Jimi Hendrix appeared to me in a vision while I was getting my wisdom teeth out. This was Thanksgiving break 1986, in Houston, Texas. The next day I took LSD. It was a trip full of signs and portents, heralded by Hendrix’s visitation to me at the dentist’s office. At first I thought Jimi was protecting me, but now I think he may have been trying to warn me about that acid trip.

I’d heard Hendrix on LSD the previous summer, as “Are You Experienced?” transformed my boom box. That’s the song where he says he’s experienced, and then he says “Let me prove it to you” and plays a backward guitar solo. Everybody knows that song, but on psychedelics I heard the solo, man. It did prove Jimi was experienced, just like he said he was. I trusted him, an ersatz father figure dispensing psychedelic wisdom.

Why did I get into LSD, you may ask. Well, in 1983 after our father died, my family lived with our Houston grandmother for a summer of grieving. And while we were there, my little brother Allen and I watched the William Hurt movie Altered States on cable like 5,000 times. It’s about a psychedelic scientist testing the limits of meaning and sanity. We adopted it as a roadmap for how to live.

We became legacy admissions at an Episcopal boarding school in Austin. This was due to our dear departed Grandfather, the Bishop Richardson, preceding our father in death.

Allen and I also started smoking weed. So we looked at Thanksgiving break 1986 as a week to find ways to smoke pot and do acid. Maybe we would meet God personally this time, to ask Him pointed questions in our extravagant teenage hubris, like: Why did you kill Dad?

Priding ourselves on never getting caught, we treated every drug escapade like a secret mission. We made plans on the Greyhound bus to Houston. Sneaking around smoking pot at night was no problem. The real question was: When could we trip?

We analyzed the schedule for weaknesses. The day after the extraction of my wisdom teeth, Allen and I would have the house to ourselves. We chose that as our LSD-Day. We would storm the beaches of our minds.

Jimi

To get my wisdom teeth out, they put me under. I forget what it was, maybe laughing gas? Anyway I was out, tipped all the way back with the dentist and an assistant or two hovering over my face, digging around in there. And after a timeless time, I wasn’t 100 percent out anymore. A sliver of dreamy awareness began to assert itself. I was dimly aware that my body lay supine. I felt no pain, but I knew of the work being done on my teeth, as if it was happening very far away, and very small like looking through a telescope backward. It’s possible one of my eyes had sagged open a sliver. I think they cracked my teeth and dug out the pieces — but I’m not sure because the anesthetic worked so well. So well that it tipped into an altered state of its own.

Cut off from bodily sensation, about 3 percent conscious, I was a disembodied mind at the edge of a dream state. The dentist worked to piped-in music; an oldies hits station. I wasn’t listening or hearing it so much, it was more like background music inside a space station on the horizon. It was so far away that it basically wasn’t happening. But I wasn’t 100 percent out.

And that’s when Jimi Hendrix appeared. I think a Hendrix song must have come on the dentist’s station — a half memory/half projection of what prompted this visitation from the land of the dead.

Jimi stood over me, watching me. He was dressed like he’d just walked off stage. He had a wide-brimmed black hat and his deep purple velour Sgt. Pepper jacket. He was backlit, which shadowed his features while giving him a halo of silvery light. I felt he was there to protect me while I was vulnerable, while I was helpless. In wonderment and astonishment, I basked in his godly beneficence.

When I came to, I was like, “Holy shit, I just had a literal vision of Jimi Hendrix.”

Sending me home, the dentist said, “Don’t smoke anything for a couple of days or the suction in your mouth might pop your clots.”

That was bad news because the next day, Allen and I were going to drop acid and smoke weed and cigarettes. I immediately began brainstorming ways to smoke without popping my clots.

The Next Day

We each ate a tab of acid as soon as the coast was clear.

The solution to the smoking pot problem was to take nose hits behind the garage, which probably still could have popped my clots, but I went for it. The nose-hit technique we used was the so-called “shotgun,” which we were adept at anyway. Allen put the lit end of the joint in his mouth, and blew. I cupped my hands around my nose like a funnel, inhaling the thick stream of smoke up my nose. I was breathing it in but I wasn’t sucking on the joint with my mouth, and that did the trick. It burns your nose a little bit but you get gigantic hits.

