This Benevolent Snake

 

 

During my fifteenth summer, in 1978, I began to hear the siren call of LSD. I was already smoking marijuana as though it were to be legalized the next day (of course, in those days we all thought--foggily--that it would be); surely I was ready for the Big A. Reading Wasson, Huxley, Kesey, Wolfe, and the rest of the high school-burnout Classics List convinced me that at the very least, I could expect my wardrobe to improve--at most, the knowledge of the aeons could be mine, along with religious ecstasy and an even more solid rating as an outsider.

Timothy Leary would have advised me to buy the LSD from a person of character and honesty, a true head whose guiding ethos was to turn on the masses, spreading enlightenment and bliss in his wake. Unfortunately, by the time I got on the scene, any semblance of higher purpose to drug taking had evaporated like mist in the strengthening glare of the sun, and I resorted to the leader of a street gang who had some for sale. As I write this, in the first year of the twenty-first century (or the last year of the twentieth, depending on your orientation), the words street gang conjure up a different image than they did then, although the basic idea was the same: a pack of young male thugs intent on marking their territory and asserting their masculine prerogative through aggression. This particular gentleman could easily have had me killed, but luckily I represented about as much of a threat or an opportunity to him as a fly would to a tiger. We didn't see him too often, anyway. I'd describe him more clearly for you, as I'm a firm believer in making text convey sensory cues as rich and compelling as possible, but he could well still be alive and could therefore still easily have me killed. Anyway, there he was at the forest preserve selling little green microdots full of acid, and there I was with enough money to buy one: $2.50. Acid was quite a bargain then and remains so today, or so I'm told. So I approached him and asked to buy a hit. As he handed it to me, I asked, "Is it real?" He and whatever shady buddy he had with him laughed at me gently, as one would laugh at any harmless fool, saying, "Yeah, it's real." And so I went on my way, acid in my pocket and plans in my head.

The sun rose and shrugged its shoulders over the appointed day. I can't recall which day of the week it was now, but it has to have been a Saturday, as I was in high school at the time and don't recall having skipped class or anything like that. Before going out to the forest preserve, I went to the bathroom with the acid, took it out of its foil wrapping, and for some reason, I left the exposed microdot on the toilet tank. I finished pissing and reached for the acid, at which moment Murphy, wherever he was, saw me and invoked his law. The microdot slid from my hand and fell with a plop into the yellow water in the bowl below. A great crisis of priorities ensued. Do I really want to trip that badly? Has the bowl been scrubbed recently? Is amoebic dysentery the price to pay for illumination? This was the toilet into which my siblings, mother, grandparents, and myself routinely evacuated our bowels, and anyway, the LSD might have already washed off the tiny green pill. But so resolved was I to take a trip at last that I shoved aside all these objections, reaching down to extract the green pill, now slightly slippery, from the pee water. Taking a deep breath, I popped it into my mouth and immediately washed it down with much water (and as much ceremony as befitted the occasion), finishing by rinsing with mouthwash. There. The deed had been done. Now I had about an hour to get to the forest preserve before the effects began. Or so I thought.

As usual, walking to the forest preserve took only twenty minutes or so. The sun shone through the green leaves of the trees, and the air smelled as good as Chicago would let it as I strolled through the blue-collar neighborhood in which I lived, passing brick bungalows and aluminum-sided two-stories. On arriving, it was barely noon, and no one else was there (at least, no one else in my circle of friends and acquaintances). Presently, someone else my age showed up. I told him that I'd taken some acid and that I was waiting for the effects to kick in. Our conversation (or he himself) must not have been very memorable, by definition, because I don't remember it (or him). He drifted off, and I remained, waiting for some sign that I was entering a psychedelic state. None presented itself. Sun reached through the leaves on the trees to dapple my skin with patterns of light and dark; the sky was a deep and soothing blue; and I was as of yet completely in my right mind.

