The first acid chicken weekend was just before the 2016 election, a stretch of time I now think about the same way I think about February 2020, a retroactive tinge of naive pleasure suffusing the period just before a seismic shift. Five friends and I had rented a farmhouse in upstate New York, a place with no cell phone service and an extensive record collection and a cedar hot tub in a silent, open field. We drove up on Friday night, with the plan of spending the next day staring at the last fall leaves while tripping on acid. The sun was going to be out, and the house came with a view of the tree-covered mountains, and as we sat down to a big bowl of pesto-slicked linguine that the first car had made for the latecomers, I felt like the richest person in the world.
The free space of an acid trip is best preserved by a small amount of advance planning. You want a space, preferably outdoors, where you can flop around and explore without disturbing (or being disturbed by) sober passersby. You want to be ready for seasonal weather—bug spray in your backpack in the dead of summer, waterproof shoes if it’s going to rain. You want music at some point, preferably in a delivery format that doesn’t require anyone to look at their phone. Bonus points if someone can bring a visual plaything: a rainbow maker, a cheap disco light. And to me, a food-and-beverage plan is nonnegotiable. Hallucinogens make you lose your appetite: you have to decide to drink water, and the idea of chewing anything other than a sour gummy worm feels appalling. So you’ve got to have a good late breakfast before tripping, and you want to be able to eat, with an absolute minimum of effort and knife usage—maybe around nine or ten p.m., when you’re starting to shudder back toward reality—a warm and friendly meal.
At the farmhouse that morning, as one friend scraped bits of eggs and toast into the trash can and another ceremonially laid out tiny square tabs of LSD on the coffee table, I took a chicken out of the refrigerator, salt-and-peppered it, and stuffed it with lemons and onions and garlic. My friend Frannie roasted a pan of broccoli and a bunch of cherry tomatoes, which went into a big orzo salad with feta and toasted pine nuts, which we assembled in a big ceramic bowl and then covered with foil. The chicken went back into the fridge, we put the tabs on our tongues.
For the rest of the day, we were in an alien dimension. Dirt shimmered like fairy dust; a small stream on the property became primordial Antarctic meltwater; Frannie, who wasn’t tripping but was helping us build fires in the outdoor fire pit, kept appearing and disappearing—we decided—like a cartoon elf that had been the subject of regional lore for several hundred years. Everyone’s faces looked bewildered and blown open and beautiful. The trees on the mountains swelled like an orchestra, pulsating apricot to scarlet to mauve to indigo. It was a freshly overpowering miracle to be alive on a planet where so many things were growing and dying. It took weeks for the sky to darken, and when it did, we went into the house, opened a bottle of wine, and started playing records. When my stomach suggested to me that we might want to eat in two hours, I turned on the oven and took the chicken out of the fridge.
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Raw meat seemed like a lot at the moment, noted one of my friends, who was dancing to Fleetwood Mac like a car-dealership inflatable tube man. But I felt unusually thankful for the chicken, which had once been alive, and for the arbitrary cosmic reality that I was the person cooking the chicken and not the chicken itself. We set the table; when the chicken came out, its skin crackled like the fire. “Acid chicken,” someone said. We ate quietly, adjusting to the fact of having bodies. The food gave us a soft reentry back into the world, and an appetite: We reached for seconds and sat at the table for a long time, and in the wee hours, my friend Emma recovered her fine motor skills and made us a melty, cinnamon-dusted apple pie.