The Acid Salesman

When I was in my early twenties I worked in a Japanese restaurant as a bartender.  Actually it was my first job but I didn’t start out as a bartender.  I was only sixteen when I started there busing tables but that’s a whole other story.  Things really picked up when I turned twenty-one and the manager at the time, a thirty-ish married Japanese woman named Saori with slightly crooked teeth and a cute smile pulled me aside one day and said “we’re gonna make you a bartender” which was kind of weird at the time because her husband, who had gone on to be the regional manager, only hired women to sling the drinks, but I was twenty-one and I still had a lot to learn about that sort of thing.

That’s a whole other story too.

I sometimes think that women don’t do near as much fucking as people say they do.

Except when they do.

But, like I said, whole other story.

It was a different world back then in those pre-internet days of 1989.  Pornography was still kind of hard to come by.  There were a lot of horny guys running around.  We used our imaginations a lot.

It was a world of digital blackout and more or less constant fist fucking.

So, yeah, I was a bartender.

There’s a certain myth about bartenders, or at least there used to be, that mixing drinks was the easy part.  The real job was just kind of standing there, dusting the glassware with a terri cloth, and listening to people talk about their problems.

That’s exactly the way it was too.  Lotta lonely women, recently divorced and on the rebound.

But it never went anywhere, at least not for me.

If you’ve never had genuine Japanese hibachi style cuisine you’re really missing out.  I’m told it’s not really Japanese, that’s it’s Americanized Japanese, but still, it’s a thing unto itself, a real product of an unlikely cultural clash that has no equal.  First they lay out the vegetables on the grill.  Oh yeah, the grill - it’s part of the dining table, a slick sheet of cooking metal bolted into a wooden frame, gas heated.  Back in the eighties it was still a brand new thing.  So yeah, they slicked the surface with oil and started cutting the vegetables.  Then they set them to the side to warm, but the real action was in the center of the grill.  I would know that for sure, because my first job - my first job ever - was cleaning the damn things while the customers sat there enjoying their food - their grilled shrimp, their filet mignon, their teriyaki chicken - dipping the pieces in platters of soy sauce with chopsticks they were still learning how to use, all the time saying “you don’t look Japanese” like I’d never heard that one before.

The food was good I always used to say, but the religion was even better.

Sometimes I think that there isn’t a real, actual difference.  Kind of like “don’t drink the water” just a bit more metaphysical.

You know, like, don’t drink the religion, you’ll have the shits for aeons, or real, actual, incarnations, whichever comes first.

Japanese die for their beliefs.

Other people just believe they’ll die.

Do you see the difference now?

I met a lot of different people tending bar.  There was James, the divorce veteran and sales executive, who was a writer back in college and thought he was still except he never actually wrote anything.  Then there was Brandi who seemed shocked that I didn’t even know what a fax machine was, which is crazy to think about considering the tech nerd I went on to become, Brandi, who used to cry on my days off, because I wasn’t there to listen to her talk about fax machines.  She had a pretty face though.

And then there was Lars.

Well, that was his real name anyway, but in Japan, where he’d just spent the last ten years of his life, he was known more widely as Elvis Presley.

He looked like Elvis too, like a late age Elvis, overweight and battling his demons, battling the pills, battling the alcohol.

Because that’s kind of what he was.

“Pour me another sake,” he’d say.  Then he’d start telling me his life story.  Occasionally he’d croon an Elvis tune, trying to relive the past, his whole other life across the pond as an Elvis impersonator, which, the way he told it, more or less made you instantly famous in the wild and wacky world of Bush Sr. era Japanese society.

Especially with the women.  Those Japanese women had a real thing for Americans back then.  They didn’t give a fuck who the president was.

“All you had to do was sing Love Me Tender,” Lars would say.  “After that you went home and they fucked you.  Then once you got done they went home to their husbands.  Just like that.  The husbands knew all about it but as long as no one found out about it they didn’t give a shit.  They’re just weird that way.”

Lars always started out as a happy drunk.

But that fat bastard could put the sake down.

And you couldn’t ever get the fucker to leave.

