When I was fifteen, my best friends were a couple: a 30-year-old electronic musician named Lorelei and her boyfriend Raj (not their real names). Raj was a 36-year-old carpenter who lived in his mother’s basement and crafted homemade cassette tapes of his moody, lyrically intense, socially conscious rock music. Not surprisingly, I was a huge fan of both their creative endeavors. Despite the fact that they were both perennially stoned or high, they never once tried to contribute to my delinquency, and I was never interested in partaking of the drugs myself. Both Lorelei and Raj insisted that LSD contributed tremendously to their creative processes; I just thought they were fun to hang out with, regardless of whether or not they were under the influence.
Attending one of Lorelei’s concerts once at a small new-agey workshop space in the heart of Soho in the early 1980s, I had the lesson of a lifetime when someone passed out acid tabs to the band – and the entire audience. The only abstainers were myself and an elderly man in a wheelchair, who seemed to already be enjoying the ambiance anyways. It was obvious to me that these were all people experienced with LSD, as there were no wild manic nervous breakdowns on display, but as the spacey electronic music and coordinated subtly colored light show swelled, I felt that I was getting a psychological contact high.
Another friend of mine once regaled me of the time (in the late 1960s) when he hitchhiked across the country from East to West coasts, doing hits of acid the entire week-plus of his journey. Not only did he live to tell the tale, but to this day he is one of the most conscious and integrated people I’ve ever known. As some of you may know, one of my former blog screen names was “Lysergic Asset”, chosen in honor of this friend, who used LSD as an intellectual asset. It makes me wonder if the real reason that lysergic acid was banned by the U.S. government is because the powers that be had no desire to open minds before their time – or at all, really.
Living in San Francisco in the 1990s, I met many former hippies who shared with me their rich and varied drug experiences. (My favorite of the many I heard was doing peyote in the mineral spring rock pools on a cliff overlooking the ocean at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, during a full moon.) Several friends told me with candor that in their estimation, I really didn’t need psychedelic drugs. One explained it thusly: “You remind me of that AC/DC lyric: She told me to come, but I was already there. You are definitely already there.” Basically, he was saying that I was a natural-born space cadet… which is admittedly quite true.
I have no regrets that my illegal drug use has been limited to a handful of marijuana contact highs (I inhaled, but I hated it); I feel that I have lived vicariously through the experiences of many people far more experimental than myself. Even straight up sober, reality is still a fascinating dance for me.
