My first acid trip was just a trip, a journey of discovery undertaken with no goal or purpose in mind. The next thirty or so over the course of a year and a half until I realized the pills were no longer necessary were all business trips. I went down the rabbit hole looking for transcendent understanding. It was available. I found different, more transcendent rabbit holes in shamanism and druidry, but that came years later. As Dr. Leary said, once the acid had removed the paint from my window so I could see there was a world outside, I could always open the window and get out on my own. Suddenly, interestingly, I started getting high on weed. I’d smoked it at least six or seven months with little effect. After eight hits of Owsley’s Orange Sunshine, a few hits of even mediocre weed would toast me.

During the months that VW and I dropped acid together, I don’t think he had a business trip after that first one on the beach. He chose pleasure trips. He loved acid, and the colors, and tasting the colors and seeing aromas. He was more fun stoned, fershure. When he started doing speed he was even more fun yet, but coming off speed he was mean and paranoiac, and I was suicidally depressed. Some weekends, he’d do acid and I’d do speed. If he was doing speed, I might do some too, but never acid when he was cranked. On speed, VW dropped his harsh, stern biker pose and let his affection and humor shine through. It made him fearless and without the fear he didn’t need the biker armor.

When I took speed, my allergy symptoms and asthma cleared up and I had energy to spare. I’d been taking antihistamines and bronchodilators for years and had been switched from one type to another when sensitivities or side-effects cropped up. I learned from one doctor that the meds an earlier doctor had given me for the hay fever had brought on the asthma.

VW’s mother recommended an old doctor in Eugene who had a treatment for allergies. I took the treatment, which consisted of swabbing my nasal passages first with cocaine to deaden the nerves and then with a mixture of five volatile and caustic chemicals that included argyrol and benzene. The rationale was that it toughened the membranes so that allergens couldn’t get through. It didn’t help my allergies, but it did almost totally kill my sense of smell. To this day, my smeller works only on rare occasions when my membranes are DRY.

VW liked reds and yellows: barbiturates–and alcohol always, never a weekend without beer at least, never a run without wine. I’d grab a bottle of Silver Satin with Bitter Lemon for me, something really good for passing among the pack, and someone would buy a jug of Boone’s Farm or Gallo. The dance of thundering choppers as one in the pack weaves ahead or drops back and they sway closer together to pass a jug of wine or a joint is exhilarating and takes some of the length and boredom out of the road. As long as I kept my sips small and didn’t try to quench thirst with alcohol, I could enjoy the social games without getting sick or passing out. Speed helped there, too.

In California, the bikers had been our dope connections. In Oregon, we were the bikers and we needed local connections or we’d have to commute to the Bay Area and bring back wholesale lots. The Ravens did some of each. To connect with the local dealers to buy and sell, we had to hang out in the Student Union cafeteria, or at the coffeehouse downtown.

At the student union, I met Jim Fate. Fate was, they said, a burnout, too much acid, shrooms, fumes… a garbage head, fried. Jim Fate was LUCID, Illuminated, the purest psychic channel I’ve ever met. He freaked out anyone who would bother to listen to his rants and his murmured confidences. In the same way that dogs, cats, birds, snakes and other critters will approach and settle beside me, Fate would come right to my booth if I was in the fishbowl when he walked in. If he was there when I walked in, he would come over, greet us and follow the little knot of black-clad bikers to one of the back booths.

The bikers were uncomfortable with Fate, but they tolerated him. He directed traffic. I never saw him deal anything, but he always knew who had what and when they’d be around or where to find them. He took his finder’s fees in merchandise, a little pinch for his trouble. As we sat in the booth waiting to make a connection, I’d tune out the loud chivvying and boasting of the bikers and focus on Jim’s soft voice, and we’d talk shop. I had met my sensei, my guru, mentor, professor of cosmology and metaphysics: Jim Fate, burnout. Heh.

Sometimes the connection we were waiting for was The Hulk. I clicked with this big ruddy barrel-chested guy with sorrel hair and a red beard, orange chest hair, (golden pubes–I’d find out later), and blond Hobbit toes, from day one. Both Virgos, birthdays a day apart, he a year younger than I, we used to get into deep three-sided raps with Fate or we’d start a dialogue across the table in the booth and pretty soon eight or ten people would be gathered around listening. He had read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Proust… and Jean Genet and the Beat poets. My reading covered some of that and a lot of other heavyweights. I’m getting grin cramps in my cheeks ’cause I can see in my mind’s eye the image of a couple of slack-jawed bikers every bit as enthralled by the discussion as the collection of students and hippies clustered around them. We slayed ‘em in the aisles.

