Days of Tao and Acid

Ed Clark, Jr. died of AIDS in '92. 
If you're just arriving, this memoir starts several posts down. 
Please scroll to the bottom and read upward.

I'll just do it.

It was early evening when I swallowed the tab and set out across the campus in search of something to do and maybe someone to help me through it. Diane had procured it for me but then refused to assist me with my first trip.

I ducked inside the campus theater where an "experimental film" flickered on the screen. The disjointed fast-moving images struck me as a hilarious, reflecting the absurdity of Life. I laughed until the people in front of me turned around to glare. They must know I'm tripping. I got out fast.

Outside on the campus, the drug was definitely kicking in. Hyper-reality began to wrap itself around me. I wrote in my diary the next day: The grass looked like movie grass. I didn't know then that it was almost a rule that when a person trips, it somehow invites weird stuff to happen. 

A girl I'd known in the Freshman dorm came galloping up on a horse, followed by two horsemen. She paused in front of me, hair lifted by the wind and we talked for a moment while I tried to act normal. She told me that she now lived on a ranch. Then she rode away.

All my reading told me that someone who is after a higher consciousness experience should have a "guide." So I went off in search of one. Ed's place was too far away for me to consider. I tried a woman I knew from a scene study class who lived in a nice townhouse a few blocks off campus. She was sophisticated, grounded and she'd tripped before (as most folks that I knew had claimed).

But when I got there, she had visitors and she told me the next day that I'd walked in and said: "I'm tripping." She asked me to come inside and I said: "No. Thank you. No. Thank you." And left.

I began the long walk along the highway to Ed.

By now, the acid was starting to peak. I hardly knew my own name. It was like being inside a dream with melting colors and sensations that ebbed/flowed. I stopped and looked back at Tallahassee behind me--the FSU fountain and the Capitol building stood out in bold relief as if newly sculpted and painted.

I remember thinking that this is not a good idea.

I did manage to find Ed's place and thank God he was home. He opened the door. "I'm tripping," I said. "It's my first time." He just said that's great and took me inside.

Upstairs we sat on his bed while he rolled a joint so he could get near my wavelength. I kept trying to tell him what I'd been through but he kept interrupting: "Did you think I wouldn't be home?" "What time did you drop?" "Then you must have peaked a half hour ago, you should be mellowing out...Here this will help."

He took me on another tour of his artwork and this time I could notice subtleties as he guided me through the colors and shapes and hidden meanings. We sat listening to Moonlight Sonata and this time the music was visible as it floated through the room. I was convinced he was getting what I was getting. 

I had made a dangerous journey to safe haven and I was with a man who understood in ways nobody else had ever understood me. That was all that mattered. 

In the morning, Ed said, "Your first trip. Tell me what you got out of it." But words failed. I'd learned that tripping meant not being able to contemplate anything but the NOW. The senses take over consciousness and the rest of life seems unnecessary. And that you don't actually leave on the trip. You end up being more in life than ever.

And it turns out that just existing without agenda can be an exquisite pleasure.

That's what I wanted to say. I don't recall if I was that articulate.

We were in his living room. He was sitting in an armchair facing me on the couch talking about his art. "I can't draw," he said. "Lithography doesn't require that much drawing skill. Here I'll show you what I mean. I'll draw you. Hold still." I held still, excited that he was actually drawing my portrait with pastels.

At first he wasn't happy with the result. It was all orange and brown, kind of one-dimensional. The he said, "Wait a minute..." and he got some white acrylic paint which he brushed onto the face to create dimensions and cheekbones. Very pleased, he was startled at his own prowess.

I was flattered. Did he actually want me here? Then he wrote a title at the bottom and signed his name.

Lily of the Dark

Lily of the dark. But which dark? The one inside my head that I was trying so hard to light up? Or Ed's own darkness that he waded through day after day as he waited for his own private Godot? I'll never know. My self-esteem wasn't high enough to believe the latter. So the caption stung a bit. But we were both pleased that it turned out so well.

For years after I left Florida, Ed would ask me to take a photo so he could make a slide for his portfolio. I could never get a photo to come out right. So I never sent it. The one thing I feel guilty about. An artist friend in San Diego called it a "fucking Mona Lisa."

The next post will cover that other "tripping" that we did after I moved off campus and my father sold me his Rambler as we eventually moved into the Lighted World of friends and adventures.