Needle (38 page)

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “It’s pretty beat around here.”

“Don’t you go to school?”

“I got kicked out for a semester,” he said. “I’m just here visiting my mother for a few months.”

Following the divorce of his parents, Brandon Lutz was sent away to a prestigious, New England boarding school that offered a privileged education for anyone who could afford it, regardless of academic qualifications or intellectual capacity.

“What’d you get kicked out for?”

“A security guard found a vile of liquid in my locker.”

For those out of the drug loop, the “liquid” Brandon was referring
to was
liquid acid
, which I had heard of but never actually seen before.

“Did they call the cops?” I asked.

“No.”

“What’d they do?”

“Nothing…besides kick me out of school,” he said. “But they said I can come back in January.”

That was quite a display of commitment to the young man’s education, not to mention the $20,000 a year tuition attached to it.

“That was nice of them,” I said.

“And they didn’t even take the acid away from me,” he added.

“What?”

“They never took the shit away. I still have it.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I swear. They just called my father and told me not to come back until 1995.”

“No fucking shit!”

I was impressed by the lengths the school would go to protect its profit margin because that was a lot of acid. Even for a minor, getting caught with such a sizable load should have been much more trouble that it was worth.

“You wanna do some?” he asked. “I haven’t even tried any of it yet.”

By now I normally wouldn’t have bothered with acid, especially after the nightmarish pink and brown episode I’d recently suffered through at Baskin Robbins. But this was
liquid
acid. I had never tried liquid before and again, as my dope supply was far from depleted I knew I could forgo the trip to the city and satisfy my curiosity.

I followed Brandon upstairs to his mother’s apartment and was offered a seat at the dinner table.

“Wait here a sec,” he told me.

After a minute or two he returned with a pack of Rolos, and a Visine eye-dropper filled with the drug. He then extracted two Rolos from the pack and placed a large drop of acid on the surface of each. I noticed how nicely the drops settled within the rim of the candy—resembling a tiny, chocolate, pool of acid.

We each carefully picked up a piece of candy and consumed it. Then we sat there staring at each other for about fifteen minutes.

“This shit is weak,” I said.

I knew that typically, paper hits of acid require about an hour of
digestion before the drug actually enters the bloodstream and the effects are noticed. But this was
liquid
acid, and due to a past experience with magic-mushroom tea I knew that once hallucinogens are liquefied, absorption rates dramatically increase. Armed with that bit of knowledge I had a feeling that something was terribly amiss.

“I think this shit is bogus,” I announced.

“Let’s try some more,” Brandon offered as a solution to the problem.

We each swallowed another pool of acid, waited a few more minutes, and no one felt anything.

“I don’t get it,” Brandon said.

“Looks like you got expelled for nothing,” I said, even though I could tell that to Brandon the loss of an academic semester paled in comparison to another sacrifice he made.

“I spent $300 on this fucking bullshit!”

“That seems like a lot of money for
water
.”

“It’s not supposed to be
water
,” Brandon agitatedly pointed out. “Each of those drops is supposed to be like five hits.”

“Five fucking hits? Then I’m glad it’s water. I wouldn’t have been able to hold it together.”

“And we both did two, so that would’ve been about ten hits each,” he added.

About a minute after he arrived at that calculation, I began to feel the anxiety that always accompanies a hallucinogenic as it enters the bloodstream.

“You know what? I think I’m beginning to feel it,” I said.

“I think I am too,” Brandon agreed. “This is gonna be some fuckin’ shit!”

Now knowing that the stuff was legitimate, and that I’d ingested roughly the equivalent of ten hits of acid, I couldn’t quite share in his enthusiasm.
Two
hits—let alone ten—would have been too much acid for me to handle, so I sat there preparing myself for major problems. Realizing what was in store, and that I’d be better off losing complete control in the more familiar surroundings of my mother’s apartment, I got up to leave.

“Hey man,” Brandon said as I was walking out of the apartment, “I’ll come down and check on you in a few, alright?”

