January 1991, Berkeley, California

By Chris West

I tried acid for the last time at the party before the last party at Barrington Hall.

A ramshackle apartment building on the South Side of the Berkeley campus that had been converted to student housing, Barrington had become home to those parts of the student body who were not at home anywhere else. With its drug-dealer hippies, heroin hooked death rock crowd and sociopathically dissociative physics PhD students, the building regularly drew the ire of the surrounding residential neighborhood.

Things reached a boiling point in early 1990, and the university decided to turn the building over to a private developer. The new owners promised to evict all the current residents, refurbish the place, and bring in a crop of nice, quiet kids. And so the call had gone out to have a party to “Save Barrington Hall.”

My roommate Abel and I were invited by my hippy dorm buddy from freshman year, Mark. It wasn’t quite clear how a party would save the place, but I nonetheless wanted to visit it at least once before the exorcism occurred.

Upon arrival, my first thought about the four-story white square apartment block secreted between two unremarkable houses was how innocuous it looked from the outside. Abel and I stood in front of the barred white door and punched Mark’s room number into the metallic keypad. A second later the microphone static-roared, “Hello.”

“Hey it’s us.”

“Come on up.”

The door buzzed, and we entered the hallway with its worn red carpet. The place was suffused with a particular smell, the rancid edge of a decades-long conglomeration of pot, mold, urine, and cigarette smoke. We wavered, momentarily unsure what to do now that we were in the heart of darkness. Then we spied the industrial strength white metal door that said: “stairs.”

The walls of the staircase were legendary for their phantasmagoria of graffiti. I stared at them for the first and last time before the paint of the new owners would cover them. The words to “The End” by the Doors snaked down from one floor to another. An eye in a triangle with a dove over it hovered to one side. Images twisted in agonies of violence and sex poured over the walls. A pentagram with 666 inscribed in the middle sported the phrase “We Are Everywhere. We Are In You.”

I issued forth from the stairwell into the second floor hall with a shudder. I was glad they were erasing it. It felt like being plunged back into the strange logic and over-determined meaning of a week-long bad LSD trip I’d had three months earlier.

We knocked on Mark’s door, and it opened to reveal a small room with whitewash on the walls and a mattress on the wooden floor. The room was a big step down from our freshman year dorm, Putnam Hall. And God was that a grim thought.

“Hey guys. Come on in.”

Mark himself, though, seemed remarkably unchanged. He stood inside the doorway in a yellow tie-dyed Led Zeppelin tee shirt, a bead necklace, and faded jeans, topped off with the long, curly Robert Plant hair that I coveted.

“The party should start in a little while. We can hang out here until then. I’ve got a case of beer, and we can smoke a bong-load too.”

We did. After a very long hour spent listening to the Dead, Mark sat up.

“We should go check out the party. And, hey, I don’t know if you guys are interested, but I’m going to do some acid tonight, and my friend has a sheet to sell.”

“I might be.” Even as I said it, a voice flashed through my head: Jesus, are you really that stupid? But it had been three months now. It might be OK….

The throbbing, serrated edged sound of the party greeted us before we even got to the stairs. A chill tingled from the base of my skull through my shoulders and down my spine. Something wondrous and amazing was going to happen tonight.

We reached the ground floor, where a crowd thronged through the common area and the kitchen. All the tribes were represented. Zombies of death decked out in black mixed with Hippies in jeans and the optional white-boy dreadlocks. Radical feminist women of color, ethnic studies students, possibly lesbian and definitely too cool for me to dare look at, interspersed with high school kids looking for a thrill. The obligatory rap (that’s what we called hip-hop in those days) crowd crashing the party from Oakland finished it off.

The sound of live guitars and drums came from multiple sources. Abel, Mark and I moved away from one node of noise only to fall under the influence of another. Intoxication surrounded us in the form of kegs of beer, folding tables that had been entrepreneurially turned into distribution centers for mixed drinks, and the pervasive whiff of marijuana smoke. Cool. Now what was I supposed to do next?

“Hey, Mark?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s your friend? With the acid? I’m gonna get some.”

“I think he’s upstairs. Follow me.”

Before I could think better of it, Mark and I stood on the third floor before a stocky figure with floppy long brown hair, worn tan pants, and an oversized denim shirt.

“Hey Frank. My friend here would like to-” little nervous laugh “-do some business.”

“A-ha! How many do you want?”

“Uh, how much is two tabs?”

“How about $10?”

Shit, that seemed like a good price. “Sure.”

I fished for a bill, and Frank produced a folded envelope from his shirt pocket. He opened it, and offered the perforated sheet to me. I handed over the $10, and carefully tore on the dotted line to detach two tabs. As Mark completed a separate transaction, I started to swish the tabs around under my tongue. Mark and I headed back down the stairs.

