Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution

“We’re doing this for spiritual reasons,” I excused myself.

We really did want it for spiritual reasons. We were trying to break barriers. Which ones, we didn’t know, but we were experimenting for the same reasons people turned on in the Sixties. We were pioneers, we wanted to go there, too, wherever it was the acid would take us.

We ended up scoring, from the cousin of Jere’s friend. He came riding up on rollerskates to sell us some blotter acid. He had four little postage-stamp-size hits in a dime bag. One each for me, Bill, Jere and David Johndrow. Blue cheers. Pink panthers. Purple hearts. Yellow sunshine. We never even knew what it was, but we dropped it.

We wanted some kind of breakthrough, but the acid trip was fundamentally different from that first mushroom trip. Everything seemed so harsh. When someone would knock on the door it was a bummer. When the phone would ring it was a bummer. When we had to get something to eat it was a bummer. This wasn’t what we wanted.

Bill had read Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and some of John Lilly’s work. He was also more interested in naturally occurring hallucinogens than anything concocted in a bathtub laboratory. So the budding psychonaut made a reasonable inference from what he was absorbing: this is a communion with nature you are trying to achieve, ergo, go to nature.

That’s when we first decided to go to the ranch. And that’s where everything changed.

We took this seriously. We prepared for our trips. We fasted for a day and a half before. We did yoga and meditation. It wasn’t just us getting fucked up. Others thought differently, but we behaved differently. They were taking pills and going to titty bars. We were taking mushrooms and sitting by the pond on my family’s ranch until we were transported to the Last Supper and talking to Jesus.

Going to the ranch totally changed the experience of acid. The first times we did it in Austin, all the noises of the city — the sounds of cars and sirens and even the buzz of the fridge and the lightbulbs, all of the man-made things surrounding us – would turn into anchors and walls. You don’t realize it because you are so used to living in it, but when you are tripping in it, first it seems artificial, second it stops making sense.

One time Bill, David and I were tripping and we went to a McDonald’s drive-thru to get something to drink. And it was just bizarre and confusing, the colors, the sound of the voiceover speakers. Those people who take acid for the first time and go to a Black Sabbath concert, they probably think they have died and gone to hell.