Flashback

This story is about sex, drugs, and rock and roll over a lifetime lived in Berkeley. But at its heart it's a romance. The sex, drugs, and rock and roll are merely facilitators.

My parents never told me that an LSD flashback might take twenty years to occur.

When I left my home in Idaho to attend graduate school at UC Berkeley in 1969 my concerned parents gave me a long lecture about all things not to do in that little piece of Sodom and Gomorrah by the Bay (as they thought of Berkeley in 1969 from the perspective of Salmon, a little Mormon town in rural Idaho). Much of it was good advice. There were a lot of ways to get in trouble in Berkeley in 1969, but there was also a good education to be had if you stayed focused on the reason you came there. I stayed focused, for the most part, and ultimately obtained a PhD in structural engineering.

One of their major lecture points was the danger of drugs. My mother went on at length, especially on the horrors of LSD. "Remember," she lectured. "That stuff will give you flashbacks long after you think it's out of your system." She wasn't all that clear about what a flashback was, but she was sure it was bad.

But not even the people who later explained to me what a flashback was told me the flashback might come twenty years later. My one and only experience with dropping acid (at least I guess it was acid) produced a lost weekend. I've always remembered putting that little tab of paper on my tongue while I was watching a Grateful Dead concert on a Friday night in the old Greek Theater in Berkeley, but the rest of what went on that weekend was lost to me. It was Tuesday before I found myself back at the house in south Berkeley I was sharing with a couple of fellow graduate students. They told me I had arrived home late on Sunday night and gone directly to bed, sleeping until Tuesday morning. Could be. I don't know. Tuesday morning was where my life picked up again from Friday night when I dropped the tab of acid. Everything in between was gone. I also had a hell of a hangover on Tuesday. That headache and the drugged feeling went on for a week.

Roll forward to a pleasant day in Berkeley in October of 1991, roughly twenty years after my lost weekend. I hadn't thought about that weekend in years. Sitting in a Starbucks on Shattuck Avenue, I was drinking a coffee as I went over my final divorce papers before going up to my lawyer's office to sign them. It was 3:30 and the place was busy, mostly with grad students tying up all the tables with their laptops and a coffee they planned to stretch for at least two hours. I looked up to see an attractive woman in her late thirties standing with her coffee looking in vain for an empty table. When she looked towards me, I spoke up, asking, "Would you care to join me?" As I spoke I was stacking my papers which I had now finished reviewing half an hour before my appointment. She had a mass of long honey blonde hair twisted and stacked atop her head. Beautiful hair, I thought. Her clothing looked professional, a tan business suit consisting of a knee length skirt and jacket with a white blouse below buttoned to her throat, and conservative pumps with just enough heel to emphasize her long legs. Very attractive, I thought.

"Oh thank you. That's very kind," she responded pulling out a chair and sitting opposite me. "It's always so busy here, but sometimes I just need to come down and decompress. My office is just upstairs."

"Oh, I see. I'm just here to see my lawyer today. Finalizing my divorce," I said, gesturing at the stack of papers.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"No. This is a good thing for me. Actually for both of us," I responded. "It's something we should have done years ago."

"Well that's good then. A divorce is very difficult for some people. Helping some of them can be part of my job. I'm a clinical psychiatrist. My office is upstairs. I also have another office over at San Francisco State where I teach and run my research program."

"You had a difficult case this afternoon?" I asked. But thinking I quickly said, "Oh, I know you can't tell me about it. These things are very confidential."

"That's true,' she said. "Confidentiality is one of the hard parts of the job. The things people tell you really get to you sometimes and there is no one I can discuss it with. That's why I come down here after a particularly difficult session. It helps to be around healthy people, working happily away on their computers with no obvious signs of stress. Don't get me wrong. I love my job. I'm trying to help people, but sometimes it is so stressful." As she dragged out the last few words, she wrapped a few wisps of her hair that had escaped her bun around a finger.

