The echoes started before I even began to speak. My thoughts
were being played out as a mixture of visual and audio miscues that my brain
couldn’t decipher. It was all happening in front of me, but it was being mixed-up
inside my head. There was a small figure sitting across from me in the chair
although at the time it just looked like a blob. It seemed to be irritated, but
I couldn’t see a face.
The angry voice demanded, “Are you listening to me!?”
I stifled my laughter as the figure before me wiggled back
and forth quickly, as if vertigo had taken control of my eyes. It was difficult
to make sense of this situation, but I knew I had been here before. More than a
few times, especially as of late, I had been quarantined to this chair for
questioning. I hated this part of the night because it killed the buzz. I
tried, and succeeded more than a few times to hide my delirium, but acid was a
mother fucker, and as it happened, I needed to get by my mom and her verbal
assault before I could get to the quiet comfort of my basement room.
“Mom, I told you so many times, I haven’t gotten high for a
long time!” I lied.
She replied, “Why are your eyes so red?”
Probably because I’m stoned as fuck, and how can you even see
my eyes? My eyes! Ha ha ha ha ha! “I don’t know, mom. Maybe because it’s cold
out and I just rode my bike home. And I’m tired, I have school in the morning.”
I won’t be going to school.
Now this may appear to be a work of fiction, but this scene
played out over and over in the late ‘90s when my mom and I lived in our first
house on Edmund Avenue in St. Paul. I was getting high on a daily basis and experimenting with hallucinogens all while avoiding going
to school, and then coming home at the last possible second in the hopes that
she might be asleep. These were difficult times. I briefly alluded to working
at the local Burger King where I could be in any condition as long as I could
assemble Whoppers. Both of my managers were also drug dealers, so nobody really
cared what I did there. I often worked until the wee hours of the morning to
avoid these situations.
Sometimes, however reluctantly, my mom let me slide, and I
would go down to the basement where my bedroom was, and ride out the rest of
whatever buzz I had going. Sometimes I would sneak out of the window and meet
up with my friends who were waiting out in the alley, or simply go to a house
with less responsible parents. Either way I had gotten past the obstacle, and I
could start to enjoy the euphoria again. And sometimes my mom would lecture me
on the dangers of using drugs and alcohol, and not going to school. It felt
like hours when the latter happened, and it as very difficult to keep focus due
to the aforementioned state of mind, but eventually it would end.
What I remember most about those situations is that, in my
mind, I was able to maintain my composure while the room was spinning, shaking,
and completely chaotic. I wanted to scream, run around, and break things, but I
sat motionless and listened to lectures about my behavior. I’ve never written
much about it because I wasn’t sure if I could quite put it into words, but
that was an important time in my life that I thought should be accessed, and I
think I brought it out well enough. I never thought about this until right now;
all visual hallucinations for me must have been amplified by the natural
blurriness of my vision. I was too “cool” for glasses, so when I saw my mom in
front of me, she was just a silhouette in a chair with the light on in the
hallway behind her. A shaky, vibrating shadow with a voice that seemed to emanate
from all around me. Spooky shit when you’re in the depths of an acid trip.
