The Night I Died On 125

          LSD had come to Lisbon again, and since it was really a rare sort of thing, I decided to pick up a few hits in the hope of trying it out as well as make some money off it. Acid had been around before and I had tried it and loved it, so naturally this was another reason for making the purchase. I bought five hits of the blotter paper to start with and was pleased with the appearance of it; instead of the colorless bits of paper that I had eaten last time this blotter was very colorful, a mix of purple, green, blue and white 1/4" squares. I picked them up on Saturday morning and took them home to safety, where they would wait until I had the opportunity to embark on the 12 hour odyssey that was the trip.
          Saturday turned to Sunday and with acid you can only sit on it for so long without finding an excuse for doing it, so when my friend Jim told me he wanted to try it  I agreed to do it with him, in part because it was his first trip and he wanted a sort of guide with him, which only egged me on even more. We agreed to meet up around 7 at  the end of the Park neighborhood and then just walk around town, letting our trip lead us. I waited around my house getting ready for the whole thing and then dropped it on my tongue around 6:30, letting it kick in for my walk through the Park. The slightly bitter taste of chemical hit my mouth as well as my stomach and I started off for the night, not knowing at all what to expect.
          I saw my sister and her group of friends walking on the train tracks that were adjacent to the park and realized that she must've been hanging out with this kid I refer to as the Pedophile, on account of the fact that his main group of friends consists of young middle school girls and he was in high school. Now I know that you might not see the harm in all this but realize that you don't know the kid as well as I do, and this kid was just feeding off these girls ignorance as well as their innocence at that age. Anyways, I never saw eye-to-eye with him and he knew it. For instance, when i first saw him I said "whats up bro" and he thought i was making fun of him in some way. Still, he approached me as he saw me walking and we struck up a conversation while we walked to the end of the Park. It wasn't long until I saw Jim walking towards me and realized the situation was about to get awkward.
          I met Jim and we exchanged the hook-up and all that and almost immediately I got a hit out for him right on the sidewalk. We had nothing to be sketched about, besides pedophile, because we had nothing on us and wouldn't be in any trouble and all that. Pedophile asked me what I had but I didn't feel like him knowing so I told him not to worry about it. My motive was clear to him too so he shut up pretty quick, although the fact that he knew I had something wasn't all that favorable to me. I mean, he wouldn't know it was acid, but he wasn't stupid enough to think people just carry colorful little pieces of paper around to eat. But I wasn't about to bog my mood down for this trivial fact and he went back to his house after Jim and I started to walk around town.
          We set off  to see our friend who lived a few blocks down but went to see a group of kids from school who were hanging out in a driveway after one of em shouted my name. Now these were the preppier breed of kids who sorta looked down upon my group but we never really gave a damn what they thought. They could tell we were on something though, as I could tell we were on something, cuz when your on acid the more you talk to people who aren't on it the more you really feel the drug's effects. We stayed for five minutes and then went to see that friend I told you about, but he wasn't home. Everything was starting to become slightly different now as we took the trip elsewhere.
          Jim and I could feel the acid take hold as we stared down a telephone pole that we swore was sideways. We had a hard time proving it, of course, but it sure as hell looked like it was. I decided I wanted to go to the river and watch the falls for awhile. It was on our way to Lisbon Falls anyway, which is where we decided to go. You see, on acid you need goals. Or maybe not in every situation, but in ours, we needed goals. So the goal now became to get to Lisbon Falls by way of the walking path, which went right through the woods and would make for a fine adventure given our state of mind. We checked out the river a little bit, which seemed amazing because of the sounds and the swirling patterns caused by the small waterfalls.
          So we walked down Upland Rd., really digging everything we saw, from trees to the sky to cars to even a swamp full of nature's mucus. It was a real shithole but we even saw the beauty in that. I could see the trees swaying off in the distance amidst the sunset and I knew my trip had really started. We raced up a mountain of dirt on the side of the road and admired all that we saw, all the objects rolling in the fields below us. It really was a beautiful sight that only comes around once in awhile.
          The new goal at this point had become to find a water fountain at the community school, which is where we were heading anyway on account of that's where the nature path started. We tried unsuccessfully to change the letters on the school's board along the street to read drop acid ( we found there was a layer of glass seperating the letters from our hands ). After observing the school, finding no water fountains and having swordfights in the parking lot with road cones, I discovered that an ordinary wall was something I could not understand any longer. I realize this is a hard subject to explain, but it appeared that the wall was not flat. Instead, it had different layers, and although I saw it as a wall, it was impossible to see it as flat in any way. This intrigued as well as scared me, so Jim turned up Bob Marley and we set off down the trail.
        At this point it was night and really pretty dark out, which provided an interesting dimension to the already intense trip. Acid can be enjoyed in almost any setting, but I think the ultimate setting is nature, because humans truly are a part of nature more than they are a part of society. I saw houses only as boxes, places to call home instead of wandering nomadically in the wild. I saw society as a club, the biggest club, one that everyone was a part of. It is a radically and refreshingly different way of thinking, one that spiders your thoughts like branches in a beautiful and sometimes overwhelming cascade of ideas and reasoning.
          But yes, the trip. It was progressing smoothly amongst Jim and I's frenzied conversations about anything that popped into our heads. It seemed as if we were rushing along the path but it was so wild and crazy that I didn't care, I was a true free spirit at that time. We began to wonder who or what we might encounter in the woods at this time. Murderers, cops, even bears perhaps? It was freaky but we were in it now, and it gave us a good laugh to think about the possibilities.
