GOING TO WORK ON ACID



The early 90’s in America – the grunge years. We wore clothes from second hand shops and shaved once every three days. We took pride in spending as little money as possible. We all had long hair. We listened to groups chosen for their obscurity and their distortion rather than their musical ability or their lyrics.

And we took lots of LSD.

We wanted to explore our psychological and spiritual inner crevices, certainly, but I think, in general, we were less interested in the mind-expansion aspect of it than in the cost-effectiveness. One hit – which then cost between $1 and $3 – and you were fucked for 10 or 11 hours. Take a half or a quarter, and you could run around and drink all night with a psychedelic background to everything.

There was a considerable bit of drug “machismo” amongst my set, which involved taking LSD in the most spectacular, precarious or disturbing place possible. “I did acid in a slaughterhouse once.” “Oh yeah, I did acid at my grandmother’s funeral.” Going through a shift of work on acid was something of a rite of passage.

When I did it while working in Bangkok, though, it was more or less an accident.

On the train back from Malaysia, where I’d been getting another tourist visa so I could continue working illegally, I met a female scuba diving instructor who’d been working on Koh Tao on the east coast of Thailand. She was heading back to England for awhile though, so she was staying in Bangkok for a couple days. She suggested we meet up for a drink in the evening.

As it often happens, however, one drink became ten. At that time there was a place called the Hole in the Wall in an alley off of Khao-San Road, Bangkok’s famous tourist strip. It’s probably still there in some form, though I know it changed locations and design several times. Basically it was exactly what it purported to be – a hole in the wall, a small space the size of a garage that had literally been ripped into the side of another building. I think there were two tables. They sold Singha beer and Mekong rice whiskey and soda water. They played techno and house music and there were some psychedelic drawings splashed on the wall with glow-in-the-dark-paint. Of course they had a black light or two. There wasn’t really a dance floor to speak off, but that didn’t stop people from dancing.

And, being the only late night bar with dancing in the area, it attracted dozens and dozens of drunk backpackers, crammed sweating and heaving into the place, which often became so humid the walls would literally be dripping. They moved a huge industrial fan into the place eventually, but it didn’t help much. Towards the wee hours of the morning, people tended to start taking their clothes off in an attempt to cool down. Didn’t usually work, and was rather dangerous anyway because the floor was inevitably covered with broken glass by the end of the evening.

So there we were in this sweaty little meat-market on the far end of the earth, listening to music that seemed to consists mostly of BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, surrounded by ponytailed Austrailains, crop-headed Brits, glassy-eyed American sorority girls, rosy-cheeked English girls in flowered skirts and bathing suit tops, Thai prostitutes, transvestites and begging children.

12:07am. “Hey, you want some acid?” The Austrailian guy we’d met offered it to me freely. He was carting a video camera around Asia making tapes that he sold to some travel program in Austraila for some outrageous price.
“Yeah, I’d like some,” I said. “But I have to work tomorrow.”
“Aw, don’t worry, it’ll have worn off by then.”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I just started a month ago I don’t want to get in the shit just yet.”
“Alright. More beer than?”
“Yeah, all right.”

12:50am BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
“Aw, mate, this place is raging! I’m going to drop some now. You want some?”
“No, I better not.”
“Maybe just a half? You can handle a half, can’t you mate?”
“Ah . . . “ I glanced around at the sweaty mayhem and half-naked bodies around me. “Ah, shit. Okay, why not.”

2:00 am BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
“Man, I’m taking another! This is wicked.”
“Yes it is.” I slur. I’ve moved onto rice whiskey and I’m stripped down to my shorts, like most everybody else. Some girl had been rubbing up against me on the dance floor while pretending not to notice me. Sex in the 90’s was often like that.
“Sure you don’t want another half?”
“Nah, better not.”

2:38am BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
“Come on, take the other half.”
“Why the fuck not!”

