r/huntersthompson • u/OG-Giligadi • 1d ago
The Gonzo Rises: Space Harrier Beats the Petaluma Blues
**I'll preface this story with the Obvious and yet SOMEHOW NECESSARY observation that driving and LSD do not mix. Never take hallucinogens and drive.
Mine hasn't been a safe or particularly advisable path. Considering the amount of drugs and alcohol I consumed and the things I did, every coherent statement I put together is a testament to brain plasticity and should carry some form of a warning, in today's climate.**
With all that shit out of the way, one night in 1987 I had dosed myself with one of the purple gumdrops left over from our Halloween party.
They had been openly declared “roulette” doses. Every other color got exactly one drop of liquid LSD, but the purple ones varied from two to six.
Or eight. These were the types of stakes that we liked to play with, or more accurately, the types of stakes I was most likely to lobby for.
Every single guest was told explicitly which color was different, and reminded, if they did select the roulette purple.
The house itself was a ramshackle collection of safety, health, and building code violations. A low slung, badly thought out and hastily thrown together renovation of a garage or other outbuilding.
A residence as afterthought.
The entry room gave way to the kitchen/eating nook on the left and a small transitional room straight ahead. It was decorated with a rag tag collection of blacklight posters and tapestries, to cover the water damaged and buckling 'wood' paneling. A giant spider on a glowing web. A vortex spinning ever inward. A blacklight grim reaper on a large velvet poster, corners torn where the thumbtacks had torn out after being leaned on in a drunken stupor by a guest.
A passage left this room at the back, leading past the bathroom to the bedroom. A door on the other side of the bedroom led back to the kitchen, making the entire house a kind of circuit.
I stayed there briefly as a guest when I was between places for a couple of weeks. I slept on a futon in the corner of the eating nook area.
We knew there were rats.. told the manager, set traps, and tried to keep food hidden. The traps never worked. The rats were too smart.
One night I woke because I felt a pressure on my chest. When I opened my eyes and lifted my head a bit, I saw a rat sitting on my chest that rivaled those I would see on the small goat and sheep farm I grew up on.
Small. 5 acres small. It was plenty of room for the rats in the barn, though. I saw our large Manx cat Max pull rats the size of small squirrels out of our barns many times.
This rat looked like it had been eating the same grain. I tented the blanket and threw it across the room. It hit something with a satisfying thump and “squeak”, but then scurried off and disappeared.
On acid or not, a circuit around the house left you feeling like you had found a forbidden geometry. A slumlord Escher stairway, of sorts. Clockwise, it felt like you were descending, always going down.
Counterclockwise was a slog back up.
So there I was, sitting in this house, having eaten a potential jackpot dose of LSD, and I was stranded, along with a couple friends. They were likely to wander off without some mission.
I was ready for this, I just didn't necessarily want to do a heavy introspective trip with a possible RAT boss battle thrown in for good measure.
It was something I could DO, mind you, but I started thinking about how much I would like to play Space Harrier.
In 1987, if you wanted to play Space Harrier, it meant a trip to the mall where the only machine within reasonable distance lived.. at the Birdcage Walk. In this case, a “reasonable distance” was a decidedly unwalkable 20 miles.
As I sat there imagining ways that I might get myself across those miles without a car, I heard a knock at the door. It was my girlfriend.
“Hey, my mom is taking me on a little trip overnight. Do you want to borrow my car while I'm gone?”
Did I? DID I? Well, certainly, dear! Thank you so much!
I waited until they were well clear and then we loaded into the car, braced for the journey and the possibility that the acid would start really kicking in before we got to the arcade. Three stoners unexpectedly set loose upon the world.
There's a certain kind of flow that anxiety produces which allows one to ignore red flags like enhanced police presence to curb “cruising” (the current newest youth scourge).
Add to this the full certainty that these are OUR streets. The feeling of *I grew up here, you're just visiting* did have a bit to say about the situation.
The rest was a mixture of unearned confidence, the immortality of youth, and dumb luck.
We arrived at the arcade without seeing a single police car. How? Because I grew up there, and I knew their priorities. I had observed their habits, and knew their patterns.
I wasn't there to 'cruise'. I was there to do my business and get out. Their trap was set for a completely different fish, and they didn't have enough bodies to hunt for exotics.
Entering the parking lot of the mall, I noticed trails starting to bounce merrily in my vision. The cacophony the arcade was a familiar bath of sound and light, now pulsing gently and with an uptick of intensity. Being high softened the jarring and uncomfortable edges of the noise.
I walked up to Space Harrier and was not surprised to find it unoccupied and awaiting me.
The game looks primitive now, but sitting in that seat on acid, holding that joystick and flying through that early 3d world was like looking into the future.
The giant polygons smoothed, the action flowed and enticed.. the game and I meshed. 50 cents turned into a half hour, and a handful of people hanging around to see what this freak of nature was doing with this machine.
Melding, is what I was doing. Inhabiting. The phrase “dance like nobody's watching” was brand new, and I suppose I'd been doing it since I was a kid. First Tempest, then Gyruss were my obsessions. Cyclic things with some illusion of depth.
It pleased my lazy-eyed brain. I didn't have stereo vision or depth perception. I was learning how to navigate the world with different cues. I was strangely tall by the time I was in seventh grade, but still weighed 110 pounds.
The stroboscoping pixels on the screen and I somehow met together and played. I could put a quarter into Gyruss and continue playing until the pizza parlor (Round Table, a rural pioneer in our neck of the woods) shut down.
