This is a good story that demonstrates why I’m so weird. I’ve been to the fucking edge, man. My mouth got me in way over my head with some serious people.
I was subletting a room in downtown Berkeley, California, in and around August of 2010. A Japanese kid named Ryutaro was the one on the lease, and he was in Japan for the summer, poor kid. I also had a roommate who was a Japanese Buddhist monk, also a poor kid. I was an absolute terror back then, and I never remembered to take my shoes off at the door.
There are a whole lot of stories surrounding how I got there, but many of them sit in my unfinished drafts cloud until I become confident that I can do them justice, like I want to be able to.
At that time, I was at my peak daily alcoholism, like shaking in the morning before having a drink to get steady, drinking cooking wine and mouthwash alcoholism. I didn’t have any friends. I had alienated my best friend with my drunken fuckery, who was my only person out there.
So I would go to People’s Park, a park in town specifically designated for homeless train-hopping gutter punk kids to squat in. I met a bunch of people from the hippie traveler cult “The Rainbow Family,” and of course, I invited them over, insulted them, got punched in the face, and robbed of a skateboard I was borrowing.
A lot of things happened that summer, but I wanted to get at the biggest one that changed the course of my whole life. Around this time, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh were playing in a band with a bunch of younger musicians that was called “Furthur,” after the Ken Kesey Acid Test bus. They were great, and I’d prefer them to Dead & Company if I had to take the Pepsi challenge. Just fabulous jams, I still listen to the soundcheck I saw that spring in Angels Camp, CA.
One weekend, they were headlining a festival in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, so of course, I was there with a cooler full of beer, and of course, I snuck in and saw them. I also saw a bit of Nas and Damian Marley before security escorted me off the premises.
I did know some East Coast hippies from back in my East Coast festival days that were there. East Coast hippies have to go to Northern California at least once, it’s in the rule book. They have to trim bud, and back then, they had to mail it back to the land where pot wasn’t yet legal. Once again, it’s in the textbook of how to be a wook in 2010. I ended up hanging out with my favorite festival cohort Kye, and we were having a good old time. We tripped out, drank beer, and climbed the hills of San Francisco.
This is when I got way over my head. We met somebody who represented some kind of legacy hippie mafia LSD syndicate, dropping the names of nobodies who are somebodies if you spend your time in parking lots outside of jam band concerts. I won’t go into who Fast Eddie is here, but some readers will know the name. Kye bought a sheet, which isn’t a huge deal out there, 100 hits, whatever.
I did something in my drunken mania that really wasn’t a good idea: I told the LSD kid that I wanted a half-gram of raw crystalline LSD, and I would buy it the next day at my apartment in Berkeley. Of course, I didn’t have $1,200;
He followed me around for the next few days, waiting. “hey man, this is my job, you don’t want me to lose my job, do you?” he’d say.
i’ll tell you what crystal raw lsd is, if you are not familiar with this form. its the pure LSD crystal from the laboratory, that gets diluted with grain alcohol before being soaked into the blotter paper that most people are familar with. Now LSD dosages are calculated in micrograms, which are one millionth of a gram. if you want to trip out pretty nicely, you'd eat about 150–200 micrograms by my estimation. i didnt put in an order for micrograms though, we are talking about .5 g.
once the acid kid realized i was never going to come up with the money, he pulled a prankster move. I didn’t hear about what actually happened until about a year later, when i talked to my freind about what kye had told him.
it was said like this: “you ended up wearing the half g”, meaning i was dosed with an amount of LSD that was astronomical. the experience lasted over a month, in waves of intensity, and i had to move back east to be treated for acute psychosis.
my mind was doing crazy things, like studying quantum theory and thinking i had a pretty strong grasp on some of the most advanced science and mathematics known to man. i might have, i don’t know i forgot. there was a drunken physicist who sat outside the liquor store in oakland, and we would talk about this kind of thing, and i could really hang, man, i swear.
my ego died, and was reborn.
it got so scary, eventually i was convinced that MTV was making some kind of reality show out of my life, and that everything was being filmed. i thought they were sending me messages through the FM radio. the combination of my pre existing mental illness, and the heroic dose of powerful psychedelic drugs had me totally lost in the proverbial sauce. there are all kinds of intricate hallucinations and delusions associated with that time, I won’t get into them all.
my poor family back east had to deal with me in that state, plus i required alcohol at all times just to keep the edge a little duller than it tended to be. i ended up hostpitalized numerous times and prescribed benzos, which werent supposed to be mixed with my daily alcohol requirement.
i don’t really know how i came out of it, but i eventually did. Good thing i didnt end up like Syd Barrett. It left a mark, though. i was never good at selling or trafficking any drugs, and this is probably my most egregious failure.
not a good wook, not a good wook at all.
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