These were rarities, only five times maybe, in a year or so. More often when I was in the fishbowl with VW and his bros (seldom any other women on these ventures) Hulk wouldn’t be there, but then he often would be the topic of conversation. I learned the legend, the story of how he got his name. It started when his girlfriend broke up with him.

He was pissed. It was a hot day and I think he’d had some beers. He was on his way to the fishbowl to confront her and her new man. He was walking across town, carrying a sizeable stash of acid, or STP, or mescaline, thirty to fifty hits. A cop car cruised by slow and attentive and he went paranoid. He covertly ate the stash, but the cop car just cruised on by and left him walking across town toward the campus.

He was fuming over some cat moving in on his girl, building up a head of steam all the way. When he reached the double doors into the cafeteria, he opened them with a bang, stepped in, ripped off his shirt and wadded it up and threw it down. Standing there, looking around for his gone girl and her fresh meat, he was tagged by acclamation The Hulk. To clench it, when four cops tackled him, he threw them off. It took nine to subdue him. He was on probation when I met him. I guess someone doing that now would just be shot.

On these dope dealing trips to the U of O campus, I was along as the mule, the stash carrier because patrol officers were all males and if they busted a female they had to wait for a matron from the jail to do a body search. More time to ditch the evidence. We did get rousted once, and I ditched my evidence, and after a wait and some hassle, they let us go.

There was someone else I loved like Fate and The Hulk: Surfer, LeRoy Allen, heart-breakingly lithe and luscious, with a light brown forelock that always fell over one eye, and he’d tilt his head to see past it. I never got my hands on him. Got inside his head plenty, played with it and got played with in return. We had a running rip-off game, back and forth. Dope usually, we’d steal from each other, or pieces of clothing. He stole Hulk’s hat with the silver and turquoise concho band, once. Got my sandals at a party but I knew immediately where they’d gone and made him give them back. My best move on him was once I took his stash box with about four or five different drugs in small quantities, and pipes and such, and buried it in his yard while he was in the john. Then I left. When I got home I phoned him and told him where it was. Kid games.

Steve was another platonic love from that time. It might not have stayed platonic, but he was gay. He was a student, pre-med, son of a Utah surgeon of repute. He and his brother had a meth lab out in the Utah desert until it blew up. He’d make weekend trips home to Utah and leave me at his apartment to answer the phone.

He’d check in with me regularly and I’d field calls from his downline dealers and arrange a rendezvous for his return. Night and day, sitting comfortably against the wall at the head of his bed, with an excellent pair of headphones up loud and a great record collection, and an incredibly varied library, I was never bored. If someone knocked, I’d feel it through the wall, not hear it. I kept the phone snugged against my hip or thigh so I could feel it vibrate when it rang.

He paid me in speed. He knew I didn’t use needles and he said I should never start. Needles were Hell, he said, and he knew. He couldn’t do without his. But he’d bring bennies or dexies for me, and sometimes other stuff his chemist brother would experiment with: MDA, MDMA, but some of that stuff wasn’t quite titrated right. One batch that he said started out as a creamy white powder had turned to brown stuff the consistency of honey and had eaten its way out of the gelatine caps and was working on melting the plastic box it was in, by the time it got to me.

I rushed home with it so I could share it with Carol. Carol and Bill and VW and I had rented a sprawling suburban tract house with a big yard. We had a dog named Bugger, after the child in the movie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We had shoplifted a bunch of seeds and plants and were knocking ourselves out with shovels and rakes and a half acre of land.

The first thing I did was to spoon out the remnants of the gelatine capsules and brown goo onto a small dish and discard the softened plastic box. Then Carol and I licked the spoon and discussed how many doses we might have on our dish. That mess of impure amphetamine stuff lasted us nearly a week and I still, thirty-some years later, can’t recall that crazy week without laughing.

After spooning up what seemed a fair dose and then gagging on the bitter taste and washing it down with two or three glasses of water, we went out into the yard to look things over and decide what we needed for our backyard vegetable garden and the front yard landscaping. Next thing I knew I was leaning against a slender tree in the center of the lawn, puking. By this time, I recognized that as a good sign. All my best trips started that way; it’s my body’s signal that it is gettin’ off.

