Mayday! Mayday!

 

 

Poets have sung the praises of the grape for millennia; others wax emphatic over the distilled grain. Some few extol tobacco for its service as the writer's crutch, and this writer must admit to wishing he could avail himself of it without becoming its slave as he once was. Others whisper prayers to cannabis, once loudly dubbed Vijaya, "Victory," by the Hindus; to psilocybe, the Aztec flesh of the gods; to peyote, the seat of Mescalito; or to the drowsy poppy, nodding its empty red head over the summer fields. Raising one's voice high for these sometime helpers, sometimes hindrances, sometimes murderers is as old as the hills on which the vines grow and the hashish ripens. But in the past hundred years, the fields have given way to the laboratory, and the sun has yielded to the fluorescent light, shining on the white-coated men and women who mix and craft new drugs. Thus, LSD has received the encomia of Kesey and Paz; amphetamines, of Kerouac and Cassady and Turrentine; heroin, of Burroughs and Carroll. All have been added to the lengthy missal of Stuff What Fucks Us Up Good, and every copy is well worn, with pages stained and thumbed and folded over for easy reference. And ancillary volumes appear weekly, as ravers gobble MDMA and ketamine and GHB and a host of other space-age concoctions. Yet as I leaf through the pages, I can't help but notice that my favorite drug of all is sadly missing. My muse, waking at last from catatonia and with trails still zipping past her eyes, has nudged me out of bed and to my desk, where I now begin to add my own contribution, hopefully worthy of its fellows, to this tradition. I sing the body 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine, or MDA.

The Shulgins, to be sure, have treated MDA as well as a host of other arcane phenethylamines, but their work is meant to be empirical, of aid to scholars and clandestine cerebronauts. They focus on reporting the effects more-or-less as one would in a scientific journal, however bizarre the results. I would place a platinum crown on MDA and lead it down the aisle, shaking slightly and pale as mist, for all to appreciate; I leave dosages and set and setting to others. A song has no footnotes and no references, no tables and figures, and singing, albeit prosily and without accompaniment, is what I am about.

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MDA is a curious chemical with characteristics of both amphetamine (as evinced by its full name) and mescaline. Its baggy-trousered sister MDMA, or Ecstasy, produces a trip that lasts no more than four or five hours, but an MDA trip usually lasts about twenty-four and combines the best aspects of speed and psychedelics. It has a down side, of course, like everything, and MDA's can be as scary as a clown in a dark alley holding something behind its back. Years passed before I wound up whistling past the graveyard in my head, but most of my reminiscences take place in full sun.

I began by saying that MDA hasn't been chronicled in literature, but now that I start in earnest, I see that either the introduction will need to be revised or this sentence shall remain as a testament to my flawed memory. The first I heard of MDA I did not hear but read, in a short story that appeared in High Times circa 1978 or so. In it, a woman awaited her lover, sitting at a table piled high with what was to be their wedding (or ersatz wedding) feast; an hour before he was to arrive, she took 500 milligrams of the drug in an orange capsule. Love did not conquer anything that night. She was stood up, and weeks later her friends found her, still seated before the rotted food with spiders doing their best to trap the humming flies all around. The combination of her abandonment and what was described as an overdose had caused her brain to fry. "Just like Miss Havesham," one of the characters offered, likening the unfortunate pseudobride to the woman in Great Expectations who sat in vigil for her groom, still in her bridal gown, withered and gray with age. Or so I think, anyway, as it's been years since I read that story and fewer but still many years since I picked up that particular Dickens. Despite the ominous tone of the tale, I was intrigued. The fact that it was called the Love Drug did much to recommend it to a horny adolescent such as myself, although the fact that I thought a chemical could cause sex to happen ex nihilo, let alone love, proves how adolescent I was.

Not much later, while I was still fifteen or maybe just sixteen, my drug buddies mentioned some local dealer having MDA for sale. They were a few years older than I, and I was barely tolerated among them as a combination mascot and butt of jokes. But I was privy to their contraband transactions, and luckily I had enough pocket money to buy what was purportedly an eighth of a gram of MDA, purportedly because, like cocaine, this was a white powder that grew more complicated and less potent with each progression to the final sale. And the sale was made. We all bought some and gathered later that afternoon in the local forest preserve to enjoy ourselves.

I had never done this particular drug and did not know what to expect. After about an hour of standing in the leafy gloom by a picnic bench covered with graffiti reading GENESIS IS GOD or KING CRIMSON or FUT YOU (a reference to our friend Zoom's speech impediment, which prevented him from articulating the \k\ sound), the dark became velvet and tactile. I felt rather elated, I supposed, certainly not just high from the sixteen or so joints we'd smoked. In retrospect, I felt more under the influence of an opiate than anything else; my thoughts, often white capped and rapid, grew smooth and mirrorlike. Soon we decided that a fire must be built, and the perfect source of firewood lay nearby. Scrambling like Marines up the embankment, rustling through the underbrush, we emerged onto the train tracks that bounded the forest preserve to the west. On the other side of the tracks, the vast black hulk of a building whose exact purpose none of us knew was framed against the fading chiaroscuro of twilight. We referred to it as "the heartbeat of the Glen," the forest preserve, because some machine within it pounded in rhythm for hours every day. It was silent and dead now, but in its slumber was our good fortune: piles of creosote-soaked lumber neatly stacked, just on the other side of the wire fence. The more agile of us clambered over and, two by two, lifted and hoisted the huge beams, while the more earthbound or wasted ones, such as I, went about the task of picking up the wood, dragging it over the tracks to the head of the trail, and sending it plummeting to the bottomland below. I was feeling less high than numbed; colors were pretty, and my arms felt as though helium rather than blood were hissing through my veins.

