Acid Date

[STORY. A date on acid in South London]

We wanted to go on a normal date for once. In other words, I wanted to go for dinner somewhere relatively nice instead of a typical evening of binge-drinking, binge-smoking, Valium-popping, line-sniffing at home. He chose the restaurant: a gastropub, i.e. an establishment that’s neither a pub nor a gastronomic experience, but definitely a step-up from sitting on the pavement outside our local bar once it closed. Every neighbourhood has that one restaurant, the one you take your date, or your parents when they come visit.

Before heading out, we knocked back some drinks, listened to records and smoked a few joints. As I was placing the icecube tray back in the freezer, I noticed a colourful sheet of acid tabs in a Ziploc laying against a bag of frozen peas. I had forgotten I had so many tabs left. I repeated this thought out loud, as if to check if J and I were on the same page about what was about to happen. Great minds did think alike. We took a tab each, finished our drinks and headed off to the restaurant.

I’d say the tab kicked in when I set my eyes on the menu that was handed to me by a shape-shifting waiter.

That restaurant was by far one of the worst places to be tripping balls. We hadn’t realised how suffocating our surroundings were until it was too late and we had ordered our food. It was also incredibly dark in there, with only one candle per table, in teal glasses, which projected a faint blue halo around them. Moreover, neither of us had taken into account that it was Friday night – the place was packed. The hostess who greeted us at the entrance seemed surprised and almost disappointed when she found a table for two to sit us.

As it also turned out, Friday night was also live music night. Crammed against the steamed up windows was a jazz trio, who likely couldn’t hear themselves play and therefore were desperately trying to be as loud as they could. I watched as the bassist wrestled with his instrument, hitting the strings with all his might, all in vain. As soon as we sat down, a waiter snuck up behind J and slammed two menus and a wine list in front of us. My mouth was terribly dry, I needed some tap water.

“A bottle of still water?” the waiter replied.
“Tap water’s fine. And free.”

We were trying not to stare at the waiter’s ever-changing face, but we saw him raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow before he flipped his order pad shut and disappeared. J and I exchanged a smile, and I could feel a twinge of exhilaration bubbling in my stomach. We each grabbed a menu and ignored the wine list – we’d order the cheapest bottle of red anyway. As I opened my menu, I remembered just how potent this acid was. My trip had officially started and, glancing over at J, I could tell his had too. I couldn’t see any of the dishes listed on the laminated page in front of me: it was glowing blue, like the candles, and a bunch of three-dimensional letters were pulsing across it.

“Oh shit”, I heard J say over the music. We started to laugh uncontrollably. That caught the waiter’s attention and he reappeared, pen in hand. He asked if we had decided, which sounded like the best joke we had heard all day to us. He seemed exasperated, glaring at us all while J was trying to articulate a coherent sentence. “Do you have burgers?” That seemed to annoy the waiter but he scribbled that down on his pad, along with a bottle of their cheapest merlot.

I kept on forgetting what we had ordered, or if we had even ordered, or that we were even in a restaurant having a supposedly normal date. I was oscillating between states – of awe, of euphoria, where the restaurant’s darkness and warmth made the blue light dance, vibrate, the colours glow, where J and I were so connected to one another, to the music, to the other people there – and a state of nervous, semi-claustrophobic discomfort, a sense of being out of place, not belonging, not being wanted, a sense of being trapped in near obscurity, smothered by the brouhaha of conversations and dissonant jazz notes. But then I’d catch a glimpse of J’s eyes, also bright and blue, his pupils so huge I could barely see a thin turquoise aureola around them. Then, a wave of reassurance would envelop me. We were in this together, us against the world.

I don’t recall if we managed to eat much of those burgers, or how long we ended up staying at the restaurant. I know we didn’t stay for dessert, we tipped the waiter, and J insisted on paying: he said he had intended to take me out on a normal date, chivalry included. I have no recollection of how we made it back to mine, though I didn’t live far from the restaurant. The rest of the night appears in flashes in my mind: a blur of laughter, often hysterical, of tenderness and of deep connection and conversations.

The only clear memory I have of the end of that evening, once we got back from our not-so-casual date, is of us in my room, lying naked on my bed, limbs confusingly intertwined, skin against skin – his soft, toned, radiating warmth against mine. As we talked into the early hours of the day, I was absent-mindedly caressing him and I distinctly remember being moved by how beautiful he was. Not just in a superficial way, although he was objectively gorgeous, but in an all-encompassing way. A beautiful person to be lying next to. To listen to. To speak to. To share an LSD trip with. A human being who exuded beauty in so many ways that I could not even put it into words.