That was mine. I picked some up when we made that stop at Bard. It was for myself. Now I was thinking that if any drug was going to open him up, make him reveal himself, acid was it. The coke would just make him pushy and hyper and that’s sort of generic when it comes to men, especially men trying to have sex, and what would we learn?

Besides, they were microdoses, and how much of a problem could that be?

Looking back, after the fact, I would say they were not microdoses. Not at all. But at the time, when we dropped, I was sure that’s what we were doing.

Wouldn’t you know it, just when we’re approaching the Thruway entrance, we see two state police cars going in. Then we see another one already cruising the Thruway. We’re not even tripping yet but it had that trippy vibe you can get about the nature of a place, that it’s good or bad or this or that, and the vibe was that the Thruway was infested with police, and we better not go there.

Instead of finding a straightaway—vroom, vroom—we’ll go to the mountains where there are twisty, turning roads, there’s not a lot of traffic, and if you’re not actually in the towns, there aren’t that many cops around. It’s going to be a total roller-coaster ride. It takes about, I don’t really know, about half an hour, until we’re sort of away from everyone, from towns, traffic, just these twisty roads.

There was freezing rain. Just like the weather report said there would be. It was freezing on the trees. The higher we got, the more it was doing that. The branches, especially the small ones, were encased in ice. It’s dark, they’re encased in ice, the beams of the headlights hit them, wow, they glitter and shine.

By then we were tripping.

I know that it was really, really beautiful and it would have been amazingly, astonishingly beautiful without any drugs. But the acid made it…magic. Made it something else. It was amazing and getting more so. It was like driving through a magic land draped in gems. Even a movie couldn’t show what we were seeing.

One of us said, “Let’s open the roof.” Or maybe I said, “Can you open the roof without stopping?” I’m not sure exactly how we got to it, but he said he could open the roof while the car was still moving, up to 45 miles an hour I think.

We’re cruising along, flying along almost, and he pushes the buttons, and the roof starts to open up, it’s a convertible with a hard roof, and the area it goes back into opens up, and we’re feeling the coolness and the wind and the rain.