As I was bending down to grab a beam, another shot over the fence and landed, corner down, right on the back of my skull. It bounced right off. Eighteen or so pairs of eyes suddenly focused on me, waiting for me to fall or for blood to start spurting from the broken shell that had been my head. Pain touched me, or just grew near enough for me to feel the air disturbed by its approach; I stood up, noticing Venus burning white and perfect in the smoggy yellow shading into sapphire; and I felt wonderful. No pain. Just relief and even joy.

"Oh, my God, are you OK?!" cried my normally macho friends, running toward me, grabbing my shoulders and looking in my eyes, perhaps searching for the injury they could not find on my outside.

"Yes...I'm...fine," I replied. I was more surprised than they. The beam at my feet had to weigh at least fifty pounds and was trying its best to look innocent. It should have killed me, I thought. And yet the absence of pain melded with the colors of the dying day to produce in me a sense of belle indifference, of ataraxia. I was a blowfish full of grace floating in a sea of cobalt blue shot with sun. In later years I attributed this to a rescue on the part of my deceased paternal grandmother, and I am not convinced that I was wrong in thinking so.

That near-trauma over, we finished our task and slid back down the hill to light a fire and enjoy the effects. Only those of us who had taken an eighth of a gram were lucky enough to enjoy them. Soon, as those members of our group--most of them, the louder, cockier, meaner, more well-financed and arrogant ones--who had gobbled a quarter of a gram or more began getting off big time, we less dosed and more blessed ones were treated to a number of hypotheses. This isn't MDA at all, it's a mix of MDA, PCP, and heroin. This is very bad MDA. I think this is acid mixed with heroin and cocaine. Oh, man, I'm fucking losing it. Shit. Shit. Shit. And so on. Being the recipient of much abuse, I can hopefully be forgiven for attempting to score some payback. I walked up to one of my companions and regaled him with a description of a scene from the Beatles' movie Magical Mystery Tour in which the tour guide, Mr. Bloodvessel, directs the attention of the daytrippers out the left-hand windows, through which the landscape glows in lurid, bloody, algae-soaked tones. I thought it might freak him out a little, but I was not prepared as he shrieked and flew from me, crashing through bushes and over tree stumps. Everyone watched him as long as they could until the firelight no longer shone on his blonde hair, and then they turned to me in various hallucinated expressions of blame or disbelief or incomprehension. I still felt no pain and no remorse. I can't say what it was we took that night, although I am sure it was not primarily MDA if at all. The episode appears here as an example of the false start; because the substance was sold as MDA and well could have had some admixture of same, I include it.

A few months later, someone else obtained a quantity of white powder alleged to be MDA and offered it for purchase. This time I had a job and a mission: to take the real thing. I forget exactly where I got the stuff now, but I do remember walking toward the apartment building--one of many, in truth--in whose inside landing we would bravely huddle and smoke joints during cold weather. I had taken the drug about an hour before, and the taste was amazing in its wretchedness. People bitch about peyote tasting bad, but I've sampled peyote, and it's nothing compared to the metallic horror of MDA. As you swallow it, you feel your esophagus turning into an old length of lead pipe encrusted with the residue of a thousand ill-cooked and greasy dinners. But as we approached the brownstone building, something struck me in a way that I am not sure anything has ever struck me since. A kindly supernova blazed in my head. I recall thinking, This is what ecstasy means. This is ecstasy. Happiness bubbled from every cell in my body, while my vision grew acute and eaglelike: I reveled in the absolute linearity and angularity of the architecture, and the branches of trees revealed their secret blueprints, once so arbitrary but now so exact. I was confident and charged and ebullient. My conversation grew increasingly empathic and yet proactive; my friends must have been amazed, although they knew of my experiment. We smoked the joints and then reemerged into the January of Chicago. The rest of the day is lost to my memory now, but I knew I had the real deal. I loved MDA. I loved myself. I floated above snowbanks in my own private May.

Whether I had taken a full quarter-gram--again, contents are shipped by weight, not by actual volume, in the world of white powders, and those "lucky" enough to receive the true dosage often end up like Janis Joplin--or an eighth that day is not mine to recall, either. Compared with what came after, that first, sweet taste was just that, a taste. I knew I wanted more, much more. If X produced Y effect, then X2 or even X3 was what I was after. Thus, when my friend Bob Semola informed me that he was buying several grams of MDA of impeccable quality, I needed no further inducement to hand him the requisite $40 for a gram to call my own. Bob was one of the more interesting characters of my acquaintance back then. He was a huge guy, a veteran acid fiend, and a Beatles freak par excellence. He also had a reputation as a bullshit artist, and he was certainly one to tell a tale on occasion. But from the vantage point of the present--I was going to write "in all honesty," but somehow that seems infelicitous--he was probably less of a liar than many in our sick little group. He just uttered untruths for entertainment, as embellishment. The lies in which the rest of us were mired were structural rather than ornamental, buttresses rather than gargoyles. I look back fondly on him as well because he was generally friendly toward me, whereas partying with the other folks in the forest preserve was often like partying with werewolves bound by a shaky spell that would keep them from plunging their fangs into my carotid only as long as the stars were right. And he was always generous with his drugs and eager to think up new excuses to take too much of them. Doing some MDA with him would no doubt be a great time, especially the three-quarters of a gram he proposed. "Everitt, it will be GREAT, I tell you! We'll be tripping our fucking NUTS off," he exclaimed, his eyes popping and his arms jacking upwards like hairy ham hocks attached to fishing line. Being three times as high as I'd been during that lovely winter afternoon sounded perfect. I was ready.

