Look at the Kitty

Back in 1978, when I began taking LSD, its status had fallen sharply from what it had enjoyed just a few years previously. All the experienced heads grumbled about acid. "It's all cut with strychnine and speed," they'd lament. "They make it for high school kids now," I'd be warned by freaks in their early thirties who apparently hadn't noticed that I was high school age myself and would then launch into glowing remembrances of orange wedges with STP boosters that caused them to think they were in Peter Max posters with flames shooting from the backs of their heads. Their deprecations of the current crop amazed me, as I never failed to have extraordinary experiences under its influence; in fact, I was almost glad that I'd arrived on the scene when I did, because hearing descriptions of the trips they had had unnerved me. "You get the feeling of being on acid with this shit, but you don't see all that wild stuff," they'd claim, providing examples of roses sprouting from brick walls or trees turning into glowing computer consoles to illustrate what I was missing. Although I'd had some first-class hallucinations of my own, with eyes open as well as closed, nothing like that had ever happened to me. I figured that sometimes you just show up to the party too late.

In later years I learned that street LSD is generally exactly what it is purported to be. Because so little of the chemical can produce an effect, each individual hit is of nugatory wholesale value, and any adulterants that might be added would cost far more than the drug itself, thus cutting into profits rather than enhancing them; as well, the tiny pieces of blotter paper or microdots or gelatin squares on which it was dropped could not accommodate any decent amount of strychnine or speed or anything else that an economically challenged drug manufacturer might think of adding. The problem, as it were, was just a matter of dosage. Back in the 1960s and early to middle 1970s, a hit of acid might contain anywhere from 100 to 500 micrograms, whereas I was unlucky enough to have arrived in time for kiddie doses of 50 mikes. Of course, I was fond of taking two hits, and I certainly caught some glimpses of the fabled wild stuff on those occasions, but even then, others who took the same amount still complained that the bloom was off the rose. And so it continued for many years.

In the late 1980s I was offered some LSD by my friend Laura. She, her brother Jim, and I were sitting in her apartment on the South Side of Chicago around eleven at night when she gave me a hit to bring back to Urbana. Not wanting to wait, I asked Jim if he'd be interested in splitting it with me. "Ask Laura if she'd like some, too," suggested Jim. So I asked her, and she replied that rather than splitting a hit three ways, we might as well take one each, entering the kitchen to give Jim his and then swallowing hers as I swallowed mine. It's just a hit of acid, I thought. This will be fun.

As a hint of what was to come, Jim asked Laura, "Is this stuff four-way?" meaning that each hit contains enough for four decent doses.

"I wouldn't split it four ways," smiled Laura, an acidhead of renown, "but what does that tell you?"

A huge white star exploded in front of my eyes about twenty minutes later. I jerked back in my chair, startled, and looked at Jim to see an expression of wonderment and concern on his face. I had noticed nothing else, no tremors, no queasiness; having a major vision be the very first sign of my intoxication was new to me. A half an hour later, as I watched Laura's face break into a Cubist portrait that would have made Picasso jealous and then sport Calderesque ornaments that hung from her by intricate filigrees and spun, shaking vibrations into the air, I knew that I was finally privy to the Good Old Acid I'd heard all those heads talk about a decade before. Everywhere I looked, something marvelous was happening. The walls, once dingy and yellow under the incandescent light, were now living Isfahan carpets pulsing in a tangle of colors. In the bathroom, while taking a piss, I had to run my hand along the wall and then up and down my torso to convince myself that both were vertical, because the room was tumbling like an amusement park ride. I had a great time; no fear or paranoia spoiled the mood, probably because any nagging portion of my superego that might have tried to foul things up had been temporarily euthanized by the sheer force of the drug. Jim and I have since dubbed that night "the galactic meteor storm," for such it seemed.

Other hits of acid came and went after that, and I decided that Laura's acid, having been obtained in San Francisco, was just some dealer's private blend and that I'd never see its like again. I was wrong.

Spring had come to east central Illinois, and warm, spicy breezes filtered through the dogwood petals and magnolia blooms to smooth away any memories of winter, such as it was down there. One Saturday my friend Mitch and I realized that no more perfect time to take LSD could be presented to us. He got some and came by my house, where we ate it, washed it down with water, and then sat on the front porch of my house, watching traffic and pedestrians on Green Street zip by and waiting to get off. An hour and fifteen minutes later, when normally I would be feeling fine and high, not much was occurring.

