’d never done acid before either. So we called Travis and asked him to bring over enough acid for six of us that night. Travis arrived and told us the drugs were on their way, and about fifteen minutes later a pizza delivery car pulled up. The delivery guy came to the door with a mushroom pizza and an uncut sheet of acid. The delivery guy was in his late teens, about two feet shorter than me, and very, very white, but he did have a piercing and a pager (which was very impressive, because this was still back in the early nineties, although probably the pager was just used for pizza orders). His name was Jacob. Travis told me later that anyone could buy acid from Jacob if they knew the “secret code” to use when you called the pizza place. At the time I thought it was probably something all cloak-and-dagger, like “One pepperoni pizza, hold the crust,” or “A large cheesy bread and the bird flies at midnight,” but in reality it was probably just “And tell Jacob to bring some acid,” because honestly neither of them was very imaginative.
Jacob sold Travis the acid for four dollars a hit, and then Travis turned around and sold it to us for five dollars a hit, which was awkward and also a poor profit margin. We each took a hit and Travis said that for another ten bucks he’d stay and babysit us to make sure we didn’t cut our own hands off. This wasn’t something I was actually worried about at all until he mentioned it, but now that the thought was implanted in our heads I became convinced that we would all cut our hands off as soon as he left, so I handed him a ten. Travis cautioned us that if we thought the house cats next door were sending us threatening messages, they probably weren’t. And he warned us not to stare at the sun because we’d go blind (which might have been great advice if it hadn’t been ten o’clock at night). “Ride the beast . . . don’t let the beast ride you,” our wise sage advised us.
Secretly, I was worried that the acid wouldn’t affect me at all. I’d smoked pot before, but I’d never actually felt the full, dizzying pleasure that High Times magazine promised. I developed all of the side effects with few of the benefits. While my friends sprawled out on papasan chairs, overwhelmed by the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange,” I ate an entire box of Nilla Wafers and became paranoid that the neighbors were calling the cops. “Schmorange!” I’d yell, while compulsively spraying air freshener to dampen the smell. “Schmorange rhymes with orange! Now will someone please fucking help me push this refrigerator in front of the door?!”