See the thing I liked about bartending was the hours were short.  I did my shit and I went home.  My shifts at the time rarely went over six hours.  It was a quick cash grab.  I made just enough to get by and that was just the way I liked it.  I didn’t play video games back then and I sure as hell didn’t waste my life away skipping from hyperlink to hyperlink because that shit didn’t even exist yet.

So I did the sensible thing.

I kept my nose in a fucking book and I was trying to finish James Clavelle’s Shogun.  It took all summer by the way.

But when this fucker showed up I knew I was in for a long night.

And when he got too deep in the sauce he started thinking the drinks were free.  He wouldn’t leave and he wouldn’t stop begging for a free round.

And that’s how I met the Acid Salesman.

Now usually when I’m writing a story this is the part where somebody starts growing horns or spewing flames or otherwise exercising some other worldly power.

But that won’t happen this time because this is real life I’m writing about.

Keep that in mind.

I’m a really smart motherfucker.  Like really smart.  And when you get done reading this you will be too.

You can take that to the bank.

Actually you can’t really take that to the bank because I’m just fucking with you.

This story is a complete waste of your time.

But it really happened.

So, yeah, there’s that.

It’s also how I learned to see people unconditionally, but that’s a whole other story too.

It’s a Nichiren Buddhist thing.  You could say all that Japanese culture fucked my head up good and proper, but what the hell can I say about it I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

The Acid Salesman worked as a kitchen helper.

He went on to be assistant manager eventually, but that’s another story too and not nearly as interesting.

The main thing was the acid because he had a shit ton of it.

And man did we love to trip on our days off.

We tripped our fucking balls off.

Like I’m still seeing tracers, ya know what I’m sayin’, and I’m fucking fifty now.

I sometimes tell people that I’m psychic, that I have X-ray vision.

They have no idea what I’m talking about, but if you’ve done enough acid in your time, then I’m pretty sure that you do.

In the light you will find a way.

Robert Plant, I think, said that.

And oh, I found a way, all right.

I did that Virgil’s journey for sure.  Hell and back.

Without a guide.

But I digress.

Still, I really am psychic.  I really do have X-ray vision.

That’s what happens when you see the truth and choose not to turn away the way most people do.

The truth will set you free.

It will kill you too.

Saori told me a story once about her grandmother, how she kept a special knife, that she would use to commit the female version of seppuku if the time came.  They were still in the process of being truly Westernized.  But I still think that story was true.

My grandfather fought in the war.  He fought on the Yorktown.  He fought the kamikazes.

Japanese die for their beliefs.

I kind of think that they are very intense people.

I was a pretty intense person too.

So it all kind of worked out, somehow.

At least I think it did.

The Acid Salesman’s name was Dennis.

He was a pretty funny guy.  The kitchen and the bar at our restaurant were connected by a window with two wooden folding shutters, the color of lacquered cherrywood.  He once stuck his ass through the window and yanked his pants down.  Then he spread his cheeks real wide.  There was still a piece of toilet paper stuck to one cheek.  His butthole looked like a shriveled prune.

He thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever done, what with customers still in the bar and all.

That’s just the kind of guy he was.

Outside of the acid, I mean.

But the acid was the main thing because that’s what this story is about.  Remember the story?  It’s about the Acid Salesman.  It’s also about the Elvis Impersonator.

Because one day we got that crazy fucker to take a hit of acid too.

 Anyway like I said it was Lars that got me hooked up cause every time he came in Dennis would poke his head through the kitchen window, assess the situation, and shake his head laughing, knowing my predicament. He would just stand at the window snickering while Lars was buried in his sake, with me standing there dusting off a tumbler and trying to keep a straight face.

After a while we started talking about it after work and one day Dennis mentioned that he had a sheet of Clown Face back at his apartment and he was selling tabs for three bucks a piece.

He asked me if I’d ever tripped before.

I said, yeah, one time back in high school which was true.

Let me tell you about my first acid trip.

Me and my buddy Steve (who moved to Virginia Beach after we graduated and I never heard from him again) were inseparable in high school, especially during our senior year, when he’d call me everyday (on a wall phone, remember it was 1986 then) and the conversation would go something like this:

Steve: what you doing?

Me: nothing.

Steve: you wanna get high?