I stared. I had seen that gesture, but where and when? Then I checked out. Physically, I was still in 1991 in a Starbucks on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, but my head was someplace else completely. The blonde was still there, but she was much younger and thinner, wearing jeans and a faded, tie dyed T-shirt that did little to conceal her ample bosom. We weren't on Shattuck Avenue and we weren't in 1991. It was 1971 and we were in the old Greek Theater on the far side of the campus listening to a Grateful Dead concert. I must have just dropped the acid, because I was staring at her chest watching the patterns in the T-shirt swirl and spin more or less in time to the Dead's rendition of Scarlet Begonias. I looked at her and said, "Oh wow."

And then I was back. Back in 1991, sitting in a Starbucks on Shattuck Avenue with an attractive middle aged clinical psychiatrist I had just met, who was the same woman I had been with moments before at the Greek Theater, just 20 years older. "Oh wow, I repeated as I shook my head and tried to clear it.

She was looking at me with concern. "You just said that," she said. "Twice."

I shook my head again. Oh I guess I did, I thought, but the first time was twenty years ago and the patterns on her T-shirt were swirling and rearranging themselves.

"Uhh. Did I?"

"Yes."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"Oh." But I wasn't here the first time, I thought, and she wasn't either. We were in 1971 at the Greek Theater.

I sat staring at her for a long time. What had just happened, I wondered. I shook my head again and then, picking up my papers, said, "I need to get up to my lawyer's office. Time to get this over with." I was actually going to be fifteen minutes early but I felt a need to get away from this woman before whatever it was that had just occured happened again. I tossed the last of my coffee in the trash and hurried out the door.

As I rode up the elevator two things were bothering me. I had this deep conviction that the woman I had been having coffee with was the same person who had given me the tab of acid that started my lost weekend in 1971 and prior to today, I had no memory of watching her T-shirt's colors swirl and blend in response to the band's music. I remembered it from my little check out of a few minutes ago, but prior to that it was, if it occurred at all, a part of my lost weekend. What the hell was happening to me?

As I left my lawyer's office an hour and a half later, a folder of my now signed divorce papers under my arm, the door to the office next to his opened and the woman I had met in the Starbucks stepped out in the hall. She had a brief case in hand and appeared headed home for the day.

"Hello again," she said. "Did things go well with the lawyer?"

"Oh yes. No problems." I smiled at her. She really was attractive.

"And you. Your next client was a little less stressful I hope."

"Oh yes. Actually the one I mentioned was my last client of the day, so it is always easier when I talk to myself." She smiled. But then she looked hard at me, the smile fading to a look of concern. "And you? Are you okay. I was a little worried about you when you checked out on me down there in the Starbucks."

"Oh that. Well it was a little disquieting."

"Would you like to talk about it?" She still had her hand on the doorknob.

"You wouldn't mind? You look like you are headed home."

"No one there but my cat. He won't notice if we chat for half an hour."

She pushed the door open and we walked into the reception room and then through to her office. There was a large walnut desk and two comfortable looking arm chairs opposite each other. "You don't have a couch?" I said.

"That's a bit of a myth," she said. "Most people are more comfortable in an arm chair. Besides I like my patients to look me in the eye, if they can. Have a seat." I noticed she gestured towards the arm chair that had a large box of tissues setting on the table next to it. Yes, I thought, I suppose a lot of crying goes on in this room.

I sat down and said, "You're right. This chair is very comfortable."

"I told you," she said with a smile. She apparently didn't consider this a formal session as she had peeled off her jacket before sitting down and then kicked her shoes off. I couldn't help noticing that under the conservative white blouse she wore, she was very buxom. I also noticed, again, that she had great legs.

"Okay. Is this the part where I spill my guts out to you? I've never talked to a therapist before."

"No not yet, and not at all unless you want to. Let's start with names. I'm Karen Rutherford, and you are? I noticed she had an open note pad and a pen setting on the table next to her, more or less where the tissues were next to me.

"I'm Alan Sanders," I said. "I own a consulting structural engineering firm over in the City. We're on Sansome Street. But I live here in Berkeley. Never left after I finished my engineering degree. And, as you know I am recently divorced."

