LSD: My First Two Experiences

Date/Time: December, 1989 and January, 1990

Age at time of experience: 15

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 110 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

  LSD (microdot): 1/2 tablet and 1 tablet

Setting: outdoors

Companions: Nick

My first two experiences with LSD were in the winter of 1989/1990, the mid-point of my Junior year in high school. My memories of these experiences 30 years ago are spotty so accurate, unbiased reportage here will be pretty much impossible.

I remember meeting my soon-to-be close friend Dave in the weeks before winter recess outside the courtyard adjacent to the cafeteria at my high school. He, like me, was in a small group of people secretly smoking cigarettes, an activity that had recently banned on campus. We were obscured from the view of nearby classrooms by a large evergreen bush and hidden from the courtyard behind a metal door. Someone introduced us and almost immediately he asked me, “Hey, maaan. You ever do aaaacid?” It felt like the beginning of an after-school special on television.

Dave was a Senior but he was someone I’d seen around since I was a little kid. We lived about 5 blocks from each other and went to the same elementary school. He had a goofy disposition, an awkwardly-bouncy, pigeon-toed gait, and big, bugged-out, blue eyes. My childhood friends and I referred to him as “Space David” because of the spaced-out look he always had. When I got to high school, he was a class ahead of me and he hung out with the kids my father referred to as the “dirtbags.” Dave had a different nickname in high school: “Altered States,” earned partly because his last name started with “Alter” but mostly because he was one of the most obvious drug users in school. He once passed out on Valium in class during his sophomore year and got sent to a 30-day rehab. He had the robot handshake from the jacket of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” painted on the back of his denim jacket.

I told him I hadn’t. He told me he had some to sell and if I was interested I should let him know. I’m not sure if it happened that day or later in the week but we eventually met up in the school parking lot in his big, white beater of a car and he sold me two red microdots in a small plastic baggie. He called them “raspberries.” I might have asked him some questions about what to expect but I’d already done some reading at the library about it. He told me I might want to cut one in half for my first time just so I’d know what it felt like before trying a full dose. My eagerness to try it once I had it bordered on obsession. It was like the acid was literally burning a hole in my pocket. 

On the night of Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I cut the microdot in half with a razor-sharp box cutter in my bathroom, figuring there was a lower risk of my being walked in on there. As the blade pressed through it, one side of the tablet stayed on the Formica countertop and the other shot off the counter and across the bathroom. Terror struck through me. For the next 15 minutes I anxiously searched the bathroom floor in vain for the missing half, having nightmare visions of my dog eating it or someone in my family unknowingly dosing themselves by stepping on it with wet feet.

I took that half-microdot in the last week of 1989. I was with my friend Nick. He’d never taken LSD but, being my best friend at the time, he acted as my trip sitter. It was a dry, gray day and not very cold. I took the dose around noon and Nick and I hung out until about 8 PM. I don’t remember much about this experience except that it wasn’t very psychedelic in the way I now understand it. My only frame of reference was whatever I’d read in books but I expected to hallucinate and that didn’t really happen. I was very high, though, and could hardly stop belly laughing all day.

My second LSD experience was a few weeks later, on a Sunday in January, 1990. I’m pretty The sky was overcast and the streets were sandy and wet with melt from a snowfall a few days earlier. I dosed myself with a full microdot at noon when I got off work from my part-time job at a stationery store. Again, Nick acted as my trip sitter.

We met up in the parking lot of a small office building about a half mile from my job and skateboarded for a while. This parking lot had a small stairwell down into a hallway below street level that led to the back entrance of the office building. The hallway had no lights but was bright with sun exposure from big glass windows toward the ceiling at street level. At one point we were down there smoking pot and this when I experienced my first psychedelic effects. 

I noticed a pattern forming in the droplets of water condensing on the windows. The trails of the droplets running down the window started to glow like the filaments in an Edison bulb. These filaments moved about, slowly forming the outlines of what became a vision of a pack of glowing, cartoon dogs. Some were wagging their tails, some were panting, there was one with droopy ears howling up at the sky. They all seemed friendly and I laughed as I described them to Nick. Eventually a big, snarling, Husky-like dog started to dominate the scene in this window and I felt a little threatened. When it started barking and scratching at the window, I yelped and ran out of that hallway. Nick followed me and we left the parking lot, whooping our way down the street. Dogs persisted as a pattern during this trip. When I looked at things like brick or tile or even gravel, dogs would appear in M.C. Escher-esque, interlocking patterns. I remember frequently wondering, “Is that real or is it just me?”

As we walked and skated, I saw wispy, repeating trails coming off moving objects and my body when I waved my arms around. Little piles of the yet-unmelted snow glowed and seemed to breathe. The branches of the trees seemed to create geometric patterns out of their chaos. Everything around me emanated a strange, smoky aura. 

Emotionally, this all felt pretty intense and I totally understood how people could have “bad” trips. At the time, I believed I was risking my sanity any time I took acid; that any experience could be the one where I “freak out” and “never come back.” I felt somewhat protective of my mood.

After skateboarding some more in an alcove outside the elementary school Nick went to, we sat next to each other on the cold bricks and smoked some more weed. Nick got too stoned and he said he thought he was gonna throw up. I was like don’t throw up on me, dude. He yelled, “Well get away from me then!” I jumped up and ran away. When I turned back, I watched Nick launch a purple-green rainbow stream of puke, little bits of it splashing up off the bricks into the air. The splattering sound reverberated in the alcove as if gallons had just come out of him. When he was done, I asked if he was ok and he said he was fine now. We made our way back to his house and chilled there until my mom came to pick me up around dinner time.

I kept my head down at dinner to hide my saucer-sized pupils and to avoid engaging with my parents. At this point in my high school career, my parents were making me do my homework where everyone could see because they didn’t believe I was actually doing anything when I was in my bedroom at my desk (they weren’t entirely wrong). Since it was Sunday and I had school the next day, the tail end of this trip was spent in the dining room pretending to do the school work I was completely incapable of concentrating on. It wasn’t an ideal situation but I felt cozy and warm under the dining room chandelier after being outside in the winter cold all day. I also had my proud little secret, that I’d made it through my first real acid trip and that it would not be the last.