Have I mentioned that Carol was a redhead, too? She and Mardy and I looked like carrot-topped stairsteps. Mardy was six feet in bare feet and usually wore boots with 3-inch heels. Carol was barely five feet tall and favored moccasins. I was right in the middle.

We puttered around in the manic-euphoric state, spading and planting and weeding while we discussed grandiose landscaping plans. The thing we needed most was soil amendments and organic nutrients for the sterile sandy soil. After midnight, we got into the VW bug and headed for the Safeway parking lot where bales of peat moss and bags of guano and manure were piled on pallets next to the building.

We filled the back seat with bags of composted shit and on the drive home Carol said we really needed a bale of that peat moss, too. I eyeballed the car door and the back seat and said I thought we could do it if we took out the back seat. We had hauled a Harley back there, in pieces, with the seat out.

We unloaded, took the seat out and headed back to Safeway. Our first try failed because the passenger seat was in the way. After we put it as far forward as it would go, the bale of peat moss slid right in and we got it home okay. We probably should have gone back for another bale that night instead of putting it off, because they moved the stuff in from the parking lot at night after that.

We had a flat of strawberry plants and Carol wanted a strawberry pot for them. That’s a specialized bit of pottery that has a number of openings, little pockets sticking out from the sides. A big one will hold a dozen or more plants. She knew where there was a nice big one, on someone’s front porch, just sitting there with dead plants in it. I drove and she navigated and we went after it.

I parked the VW at the curb. I could see the pot near the end of the porch next to the driveway and started up the driveway to take it off the porch that way. It was just about the right height that it wouldn’t require any lifting, just ease it over the side and carry it to the car. As I started for the driveway, Carol headed up the walk and the steps and onto the porch. Just as I got in position, she lifted the pot, found it was too heavy for her, and she and the pot full of dirt and dead plants fell right into my arms.

I saved the pot from breaking, and while Carol was dusting herself off I upended it and started shaking some of that extra weight out. I left a trail of dirt all the way to the curb and had to exercise extreme self-control not to leave streaks of rubber on the street as I pulled out. We were laughing so hard from the moment she fell on me that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole neighborhood woke up.

Well, unless you are offended by casual drug use and petty thievery, that was a pretty innocuous blog.  If you need a dose of offensiveness today, you can always go check out www.xanga.com/ArmsMerchant.  Greyfox got on here last night with a rant he’s been incubating for days, stimulated partially by my rape blog.  It’s interesting listening to him at the keyboard.  For me, these keys go clickety-clickety, usually in little spurts with brief pauses.  When Doug is at the keyboard, it is a steady flow of soft tappity sounds as he strokes the keys.  Greyfox  hunts and pecks hesitantly until he really gets into his rant, and then he bangs on the keys and the clatter is punctuated with curses as he hits the wrong key or accidentally touches capslock or enter and has to go back to fix his typos.  He’s a trip.

Things started looking up in the spring. VW went to work in the
woods, setting chokers. It was dangerous and strenuous, but he handled
it okay. VW and I moved into an apartment by ourselves in a strip that had to
have started out as a motel. I attempted my first marijuana crop there,
but my landlady’s dog and cats chewed up my plants and rolled on them.
I thought it wisest not to complain.

It was there that I subscribed to the Time-Life Foods of the World
cookbook club. I began learning about wines, and expanded my repertoire
to include several Scandinavian, European, Mediterranean, Caribbean and
Polynesian cuisines, as well as expanding my already considerable
knowledge of Mexican cuisine. I kept a stock pot always simmering on
the back of the stove. Every day VW came home to a new dish. Some were
not ever attempted again. We discovered that we shared a general
aversion to Scandinavian fare, and little fondness for most German food.

Other than those few less-than-perfect dining experiences, we both
had a lot of fun with my culinary experiments. Besides the
international cuisine, I was getting adept at pastries and fancy
desserts and had started improvising my own complex recipes, which I
could never duplicate. I’ve never been much good at the sort of
“experimental” cooking that goes on in commercial kitchens where the
recipes are measured and recorded. My talents run more toward combining
a bit of this with a shake of that and cook until done. The meals were
enhanced by my shoplifting only the best wines to go with them.

