David Bowie

By now it was around 11:00 in the morning, and Sunday Dress Dinner was coming up. Occasionally, Dress Dinner was a served affair, but, fortunately, today it was just the regular cafeteria scene – stand in line, get your gruel, sit down and eat it – except that the tables had paper tablecloths on them. As I walked calmly down the hall towards my room, my brain was spinning. And, frankly, so was the hallway. I felt gleefully insane, but I had no idea if I looked it, so I tried to comport myself with dignity and grace. Getting to my room, I decided to see how long I could interact with Eric before he knew something was up. Using him as a litmus test was a good way to determine how strangely I was acting and what I could get away with. I took a deep breath and walked into the room.

Eric had just gotten out of the shower and was standing in the bathroom, shaving. I walked quickly by the open bathroom door and into the room as coolly and normally as possible. Eric immediately came out of the bathroom, face covered in freakish white foam.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he demanded.

Oh, dear. This was going to be harder to pull off than I thought.

I told him what had been going on and, while a bit jealous that he wasn’t also involved, he was enthusiastic and curious about my experience. I tried to change into my dress clothes, but was laughing so hard that I got my legs tangled up in the pants and fell over into the closet, where I lay shrieking with laughter while Eric shook his head. Knowing that the biggest test was coming up – eating lunch in a room full of hundreds of people that knew me – some friendly, some not so much – I promised him I’d chill out, got my shoes on, and walked with him to the cafeteria.

The hallway was endless, and the sound of our footsteps bounced around disconcertingly. If I looked straight ahead, it seemed like I wasn’t moving at all, like I was walking on a treadmill, but if I turned my head to the side, it looked like I was running down the hall was fast as I could. I also had the strange sensation that as soon as I stopped looking at something, it disappeared, and became fascinated with my inability to prove that that wasn’t the case.

Concentrating mightily, I grabbed a tray and navigated the line, coming out with a Salisbury steak and some mashed potatoes. We took our usual table in the back and I set myself to the task of eating lunch. Only I didn’t have much of an appetite. And the steak was doing this strange bubbling, swirling thing that made it so completely disgusting that I couldn’t even fathom anybody eating it ever. A big, grey slab of dead animal carcass covered by viscous brown bubbling goo. I tried the potatoes, which were agreeably soft, but the gravy was so horrifically metallic tasting and the potato flavor so overwhelming that it was like drowning in a giant vat of mashed potatoes while chewing on tinfoil. Then some girls came and sat at the table and I could no longer keep it together. I mumbled an excuse about not feeling well and practically sprinted out of the cafeteria.

The truth of the matter was that I was feeling great – too great to try and play it cool for some girls while my steak was erupting. Giggly and amazed, I found the world an endlessly fascinating place, each texture and object almost unbearably interesting. I went back to my room and pulled out Bowie’s Changesone album, a greatest hits package that had been in heavy rotation in our room the past couple of weeks. First up on deck, Space Oddity.

Although I understood the “psychedelic” aspects of the song before, actually being in a psychedelic headspace when hearing it was an entirely different experience. The song was breathtakingly beautiful, with its inventive production swirling around in what seemed considerably more than three dimensions. Time became fluid, expanding and contracting like the walls of my room. The song was both comfortingly familiar and horrifically alien at the same time. Seeming profound beyond reason, it struck me as perhaps the greatest and most important piece of music I had ever heard. Its mixed pro/anti drug stance seemed startlingly relevant, and I realized, listening to the shards of sound echo through my addled brain, that I had been initiated. I had crossed a threshold. No longer a chemical virgin, I hadn’t just dipped my toes in the stream of unconsciousness, I had jumped in to the deepest part I could find. And triumphantly bobbed to the surface again, minutes older and years wiser. I swayed along to the disintegrating track, as Major Tom floated into his own internal sun, but when the opening of John, I’m Only Dancing burst on, I pulled the needle from the record and turned the stereo off. As cool as the music was, the temporal distortions were making it hard to listen to for long and the unbearable green outside the window was beckoning me and I had to go outside.

It couldn’t have been a better day. I wandered around the woods and down by the lake, marveling at every blade of grass and every flutter of wings. There were no hassles and no freak-outs and no bad feelings. At one point, I had to be careful not to look down at my feet as I walked because if I did so, the ground would rapidly telescope away from me and I’d be left dangling hundreds of feet in the air. I didn’t get any great insights into the nature of reality or have any conversations with dogs, but I did have a spectacularly wonderful, infinitely green afternoon.

I eventually made it back to the dorm and stopped by Andrew’s room. He wasn’t there, but his roommate Bob was. Bob was actually a better friend to me than Andrew was, and he was happy to see me, although he was suffering from a head cold that day. Still, he was curious about my maiden voyage and tried his best to freak me out by saying ridiculous non-sequitors and clapping loudly while he talked. It was far too obvious to work, but then I noticed something on his desk that I’d never seen before. The cafeteria used pebbled brown plastic glasses to serve drinks, and Bob had a juice glass from the cafeteria that was made out of the same material, but was much smaller than the usual glasses. I had never seen one before and it was seriously fucking with my head. With no point of reliable reference, I couldn’t get a fix on how big it was – if it really was small or if it just looked small through my distorted vision. So I picked it up and turned it around and held it up to other things, trying to determine how big it really was. Finally, convinced, I announced, “This is small.”

Satisfied, I set it down on the desk and then noticed a pair of toenail clippers lying right next to it. I had never seen a pair of toenail clippers before. They were just like every pair of fingernail clippers I had seen except that they were – you guessed it – much bigger. Again, I gingerly picked them up and turned them over and stared at them. Bob watched with bemusement as I held it up to the juice glass, brow furrowed in puzzlement. Finally, convinced, I announced, “This is big.”

Bob had enough of my explorations in scale and kicked me out so he could get some sleep. I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The rush had passed and I was feeling calm and tired. Finally, I realized that I was back to normal. I looked at the trees out the window and noticed that if I squinted in a certain way, the branches on one of the trees clearly spelled “eat shit”. Whoops, guess I’m not quite done.

Eric took his first trip – also a solo one – that night and had a much different experience. Since he couldn’t leave the dorm and was worried about running into an RA in his state, he spent the entire adventure in the room. I was crashing hard as he was lifting off and all I wanted to do was go to sleep, but he was wired and talkative. He cornered me in the bathroom as I was brushing my teeth and explained his realization that smoking pot was like standing still while the world revolved around you and taking acid was like the world stood still and you revolved around it. Anxious to get him occupied long enough for me to go to sleep, I pulled out my big book of Roger Dean paintings (he’s most famous for painting the covers of early Yes albums like Tales from Topographic Oceans and Fragile) and handed it to Eric. He opened it up and immediately disappeared down a rabbit hole long enough for me to get into bed. He only woke me up once, around four in the morning, when a tickling sensation lifted me out of my slumber and I discovered him playing with the hair in my armpit. I opened my eyes and startled him so much that he yelped and jumped across the room, cowering and babbling gibberish and laughing maniacally.

In the morning, all was well, and he and I ate breakfast, sharing war stories and grinning at our new membership in the brotherhood of psychonauts. He and I would go on to trip together another fifteen or twenty times before my emotional and psychological state got too fragile to support that kind of excursion. Some were good, some were great, but none was better than that first one, on that gloriously too-green spring day when, with the help of Mr. Natural, my brain finally relinquished its hold on sobriety