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One of Sheafer's nicknames was "Sleeves". He got it when Bubba had asked him if he knew the words to the song "Greensleeves." Strumming his ukelele, he'd responded: The king called the queen an old gray goat, So she sewed green sleeves on his yellow coat... Now here was Sheafer sitting next to him on the curb, telling him he thought he knew where they might get some acid. Sheafer had taken it a couple of times while staying at an ashram down in New Orleans. Bubba had wanted it, had planned for it for the past four years, but figured it was something still in the distant future. If they got some now, it would be his first trip. There were pitifully few hippies in Memphis in 1969, at least as far as one could tell by sight alone, so locating a potential LSD source was quite an accomplishment. Bubba figured Sheafer must've run across some at Underground Cinema 12 and, bolder than any of the rest of Duh Gang, talked with them about it. Bubba was doubtful in extremis concerning the idea of meeting total strangers and asking them to assist in committing a felony. But Sheafer wheedled unmercifully, and Bubba finally caved. So they took the Maverick out to an area near the college and wandered through the back streets till they located a house Sheafer thought was the one. A definite hippy answered their knock. Bubba figured he was from out of town. The hippy didn't recognize Sheafer at first, and his nervousness was excaberated by their own. Growing up in the South of the Fifties and Sixties one learned not respect but rather outright terror of the police. All three of them were so busy looking over their shoulders that they hardly noticed anything other than the thousand suspicious sounds coming from outside, each seeming to be the crunch-crunch-crunch of hobnail boots tiptoeing by the windows to surround the house. "Just wondered if you had any SHIT, man?" Sheafer blurted out, sounding precisely like a fledgling nark on his first sting. "Whaddya mean 'SHIT', buddy?" the hippy asked, his eyes narrowing. "Well, you know, uh, well, uh..." Eventually the wall of paranoid communication was pierced and the two of them retired to the back room to conduct the transaction. Sheafer came out grinning from ear to ear. Bubba assumed he'd been successful in the attempt to purchase some "SHIT." He had. They walked back out to the car, feeling the eyes of the dealer peering through the shutters at them the whole way. As Bubba started the car and began to drive away, Sheafer unwrapped a small bit of tinfoil. There lay two asprin-sized tablets the color of green Easter egg dye. "Here it is, man, Green Lime!" "Oh, Christ! Hide that shit, man!" "Take it easy now. 'Paranoia strikes deep.'" "What do we do if the cops stop us?" "Now, how many times a day do you get stopped by the cops?" "Well, none really. The only times I've had trouble from the cops was when I was out parking with Heeb." "Are we parking now? No! Don't be so paranoid. Besides, if anything happened we could always eat it." "Eat it? Are you out of your mind?" "No. It's only a crime to possess it or sell it. If it's inside you then you're not in possession--and you're sure as hell not selling it." "Yeah, but they would know. They have tests." "They might know but they couldn't prove it. There's no blood test for LSD--nor any urine test neither." "Don't say it so loud!" "For Pete's sake, the damn windows are closed!" "Well, okay. But at least wrap it up again." "Awright, awright, cool out a little, wudja?" "How much was that stuff, anyways?" "Six bucks a hit." "What's a 'hit'?" "A dose. People call them 'hits' or 'tabs'." "Short for 'tablets'?" "Yeah." "So my twelve bucks went to buy those two little tablets." "Yeah. A damn low price, too, for what you get." "God at six bucks a hit?" Sheafer chuckled. "Right, Bubba. God comes cheap these days." "Cheap? That's two tanks of gas!" "Which would you rather have, God or two tanks of gas?" "Can I think about that awhile before I answer?" "No. In fact, I'll answer it for you. What doth it profit a man if he gain two tanks of gas but lose his hit of Green Lime?" "I guess you got me there." They decided they would trip at Bubba's parents' house the next day. His mom and dad had gone down to visit relatives in Jackson for the Labor Day weekend and wouldn't be back till Monday night. That gave the two experimenters a day to trip and a day to recover, which Sheafer said they would need. Bubba had an all-day date with Heebie, so they picked her up that morning. They figured it would be good to have one sober person to babysit them, just