We‘re in a flying saucer kitchen and Yardley’s stirring instant coffee in a mug with spatters and spray glazed in. He offers his palm to show us three doses of LSD, three sugar cubes, each with a stain on it like a spot from tea.
          “Just be prepared to feel as if you’re on another planet but you aren’t.” And he sips coffee. “All the earth rules apply, and I mean especially gravity, but also time--”
          “Apparently,” Joe tells me, “time can stretch or freeze.”
          “Remember , nothing bad can happen. That’s all. Okay? Bon voyage.” So we take the LSD but out of the hall comes a bent woman. She is a gnome in a housecoat and puffed pink hair.
          “This is my mother’s mother, Maxine Small. Mee-maw.”
Can you believe the aptness of this surname? But I say, “Hello, Mee-maw.”
          Yardley and Maxine Small light cigarettes from a paper match. Nothing happens for a long time as we all sit in a Bauhaus living room with crane neck lamps bowed over looking at us.
          Two weeks before at a drive-in movie of The Haunting, this girl allowed me to touch her through her underpants and my memory visits that now and stays. Giant screen alight in black cornfields, and the girl in a dress, and her softest part. Mosquitoes eddy. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom sprayed across stars.
          Here in the NOW, Maxine Small is seeing me, squinting as if she knows how dirty my thoughts go.
          Nothing changes.
          Actually, though, I notice, she is getting sadder looking. Sadder and moreso until she seems tragic, her old life written on her small face and you can see her scalp through her thin hair and so what?
          The highlight of LSD, I see a balding woman sad? Because nothing happens for almost an hour until I am thinking, This stuff is like everything else, (Cinerama, how wine tastes, the all-butter cow at the state fair), a disappointment. Maxine Small’s throat inflates like a Cuban lizard, a huge red balloon, then deflates.

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