She's A Rainbow

Our little band that eventually included Dean and Aaron and Jose and Geoff and Nigel and so many more formed in that last year of college. I was slogging through courses like Electromagnetism, Quantum Theory, Advanced Signal Analysis and Semiconductor design. I mean, they all had course names like this. I did well enough, but I’d truly hit the glass ceiling of my gifted mathematical aptitude. I just had these two semesters to get through, and I’d be free. Leslie and I had already visited Lynn in LA the summer before. We were intent on following her as soon as I graduated. So this gave us one more year to milk as much experience out of life before real life started happening. To be fair, Leslie was well into real life at that point. She worked full time at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, or maybe it was Edgewood. Creating all manner of art content for various publications. Please correct me if I’m wrong, Leslie, but I think that’s how I remember it.

              I lived with Greg in the first-floor front apartment of an old house right on College Avenue. A hop skip and a jump to the Engineering buildings, which were relatively close to us. Greg was in the same five-year program I was in but a year behind me. We’d met at California University of Pennsylvania, a coal-dusted little place outside of Pittsburgh. Three years there and two years at Penn State proper, and viola! Two degrees in five years. A BS in Electrical Engineering and a weird BA in Physics. Who ever heard of a BA in Physics? But you know what? When I needed a BA to get my master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy 30 years later, it came in damn handy.

              Upstairs lived Paul, John and Steve. Three Altoona bumpkins who formed the other half of our domination of this huge sectioned into apartments house. Our house was where everyone gathered. We’d spend most weekend nights sprawled around both apartments with a cadre of local kids and misfits drinking beer, smoking pot and sometimes lucky snatches of other stuff. But generally, it was   beer and pot. I hated pot. It’s like smoking a three-day anxiety attack. And, it makes people dumb. I’ve always called smoking pot “hitting the dummy.” Now I call it “schizophrenia-in-a-year.” The mob would straggle in, and a party of sorts would form, and we’d practice our scowls from the side. Greg and I had very effective scowls of silent judgment. When we wanted people to leave, we’d put on Einsturzende Neubauten – loud. The trickle-down the stairs and out the door would commence. They never even knew what hit them. From side two of Halber Mensch, Blixa proclaims, “This was made to end all parties.” Godamn right.

              Most weekends Leslie and sometimes Marion would come up. Sometimes I’d go back home to see Leslie. Sometimes I’d go home and stay with her in her little apartment and never say a word to my parents a half-mile away. It felt sneaky. It felt sexy.

              The drug scene at Penn State was ironically anemic compared to my four years of high school in little backwoods Bel Air. We had three main sources. Dave, Tim and I. Tim Hardwicke worked in a drugstore in Havre De Grace. An old-fashioned apothecary of sorts. Stealing pills wasn’t hard. Dave and I can’t remember his last name, but I know he’s since passed away and lived with a mother MD who practiced and prescribed out of their house. Primarily overweight patients, which meant speed. My mom was a pharmacist, meaning we had all sorts of samples in a bag in the guestroom closet.

Oh boy, the things that were in there. Black Biphetamines had 75grams of methaqualone and some amount of benzedrine in one little black, oblong ball. I loved those things. Sometimes my mom would cover shifts of other pharmacists around the area. Sometimes I’d go with her for the day. To keep her company? To keep her safe? I’ve never known why I was taken along, but I loved it. I’d spend the first hour or so surreptitiously casing the shelves and aisles while pretending to do my homework. Eventually, she’d have to go to the bathroom. And wham! I’d spring forth like a golem and fill my pockets with 10mg Valium, red Seconal tablets and Demerol. What teenage boy can’t have a field day with this kinda stuff?

              Penn State was fairly limited, but we got a steady supply of LSD. I loved LSD. I still love LSD. It’s like it just appeared. I can’t connect it to any person or transaction. It would just be there. The only other controlled substance of interest was the benzedrine or Dexedrine or some other amphetamine soaked into the innards of Vicks inhalers. Remember those? Those little white tubes you’d jam into your nose all camphor laced and mentholated. I’d read in Burrough’s “Junky” that in the 50s, people would break these open and suck the cigarette filter looking absorbent material and get a 3-dollar speed high from them. Hmmm? Maybe I’ll go have a look. I walked down to the local drug store and looked around. They definitely still had Vicks inhalers hanging on display wall metal hooks. I looked at the ingredients. I didn’t see benzedrine or Dexedrine, but I saw something ending in zine, so I bought one. I went home and cracked it open. A little tube of some sort of saturated material almost dripped liquid from it. I threw that fucker into a cup of coffee and pressed it against the side of the cup extracting every last bit. It floated on the top like an oil slick. It reeked of camphor. I gulped it down.

