Saturday, March 9, 1968, 158 days.
I got up this morning at 0540 hrs. and put on my dirty fatigues. When I went to breakfast they had SOS, but I managed to get an egg anyway. I worked in the latrine again with Gary Williams this morning. While I was cleaning out the urinals I thought to myself “I’m working with Satan in the latrine and this is hell.” After work formation we had police call and then I put on my military creased and spit shined inspection uniform. Some of the guys were laughing, since they had never seen me with strack fatigues and spit shined boots before. I guess that they thought that it was out of character, but then if I’m anything it’s inconsistent.
We had our in barracks inspection instead of work formation and the BC and Top finished it in less than 5 minutes. Before he took off for work, the Monk asked me and Rublay if we wanted to go with him to Chickasaw for the rest of the weekend, after work. He promised that it would be worth our while, and that there would be nookie. So we said yes.
Since we only work half a day on Saturday, Top left me alone, and I sat in the mail room finishing up “Sexus”. The mail came in, but I didn’t get anything. They had pizza for lunch, and we scarfed it up before we took off for Chickasaw. It was a beautiful clear day, and the temperature was around 70 degrees. Rublay drove the “White Ghost” and we picked up a couple of six packs before we left the base. The Monk said that we wouldn’t need any beer, since they would have something better, but we opened and drank a couple of cans on the way there. When we got to our destination, it was a farm house out in what looked like the outskirts of town. It was on a couple of acres and had a long driveway, with a barn. There were some dogs running around, a goat and a cow. There was a woman working in a fenced off garden between the barn and the house, and she looked up when we pulled in.
“Waaaaawaaaaawaaaa.” The Monk called out in the crazy sound that he was always making.
“Larry, you crazy hippie,” the woman said in a twangy Oklahoma accent. “Jimmy said that you would be coming up this weekend. He’ll be back from town in a little bit with Sarah, Jane and Esmeralda.”
After we parked and got out the Monk introduced us to the woman whose name was Bonnie. She looked to be in her early twenties and had long dishwater blonde hair, and was wearing cut off blue jean shorts and a loose fitting flowered blouse. We went into the two story house, and the walls were covered with posters from San Francisco concerts by artists like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplaine, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors and others. There was a couch and some padded chairs with no legs on them, and a mattress with a bright bedspread on it against one wall. There was a record player with some separate speakers sitting on top of a make shift three tier bookcase, with hundreds of record albums. On the coffee table in the middle of the living room was a large brass water pipe, with four hoses running from it. We gave Bonnie the 6 pack of beer that was left to put in the refrigerator and, sat down.
After about a half an hour a car pulled in and six people came into the house. It was Jimmy, Esmeralda, Jane, Sarah and two other guys. Their names were Hank and Campy. After we sat around and talked for a while, the Monk asked. “Is everyone ready to trip?”
It was around 1600 hrs. and I thought that he was going to pull out a bag of weed, and then we’d smoke it in the water pipe, but instead he opened up some folded aluminum foil, which had little orange tablets in it that looked the same color as Bayer’s Children’s aspirin, but half the size and with an irregular shape.
“What’s that?” Rublay asked.
“Pure Owsley orange acid,” The Monk answered.
“You mean LSD?!” Rublay said. I’m not taking any of that. I thought that we were going to have a party?”
“We are.” The Monk answered, like you never did before, and while we’re at it, you may even see God. If you don’t want to that’s okay, because Bonnie was going to stay straight to be our guide. I’ve got twelve doses, and I’ll have four for another time.”
Then the Monk gave one tablet to Campy, Esmeralda, Hank, Jane, Jimmy, Sarah, me and then he took one, and folded the rest back up in the aluminum foil and put it in his shirt pocket. He instructed us to put our tablets on our tongues, and let them melt in our mouths.
“It will take about thirty minutes before you notice anything and an hour and a half before you start peaking.” He told us and continued. “I gave Bonnie a list of albums to play to induce the best visions, but after a while you won’t even hear the music. We’ll peak for about four hours and then we’ll start coming down. That’s when the party will start. That’s when we can sit around and rap and share our visions.”
Bonnie started playing albums. The first one is the only one that I really remember. It was by a group that I never heard of before called Pink Floyd and had a kaleidoscope picture of the group on the cover. I started to feel like my body was disconnecting from the rest of me. It was a weird feeling. It was even weirder than when I used to sniff glue in high school. I think that the song playing when I started to see the walls disappear was something about space travel.
