We Love You Bib, Oh Yes We Do

So, I was doing shroomies… I love starting out a sentence in this way. I was doing shroomies with my roommate and we climbed to the top of the Escher-esque Student Union building at San Francisco State University where there is a little fenced in seating area.

We’d been up there for awhile when I began to notice what I thought were voices yelling up to us. It is difficult to tell these things when you’re tripping balls by the way. I looked over the side, and sure enough, there was a cop down below. He could have been doing a medley of songs from Bye Bye Birdy for all I knew, but I figured it was best to go down and face said music.

I managed to make it straight down to where he was, but ol’ roommate of mine got lost along the way. While he was wandering the geometric oddity that is the outside of the SFSU Student Union, I stood in front of the cop and smiled politely.

“I didn’t read that,” his shoulder patched radio crackled. “Did you need backup or not?”

I put my hands out in a placating fashion and tried to reassure him in my calm, fuzzy, head full of psychedelic mushrooms voice that, no he did not need backup; we were not going to cause him any problems.

The roommate finally tumbled over and the cop asked if we were students here. We were. He asked if we knew we weren’t supposed to be up on top of the Student Union at some wee hour in the morning. We probably did, but feigned ignorance. He proceeded to ask us for our personal info, addresses and phone numbers and stuff.

I did fine, but here’s a little secret about me: Shroomies are about the only drug that I have taken where I can deal perfectly well with the straight world. Your face may be pulsating slightly, but I can carry on a conversation with you and even smile doing it.

Roommate was not faring so well. He was spiraling into a bad trip and I was trying to mediate in hopes of appeasing the cop as well as keeping my friend from some god awful hallucinatory freak out. When the poor guy couldn’t come up with his own home number, the cop got suspicious. I told him it was the same as mine, that we lived together, but the cop was upset that he couldn’t come up with it himself.

“How many times do you call yourself?” I asked the cop. This miraculously seemed to work for him and he eventually let us go, telling us not to come back after hours.

But it was too late for the roomie, he was bad tripping something fierce. I tried to rap him in blankets and put on mellow music and Fantasia, but nothing was working. The kid had an evening of working over his own demons and fears that all the normal reindeer games were not going to fix.

Thinking back, I probably should have known it was going to end in tears. A few months prior, under very similar circumstances, my roommate managed to lose my Bib Fortuna action figure up on the Student Union.

I miss him…