On Acid in Emporia
I have a general rule that I will not discuss drug-related issues on this blog, for all the obvious reasons. When I say "drug-related issues", I mean instances where I have been on drugs. Of course, it's only happened a couple times, so it's not a problem I have to confront often.
I feel that there is a sort of statute of limitations in play when it relates to drug issues. I'm old enough now where I can use the standard, "When I was in college..." disclaimer, and not have any stories reflect on me as a person today. Now, my parents, my parents-in-law, the Government or my employers might feel differently about that.
But you know what? If I only wrote what my parents, my parents-in-law, the Government or my employers wanted me to write, this wouldn't be a very interesting blog, would it?
So, then.
I went to college in Emporia, Kansas. It's a cow town, literally, with a huge IBP beef processing plant the town's main employer. There were pits outside the plant where they would pool all the various beef waste, things like blood, hair, hooves, innards, etc. These pits would smell really bad in the Kansas heat, and in fact, they were so toxic and nasty that they often caught fire, spontaneously. And it didn't smell like steak, believe me.
Emporia was a shithole of middling proportions; the student body was mostly a bunch of slack-jawed yokels and locals, with more than its fair share of people who had had romantic encounters with various species of livestock in their teen years. Also, there were the usual frat and sorority crowds, of whom I have many fond memories from various classes. People who, in the course of a discussion about homophobia would say things like, "I ain't afraid of no fags!" and get laughs and cheers, except from all the homos in class, of which there were none unless you happened to be in the theatre department. You think I'm making this up?
Anyway, it was such a 3.2 beer, listen to country music or Whitesnake kind of scene. Fortunately, being a member of the debate team, I didn't have to experience it very often. We spent most of our weekends traveling the country, with a slightly more, if not worldly crowd, at least more interesting one.
But then the season would be over, and my group of debate friends (who were also my roommates) would be stranded in this awful berg, wondering what to do for fun. We hated the bars and we hated the people. And naturally, being loudmouth liberal smartypants, we didn't have all that many friends, either.
So, one April a friend and I decided we needed to change our existence for the better. He very casually said, "Well, we could start taking drugs." We laughed, and then realized that this was a potentially brilliant idea. Boredom equals drug use. It ain't brain science. But what to take? We both loathed the idea of smoking something, so marijuana was out. Then my friend says, "I know somebody who can get us some LSD."
Sold.
Now, I had no real drug experience, but I had the vague notion that I wanted to let my figurative hair down. In my mixed-up world where smoking something was bad (and needles were an absolutely no-no, not that we knew where to get anything requiring needles anyway), LSD became the obvious solution. The wheels of commerce were set in motion, and a trip to a cafeteria at the University of Kansas was arranged.
My friend dealt with the purchase, even better for me. He had some interesting things to say about the transaction, most notably that the guy who sold him the acid said he was looking to get rid of it, because "Acid's like having a loaded gun around. Sooner or later, you're going to use it." This gave my friend some pause, but we were content to just figure it out as we went along.
So we tried it one night, me, my friend, a friend of my friend named Caleb who was batshit insane, and some girl he knew from North Dakota. We had no idea what to expect. None. I thought a bunch of crazy pink and blue triangles were going to start flying out of the ceiling or something. Turns out all that happened was that the apartment heater exploded, we played Paperboy on Nintendo for seven hours, and, well, some other stuff happened, too.
It was a good time. We resolved to do it again. And we did.
The whole point of this story was to recount one of those nights. Nothing big happened, really. It was just a bunch of stuff strung together that fell into a cohesive whole. Why am I telling you this story, today, after all these years?
Because someone mentioned "Ironsides", the old Raymond Burr show, at work today. And damn if just hearing the word "Ironsides" doesn't make me think of this one particular night way back when.
It started with my friend and I, and two other guys we only vaguely knew. They wanted to try acid, and we had acid. In retrospect, this was a mistake, to do this with people we didn't know well. Nothing went poorly, they just didn't have as much fun as we were having. Because my friend and I, we always had fun.
We started the night on the local golf course, just wandering around in the dark on the fairways. There was a full moon that night, and there were enough clouds moving fast in the sky that it was a beautiful thing to watch, LSD or not. So we laid down on a small hill right next to a pond, which was obscured with trees. As we watched the clouds roll by, we could hear the sounds of a band playing at an outdoor festival over on campus, not too far away. They were playing these awful Pink Floyd covers, and so that was a sort of soundtrack to our cloudviewing. It was all perfect, in its own way.
