When I’m 16 I’m shipped away to Boarding School for my sins. The school is full of bright, gifted, spindled, folded, and mutilated teenagers, almost all of whom have been kicked out of at least 1, if not several, other institutions of learning. Binky draws amazingly intricate landscapes full of gnomes, raptors, damsels in distress, satyrs, pixies, angels and devils, like a twisted bastard child of Bosch and R. Crumb. And in his spare time he’s slowly filling an industrial size jar with his sperm, 1 squirt at a time. It’s an impressive collection. If you’re into that sort of thing. Popo has one of the most exquisite singing voices you have ever heard, can make a hardened, jaded, cynical, hormone-laced 16 year old weep like a baby. I also heard he would pay you $5 if you’d take a leak on him. I cannot substantiate this, because Popo got kicked out for smoking thai sticks dipped in liquid horse tranquilizer before I could ask him if the rumor was true. Another kid almost got kicked out for hitchhiking all over New England one weekend drunk out of his mind on tequila, wacked on psylicibon mushrooms, with a very reputable socialite from a famous all-girl’s school. That was me. I fit right in at Boarding School.

We have the worst hockey team in the history of the league. Our first game we get beat 31-1. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to let in 31 goals in 30 minutes? Any way you do the math, that’s over a goal a minute. It’d be hard to score that many goals if you just put one team out there with a puck and an empty net and said, “Do your worst.” I am the second best player on the team and I only played hockey for a year when I was 11. I’m a defenseman and I get a sprained neck from watching all those goals whip past me. The best player on the team is Joe Skyfeather. We call him Joe Starfucker, and he likes that. He’s our goalie. A great goalie. After a game he’s one huge Iriquois welt. He says if he wasn’t a hopeless Indian drunk already, he’d have to start drinking heavily. The one good thing about losing 31-1 is that when you score that 1 goal, you celebrate hard.

Half-way through our season, we’re 0-5. We’ve scored 4 goals, while allowing about, I don’t know, maybe a kazillion. Joe Starfucker, God love him, gets pummeled, contused, and pilloried, but he never once gives up. Makes a hundred saves a game. Acrobatic, balletic, throwing your body 3 different directions at the same time kind of saves. Hundred mile an hour soul-sucking slapshots, blistering breakaways, vicious wristers. 1 time he blocked a huge boomer from the point with his sternum, flopped down to block the point blank rebound with his athletic cup, then laying on the ice, blocked the follow up with his face. Of course he was wearing his goalie mask (with a hand-painted Native American eagle on which he meticulously drew stitches for every puck that hit it – by the end of the season he looked like Frankenstein’s Iroquios cousin in goal) but even so he had a lump on his eyebrow the size of a raptor egg.

We’re going to play our sixth game on the road, against Andover, 1 of the hoitiest of the toity prep schools in America. Before we leave, the team is packing our equipment in the cold, damp, skanky locker room, when Rat comes in all excited. Rat never gets excited, so when Rat’s excited, you know something’s up. Sure enough, Rat’s just scored some acid from his brother who’s out on parole and laying low in Rat’s room for the night while he figures out where to unload his stash. Apparently it’s Primo acid. Not Segundo. Primo. I’ve never taken acid at this point, but the word from Rat’s brother is that this is the trippiest shit he’s ever seen. And apparently he’s seen some really trippy shit. And there’s enough for everybody. Rat whips it out. I’m expecting some bubbling liquid in a laboratory beaker, with smoke and prisms and colored lights. But no. It’s just an 8 x 10 sheet of paper. He peels something off the paper and with an impish smile, places it on his tongue and downs it. Everyone looks at him. Rat seems confused, like he can’t understand what’s wrong with us.

“Come on, you assmunchers, we all gotta do this.”
Apprehension hangs.

