“Damned by God” by Brian McElmurry

“Do you want to buy a couple hits of liquid acid with our last ten dollars?”

I gave him a look from the wooden-step I was sitting on.  He was standing before me with a few of his friends behind him.  We were in his garage. I was 21. He was 20.

Before I could even say anything, Dylan said, “I know, I’m not the biggest fan of acid, but it seems perfect.  I was just talking to the guy.  We can come over right now.  And it’s just one hit, and we’ve been faded all day.  It’d probably be a real mellow time of just sitting around and smoking and drinking, you know.  It’s supposed to be good acid too.”

The spontaneity was appealing, and my best friend Dylan was persuasive.

Driving up to the acid-dude’s house, it didn’t surprise me that there were people out in front of this expensive two-story house in the Belmont Shores neighborhood poking around the lawn and bushes with flashlights.  It was a cleaning of the canvas that night.

Everyone was sitting around the pool very quietly.  A skinny dude in a hooded sweatshirt sat down and talked to the person in front of him, asking if he thought the candy would absorb the liquid acid.  After a quick discussion, he turned to Dylan and said, “Okay, I can ether give you it on a candy or just drop it on your tongue, but I’m not really sure if the candy will absorb the liquid.”

The tongue seemed most efficient.  Dylan knelt beside the patio table and the guy held the dropper over his mouth and carefully squeezed out a drop that seemed to bulge at the tip before it fell.  I looked around nervous, completely oblivious to the fact that all these kids sitting around quietly were all tripping on acid.  My turn came and the drop had a strong taste.  We all took a candy to combat that.

After an hour and a half the acid was coming on smoothly with vivid hallucinations.  Dylan’s friends had left to the beach, and he and I were having a mellow time in his garage.  My body felt completely relaxed and my mind wasn’t racing.  The air was cloudy and soft like a rose pastel.  It was like we were in the Genii’s bottle.  We were giggly and smoking chronic.  I sat on the metal chair near the garage door and stared, entranced with the grains in the unfinished wood of the large cabinet that lined the garage wall.  It was like a surreal landscape of swirling fields of wheat in France, as if Van Gough had become my eye, the wind blowing the grain and the circles of air in the sky.  The ever changing, ceaseless world like this landscape kept moving, lovely, as we laughed about the absurdity of life.  Because the meaning of things became unspeakable and cloudy—words obsolete—only this feeling.

Dylan wanted to smoke a cigarette.  We went out front to enjoy the night.

“I want to see the stars.” I said, as I pushed open the garage and we walked to the end of the driveway.

Standing next to Dylan, under the hundred foot tall pines that lined the street, I noticed five houses down, at the T of the street, a cop car parked in front of a house.

“Is that a cop?” I asked and pointed, as I moved and ducked around trying to determine if this car was a cop car and if a cop was inside.

The black and white of the cop car seemed to disperse into a cubistic style of pulsating air, all digitized into a grid—the T of the street, the trees, the bushes, the suburban houses and the cop car—all became one single item, inseparable from one another.  I couldn’t determine if it was a cop.

“Is that a cop?” I was repeating, pointing, looking, jumping about—till I realized it was one and quickly walked in the garage.

I sat in my metal folding-chair and looked at Dylan still standing in the same spot on the sidewalk.  He coolly hit his cigarette and didn’t even look at me.  I stood and paced, out of the line of sight of the cop.  Dylan turned toward the garage and strode in slowly.  Once he crossed the threshold of the garage, I closed the door.

He went in the corner and paced in a circle, “It’s over.  It’s over.” Was to be his refrain.  He ripped into me, “I can’t believe you just did that!”

“I couldn’t help it.  I couldn’t tell if it was a cop car.”

“It’s over.” He kept repeating, in the corner of the garage, by the door to the backyard.

I sat in the opposite corner in the metal chair hoping he would shut up, scared that the cop would walk up to the house and hear us talking this paranoid tripping shit through the garage door.