But then something horrible happened. A sound came from the trees over by the pond, perhaps 30 feet in front of us. It was a growling, gutteral sound, very obviously that of an animal. And it was loud. And it was in the trees, up high, perhaps 10 feet off the ground.
Look, I know we were all on acid, but we all heard it right away, and we all freaked out instantly. See, when you're on acid, sometimes people will react to things differently. Maybe one person hears growling, the other hears a purr, or nothing at all. Maybe one person wants to investigate, or lay low.
But this was such incontrovertable evidence of a large, angry beast (I believe it was a 10 foot tall Plains Gorilla, but you can call him Bigfoot), that we all immediately bolted to our feet and ran screaming. Arms may even have been raised and flailing as we ran. We were at least 400 yards from our car, and we all ran the entire way there. My friend is a larger man, agile for his size, but not prone to 400 yard dashes. But he was right with me all the way. In fact, we left the other two guys in the dust, and considered driving away before they finally reached the car. Not a word was spoken about that event for the rest of the night.
What does that have to do with Raymond Burr?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
But then we went back to our apartment, which was in the midst of a student party riot. Seriously, kegs were being thrown off balconies, at least those balconies that weren't already ripped off the face of the apartment. It was mayhem, and we wanted no part of it. We made it back inside and calmed down, and then our friends left.
Which was all good, because they were bringing me and my friend down, big time. So we sat there are listened to the riot going on outside, and tried to calm our minds by watching Donna Reed on Nickleodian. We both loved Donna Reed. While we were watching Donna Reed, there was some weird film distortion or transmission issue, and everything on the screen started to appear in the negative form. Meaning, what was formerly white was now black, and vice-versa. You know what I mean. And the film slowed down just slightly. It got really weird for about three seconds, and it really freaked me out. I mean, that just never happens, right? I looked at my friend, and he had this look on his face pretty much like I'm sure I did. He said, "Did you just see that?" If I could have played it straight and said, "No, what?", I would have, but I was too relieved that he saw it too.
I'm almost to the Raymond Burr part.
Then, the brother of my roomate Kevin, who was an ass (the brother, not Kevin) came in with some really skanky drunk girl he had just picked up out on the balcony. Met her not 10 seconds earlier. He just walks in to our apartment with this girl, letting in this cacophany of riot sounds from the outside, a riot which I'm sure he was helping to instigate, along with about 200 other people. And this was the first night my friend and I had ever met Kevin's brother, who went to school at K-State and was only in for the weekend. He just walks in with this girl, both of them drunk as all hell, and mumbles something about a room. At this point my friend and I are sitting there watching Dragnet, and really have nothing to do but gawk at this dumbass and the unfortunate girl he's hooked up with.
Then, he goes into our roommate Jim's room. Jim was out of town for the weekend. Why he didn't go into his own brother's room, who was also out of town, I'll never know. Maybe because the door to Kevin's room was five feet farther away than Jim's door. What are my friend and I going to say about it? I mean, this guy's a drunk asshole, and we've spent the night on acid running away from Bigfoot and whatnot. We did nothing.
Five minutes later (if that), they both come stumbling out of Jim's room, hair mussed, disheveled. After they left, we both looked in at Jim's bed, which was usually made with anal military precision, but now, not so much. We couldn't help but laugh and feel a bit bad, and a discussion ensued about whether we should tell Jim. Ultimately we had to, because neither of us were re-making the bed.
OK, now I'm at the Raymond Burr part. All the stuff that preceded this was just setting the scene, and now I fear that the Raymond Burr part will seem anti-climactic to you. And in truth, it wasn't a climactic event for the evening in any way. It was just some thing that happened in the course of a long evening in which many things happened.
Anyway, our evening was winding down. It was maybe 3:00 am. The riot outside had subsided. All that was left for us to do was fall asleep, easier said than done. After some channel-flipping, my friend ended up on Ironsides. And I said, "Hey, it's Ironsides."
And my friend says, "No, this is Perry Mason."
And I'm like, "No, fuck you, this is definitely Ironsides. Raymond Burr is sitting down, and besides that, it's just Ironsides." I'm not necessarily beligerent at that point, but I know when I'm right.
But my friend persists, saying, "This is NOT Ironsides. I've watched a lot of both, and this is definitely Perry Mason."
Just then, a person on the TV show slams his fist on a table, stands up and yells, "Dammit Ironsides!"
Well...maybe you had to be there.
4:18:35 PM 
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