              Boom! I was on fire. I remember asking Greg if he had anything he needed to be typed. I was here to help. Whatcha need. I’m here for you, buddy but hold on, let’s put on that first Big Black record. Loud! Boom! Where is the fucking typewriter? No, no problem, I’ll do it for you. Fuck, you won’t believe what I just found. Boom! Typing in the sun on the front porch steps. Highly distracted. Highly energized. Highly high. It can not be this easy, this dose of euphoria!

              I shared this with everyone. Cut to two weeks later. I’m in the drugstore wanting to get more. I’ve been on this stuff for days. Empty hooks. I ask. “Damndest thing. We’re totally sold out. We can’t keep em stocked.” Ah, ok, so lesson one. Resist the urge to scream it from the rooftops.

              Finding little hidden gems like this was cool and passed some time, but speed is untenable. At least I only wanted to be driven to do extra work for so long. And there was way more laughing with acid.

              When Leslie came up on weekends, when we had acid, we’d usually do it late Saturday morning. I remember always carrying around a slinky as the LSD squiggled up my spine. Having something little and movable and shiny to focus on was perfect for LSD. Sometimes we’d all crawl into the Chevette and just start driving. Pick any cardinal direction and move from State College, and you’ll be in the country quickly. All two-lane country roads and huge overhang tunnels as the roads cut through the forest.

              One day we wound up in the mid-day sun in a field of golden weeds near a stream with large shade trees looming over us lazily and only half-concerned. I remember Leslie lying next to me with Paul sitting up and gazing into the beautiful weeds all around us and crushed beneath us. This was maybe my first perfect moment. Before this, I might have said the first time I had sex was perfect. Surely only perfect for me, I’m not getting ahead of myself. Or maybe it was striking the side out as I pitched my chunky little heart out on field 9 right behind Kunkels Auto Parts. But I remember my left arm and leg pressing against Leslie with the sun dappling through the trees and thinking, this is love. This is hippie love! Maybe we had music with us, and maybe not, but I heard what I wanted to hear. The only thing I could hear.

The Stones and that Donavon-sounding song they have. I hummed and giggled and kissed Leslie. I remember that because she’d usually be too shy to kiss around people, but I can see, I can feel her just slowly and languidly roll her face to her right to meet mine. I love you, Leslie Weimer. Let’s stay here forever, I thought. To voice it would have ruined it. But I prayed for it. Let’s just please stay here in this squiggly moment forever, and God, I want to taste you. I want to fuck you so bad in these cracked and enveloping golden hairs growing up all around us like kind little zip ties. This is what I remember. I pray to God that at least ten percent of it is true. It’s true to me. Memories fit together with wishes so beautifully. We keep getting entire new lives and histories if we play with memory enough. And no one can ever check us short of some ham-fisted video, and even then, what we feel is always hidden and thus ours to tailor to specific wishes and desires. I love you, Leslie Weimer.

We drift away, slide, and vibrate back to our little apartment on St. College Avenue, slinky intact and muttering. God, I love LSD. Nothing grabs God’s ear like LSD. So odd that I wound up drowning in that which puts earplugs in God. God can’t hear us when we’re on dope. He tries to read our lips, but it’s so hard as our faces almost always look at our feet, and God is always above us.

It may have been the same weekend. Maybe it was a two-day trip. Maybe it was weeks later. It was still warm and edging into spring. The little crew finds itself again filled with LSD and careening slowly, very slowly, around the tiny country roads surrounding Penn State like arteries and veins not two miles out.

Someone points out the truth. Someone offers that “nature is scary.” Godamn right it is. Creatures and behemoths and shadows and squawks and low murmured growls are everywhere. The Chevette moves at a glacial pace as I ping pong from one shape of a tree to another shimmering slip of a fence. They could be anywhere. And yet, we’re so wildly comfortable and ebullient in this fear of nature. We laugh at that which terrifies us. Where’s my fucking Slinky!? Ah, thank you. All good. We drift down country roads, seemingly back in time. Someone simply says, “Let’s find the buffalo.” Huh? What buffalo? They used to be here. Let’s find one. Ok.