We were also having fun working on our show bike. It was an old
knucklehead engine, from the 1930s. I designed and built a stepped-up
seat that provided VW with a foam backrest that was the front of my
seat. He rode low, almost reclining, arms hanging from ape-hanger
handlebars, with extended front forks about a mile out in front, and
foot pegs placed far forward for comfort. His head was about even with
my abdomen.

My foot pegs were high, and designed to work in concert with my seat
and the sissy bar behind it, to keep me in position effortlessly. I
designed the sissy bar so that it bent back and flared out slightly at
the top, forming a cradle where my helmet would rest. It rose a few
inches above the top of my helmet. The bike went through a series of
modifications, always some part in primer or being wire-brushed to
prepare it for chrome plating. It was almost always on the road, a rare
thing for a Harley chopper. Riding it was more important to both of us
than showing it, so we took care of the engine in preference to the
paint and chrome.

Sleeping on that bike was easy, as was rolling joints. My part of
riding it was a snap because of the seat/sissy bar combo I’d designed.
VW’s part was a real challenge. We had purchased a prototype of a
high-performance cam that never made it into production: too radical.
The engine had to be revved ‘way up to start off, or it would stall.
The only way to take off on that bike was with a wheelie. Wheelies were
illegal, more challenge for VW. One of the first times we rode it with
that cam, before the sissy bar was done, we were leaving a screening of
Wild Angels or Hells Angels on Wheels, one of the exploitation flicks
that had real outlaw bikers in them. There were a bunch of us there,
all pulling out into the street at once. VW might have wanted to make a
little extra impression. He took off a bit fast, brought the bike up
higher than usual, and I clung to him, hearing the loud “thock…
thock… thock…” of my fiberglas helmet bouncing on the pavement
before the two of us managed to force the front wheel down.

Once the sissy bar was finished and installed, wheelies like that
one would just trail a shower of sparks behind us as it scraped the
road. VW could take off without anything more than a little bounce of
the front wheel if he wanted to. Most of the time (and always on gravel
or dirt surfaces) that was the way he did it. But when we were out in a
pack, on smooth concrete or asphalt, we braced ourselves and went for
the show.

Often, usually late in drunken evenings on runs, someone would
suggest that we find a nice level parking lot so the guys could try
riding our bike in reverse. With the three-wheeler transmission we had,
ours was the only motorcycle I’ve ever seen with a reverse gear. Of
course, this practice was not good for our plastic molding or deep
lacquer finish, or the egos and physical integrity of the drunken
bikers who tried it, but we were having too much fun riding to
seriously regret not having a bike for show.

The new club, the Free Souls gained more members, including some of the former Gypsy
Jokers and their friends. We began some Oregon traditions like those
we’d left in California, such as making annual runs to the coast for
the Florence Rhododendron Festival, or to other holiday events within a
few hours’ ride. In Eugene, we were well into the anti-war protests on
the campus at U of O. The student union cafeteria was a hangout for all
the hippies, dissidents and misfits in the area, not just students. A
drive-in restaurant across from the campus was another general hangout,
as was a coffeehouse on Willamette Street.

One afternoon on campus, we ran into Loose Lew and Mardy, who had
recently arrived from the Bay Area. From then on, we always partied
together, and she’d come to my house sometimes and we’d schmooze in my
kitchen as she washed my accumulated dirty dishes. I’ve always been an
indifferent housekeeper and excellent cook. I’ve had a number of
friends who exchanged scullery work for my cuisine. At the big dinner
parties we threw, I was usually off the hook for the cleanup. Happy,
win-win situations.

Mardy’s life had some correspondences with mine.  Both of us
were redheads, which was a big bonding factor, it being the planet’s
smallest ethnic group.  She had lost three
kids, not simply to adoption, but had them taken by a court when she
and Lew were declared unfit parents due to the biker connections and a
string of petty crimes. But in many ways we were different, polar
opposites: she lost her appetite when nervous or depressed, while I
found comfort in food. She was passive-aggressive, held simmering resentments and plotted
revenge for every slight. I was openly aggressive, reacted swiftly in anger, usually with
verbal assault, and then let things go. She was the housewifey type,
fond of kitschy decor, always cleaning even in my house, which was
great for me because I had much more important work to do in the garage.

Lew and Mardy moved around a lot, and she called me frequently,
usually when something had gone wrong and she needed to talk, or when
she had done something particularly outrageous and needed to crow to
someone or get a few bucks to get out of jail or out of town. Whenever
she got into a “one phone call” situation, I was her one call. Then it
was up to me to call a lawyer, a bondsman, her mom, etc.

