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it?”
    “You know damn well what I mean!”
    “But do you know what you mean?” she said softly. “Was it good? Was it beautiful? Did it take you someplace you wanted to go?”
    “But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t really you... it was the acid.”
    “Of course it was real; it happened, didn’t it? The Girl in the Rain—that’s me the way I want to be. That’s more the real me than the me you’re seeing now. So I use acid to make me more me... Be honest, which me do you prefer: me now, or the Girl in the Rain?”
    She had me there. She had me cold, and we both knew it. Softening, I said: “Maybe I don’t have all the answers. I guess I really don’t know where you’re at.”
    “Would you really like to dig my reality?” she said.
    A cold chill foreshadowed what was coming next; still I said: “Yes.”
    She reached into her coat pocket, palmed two sugar cubes. “Take a trip with me,” she said. “Let’s get inside each other’s heads. Let’s make it all the way together. Trust me. Trust yourself. It won’t be a bummer—you’ve got a good soul.”
    I felt myself paused at the brink of an abyss. Okay, I’ll admit it, acid scared me. You get so high you don’t know you’re high, you’ve got no control. And all that ego-death stuff—that was Harvey’s bag, and I knew where that was at. No thanks, baby, I was about to say.
    But... there was something very much like love in her eyes as she held out the sugar cubes. And I suddenly realized that I was about to make another safe, cagey, negative decision. I was going to throw away a possibility. A berserker impulse came over me—for once, if I was going to have regrets, it would be over a chance I had taken.
    If you want to walk through the fire, you’ve got to step into the flames.
    I smiled, a kind of forced-bravado smile, took a cube, and without a further thought, swallowed it. I raised my cup, clinked it with hers, said: “Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship,” and took a long warm swallow. And another.
    And began eating lox and eggs again, waiting for it to hit, afraid of what I would see if I looked back.
     

 4 - “Take Me On A Trip Upon Your Magic Swirling Ship...”
     
    “How much money do you have?” Robin said as we stood outside Rappaport’s on what was turning out to be one of those rare warm New York November days.
    I didn’t like the question. “What do I need, a Dun and Bradstreet to qualify as a trip partner?”
    “Come on, how much money do you have in your pocket, on you, right now?”
    There I was, one o’clock in the pm standing outside Rappaport’s with god-knows-how-much acid in me winding up for the pitch, and this chick was already hustling me for bread. Asshole that you are, I told myself, you’re gonna get the bummer you so richly deserve for getting yourself into this.
    “Come on, come on, I don’t want your bread, just want to plan ahead, now, while we can.”
    I checked my wallet: a ten and three ones. In my pocket, a quarter, two nickels, a dime and a penny.
    “Grand total of $13.46.”
    “Groovy,” she said, doing some kind of calculations in her head. “Look, it should be hitting soon and we’ll have maybe eight hours. Are you willing to blow ten dollars, I mean throw it around and don’t look back, to have a super-trip?”
    What the hell, ten bucks, I thought, about what Ted spends in one day on his therapy. And acid’s going for about $5 a cap on the street, and I’m getting high free. Live a little!
    “Girl,” I said, “you are talking to the last of the big spenders. Ten bucks is a mere pittance. Consider the vast resources of my entire fortune of $13.46 at your command.”
    “Okay, man,” she said, “let’s ride the magic carpet.” And she stepped out into the gutter, waved her hand, and hailed a cab like an uptown fashion model out slumming. Something about the authority with which she did it gave me a funny flash: one way or another, my Girl in the Rain was fully