Without saying a word, I left Brandon’s apartment and headed down the staircase to my mother’s. However, after several minutes of attempting to open her front door, I became convinced that while I
was upstairs someone had changed the locks. Although the key seemed to slide into the lock perfectly, when I attempted to turn it toward the unlocked position it refused to budge.

“Motherfucker!!!” I screamed as I tried to unlock the door with all my might.

Then, to make matters worse, the key got stuck in the keyhole.

“I can’t fucking believe this shit,” I said almost on the brink of tears.

While trying to pull the key out of the lock, I slipped on the welcome mat as it somehow slid out from under me. Then, as I grabbed the doorknob to steady myself, I accidentally turned it and opened the door—which was apparently unlocked to begin with. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t get the damned key out of the lock.

As I finally got inside, I slammed the door shut and tried to regain some composure. Then, after a minute or two of uncontrollable panting, I went to the kitchen for a glass of water and realized I was even more uncomfortable in my mother’s apartment than I had been in Brandon’s.

The trip was coming on hard and fast and there was no doubt about it: Given my surroundings and the amount of acid I’d so rapidly consumed, this was going to be a very bad experience. My eyes had already become a kaleidoscope that distorted and fused the details of my mother’s apartment into a single, indistinguishable mass of nauseating swirl.

As I walked around the apartment, intermittently taking sips of water and muttering to myself, I noticed that my trembling hands had apparently helped some of the water out of the glass and onto the floor, forming a trail of wetness behind me. That was all it took for me to grab a roll of paper towels and become twelve years-old again.

Oh shit—look at what I did! Mama’s gonna fuckin’ kill me when she gets home. There’s water all over the place and someone’s gonna step in it and track up mud, and then she’s gonna beat the living shit out of me. She’s probably gonna kick me out of the house and then what the fuck am I gonna do? Fucking loser-junky on acid. She must be so proud of me. I deserve to get kicked out. BUT FUCK HER!!! I don’t owe that bitch anything…but she could still kick me out. Did I wipe up the kitchen floor yet? I can’t remember. Fuck! Let me see. Yes, I did. Oh, but what about the fucking key in the door? It’s jammed in there like a motherfucker. I’m gonna have to find a tool or something to get it out. Shit! Did I spill water in the bathroom? I
better check. Nope, there’s no water on the floor. There sure is a shitload of water in the hallway, though. Wait a minute: If there’s water on the floor in the hallway, then there’s probably water on the floor in the bathroom and I just didn’t notice it. OK—let me get this water in the hallway first, and then I’ll take another look in the bathroom and…SHIT!!! Who the fuck is that!?!?

Just as I sat there on the hallway floor having a nervous breakdown and wiping up imaginary drops of water, Brandon walked in.

“Dude, my mother just came home early from work!” he said with excitement. “That never happens. Can you fucking believe it?”

He seemed to be amazed by the coincidence of his mother’s impromptu appearance just 30 minutes after he swallowed ten hits of acid. I, however, couldn’t appreciate the moment and knew that had I suffered a similar fate, I’d find nothing remarkable about it other than the fact that I soiled myself.

After sharing the news of his mother’s arrival—Brandon took one good look at me, paused, and then actually fell to the floor laughing hysterically.

“OH MY GOD, HE’S CLEANING THE FLOOR! HE’S CLEANING THE FUCKING FLOOR!!!”
he screamed in between fits of uncontrollable laughter.

Suddenly, this kid was really annoying me. I decided right then and there that I didn’t like Brandon, and had my eyes been able to focus on him at all—I would have hit him.

“Hey,” he said to me as he finally collected himself. “Here’s your key, dude. It was still in the lock.”

He handed the key to me and for a moment, I thought that Brandon might not be so bad after all. Getting that key unstuck had to have taken some effort.

“What’d you use to get it out with?” I asked.

“My hand. Hey—wait here a minute and I’ll be right back,” he said and then left my mother’s apartment.

I immediately jumped up, locked the door, and tried once again to compose myself.

