1976

 

 

I’m sure I’ve told this story before, probably over qualified and without the sound effects. The song should be embedded, and whether you like it or not crank it to kind of get the idea of what the experience was like and I’ll try not to editorialize.

I had come back from the east coast with this stuff I had won in a poker game because dude didn’t have the cash to cover his bet. He called it crystal T; it was homemade PCP, yellow cake like it had an ether base. It was late autumn here in south central Michigan, no snow on the ground but cold. My friend Joe and I were parked behind the Ponderosa steak house waiting for the manager so I could pick up- a check.

 

Bored, we open the baggie and cut a couple of fat lines, coke being the only frame of reference we had for any kind of powder, discretion being the better part of valor we made the lines smaller, still too much. How the fuck were we supposed to know. Ten minutes later we are going through the back door and the kitchen of Ponderosa, stepping only on the white tiles because we couldn’t tell how deep the black ones were. The manager, an alcoholic, made fun of us for being drunk. I’m sure we leered at him in the least drunk looking leer ever. Ten minutes seemed … fast.

 

We lived together in this house with our girlfriends and another couple, a much nicer house than a couple of 16-year old’s … shit, no editorializing. It was about six blocks away across one busy street and then sleepy little residential streets. I remember breaking for a falling leaf because I had no idea how fast it was falling or how much it might weigh. That was maybe forty minutes into the experience. Not really worried yet.

 

Oh, shit. 1976, turning quickly into 1977, a few major blizzards weeks away.

 

So, we finally park in the driveway, as one does, proud of how normal that seemed. Walked to the door like we were used to walking and to doors. Opened it and went inside. It was warm, felt like a blast furnace warm, all the cool green and purple colors that were under my eyelids went red and orange. That was the first time that night I thought “PCP is not a hallucinogen”. And that fucking song was playing, loud. Listen to it, and rotate your senses 90 degrees. We stood there in the sort of open foyer, there was a sunken living room, and though the foyer wasn’t cloistered it wasn’t sunken. People talked to us, girlfriends, and Louis, our friend who passed away earlier this year.

 

They filled in some of those blanks, kind of, Joe and I went outside and spent what felt like a long time laying on the cold ground looking at the sky and talking ourselves through what was way too intense of an experience. This is usually one of the places I editorialize. We talked ourselves down, the house was too much and no one else quite understood and a hospital would have been too much.

 

Some time later we went inside. Again, some blanks were filled in, I don’t know how accurately. What I remember next I usually editorialize and qualify. I’m just going to tell it as I remember it.

We are sitting on Pam and Joes bed, cross-legged facing each other, unable to make eye contact, still trying to keep each from being too high. I finally see Joe with perfect clarity. He is looking into his hands, he has a gauzy veil covering something, he peels the veil off, it’s a deck of cards, backs up. Oversized tarot cards. The backs read brotherhood of light with a pyramid and in the typical depth perception trick of the evening the pyramid seems three dimensional. He throws a card to the floor face down, another and another and finally at random he flips one over, the empress with seven sabers above head and a slave’s neck stretched on a block. I puke, but not like BLARRGH but a long, high stream that hits the window and breaks it letting icy late autumn wind in.

 

Guests and girlfriends had crazy stories. Repeating them is a lot like editorializing. It was a few years before I could listen to Catch Bull at Four again.