Me: yeah.

He knew for sure that if he didn’t have any then I sure as hell would because my step dad at the time was a part time dealer, I was working part time then as a kitchen helper/grill cleaner/busboy and I didn’t have any bills so every dime I made went for either weed or Burger King and usually in that exact order.  Not to mention the fact that my step dad always sold to me at cost (you know Republicans love their free markets and he was a card carrying member - yeah, I know, stop looking at me that way, I didn’t pick him my mom did).

Honestly, I had pretty much the coolest parents ever.

Whole other story there too.

But anyhoo we pretty much made getting together, smoking weed and listening to old 60’s music on lp a weekly routine on the nights that neither of us were working.  Hell, it was the 80’s, Ronald Reagan was president and there was a war on drugs going on.  We would know all about that.  After all we were in its army.

We were waging a war to see just how much weed we could actually smoke.

Which turned out to be a lot.

Nancy Reagan would have been proud.

It was only a matter of time before we went to see Pink Floyd live in concert at the tender age of sixteen.

Kind of came with the territory, know what I’m saying?

So anyway we drove to Atlanta in Steve’s car (a Ford Escort at the time, before he went crazy and bought that Karman Ghia, the one he could never find break calipers for, but I digress).  We tried hard to get over the fact that we weren’t really seeing Pink Floyd - we were actually only seeing a part of Pink Floyd, the one that didn’t include Roger Waters, but after two joints in the parking lot we pretty much got over everything but the music which was fantastic anyway.  David Gilmour was on point.

It was after the concert that we met some dude with long blonde hair whose name I don’t remember.  He kept going on about how he’d dropped some LSD before the concert and if you weren’t tripping on Floyd then you hadn’t really heard the music yet and once we got that stuck in our brains it never let go, so when we got back to Chattanooga we were on a mission.

We were gonna trip on some acid.  We were so excited about it we even bought a book about it, From Chocolate To Morphine: Understanding Mind Active Drugs, a book that even included a “how to” on how to trip correctly (and a separate one on how to avoid bad ones).  Hell, we even told our parents about it.

They thought it sounded pretty far out, man.

It was Steve who finally made the score, some kind of blotter acid they were calling Window Pane.

That was the thing about blotter acid.  They mixed it with ink and stamped it on a sheet of paper, usually using some kind of colorful design.  Then the sheet was cut up into individual doses.  It was usually dirty as hell, which meant that whatever underground laboratory cooked it up never bothered to separate the strychnine (which the synthesis of LSD, so I’m told, forms as a by-product).

Which made it speedy as hell.

Which also made tripping on acid, more or less, an all night affair.

So we stayed up all night at my house tripping balls.

It was my one and only good trip.

Into the light.

Mescaline is a whole other ball game, but I’ll tell you about that some other time.

So anyway I had this giant black fishing net that I’d bought at Pier 1 Imports hanging on my bedroom wall.  We put on some Pink Floyd (that was the whole point, remember?) and when the acid finally kicked in we sat and stared at that damn net for nearly four hours.

It was like a window into another world and I’m really not kidding when I say that.

Window Pane, dude.

Seriously, dude, that thing was alive.

We’d spent weeks wondering what it was like to actively hallucinate.

Staring at that net while the acid peaked we finally found out.

That’s all I’m gonna say about it.

So, anyway, when Dennis told me he was selling LSD I was all in.

I wanted a repeat performance.

Which as it turned out never really happened, but I never gave up hope, I never really did stop trying.

Ah, the follies of youth.

There are some things in life you only get to do one time.

Having a good trip on acid is probably one of them.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to the how to’s.

To be honest tripping with Dennis was a whole lot different than tripping with Steve had been.  We never did any preparation at all.

It was always in the moment which turned out to not always be the best idea.

That’s how it was that night with Lars.

Number one rule of the how to: never mix acid with alcohol.

Oh.

Yeah, we kind of forgot about that one.

So that night Lars was sitting at the bar, all three hundred pounds of him, staring deep into his sake cup like he was trying to read his fortune or something when Dennis stuck his head through the window and whispered conspiratorially, “Dude, we gotta get this guy to drop.”