"Well, if I stare at those bricks in the walkway, they . . . maybe . . . look a little warped," I offered.

"I don't knoow . . .," replied Mitch, who spoke in a cadenced, nasal manner much as William Burroughs must have during his immemorial youth: no rasp, but the pauses and emphases were pronounced, almost musical, and drawn out like taffy. "Reeeally, I would expect mooore by now. This aaacid is buuullshit," he concluded.

"You know, we should check on Annie," I said. "She was going to try some of this same batch today, I think." Annie was my Welsh friend who described herself as a feminist-pagan-atheist-witch-bisexual-communist, and she and I were inseparable back then, drinking Bushmill's and discussing points of Kant or Schopenhauer with her colleagues at the university's philosophy department, among whom I had become a de facto member. I recalled that she'd found some acid, or "yummies," as she was wont to term the stuff, and had planned a voyage of the mind herself.

"I bet Aaaannie is really piiissed," drawled Mitch. We got up and walked all-too-steadily across the street on our way.

Our minds remained unmarred by anything more than a slight thrill up the back of the neck as we traversed the four blocks from my house to Annie's. I kept waiting for something to announce the chemical's arrival into my bloodstream, but no-no rush, no feeling of dizziness, no flashing colors seen out of the corner of my eyes, no afterimages as a cardinal flew right in front of me. I'd taken placebo acid before, and maybe my chump number had come up once again.

Annie lived in a duplex, and we had to enter the hallway to knock on her door. Mitch waited behind me as I raised my fist, and he probably wondered why I stopped with my hand in midair. The white-painted door was now covered in purple wrought-iron patterns that clearly had not been there a second before. I took a deep breath and knocked. And knocked again. No answer came from within.

"I guess she's not home," I said, feeling something like an approaching hurricane swirling in my head as we walked back outside to the sidewalk. There I saw our friend Ray walking toward us. He was about a half block away when we first spotted him. I could tell that he was upset about something. His face was indistinguishable, but the air around him was rippling as it does above a very hot pavement in summer, as if he were some white-hot object on two legs bobbing toward us. When he got closer, I could see that his expression matched his aura, and after coming up to us and saying hi, he told us how he'd just been driving around with another acquaintance of ours who had been behaving quite recklessly, finally causing Ray to open a door in the middle of traffic and demand to be let out right there. The driver complied, and there he was, radiating orgone energy that curled like serpents in the troubled atmosphere.

We took our leave of him and walked toward the campus. I surely must have mentioned what I'd just seen to Mitch, and he certainly must have reciprocated with some similar description. The world was getting odd indeed, and we were the very vectors of oddity.

My memory kicks in about four blocks away from Annie's house. We had just crossed Lincoln Avenue and were walking along a bike/pedestrian path under the shade of some twisted pine trees. Sunset was coming on, and a flock of burnished orange and red and gold clouds hung in the air before the brilliant orb near the horizon. As I watched, perspective became unhinged, and suddenly clouds were floating right in front of my face or thousands of miles away-I couldn't quite tell which. The sun could have been a Frisbee of fire not twenty feet from my head. I gaped as I walked into the spectacle.

"My visual coortex is fuuucked," declared Mitch at that moment. We continued on our way toward the quad and the principal university buildings.

In front of the library I was swept up in a vision of a new religion that I could found. Surely, I had all the requisite knowledge and spiritual inspiration, and the tenets of my new faith would be commonsensical yet grounded in absolute truth and love such as can only emanate from divine planes of existence. Pages of my holy books danced before my eyes, and I saw millions of votaries making pilgrimages and adhering to my doctrines. They lit candles and did good works. I was regarded as a savior of humanity. It all made such perfect sense. But then stark horror grabbed me by the heart and lifted me off my feet as images of sectarian warfare crowded around me. Men on horseback and in tanks shot and stabbed and ripped at each other, screaming and swearing as they died; blood flowed into gutters and clotted along roads thick with fleeing refugees swathed in greasy, grey rags; and many cursed my name for having ever brought such evil into the world.

"No, NO, I can't do it!" I cried, clutching at Mitch as if he alone could deliver me from the disaster I was so close to unleashing.