Summertime had come to the Glen, and our days were spent smoking and drinking and tripping and either running from the cops and rangers or staying put. Two schools of thought obtained here. Those who favored running stressed the fact that almost all of us were in possession of illegal narcotics at any time and thus should flee the law; those who favored sitting still, as if Amway were calling rather than guys who probably got teary eyed recalling the 1968 Democratic Convention and had pet names for their nightsticks, posited that acting innocent would invite no response from them; that is, the pigs would expect us to run if we were holding, so stay put. Usually, running was more fun, unless we had all taken downers and ended up resembling a crowd of palsied Keystone Cops, falling all over each other, running into trees while looking backwards, and finally scratching at the ground to throw ourselves into thorn bushes and down a stumpy hillside while the police stood, jaws dropped, not daring to wonder what we were on and not wanting to fill out the paperwork. They had not yet arrived that day, and by four-thirty in the afternoon, we felt invincible. This was the day, I thought. Bob will be here soon. He said he would be. I hope he's not shitting me this time. He wasn't; soon his bulky form shook the leaves framing a trail from the train tracks, and he advanced toward me, grinning, patting his pocket. After some requisite small talk, a sentence or two, we got down to business. I handed him the money and he handed me my baggie, tied off into a corner, full of that lovely white snow. In keeping with our pact, we ripped ours both open and threw our heads back, mouths wide, to receive the drug. It was even worse than the time before; someone handed us a beer to wash it down, and the sense of metal was overpowering. I smelled it; I tasted it; and soon I'd be it. Hardly any was left now; we'd probably done more than 750 milligrams. We retied the baggies, stuffed them in our pockets, and set about waiting for the fun to start.

A typical crowd of freaks had gathered that day, perhaps about fifty or so of us. Some were classmates of mine from Catholic grade school who had since moved on to decadent high school careers; others of public or parochial lineage had already graduated from high school--or would have, had they not been thrown out for various drug-related offenses. One buddy of mine got the boot from Schurz High School when a narc drove by and saw him lighting a joint wrapped in a telltale strawberry rolling paper, for instance. The ratio of boys to girls was probably about five to one; most females were a little wigged by our consumption patterns, and besides, most of them wanted to go to the discos and dance, whereas we all found the disco craze to be horrible beyond words. We sat at another picnic bench, this one under a pavilion right next to the parkway of the forest preserve, smoking joints, watching traffic whiz past across the vast lawn, hearing birds sing in the trees, smelling the not-so-fresh Chicago breeze, and generally wasting time as only adolescents can. Time passed, and still I felt nothing. Every so often, Bob and I would lock eyes, examining each other for telltale signs of the awaited onslaught. We looked away as soon as we could tell we were sober.

In his orange T-shirt, Bob was now standing up next to the picnic bench and regaling some lucky listener with a story, perhaps of his own devise. Then he walked over to me.

"Ev, you know what?"

"What, Bob?"

"Here's the deal. When the cops show up, we're going to say hi to them."

"Why would we want to do that? Are you insane?!"

"No, it's simple," Bob explained, his smile white below his dark moustache. "We'll walk up to them and ask them if they're having a nice day. Then we'll tell them we're tripping our brains out on MDA. And then we'll run into the woods. And they'll never, ever, ever be able to catch us because we'll be so high."

"Are you sure about that?" I asked. It sounded like the sort of suggestion one should humor.

"Absolutely, Ev! This is going to be great!" Then he went back to his side of the picnic bench.

I stared out over the lawn toward the road. At the time I didn't notice, because that part of me capable of noticing a change in my consciousness was itself being changed, but later I surmised that the effects must have been coming on before I really could tell anything was amiss. I do know that later, folks told me someone next to me had been whispering, "Ev, are you freaking out? Are you freaking out, Ev?" into my ear because my face had taken on a frozen, pale expression and my eyes had started bugging out of my head. I don't recall having heard a thing, but on some level, I must have.

What I do recall is seeing two piercing, bluish-silver stars, one a little brighter and bigger than the other, bloom above the green grass and then slowly drift to the left. As they picked up speed, electric-blue trails followed them, leaving a snail-like streak in the air. Sound became jellied, and then, or so I think, I heard a whoosh and a hum such as the sun would make if it were operated by turbines. Then the world split in two and came undone.

Any acid fancier is familiar with trails, the afterimages left when an object moves through the field of vision. They can be monochromatic or in vivid color, and sometimes they are triggered by rapid eye motion as well. I didn't call them trails back then but tracers, a term used only in that neighborhood of Chicago's Northwest Side at that time, I guess, because I've never heard it since; someone later explained to me that it was Vietnam lingo for the visual effects of gunfire at night. Whatever one called them, I liked them, but in moderation. Everything before me was now shooting tracers that mixed with other tracers to form webs and patterns that clearly meant I was losing my mind forever. Death didn't cross my mind; I knew I wouldn't be so lucky. Every solid surface was lost in a maze of outlines. Pure terror gripped me as the specks and graffiti on the bench spun and danced and entered new dimensions. My head felt as though it had popped open like a milkweed pod, and I was helpless as my fluffy thoughts tumbled away. Control over them was now as futile as trying to control the sky. Bob's dancing form became a surreal cartoon floating in the air, the outline of his profile and T-shirt and body limned in orange and blue and fleshtones. I could not speak. I had ceased to exist and was now only nominally conscious insofar as I was the helpless recipient of a sensory tidal wave. I had no ego. I was no more than a screen on which events were being projected. Even now, I shudder to remember those moments, or minutes. Many times since, when I have taken too much of something or another, knowing that I had gotten through that experience has given me hope that I'd make it through whatever pharmacological challenge I'd issued myself. But I had no hope at that point. As much as I could think at all, I knew that I would never be the same again, that I had completely lost touch with reality. My synapses were white hot and about to blow.

I must have sat there, mute and horrified, for some time before I got up and staggered away toward the distant water fountain. Maybe walking would help me. I am sure that laughter followed me on my dizzy way, although Bob was soon walking with me; no doubt, despite his much greater body mass, he felt similarly besieged.

