We had purchased a vial of acid

“We had purchased a vial of acid.”
The millennium was a big to-do for most people, but for the drug community it was an opportunity to finally crack open the nutshell that contained the mystery of life. For me, it was the night that enlightenment could finally be found—perhaps amidst the many half-full beer cans that littered the floor of my dingy Capitol Hill studio apartment, which I shared with four other people.

My guru/boyfriend and I had purchased a vial of acid and splattered a few packages of Necco candies with some generous drops. Then we dressed up in our Sunday best and waited. We were really hyped up for Y2K to change the current economic structure of the world market, and we wanted to simultaneously feel the liberation of every third-world peasant farm worker as the American Stock Market crashed and freed up some opportunity “for the rest of us.” (Brooke’s note: Now that I think of it, it was pretty vague. It hardly makes sense in my mind.) We ate a lot of candy and didn’t know what one should do when losing one’s mind, so we decided that there was no going back, and that what we needed was to eat more candy to clear our heads.

We played the Millennium Edition of Monopoly, which really blew us away, with all the shiny and dramatic looking game pieces.

As the game wore on I realized that the homemade ear-cartilage piercing I had given myself earlier that week was steadily rising like yeast and overcoming the majority of my face. It seemed as though I wouldn’t be able to retrieve the earring from inside the swollen bit of skin. I began to come to grips with the fact that I was going to die, quite possibly in the 20th century. (Brooke’s note: My ear was actually infected. It was really nasty. It probably should have received medical attention, but I didn’t realize how bad it was until the drugs kicked in.)

My boyfriend, who was also tripping hard, made the executive decision to turn on the television. On screen was the countdown to the millennium in some other country a few time zones away. There was some panic on the streets as the Pacific Islander version of Bob Hope counted down the seconds to the New Year. Somehow- just before the clock struck midnight, someone knocked down the camera and the picture was lost. The TV went black.

I freaked. I said my goodbyes to mankind, the rest of the candies, my boyfriend, and the space-age version of monopoly. My hallucinations became unrestrained: massive amounts of white smoke began descending from the sky and were soon followed by what seemed to be Jesus. He was beckoning me to join him up in the heavens, as if to say the future wasn’t going to right itself. I would’ve been better off letting my cartilage infection take over so he could just whisk me away to a place where the Monopoly’s cartoon mascot would quit creepily staring at me.

I don’t remember anything past this point other then freeing the bag out of a box of wine and being perpetually wowed by its silvery metallic material until I was able to sleep.

–Brooke Malley