4:10 am “Dear god, what have I done?”
“You’ll be fine.”
We were walking though the pre-dawn streets of the Banglumpu neighborhood – staggering drunks, rats, stray dogs, the occasional transvestite hooker. My head was reeling.
“You should call in sick or something.”
“Ah, shit! I can’t! What if they fire me? What will happen to my students? I just started! What if I get fired! I haven’t got any money, and I couldn’t even get a visa to go to Taiwan! Jesus god, that was a great party though. Christ. . .”
The people that I was with started talking about scuba diving and ignored me. I went into my cheap hotel and collapsed onto the bed, colors whirling around in the darkness.

English Teacher X tends to panic easily when on acid. It’s probably best that he stopped taking it.

9:00 am rolls around.

I took a cold shower in the bathroom down the hall, leaning dazed against the wall. I remember it being a tremendous effort to get my cheap rayon tie correctly knotted.

The journey across Bangkok to work took nearly an hour. That probably sounds like a lot to you, but if so, you never lived in Bangkok. At that time, before the construction of the sky train, the traffic was at such a standstill that some people took as much as three hours to get to work. This is not hyperbole. I knew these people.

I was lucky – I was going from central Bangkok to the suburbs, so against the heaviest flow of traffic. I never minded the trip much, especially when I managed to get a seat on the air-conditioned 44 bus. Across the river, past some floating markets, past shopping malls and movie theaters, and a market where freshly-cut meat was sold.

It was an epic voyage on that morning, let me confirm. I hid behind my sunglasses. The details of Bangkok that day were overwhelming. Why had I never noticed how INTRICATE the litter on the ground was? The sheer NUMBER of colors in a flower market? The temples still looked like gaudy Chinese restaurants though.

The first class was at 10:30am. I went into the bathroom before I went into the staffroom, and checked my pupils. They were gigantic. The staff were all cool enough, but the manager, a bit of a pocket demagogue, would be pissed. On my first day he’d lectured me on his philosophy that alcohol and cigarettes and whores were just fine, but I’d better not come to work stoned. The students probably wouldn’t notice, but what the hell was I going to do for two hours?

There was only one chance: video lab.

Our classes met four times a week for five weeks. We were allowed to do two “video labs” per course. This was the last resort of the most wretchedly exhausted and hungover. A video lab consisted of watching a video in English. And that’s all. Sometimes we’d ask questions afterwards, but usually not.

I rushed into the teacher’s room and grabbed the TV and a video, only hurriedly greeting the others and avoiding looking at anybody’s eyes. Everybody else had their own hangovers they were filling with coffee and cigarettes, anyway, so they didn’t pay me much mind.

“Hey, I’m using that today!” It was the scary middle-aged Austrailian guy who smiled all the time and was reputed to be on the run from a child-porn conviction.

My look of panic made him laugh. “Just joking!”

“Don’t scare me,” I muttered, laughing nervously.

I wheeled the TV into the classroom – a big class, about twenty-five students. I got the light off and the TV on as quickly as possible, keeping a huge smile on my face and my eyes averted.

The film was “The Shawshank Redemption.” If you’ve never seen it, it’s the story of a man wrongly convicted of killing his wife and how he eventually not only escapes from prison but steals the money of the crooked warden and lives happily ever after on a beach in Mexico.

I was in tears by the end of it, but of course the lights were off so no one noticed.

It nicely ate up a two hour class and fifteen minutes more besides. The class could probably make no sense of anything, but semed to appreciate the idea of it. I didn’t bother with anything as mundane as comprehension questions. No time anyway.
Afterwards I felt considerably less under the influence. The LSD was mostly done for. I pushed the TV back into the teacher’s room, and went down to the KFC and got a Zinger meal with a Sprite. Still five hours before the next class. And I could catch a nap in the sound lab. It’d be okay. Everything would be okay.

I took my Zinger outside and sat eating my lunch with the sun on my face, feeling like a free man.

Go Back and Choose Again