in case some of the crazy things they'd seen in all those Health Class antidrug films might be true after all--like mistaking the flame of a gas stove for a beautiful orchid and reaching down to pick it, or deciding one could fly and then leaping off the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. Heebie would have none of that. As soon as she heard what they planned to do, she began to literally dance around, begging them to let her trip with them. At last Sheafer agreed to split his hit with her. "What the heck," he said, "two people half tripping is probably about as safe as one tripping all the way and one not tripping at all." Little did they know. "Remember, though," she cautioned them, "I've got to be back home by six to eat dinner with my parents. It's very special to them. Kind of a reconciliation gig." "Nothing to worry about," Sheafer reassured her. "You're only going to be getting off half as much as Bubba, and it'll probably only last half as long. Even if you're still tripping when you go home, it'll be a breeze." Oh little, so very little, did they know. Sheafer opened the tinfoil with great ceremony, as if unwrapping a key which would unlock the centuries. "Here they are," he murmured, holding them cupped in two hands for the others to examine, "our sacred psychedelic eucharist of the Buddha-Light. Say goodbye to the world, dear hearts, for when we return it will not be Kansas anymore, not ever again." Bubba's mouth was dry. He swallowed nervously, laboriously. "Should we take it with water?" "No, Bubba, you can only chase this with nectar from the finest orchids. Of course we take it with water, fool!" "Well, I didn't know!" Heebie fetched a glass for each of them. "Elbows up," Sheafer said. And they did. The tablet had a floury taste in Bubba's mouth and sent a chill up his spine as it went down. "It's in me now!" he thought with mixed feelings of excitement and alarm. "That's it, bruthuhs and sistuhs. No time for criminations and recriminations now. The game is afoot!" Sheafer said. "No," replied Heebie, "the game is ahead!" "Three heads!" Bubba corrected. They entered into a fit of giggles that lasted several minutes. "Hey Sheafer!" Heebie said, wiping her eyes, "I thought you said this stuff took a half hour to have any effect. Seems to me like we're pretty high already." "High on our own genetic makeup, my dear!" Bubba said. "The effects of anticipation," Sheafer said. "After all, it's the mind that does it all anyways. Oh yes, there's something I neglected to mention." "What's that?" Heebie asked. "Well, it's like this. I mean, the heads I tripped with at the ashram in New Orleans told me you never really come completely down from your first trip." "Oh, well gee thanks, Sheafer. Fine time to tell us!" said Heebie. "Gosh," said Bubba. "Well what the hell, we're in it now, might as well go all the way." "A burglar couldn't have said that better," Heebie smirked. "So what's next?" Bubba asked, looking to Sheafer. "The cosmos." "Besides that." "Tell you what. I been thinking we might go down to Anglohaven Cinema and see Peter Pan." "A Disney cartoon?" Heebie asked. "Sure," Sheafer answered. "Why not? A good, tame movie with nothing to upset us while we're getting off. Would you rather see Clint Eastwood blowing people's guts out?" "NO!" they chorused. "Then it's settled. How much bread you got, Bubba?" "Lemme see. Hmmm, about five bucks or so." "Great! That'll get the three of us in and have a little left over for cokes and popcorn." "Jujubees for me!" Heebie said. Sheafer widened his eyes in alarm and shook his head emphatically. "I don't know if that would be wise in our condition." The feature was preceded by a documentary on the hunting and butchering of whales. It was objective; it was factual; it was an interminable nightmare for Bubba as he watched mile-long entrails being slowly unwound and ripped from the bloody corpse by greasy men stumbling kneedeep in gore. It could only have lasted about ten minutes, but it might as well have been weeks. (As I said above, there was no "Save the Whales!" movement in those days, at least nothing on the scale of Greenpeace. I feel sure we would have heard of it if there had been. We kept up with all the radical literature we could lay our hands on, which consisted mainly of magazines like Avant Garde, Ramparts, and Psychology Today, along with the occasional Berkely Barb or LA Free Press. Yes, dear hearts, Psychology Today was considered fairly radical in those days. Of course, Darwin's Origin of Species was seen as radical in the South back then. Radical as Marx and Mao. Still