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TEN.
The subject of this composition is My Very First Acid Trip.
My first and my last, eight years ago. Actually it wasn’t my trip at all, but Toni’s. D-lysergic acid diethlyamide has never passed through my digestive tract, if truth be told. What I did was hitchhike on Toni’s trip. In a sense I’m still a hitchhiker on that trip, that very bad trip. Let me tell you.
This happened in the summer of ’68. That summer was a bad trip all in itself. Do you remember ’68 at all? That was the year we all woke up to the fact that the whole business was coming apart. I mean American society. That pervasive feeling of decay and imminent collapse, so familiar to us all — it really dates from ’68, I think. When the world around us became a metaphor for the process of violent entropic increase that had been going on inside our souls — inside my soul, at any rate — for some time.
That summer Lyndon Baines MacBird was in the White House, just barely, serving out his time after his abdication in March. Bobby Ke
I was living near Columbia in ’68, in a seedy residence hotel on 114th Street, where I had one medium-big room plus kitchen and bathroom privileges, cockroaches at no extra charge. It was the very same place where I had lived as an undergraduate in my junior and senior years, 1955-56. The building had been going downhill even then and was an abominable hellhole when I came back to it twelve years later — the courtyard was littered with broken hypodermic needles the way another building’s courtyard might be littered with cigarette butts — but I have an odd way, maybe masochistic, of not letting go of bits of my past however ugly they may be, and when I needed a place to live I picked that one. Besides, it was cheap — $14.50 a week — and I had to be close to the University because of the work I was doing, researching that Israel book. Are you still following me? I was telling you about my first acid trip, which was really Toni’s trip.
We had shared our shabby room nearly seven weeks — a bit of May, all of June, some of July — through thick and thin, heat waves and rainstorms, misunderstandings and reconciliations, and it had been a happy time, perhaps the happiest of my life. I loved her and I think she loved me. I haven’t had much love in my life. That isn’t intended as a grab for your pity, just as a simple statement of fact, objective and cool. The nature of my condition diminishes my capacity to love and be loved. A man in my circumstances, wide open to everyone’s i