So I've finally get around to writing the 2nd edition to my series of recollections about a very misspent youth. After a great response to my first episode, in which I told the tale of how I discovered, moments before our comprehensive school disco started, that what I had just taken was LSD. Since then, I have been chomping at the bit to continue recounting these fucked-up moments of my early teenage years..

Ep 2 - It's midnight, we're in a grave-yard and we're off our noodles on Acid. What's the worst that could happen....?

Acid, or LSD, is a very powerful hallucinogen. I have known people to recount the most mental sensations, visions, and sounds. I've had a friend tell me of how he took a 'trip'(Our word for a single tab of LSD) and then decided to have a bath. He recalled how he felt(and was completely convinced) that the water had turned to a cement like substance. He says he was unable to move for a good while...

LSD doesn't come without its more crazier tales.

One of my best friend from school used to always make me laugh when he recalled how his 'trip' turned sour and he started to lose control of what was happening. The guy walked home with a giant carrot! And after he got back and freaked out in-front of his dad, who subsequently phoned the ambulance to come and work out why his 14-year-old son was asking if his big orange friend could join them for dinner... It did get a little more "train-spotting" when he recounts the moment the doctors were trying to examine him. Fucked-up on acid and some stranger in a white suit starts shining lights in your eyes. Fuck that must has been some trip!!

I've only ever know one guy who went mental from taking LSD and crickey-o-riley, did he go full retard. Stark bollock naked and throwing shoes at his parents from behind the sofa, is how I remember the story going.

You always have to bare in mind that all drugs react differently, depending on many different factors. If you are going to try riding the yellow submarine, then just start small and make sure to wait before you take more!

I remember the first time I ever took ecstasy, while at a nightclub. I was around 18-years-old and back then it was proper 'e' and not the caffeine pills and fertilizer you get today. After waiting for around 30 minutes for my first 'pill' to kick-in I got bored of the wait. I found my main-man and purchased a second pill. Unlike the first, I decided not to split this one with my friend. His seemed to be kicking in now and I wanted to feel the rush.... Well fuck-a-doodle-doo! Off my banana, absolutely and completely off my trolley. At the time it was on the cusp of being terrifying. I still remember my friend and I taking about 3 hours to walk home from the club. We were both so wasted, that we honestly thought we were being followed all the way home.
(which you would think would make it a swifter journey. Weird how drugs work)

Ecstasy and LSD are both class A drugs and rightfully so. I've never touched crack, heroin, pcp, Ketamine or any of the other top-shelf varieties. I've always had my limits and I know that anything that demands you come for back more is never good. Other than a few nights on ecstasy and a handful of dances with 'Billy-whizz' I am strictly natural. If it doesn't grow from the ground, I don't want it. Ecstasy and Speed have there place but for me they are too powerful and act too much on your physical state. I have no tolerance for man-made chemicals and every time has been a case of all or nothing. This is purely for the wall-bouncers. LSD on the other hand, works its magic on the mind. It does have a slight hang-over, but nothing like the hell that speed puts you through the next day.

NEVER EVER ATTEMPT TO EAT A SNICKERS BAR WHEN RECOVERING FROM A NIGHT ON SPEED!! YOUR MOUTH HAS NEVER FELT PAIN LIKE IT.
(Imagine eating razor blades and your somewhere close)

As I was saying... LSD plays with your mind and other than a wonderful tingly sensation, the physical effects are a nothing to be afraid of. Your heart doesn't beat like a soldiers drum and your breathing won't resemble that of a virgin, ordering his first beer at Hooters. Its all about the visual and the mental/spiritual state, when it comes to taking LSD.

I wouldn't take it now, because I feel I have too many demons for the LSD to summon. At 14, you don't have a care in the world, so LSD is perfect(Maybe save it until 17, when your brain has finished developing).

As I was saying earlier, I have no tolerance for E's & Whizz, but the same can not be said for LSD and this is the reason I suggested we go to the cemetery...

