Windowpane Glasses

It was back in the early seventies. I had been one of the last hold outs in the group I ran with to finally smoke pot. Yet that’s the most I would do. That is until a friend finally convinced me to partake with him of a substance known as purple windowpane – acid for short. The plan: we had rolled some joints dipped in hash oil. My friend, Brian, told me this would temper the effect of the acid, which we would split. Afterwards we would walk down to the Community Center, a local teen hangout.1

After splitting the acid with a razor blade we put the substance on our tongues and let it dissolve. Then we left Brian’s house, stopped in a small park on the way to the Community Center, smoked a couple of the joints and proceeded. It was Friday night and the Center reminded me of an ant hill lit up with teens popping in and out of doors like worker ants. Brian and I stopped out front, leaned up against the wall and lit cigarettes. It was a perfect September evening. Cool but not cold, just right for the faded jeans and long jean jacket I was wearing – the mark of a “head”.2

I saw a girl I knew named Jessie step out the front door, look around and begin talking to a couple of girls a few feet to her right. It was about this time that the windowpane began kicking in, plugging into the mellow foundation laid by the hash-soaked reefer. All of a sudden I felt as if I could concentrate on anything at will and make it belong to me. I can’t explain it any better than that. Jessie walked over and asked me how I was. I had always had somewhat of a crush on her. She was cute and sexy looking. But I’d never had the nerve to reveal my feelings.3

As she looked into my face I stared into her eyes with a calm single-mindedness I’d never felt. I was usually shy with girls. But now all shyness was washed away like the final traces of soap circling the drain in a shower rinse. As I looked into her eyes my thoughts told her that I could swallow her into myself at that very moment, without compunction or shyness, and I knew my thoughts shouted in my eyes. I KNEW it! I don’t even remember what we said, but she went her way. Later when I explained to her what I had done she would tell me that I scared her, and I would apologize. I walked over to Brian and we exchanged looks. No words needed. We were both wired and we owned the world, at least the one we were manufacturing. We resumed smoking as if nothing had happened.4

A small black dog came from across the street. I could hear each scrape of his claws on the asphalt as he approached as if my hearing had somehow telescoped in on each sound. When he got to the sidewalk he turned away from us to go up the street but stopped at the building’s end where water from rain earlier in the evening had collected in a depression in the sidewalk. He began to lap from it. I watched him, calmly concentrated as if he were somehow my specimen. 5

Then it happened. The water he drank began to come through the hairs on his body in individual crystal drops. I observed all this with a clinical detachment as if I was hanging in a bathysphere a mile into dark ocean depths watching strange marine life pass before me. The dog went his way and before I could ponder the incident my attention was stolen by the red trails that began to extend behind passing car tail lights like neon taffy. At no time did I get excited. I continued to feel detached like an observer, like Mr. Spock saying, “Interesting.”6

I looked around and Brian was gone, so I decided to go inside. I walked through the door and the brief foyer to the next door that would open into the Center’s lobby. I felt like I was going through the air lock of a submarine. When I emerged into the lobby I passed on into the large room where most people congregated. All of a sudden a rush of voices converged on me like verbal piranha and I felt like they were trying to enter me. But that detached feeling remained and I was able to ignore them. I sat down on one of the wooden benches that lined the far wall, a point from which I could see everything. The jukebox was blasting and teens were moving about like atoms bouncing off each other. They were concurrently dancing, laughing, shouting, smoking, playing pool or ping-pong. I observed it all, in an unexplainable way, as one great motion. My mind moved somewhere to the background, looking at all through some mentally orbiting Hubble telescope. Yes, Mr. Spock. Interesting.7

But this mild interest gave way to the windowpane induced fact that the walls were starting to run like the melted cheese on a freshly cooked pizza. I watched everyone continue their activities as the walls melted in the backdrop, sagging and drooping, their voices running together, congealing in a roar that never reached crescendo, and thinking how this was all, yes, indeed, very interesting. 8

Just then I saw Brian sitting across the room and our eyes caught and locked like a docking ship. And we knew we were having the same experience. In some way we both took solid note of that, two people connected across a room full of activity, about to slide down, down, down through black holes and emerge into another universe while our bodies sat and observed. But we never left, and it was all indeed interesting as we wiled away the evening, floating around town like two exposed nerve endings drinking in sensation, observing through windowpane glasses.9