"Ev, are you going to be okay, man?" Yes, he sounded panicked, too.

I couldn't answer. My mouth wasn't working. My hands were shaking as the air congealed into the colored rubber strips found inside superballs and the ground moved below me, seemingly divorced from whatever plodding actions my feet and legs might be taking. Together we walked toward the fountain, under the shade of many trees.

About fifteen feet from the fountain, I felt the earth shift below my shoes, as if it had reappeared after a brief siesta. The horror faded and was replaced by its polar opposite. Suddenly, I was not merely in heaven; I was God. The sun's light now shone equally from every cubic inch around me and not merely from its accustomed disk in the sky. In the midst of my own personal Miracle of Fatima, I stopped and looked up and pointed at something. It didn't matter what it was.

"Bob, will you LOOK AT THAT?? LOOK AT THAT!!!"

Bob glanced up and then back down at me. His grin stretched across his face. "Everitt, we are fucking high as hell. Motherfucker," he giggled.

At the drinking fountain I managed to take a swig of water, although my throat still felt like tin, and the water tasted of aluminum. We turned around, and then the terror began to insinuate itself once more. This wavelike function is typical of MDA and of MDMA as well, although it's much stronger in the former. One thinks that the effects have waned, and then blam, they're back. Every few minutes, I'd be granted a moment's reprieve before plunging back into the drug trance. But after that second wave, whose fright was fractional in comparison to the initial horror show, every subsequent moment of my trip was, to quote Chaucer, bathed in that liquor of whose virtue are the flowers engendered. The visual universe was more in focus; in fact, I took my glasses off and found I could see better than ever without them. Tracers still zipped unbeckoned here and there; colors were vibrant and infinitely graduated; and everything gleamed as though it had been polished, but the world was now spinning at the same speed I was. Bob and I looked at each other, smiled, sighed, and walked back to the pavilion.

MDA produces a social relaxation and volubility in its subjects such that you could happen upon some stranger who had gotten a flat tire ten miles up the road and you'd be more than happy--willing, even insistent--on walking the entire way with him so that you could listen to him talk and share your life story with him as well. It makes you generous and benevolent. Even though most of the people whom we were approaching were barely what I could call friends, I greeted them with all the quiet love of Jesus, which did as good a job of scaring them away as anything else I could have done. As well, my friends Tim and Jerry, two brothers of a large and dissipated family whose house was the site of parties as soon as their parents were halfway out the driveway, were hosting that weekend, so many drifted off in search of free beer. In a short while just Bob and I sat on the bench, listening to the world's hum, the molecules spinning and whirring all around us, everything surrounding us poured perfectly into its assigned patch in God's paint-by-the-numbers kit. I am sure we were talking, but I don't recall about what. Surely it seemed profound at the time.

At length we noticed some people headed our way. They were vaguely bad news, the sort of guys you wouldn't want to get pulled over with because they might have an illegal knife on them. As they approached, Bob inclined his head toward me and said, "Now, remember, Ev. When the cops show up, we tell them we're high and run. We don't want to get associated with these assholes. OK? We've got a deal, remember?"

"You got it, Bob," I replied. Even from the vantage point of the glass mountain on which my consciousness was perched, I rather doubted we'd be that bold. But we didn't have any problems making a show of friendliness to the semisleazy interlopers who sat down with us at the bench and produced a joint. Ah, good for something, they were. Unfortunately, they also had a boombox and a Ted Nugent tape. Back then I hated Ted Nugent's music, and I still do for the most part. Take heed, o reader, that the following doesn't happen to you. As we sat smoking and chatting, the song "Stranglehold" started up, and at some point during the groovy guitar solo in the middle, I found myself entranced, hanging on every snap of the drums and every whine of reverb. My God in Heaven, I thought, I'm so high, I like Ted Nugent. I really did. And to this day, I still enjoy listening to that song and being taken back to that day in 1979.

My reveries were halted when one of the tow-headed fellows craned his neck and looked over our shoulders. "Here come the cops," he muttered. The two of them began grabbing tapes and baggies and preparing to either stay put or run. Bob looked at me, looked behind himself at the advancing car, now pulling off the road and into the long, curved parkway leading into the woods, looked at me once more, and nodded. Without a word, we sprang from the bench and flew from the pavilion, leaving our erstwhile companions to fare for themselves as they saw fit. As I'd guessed, we didn't have the courtesy to greet the police after all.

The forest preserve had been a gravel pit at the turn of the century, and entering it was thus a matter of descent. Our feet moved of their own accord, as though we were standing still or paddling like dogs in water while the earth revolved beneath us. Down the hill and into the green shadows we sped, serene and charged and laughing with the sheer joy of velocity. We passed various landmarks, most of whose names I have just now realized I've forgotten--Camel's Hump, King's Court--and after a few minutes of trees falling past us, we found ourselves a big fallen log and plopped down. I am much more athletic today than I was then, and it's a miracle I didn't have a coronary on the spot. We had covered at least a mile in what might have been record time. The two of us panted and grinned in the security of the forest, which was like an overly permissive mother to us all. Looking to the west, we sat in silence as the sun pushed its rays through the branches and leaves. My vision was so hyperclear that I could distinguish millions of shades of green and brown. A dear friend of mine has described how he could see trees growing while under the influence of methamphetamine, and I know exactly what he means. Leaves jostled, trunks stretched, and new rings in their cores formed, pushing bark to the surface. In my case, I could hear them thinking, too, the wordless impulses of the vegetable soul. Third-dimensionality was exaggerated such that perspective looked artificial. The rank smell of the river nearby merged with other, more pleasant scents of the forest to wrap around us like a blanket. Electrons hummed against my eardrums. Whereas the world had been twirling beneath us before, now all was solid and grounded, ineffable and unimprovable. When I am about to die and my life flashes in front of me, I hope I can hit a freeze-frame button and dwell on that scene for a good long time.