is, by some people. Come to think of it, I guess they're right, too. No they're not: Darwin was far more radical than Marx or Mao!) Excusing himself, Bubba went out into the lobby to wait it out. Through the closed door he could hear the ooooo's and ahhh's and yeccch's of a hundred elementary school children as they watched Leviathon being disembowled. To him it sounded like someone roasting a zeppelin full of live alley cats. He moved away from the sound and stood looking out the front door of the theater. By and by it occurred to him that the Cinema employees might wonder why he stood gazing out at the parking lot when a movie was going on inside. Never mind that, what was someone his age doing at the showing of a Disney cartoon in the first place? He was too young to have children of his own and didn't look responsible enough to be babysitting. Just what was that unkempt, ragged, long-haired peace queer with the funny beard up to, anyways? There was only one possible answer: The sonofabitch was on drugs. Should they call somebody? No telling what he might do. And in a theater full of innocent kids, too! Maybe a terrorist! Feeling a little more than enormously foolish, he walked up to the counter and fained an interest in the candy selection. "May I help you, sir?" The clerk looked like a junior member of the Night of the Living Dead Fan Club. His gingivitic breath wafted into Bubba's face--hmmmmm, essence of pond scum. "Oh! Hi there! Uhhhh--I was looking for some, uhhh, what do you call 'em? The little colored beans?" "Jelly beans?" "No the others. There they are," he added, pointing into the counter. "Jujubees?" The awful, eternal moment of decision. Should he? Sheafer had said they oughtn't to eat jujubees in their present condition. But he'd been joking--hadn't he? And the necromantic theater clerk looked on expectantly. A definite police informant. If he hesitated now, he'd be lost! "Yes, jujubees, yes, yes indeed." "Two boxes?" Why the hell did he ask that? What did he mean? Was it some kind of secret code Bubba was supposed to know but didn't? He figured he'd better go along with it. "Yes, two please." "Here you are, sir. That'll be thirty-one cents." Fifteen cents each! He could've gotten them at a store for a dime apiece! Whatta gyp! Better not look uptight, though. Act like one of Them. Pay for the stuff and put some distance between yourself and that walking stiff. Despite his anxiousness to escape Swampbreath, Bubba deemed it prudent to throw up an alibi before he went back in. "Hope my little brother likes this movie." "Sir?" "My little brother. I saw it when I was a kid, of course. Thought I'd turn him on to it. Babysitting, you know." "Of course, sir." Why was the guy being so matter-of-fact? What did he have to hide? "Well, thanks, see ya later." "Hope your--brother--enjoys the movie, sir." Wading through a sea of colors and shadows, Bubba at last found Sheafer and Heebie. He leaned over and whispered in Sheafer's ear as he sat down. "Y'know, that concession guy was pretty weird." Sheafer looked at him questioningly. "Don't say anything about it to Heeb," Bubba added, "I wouldn't want her to get upset." The feature was just beginning. Soon he was lost in the antics of Tinkerbell. "Beautiful!" he thought. "Eminently desireable! Never remembered it showing her panties so much! Disney sure was hung up on asses." He thought then of the pixy he'd seen so many years ago--his pixy! Tinkerbell had to be of the same blood. A little sister, maybe--shallower, less mature, glamourized by Hollywood, but definitely of linked lineage. Probably a human debutante in her past life. Heebie leaned over to him. "Wonder what ole Walt was on?" "Gee, I dunno," he whispered back. "They didn't have acid back then." "Ask Sheafer." "Hey Sheafer, what was Walt Disney on, that made him come up with stuff like this?" "Pixy dust, of course," Sheafer grinned. "Pixy dust, of course," Bubba repeated to Heebie. Heebie giggled. The sound seemed to fill the theater. Sheafer and Bubba looked at her. "Shhhhh!" Bubba said, and the theater walls trembled with the force of the hiss. "You guys are making more noise than the kids," Sheafer said. Bubba remembered the jujubees he had in his coat pocket. Maybe that would keep Heebie quiet. "Here, I got you some jujubees." "Wow! Thanks, sailor!" He tried to concentrate on the movie, but he had somehow lost the story line. All he could manage to make out was a succession of disconnnected images. His pixie, having turned blonde, swooped and swirled through the air, accompanied by an elfin figure in green. Was it a boy or a girl? He couldn't tell. The name "Mary Martin" came to mind, accompanied by phantasms of green divinities form The Golden Bough, but he couldn't remember who the former was, and he was afraid to wonder who comprised the latter. Was there a Mary Martin at school? He knew at least one Martin and innumerable Marys. Was that the message the Cosmos was trying to hand him? That all Marys are one, and that one the mother of God? And God? Us all? And there was Frank Zappa all dressed up in a pirate suit. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble with the fairies. Well, they were rude little buggers. So that's how Disney got his inspirations, communing with elementals! Didn't need ehtheogens after all! How did he come to make contact with the secret commonwealth, though? Apparantly the Gentry were attracted to freaky vibes. He'd have to check that out later. Meanwhile, he now realized that there had been a great wet crackling sound in his ears for quite some time. It sounded like a tenement slum burning in a monsoon. He didn't see anything in the movie that could make such a noise, so he'd distractedly assumed it was simply bad sound quality. "Heebie!" "What?" "Stop smacking your jujubees! Everyone in the theater is looking at you!" "I warned you guys about jujubees!" Sheafer snickered. "You want to get us thrown out of here?" "Aw, leave her alone, Bubba. You're the only one who can hear her." "A deaf man could hear her!" "Take it easy, Bubba," Sheafer whispered. "You're getting paranoid." "Really? Am I?" "Sure, man. It's just the drug." "Oh, okay. I'm sorry, Heeb. Forgive me?" "Sure, sweetie." "Sheafer says I'm getting paranoid. That must mean I'm really getting off! Hey, this really is good stuff!" "Pipe down, you two," Sheafer said. "I'm trying to watch the movie." So Bubba sat still while the fairies and pirates danced across the silver scream for the next couple of hours. By the time they made their way back to Bubba's house, they were getting off pretty well, though Bubba didn't know it. After all, it was his first acid trip; he didn't know what to look for. The educational films they'd viewed in school presented acid in a wholly different light. For one thing, there were supposed to be hallucinations. The only hallucinations Bubba could make out were some slight eddies of color around and within peoples' faces, that and the echoing quality that some sounds had. He was supposed to see music with his eyes, exploding clouds of color, people who weren't there. According to the educational films, it was supposed to be so intense that it was outright dangerous. Trippers were supposed to mistake open flames for flower blossums and leap out windows, thinking they could fly. Bubba stared and stared at a candle flame, trying to turn see it as a flower blossum. It was no-go. And don't even think about leaping out a window to fly! It was all he could do to make it down the three steps at his back door. Sex was supposed to be a major cosmic experience while tripping. Now normally, in the "sober" frame of mind, Heebie was a 17-year-old Amazon with a body like Ursula Andress that tended to reel Bubba's hands and lips toward it like catfish on a three-hook trotline. But now, under the influence of Albert Hoffman's problem child chemical, Heebie looked like a painting by Picasso and felt like an amorphic Christmas package. Her clothes crackled deafeningly as he tried to fondle her. She lay on the couch. He lay on top of her and passed right through her. He found himself floundering amid the stuffings of the sofa. It was one of the most UNsexual experiences he'd ever had. Laboriously he undid his molecular clusters from those of Heebie and the couch stuffings, rose to his feet, and said, "I think I'll get a glass of water." When he returned from the kitchen a couple of centuries later, he found Heebie and Sheafer deep in a discussion of psychology. "You're crazy." "I'm not crazy! You're crazy!" "No I'm not! You're crazy!" "You're crazy!" Then Heebie spied Bubba. She whirled to face him, her arm outstretched and her index finger pointing at him. "HE'S crazy!" Sheafer eyed him up and down. "You're right, Heeb, it was Bubba all along. He's crazy." Bubba decided he needed another glass of water and returned to the kitchen. Heebie followed him. "I'm sorry, Sweets, I didn't mean it!" "It's okay, Heeb. Anyways it's true; I AM crazy. So are you and so is Sheafer. We're all crazy. I mean, we take this stuff to go crazy for a few hours. We don't even know what it really is." "It's acid, Bubba." "Is it really? I mean, I'm not hallucinating. At least I think I'm not. Except for the kids' voices