Yesterday (McLennon)

Chapter Nine: 1967

The experience on LSD stupefies me for days, so that I have no clue what to do, no clue where to go with my life.  Even my creative outlet isn’t feeding me; I’ve never really written songs like John does about drugs and the like.  But while John goes back for another hit, I can’t bring myself to.  It seems wrong to do anything more than simply contemplate what happened, think about the way I was able to just dissolve into John’s eyes, and the way I was able to feel so connected to everything around me.  

No, the drugs are killing John.  His constant use is beginning to scare me, and while I know it’s very likely I’ll go back to LSD in the future, and maybe try something else even later on, I can see what such a frequent use can do to someone.  Because I’m watching John become more unsure of himself in a way he never was in the past.  It’s merely a few weeks after we took acid together, and I’ve already seen John take another trip, a dab of the chemical on a piece of candy landing him in a world away from me for a few hours.  I watch him, sober, as he stares at the ceiling, muttering gibberish about the patterns he’s seeing, the way everything is waving into itself, the way he’s becoming a part of the world slowly, and I begin to get concerned.

There’s only so much of this sort of thing someone can take before they start to go crazy, start to forget the ways of the real world.  And I’m concerned John has started losing sight of us.  He gets bored sometimes now, when he’s not in the midst of a trip.  I start to miss that day we sat on the top of the hill and watched the sun set.  The time where he wrote songs for me instead of his drugs.  

I guess it happens in every stale relationship.  There comes a time where you start to notice someone’s differences more than the things you used to have in common.

But I so desperately want things between John and I to be the same as they used to be that I trip three more times with him so that he’ll go out with me and do some normal things, too.  He says he likes tripping with me, because it’s the only way we can be completely honest with the world around us about our relationship.  That’s hard for him, keeping our relationship a secret.  So when it’s just us and the drug, he likes to pretend we’re all that matters, because, in the end, we don’t matter.

I disagree.  We do matter.  But on the trip, it really seems like we don’t, at least not in the same way.  Maybe to the people in our society we matter, but when your ideas of that society are ripped away, it seems like you’re hardly even a little blip on the radar, barely even a single atom inside a star.  And I can’t say I don’t like feeling that way.  Just not all the time.  Just not so much that it would make John and I further apart, instead of closer.  And it really is creating a rift between us, a rift I can feel in everything: in our music, in our relationship, in our day-to-day life.  But what’s scary to me is that I don’t think he sees how distant I feel from him.

So one night, after John has a particularly bad trip, I decide it’s finally time to do something I want.  We’re going to go out for a dinner . . . Just a normal, ordinary dinner, where a few musicians are lined up to play.  Nothing too big, but something we haven’t done in a while.  A few people we know through mutual friends will be playing, and I’m hoping it will be fun to just go out, especially now that we’ve stopped touring.  Maybe things will be a little less hectic, although I have my doubts there.

John is surprisingly game for the idea.  I think he is finally starting to see just how bad a bad trip can be, that maybe he’s ingesting a little too much of them chemical.  We both get dressed at my house, in more casual attire than usual for dates, just jeans and a semi-casual shirt.  It’ll be a relaxing night for both of us.  We’re both ready by quarter past seven, and then we get in my car, turn the radio on, and go. 

But already, John is making comments about how much he hates his voice, how much he wishes he could sound like these people on the radio, how rubbish his new songs are turning out compared to this stuff.  So I turn off the radio and look him squarely in the eye, while trying to keep an eye on the road.