        Out of nowhere the impossible became reality as we felt a presence behind us. I turned around to see a light following us, in the distance still but yes, definetely approaching us. Jim looked back to and we were now considerably freaked. We both knew in the back of our minds it probably wasn't a big deal, but when you're tripping on acid the back of your mind is very far away from the frontlines of it. And the frontlines of my mind were freaking the fuck out.
          We were rushing pretty quick now down the path but the light managed to gain a considerable amount of ground on us, and eventually, it was right behind us. We were talking about our ideas the whole way, and looking back on it, they must've heard every paranoid word I said, but at the time that thought was not occurring to me in the least bit. I decided that we were ruining our trip and we should just pull to the side of the path and let the light pass us by, so that's what we did. I found a rock and laid on it while i waited, closed my eyes and hoped the light would just pass. I started breathing and felt my breath not only enter my lungs but enter the rock, discovering that the rock and I were now one and I could fill it with air. The sensation was incredible as I breathed in and out, and then I was interrupted by a hello.
            The light was a middle-aged lady out for a walk at night. That's it. Nothing to be afraid of, nothing. I managed to say a bewildered "fine" to her "how are you boys this evening?". So we let it pass and on we went. I thought about going swimming in the steady stream next to the path but decided against it when the reality of walking with wet clothes hit me in the face. Yet through all this we still needed water, so after Jim suggested it, McDonald's became the next goal and the next place to be.
          As everybody knows, water is an object found in Nature almost anywhere, yet for some reason or another we as humans don't trust this water as a reliable drinking source, and that's fine and all on account of the fact that we as humans also dump numerous chemicals into these same sources of water. We had heard that McDonald's would give out free water to people so it naturally became the next hotspot. Getting off of the nature trail at about 10 pm, we strolled down the Main road, trying to avoid the cars that were driving by with their glowing beams of light that so attracted us. Once in McDonald's Jim mustered up the strength to say what we needed and I mustered up the strength to stand there looking like a freak whose pupils were the size of small moons. Nobody said anything though and we were soon on our way. People who aren't cops are almost threatened by kids who are messed up to our degree; they give you whatever you want in exchange for you leaving them the hell alone afterwards. That agreement was fine by me.
            We continued our walk down the Main road, witnessing cops going by all the while but never getting frightened. I forgot to mention the fact that there was no school the next day and we weren't worried about staying out too late, although I was supposed to be home by 12 and knew that I would have to walk all the way across town somehow. We were in the Falls now and headed to a friend's house that was chill to hang out at.
          Walking down Booker Street, the ghetto of Lisbon, for the hell of it, we ran into a kid named Jason. He was slightly retarded and addicted to cigarettes and gambling, so he made for an interesting character. Jim talked to him while I watched a kid slam his toy truck into the ground repeatedly, wondering what the hell he was trying to do to it. Jim bummed a cigarette off Jason as well as his lighter and we parted ways. The kid didn't know about the lighter and we had a good laugh about it. Aw, jeez, the poor bastard'll be in a panic when he realizes he got no flame.
            Jim and I made it to the house where a few people were chilling out, including one kid who had eaten a hit of the same acid that morning and claimed to still be tripping. I believed him, though, as acid is an incredibly strong drug that really can grab you by the horns if you're not too careful. It was his first time tripping as well and I figured he was pretty out of it, although he managed to get a few conversations out. Me, I liked talking on acid; it wasn't at all like mushies when you can't put words together in sentences because you've forgotten what the words meant altogether. It was more like an influence that made your mind put together ideas differently, that's all. Of course, it was a much bigger deal than just that, but to get the simple notion of what that aspect of it is like, that is how I would explain it.
          Jim had decided at this point that the next goal would be to get to the graveyard. He was a firm believer in wanting to make some type of contact with the dead people there, or in other words, he just wanted to try and "see some crazy shit". I was up for the idea, of course, so we let everyone know of our plans and set out for the streets once again.
          Before going to the cemetary, we decided to stop by our friend Tim's house, who lived two houses down from where we were at already. He and another friend were outside smoking some weed, and we joined in for a few bowls before going inside the house for about a half hour to witness some "Gears of War" on playstation 2. I was getting the most intense tracers in Tim's room and the visuals were really starting to come to me, just as a kid at the other house told me they would. This was the same kid who had, the night before, seriously underestimated the power of this batch of acid and ate somewhere between 2-5 hits. Needless to say, he was out on the futon for most of my stay there but managed to grumble a few words to me.
          After about a half hour we decided to take the trip elsewhere and headed up the hill towards the cemetary. When we arrived at the old church we saw the tombstones outlined in the night surrounded by a fence about as tall as we were. Originally we dismissed the idea of going in it once we got there and started to walk off, but we realized that we had to do it out of the fact that we would regret not doing it the next day. So we ran up to the fence and jumped it. As soon as I hit the ground, a feeling of deep dread hit me. A sense of finality came with the fact that we were now closed in with the dead, and this combined with the lights I saw rising above the hill in the distance scared the hell out of me. I exchanged thoughts with Jim who was thinking the same thing as me and we booked it over that fence quick and started running. We ended up sitting in some short driveway after Jim remarked that he knew the guy who's house it was. He admitted he didn't after we heard someone in the house swearing at us and telling us to get the fuck out of his driveway.
            I laid down in another yard and watched the stars for a little while, watching them seemingly dance about the sky like burning madmen trying to put the fire out. My idea was that no stars or space even existed but that is just what the government told us. What we thought were stars and skies and space were only the tops of a dome that the world was surrounded by, one that the government put there and one that would change colors. The illusion of the sun was created by them, too. It was a very good idea and all and it made sense if you got to thinking about it but it really made sense if you were on acid at the time. And when a space shuttle went to space, all they were really doing was exiting the dome and landing in the government's higher society, one that nobody knows about except the astronauts.