I sat down on the couch and turned on the television which marked the beginning of the end. CNN was on, and though my eyes were focusing better, my ears were starting to give me problems as I was hearing the news broadcast in reverse. At first, I really didn’t think the problem was with me, and for a second assumed the
newscasters were enjoying a momentary, lighthearted reprieve from the day’s events. Then, after about an hour I realized that English, something I had once known intimately, was now completely foreign to me.

It’ll pass. This has got to pass
.

But it didn’t pass, and for an undetermined period I sat there listening to gibberish. I eventually tore myself away from the television to use the bathroom and then, while looking at my reflection in the mirror I decided to have a heart-to-heart.

People have been telling you you’re fucked up for years…Well now, you’re
REALLY
fucked up!!!

Standing in front of the mirror was obviously doing me no good. I returned to the living room and considered the pros and cons of an assisted living facility located in Connecticut as opposed to Manhattan.

“This can’t be happening,”
I tried to tell myself.
“It’s just a bad trip…that’s all.”

I decided to call Katrina. She’d been a Dead Head for years and had dropped more acid than anyone I’d ever known. She’d be able to calm me down and talk some sense into me before I really
did
have a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, when I called, it was one of her roommates that answered the phone.

“Katrina went back to Georgia,” Stacy told me in a tone suggesting I bore some responsibility for her departure. At that point, however, I was hardly concerned for
Katrina’s
well-being.

“FUCK!!!!”

It’s interesting to note that the auditory problem I was calling about had apparently subsided, as I not only understood that Katrina had gone back to Georgia, but was also able to detect Stacy’s subtle yet accusatory tone. Somehow, though, at that point the revelation hadn’t occurred to me.

“What’s the matter?” she asked in her southern drawl.

“Stacy, I just dropped a shitload of acid and I think I may have really fucked myself up. It’ll pass, right? I mean, I know I’m having a bad trip and all, but this will definitely go away…won’t it? I mean, shit—I’m OK, aren’t I?”

Even though she was apparently a little peeved with me, Stacy was a Dead Head as well and I was sure she’d be able to offer a few, much needed words of comfort:

“Well…who’d you get it from?”

That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I hung up the phone before her question began to echo in my head, along with the fucked up answer to it.

I then decided to call Perry in the hospital. He’d know what to do…or at least what to say.

“Hello?”

“Perry. Thank God you’re there. I just dropped about ten hits of acid and I’m gonna die.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“No, seriously man, I need some help.”

“Where are you?”

“At my mother’s apartment.”

“First of all, just calm down and get out of your mother’s apartment,” he said. “That
can’t
be a good place for you to be. Go into the woods and try to enjoy it. Just sit down under a tree, watch the show, and relax. You’ll be fine, trust me. You won’t hurt anyone, and nobody will hurt you. Everything will be OK, I promise.”

He was right. I was probably just exacerbating my own problems and being in my mother’s apartment certainly didn’t help matters. A little bit of getting back to nature along with some peace and serenity might’ve been just what I needed. The woods definitely
sounded
like a good idea. Unfortunately, the moment I stepped out of the building I was nearly hit by several speeding cars leaving trails of light wherever they went, and as far as “the woods” were concerned—there was barely a blade of grass to be found
let alone a fucking tree
. Although Stamford has its share of countrified areas, they are in no way a significant part of the downtown landscape which is precisely where my mother’s apartment was situated.

At some point I regained a bit more composure and though I realized I would probably survive the experience, I also realized that the only cure to my affliction was time. I would simply have to wait for the trip to run its course and try not to get killed in the process. For about five hours I paced the sidewalks surrounding my mother’s building, occasionally ducking behind a bush when things became a little too hectic to handle.

Eventually, the sun began to set and as it did I began to more fully regain control of my senses. However, as that bright, sickly-sweet glow emanated from the buildings and began to engulf the Emerald City, my anxiety again emerged. I decided to head back to the apartment before the Wicked Witch of the West returned home with a
flock of flying monkeys.

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