The most I have ever taken in one sitting is 2 'trips'. Go ahead and snigger, but I have no intention of joining the coach-potato wars and signing up to the shoe-throwers convention. 2 trips is quite enough for me and if that amount of LSD is not going to make me see a big walking carrot, then I'll just have to stick with sanity FM.

This really did annoy me and I longed to see my face melt in the mirror, or maybe have a conversation with a dog. I haven't got a dog but that wouldn't really of mattered, if it wasn't for my firm grip on reality. Don't get me wrong, if I closed my eyes I would be transported into a world of colours and vivid imaginations. Just thinking about it makes me want to start cultivating. It was truly fucking awesome! I loved it. We all did. I wasn't the only one who had a high tolerance and it was only a small percentage who could summon walking talking vegetables. The rest sat happily in the middle, waving their hands in front of their faces and pulling on the loose skin on there arms in amazement at how far it was stretching... It wasn't. But you try telling them that. Have you ever spoke to a person high on Acid? I can assure you that you'll get no sense and probably find yourself being stared at like an explore who has befriended a group of mountain Gorillas.

Buzz and I had a high tolerance and although Buzz claimed to see the odd thing or two. I knew that he had his foot placed firmly on the exaggerator pedal. He was just like that. A bit of a fibber, you know the type. Harmless really and that is just how he rolled at the time. White lies never hurt anyone and if you could see past it, Buzz had a heart of gold. Both him and I were from different junior schools and we were both 'The top-boy' from our respective schools. Lol, tough lads from the mean street of middle-England... No, nothing of the sort. Just plastic gangsters with nothing better to do than see who was the toughest. Man... did we have some arguments before we became friends. Never came to blows though and it was probably because we were like peas in a pod. It just took some male bravado to bring it out of us.

"£2.50, mine or yours?"

"£2.50, yours"

That was all we did, every night for about a year I think. We were referring to buying some weed and back in the day, £5 was enough for us both to get in the "bubble"(We had names for everything, like all best-buds do). We used to sleep over at each-others house through the week. We were masters of the Bucket-bong and everyone came to us if they wanted to get super-blazed. Buzz was a fucking master at burning the bowl. Cool-hand-Luke that could burn a bong so slow, that it would turn the smoke greeny yellow. I can't tell you how many times we would welcome a new person to the group and after serving up a Buzz-Bong, we would have to nurse them back to reality and make sure they found their way to the bog. We have all chucked a "whitey" and we always welcomed a warrior who was willing to tame the beast. One guy we nic-named "Iron-lung", for his ability to take a full bowl of anything anyone could serve up(and by god we tried). Fucking legend and I reckon it used to actually piss Buzz off a little. What can I say, the man took pride in his work.

When Buzz and I weren't hosting the local shelter for bucket-heads, we would try to find the time to have a Acid night. We had many of these through the years and I have a million different tales to tell. All in good time though. And talking of time, I have kept you all waiting long enough... I suppose it's time for you to hear about what happened, when we decided to try and challenge our grasp on reality and attempted to force ourselves into having hallucinations. All we thought it would take was a trip to the cemetery, in the middle of the night, while being completely off the PH chart!
And put it this way. After we did this, I can honestly say it's something I'll never try again...

It all began in the usual fashion of one of us having a free-house, void of parents. If it wasn't a party, it was LSD and on this occasion it was the latter. After procuring the Acid from the local arcade, we headed back up to Buzz's house. After a little while the Acid was doing it's thing and our conversations grew less and less coherent. That's not to say that we couldn't understand one another. No, we were tuned into the same beat and I wish we would have written down just half of the stuff we spoke about. I still remember one time thinking that I had come to some earth-shattering about life that would only be able to be understood while on Acid. I can't remember for the life of me what it was, but I still think I was on to something. Its just a feeling I still get today when I try to remember what it was. I've tried to recall this epiphany, but it is just like when you can't remember somebodies face. You know who it is and you can remember lots of useless details, just not that final piece to the jigsaw.

You never really knew what to expect on one of these nights. Maybe we will all become rocks, or maybe we will chuck some Ren & Stimpy on, to see if the trippy animations can stir-up my imagination. As you can probably tell, when we got high, we liked to feel the full extent and LSD held the promised land. I imagined it to be like having a lucid dream, if only I could learn to open my mind to this funky-psychedelia.