And for some bizarre reason I still can’t fathom I thought it sounded like a great idea.

Japanese die for their beliefs.

Some people just die inside.

That night a little bit of both happened.

Lars kept going on about how he was in the meat business now.  His actual job now, and I shit you not, was driving around with a freezer full of meat that he sold door to door to all the rich folks that lived on the mountain.

No wonder he drank so much.

He’d gone from rock star in Japan to door to door meat salesman in Chattanooga almost overnight.

Looking back we probably should have just called him a cab.

But oh, no, not us.  We were wicked acid wielding fiends from hell.

It was Dennis who got the conversation started.

He had a way with people that way.

Yeah, he really talked it up.

He talked about how much fun it was, which was a bold faced lie and he knew it.

But we were true believers.  We were on a journey for that one Fabled Trip, despite the mountains of empirical evidence that had been laid before us.

We were light seekers, you know what I’m saying?

In the end Lars, the meat salesman, was sold on the idea.

And that’s how the whole thing got started.

Lars lived in a hotel room out on Highway 58.

He told us we should come on out.  We could drop the acid there.

In the end I think he was just some lonely old guy who wanted company.

He got more than that, all right.

So Dennis and I followed him out to his apartment.  I rode with Dennis in his car.  I remember watching Lars in his pickup ahead, the one with the freezer strapped in the bed, swerving back and forth over the yellow line, and I remember thinking, “damn, this dude might not even make it home.”

But he made it home and we made it there with him.

The hotel was a real shit hole and his room wasn’t any better.

“How long you been staying here?” I asked him.

He just shrugged and set his jacket on the bed.  It looked like it hadn’t been made in about six months if ever.

“Can’t really remember,” he said.

Then:

“You guys want a Jack and Coke?”

Hell, yeah, we did.

We were fiends, remember?

Japanese die for their beliefs.

Some people just die.

In the light and all, but we were far, far from the light that night.

We were fiends.

We kept thinking, maybe this will be the one, maybe this will finally be the trip we’ve been looking for.

A part of me knew it was wrong.

Ah, the follies of youth.

So we all sat on the bed and ate our tabs.

Lars turned on the TV.  We watched it for a while.  Late Night with David Letterman.

He looked a lot younger then.

He had a great band though.

After a while the acid kicked in.

Letterman was gone.  The TV was playing the national anthem.

“I gotta take a leak,” I said.

Man, my head was on fire.

So I went into the bathroom to take a leak.

I’d been holding it in for a minute now.

Like a red hot minute.

And when I finally let loose it felt good like that time when I got laid for the first time, and I looked at her pussy and it looked like a great big glorious clam and I did that thing we all do without even knowing why.

You know, good like that.

Because I was tripping balls, dude, just watching that golden stream in all its rainbow glory.

Seriously though I was pissing like a damn race horse, oblivious to the fact that Dennis was standing outside the door the entire time, laughing his ass off.  Sometimes pissing is funny.  It’s even funnier on acid.  That’s just how life is.  That day it was more than funny.  It was damn life bonding and when he pulled the door open he came inside and he fucking hugged me.

He fucking hugged me hard.

We were kind of friends forever after that.  Even after that other time when I told him that I’d read in a book that niacin can cure a bad acid trip, because I’d read it in Life Extension by Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, but it didn’t really cure his trip, it just made him throw up his fries on the sidewalk by the Riverwalk, and I could still remember the way they looked all half-eaten and defeated.  What can I say?  It’s the little things in life.

We were warriors in a self-declared war and we were never going to stop.

For a minute there Lars started singing “In The Ghetto” acapelo style.

He kind of curled his lip when he did it.

But something about it was off.  Something about Lars was off.

That’s when Lars started acting weird.

It’s like all the color had drained from his face and his hands started twitching.

Then he got up and said he had to go to the bathroom.

I watched him waddle his way in like a fat, three hundred pound penguin.

Dennis and I decided to step outside and smoke a cigarette.

The air was getting stuffy and we were starting to trip really hard.

We stayed out there for what must have been a good hour and a half, sucking ‘em down.

We were thinking about leaving, but Dennis was getting kind of wigged out at the thought of driving.

