8.

A running joke in ‘Doonesbury’ was the attempts by Duke’s translator, Honey, to mask the Duke’s comments when he addressed his Chinese hosts. During one drunken speech, he informed his audience that being posted to China allowed him to fulfill a dream of dropping acid on the Great Wall. Honey told the audience that he had just paid Mao a compliment and they applauded. I found this amusing as I pictured Duke with his sunglasses and chrome dome pouring a beaker of hydrochloric acid on those ancient stones just to watch them burn. But that’s not at all what he meant, and I remember the look on my teacher’s face when I told her that joke. I was in 6^th grade, which is a bit young to be dropping acid.

Acid was around in high school but I gave it a miss. I’d heard of wild freak outs that are more associated with Angel Dust and anything with a name like acid or a complicated word that was shortened to LSD seemed a lot more dangerous than Coy beer and Jack Daniels. I was past my 22^nd birthday before I dosed myself, and it was certainly worth the wait. How lucky was I to have my first trip amongst friends old and new on the sunny shores of St. Petersburg. I stared at the sky seeing my future. There was good grass and sneaky beer and no fear at all. From that December day I was a glutton for the Sid. I took it whenever and wherever I could. Kent and I split a hit on Good Friday one year and the restaurant got slammed. Figuring it was going to be slow, most of the staff had been cut. It was Kent in the kitchen engulfed in flames sending out plate after perfect plate of trout meuniere. It was me, Gabriel the acid-eating freak Doucette carrying huge stacks of plates, pouring wine with aplomb, popping champagne corks. I was whacked like a board and wired for sound but I did it and thanks to an indulgent bartender who kept me fueled with Greyhounds, I waited on 100 people in two hours and walked out the door that night with a thousand bucks. There were those kinds of days and nights back then. But there was also the cautionary tale, the trip gone bad, the party ruined, friends gone in bewilderment and disgust, mad swirling fugues in which your overloaded brain seemed incapable of sorting out your thoughts, where every gesture was bathed in evil, where your overwhelming sense of unease became a cavalcade of crazy horsemen. Like the night of the Twitch.

The Night of the Twitch went something like this. A and I threw a party at the end of the fall semester. The usual crowd of theatre freaks and strippers gathered at our pad. My brother Yves, a freshman at LSU was there as well, drinking deep from the tequila punch. Somewhere amidst the revelry and good vibrations I lost my mind. By that I mean I could not control my own thinking. Instead I saw a film running at hyper speed through the portals of my consciousness. I was panicking. I was freaking the fuck out. Naturally that cancelled the party in its tracks and I retreated (or was hauled) to the bathroom. There on the cool tiles wrapped around the porcelain god, Kent ministered to me the way a true Acid Christ does. He talked me down. He told me that I wasn’t dying, that I was alive and that he loved me and A loved me and Marlon loved me and on and on until I calmed down and realized that he was right, I was a son of Man just like him and not some fool hell bound for a death by misadventure.

Kent was my first Acid Christ. But there is another kind as well and I saw him that night too. Once I recovered my senses enough to sit in a chair and drink a beer I realized that my brother was stretched across the sofa, vomiting into a bucket. His head was in Marlon’s lap and Marlon stroked Yves’ long dark locks, telling him he’d be okay. He’d had too much punch. One of Kent’s paintings was on the wall above them, a line of crucifix telephone poles against a darkling sky. The effect was one of Jesus, dying in the arms of a gay Mary Magdalene. I walked over and crouched next to Yves.

“Are you all right?”

The answer was no and when I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital the answer was yes. And so I turned into the other Acid Christ, the one for whom no good deed goes unpunished. In my acid eating wisdom I informed the house calmly that I was calling 911. And then I did. My friends hid the drugs or left the house as I sat on the couch cradling my brother in my arms. Moments later, the Twitch arrived.

He stood apart from the other paramedics, barking orders as they strapped Yves to the gurney in the living room. His eyes bulged, his bristle brush haircut bobbing like an angry paint brush. Every few seconds his shoulders would roll back and his face would twitch. I stared at him for a full minute. No fucking way. The paramedic does not have a nervous tic. I must be tripping balls. So I said nothing. Not even when I noticed that the paramedics hadn’t properly strapped my brother down. Sure enough, as they carted him out the door, Yves slipped to his right. Or did he? The Twitch told my brother that he needed to sit up properly. My brother gurgled some reply.

“Strap him down you idiots,” I said. “Do your goddamn job.”

Marlon pulled me back and said that if I didn’t cool down they’d be putting me into the back of that ambulance. Maybe they should have. It would have beat the feeling that I carried from that point on. I wasn’t sure anymore if I could trust my own thinking. Did the ambulance driver really have a tic or was I just spazzing out? Did my brother really slip and so had I been right all along that they failed to strap him down? Nobody could tell me, and later when I asked Kent if the ambulance driver really had a twitch, he laughed and said, “You were the Twitch, mutherfucker.”