Date: Tuesday, 11/18/69

I’m not able to talk to anyone about the time in DC. I haven’t seen Charles either since we returned. I’m sure he knows why. He doesn’t seem to mind either. I haven’t had the nerve to tell him that I’m not going home with him for Thanksgiving.

Trust is again an issue between us. What happened in DC that was worse than him reading my diary was this—I saw him and Tony shooting up while we were away. I can’t begin to describe how disgusted and frightened it made me.

Why does he do drugs?

I know that everyone here does them. They are everywhere. People come to class stoned. Alex kicked two guys off the team for being on drugs. I heard while we were in DC some guy raced around the campus naked and yelling that the FBI had infiltrated the campus and they were going to kill him.

I had thought that being in love with me would help him and would be a great thing for me. Now it seems that I am falling in and out of love so quickly that it’s more like a tennis match than a love affair.

Maybe I can’t rid myself of Skokie enough to ever be in love with Charles fully. I wonder if I would have reacted differently if I had come here from Montreal or Brooklyn. I know Alex thinks Charles is too messed up for me to waste my time with.

I’m no saint. I too succumbed to the allure of drugs. Though in my case, I am certain this will never happen again. I took some acid while we were away. The day of the march, everyone, me included, dropped some acid. I didn’t get really trippy like the others did. I did it so I could be a part of the group, to feel involved with them. I don’t ever want to do it again, but at least I know what it is like.

Maybe taking the acid was my way to try to leave Skokie forever. It kept me awake for a day and a half. The acid affected me more visually than any other way—what I saw appeared more intense, more vibrant, had more texture.

As soon as we arrived in DC, I walked away from the group and into the crowds. When I looked around, I couldn’t find anyone I knew. I panicked and the panic intensified. I jumped when Healey appeared, tapping me on the shoulder to let me know he was close by. He became my shadow.

No matter where I went, he was nearby. I got trapped in a large group of singing and dancing hippies. No matter which way I turned, they did too. They wove themselves around me. I couldn’t get free of them. Healey came to my rescue and spread the crowd away from me so I could move out of their orbit and follow whatever path I needed to be on. I couldn’t stand still.

By walking, constantly walking, I could absorb what was going on around me, listen to the various speakers and not freak myself out by what I had done.

It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

While I was tripping, ecstatic thoughts and images went off in my head. Not one of them remains as rich as it was then. One of those eruptions remains. It fills me every morning with its presence. I don’t care. It can stay or it can go.

I know I behaved stupidly. Wandering around in that state, in the vast crowd of hundreds of thousands of people, wasn’t the best way to take care of myself. At the time, it didn’t seem so stupid. It was, after all, a peace march. We were into non-violence. I felt so safe, that had anyone come at me with a weapon, I would have walked right up to them and kissed them. That’s how powerful the mood inside me was.

As the day progressed, that mood intensified. The drug didn’t wear off for a long time, it kept getting stronger and stronger. The drug opened doors inside me that I hadn’t even known were closed. Colors on that very gray day were so bright and vibrant, that I needed sunglasses. I was able to breathe exactly as Alex instructs us to do.

I had enough stamina to run around the perimeter of the entire demonstration at the Washington Monument. I wanted to carry a banner to help with the cause. I wanted to let all those people know that I loved them and would be their friend forever. That I would do anything they asked of me.

I know it all sounds so silly. Like I’m some stoned out hippy. It was wonderful to have no cares at all and to believe that I could live like that forever. It wasn’t until the drug wore off and I felt the opposite of wonderful—sick to my soul—that I could for a few moments feel sympathy for Charles. Without the drug, I felt so awful, like I lived in a dark hole that had constant earthquakes. It never occurred to me that I was just in the van with its lousy shocks and inside a sick body coming down from a trip.

I didn’t eat the entire way back. I sat in one spot and never moved. Healey sat next to me. His silence helped because sounds hurt my ears. The worst part was that I needed to be re-introduced to myself.

I guess in that Jefferson Airplane tradition, I had only taken the pill that makes you larger.

If I ever was going to take a drug again, I guess that would be it. I liked being 10 feet tall.

I must still be radiating that peace and love vibe from the march because Eileen smiled at me today. I guess we are friends again. I hope so. Though now we aren’t the kind of friends I had wanted us to be. Her world revolves around Philip totally. We’ll never be able to mention that night.

Now I am so concerned about the the war. How incredible, right, for me to write that? It wasn’t that long ago that I never gave it a thought. The news of the war was like some background noise in my parents’ life. It didn’t affect me.

The strange names of cities I had never known about or cared about. The numbers of those killed, wounded. The number of bombs dropped. The people who destroyed themselves to try to stop this war—all of that was as unknown to me as most of the names in the phone book and about as interesting.

Then I met a boy named Charles and that changed. On December 1 there will be a lottery, and depending on when his birthdate is drawn, it will determine whether he will go to war. I know I haven’t written about that yet. I must. I have to understand it or I won’t understand what he is going through.

Right now, the equilibrium is gone. I hope this is due to exhaustion and nothing else. I’m finished for the day.