After a week of intense parties at Burning Man, the two-days regulatory stop in Reno and before we start our road trip to LA, Matt, Dan and I go back to San Francisco. Dan, an Australian also met at the Mind Eraser camp, is scheduled to fly to Sydney. For my part, I have to return to Maria the things she lent me and say her goodbye.
Thanks to the Gold status and the inexhaustible number of points that Matt holds with the Hyatt, we are staying for free in one of those in the city. Perfect for a good night sleep after the 10 days we have just spent.
I meet Maria at the 1906 Mission Hotel where she works but instead of saying goodbye, we agree on spending this last evening together and join Matt at the Hyatt. Upon arrival, he already had unsuccessfully tried to arrange a party in the room and did not seem to want to sleep early.
Conversely, he shows us a rectangular piece of paper on which are drawn circles of variable diameters supposed to delimit the size of the LSD that Sergio dropped off there.
Sergio was our official dope supplier during Burning Man. He was packed with all sorts of drugs and spent most of his time completely stone with his girlfriend Sidney in the school bus they used as their home. Certainly too stoned to stay upright long, he would regularly offer us to join him to, I quote “chill in the bus” for the rest of the night, a sentence on which Matt and I still joke today. In short, Sergio had the strongest drugs that I was given the opportunity to try and his lack of lucidity probably explains the heavy hand he had with doses. This heavy hand led me one night to experience involuntary and uncontrolled movements and reactions of my body during the Burn.
While I was still wondering about accepting or declining Matt’s invitation, Maria, tempted by his proposal, seizes the paper with authority, detached it in three and puts one of the circles on her tongue. She had just given the opening shot to another stoned night.
We decide to let the effect of the acid rise at the bar of the hotel where, Eureka, they have a bottle of Ricard! The LSD – Ricard mixture seems to me quite appropriate and I insist on giving my two friends a taste of this drink synonymous with south of France, sun and cicada songs. Additionally the advantage of ordering this drink abroad is that it is very unusual to come across a bartender who knows how to serve it or who even knows its existence. I therefore apply my usual technique by asking him to fill three quarters of the glass with Ricard and give us a jug of water in addition.
With the help of the alcohol, the acids quickly start to have effect on our behaviors. Better not to linger in the presence of guests or staff of the hotel. Our giggles and looks are already remarkable enough.
For Matt, getting high on LSD does not just mean swallowing acid but it’s a real ritual, a journey that requires a proper outfit. Today it is gray plaid shorts, a blue Hawaiian shirt with white flowers, a cap and a guitar entirely decorated with the colors of the Grateful Deads in tribute to their 50th anniversary. For my part, I wear one of his colorful shirt.
Maria and I decide to sit down in the room while Matt prefers going on an “exploration” in the hotel and slowly moving away in the corridor while playing a few notes on his guitare. The guy must be having a strong trip on some paint or carpet pattern because it takes him a long time to come back into the room. Long enough for Maria and I to kiss and touch each other like teenagers. Once again, the acids are extremely powerful and the rise is very strong. It is impossible for us to even think about a more intense sexual activity. I feel the LSD invading my whole body and all I can do for now is to let it taking possession of me while lying on the bed. I can feel that Maria is in the same situation, completely stone and unable to move. Even just talking seems to require a considerable amount of energy. Too strong, this rise is not the most pleasant I have known.
After a time I am unable to evaluate, I answer Matt’s FaceTime call and watch him wandering the corridors at a frantic pace while talking about things that seems totally incoherent and funny at the same time before starting to run yelling that he has to come back to the room. The tripper is far away…
We spend the next few hours laughing a lot, tripping over Matt’s drawings and songs, in an atmosphere of innuendo that has let me think on several occasions that the night could have switched into a sort of threesome.
So we were quite noisy when at 5 o’clock in the morning a security member of the hotel eventually decided to knock on our door to inform us of many complaints from our neighbors and that the next warning would amount to an expulsion from the hotel and a call to the police.
So the party ended in the room. But not in my head.
The minutes that followed were the most intense experience of my little knowledge of drugs. I believe that on this day I reached the limit of the distinction between the reality and the imaginary. Let’s be clear, LSD is a hallucinogenic drug that distorts the perception of reality and the relationship to people, space, colors, our whole environment. But even on acid, one is generally aware that it is the drug that produces these effects on our brain and it is precisely the loss of that consciousness that can lead to dangerous behaviors, such as attacking someone harmless by whom you feel threatened or jump out of a window to escape a non-existent danger.
No feeling of insecurity in my case but rather a very special relationship to my body.
By closing my eyes, I let myself go and tripping over the fact that the hotel room was actually a huge baby bed and that Maria, Matt and I were teddy bears. This uncontrolled idea first made me smile until I lost all notion of reality and began to believe that I had really transformed myself into a teddy bear, having to touch me and open my eyes to make sure my body was made of bones and flesh.
Once this illusion over, I gradually felt myself getting liquid. And as if it were not enough, beyond feeling liquid, I could observe myself evolving in this new form. I was at the same time the protagonist and the spectator of the scene. I could see my head, kept in its natural state, pulling my liquid and rainbow-colored body into a sort of twisted test tube until I could no longer feel my body at all just as if it had faded away. This feeling, that I really felt true, caused me to get up from the bed and touch my body so that I could feel myself human again.
After I regained consciousness, I finally returned to my bed. But my imagination didn’t let me sleep but took me again in an unknown sphere and built around me a tunnel of colors in which I seemed to go at full speed aiming for an exit that I never managed to reach. I felt trapped in this tunnel and thought I could never get out of it. As with the teddy bears, as when I was feeling liquid, I really felt locked into this tunnel, it was no longer the fruit of my imagination. I was really trapped, unable to get through!
Every time a jolt got me out of there but who knows how far these trips would have taken me if Sergio had had the hand still a bit heavier…