At length, Bob broke the silence.

"You know what, Everitt?"

"What, Bob?"

"Everitt, this is the highest I have ever been in my life--"

"--and liked it?" I finished his sentence for him as we both cracked up briefly but then snapped back into solemnity. Laughter seemed like a profanation of something as grand and sacred as the world around us.

Memory lapses at this juncture. Somehow we must have traversed the several miles on foot across the neighborhood, perhaps even braving Foster Avenue, until we walked into Tim and Jerry's backyard. The sun was now setting, and about twenty freaks were splayed out on the huge telephone-pole logs that the brothers' father had stored there for some unknown purpose. The latest album by U.K. was blaring from an open window; the organ's staccato bursts flowered in my head.

Word must have spread that I'd had a bit of a hard time earlier, because upon seeing us, everyone got up from their spaced poses and advanced on us, smiling. "Ooh, Ev, are you freaking out?" asked Jerry, his teeth bared in a half-friendly, half-mocking smile.

"I was, but I'm sure not now," I sighed. "I feel fucking phenomenal." I smiled at Jerry. Both he and his brother were among the few guys I could really call friends from that group. I was never physically attracted to them but enjoyed their intelligence and, of course, their love of drugs.

"Well, do you have any more mayday?" inquired Jerry, jokingly.

The giving spirit of the chemical rose from my heart. "Sure do," I replied, fishing in my pocket for the remaining bit of powder and handing it to him. "Here you go."

Jerry seemed genuinely shocked that I would take him up on his request. "Really?"

"Yeah, sure, go ahead, man, this stuff's excellent!"

"Wow, thanks, Ev," he said, looking at me with genuine gratitude and respect. He opened the bag, and I watched as the MDA poured onto his tongue, causing him to gag and wretch. "AACCKK!" he sputtered as Tim ran over with a beer to wash it down. Bob had gone inside to look for a Beatles album, and I took my place on the log pile, watching as Venus and Jupiter blazed on the twilit horizon.

Unlike an acid trip, the MDA experience is not so much visual as it is emotional and even spiritual. Tracers were still flagrant everywhere, and colors had been sharpened to millions of gradations, but none of the florid patterns or distortions of LSD were to be seen. Instead, I floated in and out of myself, a perfect mote in the galaxy, at peace with everyone and yet energized and active. I carried on conversations with alacrity, finding a new interest in my friends and acquaintances, and then, noticing that my body was making certain requests, I excused myself to go inside to pee.

In the bathroom I saw myself in the mirror for the first time since I'd taken the drug. Never since have I seen my eyes that dilated. They looked like dishes of blackest caviar; my irises were but a razor-thin green rim around my pupils. I stood staring at them for about five minutes. Somehow, the knowledge that my eyes looked that way thrilled me. I wish they could look like that now, with or without the drug but preferably with, of course.

Later that evening, I recall being up in Tim and Jerry's bedroom, listening to music on headphones. They weren't present. The Genesis album Trespass was on the turntable, and as the song "Visions of Angels" began, my euphoria reached a peak that I'm not sure has ever been surpassed. As a young altar boy I had been assigned to Benediction of the Host, and nothing had happened: I might as well have been praying to a potato chip for all I could tell. But now I felt what I had been hoping to feel then: the presence of Something infinitely powerful and tender focusing on me and approving. The guitar and piano rippled under Peter Gabriel's throaty voice. The notes struck my consciousness like pebbles falling in a pool of water; concentric circles of myself radiated out far beyond where I could see, yet I could feel myself continuing onward, flying into space and yet never any farther from home sweet home. I put that album on just now and listened to it on headphones, and even today the music brings tears to my eyes. Take that, William Bennett.

The party must have broken up at some point, and again, my memories do not reach that far. I remember being back at the forest preserve around three or four in the morning with Bob and some other people. We stood in the cool darkness, with streetlights and houses emanating normality some distance away across the lawn, smoking joints and talking. I was seeing beautiful patterns like spiderwebs forming everywhere I looked. Suddenly, we heard someone or something on the tracks not a hundred feet away.

"GgrraraARarARAaAHAHRGGhgHaahahhaAAAAAGGRGGGHH!!!!!!!" who- or whatever it was roared. I almost pissed in my pants. Surely a human had made that noise, but had I heard it in a movie, I would be hoping for the sake of whoever was on screen that they had wolfsbane or a silver bullet handy. In the quiet of night, its ferocity and bestiality was all the more terrifying.

"Who goes there? Who goes there?" called out Bob, trying to sound manly and in control, although his voice was shaking. "Who goes there?"

"GrrRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGH!!!!!" answered the Thing on the Tracks.

Some instinct warned us to shut up and stand perfectly still. We heard rocks being disturbed as our visitor moved along in silence. After a while we dared to whisper again. A few minutes later, when Bob excused himself to piss in the bushes, we huddled.

"Did you hear Bob's voice? He was fuckin scared, man."

"Man, if someone like Bob is freaked out . . . holy fuck . . . what was that?"

Probably it's best that we never found out.

I must have walked home just before dawn to sneak into the home shared by my grandparents, mother, and siblings that was perched just above the Kennedy Expressway and to creep into the bottom bunk in the dining room so as not to disturb my brother above me. When I awoke, I gazed at the wire support for the mattress overhead as it suddenly warped and flowed like maple syrup. Oh boy, here we go again, I thought. It was about noon when I got back to the forest preserve, where I smoked a joint and found myself very, very high once again. One of MDA's hallmarks is that after you think you've come down, all you have to do is get stoned and boom, you're back in the clouds. The day passed in delightful fashion, a sunny reprise to the fireballs of the day before.