“Come on, you sorry bunch of pansy-asses. We gotta go show those rich bitches what it means to be play this game with a head full of the trippiest shit in the Berkshire Mountains. We gotta do this school proud. We gotta show the world that we may be the worst hockey players in history, but we’re the all-time greatest partiers. We gotta let our freak flag fly, man!’

Rat’s speech stirs something within me. In all of us. We’re castoffs, misfits, the throwaways of our generation. And suddenly we’ve got a shot to go down in school history, turn ourselves from laughing stocks into folk heroes, talked about around campfires for years to come.

Still, no one wants to be the first one to follow Rat down the road to Infamy. Eyes are averted. Feet are shuffled. Harrumphs abound.

It’s times like this that turn boys into men. While us white suburban bourgeois baby boys sit with our thumbs up our collective ass, it takes a kid from the wrong side of the tracks to lead us. A young brave from the reservation. A boy warrior whose ancestors have been raped and pillaged, lied to, deceived, mocked, villified, burned out of the land they loved, hunted down and destroyed like vermin. Joe Starfucker. He rises slowly, a beat-up rented mule of a goalie with long, straggly scraggly raven hair. He walks with the weight of the ages to Rat and sticks out his tongue.
Rat grins like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”.

“Yeah baby, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Joe Starfucker, you are the man!” He practically sings as he peels something off the paper. Joe closes his eyes and crosses himself, while Rat places the tab on his tongue like he’s giving Holy Communion. When Starfucker swallows, everybody whoops and hollers, going-on-the-Warpath style. Rat dispenses the acid like he’s High Priest of the Order of Psychedelic Hockey, a cross between Wayne Gretsky, Johnny Appleseed, and Timothy Leery.

Beevo, Nevs, Harry the Hoagy, Fat Phil, Dougy the K, even Lurch, we all gobble down our medicine.

When my turn comes, I’m shocked to find out that the tab of acid is actually a thin little transparent Mickey Mouse. I smile as I swallow my electric Disney coolaid, visions of Snow White stoned, while the Hippos in tutus dance “Swan Lake” as scored by Jimi Hendrix.

It’s quiet on the bus to the game. Scary quite. Everyone’s bugging eyes at each other, suspicious, waiting for something to happen, trying to feel if anything is different, wondering if this really is some trippy shit, and if it is, what it will be like trying to play hockey against the masters of the universe Andover superstars while we’re tripping our little brains out.

Then suddenly – Boom! - we’re pulling into Andover. You can smell the money. At least I think that’s what the smell is. The dorms are all swanky swank swank. The grounds are manicured to within an inch of their strangulated lives. All the boys are wearing their spiffy little blue blazers, and their spastic little tassley shoes with their dorkadelic little preppy haircuts. If you weren’t high on some trippy shit already, looking at all these Young Republican bootlickers-in-training would make you go all wavy gravy in a split second.

I’m still not feeling any effects, and frankly I’m beginning to wonder whether Rat’s brother sold us all a bill of goods. We troop into the visiting locker room (which is Taj Mahal compared to our own medieval dungeon-torture chamber crypt that doubles as a locker room) looking at each other for any tell-tale signs of synaptic scramble. Everyone seems perfectly normal, although there is an air of tension in the room that has nothing to do with the impending game.

We start going through the elaborate ritual of putting on our gear. If you’ve never played hockey, darling, you have no idea. Sanitary socks, undershirt, jock strap, nut cup, shoulder pads, huge shin pads, enormous socks to go over them, a garter belt (I love the fact that huge toothless brutish mooks are all wearing garter belts under their butch outfits) to hold the socks up, elbow pads, huge black padded bloomers, suspenders to hold up the padded bloomers, jersey, helmet with visor, oversized gloves, mouth guard, and of course, last but not least, skates.

Not a word is spoken as we labor to don the tools of ignorance necessary for us to get the inevitable ass-whupping we are about to take. Our coach, Mr. Clament, the Clam, a besotted French teacher, senses something is amiss. He clears his throat drunkenly, and launches into his best Win-One-For-the-Gipper speech.