I distinctly remember all of us getting excited that we now had a project, a goal. Find the buffalo. We closed our eyes and stretched our necks, and clenched our fists as you do on LSD. That delightful tingling that zaps through you…and no, it is not rat poison, it is NOT strychnine. Don’t be an idiot. Remember those troglodytes who preached that nonsense clearly devoid of any sense of volume and dosage requirements on a little square of paper? Those dummies always show up.

We drove about, chattering about buffalo and the terrifying nature of a cow behind a fence looking and chewing away from us. We manifested beaming and exciting fear and collapsed down whole mountains of the stuff with laughter. Laughter so hard we had to pull over from time to time and wipe our eyes. I’d pay anything to be back in that car in those moments. Or at least try to recreate them. I will not die until I do. God lives between the giggles of friends. God is happiest when we let our guard down and just give into joy and silliness. God begs us to be little children running after butterflies on a June day, only vaguely waiting to be called in for lunch. These are the spaces God inhabits. I want to forever be as close as possible to God. I believe in God. I do.

We keep driving and looking for buffalo. We don’t see any. We keep laughing and keeping God close. “Him!” someone in the back says “Him,” and we all collectively look to our right and see what can only be described as a Dark Age Serf in the midst of fieldwork. If anyone knows where the buffalo are, it’s this guy. As God is my witness, and He was absolutely in the Chevette with us, this person is clad in what seemed like a burlap coverall sort of dress with a belt around the middle. Hair all wild and dirty and reaching for the stars. He’s using a pitchfork. A fucking pitchfork! To move piles of what seemed to be middle earth hay and oats. He’s in the front of a little house. A hut by truer description. Jesus! Where had we gotten ourselves to? I pulled over to take the joke to the next checkpoint. Paul pushes his pulsing face through the window and simply asks, “Where are the Buffalo?”

Now I know that memory is malleable and likely not enhanced by LSD, but as I said, God is witnessing all of this, and so I sit here now as I have for all these years and see him silently hold up his filthy burlap-wrapped right arm and just point across the fields lying on our left. We’re stunned. All giggles trapped inside. Paul mutters thanks. I edge the car away. Fuck! Oh shit. What was that? We just keep driving, trying to figure out if he was a plant, someone involved in some crazy-complex prank or maybe a guy who knew where buffalo were.

All serious now, as serious as a car of LSD-filled kids can be, we drive. We drive for a while until we encounter a possible left turn. I slow down and kinda look around at my friends and God thumbing through Atlas Shrugged in the way back. I turn and drive down an identical road in the waning sunlight. We all look and slide our eyes across the fields and eventually, maybe a mile or so, come to a T in the road. I feel like I got the guy’s directions, so I turn left. We roll up a little rise and crest, and then we’re pointed forward and down upon huge pastures on either side of the road.

They stand together without any of the cares that plague us. They don’t question the existence of God. They haven’t the arrogance. They chew grass and walk forward a few steps to the next tuft. We sit in dumb shock. We sit there looking at hundreds of buffalo. They fill the space while pressing together, moving like a single fluid organism. We’d found the buffalo.

We’re all almost frightened to see them. As magical and ordained as this feels, it’s too much. We shouldn’t be making stuff happen. It feels like we did. But, here they are. Perhaps they’re Beefalo, a cow hybrid type raised for low-fat meat. But they are fucking buffalo as far as we’re concerned. We get out and move to the fence and just gaze upon them. I remember almost tearing up at the site. Again, maybe I’m manufacturing this detail but please, God, let it have happened.

We watch in dumb silence as they slowly move up and over the crest of the hill. We found them; they’ve shown themselves and must move on. This really happened.

Later, when we’re home and drinking beer, we start to doubt ourselves. Really? Did we really see them? God walks in and says, “You saw them. I could read your lips as you looked up to see them slowly eat and glide through the pasture. I saw ‘I believe’ on all of your mouths. Look, don’t take my word for it, but what do you have to gain by not seeing them?”

In time these moments became fewer and fewer; we trusted God less. And shortly, I started staring at my shoes more than I ever should have. God’s been trying to pull my chin up for years.