"Calm dooown, you . . . won't end the wooorld," Mitch reassured me. I am not sure how or if he knew what I was afraid of. I took his advice and a few deep breaths and soon forgot all about my religion, given that the sidewalk was now breathing and undulating under our feet. I say "our" because not only I but also Mitch was having trouble walking in a straight line. We were drunk on LSD. At one point we came upon a stretch of ground without pavement; it was muddy and covered in ruts from bicycle tires and footprints, and I stared amazed as it turned purple and grew and shifted around on itself. Neither of us dared to step in it, and we edged around it carefully as if it were an uncaged lion that hadn't caught our scent yet. Somewhere the Led Zeppelin song "Dancing Days" was being played at full blast from what sounded like but couldn't possibly have been a revolving Leslie speaker. The Doppler effect had its way with Robert Plant in the air around us. Neither of us were speaking now because the world was so much with us as to render speech impossible. We endured walking past a frat house football game. Several cops drove by us. We ended up at last back at the quad.

The summer stars had come out, and so had the Deadheads, wearing their mass-produced tie-dyed T-shirts, strumming guitars, and playing-surprise!-Grateful Dead songs. They lounged around on the lawn and sat on the stone benches and stairs along the south side of the student union. The sky was purest indigo against the stars, which were blazing and disappearing and reappearing and forming intricate webbed patterns among themselves as we staggered upon the scene. I paid no attention to the hippies, being drawn instead to the most adorable thing I had ever seen in my life.

Sitting on top of a garbage container was a calico cat. Not a calico cat, but the calico cat, the one Plato envisioned when contemplating the essential nature of calico cats. It was white and orange and brown and tabby striped and black. I could hear it purring. Light streamed from its fur. I had never seen a cat, or anything, like it before. Enchantment poured from its eyes into mine. It loved me. My mouth opened involuntarily. I had to speak, to acknowledge this moment.

"Oh, LOOK at the kitty!!" I gushed, walking with gelatin knees in a lazy line toward the cat with my arms outstretched. It grew more lovely as I got closer, but then my vision blurred. Damn acid, I thought, not now! This is real! Squinting like a mole, I managed to get the cat back in focus and advanced on it, my hands open and ready to feel its warmth, to hold it and cuddle it. Such cuteness as that was surely to be treasured forever.

About ten feet away, the cat still regarding me with its lambent face, my vision went quite fuzzy another time, and yet again I had to squeeze my face into knots to bring it back into resolution. I could smell its scent now, sweet and musky, from five feet away. The cat looked up and then dissolved into a smudge as I neared it, my arms closing on it, my hands about to touch its fur. I adjusted my eyes once more.

I was standing in front of a garbage receptacle with my hands mere inches from a greasy McDonald's bag. Two straws protruded from the bag, and a french fry had poked a hole through it as well. I noticed that the Deadheads' music had stopped. Dead quiet reigned. I took a breath and then sidled slowly away with my back to the no-doubt-entertained crowd, finally finding a stone bench some distance away from them. I was too high to feel embarrassed; I just felt noticeable and exposed.

Mitch appeared suddenly; I don't know where he had been during the kitty incident, but having arrived, he excused himself to go inside and piss. I sat and attempted to roll a cigarette, which was difficult because my arms had grown about forty feet and my hands were now some distance away over the lawn. I couldn't make them do my bidding. As well, the lights on the dome of the auditorium at the quad's south side began to dance and multiply, filling the sky like aurora australis. The tobacco fell to the ground as lights swirled in the air and I could do nothing but watch and wait for Mitch to return.

The evening ended rather plainly; although I recall trying to cross at a major intersection and fully appreciating the old clichÈ of feeling like a rabbit (or deer) in the headlights-we waited about five minutes before gathering the nerve to trust the traffic signals-not much else of that evening brings itself to recall. (Annie later told me that she'd been unable to speak in English during her trip; although her thoughts originated in the tongue of Churchill, they had exited her mouth in perfect Welsh, which made communicating rather complicated.) At one point later that night, I closed my eyes and entered a universe of peacock feathers, and some day I hope to return there. But that calico cat will live with me forever, a reminder of why we shouldn't ever take ourselves too seriously or think that our perceptions are an accurate reflection of the world as it is. How much of our lives do we spend grasping at what we think are kitty cats but are actually fast-food refuse? The answer, if one were forthcoming, would likely make us all wonder why drugs such as LSD are necessary, at least for a little while. Why get fucked up when we are fucked up? Then we might conclude that in such revelatory misapprehensions we find the seeds of truth, lying dormant until just the right moment arrives to water them with human folly, that consummately nourishing and plentiful substance. But that is not the most appropriate metaphor. Rather, truth, like a cat, rarely comes when called; it shows up when it pleases, which is often when you've spilled something tasty on the floor.

© 2000 Gregor Everitt