I’ve touched on “tips for taking LSD” before, but here’s my personal favorite tip : if you smoke some weed just after you drop acid, you’ll transition nice and smooth from “high” to “tripping balls”. It’s a technique I’ve used many times, and I recommend it highly.

I was at Kevin’s apartment, which was becoming a pretty regular LSD hangout spot (a “fry pad”, as we called them at the time). He had a nice place with almost no furniture, but it was large and comfortable, and the sun that shone through did so through windows near the top of his high-ceiling living room, so it was never in your eyes, but it felt calm and relaxing. Kevin and I got really high and dropped 2 tabs each (I was dealing LSD at the time, so I could afford such luxuries). He and I were lying on the floor, and we crashed out shortly after getting high.

It can be a weird feeling to wake up tripping. Kevin was still lying next to me, or maybe he’d gotten up prior to me waking up and his lying down next to me is what helped wake me up. I opened my eyes and immediately started laughing at the absurdity of it all — who wakes up tripping? — and Kevin and I joked back and forth about how weird his ceiling looked.

At the time, Kevin lived with this shithead miscreant named Terry. I have no idea how Kevin met Terry, but Terry wanted everyone to know he’d been to jail and that he was a real badass. If you’re trying to picture Terry in your mind, imagine Merl from The Walking Dead in his 20s. Terry and Kevin shared a room, but Terry was rarely ever home. He was always up to his own shit. If we were in the living room, Terry was in their bedroom. If we were all in the bedroom, Terry was in the living room. Most of the time, thankfully, Terry was nowhere to be found.

Except this night.

My eyes were half-closed, and mostly watering, from laughing so hard with Kevin. When I had a moment to breathe, I heard a voice say “SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.” and I looked up to see Terry, standing over me. With a gun to my head. Kevin said “Oh. Hi Terry” in a monotone voice that I’d never heard him use before. This was my first time actually interacting with Terry, having only heard about him prior to this. I was frozen in fear. Hell, I’m frying my balls off, just woken up from a nap, and there’s a fucking 9mm pointed 6 inches away from my skull. Terry yelled out “you’re being too FUCKING loud!” and as I was apologizing, he pulled the trigger and I heard a loud CLANK! from an empty chamber.

He laughed and said “I was just fucking with you”. Kevin would later say “I’m pretty sure that was a BB Gun”, but I’ve never heard a BB Gun have such a loud clank! noise. That said, I was tripping, so don’t trust my judgment on that one. I just know you don’t point a fucking gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy¹.

The rest of the night went smoothly. Kevin had amassed an interesting group of people during his time in that apartment (probably from his days at the AM/PM). The women who would roll through to trip with us were unbelievably attractive, and I still don’t understand how he managed to just have a constant revolving door of hot young chicks swinging by to hang out and get high for hours on end.

One of those girls was only ever referred to as “Glow Stick Girl”. I’m sure someone knew her name, but no one ever referred to her as anything but Glow Stick Girl. She was ridiculously hot, with a beautifully perky set of tits, neck-length blonde hair in a bob cut, and the kind of abs that befit someone far more active than her. She’d come over in a tight crop top and a knee-length skirt. She never wore underwear – or if she did, I never saw them. In her purse, she kept a stash of glowsticks. Once she was feeling the acid, she’d pull out a fresh glowstick, crack it, fuck herself with it for a minute – in full spread-eagle view of anyone in sight – and pull it out a short while later and ask “who wants a lollipop?”.

This might all sound incredibly fucked-up, and borderline gross to some of you. But, to me and Kevin (and many others at our parties), Glow Stick Girl was awesome. No one ever gave her shit, and surprisingly anyone who hit on her was shot down and we’d usually give them shit for trying to ruin a good time with their selfishness. Kevin and I sucked on those glowsticks like they were mother’s milk. I remember sucking on one for long enough that I felt weird about it, and I said “hmm.. I think mine needs a … refill or something” and she kindly walked up, pulled it from my mouth, and uhh… “gave it a fresh coat”, before gingerly placing it back into my mouth for me.

As the morning light shone into Kevin’s ceiling windows, he and I sat and watched Glow Stick Girl pleasure herself with just her fingers. Everyone else had crashed out, and she had doled out her supply of glowsticks. Neither of us tried to make a move, we just sat in amused and appreciative silence, like you would if you were watching someone paint on a canvas. When she came, her legs shook, and she cocked her head back, staring towards the ceiling.

She got up, hand-brushed her hair for a minute, said “hey, thanks for the acid”, kissed us each on the cheek, and walked out the door. In all the times I fried with her, she never slept at Kevin’s place. She just partied until she felt ready to leave, and off she went.

Glow Stick Girl is still my fuckin’ hero².

³

1. there are many (what I call) theoretical badasses who said they’d have kicked Terry’s ass for that shit. I chose the realistic option : fuck it, I’m going back to my acid trip. Judge me accordingly. ↩

2. I mean that genuinely. This was a girl who just wanted to have fun with herself, knew people liked to watch, and didn’t mind them watching. She did what she wanted, and she knew people like Kevin and I would stick up for her if anyone got too sassy or judgmental about it ↩

3. header photo credit : Dollen ↩