The Wilderness Years- Between Planets

It was 21 years ago this weekend when i got in the car for the second time and drove back to the cesspool that was OCMD to dive headlong into the wilderness, i mean i had been flirting with it, getting deeper and deeper into the trees, watching the sunlight flicker and fade above the canopy but it wasn't until this that i dove headlong into it... of course some of this has been covered before in the Wilderness Years posts How I Learned to Read pts. 1&2 but that was a more mild mannered post about the books i read and the girl i sorta fell in love with because there always has to be a girl right?  but on this anniversary of sorts i'm going to cover it again, maybe from a bit different angle because the summer of 91 would forever go down as the summer that our hero ate more acid in three months than a small commune of hippies might eat in a lifetime... and so we begin...

That summer i paid exactly $800 bucks to live third floor ocean front, my first of many rooming houses that would come in and out of my life like the drug-addled friends who would come and go like ghosts, never knowing if they were really there or if i was just hallucinating them for the night, needless to say that Memorial Day weekend as my mother swept the floor and my father and i put a lock on the closet to store my valuables i'm sure neither of my parents, who may i add tried their damnedest to raise a responsible, compassionate human type, thought that what that closet would be used for most was a place to lock away my acid, those brilliant little squares of paper that were leading me in all there blue-eyed glory out into the wilderness, oh they were sweet little squares, the blue peace signs of 91 and for those who ever took them you'll know what i 'm talking about, good clean fun, none of the strychnine that you'd find on shit acid, no this was the good stuff, talked about years later over beers in random bars by people who could only grin at the memories of the beautiful times they had ingesting them, and ingest them i did on a damn near daily basis for most of the summer...

As we know i got started a on the weed and the booze the same week back as a 16yr old and then came my first experience with the fungus but as far as hallucinogens went i was still relatively wet behind the ears, so when Judas (a name i'll explain at another time but pretty much exactly what it seems) one of my best friends showed up at my door one day, early on, the party seemed to be on, Judas was a rich kid whose daddy owned a car dealership and he was staying 3 blocks away with some other guys i knew but Judas and i were cut from the same cloth in certain respects and when it came to taking drugs, other than fucking, there was nothing better we liked to do and since when we bumped into each other we were both woman less and this was the summer of the great weed shortage in OCMD, we resorted to the next best thing we could come up with... LSD.   That first night as we stood in my third floor room and he handed me my first hit i could feel the nervous pit in my stomach, a good nervous, a nervous that i felt ready for, i remember saying "what's this gonna do?" and Judas laughing and saying, "i don't know this is like my third time, it just fucks you up."  and of course i shrugged, smiled and tossed it in my mouth and from there on in i was like Kelly Slater on a surf board, a fucking natural when it came to this shit, god damn did i love it...

Being the consummate wastoid i had had One-Eyed Bobby score me a case before he went to work and Judas and i sat around listening to tunes and drinking that case and sitting on the balcony of my place and laughing are ass off until the eastern shore began to lighten and Judas made for his place and i asked when can you get more? and he said tomorrow and i was like fuck yeah... Now it seems that sometimes things happen fast and since i'm a personable guy i meet people and when i'm tripping my face off and hanging out at parties and trying to get laid i meet even more and of course when  you're so pie-eyed your eyes look as if there are no irises people are like, "hey man can you get me some acid?" and so you begin to be a bit of a pain to the guys who get it until the one day one of them looks at you and says, fuck it, i'll just take you to meet the guy you seem to buy more than anyone else anyway...

So you end up in a seedy motel room a few blocks off the beach, the kind of place one would stay if you were selling acid or making meth or moving jet fuel, a place you'd go to hide but the kind of place that reeked of the cops kicking in the door at any minute, and so that first day i walked in with my sponsor and shook hands and made eye contact and tried to act cool as fuck when all i really wanted to do was piss myself and the guy i'm dealing with makes some jokes about killing narcs and shit and his muscle, a large black man with a 9mm visibly sticking out of the front of his waistband stares at you like you'll be the next dead whitey if anything smells even a little un-kosher, and so i get on with it and buy my hits for me and my friends and make some small talk and Acid Man says, "you know what man?" and i shrug and he says, "i got a good feeling about you man, you seem fucking cool, your boys know when i'm here, every week like clockwork, but you don't need them anymore, next time you can come on your own."  Which of course makes me a bit nervous but also makes me feel good about handling my shit...

It was about this point in my life where i realized that i had a face that every dealer trusted, the people i've dealt with over the years have always very quickly come to trust me and my judgement and gotten into some heavy duty shit in no time at all, this in itself could be a whole post but we'll fast forward a few weeks, now when i knock on the door, the muscle looks through the peephole and the door flies open and people shout "Kono", and the put a beer in my hand and pass me a joint, offer my a line and then we shoot the shit for a bit, they hand me another beer, i buy some ridiculous amount of hits for a guy who just runs them all back to his friends, pop a couple in my mouth for good measure, laugh, drink another beer and before you know it Acid Man is tossing me ten strips for free for being such a good soldier, of course i was still relatively new to this concept but it was something i filed away and would go to when i myself became the guy who was in charge...

Of course from here on out my summer became one long blur, sometimes tripping for days at a time, going to work high, coming home high, literally between planets, yeah i was technically on Earth but really i was somewhere else altogether, basically going every night of the week except for Sunday for some reason and on that day i'd crash and sleep as much as i could as i lay in bed munching peanut butter sandwiches and drinking Gatorade and guzzling beers, usually sprawled next to MJ, who would come and go between work and other shit, only to come back to my room and find me like she did the one night, dancing by myself to the Jesus and Mary Chain, Automatic being up there with Nothing Shocking and the Best of the VU that summer, nothing but a blue light and red light in my room, and MJ would look in and see that the closet door was slightly ajar and some nights i'd grab a hit or two or three and place them on her tongue and other nights she'd shake her head and fall into bed and listen to the ramblings of this wild-eyed boy, sometimes talking until the sun rose and collapsing in each others arms as the heat of the day came crashing through the curtain less windows and other times the wild-eyed boy would just sit peacefully in his garbage picked lawn chair, chemicals racing through his blood and listen to the sound of the waves breaking and the breathing of this girl and often times he would wonder if life would ever be this perfect again, as her black hair fell over his pillow and she sighed and rolled over and then he'd turn back to those waves, not really worrying about if it was ever gonna be perfect again cuz sitting there now, as the sun began to crack over the eastern shore and the gulls cried and the waves crashed and this beautiful girl lay behind him and his chair creaked softly and his beer can left dark wet rings on an ancient wood floor... it was perfect... and that was all he could ever ask for... and it all began 21 years ago today.