I remembered the last time I’d driven home after tripping.  I remember the hood of my car swelling up like a hot air balloon.

I don’t recommend driving under the influence of LSD.

I know, after all I’ve done, how crazy that sounds.

But a man’s gotta have boundaries, ya know?

Japanese die for their beliefs.

I don’t trip acid and drive automobiles.

Do you see the similarity there?

Anyway, after a while, Dennis made up his mind and we decided to go back in and let Lars know.

The first thing I noticed was the pill bottle by the bed.

The second thing I noticed was Lars.

Cause there was Lars, on the hotel bed, shirtless in his tightie whities and looking like that beached whale in that textbook whale removal, like that one in Oregon back in 1990, where they tried to dynamite a beached whale to get rid of it just to have boulders of whale blubber fuck up all the cars, only Lars was solid white, albino even, softly snoring in a creepy way like maybe he could stop breathing at any time now, it was almost like a truncated snarl, but maybe it was the acid, who the hell knew, and I’ve got “baby born in the ghetto” running on repeat in my head for some reason, because it was Lars after all, so, yeah, all that was happening, and I knew right then and there that I was starting to have a bad trip, because god knows I’d had my share at that point, and I remember looking over at Dennis, waving that empty bottle of pills in his face, and saying, “dude, I think he’s gonna die.”

And the thing about it was he actually did.

Maybe the acid got to him and he thought the Percocets would bring him down and he took too many.

I would have been the first to tell him that acid doesn’t play that shit.

The last thing you wanna think about when you’re tripping balls is dying.  Because once you get that thought in your head it simply will not be dislodged.  That’s the thing about acid.  Everything you think about sticks to you forever like a second skin.  Hell, most people my age didn’t have any real experience with death anyway.  I know I didn’t.  But there I was, thinking about it.

I’m still thinking about it.

So kids, don’t do drugs, ummmkay?

They make you think too much.

Governments hate that.  And so do actual people.

Me?  Not so much.

So, yeah, there’s that.

In the light you will find a way.

I remember standing there, just watching him breathe.  His breaths were getting shorter.  Then he kind of wheezed for a second and I heard a soft rattle that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside his chest.

I gave Dennis a knowing look.

And Dennis gave me a knowing look.

We’d both just stood there and watched him die while the acid raged.

“Dude, what the hell are we gonna do?” I said.

“I have no idea,” Dennis said.  “But we sure as hell can’t call the cops.”

“Dude, I think there’s something wrong with us.”

But he didn’t say anything.

And we shared a knowing look again.

We both knew what we had to do.

It went without saying.

It was unspoken.

But we both knew.

We just knew.

So we did the only thing we knew how to do, that one unspoken thing.

We just left him there.

A few days later Dennis brought me a newspaper clipping.  I don’t remember the exact wording but the headline went something like this:

ELVIS IMPERSONATOR DIES OF DRUG OVERDOSE

The short article made mention of the fact that he’d gone out like the King himself.

I guess in a way he had.

But what could I say about it?

Dennis and I never talked about it again.

As for me?

I said a quick prayer and I felt satisfied.

Like in that Dylan song “Isis”.

Yeah, Dylan came later, but still so, so apropos.

Then I wondered about what he’d be coming back as.  Maybe a whale.  Or a cougar, like Will Ferrell in that silly Bush Jr. impersonation he did.

Do you see what I did there?

Life is really comedy disguised as tragedy.  Or a puma.  Or a cougar.  Or a textbook whale removal.

Or some lonely guy who wound up dead because of two dumb kids.

Take your pick.

It won’t help Lars either way.

At least I think it won’t.

But I still pray from time to time, in a Japanese way, and I think about my karma when I do it.

Because that’s what prayer is.

It’s about facing your karma.

It’s about, you know, finding your own inner X-Ray vision.

And my karma is bad.  Like really, really bad.

But I still pray anyway.

And when I pray I pray for Lars.

Wherever, whatever, he is.

I kind of like to think he’s a puma or a cougar now, but who knows?

It’s a nice thing to fantasize about.

Besides what else can I do?

I drank the religion and there’s no more turning back.

I’ve got the karmic shits forever now.

And even the acid can’t help me anymore.

Nothing can.