Acid Angel

Dawn Reynolds was an eighteen-year-old alabaster beauty with cobalt eyes and the figure of a ripe voluptuary. People who saw her at parties all over the hills and canyons of Los Angeles called her an “acid angel”—and as she walked through the crowds at the Monterey International Pop Festival, wearing a sheer white peasant shirt that billowed out of a brightly embroidered vest, her long auburn hair garlanded with mountain flowers, she could see that she was among other acid angels, but she still turned plenty of heads in her purple velvet bellbottoms. Except for the sunburst of girlish freckles over her button nose, she looked sophisticated way beyond her years and exuded a bold open sensuality.

Some people she barely knew had given her a ride up from Los Angeles and Dawn had lost them in the throng but it didn’t matter, any more than it mattered that her parents in Encino didn’t know where she was, any more than it mattered that she had no idea where she was going to sleep that night. Dawn was one of those girls they seemed to be writing songs about: She’s got everything she needs she’s an artist she don’t look back…Young girls are coming to the canyon…She’s a Twentieth Century Fox. Even the Beatles had written about her on their new album: She’s leaving home, bye bye…

Dawn was happy to be leaving home, even though it was definitely a case of with no direction home…like a rolling stone. She was just getting out of high school, and as upset as her parents had been with her lately, they did not yet know that she was pregnant. Worse, she didn’t even know who the father was…well, that’s not entirely true; it had to be one of the two guys at the party that night up in Topanga Canyon. The three of them had found themselves down around Zuma Beach after taking the little blue barrels and one thing had led to another and she knew she was going to find out if what Timothy Leary had said about sex and LSD in Playboy magazine was true.

In the controversial interview Leary had called LSD “the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man” and talked about things like “cellular communion” and “complete merging,” making love with eyeballs and breath, every touch an orgasm. “In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman can have several hundred orgasms,” he claimed, and while Dawn wasn’t aware of several hundred orgasms during the experience of making love to two men at the same time, it had been just as boundless.

Every step in the mud was ecstasy, every grain of sand beaming with the miracle of creation. They pulled off each other’s clothes and frolicked in the water for hours, where they became fish, seals, coral reefs, embryos floating in the womb, and they made love in the sand with the stars overhead and the surf crashing around them. Every taboo came down as they tried every conceivable flavor and sensation and combination possible with the particular sex organs of two males and a female; it was orgiastic but religious, no words for it because it was all touch, sound, liquid, images, and energy. She was making love to God and their bodies became a configuration of light and they seemed to meld into each other electro-magnetically until she experienced the Great Oneness that all life came from. There were reincarnation flashes in which she became Mary Magdalene, the archetypal Mother Mary, and she knew she had been with Jesus and could feel the crucifixion inside her but it always came back to the Oneness. It reached a level of such intensity that their cries of ecstasy became like one long ululating howl that resounded above the sound of the thundering waves and ascended into the night sky. When it was over her heart had swelled with breathtaking waves of love. All people were brothers and sisters. God was All.

In the weeks afterward, tears came to her eyes whenever she thought of that night and how beautiful it was, but the truth was that she hardly knew those two guys and didn’t particularly want either of them as the father of her child. No, Dawn was going to be the pioneering single mother of the new age, and every step that she took towards the festival only seemed to confirm the wisdom of this decision. She was always the kind of girl for whom things had always materialized, just as she needed them. All around her, everyone was sharing, lighting joss sticks, and she could feel the openness in everyone’s gesture. It was better than Mardi Gras, like the preparation for a saint’s feast day. She would pick the man that she wanted as the father of her child, maybe even find him here at Monterey, and if she recognized him, all an acid angel had to do was smile.

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Then Came the Bugs

Crack was the drug of the underclass; it produced headaches, body aches, the hangovers were terrible, you could never be sure what was in it. The freebase that Suzie Ryan and Richard Stoltz smoked was refined and smelled sweetly medicinal. Richard hired a Colombian chef who cooked their cocaine as well as their food. After long days of smoking, she would make them a special stew called “Back to Life”—and that’s what it was, like nourishment that would bring you back from the dead.

