I grew up with a fear of nuclear war, not in the 1950's sense of duck-and-cover, but in the eighty's sense of melting, burning oblivion. Yes oblivion.
I learned early on that Christianity was a joke. Ten years of catholic school saw to that. It seems to have all started with a popular/powerful mystic back in the post-caveman days. A man of learned science could blow up into magical/divine legend in a generation or two. To die well was an art in those days.
With such things whirling in my head, as well as a host of the finest chemicals a high-school student could possibly get his hands on, I set out on my own.
I decided on my trek one morning after a particularly exhausting LSD experience. I lay in my bed sleeping for what seemed like 10 blissful days after finally coming down to my copy of Pink Floyd's "Wish you Were Here".
My Mother at the door.
I gain awareness.
She informs me that it is Sunday and demands that I go to church.
I grunt acquiescence and roll over.
She bangs and beats from behind the locked door preventing me from sleeping.
I get up, naked, and plug my pawn shop electric guitar into my old beat Radio-Shack stereo's MIC input and press record on the tape deck. Recording levels all the way up, I start jamming the only two or three bar chords I know in a rhythmic mantra I had devised the evening before in my silent room.
She rants and raves, me drowning her out rhyme for rhyme, note for note, almost mocking her with my sophomoric guitar styling.
She subsides.
I play tentatively and go off on a melodic/punk lead.
Suddenly the guitar dies in my hand. The lights go out on the stereo.
I feel the stereo's side. It isn't hot, no smoke. I wiggle the guitar cord. No sound at all.
I hear my mother screeching her victory like a harpy. She screams, "Fuse box!!! I won't let you break that guitar Goddammit! You still owe me one hundred seventeen dollars and eighty-one cents for that thing!"
I continue to jam on the now acoustic (barely) electric guitar.
She begins to realize that I will not be 'saved' today.
She bargains, telling me that if I don't go to church, I had better give her some money for the collection plate. I have no job and she gives me only 10$ for lunch each week. I wonder what makes her think I have any money since the school's lunch program provides for $1.25 lunches a day and I supposedly eat these lunches. I don't, but she didn't know that.
I was a fat kid and my method to lose the weight was drugs and alcohol and starving. I kept the 2$/day, starving, and bought the other two in whatever quantities I could muster for my meager cash.
Soon I wised up and began getting together all the money I could. With this I procured quantities for sale to my friends who used like I did. I cleaned up.
I was standing next to a stack of bills from the party the night before.
With friends, I went to a party filled with people on another type of acid. I talked a while to another dealer like myself and we each took one of the other's acid. we liked what we saw and traded three hits for three hits. He subsequently gave away/sold the acorn to his friends. He had given me Black Dragon which I distributed to my associates...
The room tripped a while and suddenly word of mouth went. I started getting people asking me for golden acorn. I had quite a lot with me as it happened, but I was tripping really hard with a bunch of people I didn't know and only a few I did.
I asked one of them to step into the kitchen of whomever's house it was and he obliged. I had a film canister filled with about 70 individually wrapped hits of LSD. The handling involved was minimal and therefore the quality wasn't compromised noticeably. I was exactingly careful with each, using tweezers caked with the greasy LSD juice soaked into each square of paper, so as not to degrade any hit's impact.
This guy bought 4.
I looked him in the eye and knew he planned on all four himself.
I had a goldmine on my hands here. I had charged him $5/hit even though he had bought four. At school or to friends, if I sold four, I'd have to drop to $4 or $3.50/hit, but here this guy didn't mind.
At that point I knew I could get rid of all of this acid tonight. If these people didn't do it all, they'd buy it up to sell to their friends, or keep it for special occasions.
I had been getting really good acid for weeks and it was always a different type, which helped to make each trip something special and keep me happy with the types of acid that went by me. I had good connections in nice, calm, crowds.
I asked the guy if I could put one onto his tongue to satisfy myself of his, and his friend's validity as acid heads and not cops.
He consented and I stuck it on his tongue.
He swallowed it and stood there for what seemed to me to be about 30 seconds.
I nodded.
He laughed and turned and left the kitchen.
A second patron entered. 6 to him at $30. Still $5/per hit. I wanted to get the line moving before the stuff was so plentiful that people tripping really hard started giving it away. Already I had 10-15 hits floating around about 25 people. They had their Black Dragon too. The next guy reassured me by buying 10 hits. I gave it to him for $45. This started people moving toward me.
One by one, they filed into the dark kitchen where I doled out individually wrapped hits of fantastic LSD to them. They mostly took it right there in front of me too. I figured that had less to do with me and more to do with the fact that taking it in the livingroom would prove difficult as there was forming presently, a line to the kitchen, with much jostling about and some wrestling, all in good acid-fun of course. No one wanted to mar the beauty that I had wrought on this little gathering of trippers.
Their Black Dragon was for the most part, a very cerebral LSD, while my Golden Acorn simply erased your word-thinking consciousness and blew you away with phantasmagoric hallucinations incomparably better than any fireworks display, art museum, movie or computer graphic. They loved the stuff, and they bought me out.
I left with a greasy stack of ones, fives and tens four inches thick. I rolled it with a hairband borrowed from a little hippie girl and soon drove my friends home from the party.
I drove perfectly and we even went driving for pure pleasure as the sun came up. I took the ferry across the Mississippi and we all ran to the rails to get the cold wind in our faces and see the sun rise draping the New Orleans skyline.
We drove through the french quarter and watched the drunks finding themselves in the morning.
We watched the homeless walking around to keep warm enough to live.
We watched the shop keepers opening their businesses, sweeping sidewalks, rolling up awnings.
We watched through our mock ray-bans and laughed and cried at the raw humanity of it all.
I finally brought them home and went there myself, tiptoeing through the livingroom to my room where I could sprawl and light my bong. I did so, and finally slept.
Until seven in the morning, when mother woke me with her church rantings. I decided to give her ten dollars. I slipped it under the door and screamed at the top of my hoarse lungs to give it to the needy.
She cried in the hall ranting her love for me and went to her room to dress for church. On her way, she turned on the religious channel on the TV, where Jimmy Swaggart, in his heyday, was preaching the gospel of money to unsuspecting widows and divorcees, like my mother.
She cranked her fine stereo TV and Jimmy boomed through the house and especially through my sensitive ears. I played Iron Man on my powerless guitar until she had dressed and left for church, Jimmy still blaring. I stormed out of my room as soon as the automatic garage door had closed.
I slapped the TV off and went to the fuse box. I turned my room back on and decided to reek out the house with marijuana and play my guitar.
These things I did for about two hours. I had allotted myself this amount of time in advance and set my alarm to stop me. It did.
I turned off my guitar and went to sleep.
I awakened in the night and found mother still (again?) gone. I figured I had slept 16 hours.
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