Cops on acid!
These two friends probably have respectable careers now, so they get new names?Dump Truck and Mengele. Dump Truck wasn't really my friend, he was more Mengele's friend, and I so name him because of his legendary habit of standing up and shouting "Dump Truck!" every time he had to take a shit, regardless of whose company he was in. He would do that in front of girls. He was a WASP who I think came from money and had kind of a big fleshy body and a huge, goofy head of curly brown hair. He and I had never gotten along, but it was his acid, so I kept quiet.
Mengele, on the other hand, had been my very close friend all through high school. Skinny, blond, possessing a set of creepy fish eyes and a gift for jazz piano, he was an extremely dangerous person, a genuine psychopath. Once, as we drank beer on the roof of a 12-story building in Boston, I caught him tossing nails over the edge into a crowd of pedestrians below. He had once woken me from a stoned sleep in my room by shooting a crossbow bolt two feet left of my head, right through the wall. Driving on the highway, he was liable to start tossing clay pigeons or other largish objects out the window. Once, he pulled the keys out of my car's ignition while I was at the wheel, causing the power steering to lock up and the two of us to fly off the road.
Most of the time, though, he was a good friend.
We sat in a circle on the summit under the blazing sun and tossed the little quarter notes in our mouths, never guessing that we had just set ourselves on a crash course for scenes of violence, terror, blood and shame that would change our lives forever. After that day, none of us would ever see meet again.
There was something terribly wrong with the acid. I had taken LSD a good 15 times before that and handled it with flying colors each time. This stuff put us completely out of our minds. Actually, better to say it put me completely out of my mind. Dump Truck and Mengele it left in a kind of catatonic stupor; me it imbued with deranged, messianic purpose. Within a half hour of taking it, I found myself convinced that I had been brought to this mountain to fight someone to the death?and that person, I reasoned, was Dump Truck.
I took hold of his fleshy shoulder and told him to prepare himself for the end.
He must have seen the look in my eyes. He got so scared that he ran screaming down the mountain, shedding his clothes as he went. Police eventually found him buck naked at the base of the mountain, huddled in a ball with his arms around a tree, sunburned to a crisp and covered with mosquito and black-fly bites.
For whatever reason, my mind in its deranged state decided early on that Mengele, my friend, was not the person I was supposed to fight to the death. "Don't worry," I told him. "It's not you. It's somebody else. Come on, let's find him."
Stunned into obedience by my decisiveness and by the weird role reversal?me acting crazy for a change?he went along. So we went down the mountain together, and each and every yuppie or hippie hiker we passed, I marched up to and asked: "Are you the person I'm supposed to fight to the death?"
Thankfully, no one said yes. But along the way, one of these people had the sense to contact a park ranger. So as Mengele and I made our way down the mountain, with me babbling apocalyptic predictions befitting Manson and rapidly slicing up my bare feet on the rocks, an armed search party set out after us.
And they found us?at the base of the mountain in the parking lot, sitting against the wheels of my car. I was taking a rest and plotting my next move. When the police arrived, I was genuinely confused as to why they were there, and I think we both initially submitted to our arrest quite peacefully. But after cuffing us and throwing us in the back of the cruiser, the Jaffrey cops?all sunburned, thick-necked young white guys?stood commiserating outside the car for a while, joking and looking back at us from time to time.
"They're going to kill us," I explained to Mengele suddenly.
"What?" he said.
"Look at their arms. They're all red. They're not taking us to jail. They're going to kill us."
"Shit. Really?"
I was sure?and I was sure that we had to escape. Hands still cuffed behind my back, I undid the seat belt and quietly opened the cruiser door. At the count of three, we both bolted. They Mengele got right away and tossed him face down in the dirt. I did better. I got deep into the woods before a cop chased me down, subduing me finally by bashing me in the side of the head with the butt of his gun, opening a huge, golf-ball-sized gash that left my whole head and my shoulders drenched in blood. They brought me back to the clearing and tossed me on the ground next to Mengele, who saw my blood-drenched head and lifeless eyes and assumed instantly that I had indeed been executed. First he screamed, then he started twitching.
Hours later, I snapped out of it?in jail. There were only two cells in the Jaffrey pen, but I had my own, because I was the violent one. I woke up with my head in the jail toilet. That was what I was drinking out of, because there was no sink. I remember looking at a brown streak, left by the previous occupant, just inches from my face.
There are bad drug experiences, and then there is waking up covered in blood with your face in a jail toilet.
The Jaffrey cops gave me a break. Probably they just didn't want to deal with me. They decided not to prosecute. I was released.
At the insistence of my parents, I spent the rest of the summer in the hardest of hard labor, working with an all-black demolition crew in Roxbury, MA. We spent the summer breaking up ten feet of concrete floor in the basement of a huge theater and carrying the pieces by hand up four flights of stairs. During lunch breaks, they kicked my ass. It was the best job I ever had, and I went back the next two summers voluntarily. And never took acid again.