“It’s okay. We’ll be cool if we just shut up, and wait a while.” I told him

I didn’t think it was okay, but felt Dylan needed a hand—and was actively trying to deny this powerful paranoia that had my mind racing, my veins lined with electricity, and time going uncomfortably slow.  I said nothing and Dylan shut up.  After 15 minutes, he went into the living room to see if a cop car was down the street.  I paced while he was gone.  He returned and said he couldn’t tell.  His face pulsated as he said this.  His pours irritated by acne seemed to open red and wide and form a pattern, as his head billowed in size like a fluctuating balloon.  I couldn’t focus, as I looked at the black holes that were his eyes.

After a half an hour of stress, his friends had returned from the beach.  We heard them pull up and Dylan opened the garage as their footsteps neared.

I said, “Hey Tyler.  Hey Tyler, is there a cop parked down the street?  Go look.”

He took a few steps passed some bushes and laughed, “No.”

I walked onto the sidewalk and looked to where the cop car once sat and wondered when it left, or if it saw us, or if it’d be back.  It was a relief, but I was still on edge.  I was locked in now.

Right off the bat, once the garage was closed, I asked Tyler, “So there’s no cop out there and we’re okay?”

“Yeah, you guys are okay.”

It felt good for him to say that, a confirmation with reality.

It was nearly three in the morning and it was just these two ripen skater and Tyler.  I chatted the non-tripping skater and Tyler up because I was fucking wired and tripped out, telling them about how we saw the cop and freaked out.

“Cop cars are trippy.” Tyler commented, as he looked over at Dylan pacing near the back of the garage before looking at me, twisted, rubbing my hands and squirming around, sitting in front of him. “It’s a good thing we came back.”

“It is!  It is!” I laughed hysterically, rocking in my metal chair.

Dylan shook his head in agreement, from the corner, pacing.

The other ripen skater had taken a hit of acid also and seemed to be sleeping on the bed.  This amazed Dylan and I, and we asked him several times if he was okay.  He was.  A few months later, he told me he was just tripping really hard and felt it best to pretend and sleep, so not to do something stupid.  He got up and asked if he could use the bathroom.

“Just go outside, dude.” Dylan said quickly.

“But I gotta take a shit.”

Dylan was worried about letting him inside, and asked if he could hold it.  Tyler came to his rescue and reassured Dylan he would be okay.

Dylan led Scott through the dark hallway to the bathroom.  Dylan returned and worried the whole time about him.

“It’s cool Dylan.  It’s gonna take a few minutes.” Tyler said.

He returned from the bathroom and Dylan asked, “Everything go good?”

“Yeah.” He said shyly.

Everyone laughed and he tried to sleep on the bed again.

It boggled my mind at the time.  I felt wired and tripped out beyond anything called sleep, or even lying down.  When Dylan went in the bathroom after Tyler gave them a ride home, he came back laughing, “Dude, Scott must’ve had to go bad because there was a huge shit when I came in there.”

“He didn’t flush it?”

“Na ah.” He laughed, “It must have been killing him.  I just turned on the light and there it was—this huge shit in the toilet.”

Tyler returned and continued being our anchor to reality.  He really helped Dylan and I out that night, talking with me because when I’m wired I have the tendency to talk constantly, as the affect it had on Dylan was a constant pacing back and forth with the intermittent pause in his step when he got really deep in thought.

Tyler had grown up in Utah and had rebelled pretty hard in high school doing hard drugs like coke and heroin, which he shared stories of, like waking up in a bathtub with a needle in his arm after he had puked in the toilet after shooting up and passing out.  That was the last time he did heroin.  He said shooting coke was like 45 minutes of a hardcore Nitrous high.  Yet he was a charismatic fellow, blonde and tall, had a cute 16-year-old girl with him earlier and would go to her house later that night (though he’d come too late because I’d make him give us a ride to the store.)

He said, “One time, I was tripping on acid and I took another hit and I was sucking on it while I talked to this chick, and it popped out of my mouth and onto her arm.  And I was like ‘uh oh’ and grabbed it real quick and put it back in my mouth.”

