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When’s it gonna start? When’s it gonna start? How silly. Here we are on an absolutely beautiful day, four beautiful people in one of the world’s most amazingly beautiful places. What are we messing around with some drug for? What more could we want? What more could there be?

I never called it a “bad trip.” Sometimes other people would call it that when I told them what had happened. “Bad trip” didn’t really describe it. It wasn’t saying enough. It was saying too much.

If you had a bad trip it was because you were a bad person. If you weren’t a bad person, then at the very least having a bad trip indicated that work was needed on this or that part of your head; a lack of wisdom or something like it was at the root of your bad trip. People would always talk about what a terrible trip someone like Nixon would have and what a nice wonderful beautiful trip someone they really loved or admired would have. I found the logic appealing. It made sense to me that the drug somehow opened you up and that if you were somehow pure, everything would go fine, but if you were twisted and kinky, you’d have a bad trip. Finding myself on the other end of the stick, the end of the stick I had hoped to use on Nixon, Mitchell, etc., didn’t lessen the appeal of the logic.

I was shaking, I was crying, I was scared. Not the whole time but for quite a bit of it. The only honest thing to say is it was a bad trip. And that thought became an obsession.

I was different from other people. That was the meat of it. Vincent, Virginia, and Gloria were all fine. They didn’t end up crying, shaking, scared. For them it seemed to end after eight hours. They all felt a tinge of regret about it. “If only it could be like this all the time.” The hell of it was that for me it was.

Had I had a rock-stable world to start with, I might well have enjoyed an extracurricular jaunt into psychedelic perception. But it was just too close to home and accelerated everything I was trying to keep a lid on.

It had really been acid. I was grasping at straws, something to make the fact that I was shaking, scared, crying, more reasonable. An honest mistake? It happened all the time. Mescaline was in big demand. Some bastard had sold Vincent acid as mescaline.

And the bastard got closer and closer, as bastards always do. It became Vincent and it wasn’t for money. It was to show Virginia what a fucked-up person I was deep down inside. Maybe they had all taken dummy capsules and I had been given a whomping dose of acid. That was too heavy. In a switch I decided that yes, I had been deceived but I was deceived because they loved me so much.

They knew me better than I knew myself. They had given me this acid to straighten out my kinks, to make me see how beautiful I was. To make me love myself as much as they loved me. They knew I wouldn’t have taken it if I had known it was acid. That was part of the stupid but charming thing about me that they were trying to help me with.

It went back and forth. Bad plot, no plot, good plot, no plot, bad plot, no plot, good plot. Back and forth, faster and faster, and then a few days later, after many cold showers and lots of staying in bed, it finally started slowing down and then went away. But the nasty fact that mescaline had made me crying, shaking, scared remained. It haunted me. If the good fairy had appeared and granted me one wish, it would have been a good trip.

It wasn’t just the psychedelics that hit me differently. Enough speed to keep most people up one night spaced me out for three. Amyl nitrate—poppers—was a fine two-minute high that blasted me for hours. Lots of the time I couldn’t even smoke grass right. Everyone else would get drowsy and mellow and I’d get activated and hyper. Grass was still pleasant for me so I smoked my share, but I couldn’t help worrying about what the hell made drugs so different for me.

And then it happened. I got my wish. Just after Christmas, a year and a half after my mescaline disaster, I had a “normal” acid trip. I went up, got