Bob and I did MDA together one other time. I was supposed to go in to work that day, as a telemarketer for a semilegitimate policemen's organization, but instead I opted to dose myself with a quarter-gram. Walking on the lawn of the forest preserve that day, I saw individual tufts of grass like toothbrush ends, each one a slightly variant shade of green. The trees as well were distinguished in their verdancy. Green ceased to be a referent worthy of the ink it takes to print the letters; it had been subdivided on the atomic level such that entire dictionaries would have had to have been composed to capture the resultant new vocabulary. I was happy and washed in the pleasant, active buzz, but of course, nothing like what had happened to me the previous time was to occur.

A few years later, after my family had gotten its own home on the South Side of Chicago and I'd insinuated myself into the local underground, one of the local dealers offered MDA for sale. It was a new commodity in that neighborhood, and when he found out that I was familiar with it and loved it, he chose me as a booster. My zeal was nothing less than messianic. I extolled its virtues to all my buddies and soon was ringing up sales left and right for the guy.

I'd invite people up to my room, which my mother allowed me to maintain as a drug den as long as no alcohol was permitted, and offer them a glass of cool water into which a quarter-gram of the miraculous, vile powder had been dissolved. They'd raise the glass, down its contents, and then grimace, shaking their heads. An hour later, we'd all start giggling and crying, "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!" as the rush hit. (A friend of mine has told me she shot up MDA a few times, and I can't imagine why anyone couldn't just wait an hour or so. The effects are instantaneous enough taken through less invasive means; you go from completely sober to utterly high in seconds.) For many months, we'd sit up there and "sizzle," as we dubbed the act of being high on the stuff, listening to The Moody Blues or Mahavishnu Orchestra or George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, which quickly became a six-sided anthem for me and my merry crew.

This would have been during the fall and early winter following my graduating from high school in 1981. Everyone I knew was tripping every other day. I'd be up late at night on windowpane, watching the walls go trapezoidal, when a snowball would thunk against the window and I'd descend the stairs to let my visitors in. With eyes huge and wild, I'd greet them.

"I'm on acid. Gee, don't you guys look high!"

"We're on mushrooms, except for Steve, who is on MDA."

"Cool! Come on in."

And so it went for months and months.

During the course of our tripping, I began to notice that MDA had a distinctly sexual side as well. It made me incredibly lustful. Once I was on the stuff and talking with a very muscular and handsome friend of mine when I felt my spinal column and brain get an erection. I don't know how else to describe it. My dick remained quiescent enough, which was good given that we were in mixed company and I had no intention of making my homosexuality public at that time, let alone providing a demonstration for the crowd, but I felt my entire nervous system stiffening, becoming engorged, throbbing and pulsing. A clicking noise, as of some meter registering a dangerous level of something, was loud in my head. I managed to keep my conversation as lucid as I could. After everyone left, I masturbated and had seven or so seismic orgasms in one hour. I was eighteen years old, of course, but even then I was impressed. I kept hard and couldn't stop ejaculating after a minimum of stimulation. However, it may be that I was just young and horny, because on MDMA, so close chemically and yet so far, I had the experience once of an ejaculation sans orgasm. My erection was none too solid, and although the act of sex was enjoyable just in terms of emotional closeness, I wasn't very turned on. My partner kept playing with me until suddenly I felt muscles tense up and sperm flew out of me without a smidgen of pleasure. It was like a sneeze gone south. I think I said "Gesundheit!" and thoroughly blew the mood. Perhaps that extra methyl group makes all the difference; I don't know. I do know I wouldn't mind certain experiments under the influence of mayday at some point.

One night a bunch of us were sizzling like sparklers up in my room; among our number was my best friend at the time, Mark Gonzalez, who was half Spanish and half Irish, very dark complected and hairy. I wanted him very badly, but I also really liked him as a person. He was an accomplished musician and loved getting high just as much as I did. I had taken a quarter-gram of MDA the night before, and for once I decided to relax my usual one-day-of-rest rule--I figured that tolerance would set in fairly quickly with this psychedelic as with the others--so I took another quarter-gram, even though I was still not quite back to normal from the previous dose. I felt the effects kick in, and then something horrible happened.

A voice began piping in my head, saying I hate Mark Gonzalez over and over. I went all cold and began to sweat.

"Greg, are you doing alright, man?" asked Mark, his eyes wide with concern and intoxication.

"Oh, I'm cool." I smiled back while trying to find the mental invader within, to kick his ass, to make him leave me alone. But he wouldn't. I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez STOP IT SHUT THE FUCK UP I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I DO NOT! HE'S MY FRIEND YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez OH MAN THIS SUCKS I hate Mark Gonzalez I hate Mark Gonzalez

Not wanting anyone else to know of my distress, I twisted my facial muscles into a grin and did my best to enjoy myself despite the uninvited antiphon. As I look back on that night now, I am amazed that I got through it. The anguish of having part of me express something so antithetical to my conscious self combined with the terror of loss of control and the metaphysical horror of wondering what other monsters might be lurking in my subconscious cannot be described, and if I could convey it accurately, I'd probably be liable for whatever lasting damage that paragraph might cause my readers. Five days passed before it went away, and I decided that I'd had enough of MDA for a while.

Subsequently, I started noticing millisecond lapses in my consciousness. I'd be sitting reading and suddenly I could tell that I hadn't been there for a bit, just long enough for me to notice. When I smoked pot, the effect was quite pronounced and alarming, and I actually quit that, too. I did some research and found that my symptoms sounded rather like petit mal epilepsy. I had an electroencephalogram done at a local hospital, but it turned up nothing. "A fraction of a second? Come back when they last a minute or two," laughed the doctors. I took to writing rather than drugging. A few months later, I began studying shamanism and witchcraft with a woman who was friends with a friend, and I cautiously began getting high with her again. The lapses had stopped, and soon I was bold enough to take acid again. All was well.

