It was the summer of 1962 and I had just dropped a quarter tab of Orange Sunshine...
While standing on top of the stairs and convinced that I could fly, I simply let go.
Another day, same time period, while driving home (also on acid), I saw an oncoming car make a right turn but it looked to me like it was swerving at us. With a speed of about 40 MPH I quickly turned into a tree to avoid the imagined danger and totaled the '53 Chevy that I was driving. It was a steel tank and nobody was hurt but my passenger broke his glasses. A couple years later I was bothered by thoughts of suicide but figured the only way to do it right would be to prop a fireplace poker against the wall and impale myself onto it. The gore that I'd leave behind and the filth of the sooty poker made me think twice.
While driving my motorcycle onto an on-ramp of the freeway somebody in a convertible sports car tried to run me off the road. While walking home once a car stopped in front of me and 4 kids got out (one had a tire iron) and confronted me. Once, while in LA I gave a guy a ride home and he tried to steal the keys to my car. I grabbed his wrist as he was getting out and followed him out the passenger side of the vehicle. He said,
"I got a knife and I'll stick you," as he reached his hand behind his waist. I brought my knee into his nards and felt a solid connection but got really scared when I looked in his face and there was no reaction. He might have been on Angeldust, not sure, but it scared the crap out of me. One time I was walking to the bus stop and 3 kids started talking smack. One of them approached me and his left cross connected right under my jaw. He looked into my eye and thought better of his plan and ran off saying,
"Don't try any of your karate sh!t on me." I had a pair of sunglasses that were knocked off and one of his buddies picked them up and stole them.
While working as a store clerk in East LA, the liquor store that I worked for was robbed and I was held at gunpoint. Another time my neighbor was rumored to have killed a police officer while he broke out of custody. His girlfriend shared the duplex with us. He left a threatening note on her door. I never saw him but don't know what I would have done if things turned out differently. When I talked to the police about it they told to save everybody the trouble and if he came onto my front porch, just shoot him. They said I could drag his body to the threshold of my door and put a knife (one that didn't match any other from my kitchen) in his hand and claim self defense. They told me that the detectives would be able to figure out what happened but no charges would be pressed.
While in high school I read a newspaper article about a guy who had his testicles cut off while he was in his car, parked in a parking lot. I knew the guy.
-- heheheh.. there's probably more but that's all I could think of right off. One more: When I was living in Stockton, CA I noticed police body outlines on the sidewalk 1/2 block away from my house. The victim was a 10 year old kid who had the mis-fortune of wearing his older brothers' jacket while he went out trick-or-treating on Halloween. His older brother was a drug seller and I moved my family baci to the Pacific Northwest quickly thereafter.
I can swim but always wonder about the statistics showing deaths directly in the center of highway intersections. What did they think they were doing out there? Probably SRF members it seems.
~Granps
thanks for checking. Being a tough ol' coot, I'm still here. 