Because Richard always paid, he went first all the time, smoking huge rocks out of a bent Diet Coke can with holes in the side. People’s eyes would go wide at his gargantuan three-gram hits. Sometimes they would smoke for four days in a row. Once when they ran out and he had to go to a meeting, they hired a limo and copped down on the Lower East Side and Richard cooked it up in back. They must have gone around the park forty times smoking before the driver started getting uptight. Just keep driving no matter what, Richard told him. I’ll buy you a car…

Maybe it was the time that Richard stepped on a glass and cut his foot badly and couldn’t get to the hospital for days because he couldn’t stop smoking for fifteen minutes that should have alerted Suzie to how bad things were. There were many such episodes during that nightmarish eighteen-month jag; the vignettes and images that later resonated as the most obvious warning signs of their descent failed to sound alarm bells as they occurred. Like the time they had sex on the living room floor of one of Richard’s potential investors just so that he and his guests could watch. It was a line Suzie had told herself she would never cross--and yet she did it without so much as a thought. Maybe it was the time they were flying to Florida and Richard cooked up half an ounce and insisted that she store it in her vagina during the trip so they wouldn’t get busted.

Hallucinations became common--“the bush people,” as David Crosby would call them—but the worst was the police paranoia. Richard became certain that they were under constant surveillance and hired a security guard and stationed him in the stairwell because he was certain that a SWAT team was lurking there, ready to bust down the door. When they checked into a hotel, he would pile all the furniture in front of the door, leaving one piece in the middle of the room that he would use to break the windows so that he could throw the drugs out should the police succeed in breaking their way in with a battering ram.

I can’t stop this so I must be a drug addict, Suzie would tell herself sometimes as she looked in the mirror—never a good idea during a freebase jag. No, she would then think, I can’t be a drug addict, I was a Homecoming Queen!--and she would try to conjure up that beautiful autumn day, but it always seemed like it had happened to another person in another lifetime.

Other times she knew exactly what was happening. Good, she would think. It’s working; I’m going to die…

Then came the bugs. She might have kept going had it not been for the bugs crawling under her scalp. There was actually a medical word for it: “formication,” the hallucination of bugs crawling around, over or under the skin. It was one of the symptoms of cocaine psychosis, but she was never more certain of anything in her life that they were absolutely real, nesting, multiplying, swarming. John Phillips experienced them as maggots when he was shooting cocaine. He was so determined to prove to other people that they were real that he would wrap his whole body in cellophane so that he would be able to trap them when they crawled out of his skin…but Suzie’s would never crawl out, so she had to dig them out with sharp objects: paper clips, metal nail files, letter openers, the smallest blade of a Swiss Army knife…

There were deep open festering sores on her head and her skin smelled putrescent from all the vodka and cranberry. It was as if every toxin, every chemical was coming out of her pores at once, but the smell wouldn’t go away, no matter that she stood in the shower and scrubbed her skin until it was raw. Later when they started smoking she was hearing voices and had no feeling in her hands. Her arms felt like they weighed hundreds of pounds as she crawled around on the rug to pick up some rocks, and when she righted herself in front of the mirror and looked, that’s when it happened.

She had the eyes of a rabid animal. She looked into those eyes and knew that she was stark raving mad. There was death in them, she could touch it, feel it enveloping her like a shroud. When she saw Richard in the mirror light the pipe and realized that in spite of all that she was seeing and knowing she still wanted it more than anything else in the world, something broke loose inside of her. It was like a veil suddenly being pulled back to reveal that most basic human desire to survive but combined with it was the acknowledgement of how much help she would need. The words she cried out to the image being reflected back at her were simple but came from the depths of her soul.

“Please, God, help me!”

It was the prayer of a frightened child calling out into the dark, of a scared soldier in a lonely foxhole. She would always liken it to the prayer of George Bailey, the character played by Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra’s classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, when he stands on the bridge on that snowy Christmas Eve and begs God to give him back his life, to put things back the way they were.

© Copyright 2004 Martin Torgoff. All rights reserved.