Once back into the mix, Mark ran into a girl he knew and started to talk about whether Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin was the best band ever. I hovered on the periphery of their conversation for a while, but my vote at that time would have been for the Clash or the Sex Pistols anyway, so I gradually drifted away.

I felt time stretch out with each step I took into the distance. Oh shit, that feeling. The acid must be taking effect. Well, a little freaky, but not too bad. Not like last time.

I wondered what I should do now. I’d completely lost sight of Mark. In fact, the next time I saw him would be in a picture on the front page of the Daily Cal a week later, pupils wide under the influence of who knows what as he crouched behind a barricade during the police riot that ended the final party at Barrington Hall.

Untethered, I wandered up the stairs, almost directly into a girl I’d seen all over campus. Her perfectly clear, angular face, framed by long, curly brown hair, was completely and beautifully blissful. Her eyes were an almost transparent gray, with pupils as big as saucers. She was tripping on something, just like I was. She wore a white blouse, but was naked from the waist down. A guy led her by the hand down the stairs. She smiled at me as she passed by.

Wow. Did I just see that? Maybe I should follow—

But something compelled me to scale the staircase. Almost as if I might find the thing that was always out of reach if I just kept climbing up, up, upward to….

In the darkness at the top of the stairs, all I could see was a short staircase that led up into blackness. I stopped at the precipice and shut my eyes. I almost had the—

A rustle in the darkness snapped my reverie. With a little start of fear, I realized somebody sat on the stairs in the darkness. One person? Two?

“Hi. Don’t be afraid. Come sit with us.”

Two women? I felt my way up the steps, and sat between the two of them.

“What’s your name?” one of them asked.

“Chris.”

“Hi Chris! I’m Samantha. And this is my friend Denise.”

Wow. Alone with two women in the dark. This was exactly what was supposed to happen at parties! The three of us talked together in the darkness with low voices as I breathed in their fruity smell. I soon held Samantha’s hand and nuzzled against her.

I leaned sideways and kissed her. Was it Samantha or Denise? Whichever, she tasted like peppermint. I turned to kiss Denise on the other side. Just like a dream.

But was that stubble?

The doubt soon submerged in the swirling molten plastic froth inside my head. I kissed Samantha now. Denise chewed on my neck, which sent a serrated thrill all the way down to my groin. I had my hands on Samantha’s shoulders, and ran a finger down the bra-strap that I felt through her shirt. Were there really breasts there? I wanted to believe.

Meanwhile, Denise unzipped my pants, and slipped a hand into my underwear—

“Hey, can we get to the roof that way?”

Fuck! I pulled up my pants quickly. My head spun.

“No, it’s blocked.”

“No, that’s the way to the roof.” The interloper stepped over us, and headed to the murky blackness of the top of the stairs. A rattling sound issued forth.

“Oh shit, it’s boarded up.”

“Yeah. They did that last week after that guy jumped.”

“Sorry.”

The intruder bustled back down past us.

We settled into our trio again. I kissed Samantha, and tried to slide my hands under her bra. She pushed me away and dug her nails into my hands, which made me hard. I turned to kiss Denise. Samantha leaned against me, a hand on my shoulder, and scraped her nails down my chest until her hand reached inside my underwear. Denise wore a skirt, and offered no resistance as I moved my hand up her thigh. I slid my hand over her hip and down to—

My God, was that a dick that I was holding?

Before I could process my discovery, a flashlight shone in our faces. I cursed, and scrambled to get clothes back in place.

“Is this the way up to the roof?”

“Fuck. No!” Samantha grabbed my hand. “Maybe we should head back to our room? There are too many people trying to get to the roof.”

“Yeah, good idea.” The double shock of the interruption just at the point of revelation made my head feel even more liquefied. Everything looked pale, washed out and grainy, including Denise and Samantha, who I could finally see clearly.

They both had short-cropped hair, dyed blonde. Cute tomboyish faces, with vivid lips. Dressed as women, and not without a certain air of femininity. But they were definitely men.

“Are you OK, Chris?” Samantha looked at me, head cocked to one side. I realized my dismay must be showing.

“Yeah. I — I have to go. Go find my roommate.”

“Oh. OK.” She pouted. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Bye.”

I gave a half wave, and bolted down the stairs. I passed people on the way, but avoided their gaze. My ragged breath got calmer the closer I got to the ground floor. Nobody there knew. Just like it never happened.

That did not end my acid hi-jinks that night, but it was certainly the highlight.

Although little old 19-year-old me was scandalized and mortified, when I look back on it now, older and more humble before the gorgeous mystery of sex and identity, all I can think of is the extraordinary erotic possibility of that night. I’m an unrepentant heterosexual male (something of a rarity here in San Francisco), but I would go back to that stairwell in a heartbeat.

Samantha and Denise, are you out there?

A resident of San Francisco, Chris West believes in the power of cats, punk rock, heavy metal, Beat poetry, and the sanctity of Star Trek. He has been published in several local journals and is currently seeking an agent for his first novel.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.