She grilled me about the divorce for a while including the classic therapist question as to how I felt about the divorce, to which I responded that I felt it was unfortunate, but as I had told her earlier, it was the best thing for both of us. I explained that my wife had become so involved in her international law practice over the years that we really had nothing in common and that she was out of the country more than she was home. We had become more like roommates than a loving couple.

She poked at a very high level for the essentials of my life story (grew up on a ranch in Idaho, educated at Brigham Young University and UC Berkeley). Raised a Mormon, but non-practicing since I had left BYU. Served during the Vietnam war, but not in combat. Not traumatic, just boring.

Finally she got around to the issue she was really interested in. "What happened down there in the Starbucks? You kind of checked out on me for a couple of minutes."

I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes for a moment. This was the spill your guts part of a session I guessed. "Yeah, I guess I did. I'm not sure what happened. I was there with you in the Starbucks and then I was someplace else, but it was still me."

She was scribbling furiously on her note pad. Before she could ask another question, I held up my hand. "Wait, I have to tell you I can't pay you. Divorces aren't cheap."

'I understand," she said. "I hear that frequently. Usually I send the person to a public clinic or get their lawyer to make the spouse pay, if the settlement is not final or permits it. But I'm not going to charge you because I'm interested in you. People don't usually just check out like you did and then check back in that quickly. So where were you, I mean when you weren't in the Starbucks with me?"

"I was with you in the old Greek Theater over on the other side of campus, but it was 1971."

She kept scribbling. "Can you tell me more?"

"Yes, but first I have to give you a little background about 1971." I told her the story about my lost weekend, leaving out the part that had been filled in when I revisited 1971 an hour or so earlier.

"So 20 years ago you went to a Dead concert, dropped acid, and had a lost weekend. How much acid? People don't usually loose a whole weekend from a typical recreational dose of acid."

"I don't know. I was an engineering student. I didn't know anything about acid or any other drugs. I was just there because I liked the music. I've always been a Dead Head, at least since I came to Berkeley. They didn't play Salmon, Idaho or even Provo, Utah."

"Tell me what it looked like?"

"The acid?"

She nodded.

"A small piece of blotter paper, maybe an inch square with a picture on it. She told me to put it on my tongue and hold it there for a little while. She said she got it from the band's sound man." Karen had stopped taking notes.

"Who was this girl that gave you the acid."

"When I finally came to after my lost weekend, I had no idea." I paused. "But today it was you."

"Me? A 39 year old clinical psychologist was at a 1971 Dead concert handing out tabs of acid?

"No, it was a 19 year old girl. At least she told me she was 19. She looked exactly like you, less 20 years."

"Did she tell you her name?"

"No." I waited a long moment. "Did I just make this up? I mean subconsciously, while I was checked out, or however you would say it."

Karen leaned back and untied the knot in her hair, shaking it loose and letting it fall to her shoulders. She had thick, beautiful hair. "It was the fall of 1971, in the Greek Theater? A Grateful Dead concert?" she asked. "You're sure of that?"

"Yes."

"And it was me, a 19 year old me, that gave you the acid?"

"Well that was this afternoon's version of 1971, so..." I was silent for a moment "Were you in Berkeley then Doctor? Were you at that concert? Was that you?"

"Well I grew up in Berkeley. My father was a biology professor, so I was here in 1971. I've always lived in Berkeley. Was I at that concert? I have no idea. Did I give you a tab of Owsley's acid?" She shrugged her shoulders. "Even if you did drop a tab of acid it shouldn't have wiped you out for the whole weekend. There must have been more."

She dragged her fingers through her hair, thinking. "I have to tell you Alan, 1971 was a bit of blur for me. Not one weekend, but most of the year. My father had kept me in a private girls school down near Monterey for four years of high school. It was run by nuns. He didn't think Berkeley was a good place to grow up, and he was right. When I finally got out of high school, I moved in with my mother. She and my father had been separated for years. She was an artist. She let me do anything and for most of that year I did. It was crazy. I knew the band and their soundman, so yes, I might have given you that tab of acid, but like most of my life that year, I don't have a specific memory of it."

"I see," I said.

