The First Trip

​How did I end up suffering in 40c heat on a dilapidated charabanc in Kos while still wearing the same clothes I had on when I went to the pub in Manchester the night before? The answer is quite simple really: My housemate Baz accidentally bought 200 tabs of acid.

Yep. That’ll do it.

He’d recently broken up with his long term girlfriend and he hadn’t taken it well. If he were older you’d say he was going through some sort of mid-life crisis, but given his age it was just a normal, everyday, run of the mill crisis. The sort of crisis that made him want to get drunk every night, experiment with drugs, that sort of thing. 

Some people might’ve staged an intervention, but we didn’t play those games in the north of England back in the 90s. I just let him get on with it and went along for the ride. One day he tells me that he’s decided to try acid. There’s a guy he works with who knows a guy who can hook him up. ‘Go for it’ I said ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’

The Friday of that week rolled around. It was payday and I had the following week off, and I asked Baz if he was coming to the pub. ‘I’ll be along later’ he said ‘my acid guy is coming.’ So I left him to it and went out. In the pub I met Mark, who also had the following week off work, and it transpired that neither of us had made any plans. I had an idea.

‘Why don’t we go somewhere?’ I asked. ‘Get the train, go to a place we’ve never been.’

‘OK. Where though?’

‘Scotland?’

‘Nah, too cold.’

‘Newquay?’

‘Too far.’

‘London?’

‘Full of cockneys.’

Eventually we realised that we needn’t be limited by the British rail network, we both had passports and could go literally anywhere in the world.

‘I have an idea’ said Mark, ‘what if we go to the travel agent when it opens tomorrow morning, with our bags packed, and get the next available package holiday?’

‘Great idea. I’m in.’

So Mark went home to pack and I stayed in the pub, waiting for Baz, but Baz never came. After last orders I made my way back home, slightly the worse for wear, and walked in to find Baz sitting on the couch with a troubled look on his face, staring at a piece of paper on the coffee table. I thought he must’ve opened a letter which contained bad news: A dead relative, or a court summons, something like that.

I took a closer look. 

It wasn’t a letter.

It looked like a sheet of miniature postage stamps, each one decorated with a tiny picture of a strawberry.

‘What the fuck Baz? You said you wanted to try it, not corner the fucking market!’

Here’s what he told me:

The Housemate’s Tale

“I was talking to this guy in work about acid and he said his mate was a dealer, so I’m like ‘no way, I want to try acid, if I give you some money can you get me a couple of tabs?’ and he says ‘nah mate, I’m not getting involved. I’ll give him your phone number and get him to bell you.’ So that night the phone rings and it’s him, the dealer, and he’s like ‘I heard you want to buy’ and I go ‘yeah, but what’s the price’ and he says ‘if you want one they’re £1.50 each, but if you buy two I can give them to you for £1’ so I go ‘yeah, fuck it, give us two’ and we arranged for him to come over tonight. When he gets here he hands me this sheet and I’m like ‘how many’s that?’ and he goes ‘200, like we agreed’ and I realised I’d fucked up but it was too late. Luckily I’d been to the bank earlier and drawn out the rent money because all I had in my pocket was the £2 I thought I was paying.”

So now there were two of us staring at enough acid to kill an elephant, both wondering what to do with it. The sensible thing would probably have been to keep the two tabs that Baz had planned on buying before becoming an accidental kingpin, and throw the rest away, but it was too valuable. So, we decided to put the feelers out, see if anyone was interested in buying them. For all we knew we were on the cusp of another summer of love and Baz was sitting on a goldmine.

‘Of course, if we’re going to sell them’ I mused ‘we need to know what we’re selling. You know, like, quality control.’

Baz agreed, then ripped off two squares from the sheet, put one on his tongue and handed one to me which I duly swallowed. Thirty minutes later, we’re still sitting there and absolutely nothing is happening. ‘Maybe they’re not very strong’ I said ‘after all, they’re tiny.’ So Baz ripped another two squares off the sheet.

The moment I swallowed the second one I knew that I’d made a huge mistake.

Suddenly everything looked funny. Like, hilariously funny. The wallpaper, the curtains, the furniture. There was nothing that didn’t make us laugh. Baz thought it would be great to watch some stand-up comedy, but somehow that wasn’t funny. Lee Evans looked like a grotesque caricature, Jack Dee was a robot and Billy Connolly’s face turned yellow and seemed to protrude from the TV screen.

We turned the TV off, it was getting too weird, and I suddenly remembered the fireworks that we’d bought for New Year but had forgotten to use. I checked the cupboard under the stairs and they were still there, so we went out onto a nearby school field and started letting them off. It was amazing. Each exploding rocket created a kaleidoscope of colour in the sky, then we noticed the sky itself. I could see the entire universe, all of it, the whole coruscating firmament performing a celestial ballet. 

Soon the first fingers of daylight began to lift the veil of night, and the sky gradually filled with colour. Pinks and purples emanated from the horizon, clouds began to gather and I could make shapes and forms appear in them at will. Then the clouds got darker, heavier, and raindrops the size of apples began to fall. We ran back home. Baz went to bed, but my mind was racing so I sat down, tried to relax, until ‘bang bang bang.’ 

Someone was knocking on the door.

‘Bang bang bang’ Panic was rising. What if someone saw us with the fireworks and called the police? What if they know about the acid and they’re doing a dawn raid? All of this was flying around in my brain then I heard ‘Woz, it’s Mark, are you in there?’

Fuuuck! I’d forgotten all about Mark and our holiday plan.

I let him in and he said ‘Are you alright? You look a bit pale’ and I was like ‘yeah, sound mate, just didn’t sleep all that well.’ Obviously I wasn’t ready, so I grabbed my wallet and my passport, emptied the contents of my gym bag onto my bed and stuffed it with some clothes that happened to be on a drying rack. ‘Right. Let’s go’ I announced.

Mark was dumbfounded. 

‘Is that all you’re bringing?’

‘Yeah, you know me, I like to travel light’ I lied, I just wasn’t in any fit state to make complicated decisions. 

We went to the travel agent where Mark did the talking, which was probably for the best as I could barely string a coherent sentence together. I just stared at the undulating pattern in the carpet. The next thing I remember is getting into a taxi. How I made it through airport security is anyone’s guess, because after the taxi there is nothing, no memories, just a void, until I woke up on a runway in Kos.

https://wozbridge.blogspot.com/2026/05/greek-trip.html