The Not Electric Acid Test That Had Nothing To Do with Kool Aid, Part One

This is my favorite true story of all time. As far as I'm concerned it's got everything. Drugs, road trips, identical twins and land that used to belong to the richest man in the world. If I had to impress and frighten someone within 10 minutes, this is the anecdote I would drag out.

The year is 1993. A young Bill Clinton has just started un-fucking the economy, the nation's still awash with Dream Team excitement, and Grunge music is teaching the world to stop giving money to people like Lita Ford and Cinderella. During this era, I inexplicably find myself living and going to school in Coalinga, California. Anyone who's ever driven the stretch of highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles will remember Coalinga as the place where all you can see right up to the horizon are cows and all you can smell for 10 miles in any direction is cow shit. At one point in my life I was so desperate to get out of southern California that this seemed like a good alternative.

Anyway, at the time I was living with a guy named Richard Gaeta. Now Richard was just your average SoCal 20-year old from Simi Valley who also happened to be a pretty decent basketball player. We had moved up to Coalinga the previous year so that he could try and play his way into a division one school and so that I might be able to educate my way back into a decent college. Oh, and one other slightly interesting thing about Richard is that he has an identical twin brother that joined us in this godawful shitkicker of a town for the Spring semester.

Over Christmas break of that year, I had come into a small amount of LSD (2 hits). Upon returning to central California, I then had the brilliant idea of inviting the twin brothers on a road trip wherein we would ingest said drugs and chill out on the beach or something. Being 1 hour away from Fresno and 3 hours away from anything else, good ideas were hard to come by. So we hopped in the car, pointed it towards the coast (also about a 3 hour drive) and off we went.

About an hour outside of San Simeon, the former hometown of William Randoph Hearst and one of the largest 'fuck you's ever built in this country, the Hearst Castle, we all took the acid. Being a big dude and slightly more experienced, I took a full hit whereas the identical twins took a half a hit each. We drove up and down the coast for a little while before settling on the beach located under a cliffside hotel. We hoped that the craggy outreaching rock would protect us from authority figures or anyone else that might be harmed if they gave us any sort of 'surprise'.

We hung out for a little while, shivering in the midnight cold, waiting for the chemicals to really grab hold. Anyone who's taken acid before knows that there's usually a period of an hour or so after you take it where you manage to convince yourself that you got bunk shit and you're in for a night of sitting around cursing the guy who sold you this crap. It's almost always at that exact moment that something fucked up usually happens.

In our case, it was that all the rocks on the beach turned into human skulls...

To Be Continued...