“Boysss, dese guysss put dere shoes on one sssock at a time. I mean, skatesss, not shoes, obviously they’re not gonna be playing in shhhoes, although maybe we should ask ‘em if they wouldn’t mind, give ‘em a game then, wouldn’t we boys, eh? Buuut irregardless, let’sss go out there and fight! Well, maybe not fight, ‘cause I don’t want anybody gettinnn’ hurt, and those fellas looks awful big. They’re real big. They’re big. But, uhhh, let’sss try and not be ‘timidatededd ‘cuz what the heck, it’s just a game, I mean, believe me in five years nobody’ll even give a hoot. Sooo, anyhoo, let’sss go, eh!”

About half-way through his speech, the Clam’s face starts melting, his tongue flicks out like an iguana, and his eyeballs spring loose from their sockets like those eyeball glasses that hang down and wobble when you move your head. The way his Dumbo ears flap around, I think for a second he’s gonna fly away. His nose spreads out like Silly Putty smushed across his face as his eyebrows do the Australian crawl. His lips are wax candy and his teeth are changing colors like the Wizard of Oz’s horse: red to green to blue to orange.

I shake my head to try and clear it, but that makes little fireworks with tails shoot across the inside of my eyeballs in wonderful waving watercolors.

I look around. Everyone’s shaking their head, eyes covered with potter’s glaze, like a flock of sheep who’ve just been converted to Christianity.

The Clam reaches his drunken crescendo, expecting a rousing jolt of competitive manchild testosterone. Nothing. We just sit there, mouths open like big mouth bass, tripping our little brains out. He’s dumbfounded, and quickly realizes the next logical thing for him to do is go into the bathroom and drink, so he shrugs, turns, and disappears into the bathroom to drink.

“Is this some trippy shit or what?” Rat pops his eyes out of his head and rolls them around, and the laugher lets loose – KABANG! – and we chortle like whacked-out bobbing head dolls.

The Andover uniforms are so shiny and new as the masters of the universe practice crisply in preparation for using us as the tools of their athletic glorification. They look like bourgeois marionettes to me, puppets of the paramilitary state, stooges of the fascist oppressors. The thought of cutting their strings and watching them crumble to the ice cracks me up, and I catch an edge of my skate on the ice, tumbling down, and sliding headfirst into the boards with a loud crash. The game hasn’t even started yet, and I’ve already checked myself. Our whole team stops their pitiful warm-up, and stares at me, getting the giggles, and we’re tittering like schoolboys, kids in the stands pointing fingers and laughing at us, Andover superstars glaring with smug, condescending menace.

Then suddenly the game is starting, the crowd shape-shifting, all beautiful fuzzy colors that only make sense when you look at it from a distance. When I focus on any one person, the face seems to disintegrate and lose focus. Or maybe it is me who’s disintegrating and losing focus. Can’t say for sure. The referee looks like a big fat zebra. I chuckle thinking about the lion waiting for him at the watering hole after the game.

The puck takes about six weeks to drop from the fat Zebra’s hoof to the ice. I don’t have to move my legs to skate. I float over the ice like an angel on a wave of feathers. Beevo is winning the face-off now, and the puck shuffles back to me. It takes its sweet time. It realizes time is sweet. I stop it with my stick, which bends and waves in my hands. An Andover superstar rushes headlong at me, snarling like an overbread dog from hell, but moving in slow motion. I sidestep him with the greatest of ease. I have to stop myself from laughing it’s so much fun. My bones are almost-congealed jello, my skin tingles with the fire of Godlove, and my third eye is wide open. I see Harry the Hoagy streaking with trails like a comet up-ice and I can see the line the puck will travel to get to him before I even make the pass. So I flick my stick and the puck goes on that exact line, like a geometry equation only I can see. As if Harry the Hoagy and I are connected by a Higher Power. The puck nestles gently on The Hoagy’s stick. He cuts between the two Andover behemoth superstar defenseman and suddenly he’s 1-on-1 with the master of the universe goalie, face to mask, stoned off of his nut. Harry the Hoagy starts to go right, the goalie bites, then Harry changes his mind, slides the puck onto his backhand and eases it into the gaping mouth of the goal like Casanova scoring with the Queen of France.

