Dock Ellis, talks to Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel about pitching a no-hitter on LSD:

We flew into San Diego and I asked the manager could I go home, because we had an off day. And he said, "Yeah."

She said, "I don't know but you better get to that airport."

via Weekend America.

I used to work with a guy who dropped acid at the office. He would slice blotter paper up into tiny, hair-like strips using an exacto knife, dropping the little hits onto his tongue using the spit-moistened tip of the blade. When I first met that dude I thought he was completely bonkers in a charming, over-talkly kind of way. We sat on a couple of union/minority employee together and he would often derail the meetings with completely righteous (but random) outbursts of collective enthusiasm, wild monologues about exactly how to stick it to the bosses/man. After I found out about the funny confetti he kept in a sandwich bag in his desk I was like, "oh! of course!", marveling at how precise and profession his work remained (he was a designer) no matter how gone he happened to be on any given day. I heard that while he was dying of AIDS he tripped the whole way out, and although I was a little disturbed at the thought of dementia and LSD vying for his already perpetually split attentions, it seemed as a good a response as any. He disappeared near the end, and some friends found him in an unkempt apartment full of homeless people. He had opened his doors to the local street people, and, manic and happy, had devoted the last of his strength to ministering to them. He was convinced not only that he had cured himself via meditation and vitamins, but that he had pierced the veil between our world and various others, and wanted to share the secret of his success with as many of the needy as possible.

I always wondered how he got the acid at the end. Were friends keeping him stocked? A dealer with fond memories of their decades-long association? My father used to tell stories about him and his pals visiting alcoholic droogs in the hospital while they were dying of cirrhosis or lung cancer, this in order to have a last drink/smoke with them. "It's not being dead that's the problem," he would explain to me, "it's the dying. Why make it harder than it needs to be?" After a lifetime of dedicated, connoisseur consumption, Dad gave up drinking the last 2 decades or so of his life, but he loved to reminisce about the bad old days, about the exceptionally curdled Haitian exiles who were his primary drinking buddies and the bane of my mother's life. (The arrival of certain men at the house on a Friday night meant 24, maybe 48 hours of babysitting and feeding grown, increasingly belligerent men.) He treated sobriety like an annoying necessity that had been imposed on him by factors beyond his control (like exile? life in the states?) and spoke with a certain wistful admiration of the hardcases who had resolutely decided to ride out on the same horse they rode in on.

My co-worker was like that. I once asked him if it was a good idea to mix his HIV meds with all the other stuff (I was very young and this the early 90s) and although I can't remember exactly what he said, I think it was something along the lines of "It's the dying, Gary." I imagine my father would have saluted that - provided he was able to get over my co-worker being completely queer and mandal-wearing, this back when mandals were "feminine, like sandals" as the GZA once put it. I figure slipping him a tiny sliver of blotter paper might have made everything better. Perhaps in a plate of rice and beans, seeing how he no longer drank.