Then something changed in my emotional attitude as we passed Memorial Hall and continued on the red brick road alongside the Science Center. The joy was flipped right over and immediately into an impending sense of doom. My anticipation of the acid high morphed into agitation, now that I was in it. The joking and laughter died and became anxiety and barely restrained terror.
This was turning into a bad trip!
I turned to Kee and advised, “You know what? We should get back to the room.” I was starting to worry.
“Oh God, yeah, I think you’re right.” Concern colored his voice, too.
We made an about-face, and I have no idea how we made it back in that worsening condition, with the acid slowly but surely taking over our minds.
*****
The next thing I remember was Kee and I sitting in the common area of our room, caught up in an increasingly incoherent conversation. He was starting to deteriorate mentally, and it was all I could do to put up the bravest stonewall against a shitty acid trip with his outrageous behavior heaped on top.
“Oh Jay! My parents have no idea what college is like!” He took out his wallet and opened it up to drop all his money bills and ID cards inside onto the floor.
“You see that, Jay? You see that? That’s college! That’s college, Jay! It doesn’t matter! All of this DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER!”
I sat in silence opposite Kee on the couch, holding my broken head in my hands.
“Kee, take it EASY, man…”
“Come on, Jay,” Kee shouted, as he took off his pants, revealing his hospital-white, loose-fitting boxers.
“LET’S SHOW ’EM!” he roared and then ran out of the room.
I heard the wooden door slowly close behind him, in contrast to his quick exit, leaving a curious silence after all his hubbub.
That’s when, in the midst of the reprieve from the pressure Kee had placed on my really shitty trip, I heard him screaming and raving at the top of his lungs: “I’M A GENIUS! I’M A GENIUS!! I’M A GENIUS!!!” He was basically almost exactly downstairs from where I was, except outside, as I could tell from the ringing of his voice revealing that he was probably sitting on the steps of the front entrance of Claverly Hall, carrying on to anybody and everybody about how much of a crazed lunatic he was.
My vantage point changed, from upstairs looking down over the railing of Clav-5’s balcony, to having crept downward on my own fucked-up cognizance to the front entrance of the same building just outside. The traffic that circulated in front of the College Lampoon building and the adjacent Lowell House had stopped, and Kee was in those same hospital-white boxer shorts, facing off, his one versus the many, standing against the traffic, with a dark haunted glare and menacing snarl, while the traffic had momentarily ground to a complete halt. People were getting out of their cars and pointing and laughing at the sorry sight that Kee had become. It was utterly and completely unnerving.
“Jason!” I thought I heard Kee scream.
Oh God, what now? I don’t need to be recognized. I turned around.
“Oh Juan!” The security guard had stepped up beside me. I was so relieved to see him, as I felt the pressure that had built up inside of me taper off right away.
“Thank God, it’s you!”
“Hey, isn’t that your boy out there? What’s he doing, man?”
“Juan, look man, please…please…just get him off the street…just get him off the street,” I pleaded, my mind jackknifing in all directions from the way-too-strong acid.
Alarmed as well as concerned, Juan replied, “OK bro, I’ll see what I can do.”
I remember that law enforcement had reached the scene right at that moment, and I saw Juan in his brown uniform surrounded by a sea of blue uniforms, a surreal super grin on his face, and I knew at that moment, Juan was trying his complete and absolute Sunday best to convince the cops that Kee needed to come with him, and not with them.
Feeling paranoid and running for cover, I turned back, swiped my keycard to the entrance of Claverly Hall, and ran up the steps to Room 5.
*****
I crept to the balcony window of Clav-5 to look down at a worsening scene. Juan was nowhere in sight. But there was Kee, bent over the hood of a police squad car, with a good half-dozen police officers hovering over him, trying to restrain him. I could see from the occasional convulsions of Kee’s body that he was trying with a madman’s energy to unloose himself from their grip. It was all they could do to keep him from hurting himself or them.
Then the ambulance screeched to a halt, and in a matter of minutes, Kee was lying partially upright in a stretcher, held in place by cords, and in Kee’s upright posture, the most bizarre, ghastliest grin appeared on his face as he shrieked incoherently with demonic laughter. The paramedics loaded him through the back of the ambulance, and that’s when the whole scene began to die down.
The paramedics curved away from the scene and up the hill around the corner, heard but not seen, until the ambulance siren could not be heard anymore. The cops returned to their congregated squad cars and peeled away, leaving a deserted street that began to fill with once-again normally flowing traffic.
I lay on that ugly gray-brown carpet, huddled in a fetal position, trying to make sense of the horrifying scene that had just passed, now in a slow transition from RED ALERT back to Situation-Normal-All-Fucked-Up.
I stared at Kee’s dollar bills, jeans and jacket, lying on the carpet as if tossed there carelessly by someone who had too much money and too many possessions. They were the only silent reminders of an acid trip gone horribly wrong.
*****