Peter Hunt Welch - And Then I Thought I Was a Fish

And Then I Thought I Was a Fish

And Then I Thought I Was a Fish

by Peter Welch

12by3 Press

And Then I Thought I Was a Fish

Copyright 2012 by Peter Welch

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First eBook Edition: April 2012

12by3 Press, Brooklyn

www.12by3.com

For Trinity and Pocahontas

Thanks to Barb, Tom, Sam, Acadia Hospital, the guy in the restaurant, Jake, JD, Jun, Ashleigh, Norm, Dana, Jonathan, Deirdre, and Amy

Apologies to Big Drug, Earth Mother, Jakes parents, the waitresses, my employers, the Bar Harbor police department, the Southwest Harbor police department, the University of Maine, Sirius, Crow Abilities, everybody living on Maple Street, the woman Jake almost killed, the store Jake wrecked, the third floor of York Hall, the taxi driver whose car I stole, the woman whose truck I almost stole, and my parents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Just the fact of having had a psychotic episode creates social difficulties, long after the business of actually having it is over.

The least successful year of my dating career was my stint at UMass, Amherst. This was partly because I lived in a dorm full of students from the suburbs whose life experiences differed somewhat from mine. I had a protracted conversation with my neighbors that I let unfold with sick fascination as I tried to communicate that when I wanted to borrow a bowl to smoke pot, I wasnt talking about cooking. This was the first year I let slip to a stranger that Id been in a mental institution, and since it was one of those students, she immediately made some excuse to leave and stopped talking to me.

If she had known the whole story, she probably would have changed schools. Her initial reaction was just ignorance: plenty of people take a break in the nuthouse for minor breakdowns or other temporary and unshocking reasons. The appropriate response to I was in a mental institution, is Why? Unfortunately for me, the answer to that question is I had a full blown psychotic episode because I took too many drugs, thought I was Jesus, and stole some cars.

A decade later, I live in Brooklyn, Im surrounded by jaded New Yorkers, and I work in IT, so I have fewer professional and social worries about elaborating on this particular section of my life.

The summer of my twentieth year on the planet obliterated every measure of good, evil, truth, beauty, reality, and fantasy Id had before, and makes everything thats happened since seem banal. Its the reason I will never believe in anything again, the reason I play music, and the reason the Acadia Hospital nursing staff thinks Im a crackhead. There are probably three or four dozen people that wont talk to me to this day because of these events, and I am a local legend in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Im writing this down for a number of reasons, first among them being that Im sick of telling it. If I know somebody long enough, this story eventually comes up, and I have to tell it again with a varying level of detail depending on the listeners level of interest and my level of blood alcohol. The shortest, no-frills version that does it any amount of justice is upwards of half an hour. With questions its usually a one- to two-hour conversation. Even I get bored talking exclusively about myself for more than forty-five minutes. If you have a good LSD story, it can take fifteen minutes to tell it in all its glory, and thats just an eight- to twelve-hour ride that feels a lot longer because your sense of time is on a lunch break. This story is about a 2,304-hour ride, and my senses were a lot further gone than some measly industrial-grade psychedelic drugs could have taken them. Its just too long to tell.

Im also telling it because I need to get it out of my head and Ive been putting off getting it down in its entirety because it makes me feel weird thinking about it, as it is the cause of my PTSD. But I think eleven years ago is long enough that I can dig through the memories without wigging out.

Its not all bad. My mind changed, chemically and psychologically, and ultimately for the better. It was also one of those crucial experiences secretly treasured by chaotic and intemperate people like me, in which the suffering and fallout are so monstrously disproportionate to the original sin that you are freed from judgmentinternally, externally, and, at least in my case, cosmically.

This is the complete, annotated, and unabridged story of how I went crazy for three months.

Prelude 1: Why We Thought It Would Be Such a

Great Idea to Drop Acid at Noon in Bar Harbor

Any good story of a stupendously bad decision should have a little preamble about how the decision, out of all decisions, was weighed and chosen.

Part of the reason I made this truly epic bad decision was because wewe being my heterosexual life-mate Jake and myselfhad made nearly the same decision a month prior, and it worked out great. The fact is, acid is a blast unless it destroys your mind and life. Jake and I had just had what was possibly the perfect trip. It is the happiest I have ever been or ever will be. It was every existential dilemma not just cast aside, but thoroughly solved. All the answers of life, the universe, and everything were laid at our feet, the whole of creation stepped out from behind the curtain and said, Yes, its okay, this is how it works, everything is fine, and youre pretty cool.

This is how it began:

One morning, Jake said, Fuck it, lets do some acid.

At the end of my table-waiting shift, a friend of mine walked up to me and said, I would like to shake your hand, shook my hand, and put a ten strip of acid into it.

Theres no better preparation for an acid trip.

We started at about midnight. Maybe later. Lesson 1: Midnight is a better time to start tripping than noon. You have a little time to get a handle on things before you have to deal with people. This was Jakes first trip, so we worked our way gently through the opening stages. You have to bounce around with tripping. It comes in waves; at the top of each wave, reality falls apart a little more, you lose your sense of whats real, the subject/object, other/self dichotomies break apart, youre not sure why, then you come back down a bit and remember youre on drugs and everythings okay. We wandered around, getting more and more tripped out, then found ourselves on the beach, at dawn, at the exact moment we started peaking.

I dont know what this acid was. I heard George Washington print and Tim Leary print. It would not have surprised me if this was the concoction that got Tim so worked up for the second half of his life.

Bar Harbor has a neat little feature, which is a sand bar that bridges a smallish island to the main-ish land (Bar Harbor is on an island to begin with) at low tide. At that moment, while we were peaking, just after dawn, the tide was as low as wed ever seen it, leaving a vast walkway to this island, the fringes of which were covered in sparkling green sea plants and scuttling sea bugs. Directly above this bridge, the sky was split as if by a razor: to our left, black storm clouds stretching to the western horizon, to our right, crystal blue sky with the perfectly yellow sun coming over the sea. It was in the low 70s.

At this point we were already beside ourselves with joy. We headed across the bar to the island.

A dog ran up to us, which was the funniest thing ever, for some reason. If you havent done acid, but have smoked pot, acid giggles are like pot giggles... well, on acid. The dog ran back to some other people, and we just kept moving, not wanting to kill our vibe by running into sober kids. At some point Jake bursts out laughing and points to a kid lying comatose on the beach, wearing a Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt. We laugh about it, then stop and look at each other.