From A Time Ago & Then - Chapter 2. Tripping (pt.1)

It was late August by the time my cast was cut off and I was transferred to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. One of the things I’d purchased while convalescing was a Minolta 35 mm SLR. I fancied myself a photographer and, when I wasn’t in bars, took pictures around Waikiki and Honolulu. It was on one of these excursions, celebrating my twenty-third birthday, I met a couple of hippy looking dudes in a bar behind the International Market Place on Kalakaua. During the late sixties, this area behind the market on Kuhio was a known venue for drug dealers and muggers. I was drunk and oblivious to this as I talked with the two men in the bar.

“You guys know where I can score some pot?” I asked, knowing full-well these two, of all people, would. World-wise in foreign ports, I knew very little, or nothing, of what had been going down in the culture. I’d bought the myth about hippies being love, peace, pot, free love and LSD. I was soon to learn otherwise.

“Yah, sure, but we have to go a few miles to get it.” Agreed the one whose hair resembled the folk singer Donovan, “C’mon, how much do you need? We can get all you want. How much cash do you got?”

I jumped in the back seat of a four-door, beat-up, Mercury, while Donovan rode shot-gun. The driver was oddly quiet and emitted a sense of ominous foreboding as he drove up out of town into the hills and isolated road where a housing development was under construction. Mr. Ominous stopped the car on the side of the road that had a steep drop of about seventy-five feet above a place where there was nothing but the frames of houses on slabs. It was then that Donovan turned to me with his right hand and put a huge diving knife neatly to my throat.

“Gimme that goddamned camera and your money!” he demanded.

I was in a state of shock… I hadn’t even imagined, let alone seen it coming. I handed over my cash, about forty bucks, and the camera with my left hand flashing an expensive Zodiac diving watch.

“Gimme your watch too.”

Demanding the watch was just a bit too much for me. It wasn’t so much that I held an attachment to the watch but I wasn’t about to let this hippy have it all: my camera, my money and my watch! I put out my left hand with the watch as if to surrender it and, with my right hand, opened the door as Donovan turned to set down the camera on the floorboard. I rolled out, tucked and skied down the loose dirt of the slope to the bottom. I felt my lower back cry out but I didn’t have time to nurse it as I ran for the stacks of lumber set in a maze around one of the houses. Luckily for me, Donovan and Mr. Ominous didn’t bother to give chase on foot. They cruised back and forth on the roads around the development but gave up after a few minutes and sped off.

I thumbed a ride back to the base. It wasn’t hard to hitch a ride in those days. My clothes and face were filthy from rolling down the hill in the dirt and I had no money. Yet the Air Force First-Lewie who picked me up, hit-on me regardless. That is always how it was and, any other time, I might have played along for whatever I could con the guy out of otherwise but not this night. I, Max, who was always on the take, was taken this time. I just told the guy I was straight and the subject was dropped. I got back to the barracks and crashed.

There were a few stoners in the medical holding company; mostly section-eights awaiting orders. I was a month or so over the end of my enlistment by this time and I was itching to get back to civilian life. Two of the guys I bunked with had acquired some LSD and asked me if I’d ever done acid before. I was not about to admit that I hadn’t tripped. I only knew enough about acid to want to try it.

It sounds lame now but the language people used back then went, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, something like this: “Max, we got some acid bro, are you... Experienced?”

“Sure,” I lied, “I’ve done acid a bunch of times.”

My qualifying experience was an interview with Timothy Leary in Playboy I'd read but that was enough for me to pose as a big-time tripper.

“Good… you wanna trip with us tonight? We’ve never done it before and we’ve been told we ought to have an experienced guide for our first acid trip.”

“Where you want to trip?” I asked, using a tone of confidence and assurance to make them believe they would be in good hands. After all, I thought, it couldn't be that big a deal.

“We can go to the beach and hang out where there’s some live music if we get bored there,”  one of them volunteered.

The evening started out full of promise. I was excited to be able to experience acid but mostly to be able to say I’d done it. I’d lied to my buddies about having dropped LSD because I just didn’t want to admit to anyone that I hadn’t taken it. Once my pals admitted that they had not taken it, I was already committed to the lie and I knew how to lie well enough to stick to my story once I’d told it. I was undaunted by the fact that I was expected to be the “guide” for the evening simply because I had no idea what a mind-altering trip I was in for.

Once on the beach we dropped the orange barrel shaped tabs and passed around a bowl of Panama Red. We then waited for the trip to begin. After about a half hour I began to wonder whether we’d been ripped-off. Someone suggested we go to Kalakaua and hang out in front of one of the open-air clubs with a band. I shuffled along a path leading off the beach on a cement walkway partially covered with sand. The sound my feet made became hilariously funny.

I chuckled, the chuckle turned into chortle, and the chortle into a gut driven guffaw. Soon enough all three of us were laughing and shuffling our feet. The sand shuffling out from my feet was iridescent. The laughing was so intense I became alarmed. It was as if my whole body convulsed in one guffaw after another. I thought; Whew, I’ve got to get control of this thing or I’m going to freak out!