Eventually, some of the rest of us began to arrive in various Mustang convertibles, on bikes, or on foot, crossing the railroad tracks just to the west that separated the forest preserve from a huge Department of Motor Vehicles parking lot. By us, I mean the local so-called freaks who congregated there like paresis-ridden hobbits, taking weird combinations of chemicals and then running at the first sign of "the pigs" into the Mirkwoodian depths of the forest proper, which had once been a gravel pit proper. Whether I suffered my copartners in crime to know what I'd done--knowing who I was back then, I probably couldn't keep my mouth shut about it--I don't clearly recall, and neither do I remember how I passed the time for the next few hours. However, at around four o'clock or so, I was coming to grips with the realization that I wasn't getting high at all. Maybe the LSD had washed off in the toilet, or maybe I was immune to it, as I had been to marijuana at first. Perhaps I felt something . . . if I strained against the borders of my mind, wasn't there something a little odd along that perimeter? Perhaps. Yet from all I'd read and heard, LSD was not a subtle drug, as marijuana can be; it was the chemical equivalent of a hurricane or a herd of charging bison. I shouldn't have to examine my consciousness to see if it had been altered. Alas, I figured, another of life's disappointments.

At five o'clock, however, some friends strolled into the forest preserve and sat at the graffiti-swathed picnic benches placed there for our benefit under the pavilion, which resembled a cement-and-brick minimalist Greek temple. They had some pot. Good pot, too. I watched as they rolled some joints and lit them. Filling my lungs with sweet smoke, I wondered if the acid wouldn't kick in now that I was jumpstarting my system. I was right.

My spine began to tingle and hum as if I had been plugged into an electrical outlet. Energy surged through me to my hands, which felt heavy and leaden on the bench's top, and to my feet, the sound of whose tapping on the cement floor echoed in my ears. I stood up and felt the air impeding my ascent. We all learn that air is, despite its invisibility, a very real and ponderous presence, a material of weight and mass just like granite or wood, but unless we're struck by a gale, we don't think of it that way. I did at that moment; the air was gaining solidity, as if it were a very clear, very thick honey imbued with crackling yellow bursts of power that I understood to be conscious. Everything I saw was limned with an aura (so this was what psychics saw), and the visible spectrum was widening to include wavelengths that appeared only in the equations of theoretical physicists. No way was this just a pot rush; this was something entirely new and profound.

I moved away from the picnic bench and my friends and regarded the cement floor of the pavilion. A Chinese dragon, all curves and spurs and outstretched claws and teeth, had stretched itself across the pavement. Decked with all of the ornamental doohickies with which the Chinese are wont to adorn their dragons, it looked like something Bruce Lee would have worn on a T-shirt. Its surface seemed liquid, and its colors--everything in the rainbow and then some--merged and underscored each other, opalescent and glimmering. The effect was as if a pool of watercolor paint had been applied by some genius to the cement or perhaps slightly beneath it, with not a false stroke to be seen. A razor-thin set of outlines bounded the dragon's perimeter. My friends watched me as if I were crazy (and I was). Standing before it, I saw my shadow stretching into the dragon's infinite depths, as if a bright light were behind me; the shadow inclined at about a 20-degree angle into the floor rather than flush with it. As I strode back and forth, marveling at it, I saw that my shadow moved with it.

"What the fuck are you doing?" inquired one of my buddies.

"There's a dragon," I said as noncommittally as possible.

Glancing away from the hallucinatory reptile, I noticed that everything--floor, benches, people, me--had become covered with patterns that resembled a cross between some Aztec design and the paintings of Piet Mondrian. Big, black lines formed shapes filled in by vibrant yellows, magentas, blues, and greens.

I don't recall many--any, really--specifics of the afternoon at the forest preserve, but I surmise that as usual, my tenuous social standing as barely tolerated mascot led to razzings from the older, bigger boys. My guess is that I got uptight and left. Quickly. Would that I could recall what they said and how I answered. But somehow I managed to traverse the newly expanded world about two miles on foot toward my home, where I lived with my grandparents, mother, and siblings. This means that I somehow negotiated several busy traffic intersections, not to mention the horror of walking through ordinary neighborhoods feeling as though every single nerve cell were exposed to any and all stimuli. The fact that I made such a decision under the circumstances proves without a doubt that I was really high on LSD. Had I been sane enough to realize how insane I had become, I would have sought shelter under a honeysuckle bush and rode it out.