We stop. The crowd is stunned silence. The Andover superstars flabbergast. Then it dawns on us. We scored a goal. We’re ahead for the first time the whole year. We free-form dance to Harry the Hoagy and do a group hug interpretive dance celebration, Fosse meets Bullwinkle. The fat Zebra has to come get us to re-start the game. We’re too busy celebrating. We’ve never celebrated being ahead in a game before, and we have no idea how it’s done, or when it’s supposed to be over.

The whole game is like that. Lurch hits a guy so hard he airlifts him up off the ice and knocks out his whole family. Rat is a whirling dervish, breaking up plays, leading rushes, poke-checking guys who aren’t even there. Fat Phil is a man possessed, moving like one of those graceful hippo ballet dancers in tutus from “Fantasia” I saw earlier. And Joe Starfucker., well, Joe plays the absolute game of his life, here there and everywhere. Stick saves, pad saves, glove saves. At one point he makes a save, and his glove flies off. The puck rebounds right back to an Andover superstar, and he fires again. Joe Starfucker reaches out and catches that puck with his bare hand. This time even the Andover superstar crowd has to give him a big ovation. They don’t want to, you can tell. They have to. He holds the puck over his head, he’s showing it the Great Puck Spirit, then bows deeply, like he’s a Japanese kabuki actor.

Late in the game, the Andover superstars manage to sneak one by Joe Starfucker, after they roughed him up in the crease, which as anyone who’s ever been roughed up in a crease knows, is nasty business, and strictly illegal to boot. The game’s winding down, and the Andover superstars are sharks who’ve smelled blood. But the acid still floods our collective brains with the power and beauty of Mother Earth and Father Sky, and we match the superstars hammer for tong.

There’s a minute left to play. We to get a face-off deep in superstar territory. Beevo takes the face-off, the puck falling like a big black penny from heaven. Beevo flicks it easily back to Lurch at the point. Lurch winds up and takes a Paul Bunyon swing at it. However, he mostly misses, catching the puck on end so it flutters like a drunken butterfly toward the net. The Andover superstars are caught off-guard. They’re expecting a bullet, clenched and moving towards the upper left corner of the goal, where the puck is happily headed.
I see the puck fluffernutting towards me, getting bigger and bigger as it calls my name:

“Here I come, David – here I commmmmmme…”

I see myself gently flicking the puck, caressing it lightly like a well-loved lover past the Andover superstar goalie. So I reach up with my wavy stick and kiss the crazy gyrating puck with it. The Andover superstar defensemen and goalie are already off-balance because it is loop-de-looping instead of shotgunning, and when I flick it, the puck tumbles down down down and right right right, leaving them grasping at air strars.
Gently lovingly it bulges pillowy into the billowing netting of the goal.

The buzzer sounds.

BUZZZZZZZ!

The game is over.

The silence sits on the ice like the gods have pushed the mute button.

David has slain Goliath. Not with a stone and a slingshot, but stoned with a headful of totally trippy shit.
We skate to Joe Starfucker and jump on top of him, flopping around on the ice like a huge happy undulating amoebae, until they cart us off. In the locker room our clothes jumping off our bodies. We sing in the rain of the shower, then have a wild raucous ride home.

Word of our triumph, and the way it has been achieved, spreads like wildfire through our little community. Of course we never win another game all year. Never even come close. Rat’s brother gets put back in the slammer, and that’s the end of the great Acid Experiment.

But for one glorious winter afternoon, we were one with the universe, Kings of the World, and we did it tripping the light fantastic.