The guy who sold us acid had lived in the park for six years before he started dealing, and now he had been there for almost forty which he said felt like forever and the place never went back to the way it was during the sixties. He was burrowed into a little hollow behind some trees just through the tunnel off of Haight Street on the way to the big colorful metal structure of the children’s playground, he rustled out and startled us with his voice scratch infested with nicotine Hey. You guys want some acid? His girlfriend was a mushroom dealer, he told us in polite pre-illicit dealings conversation, and she made more money because she found her shit in the park, didn’t have to pay anything for it, paid a friend for a room in an apartment and they wouldn’t let him come live with them because he didn’t like to bathe very often. To me it smelled like he didn’t like to bathe ever, only I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to offend him and get overcharged since we only had just enough money on us and I’d gone to such elaborate lengths to make sure I wasn’t going to go home tripping. I hadn’t ever done acid which was silly because I’d already done coke and that’s way worse so it felt like I had skipped a step on my way up the drug chain. I swore I wouldn’t do heroin ever because I had read Naked Lunch and that guy was way cracked out but if it wasn’t really expensive or if it was right there I would probably do it and then I’d be so far ahead it would be pointless to go back and I’d never get around to doing acid. The acid guy was really skinny but swollen, like he had filled up with air instead, and he smoked furiously through a thick fistful of joints he kept fishing out of his pocket and picking through like they were coins, a whole stack of them ready rolled in his pocket.

The house we went back to was a few blocks away from Haight Street in an area the yuppies called Cole Valley and the hippies called the Upper Haight because they didn’t want to be labeled yuppies. It belonged to this guy whose nickname was Jax because that’s what he tagged but I didn’t know what his real name was, all I knew was this kid lived in his North Face windbreaker and Diesel jeans and complained how all his money went to spray-paint and cigarettes. The air in his room smelled like soapy coffee and hot oranges and the carpet was an ugly green like frozen pizza olives. Jax had a best friend Paul who had a chemical imbalance that made him seriously psycho crazy insane and I was happy he wasn’t there when we did acid. He had been there when I did mushrooms for the first time and I was so embarrassed, retching and tripping and the room swaying around me as he watched. Instead I was with Sage, my somewhat boyfriend. We hadn’t decided what we were yet, it was confusing, having sex but no romance whatsoever. Sometimes I thought maybe I was in love with him and then I would think about what a terrible couple we would be, and even if I did ever have real feelings for him I’d be too afraid of rejection to say it, and the feeling was mutual. Sage had so much power over people, he didn’t even realize it, how badly he could fuck with a person’s head if he wanted to. I think it was mostly the fact that he didn’t care about many people so everyone wanted to be one of the ones he did care about. I was one. I didn’t know what would happen if he wasn’t there all of a sudden and I had to stand on my own, but while it lasted I would bask in the security of it.

But the acid. We had a tab each and it took a while so I got bored and went to take a shower and while I was in the tiny glass cubicle the acid hit and I looked around at the water falling and pretty soon the soap I was using had completely disintegrated and I was dripping cold onto the bathmat. Somehow I got dressed and wandered into the room where Sage was stretched out connected to the floor. After a while of us staring at the paint stains in the carpet and the grooves in the wood of the desk, Jax called us. He wasn’t home but he gave us a key so we could go when we wanted because his mom didn’t care and his dad moved to Mexico or somewhere when he was seven. He told us to come to May’s.

May was Jax’s girlfriend who was too hot for him although he was pretty hot himself and who broke up with him periodically every four to six weeks. Once they stayed together for three months straight and everyone was waiting for them to break up the entire time and when they finally did we all went and bought a bottle of the worst vodka we knew that tasted like nail polish remover and we gave it to Jax and he finished the whole thing in two days and was still drunk when he woke up the morning of the third.  May was nice but fucked up and she didn’t know how to deal with her relationship. She had a lot of self-esteem issues even though she was tall and beautiful and had French parents who didn’t give a shit what or who she did. She was Euro-gorgeous with big blue eyes and straight blonde hair and the kind of acne that was cute because it was just around her mouth in little pink bumps that blended with her freckles. She was tall, but Jax was taller, her beauty enhanced his, and when they stood together it was overwhelming, the beauty that pianoed its way from their bodies and over whoever was with them and made us squirm. I had a girlfriend once who was like that, who made you nauseous she was so pretty but once I got to know her I realized how she was screwed up inside like the rest of us, and she was crazy not in the way that Paul was crazy, but she would get in weird moods and have to do things like ask people she didn’t know to be her friends or make two dozen muffins and eat them all in one sitting and that made me feel better since she was earthly and down on my level. I had sex with her in her parents’ broken VW bus that was on blocks in her backyard and got rug burns in long pink stripes down my shoulder blades from being pressed so violently into the carpet lining the trunk where we did it, hot and sweatslick and her biting on my neck that made my stomach twist and I ground up hard against her pelvic bone until we were so close our hips were bruising. But May was even prettier and it made me hurt to look at her so I avoided her even though I thought she might really understand me. And I didn’t want to go to her house because I was afraid of what might happen if I did.