We all stopped laughing at once. It was as though there was a synchronistic mind-thread between us. Kalia Road with traffic loomed ahead. The signal light changed green. The others crossed and I followed. There was nothing to fear but, to me, the traffic took on a monstrous appearance… growling engines lined up to mow down and devour me at the change of the light. I found myself moving regardless. I became aware halfway across in the middle of the street that one step seemed to stretch out, taking an eternity, between lifting my foot and setting it down on the spongy pavement… like my leg was made of silly putty. Time seemed to stand still for a moment. I took note that none of the cars stopped at the light, or seemed impatient at all. In fact, I realized that I had been walking quite normally as I popped back into the present time/space relationship.

“Whew! This is more than I expected and we’ve just begun,” I mumbled to myself.

“Huh?” said one of my charges… “What did you say?”

“Nothin’; I just said I’m stoned!” I heard my own voice shouting as I reached the far side of the street. Everyone seemed to be walking normally. Everything was okay. “Just fine... Self,” I said again to myself.

“Huh?” my pal queried again.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“S-T-O….oh…oh…N-E-D… Freakin’ STONED!” he shouted back.

There were dozens of mini-adventures such as these that occurred along the way. Our freaking and stoned threesome finally reached an open-air nightclub where the music was blaring out into the street. We stood there outside on the sidewalk. A planter was all that separated us from the inside of the club. The live band caused the air to ripple out each note before my eyes the way the air does in the heat from the desert floor. I got into the music but, suddenly, I longed to get back to the beach and away from the noise. Since I was their trusted guide the others complied.

Back at the small wall on the beach, where we had smoked the Panama Red, now had a group of musicians. I was told they were members of the band, Steppenwolf, which had just played at the Concert Hall. I wasn’t sure if it was true but I had no reason to doubt it. Again, each note literally breathed and rippled out of the acoustic guitars. Then I got distracted and caught myself getting paranoid when people laughed or made comments to the side. One of the guitarists asked, “Is he okay?”

My fellow trippers, the ones I was supposedly guiding on this trip, affirmed, “Oh, he’s just stoned.”

They know, I thought. They know I’m a fraud and that this is my first trip… they know I’m an acid virgin, fa’ chrissakes! A friggen’ LSD virgin… well-o-well, I Am Experienced now!

I parted from the group and walked a hundred feet away… close enough to hear the guitar playing, and so on, but far enough away for a place to sit quietly and sort things out. I looked out across the lagoon to where the surf was breaking on the reef and lapping at the shore. My mind melded with how gloriously beautiful… how beautifully glorious each sound, each wave, each crystalline star shown above the horizon.

I sat there: a series of questions and answers came to me… “Why am I paranoid?”

“Because I lied to these guys about tripping,” pausing after each query.

“Why did you lie to them?”

“Because I didn’t want them to know I was straight.”

“Why didn’t you want them to know that?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“I was afraid they wouldn’t want to hang out with me if I weren’t hip.”

“Why would they care whether you were hip or not?”

“I’m not who I appear to be.”

“Why aren’t you who you appear to be?”

“It is a cover-up that started a long time ago.”

“Tell me about it.”

I sat there on the beach in Waikiki listening to the waves gently lap the shore and went over every lie I could remember and every reason to lie that I could think of. I sat there as the stars crossed from one point on the horizon to the next and grasped the whole cosmos in my consciousness… grasped it so well that I was sure I would hang on to it. The lapping of the waves on the shore was connected to the ocean of the cosmos… I saw and felt the rhythms of it all with an amazing clarity. I was sure that I would never lie again. On that mountain top, I saw that I didn't need alcohol or depressants: that from then on I would only expand rather than shut down my consciousness. Before the thought was through; however, I feared that a great cosmic truth, which had stirred me, could just as easily slip away… back to where it came from. Still, it was embedded in my consciousness so deeply the reality of it would recur at every important juncture in my life. Then the sun rose and the three of us headed back to the base.

We caught a launch to Ford Island. I leaned my head with an ear to the gunnels and gloried in this apocalypse, listening to the reverberation of waves slapping the hull of the launch as it made its way to the landing on Ford Island. Everyone was changing into uniform for muster when we got to our barracks and I stood there looking at my uniform. I said to myself and anyone in earshot, “Never again.”

“What, you don’t want to trip again?” my pal asked.

“Oh no, I will trip again alright.”

“What did you mean by, ‘Never again’?” he asked.

“That uniform. I’m not putting it on again. I am two months past my enlistment and I’m not putting that damned thing on again.”

I walked out and stood with the others in my civvies and answered “Here” when my name was called by the petty officer in charge of muster. The First Class Bos’n looked at me askance. I was prepared to answer anything asked of me and expected a good chewing out.