I think I'll tell another drug story here. This one isn't about me either, but I figure I can tell these ancient stories publicly because they're so far in the past and the only people who'd be able to recognize who I'm talking about probably already know who it's about anyway. I searched my page for this story, and I'm pretty sure I haven't written it before.
When I first moved to Toronto, we had a pair of friends-slash-upstairs-neighbors that we used to experiement on. I'd mostly gotten out of dealing by then, but we still had constant quantities of various psychedelics passing through the house. This story is actually just about LSD, but the response was very strange and out of character for the drug.
Anyway, the story begins in a park just south of St. Clair and Bathurst, with both of our friends on single hits of acid. We assumed it would just be a pleasant night, but they almost immediately went off in the wrong direction mentally. One took off and I don't know his story. The other one, who this story focuses on, started becoming convinced that he didn't have a good enough connection with God.
So he's standing in the park in the early evening, shouting up at the sky, begging God to accept him. God didn't answer of course, much to his distress. But he has an epiphany — God doesn't want to talk to him because he has become too obsessed with the materialism of our physical world. The only possessions he has with him are his clothes, so he strips down naked and again calls out to God — no response! “Why have you forsaken me?”
He calms himself down and thinks about why God isn't answering. Perhaps it's because he hasn't been a good person? After all, you have to be a good person to get to heaven, he figures. So he goes out onto Bathurst Street, still completely nude, and begins running toward the downtown core. People avoid him — obviously — but this only helps fuel his paranoia that he's a bad person.
Eventually his feelings of guilt completely overwhelm him and he starts going up to houses, trying to open the doors so he can express his love for the people inside, hoping to convince God he's a good person worthy of heaven after all. Eventually he finds an unlocked house and runs inside, pouncing on the first person he sees, wrapping his naked body around them and telling them he loves them. As I'm sure is no surprise, he's thrown to the ground, and to his horror, the man grabs a baseball bat and begins pulverizing him.
Realizing that he's stumbled upon the home of a demon, not a human, he runs back out onto Bathurst to search for people to express love to. Of course the guy in the house, presumably not actually a demon, calls the police. Anyway, my friend doesn't just run out of the house and onto the sidewalk, but straight into traffic where he is hit by several cars. So now he's deranged, naked, and covered in blood, and still looking for love.
He actualy begins opening car doors as traffic moves on, trying to hug the drivers and passengers and express to them what a good person he really is, completely oblivious as to why they all appear to be totally horrified and terrified of him. A few minutes later, he's picked up by the police who take him to the hospital where he's strapped to a bed and given lorazepam to try and calm him down for the remainder of the trip.
As he's lying strapped to his bed, he hears screams similar to his own coming from the room next door, and he's fairly certain that he's failed completely to reach God and is now in Hell. The screams only emphasize his belief that when the demons are done torturing the other person (who he has not seen), they're coming for him next.
But, like all bad trips, eventually it ends. Morning comes, and he feels like crap (to say nothing of feeling like a fool), and the hospital releases him with a stern lecture about drug abuse… But still, he wonders what was happening in the room next door and peeks in as he's leaving, and discovers that the source of the tortured screams was his roommate that he'd taken the acid with the evening before.
No one else that had anything from the sheet had a bad reaction. I have no idea why it hit them so radically hard, but it was one of the strangest responses to low level LSD that I've ever seen.
Post a Comment