THE QUESTION

I was working the 11 PM to 7 AM shift when they brought him in... It wasn't me, 1967/68, some months before I discovered the delights of LSD.

It happened in the middle of
a Saturday graveyard shift...
I remember that kid
they brought to the E.R.
all tripped out on acid.
He looked like me.
I watched them pump
Thorazine into the big
vein in his left arm,
strap him down with
leather restraints
and dump him in
the back of the
psych ward with
the spiders and
hardcore schizos.
On bright-eyed Monday,
he came to, not much
the worse for wear, but
with the same question,
that all these decades later,
I still cannot answer,
“What the hell...
why am here?”

Reviews

[Lorry]

I have two things to say about PSD Vol, so strap in, because I can't figure out which was weirder.
Firstly, I was born in '68 and our money wemlnt decimal in' 74. But here's problem number one.... The before money was called pounds, schillings and pence, but get this, it was shown as LSD... The L somehow denoted pounds, and the D was for pence... And all that just in time for me starting school and getting my head melted that even the teachers thout pounds started with an L! No wonder it didn't take me long to become known as a cynical child.
The second, was an actual trip that I had been talked into trying with a friend, who invited his new girlfriend too. I was a bit wary about tripping with an unknown, and as you'll see, I had good bloody reason to!
So the plan was to put on some pink Floyd, take a trip and everything would be mellow yellow.... Wrong!
All I can say is, that I'm glad the big bravado talk cooled and we settled on taking only one tab each instead of two for a first trip, in a thinking of "double the pleasure, double the fun." moment of idiocy.
So the new girlfriend of his was already sending out weird vibes in that she couldn't decide to take one or a half of one, and for about twenty minutes spoke every thought in her head very loudly, before thankfully deciding on taking a half, which was a good shout after we'll, what happened next.
About an hour later, while we were tuning out to pink Floyd's, the wall, we noticed she had been gone for a while, so my friend decided to go check on her, just as it got to the bit on the album with the banging sounds of the hammers, which coincided with my friend kicking in his own bathroom door, as his girlfriend had locked it and wasn't answering.
Once I peeled myself off the ceiling at the tripponess of the hammering sounding like it had come alive, with its near perfect synchronisation of my friend kicking in his loo door, it turned out she had been freaking out and we were to into the music to notice her absence earlier.
Now, you'd think that would have taught her that maybe drugs weren't for her, but think again.
She died with a needle in her arm years later, after nearly driving my friend insane with her crazy Ness, leaving him to bring up a son she wouldn't let him see, plus three other strays who no one knew or admitted to being the father of and leaving them to a life in the ironically called social care system.
That was my first trip, or as I now call it, the night Floyd played the Wall live in my mates house! 😊

[Vol]

Dang, Lorry!
The thing I remember most was... I was watching the hands melt on our grandfather clock when Joan came to stand right in front of me... She looked into my eyes, and with a wicked grin, put her hands on each of my upper arms and began to rub them up and down with increasing vigor... "Joan! What are you doing?" Another wicked grin and "I'm going to blow your brains out!" I didn't get it until the next day, I'm not sure how the rest of the night might have gone had I thought of myself as a walking, talking hard-on...