Sage and I went to my house instead because Sage was sober and I was sobering, and my parents were naïve and gullible enough that we could get away with it. The one time I came home on hallucinogens was when I was on the mushrooms we found in the park and my parents were angry at me anyway and didn’t want to deal with me and I just walked upstairs and felt too big for the hallway. I lay down naked in front of my mirror and finally saw myself the way I thought other people saw me and I was tripping still so when I put on music my body moved to it without my realizing it. I lay curled in the dark under my sheets with my headphones as high as I could go and let the heat in the bed build and mingle with the smell of my crotch and felt primal and free. But now here with Sage we lay under the covers together and he smelled so good, sharp and spicy and mingled savory sweet with his cologne like French toast and basil. He touched my leg and I moved it and he said, I thought that was you, I never felt sheets that soft, and I smiled and kissed him because he was too nice to kiss me first. I wanted to get it over with because it was such a cliché chick thing but I loved talking to him the best, and post-orgasm conversation is better than pre-orgasm conversation because by that time you’ve been so close to each other there’s nothing you can’t say and weird things come up like the sizes of people’s genitalia. Once we talked about this guy who used to think he was in love with me who supposedly had a ten-inch dick, his best friend had told us when he masturbated it was like playing a trombone. My house was deep in the middle of nowhere-pastel-cake-stucco land, the Sunset, San Francisco’s wastesheet of suburbia, where everything was grungy sunfaded uniform with painted silver gates long sheets of barred glass, messy garages and glossy movie posters.

When we were done we slunk out of there as fast as we could, stopped by Cece’s on our way to Sage’s. She was high and singing to her rats, these scrawny little white things that always had some sort of skin problem that made their fur fall out. She was poking little sticks through the bars of the rat cage and singing to them, watching them sniff at the sticks just out of reach, there’s no way you can get out, you can never get out, and then she’d hum a disjointed little melody and laugh to herself for a while. That’s Fucked Up, I told her, but she just laughed harder. Cece lived in the Sunset too, but on Third Avenue so it was almost out. She said that was worse in a way to know you were so close but you couldn’t get away. She was so pale for a Mexican girl, she complained how everyone thought she was French which I didn’t see anything wrong with, she was adorable with her black crinkles of hair looped intricate like three-dimensional lace. She didn’t want to come with us, she wanted to come down from her high and fall asleep to her crazy European techno, so we left her, horny again and cityprowling giving way to excitement and the badass feeling left behind by drugs.

Sage’s entire family knew we were fucking. Along with all of his mother’s crazy-creepy friends, two of his father’s coworkers, his sister’s current boyfriend and her ex, and his brother’s therapist. None of them thought it was a bad thing- except the therapist, who had a Freudian take on the whole thing. Sage’s parents were free-thinking hippies and his siblings were thirty-ish and long moved out of the house he lived in, a big hollow warehouse downtown that was tall and narrow with at least six floors. It was so cool just to wander around and find things- plants on the elevator, beaded curtains on the bridge, the museum on the second floor full of weird artifacts his parents had found- among them, a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup that had botulism, enough to kill the whole city of San Francisco. But Sage’s family was huge, it would take a set of encyclopedias to explain, and every single person in it knew, even his mother’s ex-husband who had moved to Japan after the divorce to become a real ninja.

I sat down on Sage’s bed upstairs and waited for him to follow after. There was a tingling feeling on the backs of my arms that knew something was happening, or maybe it was the cold. I burrowed under the layers of blankets but the tingle was still there like an almost-itch. Like the time I got poison ivy, it started as just a tingle and bloomed red and oozing into a terrible rash. The pulsing silence was blood-hot, thick and moving under my skin, pulsing and waiting for the tiny cut to let it all out. Sage walked in and looked at me and I could tell he was blazed by the way he shifted, such an antsy stoner, and kept running his hands through his hair. I don’t think this is going to work anymore, he told me.

Sloane Martin is currently a junior at School of the Arts in San Francisco, where she is majoring in Creative Writing. She has been published by the department’s literary journal Umläut and in one self-published chapbook (so far). She firmly believes Batman is a true superhero and challenges anyone who disagrees to a long and unnecessarily drawn-out debate.