You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

A B A D T R I P

After completing my coursework in architecture in June of 1965, I spent the summer traveling across the country. I was looking for a city in which to start my architectural apprenticeship. I settled on New York City. My first apartment was in Greenwich Village. My walk from there to work took me past a rundown building where a group of hip young adults, associated with Timothy Leary, had a bookshop and meditation room. On occasion, I would stop there to browse. In this way, I became acquainted with some of the folks who worked there. When they learned that I was an apprentice architect, they asked me to help solve a space problem. I agreed to look at it. Later that week, I stopped by the shop after work. I was greeted by Bernie, the bookshop “manager”. Bernie was a slender man of average height. He was possibly two years my senior. Like the others in the shop, he was outgoing and gregarious. I quickly felt a connection with him. He was one of those people who knew how to bring you in with a little information about himself and an interest in what you had to say. He listened carefully and remembered what was said.

Bernie had earned a PhD psychologist. He was doing research on dreams at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. He worked at night in their dream lab, during the day, he managed the operation of the bookstore. Their space problem was a result of their success. The bookstore had grown and taken over the space used for the evening meditation group. Interest in meditation had also grown. I sat in on a meditation and came up with a plan. I proposed that they build a circle of bookcases. These cases were to be suspended from the high ceiling on heavy hinges. The bookcases were just long enough to reach the floor at a slight angle. Each bookcase was to be fixed to a system of small pulleys and ropes. In preparation for their evening meditation, the bottoms of the cases would be raised to a 30-degree angle with the floor. The elevated bookcases formed a large umbrella over the meditation space that created an intimate, inward-focused space, just right for a group of people sitting in a circle on the floor below it. The staff and volunteers built the cases and were delighted with the results. My reward was that Timothy Leary took Bernie and me to dinner at a nice French restaurant in The Village.

Weeks later, on a Thursday in September, I stopped at the shop on my way home from work. Bernie asked me to join him and others for a weekend party away from the city. He was very enthusiastic about having lined up some especially good acid. He assured me it would be a most memorable weekend. I was tempted. It sounded like fun and a good way to meet people. However, I was not interested in drugs, other than an occasional toke of marijuana. So I declined.

The following Friday, I stopped by the bookstore to ask Bernie about the prior weekend acid trip. I was told that Bernie was out sick. No one mentioned anything about the nature of his illness. A week later, he was still out. This time, I was told that he had a bad trip. I decided to visit him to see if there was anything I could do to help. Bernie lived in the Lower East Side near 17th Street and First Avenue. His tenement was a four-story “walk-up”. I walked to his building in the warm afternoon sunshine. It was Friday. The people I encountered seemed to be happy to be heading home for the weekend. I found his building, opened the heavy steel door, and stepped into the dingy, narrow foyer. It was lit by an inadequate single light bulb dangling from the ceiling on a twisted pair of wires. A row of mailboxes lined one wall. I found Bernie’s name. He was in Apartment 3B. I started up to the third floor using the worn wooden staircase which wound upward in the center of the building. There were four apartments on each floor. As I approached the third floor, I could hear someone mumbling. The noise was coming from a partially opened door. It was apartment 3B. I knocked, there was no answer. The mumbling continued. I pushed the door open. There I found Bernie, alone, sitting on a carpet in the center of the room. He was wearing underwear and nothing else. Half-empty cans of food were scattered around him. He vaguely acknowledged my presence. I tried to talk with him. He responded with incoherent babble. I asked if he needed anything. He acknowledged my question with an awkward shake of his head. This was terrible. I didn’t know what to do, so I started to put some of the refuse in the garbage can, however it was already overflowing. I felt exceedingly uncomfortable seeing him in this condition. It was a shocking and depressing scene made worse by knowing the kind of vivacious and outgoing person that he had been. I wished him well and excused myself. As I went heavily down the dark staircase, I was shaken, thinking that if I had accepted his invitation to join him for “an unforgettable weekend”, I would likely have wound up like Bernie.

Weeks later, when I inquired at the shop, I was told that “He had not improved much, and that he had lost his position in the dream research lab. “He got into a bad batch,” the shop employee explained, shrugging off Bernie’s condition with a nonchalant, “Hey, shit happens”.

A month later, I moved out of Greenwich Village. I was put off by the homosexual advances of a man in the next apartment and revolted by the dog shit that I had to avoid when walking there. I moved across Manhattan to the Lower East Side, where people were too poor to have pet dogs and where children played in the pocket park across 5th street from my apartment. The bookstore was no longer on my route to work, and Bernie was gone, so I never stopped there again.