In a downtown park, over which looms a big can of paint, a billboard that glowers like a huge Pop icon, my friend Janey (another misfit from drama class) and I sit on a bench. She’s in her minidress and Power to the People button; I’m in my usual array of layers and jewels; I have a kind of John Lennon look (from the Two Virgins period) going: tangly long hair cascading down my back, a scraggly beard. It’s sundown, silence all around us except for the pigeons, and she pulls from her purse a little brass walnut, hinged. Somehow that little thing seems to me now the icon of the times: a little world springs open, and gives you what? A treasure, freedom, boundlessness, which in this instance turns out to be two hits of the nastiest acid I’ll ever encounter, chocolate chip, a guaranteed eight hours of paranoia and despair. We have an awful evening, lonely, even though we’re together, horribly confused, afraid of our shadows, afraid of each other’s voices, sure that everything is a lie. We sit in a black-light pizza parlor on Speedway and watch each other’s teeth glow while some guy tells us stories that don’t make any sense, involving us in the thread of a tale and then dropping it and telling us we’ve imagined it all. What “it”? What “all”? We wind up in a Fourth Avenue dive pouring sugar into cups of orange juice because we’ve heard that niacinamide and sugar will cut a bad trip short, but we just sit there being miserable for hours, the fluorescent lights bouncing off our eyeballs, the fillings in my teeth radiating, I’m convinced, the black light I’ve absorbed. I’m frying from the inside out.

A better trip occurs on my day with Patsy Pelmet, whose name is so funny that she’s always called by the entire thing. Patsy’s a big strapping girl with clouds of frizzy pinkish hair—a white girl’s ’fro—and beautiful flocks of freckles. She’s wearing jeans and an embroidered Mexican top. We drop mescaline in the park before noon, and do what all day? Lie on the grass and watch clouds, swing on the swings a little, involve ourselves in the slow activities of the grass, groove on the water in the fountain, get seriously sunburned, sing: “Wear your love like heaven,” conjuring the colors in the lyrics, Prussian Blue, Alizarin Crimson—colors of the oil tubes in my mother’s abandoned paint box. Her last painting: a bowl of lilacs, the dab of paint delineating each petal thicker than the last, the whole thing shadowy, wet looking, smoldering. In the room where she used to paint—Orlin’s old room—the drawers clink when you open them, heavy with empty bottles, hollow cargo.