The First Time I Took Acid

The first time I took acid, I was about fourteen years old the first time I took acid. I was in eighth grade at Ocean City Intermediate School, and I think it was near the end of the school year, possibly even the last day. A kid I’ll call Adam gave it to me. As I remember it, the tabs had little smily faces on them. My best friend, someone I met in seventh grade and am still friends with roughly forty years later, took half a hit around lunchtime. I took mine in the school bathroom.

There wasn’t much thought behind it. I didn’t understand LSD or really know what I was getting myself into. My friends wanted to do it, so we did. At fourteen, that was pretty much the extent of the decision-making process.

Then I went back to class.

The First Time I Took Acid at Ocean City Intermediate School

By gym class, I knew something was happening. I remember looking into a mirror and watching my face seem to melt. I took acid plenty of times after that, but that’s the only time I remember seeing my own face distort that way.

Later, I was sitting on the bleachers while maybe ten kids were playing basketball with a few basketballs. At least, that was reality. What I saw was completely different. I could have sworn there were thousands of basketballs flying through the gym from every direction.

Somehow, I finished the school day.

Looking back, what strikes me isn’t some profound psychedelic revelation. It’s that I was fourteen years old, sitting in a middle-school gym hallucinating, with absolutely no idea what I had taken or what it might do to me. You would think that might have scared me away from acid. Instead, it was basically the beginning of the summer.

Acid Became Part of the Weekend

My best friend and I started taking acid regularly that summer. I remember it as almost every weekend. It may have been Friday nights, Saturday nights, sometimes both—I don’t remember that precisely anymore. What I remember much better is the routine.

We’d take acid and watch television. Star Trek would lead into The Honeymooners, and after that anything could happen. We might keep watching television, go outside, head toward the beach, walk around Ocean City, or just sit somewhere and trip. There wasn’t much of a plan.

Most of the acid I remember came on blotter paper. A larger sheet would be divided into little squares about the size of tiny postage stamps, usually with some kind of artwork printed across it. Each little square was a dose. I also remember acid being put on sugar cubes or taken directly as liquid. Over the years, I did it all three ways.

Drug use wasn’t exactly a hidden subject in my house. My mother smoked marijuana herself, and when I was thirteen and first started seeing my friends smoke, she told me I could smoke when I turned fourteen. She apparently meant it. When my fourteenth birthday came around in September 1987, she bought a quarter-ounce of weed, and we smoked together. That night eventually included a trip to Wawa that I still remember as completely crazy, but that’s another story.

Acid was different. I can’t remember exactly when she learned how often I was taking it, but eventually there was no question that she knew.

When One of Us Had a Bad Trip

One night Adam was with my best friend and me while we were tripping. We had the television on and, at first, everything seemed normal. Then Adam started twitching and making strange sounds.

Because we’d been watching Star Trek, we initially made a joke out of it. We acted like he was an alien from the show. The problem was that Adam didn’t stop. Eventually it became obvious he wasn’t screwing around, and whatever was happening was beyond what a couple of fourteen-year-olds could handle.

I went to my mother.

She stayed with him, kept him calm, and comforted him. As he started coming around, I remember giving him a cigarette. We smoked cigarettes at fourteen too. I’d tell him to “flick it,” meaning knock the ash into the ashtray, and instead he’d flick the entire cigarette across the room. I’d give him another cigarette, tell him to flick the ash, and he’d send that one flying too.

That’s strangely one of my last memories of Adam. I don’t remember a falling-out or some dramatic end to the friendship. I couldn’t even tell you where he went afterward. He simply disappears from my memory somewhere around that night.

The experience didn’t stop me from taking acid.

The Biggest Hit I Ever Took

The largest dose I remember taking happened at a campground in South Jersey, outside Ocean City. The piece I took was enormous compared with a normal tab—about the size of a quarter.

That turned into one of those nights when I eventually decided I’d had enough. Around 10:30 p.m., I called my mother and asked her to come get me. She told me I had to stay there and deal with it.

So I did.

My friend had a yellow Volkswagen bus at the campground. I climbed into it, settled in and rode the wave until things finally came down. I can laugh somewhat at the situation now: I was young enough that when an acid trip became too much, my solution was still to call my mother and ask her to pick me up. Her answer was essentially, Nope. You’re staying there.

Apparently, I did.

It Didn’t End With That Summer

Acid stayed part of my life well beyond that first summer. Later there were Grateful Dead shows, where it became part of a completely different period of my life. One show in Pittsburgh stands out in particular, but there’s enough to that memory that it deserves its own story rather than getting squeezed into this one.

I don’t remember with certainty when I took my last hit of acid. I think it was years later, when Kendra and I were living together in a tiny one-room apartment in Ocean City. I took acid and spent most of the night walking the Boardwalk. When I finally made it home, Kendra’s friend—I’ll call her Alice—was there with her. I was exhausted and crashed almost immediately.

There’s more to the Alice story, but that doesn’t belong here either.

If that really was my last acid trip, there wasn’t anything significant about the ending. I didn’t consciously decide I was finished. There wasn’t a final revelation, a terrible experience that scared me straight, or some moment when I decided that part of my life was over. Somewhere along the way, I simply stopped.

What I remember much more clearly is how it started: Ocean City Intermediate School, about fourteen years old, a little smiley blotter tab in a school bathroom, and no real understanding of what I was getting myself into.

By gym class, I was sitting on the bleachers watching what looked like thousands of basketballs flying through the air.

In reality, there were probably only a few.