At no time in my life have I stopped trying to learn, to educate and
improve myself. While I was with the bikers, especially for the time
before we moved to Oregon and away from the heavy Hells Angels
influence, that energy was largely channeled into mechanics, cuisine,
and learning to live in a foreign culture. In Eugene, I tried to return
to nurse’s training, and did for a few months work in a hospital and
attend classes at Lane Community College. Then I got sick again.
Hospitals seem to do that to me.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time from my perspective. I’d made
my first moves to get free of VW. He had agreed to separate, having
found a new girlfriend who turned him on. I found an apartment of my
own and we were getting packed to move, he to his parents’ and me to my
place near the hospital. I went to work one night on the midnight
shift, and before the shift was over I was in bed as a patient. It was
one of the Asian strains of influenza that swept the world in the
sixties.

The aftermath wasn’t as debilitatingly severe as after the medical
mistake a few years before, but it came close. VW was out of work at
the time. I ended up unemployed and living under my father-in-law’s
roof and subject to my mother-in-law’s less-than-tender mercies. He
picked on her and she in turn picked on everyone else.

They had, for extra income, two old pensioners rooming there. Lars
and Elmer had the roughest time of all of us. Gimpy old farts all bent
over and vague, they subsisted on meager cold cereal breakfasts,
bologna sandwiches and canned soup for lunch, and dinners that were
nothing to shout about. Except for meals, they were expected to stay
out of the kitchen and out of the way, either in their rooms or
outside. They were not allowed in the living room.

I was welcome to do any of the household chores I abhorred, but was
not permitted to cook in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, to sit in my
father-in-law’s chair, or express any opinions contrary to theirs.
“Our” room was the attic. Before we moved a bed up there and our little
stereo, it had been home to bats. They kept coming back after we moved
in, too. My only pleasant memories of that place and time involved my
father-in-law’s workshop (he was a machinist, like my father), their
horses, the beautiful land of their ranch, and music. I was listening
to Ravi Shankar, The Monkees, Jefferson Airplane, Beatles, Rolling
Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix… psychedelic sounds.

VW got another job and we spent a lot of time on the road with the
Free Souls. The club had attracted about seventeen members and
prospects by then, I think. We could put enough bikes on the road to
make a good show.

On the Fourth of July weekend, we rode to Florence, on the coast.
That night, in the beachside campground, Skip Cremeans, a Eugene biker
who had previously lost one testicle to his handlebars when a car ran a stop sign in
front of him, walked over to us and held out a handful of small, fat
orange pills: “Orange Sunshine”. He said, “take two, they’re small.”
Everyone there took at least two. They were four-hit tabs, so everyone
definitely had a threshhold dose.

Not more than two or three of those present had ever had
psychedelics before. We were all wandering around disoriented. I recall
that to me everyone’s face looked like that of a painted doll or
marionette, unreal and phony. I soon tired of trying to explain this
perception to someone, and lay on my back on a picnic table to watch
the light show in the sky. When I pointed out the coruscating patterns
of lines and angular forms to someone else, they apparently couldn’t
see them.

As dawn came, I found a dew-spangled spider web across a path and
gazed at it for a few years, then watched a bunch of birds that no one
else could see, swooping and soaring along the beach of an island
offshore. VW was freaked and not communicating very well, unwilling to
even try to ride his bike, as were most of those who had been drinking
a lot. The general consensus seemed to be that psychedelics and alcohol
didn’t mix well. Skip and those who were more experienced with acid
worked on talking down the freaky ones. I was in observation mode,
tired of trying to discuss what was going on.

Late in the morning we got back on the road, and I suppose we seemed
normal enough when we walked into my mother-in-law’s kitchen. She told
me to slice a watermelon for the old guys. I sank the knife into it and
then watched, appalled, as the thing bled all over the countertop. But
I kept my cool, that small corner of my awareness that understood the
difference between hallucination and perception. For the rest of that 3
day trip, I just tried to adjust to the altered perceptions and enjoy
the ride without letting anyone else know where my mind was.

VW found a job in a mill, and I went to work in an upscale Bavarian
restaurant. We found a house on the edge of Eugene, and shared it with
Bill and Carol, a pleasant and funny biker couple who were new to town.
The adventures that Carol and I shared, and the events as I finally
made my break from VW, will be coming up,

NEXT TIME….