“Did she start to trip?” I asked.

“Yeah, she did a little because it was all wet because I was sucking on it.  She just started to say she felt weird.”

“Was this chick a Mormon?”

She was.  He said they were freaks, telling us about making out with this Mormon girl in the woods right after puking.

“Was she drunk too?” I asked.

“No, she was sober.”

“And she still kissed you after puking.”

“Yeah, we were making out and I just started feeling all shitting from the drinking and turned from her and puked, and then she started kissing me again.  And once we were on the bus too.”

He had a bottle of bourbon that he occasionally sipped on, and he knew what was what with acid, so I asked if it was okay to drink on acid.  He said, “Yeah, but not to the point where you puke.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like once I drank a whole bottle of liquor on acid and was puking and hung over while I was tripping.  It was awful!”

Dylan and I began to drink, and then Tyler had to go, but first I asked, “Could you please give us a ride to the store, so I can buy Dylan cigarettes?”

“Why don’t you walk, I have to go over to this girl’s house because she’s going to bed now.”

I didn’t want to walk, paranoid of getting picked up by police.  Dylan wasn’t too concerned, but I was concerned about a smoker being out of cigarettes.  I finally got Tyler to give in.  He was low on gas, so drove my Civic.  He parked at the Shell station and using my parent’s gas card, I asked, “Can I get some Kools?”

The Asian man behind the window said something, but I couldn’t understand it.

“This is my dad’s gas card, and I’m his son and he doesn’t mind letting me use it.”

He said something again but no voice seemed to come from his lips.

I went back to the car, leaned in the window and said, “They don’t have Kools.”

I tried Camel Menthol.  He said the same thing but his voice was inaudible.

I returned to the car.  “Dude, I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but he doesn’t have those cigarettes, I think.”

“Just try any menthol.” Tyler said.

This time I heard him just barely say, “I.D.”

“Oh!” I said and put my I.D. in the box that goes between the windows.  I bought water too, it seemed important for survival.  I signed the credit card slip and we left.

By the time we were done, Tyler’s girl had gone to bed so we got him super stoned and when I asked him a question, he said, “I don’t know dude, I’m like you guys now.”

“Oh.” I said, feeling I had been a little too dependent on the non-tripping person’s perspective for guidance.

When he left we both thanked him for his help.  He said, “Well it seems like you guys aren’t tripping that hard anymore.  You guys were tripping hard for a while.”

As dawn came, we got the giggles as the beers eased our trip and smoked some dope.  We were talking nonstop and I had gotten on the subject of absurdity of meaning, how everything was nothing because one person may say a thing is one way and another say it’s the exact opposite.  How the closer you look at an object and deconstruct the meaning of things, all you see is symbols that people have scarcely agreed upon.  A thing like sleep seemed not to exist.  We both grew introspective and Dylan began to draw.  I asked for a piece of paper and pen and wrote:

 is there sleep?

                        it is no more

    It is no more    Moronic

    there has to be?

            7 o’clock

               in the morning

Things not making sense

                                               KANSAS

            Is this absurd?

            Aspects

                        Little cubes within a cube

                                within a cube

                                    New, so new

                                       Beatles did

                                                   Acid

                                          I poured

                                                   Beer

                                         on the floor

                                         to look at it

                                                Is there sleep?

                                                 making sense

                                                        of the nonsense

I read this to Dylan and we both laughed.  He showed me his drawing and it was really quite powerful.  It was a blue pen drawing of a man, his arms and legs out stretched, with a hole in its center, the lines swirled and swirled and swirled, so that it seemed to move.  He was pacing again while we discussed sleep, if we’d be able to.  We seemed to determine that we would sleep opposite directions on his queen sized bed, but when it came time to sleep we forgot that plan.  The beers had brought us down a notch, but they were long gone.  We thought of going to buy more, but we only had one dollar.  We kept writing things like, “ONE DOLLAR.”  Or since I had to go to the bathroom and it was daytime, I had to go inside and possibly come face to face with his parents.  I’ve known them for years, but what would they think?  Could I deal with them?  Dylan said, “Your bladder is your ultimate demon.  Write that down.  Write, ‘My bladder is my ultimate demon.’”  I did this.

