911

Several hours into the acid trip, GNP is having a bad time.
We had been having a pretty wonderful time, too. I was on as many hits of the same exact stuff as he was, but he was always more prone to this sort of psychotic break event than I was. My first sign that he was not okay was that he had left the living room, and hadn't returned.
I found him surrounded by women, in the tub. So he's doin' pretty good, I thought, but I was wrong. I asked Miss Kitty Love what was going on, and I couldn't help but hear the clumsy attempt to keep everything sounding fabulous in her response: "Nothing. Nothing at all. Everything's fine."
"Ah," I said. That's when I saw the desperation in GNP's eyes. "Send out for niacin," he said, in this tiny voice.
I knew this one. I also knew that the effort to get out that sentence, from brain to lips, had probably been an epic struggle. The library in the mind explodes, and the voyager of inner space is left with a bunch of nonsensical words flying around, never to be assembled into a coherent thought. The voyager then wonders if the rest of their life will be like this.
I asked The Baron if he'd be willing to drive me to the store, for the niacin. Years previous, I had experimented on myself. I was trying to determine if what I had heard-that niacin brings you down from LSD-was really true. I went out to George Rogers park, sat beside a spring, played the flute, wrote a little poetry, and after an hour, took niacin. I had determined that it reduces the psychological aspect of LSD, while there were still some residual visual distortions.
We drove up to the Way of the Safe, and were almost immediately followed by the in-store security. This was the middle of the night, and I could see that the guy was bored. I also found it obnoxious that I was supposed to just accept his none-too-subtle presence, right behind me on every aisle I turned down. Unable to find the vitamin and nutritional supplement section, I eventually turned to him and said, "If you're just going to follow us anyway, could you please show us where the vitamins are?"
He still maintained that glum-mouthed, just-doing-my-job-here look, and at first didn't answer.
"Please?" I asked.
"What do you need?"
"Niacin. Vitamins. Look-should I get a manager to actually help me with this?"
He silently led us to the proper section, then continued to follow us, all the way up to the cash register.
We brought it back to Kitty's apartment, and administered the antidote, to no effect. I had sort of suspected that this might happen-if the victim is already seized with panic, the problem is no longer strictly chemical, but mental, and needs to be treated by a hack psychologist. Like me.
Now, often in movies, this sort of trouble is illustrated by the victim undergoing convulsions. In my experience, this is entirely unlikely to happen, unless the victim purchased cheap street acid, and even then the convulsions are mostly among the smaller muscle groups.
GNP and I had even made fun of this phenomenon, some months earlier. Unfortunately, now he was doing it. We had taken him out of the tub at that point, and had directed him to a bed. I realized that I was going to have to talk him down, and any thought of my own continued fun at this point would pretty much have to be shelved.
One of the first things I did was try to determine exactly what was happening during the convulsions. Years later, he would develop this sort of petit mal seizure thing he'd do where he'd basically go into a trance for a half hour or so, but at the time, this was all brand new for him. By talking to him between the convulsions, I was able to determine that he was just simply going somewhere else during them. I couldn't stop the muscular part, but I could handle the rest.
We'd be talking and talking, then it would start to happen. At first, I'd snap my fingers; that seemed to bring him out of it. Later, I'd place two fingers on his sternum and say, with a tap for each note, "One. Two. One. Two."
When he'd snap back out of it, on the second count of 'two', he'd say, "You're gonna have to teach me that 'one two one two' thing."
I didn't have the heart to tell him that it actually was parody. Our hostess had three stuffed bunny rabbits she was very fond of , and was often losing one of them. She'd look around the house, panicking, saying, "ONE TWO ONE TWO?", and not finding the third, until she did, of course.
I requested that my helper (a nurse herself, these days) bring me a carrot. She brought me one, and I put it in the patient's hand, firmly. "Root." I said.
Root. Gotcha. Something to hold onto and remind you that here is this thing we all know, and like to eat, and furthermore is a solid thing, not subject to the shifts and randomness of abstract thought. I told him to keep on holding onto that goddamn thing.
I have often noticed in cases like this (and I've handled a lot of them) that what the patient really needs is to be reminded that there are some things we can all agree on. This is the first step in dragging them back to consensus reality.
At this point, we were sort of conversing, and he'd go into the convulsions occasionally, but they were less intense, in my observation. On those occasions, I'd just tap him on the chest again, saying, "Here. With. Me. Now.", and he'd come back.
Before long, he developed that sort of I've-been-through-hell, and Now-I-have-Revelations thing going on. He said, "I need to not fuck this up...Okay: the secret...The secret word is 'Sisissicu'."
"And what does that mean?"
"'Little but strong'," he said.
For some reason, this brought tears to my eyes.
Actually, I can sort of elucidate that one. Both GNP and I are small men. He's shorter than I am, but I'm mostly a column of muscle, and to most eyes, thin as hell: Prey. To be this is to need to have the power not accredited to you. You need to be bigger than big men, and it takes a weird mental toll sometimes. I know how to make myself taller, and I know how to make myself louder.
I also know that if some shitpicker wants trouble, and my attempts at conciliation aren't working, I know how to suddenly seem so crazy that, even if I lost the fight, I'd probably come away with one of the fucker's balls between my teeth, so they usually back down. The resta them got it easy. We have to be stronger.
Sisissicu is also the name of a small river in southern Oregon.
"Furthermore, it's gonna be an early Spring," he said, as an afterthought.
At that point, I was pretty certain he was out of it, and turned to assessing how I was doing, now that the sun was coming up, and we had been engaged in this for several hours.
This is only one example of why I am going back to school to get certified to become a 911 dispatcher. I've already been a dispatcher (taxi, ten years ago), have a pleasing phone voice and a calming presence. I'm well trained at leaving my work at work, and don't view death and mayhem as anything out of the ordinary. I like to help people, inasmuch as I can.
And the most important thing, as my stepdad pointed out, is knowing when you've done all you can, but you still can't help. I've got that in spades, buddy, believe me.
Besides, I've done everything for a living at this point, it seems, and even though I am an obscenely wealthy ne'er-do-well and social garbage fly, I need to plan for the future. Nobody gets to be the kid forever, as I'm fond of telling a lot of my patients. Besides, being an under-employed stagehand is getting old.
He was wrong about the Spring, by the way.