I also found I could take nose-hits off a pipe pretty well just by sticking it in my nose. I smoked cigarettes that way too.

Then we put away the grass and set up shop on the front steps of the house in the sun. It was 80 degrees — Thanksgiving in Houston, baby.

We had a pair of chunky wooden acolyte’s crosses Allen had stolen from school. The lanyards were screwed to the crosses with little eyelets, and I worked on detaching mine and then re-attaching it to the bottom of the cross. That way it hung upside-down, a gag Satanic artifact. Allen was going at his with a knife to carve a bowl in it. We were keeping these from our mother, but with her gone we wore them openly.

The trip was unfolding nicely. We had the boom box going with our favorite albums in a stack of CDs and tapes. Music sounded brilliant. I was picking out new details I’d never heard before, like the insidious subliminal vocal “suck it” hidden in the high-hat of the Led Zeppelin song “D’Yer Mak’er” — I swear it’s there.

But it wasn’t until the deep cut “Animal Magic” from Peter Gabriel’s second album that synchronicity started popping off like popcorn. A wasp began messing with us, Gabriel belting out “Animal magic!” as I ineffectually tried shooing it away. The insect traced loops and whorls through the air as Gabriel’s singing gave it a voice: “I got a few ideas of my own … with all that animal magic, I’ll do anything you can.” To the music, to the beat, the wasp took pleasure reminding us who was boss. It was a scrap of grace as the air saturated with spacetime. The situation demonstrated the existence of synchronicity before our eyes, timed with the peak of the LSD. It even felt like more than that. It felt like a pantheistic wink from the universe itself.

Just then, my grandmother drove up in her red-purple 1960s Cadillac land-yacht. She parked right at the curb and made like she was getting out of the car. This felt like the Lord God saying, “Yeah, you like that synchronicity stuff?”

Passing the Acid Test

It’s hard to overstate the sense of emergency and alarm this provoked in us, something akin to a comet strike. This completely unplanned-for eventuality demanded immediate attention with all the snap I could muster. The widow of Bishop Richardson (may he rest in peace), Grandmother had shrunk over the years into a funny little old church lady who could barely see over the steering wheel of her oversized car. It was like she was casually dropping in unannounced driving an aircraft carrier.

The ultimate danger was that any interaction risked her seeing something funny, not that she was looking, but anything could potentially get back to Mom. This was suddenly a hard test of the Richardson brothers’ proud stealth tactics. We went directly from Defcon 5 to Defcon 1.

I sprang into action. Under no circumstances did I want my loving Grandmother to get out of her ridiculous car with its sheer breadth and its pointless space-age Jetson fins styled over the tail lights. God forbid she should get out and come inside and make herself at home while we’re peaking on acid. That would be catastrophic. We could barely act normal since everything, everything was so momentous and un-ignorable. It was signs and portents everywhere we looked. This insane novelty spike had to be controlled.

Grandmother had parked with her passenger side window facing me, and it was open. I leaned right in and started making with the small talk.

This had to work. This had to make her feel like an emotional connection had been made, so she could tick that off a list of normal behaviors she had witnessed, so she could move on feeling good. I looked back at Allen, standing over my shoulder — he was staring stony-faced from behind black Ray-Ban sunglasses, impenetrable like an ancient monument — useless. Now I, the big brother, had to distract her from him all clammed up. So she and I chirped away with little jokes and pleasantries. I hoped she wouldn’t notice my fully dilated pupils currently letting in all the light and color of the whole universe.

It helped that I had just re-attached my chunky wooden stolen cross in the right-side-up position. It dangled from my neck into the car window, imputing to me the sheen of wholesome Christian values. I don’t know how I made it work, but that cross — secretly an anti-cross — was a big part of it. I made her feel like she didn’t even have to get out of the car. Why, we’d be seeing her in a couple days for Thanksgiving dinner anyway, with the whole family. I forget everything that was said, but eventually we laughed and waved goodbye.

Then she drove off, Hendrix bless her.

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.