In the summer of 1983, MDA flooded the neighborhood yet once more. I'd grown quite casual about psychedelics by this time, munching on peyote obtained from a friend of a friend who was a member of the Native American Church and eating mushrooms almost reflexively, and when someone offered some mayday for sale to me, I bit. We ended up at my friend Mark's house (a different Mark) and spent the evening sizzling on his front porch during a brilliant thunderstorm. Toward dawn, when the storm had passed and we were slowly regaining sea-level consciousness, we watched as a huge cloud shaped like a lobster with claws outstretched rose above the horizon and sailed directly overhead.

"OOOOOh, loook at the lobster!!" we all shouted, pointing and laughing. The cloud's benevolence was unquestioned. The lobster was our friend.

As luck would have it, a week later my friend Sam's house was offered as the site for an extended binge while his parents were away, so he and my other friends Mark (again, the Mark with whom I'd seen the lobster cloud), Pete, and Sharon showed up there one night to party. We didn't take the mayday until at least eleven in the evening, and as usual, an hour later we all assumed the poses and exclamations of the mixed joy and panic of the initial rush, rolling on the carpet and screaming, laughing and calling out.

Sharon was a very slender, blonde woman who worked as a model. She was one of the many women who had begun to find me quite attractive. After having been a nonentity on the hormonal radar screens of those around me during my teenage years, suddenly I was a large, glowing echo. Unfortunately for those females and me both, I was not even remotely bisexual, which is a shame because I would have been getting laid continuously. I didn't have the balls (or wheels) to get to a gay bar and render myself unto the local populace for use and abuse, and given the epidemiological stirrings of that era, that may have been God's grace expressed on my behalf. As it turned out, I was not the only one to find MDA erotically charged. Sharon, who had always been quite friendly toward me, was now waxing most forward and sluttish, sucking in lingering fashion on lollipops while gazing deeply into my eyes. All I could do was turn away embarrassed. When she'd leave the room, the other guys would counsel me, "Come on, fuck her!!!" I responded by making some ridiculous (even to me) excuses about her not being my type. True enough, I suppose, as I was already finding myself drawn to hairy, bearded men, and Sharon was neither nor. But despite those moments of weirdness, we all had a great time. The group of us had gone in on two grams, and we kept dosing ourselves during the night and into the next morning, when Mark excused himself to go to work as a chef in a local restaurant. My sister Maureen showed up and we gave her a little, which caused her an hour later to start skipping around the property and giving throat to various inarticulate cries of abandon and glee. Sam had a crush on her, and I totally approved, but nothing happened to my knowledge. She merely danced like Nijinsky through the sprinklers and sang.

While lying on the shady hill that was the front yard, which overlooked a major street in that toney neighborhood, I was given a Polaroid camera by Sam, who was and probably still is a very talented photographer. I focused on the sun through the trees, and when the image came out, reflections in the lens and the camera itself conspired to create an almost human image, as though an angel were descending. Throughout my many peregrinations since, I've kept that photo. In light of what someone else saw a few hours later, it may not just be a trick of the light.

 

Morning became afternoon, and still we were licking our fingers, sticking them in the remaining baggie, and popping them in our mouths with a shudder. I had more experience with MDA than anyone else there, so I took less and less, just enough to keep me awake and high but not enough to send me into hyperspace. I'd been there once and wasn't sure I would be welcomed so warmly for a return visit. At some point, when Sam, Pete, and Sharon were really being hogs, I made some comment about how they might not want to take quite so much, because, well, you know, it's, like, powerful stuff. They all paused, considering my warning, and then went back to their drug taking. They were soon to be sorry.

The heat of the day sent a few of us inside for relief and few of us outside to baste in the sun. I was inside with Pete when suddenly he stopped talking with me and stared up at the ceiling, moving his lips as if still speaking but not to me. Then he got up and very purposefully walked over to the kitchen counter, still miming a conversation and making gestures at his invisible interlocutors. This was not good. I ventured into the baking oven that was the world outdoors and found Sam lying on his back on the grass in full sun, his pale Irish skin almost smoking under its force.

"Sam?"

Sam's face, framed by sunglasses, remained impassive.

"Oh, Sam?"

Sam stirred, smiling faintly. Then he propped himself up on one elbow and replied, his grin becoming Grinch-like, "Sulu, get us the hell out of here."

Oh no. That makes two freakout victims.

"Um, Sam, do you have any Vitamin B? I think Pete is freaking out."

"Why do you need vitamins?"

"Because Pete is talking to people I can't see in your living room."

"What does it matter?" mused Sam, still showing all his teeth. "You're just going to make tea out of them."

I quit Sam, hoping he wouldn't burn too badly, and returned to the living room to find Pete now rather agitated and walking across the room back and forth, scaling whatever furniture got in his way of completing a straight line. I gazed in shock as he climbed up a cabinet and then fell right on the cage housing Sam's parents' pet cockatiel, which was unharmed but escaped, screaming and whistling and flying around the room as Pete began wailing and flailing his arms at it. The air filled with afterimages of its white wings.

Sharon appeared in the doorway, pale as bone under her blonde hair, dripping sweat, clutching a heavy wool blanket over her shoulders, and shivering. "Iiiiii'mmm freeeeaakkinggg outttt," she whined. "Heeeeelllpp. I feel coolddd. Iiiii'm reeaaaaaaaaallyy frriiiiiiiiiiieddd."

"YAAAAOOOO!!!!!" howled Pete, now wrestling a pillow.

The effect this had on me, of course, was to wash me in gratitude that at least I was not having a psychotic episode, although I could tell I was not far from one myself and could be hurled over a mental precipice at any moment given the proceedings.

