by Michael Nagle

Raimond Klavins, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

The crack in my armor

Michael Nagle | June 2024 | Issue 34

“Do you have any tobacco?” I asked Alex.

“No, it’s like peanut butter or ketamine,” he said. Meaning: if I kept any around I’d eat it all.

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I like to smoke when I trip. I wanted to trip because Dad’s second death anniversary was coming up on the approaching Sunday. And if there was any way to remember Dad, it was acid.

“I don’t want a funeral. I want people to be having a good time!” — what he used to say of his then-future death.

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On acid I like to ask Alex questions like: “On a scale of 1 to person, are you a person?”

“Uh,” he said. It was now the second death anniversary trip — we were in a beautiful home, surrounded by forests and roving packs of deer, a few hours north of the San Francisco Bay Area. His earnestness was fully audible. “That question is just too big for me right now.”

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Acid is my cosmic washing machine. You stick yourself in and go round and round, the speed of thought revving up and up, the washing machine spinning faster and faster, and then BAM, out you come! Clean as the universe.

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“Who saved who?” — The bumper sticker for rescue dog owners.

“Who fucks who?” — The bumper sticker for horny queers and high intensity spiritual seekers alike, the crystalline crescendo of expanded consciousness pulsing through you like the mechanics of extended orgasm, the electricity of it all riding and cresting and riding to its delicious, barely tolerable heights, you can’t stand it, you stretch and screech in pleasurable agony, oh god make it stop (you don’t want it to stop), and suddenly you come, or the universe comes (who fucks who?), and you’re released, out of self and out of personhood. You’re big like the sky. Like the trees young and old. You’re as spacious as springtime. There you are. in the grinning place. the untroubled place. the easy place. the place you were meant to be your whole life place. the birthright place. the infinite energy place. the five-year-old's kindness place. There you are. the place where you don’t question where home is.

The place where you belong.

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“If Dad was here, he’d make me a burger,” I told Alex, after the crescendo quieted down. Meaning: I could go through my big profound experiences, the whole spinning out of control until the universe came, me its sacred ejaculate, and Dad would get it, no question. And then he’d want to make sure I’d eaten. It was in fact a beautiful California springtime day, and Dad loved to barbecue.

He would have gotten the thing in me (the thing in him) that craves creative communion with all of life. And then he would have made me a burger.

I was extraordinary to Dad, but I was also ordinary, and I loved all of it. I loved being incredibly special to him. And I loved being incredibly ordinary to him.

He’d have made a burger for Alex, too.

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When I overhear Alex expressing doubt about the experience a few days later, it feels like a gut punch in a stomach I didn’t know I had. Human rubber meets transpersonal road.

So what do I know? That on Sunday I made an altar for Dad: a plush black cat — our Kitty’s representative — sitting on a thunderbird-adorned pillow, alongside a small picture of him I normally keep in my wallet where he’s laughing, eating outdoors, happy and messy, wearing his goofy-ass RISD shirt that he loved so much (“GO NADS,” it really is their slogan).

I remember him. I remember his death. I remember LSD. And that lets me remember what a complete utter relief it is to spend a day in the brilliance of springtime, at home in the transpersonal warmth of the universe. Dad and his (my) megawatt smile: the crack in my armor.

Michael Nagle splits his time between California and Portland, Oregon, and is currently undergoing treatment for metastatic colon cancer in his hometown of Los Angeles. The happiest time in his life was as an educator designing and running an alternative school in Cambridge, MA.