Windowpane
by John Matthews

Imagine you are given the opportunity to get to know the inner workings of your mind. Imagine that if you agree, you will be confronted with the very best and very worst of yourself at the same time. Imagine that you will have the most fascinating thoughts of your life and yet occasionally endure pure and utter terror. Imagine that this would happen to you for eight hours non-stop, alone. Would you do it?

In 1987, I unwittingly signed up for this to occur. I was nineteen years old at the time. I was a heavy pot smoker but knew nothing (or next to nothing) about acid.

I had a friend named Woogie who often picked me up after school in his 1973 gold Dodge Satellite. At 3:15 p.m. nearly every day, we’d commence smoking bowls, driving around and listening to progressive rock. One October day as the afternoon turned into evening and we continued partying and driving to cop-free areas of the suburbs, Woogie divulged that he was holding two tabs of acid- Windowpane he called it.

At the time my curiosity about drugs was at its peak. I immediately began begging Woogie to let me buy a hit off him. After much discussion, he finally agreed. I thanked him profusely and informed him that I was going to take it that night. I couldn’t wait to try it. I was like a kid with a new toy.

“I don’t know if you want to do that,” Woogie cautioned, “you’ll be up all night…” (Woogie had taken acid quite a bit so he knew what it would do to me). I laughed it off. I figured I’d pop the tab, enjoy the “trip” and then, after an hour or so, crash out as usual.

I swallowed the little white blotter square at about 11 p.m. on Thursday night. Despite Woogie’s repeated warning about the effects of LSD, I disregarded him, thinking acid would be just a tad stronger than pot. As the drug burrowed through my veins for the remainder of the night, I was to realize differently.

I asked Woogie to drop me off at 11:30, roughly a half hour after I took the tab. Woogie asked how I felt.

“Fine,” I said, and did. I really didn’t feel any different at all – just stoned. I thought perhaps the acid wasn’t going to affect me at all. Telling Woogie I’d see him later, I hopped out of his car. As soon as I slammed the door, everything changed.

For starters, Woogie was no longer driving a car. When I turned to watch him go, he was now driving a glowing plastic egg that growled as it moved. The street lights down the block grew until they were the size of white suns as I stared at them. Stranger still was the fact that my parents’ two-story house had turned into a castle, complete with moat. Pterodactyls were flying over it.

I wasn’t finished marveling over these new spectacles before I realized that acid gave me a new ability- the power of teleportation. It was the only explanation as to how, without walking an inch and without opening a door, I went from standing in the middle of the street to standing in the center of my bedroom

Try as I might, I couldn’t remember a single detail about opening the back door (did I shut it?), going through the kitchen, walking up the stairs, or anything. Was my father still laying on the living room watching PBS as was his usual custom? Had he seen me? Had he said anything to me? I had no answers. I had no idea.

The thing to focus on now was that I was in my room and I was presumably safe. If I hadn’t done anything stupid, I’d be left alone. My father never knocked on my door at night. All I had to do was to keep quiet and still and wait for him to go to sleep. Relax, I told myself, just relax…I sat down on my bed and looked across the room at my small blue dresser. I had a square white alarm clock on top of it. The face was orange-colored, like a sunset. It reminded me of deserts. It began creaking at me. It was always a noisy clock but it had never been that noisy. It sounded like a large tree bending in a windstorm. In my mind, the clock became an hourglass. I knew if I were to break the clock open, sand would pour out.

What happened next was straight out of an Afterschool Special. I had a crappy plastic phone in my room. It was lying on the floor. For approximately five seconds, it became a snake. I wasn’t frightened of it, since I doubted it was real, but it was scary that my mind could fake me out like that. If it could do that, what else was it capable of?

By now, a symphony of robotic sounds was churning in my ears. It was like a tiny but loud factory inside my eardrums. The songs were lyric-less and machine-like.

I remembered that Woogie had told me to call him, “If things got weird.”

I decided that things had got plenty weird so I picked up the phone, willing it not to be a snake. I have to say I never found dialing a phone more interesting. The buttons stood a good two inches off the receiver. When Woogie answered, I sighed with relief. I felt there was some control over the situation. There was a problem though - Woogie’s voice sounded like it was coming from two miles away through a megaphone and echo phaser.

“What’s going on?” he said. “Are you feeling it – it - IT – IT- IT- IT?”

“Oh yeah…” I said, looking at the walls breathing in and out around me, the floor bulging three feet in the air, “That’s affirmative.”

Any movement of any kind would send a trail of afterimages in its wake. Move an arm and twenty arms moved behind it and fell into the last one. Tiny red and green dots formed symmetrical patterns on the wall.

I asked Woogie to go on riff- to say anything long- I wanted to listen to him. The sound of his voice was fascinating. Woogie was a huge horror freak so he did a monologue that included references to The Exorcist.