“Everyone has demons.” Tyler had said the night before, but that seriously felt like eons ago.  Since the beginning of last night was a whole other time.  The canvas was cleansed and every idea was broken down to its absurdity.  Birds were chirping as the outside world rose and the sun began to show.  We wrote odd things that struck us funny.  We had no idea what we were talking about.  We’d start a conversation, go on a tangent and forget what we were talking about.  We both said, “I don’t remember” a thousand times.  But this was a celebration.  I wrote, “Celebration of Life?  Life….” Then I laughed as I waxed intellectually—my mind had been skewed for a good time.  My illusions and perspectives had morphed and changed feeding off each new tangent of the idea, each based on an unrealistic thing, but seeming so true.  I was giddy in this blank space of my mind—washed of preconceptions.

Dylan, near the door into his house, was pacing back and forth and back and forth.  Slow and then fast.  He turned and talked to me before he posed sideways and brought the fresh bowl of chronic close to his face.  As he admired the crystals of the fabulous bud, he said, “And I do remember saying it was beautiful.” Then he hit the pipe.  He said, “Write that down.”  He repeated what he said like a Shakespearian actor, holding the pipe near his face, looking into the bowl of chronic, “And I do remember saying it was beautiful.”  Then he instructed, “Write this, Dylan says confusedly looking into the bowl of chronic.”

We laughed and he began to pace again.  The floor seemed to be worn from his pacing—from left to right in a tight area—seemed to wear an ellipse in the concrete like Scrooge M^c Duck in Ducktales.  I wrote:

 Indent

Pacing

Wears

It seemed as if I’d heard it before.

Is there sleep?  We weren’t sure.  The garage was safe, we knew this, we wrote it down.  Dylan got into bed and I sat in my metal chair by the garage door and said, “I haven’t sat here in a while.”

“Write this down, Ian.” Dylan said, in covers. “With a pillow and blanket, I lounge for safety.”  I did.  Then he took the pad and wrote: “I’m

         Over

     It.

10/24/99  8:13 AM”

            But the acid had him up again.  I had it down now and I was telling Dylan about it.  The thing we’d been talking about all night.  He asked me questions about the loss of meaning—the meaninglessness of things.  How no one could really agree what a certain object is.  How each perspective is their own.  How each interest and subject was enlarged in their brain too such an obscure range of thought that it’s meaning wasn’t valid to a concrete meaning.  We were lucid right then.  But, I told him, to figure out this is to face the meaningless of life—the nothingness.  Dylan had the sheet of paper and was asking me questions.  He was getting it.  He wrote this:

Little Cubed

To figure out something, is then

to figure out nothing, to then

combine to make chaos

the most unsure thing that we have.

(I read this to him after this night and he had no recollection of writing it.)

A little after this, he shuffled me off to his brother’s room where I was suppose to sleep on the floor.  I’d almost fallen asleep by the self-hypnosis of wrapping myself in the fluffy comforter, but snap, I was wide-awake and tripping.  I thought sleep was impossible.  I felt exposed on the floor next to his brother’s bed, his brother sleeping in it.  I stood and tried to open the door into the garage, but it was locked.  I felt panicked and knocked.  No answer.  I knocked again, louder.

“Alright, hold on a second.” I heard.  Dylan quickly opened the door before he jumped under his covers, asking, “What the fuck?”

“Dude, I can’t sleep in there.  I don’t even think I can sleep.  Let me lay down somewhere in here.” I said, standing on the wooden steps.

“It’s all concrete.” He told me. “There’s nowhere to sleep.”

“I’ll just sleep here on the ground using the comforter.” I said.