It seemed like a long time before I became aware of reality again. I felt like I was beginning to see the Monk looking at me with this crazy grin on his face, and Pete was asking me if I was okay, when it felt like a wave crashed over me and drug me back out into the most incredible place that I’d ever been. I saw an infinite number of what looked like holes in a bee’s honeycomb and when I looked through one of them I found myself in pitch blackness with a feeling of weightlessness and I didn’t have a body. All that there was, was awareness of being there. Then I saw a single point of light, and as soon as I became aware of it, it exploded into a rainbow of fluid colors that started becoming shapes that filled up the entire universe. I found that I could control what the shapes and images were, but they were things that I had never seen before that were beautiful beyond description and they were so intensely colorful as to be astounding. I found that I was flying through this universe, but I didn’t have a body, only awareness that I was there. Then the shapes began to become familiar, but looked like brightly colored cartoons of religious symbols like crosses, chalices and the tomb that Jesus Christ resurrected from. I saw the history of the world take place from the big bang through the dinosaurs and ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages right up through the 20th Century. I saw Adam and Eve and the fall of man. I saw myself being born and my life unfolded before me until I died of old age and was buried in a mountain that exploded like a volcano whose lava formed the glass of kool aid that was sitting in front of me, on the coffee table.
“Toby, are you okay?” Pete asked me.
I wanted to answer him, but found that I couldn’t speak. I just sat there and looked at him, when the Monk reached over and stared into my eyes without speaking a word. His eyes drew me into his and somehow we communicated on a level that didn’t need words. Inside his mind I somehow understood what the word transcendence is. I saw the radiating beauty of the Godhead emanating from what appeared to be an infinitely large Buddha, emerald in color, but radiating a rainbow of colors that flashed sparks, that became flying creatures that exuded a liquid that formed a golden road that seemed to go on forever. Then I heard a voice without words asking me if I understood that I was God and asked if I was ready to take my place as master of the universe?”
“How could this be?” I thought, but then suddenly remembered that there were eight of us, and now we’re all laying on the floor together having the same experience together, so the question wasn’t just to me, but to all of them, and not just them but every living creature that ever was and will be. I never felt such peace and understanding and connectedness with others as at that moment. I still couldn’t talk and realized that words were useless, because we were communicating on a deeper level. Just by touching each other somehow we were part of each other. I loved them all, and I didn’t even know most of them, but it didn’t matter, because now I understood everything that I had been searching for my entire life. This feeling lasted until one of the group, I think that it was Jimmy, stood up and said – “I’ve got to go take a piss.”
I looked at my watch and it was 0040 hrs. I sat up and asked if there was anything to drink, when Rublay handed me a lukewarm glass of Kool Aid that was sitting on the coffee table. I drank the entire thing in one gulp and asked for more. I was sitting between Sarah, who was just over 5′ tall with long blonde hair, wearing tennis shoes, blue jeans and a plaid button shirt, and Campy, who had shoulder length brown hair and a beard, with bare feet, blue jeans and a dark green T-shirt. Then Sarah took my hand and asked me if I wanted to go outside with her.
“Sure.” I said.
We got up together and held hands as we walked out the front door, into the cool night air. The sky was clear, and there were no lights nearby, so the stars shone in the sky like jewels. You could see the milky clouds of galaxies infinite light years away. I never felt closer to a person than I did to Sarah at that moment. Then she led me into the barn across from the house.
The barn was dark, except for a light on the far end, where there was a mattress, a chair and a solitary bare red light bulb that made it look like we were in one of the rooms of a brothel in hell. Then she started unbuttoning her shirt and took it off. In what seemed like an instant, we were both naked and on the bed. As we engaged for what seemed like an eternity I alternated between visions of exploding colors and a Biblical movie that I had once seen, about the ancient queen of Israel, named Jezebel. I remembered the Monk once telling me that some people had bad trips because they dwelt on negative thoughts that floated into their consciousness’s during the second half of their trip. So I concentrated on Sarah’s body that was more beautiful than any naked female I had ever seen in my life before, including the burlesque theaters in Detroit.
♪Jesus♬Rocks♬The♬World♪ 
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