Dying Inside

I was living near Columbia in ’68, in a seedy residence hotel on 114th Street, where I had one medium-big room plus kitchen and bathroom privileges, cockroaches at no extra charge. It was the very same place where I had lived as an undergraduate in my junior and senior years, 1955-56. The building had been going downhill even then and was an abominable hellhole when I came back to it twelve years later — the courtyard was littered with broken hypodermic needles the way another building’s courtyard might be littered with cigarette butts — but I have an odd way, maybe masochistic, of not letting go of bits of my past however ugly they may be, and when I needed a place to live I picked that one. Besides, it was cheap — $14.50 a week — and I had to be close to the University because of the work I was doing, researching that Israel book. Are you still following me? I was telling you about my first acid trip, which was really Toni’s trip.

We had shared our shabby room nearly seven weeks — a bit of May, all of June, some of July — through thick and thin, heat waves and rainstorms, misunderstandings and reconciliations, and it had been a happy time, perhaps the happiest of my life. I loved her and I think she loved me. I haven’t had much love in my life. That isn’t intended as a grab for your pity, just as a simple statement of fact, objective and cool. The nature of my condition diminishes my capacity to love and be loved. A man in my circumstances, wide open to everyone’s innermost thoughts, really isn’t going to experience a great deal of love. He is poor at giving love because he doesn’t much trust his fellow human beings: he knows too many of their dirty little secrets, and that kills his feelings for them. Unable to give, he cannot get. His soul, hardened by isolation and ungivingness, becomes inaccessible, and so it is not easy for others to love him. The loop closes upon itself and he is trapped within. Nevertheless I loved Toni, having taken special care not to see too deeply into her, and I didn’t doubt my love was returned. What defines love, anyway? We preferred each other’s company to the company of anyone else. We excited one another in every imaginable way. We never bored each other. Our bodies mirrored our souls’ closeness: I never failed of erection, she never lacked for lubrication, our couplings carried us both to ecstasy. I’d call these things the parameters of love.

On the Friday of our seventh week Toni came home from her office with two small squares of white blotting paper in her purse. In the center of each square was a faint blue-green stain. I studied them a moment or two, without comprehending.

“Acid,” she said finally.

“Acid?”

“You know. LSD. Teddy gave them to me.”

Teddy was her boss, the editor-in-chief. LSD, yes. I knew. I had read Huxley on mescaline in 1957. I was fascinated and tempted. For years I had flirted with the psychedelic experience, even once attempting to volunteer for an LSD research program at the Columbia Medical Center. I was too late signing up, though; and then, as the drug became a fad, came all the horror stories of suicides, psychoses, bad trips. Knowing my vulnerabilities, I decided it was the part of wisdom to leave acid to others. Though still I was curious about it. And now these squares of blotting paper sitting in the palm of Toni’s hand.

“It’s supposed to be dynamite stuff,” she said. “Absolutely pure, laboratory quality. Teddy’s already tripped on a tab from this batch and he says it’s very smooth, very clean, no speed in it or any crap like that. I thought we could spend tomorrow tripping, and sleep it off on Sunday.”

“Both of us?”

“Why not?”

“Do you think it’s safe for both of us to be out of our minds at the same time?”

She gave me a peculiar look. “Do you think acid drives you out of your mind?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot of scary stories.”

“You’ve never tripped?”

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“Well, no. But I’ve watched friends of mine while they were tripping.” I felt a pang at this reminder of the life she had led before I met her. “They don’t go out of their minds, David. There’s a kind of wild high for an hour or so when things sometimes get jumbled up, but basically somebody who’s tripping sits there as lucid and as calm as — well, Aldous Huxley. Can you imagine Huxley out of his mind? Gibbering and drooling and smashing furniture?”

“What about the fellow who killed his mother-in-law while he was on acid, though? And the girl who jumped out of a window?”