Memory kicks in again about three blocks from where I lived. The street along which I was hurrying was heavily shaded, and the sidewalk was old and brown and pleasantly rough. My bare feet slapped against the ancient pavement as I neared the corner, where four or five of someone's Polish grandparents--a category comprising about 90 percent of the area's residents--were standing and having a chat, probably in Polish. Their voices, murky and Slavic, wove about them like smoke from an autumn leaf burning. If I understood Polish, maybe I would have been able to have overheard them talking about me as I approached. I was 15 that year--barely 15 at the time of this incident--and I looked like a throwback to the previous decade with hair down to the middle of my back, octagonal glasses, and my grandfather's heirloom vest with paisley silk backing. (All this at a time when the 1960s were considered ultra-uncool and passé; feathered hair was in, and I was way out.) I reached the corner and stepped out of the shade as I turned onto the street where I lived. The sun was brilliant, the grass was livid green, and the brand new sidewalk there was white as chalk against it. My eyes soaked in the colors. Then the sidewalk coiled and shot out in curves, undulating in crazy S shapes before me like a rope given a flick of the wrist at one end. BRAAAAaaaaAAANGG! Then just as suddenly it regained its composure and stretched out before me once again.

"Oh, JESUS," I exclaimed, stepping back and giggling. The sound of my voice startled me, and I grew even more startled when I realized that it had sounded so loud because the Polish jabbering in the background had ceased. Several pairs of eyes were now burning holes into my medulla oblongata. I thought it best to walk on.

Those last few blocks before my house stretch ahead in memory like the inside of a kaleidoscope, full of shifting trapezoids and rectangles of color laid on top of the houses and cars. Mercifully, no one was out, and my thoughts multiplied to people the empty landscape. Glancing at my feet, I saw the form of a snake materializing in the sidewalk below, which was graciously opting for transparency. Quickly gaining color and definition, it appeared to be wrapped around a stick or pole, like a caduceus, although I could not see its head, such was its size--perhaps 2 feet thick and therefore around 100 feet in length. I was walking over its middle. Its scales were beautiful, like jewels, shining in a myriad points of light. Then I began to feel fear, just a little at first, but the feeling grew as if feeding back on itself, like a Hendrix guitar solo. Here I was striding nonchalantly over what could be a hungry carnivore of indeterminate size. Surely I could be lunch if it wanted me. My mouth began to stretch in terror. Should I run? Would it give chase? Was there anyplace safe from it? What would I do? My steps slowed to a crawl, and my knees felt like old grease in a jar.

At that moment I heard the voice of Roddy McDowell, speaking in his very best upper-class Cornelius the Chimp accent from the trees above me:

THIS BENEVOLENT SNAKE RULES ALL. THIS BENEVOLENT SNAKE RULES ALL. THIS BENEVOLENT SNAKE RULES ALL . . .

I heard and understood and accepted. The snake was my friend! My fear vanished with a pop, and the serpentine coils and hues waxed ever more lovely as I picked up my pace, swinging my arms and smiling with Roddy's blessing still echoing in my ears. Elated, I entered my grandparents' house and managed to evade engaging in conversation with everybody there. I ended up sitting in the living room with headphones on, listening to King Crimson and reading an illustrated book of Beatles lyrics. As I flipped the pages, large, oily blobs of a blue that only Maxfield Parrish could have rendered emerged from the pages and sank back into the front of the book, and much of the artwork developed spinning patterns as I gazed.

And so it was that I earned a stamped passport to the world of psychedelia, although I was somewhat disappointed that the only cosmic revelation I'd had concerned the universal and loving authority of a huge, multicolored serpent given to living in sidewalks in Chicago. All was well as ended well, but the experience did leave me quite apprehensive. Could I count on Roddy every time I dropped acid? I resolved to stick to half-hits from then on, and I kept my resolve until fall, when I ate two hits of green microdot and really lost it. But that's another story.

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt