I looked around. Was this reality? I had to ask myself. No, I said
hopefully, it's not. This is above reality. Below reality. No. This is
beyond reality. This is what reality really is. I don't know, never mind,
I'm confused, it's not important. What is important is that am here, now,
and...
Hey Milo! You okay? You look pale.
No, I'm not okay. I'm sinking. The walls are closing in, becoming a cream-colored gelatinous mold, hardened Jell-O warming in the sun, and I'm sinking in it. The room is becoming tighter around me and I'm shrinking, and the world is leaving me. The trees laugh at me and I'm sinking into the ethereal floor that is reality, no, it's just my imagination, the walls are warm and soft, like a woman, and I'm imagining the whole thing, and my brain is crushing my body but I'm free, I feel liberated, I can do anything. I just have to set my mind to it.
Hey, yeah, sure, Bumper, I'm fine, I heard myself say, I didn't know what I had said until I realized my lips had moved and listened to the sounds. Pale, he had said. My thoughts were running away with reality, and they latched onto every detail of the environment and expanded it until it was all that existed, for all I knew. It was my first experience with LSD, and I was still a young kid. Only seventeen, I couldn't drink yet, I couldn't even see a naked body, an here I was, having believed Timothy Leary, his message speeding through time via the technological miracle of the audio tape. He said it was a life-altering experience; surely I would never look at reality again the same way. But as I learned, reality is only a way of looking at things.
Bumper was a friend of mine from Junior High. When we went to high school, we lost contact for a couple of years, but then two months ago I saw him working at a McConnell's, spooning out ice cream to single, overweight women. We talked between customers for an hour or so, and when I had to leave we resolved to meet again. That evening he called me, and we talked for another hour or so. I realized that since both of us were infinitely different people from who we were in Junior High, we were once again almost exactly the same type of people. I had once been an ignorant, childlike homophobe who did everything possible to be 'cool' and because I tried so hard, I inevitably failed. Bumper, who had earned the nickname for no particular reason in 7th grade, had been exactly the same way. Now we were both different people. We had both realized we were hetero a couple years ago, and both had many non- hetero friends of both sexes. We had applied to two of the same colleges (UC Santa Barbara and Berkeley) and neither of us really cared what people thought unless it was necessary. Bumper, for instance, wore a cap with 'New York' emblazoned on the front because he had dyed the top of his head purple and couldn't let his boss or customers see. And now he was sitting in front of me, having introduced me to acid, with a half-curious, half-worried, half- asleep expression on his face. I looked pale, he had said.
I looked at the bottle of juice I had, the same kind of bottle I had drunk from countless times before, but now it seemed to exist away from me, in a different dimension. It was plain enough, with a white label that had a little scene of mountains with a bunch of grapes in the foreground. Embossed out of the glass on opposite sides was the word 'Calistoga' in stylized text. The entire thing began to take on new meaning to me.
My mind, my mind, my brain. Help, the bottle is taunting me, taunting me and laughing. I look into the label and see Chinese coolies, working their lives away for nothing, trapped by the American system because they are minorities. What are they doing in there? I try to reach the bottle with my thoughts, to reach out and melt into it, but I can't. Why? What is happening? I can't do it... those people are there but they don't see me, am I invisible? Why can't I go? Goddamn it, I thought this was supposed to be fun. What the hell are you trying to pull, Bumper, keeping me from going in there. What? I can't see the people, I can only see their faces, they are reaching to me. Thank you, thank you, and they nod at me, hey wait, can I follow you? The trees here are so beautiful, and all their colors, they seem so surreal, everything seems so surreal. This is not reality, it can't be. Confusion. Trees don't speak, not in reality. But this seems so much better, everything is so nice. The people here, they like me. It's all just so beautiful. Confusion. Why can't reality be like this? Bumper, where's Bumper? I need him. He says I am pale. Pale, like the walls, the gelatinous walls... shaking, shaking, closing in, warping around me, why? What is happening? Why did the trees go? Where is the color? Everything is pale, Bumper, Bumper help me...
I felt my life sliding away from me, and I could see my heart thumping loudly in my chest, the blue veins becoming as thick as my finger with each pulse and then shrinking until the next pulse, when they would bloat up again. I ran around, frantically, pushing against the walls, feeling them stick to my skin like the membrane on a fish egg, a soft, warm feeling but still the most frightening thing I had until then experienced. Bumper recognized the danger, that I was having a bad trip, and it was an incredible stroke of luck for me that he was completely sober. I ran around the room, pushing against the walls, until I tripped over my bed and fell, sobbing, on the mattress. Bumper sat down next to me, and spoke in a soothing voice and stroked my head, while my tears soaked into the pillow and I shook violently. We sat that way for several hours, and once or twice when I shook particularly furiously he brought me back to the bed and calmed me down with a combination of words and force. It must have been far past midnight, close do dawn when I finally stopped sobbing and lifted my head. By this time the pillows were wet and I ran to the bathroom and stood with my hands on the toilet bowl for a long time, trying to vomit but unable to bring anything up. Bumper brought me a glass of water after what seemed like an eternity, and looking at him through glazed eyes I could see that our friendship, as it were, had permanently changed, that we were closer at that moment that I ever was or will be with any other person.