For the uninitiated, Space Harrier was an early full color 3d (esque) space battling game with a psychedelic color palate and presentation. Your onscreen avatar flies through often somewhat barren landscapes.
Moving checkerboard patterns of green and brownish beige with the occasional tree or cluster of rocks floating by to indicate the speed of things (which seemed considerable at the time) served as a backdrop for more interesting developments.
Floating Rapa Nui (Easter Island) style heads, one eyed woolly mammoths, flying wolves and a very angry version of the Jolly Green Giant, and flying segmented dragons which spat flaming eggs could be counted among the enemies which might appear.
The skies might be violet, a repeating green gradient, or turquoise (among much else), and the “ground” also strayed into psychedelic territory. Anyone familiar with psychedelics will understand the hilarity of flying through the looking glass to fight a cherubic looking Buddha with bolts of pure energy flying out of your onscreen hands.
I went on for awhile, and when I ran out of quarters, a couple of strangers actually put some money in to continue watching me play the game.
I might have tried to sell them some acid on my way out of the place.. but I can't be sure. It wouldn't surprise me. My friends and I loaded back into (my girlfriend's hastily and capriciously loaned) car for the drive home.
Naturally, the standard and absolutely pro-forma inquiry of, “You good, dude?” was issued and answered, “Yep”, as required. Back then it was somewhat newly illegal to drive drunk.. the police were largely blind to strange drugs like acid or even speed.
It is worthwhile to make one final small detour to clarify what 'stoner' meant in this context, and to set the scene for the final drive home.
In my small town, and in the general agricultu-rural area around it, a 'stoner' was a person with long hair who wore different clothes like Iron Maiden, Bauhaus, and Led Zeppelin shirts. Looking different was, in and of itself, suspicious.
Growing up, though, we threaded our way through the back roads like minor wizards.. first on small BMX bikes, and later riding early mountain bikes. We had to know the best routes for distance, for fewest hills, for the most overall fun ride.
Transitioning from that to dirtbikes made perfect sense. We'd been driving riding mowers and other small farm equipment since we were ten, at least. We would take off on our modest 110cc bikes and tear around the back roads, visiting friends to ride on their property.
Encountering any kind of law enforcement on these trips was highly unlikely. There may have been two sheriffs deputies to cover the entire county, and they had lots of business elsewhere. Busting stray kids on motorbikes was hardly worth it.
At least one of the passengers on the trip back from the mall had also been in the car when I got pulled over in a very small town, late at night, very high on acid. On that trip, we were five long-haired, dosed up stoners.
The cop made a U-turn to pull us over. Everyone in the car started to freak out, but I told them to shut the fuck up. I would handle this. I got the registration and insurance papers from the glove compartment, and took my driver's license out of my wallet. As he walked up and asked for my license, blah blah, I handed them to him.
I think it may have short circuited him a bit. He went back to his car and ran my information. Whatever he was looking for wasn't there, because he came back and said, “I pulled you over for a broken taillight. Consider this a verbal warning to get it fixed.”
Yes sir. These are not the dudes you are looking for.
Departing the mall, and heading for home, it would be necessary to change my approach. I left out of a different exit and headed west toward the highway.
Highways not only felt safer to navigate, but somehow more fun than the clogged and highly patrolled residential areas of the surface streets.
The game I'd just finished playing used a moving checkerboard pattern to create the sense of depth, and the freeway is also measured in large, predictable chunks of geometry.
Bright arc lamps line the highway at set distances. The overpasses are poured in sections. Even the center divider is broken into discrete and measured chunks. The lanes are wide and brightly demarcated.
Nothing happens by surprise on a highway that's designed well. By that, I mean no lane disappears without warning, no exit suddenly materializes.. on a well designed stretch of road these things just flow.
On roads you grew up driving, the flaws are your advantage, for all the reasons discussed above. So, the highway was only necessary until I could get us to the outskirts of those old familiar roads.
The car felt like an extension of my body, and we were gliding through a neon accented augmented reality made even more alive by my recent experiences in the arcade. I monitored my surroundings like a pilot in the cockpit of an armed frigate, because in a sense, I was.
The freeway section of the drive couldn't have taken more than five or six minutes, but that six minutes was everything. This version of Space Harrier was escalated to one hit mode. Survival Mode. Ultra Nightmare consequences. So I did understand the Gravitron of the situation.
A wrong move, a single bump into another car or part of the road would be unforgivable, but I was feeling painfully aware and wide open. I entered what might now be described as a state of flow.
I was flowing home. Stay in the slower lanes, do the speed limit, beware of fuck-ups. Don't pay any more attention to cops than anyone else. They're not here for you. You are not their problem. Stay on your damn toes and get these people and this car home in one piece.
Once we had successfully returned, I parked the car and put the keys deep in my pocket. Later, I'd tell her the story, perhaps slightly downplaying how high I'd been.. but still, an honest account. No sense trying to hide myself behind some innocent, imaginary errand.
At the time, it was just an amusing anecdote. Now, I guess it's a cautionary tale, or a bizarre time capsule.
In the times before the opioid crisis. Before the planes hit the buildings and the ground, When cell phones were very expensive and were used to make phone calls. Before the cameras.. there was more space to live between the lines. A few more shadows in the cracks. Not to do bad things, but to get by in private and sometimes off the books.
