Night of the Living What?

“Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me

Other times, I can barely see

Lately, it occurs to me

What a long, strange trip it’s been”

Grateful Dead

After High School, I found a group of friends and started “hanging out”, a new thing for me. It was the late seventies; sex was there for the taking, drugs weren’t illegal and you could drive impaired pretty much. Our get-togethers consisted of going to someone’s house or someone else one of us knew, whose parents were out for the night or out of town for a few. I remember how normal it was to walk into a living room littered with glass candy bowls filled with all kinds of pills; yellow jackets, quaaludes, black beauties. Weed and hashish being lit up in the kitchen and a crowd gathered in the family room watching SNL or Second City Television. If you were looking for coke, go see Sean in the bathroom upstairs.

Me being a novice and total lightweight, watching my younger brother succumb to the addiction of drugs, usually stayed mostly sober, unless of course I was going to stay in one place for the night and then I was very selective in my drug of choice. My experimentation with drugs lasted about six months, from my first inhale on a joint and decided I didn’t like the paranoia that followed, to the end of it where I went on a trip I didn’t sign up for and then I was done, not going beyond speed (maybe 4 or 5 times total), mescaline (my favorite! Not exceeding the number of fingers on one hand) and the occasional popper. Oh, but when it came to alcohol, I was a fierce competitor; frequenting the Beer Bashes at my favorite bar, accepting every challenge to a chug a lug contest and making the mistake to first accept, (I kept saying no), and then giving in and beating my younger brother in front of his friends and then being hounded for a rematch for a lot of years to come. But always stopping before I became a sloppy drunk. I had standards!

The other places we would go and hang out would be at one of the many beaches around Long Island or at this abandoned shipyard in Oyster Bay along a very long and winding dark road back off the beaten path. The back of the yard sat on South Oyster Bay with a small sandy beachfront that stretched from behind the vacant building out to the left. There was always a bonfire, a few kegs, whatever drugs they were all doing and between twenty to thirty of us just partying and having a good time; never any issues, no one getting out of hand and making sure to clean up after ourselves so we could return. My brother would usually be at these keg parties, knowing someone who knew someone else who knew one of my friends; their cousin, neighbor, drug dealer, whatever.

This particular Saturday afternoon in September, there was a keg party down at the abandoned shipyard. I went to pick up my girlfriend Gayle and we drove down around six. I loved driving those two-lane country roads, heavy woods on either side, obscuring the sunlight, shady and winding one way and then another, forced to keep your senses about you, always at the ready for what was going to meet you beyond each bend; animal, vegetable or front grill of a drunk friend. Fun times.

I found the dirt patch in front of a tall stretch of cattails and thick reeds obscuring the Bay and most of the property and pulled in. There were already quite a number of cars parked along there as well as some parked across the street where there were intermittent spaces surrounding a tree, sitting far enough back from the edge of the road to give space. You had to walk down a bit to the fence and then along the reeds until you found the opening to gain access. Once in the lot, straight ahead was the beach and to the right, a bit behind the building were the kegs and bonfire, ready to be lit. It was still light when we arrived and met up with some of our other friends. After a few beers, Sean and Tiz asked if I wanted to go see something cool. Sure.

And so we left the compound, out between the overgrown reeds and fence and walked across the street, very cautiously, and into the woods, following a scant dirt path. After about 10 minutes we came to a ravine and a couple of people across this wide stretch, standing at a tree with a rope tied to one of the large limbs stretching out over the middle. They were swinging across this wide stretch of nothing with a drop of about thirty feet into clear, shallow water with a hard concrete floor underneath, thick roots, and other overgrown foliage springing up between the cracks. It was wide enough you couldn’t even think about jumping across, at least twenty feet easy, and here came the rope and they asked me if I wanted to try. Hmmm. Got a buzz on, afraid of heights, if I fell, there would be no way any of them could really get to me, I’d probably be dead, if I didn’t swing hard enough, I would be swinging from side to side too far from either side, what if I couldn’t hold on. Let’s face it, I couldn’t climb up the rope even halfway in Phys Ed ever, even with the hand over hand technique and my ankles crossed. Ok, sure, why not.