After an hour and a few episodes of Ren & stimpy had been played, back to back. I decided enough was enough and tonight was the night that I would find my very own carrot-man. But what was going to be able to peel my fingers from the balcony of normality? "Lets go to the cemetery"!

"Fuck yeah!" (Buzz was always up for it, which is one of the reasons we got on so well)

That was that then. No turning back now...
"Oh fuck, there it is... I hope this doesn't fuck us up for good, Buzz?" "Buzz...?"

He was half way across the road, the silly bastard... "Come on! This is fucking freaky already"

As we both hopped over the, small, sand-stone wall and entered onto the pathways that lead between all the different graves, it began to get very tense.. The trees lining the perimeter seemed to sharpen their limbs and turn their bark pitch black. Every grave began to meet my eyes with finite detail. The smiling statues turned to smirking gargoyles and whichever grave I looked at, seemed to develop its own back-light, that brought out the more ghoulish features of each resting place.

At this point we had probably managed to trek about 2 feet into the depths of the cemetery, but to us it felt like we had fallen into a scene from the Blair Witch movie. It was all around us and we started to feel like we were not alone...

"Psst! Hey Beige... come over here and look at this!"

"What is it?"

"I'm not sure but I'm sure I just saw something behind that grave"

As the laws of horror dictate, we both made a path directly toward danger. We crept up to the grave in question and you couldn't fit a rizla paper between us...
Big tough lads and now we were virtually holding hands, like girl-guides watching a scary movie. Staring towards an ever-darkening gravestone. At this point we were both at the height of fearful anticipation and our eyes must have been like space-hoppers. As we both got right next to the head-stone, about to stare death in the face, together as one.

Hippy-musketeers! Or so that's what I assumed.

It was at this, indescribably, tense moment, that SOMEONE(and I swear to this day it was Buzz) stepped onto a decent sized branch that had fallen from the overhanging tree and settled, serendipitous-like, right in our path.

CRACK!

Like a fucking ten-ton mega blast going off inside a cast-iron box that you have put over your head. That is what it sounded like to me...
From the dark blur that was pegging it, like Speedy Gon-fucking-zalles, over the sand-stone wall. It was safe to assume, that it wasn't just me who had released himself.

"AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!! GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE"

They say that you are supposed to go white with fear. Well explain to me why I turned into Chris Akabusi? Because he ain't white, but boy can he jump! I hurdled that little wall as if it was the gates of Troy and then joined an equally traumatised Buzz, on the other side of the wall. In our state of blind panic, we then began to recreate the 80's video game, Frogger.

Eyes bulging and running in no, obviously, distinguishable direction. We must have scared the shit out of the poor old geezer, who was cruising by in his comfy Saab. There he was, tootling along, probably thinking about what he was going to eat tonight.

And then out of the pitch black, comes the first of the Acid-Hawks!
A mix between Bat-fink and Hi-Karate, mixed with Cheech and Chong. What went through that poor blokes mind when the two of us nearly went under his front and back wheel, respectively in-turn with our staggered retreat, God only knows. I think there were 3 people that night, who needed a change of underwear. By the time he had focused on the two gibbons hanging from the trim of his car and realised he hadn't taken a detour through the local safari-park. The driver shot us a look of absolute bemusement. He had no idea how to react. He couldn't have felt threatened by our surprise attack, because by the time we hit the side of his car, we had both regained our Acid faces. I can only think that it must have looked like a pair of smiling Somali pirates, bouncing of the side of his vessel.

I wonder if he still remembers that moment... I would sure like to hear what he said when he got home...

Well that's it for the 2nd edition. Come back for more and same as last time I will leave it up to you to choose the next chapter of The Science Class of 1996.

Option 1 - Mushrooms in Amsterdam

Option 2 - School trip - The Lincolnshire show and the silent Hippies.

Image sources

Carrot man

Pilled up man

gravestones

scared boy in car

old man in car
Painted man
acid tongue
All other images sourced from pixabay.