were echoing when we were back at the theater. It's not like I thought it would be." "What, you mean seeing God, stuff like that?" "Well, not necessarily God. Colors and stuff. Imaginary people. Elves and Dwarves. I dunno." "Yeah, well then I'm not really hallucinating either. I thought 'cause you had twice as much that you'd be seeing all kinds of stuff." "No, not really." "Tell you what," she said after a brief pause, "let's make our own trip." "What you mean?" "C'mon." She took Bubba by the hand and led him out into the back yard, picking up her recorder on the way. They sat on the ground in the bright sunlight while she played her recorder. Bubba watched the Bermuda grass transform into a tiny jungle, complete with native huts and a train of elephants. There was a large rectangular clearing in the midst of the jungle. A tiny little figure stood in the middle of the clearing, waving a couple of red flags. Bubba soared over the jungle in his Spad biplane, then circled around to come in for a landing. The figure with the flags waved him away, though, so he stood up. "Whew! That was weird!" he said. "What? Did you have a hallucination?" "I don't know. Let's go back inside. The sun's pretty bright out here." When they got back in the house, Sheafer was waiting for them. "We better go," he said. "It's about time to drop Heebie off at her parents." So they did. Then they drove to Casa Taco. Bubba didn't really feel like eating, but Sheafer insisted. "You gotta remember to take care of your bodily functions while you're tripping," Sheafer said. "It's easy to get lost in the trip and forget to eat or go to the bathroom." "But I don't even wanna look at any food!" "Don't worry, we'll go veggie. That's always the best when you're tripping. Here, let me order. You pay." Sheafer ordered them some vegetarian tostadas. Bubba tried eating his, but it was like having a Mexican carnival in your mouth. The tortilla crackled and popped like firecrackers and the hot sauce danced on his tongue like lightnings on a Tesla coil. Meanwhile the lettuce and cheese writhed on the surface of the tortilla. Bubba put it down and gazed out at the cars passing by on Highway 51. The acid magnified the Doppler effect, both visual and auditory, as the cars approached, passed, and sailed down the road. Each vehicle left multiple image trails behind it. Later, back at Bubba's parents' house, the phone rang. It was Heebie. The dinner with her parents was about to freak her out and she needed them to pick her up. They hopped in the Fode Mavrack and fetched her. Sheafer said that he needed to go home and get ready to go play a gig later on, so they dropped him off at his place. The sun set and it was night. Bubba and Heebie went for a long walk in the moonlight, and eventually came down from the acid. He took her to her house and drove back to the dorm. Bubba was disappointed with his first acid trip. It seemed to him that LSD had been overrated. Either that, or what he'd gotten wasn't genuine LSD. This was a doubt that was to recur over and over during his first ten or twenty trips in the next few months. In hindsight, some thirty years and some thousand trips later, he felt confident that it was LSD, just a very weak dose. Besides, Authorities on the Web stated that there was very little fake acid and very little acid with strychnine in it back in the Sixties and Seventies, a major worry back then. In ensuing trips, he was to have many, many hallucinations. But the very best acid was almost totally lacking in that regard. Blotter and Windowpane engendered trips in which the psychological facets overwhelmed anything the senses could provide. For this very reason, they were also the most frightening. He also discovered tactics for handling trips that got too intense. The first tactic he found was to smoke a cigarette. The ritual movements of lighting, puffing, and holding the cigarette gave him a sort of anchor to mundane reality. Unfortunately the nicotine gave everything a smokey, depressing look. Later, he discovered the effects of orange juice. Any time a trip's intensity got to be too much for him, he'd get a quart or more of sunshine juice and begin chugging it. He never found out if it was the vitamin C, B-12, or just what it was in the juice that did it, but it would always mellow out the trip. As time went by, he and Fleebus found that taking vitamins generally intensified a trip while mellowing it at the same time, and that taking multivitamins between trips was greatly to be desired. Of course, multivitamins also seemed to magnify the intensity of the trip.
The Harriet Mythos