"But what I'm most interested in," she said, "is what triggered you? Was it just seeing me or did I say or do something that caused you to trip out like that. In my lab over at San Francisco State I study hallucinogenics and their effects on people. What you've described sounds like a flash back, but I've never heard of one delayed this long. It is also a little like a fugue state, but they usually last much, much longer--months and even years, never only a few minutes, and typically people in a fugue state have a whole second personality. You said you were yourself."

She reached up and grabbed a strand of her hair twisting it around her finger, just as she had in the Starbucks. And I was gone again.

When I returned we were both still sitting in the arm chairs in her office on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. I looked at my watch and saw that about five minutes had passed. Karen was sitting watching me, her fingers supporting her chin. I blinked and shook my head.

"You're back?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Where were you this time? 1971 again?"

"Yes."

"And was I there?"

"Yes. The younger hippie chick version of you."

"At the Greek Theater again?"

"No. We were in the back seat of a car going somewhere. You didn't give me any more drugs, but..." I wasn't sure I was ready to tell her the rest. I was also somewhat uncomfortable because I realized that I had developed an erection. At age 43, I didn't routinely grow an erection while simply sitting in chair talking to an attractive woman. I tried to discreetly adjust my trousers to accommodate things, hoping she wouldn't notice. She noticed. I think she had already noticed my erection.

"But?" she asked, seeking to get me to continue.

"I'm not sure I'm comfortable in telling you about it."

"My patient's never are. That is why they come to me."

"Oh. Of course." I paused. "But this involves you."

"Perhaps. It's not uncommon for a patient to fantasize about the therapist. Although I have to admit, I've never seen it in a simple hallucinogenic flash back case. But I've never seen a flashback that was delayed for twenty years." She thought for a moment.

"I'll tell you what," she continued. "Let's start by trying to identify your trigger. This has happened to you twice in the last couple of hours and each time I was present. Was there something I said or did just before you checked out each time?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Yes, there was," I said. "but it was so simple that I can't believe..."

"Sometimes simple is it. It doesn't have to be complex. What was it?"

"Each time you were thinking before you spoke and you reached up with your left hand and wrapped a stray strand of your hair around a finger. The 1971 version of you did the same thing, just before she gave me the acid tab."

"How interesting," she responded. She sat thinking and unconsciously began to reach for her hair with her left hand.

"No. Please don't do that. My little trips are uncomfortable and I don't want to do it again."

"Oh. I'm sorry. That's an unconscious habit on my part. My late husband used to call it my tell. He said it was something I did when I didn't want to say what I was thinking."

"You mean like a bluffing poker player."

"Yes, but broader. Well okay, that's good to know. I may have to get a skull cap for our conversations, but at least we have identified a trigger. It's me and one of my weird little gestures.

"But now you need to tell me what happened during your last little visit to 1971." As she spoke she released a button at the top of her blouse and let her fingers lightly graze her throat.

"Okay." I said with reluctance. I felt my erection flex at the thought.

"We were in a car, a big 1960's sedan like a Chey Impala or something similar. We were in the back seat. I don't know who was driving. There was a steady tone of the tires hitting something repetitively on the roadway. Slap, slap, slap. It was rhythmic, like expansion joints on a bridge. It was dark and the lights on the bridge were making a stripped pattern on the interior of the car that would come and go as we passed each light source. The timing seemed to match the noise--slap, slap, slap. Flash, flash, flash. I was really tripping on the combination."

What was I doing? she asked.

"Nothing at first. I guess you were tripping on the lights too."

"And then?"

I paused before I spoke. My erection was getting harder as I thought about how to describe what happened next. "Well, you pulled your T-shirt off and we sat there, in the back of the car both of us tripping on the light show on your naked breasts. You were holding them out to me. You had beautiful breasts."

"My late husband thought so too." She had released another button on her blouse and I could see her upper chest was a little flushed. Her fingers were still stroking her throat. "What happened next?"

My cock flexed again. "When we came off the bridge,... I think it was the Gate, not the Bay Bridge, because it was dark and if we had been on the Bay Bridge the lights of the City would have been around us. When we came off the bridge... I started fondling your tits. You had your head back against the seat. My head was in your lap and I was using my hands to fondle your tits."