As you walk through the ruins, you notice a thin plume of smoke rising from behind one of the trees. You walk over, and realise that it’s not smoke at all – it’s steam, rising from two little coffee cups placed on the forest floor. Beside them is a little silver container with sugar cubes, and a tiny pair of tongs to handle them with.
“John and George were the first to try acid of the four. Did you ever hear that story?”
John and George shared a bond over spirituality, India and psychedelics, you knew that. Those two were the most invested in their meditative practice, stayed on in Rishikesh the longest, and found a common ground for their friendship within that particular space. It made sense that they were the first two to try it out together, and you figured it must’ve been like the time Bob Dylan introduced them to marijuana and Ringo smoked the entire doob by himself because he wasn’t aware of the “puff, puff, pass” etiquette.
He laughs, and it resonates around the forest like you’re standing at the centre of a circle of multiples of his selves all laughing at the idea that that was what went down. You realise you really don’t need to speak anymore in order for this man to hear you – he’s very simply able to look straight into your brain.
“John and George, along with their wives Cynthia and Pattie, were at their dentist’s John Riley’s place for dinner. He offered them coffee at the end of the meal, as was custom, and they accepted, as was custom. It was only that Riley’s girlfriend at the time had slipped in little sugar cubes laced with LSD into each cup. He kept requesting John and George to stay, but they’d had enough. They went off to a discotheque in London and that’s when they began to feel it.”
You glance over at the coffee cups once again. You’re a bit apprehensive about this, considering your last little sojourn into John’s brain.
THE TRIP
You’re on the street outside a bar in London that you know should feel familiar, but in the moment looks like nothing you’ve seen before. The building grows and shrinks in front of your eyes, bobbing away to the music wafting through the windows. The window shades slam to the rhythm of the percussion, lights in different windows going on and off and on and off like the building is winking at you with each of her eyes. You see John, George and the girls (and the notorious Dr Riley!) getting into an elevator, and you scurry after.
Inside the elevator, everything is red. You can hear that distinct fireplace crackle, you catch a little spark from the corner of your eye. You watch, calmly, as the flame spreads its scarlet fingers across the first wooden pane on the wall, then the second, then the third, until in a moment the entire lift is aflame. John and George are shouting at the top of their lungs by this point, while the girls merely stare, shell-shocked. The shouting gets louder and louder and at some point morphs into laughter: John exclaims: “it’s just a little red light!”
At the table, George is looking all around. He leans over to you, tells you he loves you. Then, you watch as he taps the waiter standing on the other side, and tells him that he loves him too. John tries to reach for a plate, but the table elongates and moves the plate away. He blinks, pauses, and tried again. The table stretches out once more. It’s too much this time, and George’s noticed too, and both of them are in hysterics now. You haven’t even realised that you’re laughing too, and you feel like how Paul Saltzman felt when he met them in Rishikesh and asked Mal Evans, their roadie and right hand man, if the Beatles lived up to what they were cracked up to be. He said that sometimes they didn’t, but most of the time they most definitely did.