“John,” he said, “you know, the thing about you is- you’re a motherfucker, but your mother…Well, she sucks cock in hell…I mean Op Bop Bop…”

Suddenly, I discovered humor. I began shaking with laughter. I begged Woogie to keep going - to keep insulting me and my mother. It was hilarious. Tears were coming out of my eyes. I was reduced to a laughing/crying lunatic for about ten minutes. I had to stifle my roars into a pillow.

After a while, I think Woogie was getting bored by my near silence. I told him that I figured I’d try to get some sleep. I thought saying I’d get some sleep was a way I could convince my body to do it, though I had my doubts. Once I hung up on Woogie, I put the phone under the bed and lay flat on the sheets and shut my eyes.

If I thought I was going to be rewarded by sleep, I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I closed my eyes, the most vibrant spectrum of colors came swirling before me in never-ending patterns and configurations. And that insane orchestra had started up again. A few minutes of that and I knew sleep was out of the question.

I was so wired and awake by now I couldn’t even imagine what “sleep” was anymore. The Soma train had left for good and the only ride in town now was The Bat Out of Hell Express. I suddenly had the impression that I was adrift in a body of water. My bed was a life raft and the rolling images around me were the sea. I lay on my stomach for the next hour or so, holding tight to the corners of the bed, trying to ride it out. My eyes were fixed on the chaos of the walls and my teeth were set in an iron-hard clench. At times I thought I had gone completely, irrevocably mad. I thought I’d never know reality again. Still, there were occasional reprieves to my self-imposed hell. At certain moments, the most amazing thoughts came into my head but were so fast it made remembering any of them impossible as they were immediately replaced by other, even more fascinating revelations.

I was a God/Devil/Man thing. My Ego was in fragments in all corners of the room. I was an animal, the elements, a chemistry set, a floating personality, a ghost. I could look down on myself and through myself like I was a scientist viewing cells through a microscope. I was a squirming jelly mass, ever changing and combining.

After a while that was too much. I decided to “get back to normal” I should do something normal. I decided to read a book. One look at the page of the Stephen King book on my nightstand was enough to cure me of that idea. The Tommyknockers may as well have been written in Chinese for all I could make of it. It was like trying to read through a waterfall. The words either slid off the page or reassembled themselves in combinations they preferred, making reading impossible.

TV, I decided then. That would work.

I put on the small black and white TV that stood at the foot of my bed. I ran through some of the channels blowing past commercials for car insurance and wake-up services until I found an old episode of Three’s Company. Jack was involved in some shenanigans with Mr. Furley, as usual, but I was helpless to understand what was going on. It was like I was a goldfish trying to decipher the behavior and speech of human beings. It was far too perplexing for my mind. The simple plot was beyond me. I couldn’t understand anyone’s motivation for doing or saying anything. New characters would walk on screen and speak unintelligibly and further complicate things. Jack’s pal Larry seemed deeply sinister. His being was pure evil.

My inability to comprehend the show scared me. TV was my last hope- if I couldn’t do that, what could I do? I was trapped. My room was too small - it was a doll’s house room. When I stood up in the middle of it, I hardly fit. I was a giant. The room looked like it was made out of paper- a cheap Hollywood movie set.

At some point, I went over to my dresser and looked at myself in the mirror. My pupils were the size of Mickey Mouse’s. Huge black holes. My face was shiny and waxy. I looked like an elf from a Tolkien novel. I smelled and tasted metal. My joints pinched as if tiny pins were stuck into them.

As I looked into it, the mirror turned into a gateway to another dimension. Suddenly I was looking at a thousand or more replicas of myself going back to infinity. I realized that I was seeing every one of my former “selves.” If I had crawled in and kept going past my images I would eventually end up with myself as a baby.

About three A.M., I discovered that music got rid of the scary bionic orchestra in my head. I strapped on my headphones and turned the lights off so the walls couldn’t move around as much. I stared at the psychotic-looking tree out my window and listened to The Darkside of the Moon twelve times in a row.

At six A.M., the sun seemed like a forgiving God. I was starting to come down finally. Things wobbled but weren’t moving quite so much. Shadows stayed more or less put. When I heard my mother leave for work, I knew my father wouldn’t be far behind. Frantically, I tried to remember what time I got up so I could synchronize with my typical behavior. After giving it some thought, I decided it would be best to avoid my father if at all possible. He was not very friendly to talk to in the morning and I was still in no condition to deal with him. Evaluating myself in the mirror again, I decided I didn’t look like someone waking up from eight hours of restful sleep. I looked like what I was- a madman who had been up all night watching his walls melt.

When my father finally left, I had about five minutes to wolf down some breakfast before I had to leave for school. For some reason, I craved bananas. I ate three of them. As I walked across the field that would take me the high school, I heard some faint strains of classical music coming from the trees. It was pleasant. Reality was slowly asserting itself. I hoped for a completely normal day.