Although a bit nervous, I was now committed to this trapeze act and so they sent the rope over and I reached out and took it, stuck my one foot into the noose at the end, grabbed on tight, and then ran towards the ravine and jumped. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Here comes the other side, great ok, and then whomp. I hit the side of the cliff, hard, at my knees. Oouuuuuch. No one told me to lift my legs to get up on the other side. I think I closed my eyes. Then I started laughing and wasn’t doing much of anything else to ensure I would actually “make it” to the upside. They reached over and grabbed me and pulled me up onto solid ground. And then everyone got across and then we had to go back the other way but this time I knew what I had to do and did it like a pro. You don’t have to smack me against the wall twice. Walking back through the woods, it was now dark and I was impressed that these fine young men, who were all high as a kite, had no problem finding our way back. I was in good hands, or so I thought……

Rejoining the party, now with more people and the bonfire lit, I saw my brother and hung out with him for a while. He had brought a rowboat down to the beach and was going to take it out into the Bay. It was pitch dark, no moon, no lights anywhere for miles and I didn’t think that was a good idea, especially given his current state of wasted. We went back and forth, me pleading to any sense he had left and him pretty much blowing me off. And then he took the boat, two of his friends, and the oars and was off to launch themselves out into the darkness of that fine night. I watched him go until the boat was lost in the blackness beyond the halo of the fire. I called out to him a few times, but never got a reply. Sigh.

And then Gayle was beside me and we caught up. She asked me where I went off to earlier and I told her about the swinging rope adventure and showed her where my jeans were ripped and dirty from hitting the solid wall of earth and jutted roots. One of the guys, who was working the keg, walked over and handed us each a red Solo cup filled with cold beer. Thank you, kind sir! And so we chatted with our friends, drinking our beer and enjoying the night for about thirty minutes more, with me looking towards the Bay now and again and seeing how dark it was and no sign of my brother and the boat. All of a sudden someone yelled “The cops are coming. Everyone out. Get out” and everyone started to exit quickly. Gayle and I ditched our cups in the garbage can, made our way to my car, and got in. As I turned the key in the ignition, I started to feel something about me. Didn’t know what. I was watching as bodies started walking out from between the reeds into the shadows of the headlights, eerie, blank expressions, like “Night of the Living Dead”. In the distance, I could hear sirens. I waited for my turn to back out into the street and started to drive off, passing a scene that I could not logically put together in my head - which by the way, normally operates very logically. There was a car facing the wrong direction for being on the other side of the road, the front bumper sticking into a tree with one guy standing on the driver's side and two others on the passenger side, like zombies. My one thought as I passed, “There is something wrong with this picture”. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, connect the visual to what it actually was. Hmmmm.

We followed the other cars down the long, dark winding road and passed three cop cars about half a mile out racing to the scene. By that time I could not feel my hands on the steering wheel. It was like they were hovering a foot above, and I didn’t know how the car was steering. I then asked Gayle how she was feeling, thinking I was having an out-of-body experience and didn’t want to frighten her. She started describing how weird she was feeling as I lost the connection to the rest of my body and was floating above the seat. Oh boy.

As we shared our ever-increasing symptoms, Gayle told me that our beers must have been spiked. “Spiked with what?”, I asked very innocently. Acid. “What?”

Well, do not ask me how the car got Gayle home safely and me to my boyfriends - I definitely was not driving. I went to Billy’s because I had some sense that I should not be alone and I wasn’t sure how to handle the feelings, sensations, and then the hallucinations that began, some very dark and twisted. I would learn that he was experienced in this matter and I knew I was driven to where I needed to be. I told him what happened and then what Gayle thought happened. He explained to me that I was “trippin”, what that meant and everything that I would or could experience. He sat up with me the whole night talking me down through the bad parts, which were most of it. For me, this trip was an extreme sensory assault on an extremely sensitive empath, (although I didn’t know that’s what I was at that time). The moments that were not dark and terrifying were a desperate reprieve until the next wave pulled me back under again. I finally crashed around 8AM the next morning. I was spent, every part of my being raw and undone. I started to cry and he held me until I finally cried myself to sleep around 10AM. I didn’t wake up until the following day and then went home.

When I thought about what had happened, I was upset that I was not given a choice to partake in that particular experience but I also understood that I lived in a culture and time where drugs were the norm, commonplace and I didn’t feel that it was done with intentional malice. Most people did or had done acid and enjoyed the ride. The delivery to us could have been an error or the person delivering the beer didn’t know. I was very lucky that I had not been in a different situation and that Billy knew exactly what to do. I realized that I could not navigate in this world without the innate intuition and guidance I had come to rely on that was wiped off my map while under the influence. I made a decision then that I would never, ever not be in control of myself. Always clean and present. Understanding that everything else around me may or may not be in my control. It was the last time that I would participate in recreational drugs, my experimental days at an end. We were never able to go back to that abandoned shipyard, that had come to an end as well.

Honestly, I really didn’t miss the drugs, more addicted and needing to sit in reliance of my inner awareness, but I still hung out, without judgment, from any of my friends and theirs. And, in time, I would realize that I had unconsciously come to understand acceptance and non-judgment as a part of my being because of the gift that they and the universe had generously given to me and one in which I would eventually learn to give to my brother before he ended his life.