Preparing For Flight (part 3)

           Sarah and I stopped by my aunt Mary’s house that she shared with another girl.  One of my friends, Ward, was there also.  He was pretty cool and I decided to ask him if he wanted to trip with us.  He did.  Unknown to me at the time, you can’t get high off acid two nights in a row.  I don’t know why, but that’s how it works.  Neither Sarah nor I tripped then but Ward, on the other hand, was going nuts like we had the night before.

            We loaded up in Sarah’s Maxima and decided to drive around.  We were having fun just watching Ward trip out.  Sarah had the grand idea of hanging our bodies out of the sun roof.  Sure it was dangerous, but we could have cared less.

            We got ready to leave, but Ward was gone.  He was no where to be found. We drove around and looked for him, but we never found him.  Hoping he was alright, we headed for the cabin.  We brought a few movies along with us to give us something to do.  Among them were Natural Born Killers, Fantasia, an episode of Pee-Wee Playhouse, and Stephen King’s It.  We had rented the last one because Sarah was afraid of clowns.  She wanted to try to overcome it by watching a movie about a killer clown.

            After the movies were over, we popped in a CD and just sat in the dark listening to music.  I looked at her face and saw she was crying.  When I asked her what was wrong, she wouldn’t answer me.  Finally, she turned towards me and told me about all the trouble with Patrick.  It was beginning to be too much for her to handle.  He had hurt her in so many ways and it had been going on for so long she felt it would never end.

            When she was feeling a little better she said, “I’m just throwing this out at you.  This is just an idea.  Let’s leave and go somewhere away from here, anywhere.”

            The summer before, I spent some time following the Grateful Dead.  The trip had ended in disaster.  I had gotten messed up on all kinds of drugs—taking anything people placed in my hand—and ended up calling my mom for a bus ticket home.  It was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life up to that point.

            With that experience in mind, I told Sarah, “Sure, let’s go.”  It was another one of my great decisions.

           We talked about it for awhile and decided to pick up where I had left off the summer before.  Some friends had been talking about a Dead concert coming up soon in Memphis and we would start there.  We didn’t have much money but I thought we would be able to sell acid at the concerts to finance the trip.  It was a horrible plan, but neither one of us cared at the time.  We just wanted to leave.  We agreed to sleep on it and if we still felt like going in the morning, we would.  We both did.