The phone rang. And rang again. We all stood still, and then Pete got up to answer it. Sharon and I, realizing the implications, tried to race him there, but we lost. He seized the phone.

"Hello, Darla's Wildwood II Cleaners," he said in a clipped, professional voice. He told us later that right when we'd been chatting in the living room earlier, the ceiling had parted and a long, silver stairwell had come down from heaven. Scores of august old men with platinum hair and silver eyes and white robes were filing toward him down the stairs two by two, and he assumed that they were customers of his at the dry cleaner's at which he worked. However, they didn't have their tickets, which caused him to get up to what he thought was his work desk but was actually the kitchen counter and try to reason with them, because he couldn't give them their clothes unless they had their tickets. Those were the rules, after all. But Sharon and I didn't know that; we did know that whoever had called Sam's house didn't want their clothes returned. I reached over and grabbed the phone to discover, as I had feared, that it was Sam's father. I tried to be rational and reassuring, but I could think of no good excuse for why I was there, why Pete had answered the phone as he had, and why I was starting to giggle and snort. (The answer to that last mistake was that Sam's father had a brogue so thick as to be almost impenetrable even without a head full of chemicals.) I managed to convince him that Sam was ill (mentally, surely he was by then) and that I'd taken it upon myself to mow the lawn for him. He said they wouldn't be home until midnight or so.

The bird was still rampant, shrieking and dive-bombing us, and it got tangled in Pete's curly hair several times, biting us in the process of freeing it without injury. I got Pete and Sharon lying down, gave them water, and then went outside to find Sam lying face down and licking the dirt. He was guided inside, too, and ushered to a couch. Then I figured I might as well take some more of the stuff myself to stay awake. And maybe just a little more to make life meaningful. Hell, another fingertipful couldn't hurt, could it?

Five hours later, while the rushes of my follow-up doses were kicking in and making me run around the house, touching houseplants in an attempt to transfer some of my high to them, Mark showed up. He regaled us with the terrible saga of kitchen work while tripping. Knives had gleamed silver and evil under the bright lights, and vegetables had looked waxy and poisonous. Every dish he had created seemed as though Lucretia Borgia had supplied the recipe. He had hated every second and didn't want to be inside.

"Let's go out. The moon's coming up," he suggested.

Pete and Sam and Sharon were now more or less sane again, although I was rather unhinged by the experience of calming them down as well as my more recent dosings. We emerged from the snaky shadows of the oak trees surrounding the house and made our way toward the road, turning back to soak in the daguerreotype panorama of the sky.

"OH MY GOD!" exclaimed Mark. "LOOK! LOOK! IT'S BACK!"

My eyes focused on and then recoiled from the heavens. There, sailing from the east, with the full moon's glare at its back, was the lobster cloud. But this time, we could tell it was not our friend. No. This was the avenging demon lobster from the Pit. I could see the barbs on its claws, the fangs in its hungry mouth. It was headed right for us. Sam got noisily sick and went back inside. Sharon walked off, a blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, with Pete following her down the peaceful street.

"Greg, let's get the fuck out of here!" muttered Mark. We ran for his car and drove back to my house, where he produced a joint. We hadn't had any pot on us, which was one of the motivating factors for the MDA binge in the first place, and we'd made a constant chorus of "Oh, how I wish we had something to smoke" during the entire twenty-four-hour affair. I really, really need to get stoned and just relax, I thought. That will make everything just fine. He lit up, and the heavy scent of fine sinsemilla filled the room. We passed it back and forth until it was done, and then I put on side three of All Things Must Pass while Mark reclined on my bed and I lay back on my couch.

The opening chords of "Beware of Darkness" chimed in the room when I decided I might want a bit of water. I found I couldn't move. I was pinned to the couch. The marijuana and MDA, combined with my lack of sleep and psychic damage from dealing with the freakouts, had potentiated each other and paralyzed me completely. Thank God we hadn't had any pot, we'd be dead, I thought. I was still breathing, and I seemed to be blinking, but I could not consciously move a muscle, not a bit. Fear mixed with lassitude and intoxication. I'm going to die. It's nice to be home again. Where does the couch end and my back begin? I am way too high. I hope a spider doesn't drop on me from the ceiling now. The music sounds great. I can't move. What is Mark going to think? I lay there, staring at the ceiling, unable to so much as shift my head off the pillow, and I fell into blackness sometime after the tone arm left the album and returned to its post automatically.

The sun hit my face the next morning, and I saw that Mark had gone. I felt shamed, thinking that he probably saw me pass out, tried to rouse me, gave up, and left shortly after. Later that day, he called to say that he, too, had been stricken with paralysis and had walked out the door only an hour before I awoke.

***************************

This story, this unlikely song of mine, seems unfinished to me, and I suspect that it is. Were some of my once favorite chemical to appear before me right now, I am sure I would be tempted, but even more surely I would respect it. MDA is a Janus-faced substance, obviously the work of human hands. I could always tell when getting off on it that my brain was encountering something not of nature, something alien, something benevolent or malevolent not by design but only incidentally, by accident. It's the square peg that tries to fit in the round holes of our brain's receptors, and it expands them with consummate beauty. Most of the time. Still, I have no regrets. As I said earlier, many times I've found myself amidst the mental equivalents of the rings of Saturn and have taken solace in the knowledge that once I was reduced to my component atoms somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and lived to type the tale. I remember that day with Bob Semola and the silver-blue stars over the lawn, and for that reason alone I am thankful for my experiments with the drug. Some day I may take it again, and I am sure I will enjoy it immensely, but until then, I listen to All Things Must Pass, recently rereleased on CD, and take pleasure in my memories. MDA, I'd have you any time, but I hope it's not any time too soon.

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt