“Hey! Hey! Hey!” The man tested the microphone.
“There should be sound.”
“Where should I start? Let’s start from the first time I took LSD.”
“Alright,” I said.
“I’ll say this first: I’m not advocating for psychedelics to be legalized, and I don’t agree with legalizing them.”
“Mm. Start,” I cut in, stopping the pointless disclaimer.
“About ten years ago — let me count — 2000, yes, ten years ago. There were outdoor parties everywhere then. That was in Hualien…” The man began his story.
It was in Hualien, a valley. I sat on a bus for hours to get there, rented a scooter, then got lost for a few more hours. By the time I arrived it was already getting dark. It was February. A party in February sounds unbelievable now, but that’s how it was then. All year — spring, summer, autumn, winter — there was always some reason to party. I forget which solar term that one was; it was probably tied to the lunar calendar. It was also the first outdoor party I ever went to.
Before that I listened to electronic music, but only in clubs. People now call those places “head-shaking bars.” It wasn’t like that for me. I loved electronic music, even when I couldn’t tell one track from another. I was drawn to that regular pulse, as if it were pulling my consciousness loose. I was using drugs then too, but not more often than when I first got into rock. A bit of cannabis, an E now and then — only when I really wanted to ease off. I still think electronic music needs drugs to become common. In a heavy sense of reality it isn’t that easy to enter. My head was probably already missing a few screws, so most of the time I didn’t have much reality to begin with.
The Hualien party was in a valley. Later a lot of parties were in valleys too. That one was small. A half-hour walk and you were at the sea — a beach — but it was a February day with a fierce cold wind, and I didn’t stay on the sand long…
Should we jump to the drugs?
The man who gave me LSD had a Rastafarian look. It was a bottle of liquid with a particular smell. How do I describe it? Like nectar that bees haven’t taken yet to make honey. As a child I’d pick hibiscus, pull off the calyx, draw the pistil out backward, and there would be a little nectar — faint, sweet, fragrant. LSD isn’t sweet. I can’t name the taste. The smell was close to that, that’s all.
At first I only put a small drop in the web of my left hand. It felt new. I had never taken LSD and didn’t know what it would do. Looking back I was naive: after half an hour I felt almost nothing, so I asked for another small drop. The Rasta man accidentally dropped a larger one. Only a little more, but for a first time it was already a very high dose.
Slowly I noticed the people around me seemed off. I asked someone nearby whether they thought so too. One person gave a strange answer: “The person who is most in a state thinks other people are the most in a state.” Meaning the stronger your own drug state, the more severe everyone else looks.
The offness I meant wasn’t that they had become strange. I started noticing their speaking voices, their gait, the way their limbs moved. Slowly I seemed to see a gear in how these things ran: because they said a certain thing, the body made a certain movement, and that movement was sometimes deliberate, sometimes completely natural. I can hardly describe what my mind was locked onto. It was like being pulled out of the real world while still being in it, reading everything you saw and heard and felt through some conducting wire.
I started wanting to walk, not wanting to see other people. I don’t know. I suddenly wanted to look at other things around me. I climbed a slope, a gentle grass slope, and noticed the grass flowing slowly downhill like water, sometimes turning. Near my feet the grass hit me the way a river hits a rock, raising a vortex, then winding down to the bottom.
At the top I saw the most staggering image of my life. From there the view crossed the valley to the sea. Out of the tumbling white of the waves a huge white creature rose, like a great snake, cutting the sky, becoming a light I can’t name — not piercing, but immensely bright. I was covered in it. A peace I can’t name. I wanted to say I had seen God, but it wasn’t that. Later I did see the maker of things, but not in this picture. I was lucky: as the drug came on, and on a first time, that peace wrapped me and I felt safe. Maybe that’s why the whole thing stayed beautiful.
A lot of the talk and images I don’t really remember. Before Hualien I had brought a bottle of whisky, thinking it would help against the cold, or that a drink would be fine. I didn’t expect the LSD to keep me away from alcohol for nearly six years.
LSD comes in waves. You aren’t in violent hallucination the whole time. I’ve always felt that breathing strongly affects how deep you go — maybe oxygen forces you back to reality. When the drug eased I would still pick up wood for the fire. There was a campfire in the middle of the dance floor; people stood around it for warmth. Picking wood was interesting. Sometimes I’d look at the grain of rot and fall into thought, as if a truth were visible in it.