Back in High School I was doing acid with my three best friends one of whom was pretty severely disfigured. He was born with a bad hair lip that altered the whole front of his face but when you’re pals with someone like that you don’t even see it. Of course, if you go away for a few months and then come back or even DO FUCKING ACID WITH THEM then yeah, you notice.
As soon as we started tripping I knew this was going to be a problem. My two normal-faced buddies Dave and Christian were too oblivious to give a shit about what was going on but I could see Jamie’s face was already becoming an issue. The first evidence of this was when we went to the local bodega to- I don’t know why we went in there actually. We didn’t want any chips or anything. I think it was just for the experience. Jamie went in first and then came running back out almost instantly screaming, “You guys don’t want to go in there. It’s super bright and there’s mirrors everywhere!” Christian and Dave shrugged it off, went in and had a great time laughing at candy bars and pointing at a big cut out of The Rock. I realized Jamie was bummed out because he saw his face so I pretended I was scared of the mirrors in the bodega too and told him there was “no way in hell I was going in.” Great. Now I’m Dr. Phil here on my trip trying to make people feel better about themselves when I should be watching the walls breathe. Once you start a trip out on a bad foot you basically need a perfect record from then on.
The next incident happened a little later on in the trip. We were smoking joints in Jamie’s car when he started going through his wallet. He got to his driver’s license and rammed it back into his wallet saying, “Guys, don’t look at your driver’s license. It’s a total bad trip.” The oblivious brothers soon pulled out their driver’s licenses and had a good hard laugh at their own perfectly normal faces. Again I sided with Jamie and refused to take mine out. “All faces are freaky” was the message I was trying to convey with my solidarity. “It’s not because you’re disfigured.” It was.
The final slam-dunk-never-forget-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life came at the end of the night. We were back at our high school lying on the grassy hills out front and staring up at the stars. It was a full moon and you could still see the clouds pretty well. I had finally started to enjoy the trip and could actually focus on something other than Jamie’s face obsession. “Do you guys see the sky as slowly rotating hexagons that seem to interlock like cogs even though it’s impossible for hexagons to do that?” I asked. They did. What the fuck!? How can we both be having the same hallucination. Of course, I couldn’t get too deep into that question (a question I would still love to know the answer to. Did I put that hallucination into their heads by describing it or were they really seeing that too on their own accord? Is there something about acid that creates slowly rotating hexagons that defy physics?). As soon as I started to enjoy the sky Jamie says to me, “You know what I see?” in the softest, grossest, “here we go again” kind of way imaginable. I knew what was coming next. “I see- you know those things that have a series of like, nails in them and you push your hand on one side of them and the nails make a hand shape on the other end? You see them on people’s desks like the pendulum balls that swing back and forth…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know them,” I said, desparate to get this over with. “Well I see one of those in the sky,” he said like a guidance counselor trying to convince me to tell the cops about my dad touching me in my swimsuit area. “Only instead of a hand coming out of the other side it’s a face. God is making people’s faces with that thing and whatever you get, you get and you just have to deal with it.” I tried to act casual and go, “Oh that’s cool” and change the subject. I thought if I pointed out specifics about the sky, “That one looks like a horse eating a giant hammer” we could lose this analogy thing we were drifting into. Then he rolls over and totally faces me one inch from my face and goes, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I said, “Yeah, Jamie I do.” And then he sits up a bit so he’s leaning on his elbow and almost looking down at me like he’s going to kiss me and he goes, “Seriously Mark, do you understand me?” Jesus Christ. It was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. I didn’t know whether to kill him or just run home screaming my head off. I chose to do nothing at all.
After staring at me for awhile he lay back down on his back, stared at the sky and said, “I’m going to ask you tomorrow if you know what I mean because it’s very important to me.” He never did.
MARK CONWAY
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