I quickly lay on the ground, between his bed and some boxes, with the comforter wrapped around me awkwardly before he had time to blink.

He sat up in bed, and looked over the edge at me.  “Dude, what are you doing?  That’s a new comforter and you’re getting it all dirty.  God, my floor is filthy.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know.” I said, laying on my back, unevenly on the ground, the lumps of the comforter fucking with me.  I rolled around trying to straighten the comforter in the skinny space.

“Ian seriously, if you could see yourself right now…  You’re fucking up, man.  Once you come down, you’re gonna be like ‘what the fuck was I doing?’  Just go back and lay on my brother’s floor.  It has to be the hell of a lot more comfortable than that floor your laying on right now.”

“I’m cool.” I said, stilling trying to even out the comforter.

He just sighed and rolled over.

After uncomfortably lying there a moment, I realized he was right and went back into his brother’s room to try to sleep.  His room was all white, minus a few rap posters in a corner completely out of my gaze.  The morning light filled the room, as I stared at the wall and tried to huddle in the comforter to create the least amount of light and suffocation.  Physically, I convinced myself, I was capable of sleep.  I was tired and wired.  My mind needed to stop its racing, so it could settle into unconsciousness.  I started counting my breaths.  Taking long, deep breaths, counting one as I breathed in and two as I breathed out… 1… 2… 3… 4… 1… and so on.  My mind was envisioned completely clear.  I had stopped all thinking and was ready to sleep, but found I couldn’t relinquish my concentration on my breath.  I couldn’t switch back to autonomic breathing and had to keep concentrating on my breath, or I thought—I’d not breathe and die!  Then I was scared to sleep because I feared I would not wake up!  Staring at the white wall, it felt as if the darkness and the nothingness continued from my body into the ground into a void of nothingness so immense and deep that it seemed eternal and blank, a vacuum.  Then bam—complete disconnection from God—I felt damned—out of the protection of God—out of the boundaries of God.  I prayed for forgiveness for I had thought and written those foul words Fuck Jesus.  Now complete abandonment.  Nothingness.  I prayed for forgiveness.  Scared of death.  Scared of being at the mercy of the devils now.  I prayed for forgiveness knowing that in all this nothingness there must be something.

The prayer for God’s grace brought some relief.  I was unconsciously breathing again.  But I was still heavily into my trip.  I barely moved so not to wake his brother, and have him see me out of my gourd lying on the floor.  I couldn’t stand myself.  I no longer believed in sleep.  I no longer believed in the fixed form of anything.  And since I didn’t believe—I didn’t know where I’d end up—a Sanitarium?  It all just seemed so pointless.  Nothing but a hassle.  Everything.

Laying there till noon—staring at the light fixture on the ceiling to gauge my state, which after a couple hours stopped moving and pulsating and changing forms.  I knew I was finally coming down.  I walked to the gas station to get some food, which was strange.  It was safe, but weird and paranoid.  I turned a corner nearing the Lincoln Highway and I wanted to hide like a spy from a man watering his yard.  I looked at him, briefly, walking by, so if to say “hi” and not be rude, but he didn’t register me.  I walked quicker.  I bought donuts and milk, some juice, a Pay Day, and some chips, but couldn’t eat anything.  The milk was good.  Sleep was impossible and I knew I needed to get home.  Was I cool to drive?  I showered and put on fresh clothes before sitting in the front room to watch TV with Dylan’s brother and sister, but after a few minutes it became too straining, too much of an edge in me.  I waited in his brother’s room till two in the afternoon when I thought it was safe to drive home.  Knocking on Dylan’s door to get my things, he promptly answered.

“Did you sleep?” I asked.

“Part of the night, but it was just a half sleep.”

He used my hammerhead-glass pipe, before I left, and placed it on his bed once he was done.  After slapping Dylan five, I swung my bag around and knocked the forgotten-glass pipe off the bed.  It bounced a couple times off the concrete floor, echoing a strange metallic sound before it shattered into pieces, the noise ringing and continuing in my mind like a slow water fall.