We drove from Columbus to the Adirondacks in a Cadillac owned by Jeff's dad during our senior year spring break. I'm in the bomber jacket standing next to Dan, Jeff right above him, and Mike is leaning on the back window. His family had the cabin that was our destination.

There was still a lot of snow in the Adirondacks in April (or May); we had to park the car on a plowed road about a quarter-mile from the cabin. At some point during the hike in from the road (especially difficult without snowshoes), the car keys were lost in the snow. The very next day a visiting friend making the same trek sank to his knees in the stuff and came up with the keys.

There was some drama on this trip, mostly provided by the two Mikes: me and Fogarty. We were determined to do some acid, and we had some tabs of windowpane. In Columbus this was primo dope: clean and powerful. I was expecting a lot and got it: a lot of hallucinating, for instance. I was mostly standing in front of the fireplace; any movement of any part of my body was a matter of serious consideration, as I was aware of each corpuscle travelling through increasingly narrower capillaries.

Tripping made me aware of how much day-to-day reality was a story my brain was telling me while it processed the gigabytes of sensory data incoming every second. It made me more sophisticated about how I perceived what was happening to me, about what my senses were telling me, and about how I was parsing the data.

Jeff and Dan were opposed to us taking the drug. They were worried about the effect it might have on our still developing brains. On a trip it was possible make a trauma, to trigger something that looked like a car crash to a brain. I've seen acid casualties; I've been with people who were having a bad trip (but never had one myself). But the Mikes figured most people taking the drug survived the experience, and we very much wanted the experience. The opposition ended up as watchers, there to help. Did we suffer damage? Who knows.

I was in our high school's production of The Music Man playing Harold Hill, a part I wanted more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. I'd seen the movie many times; it was a family tradition like The Wizard of Oz or Yankee Doodle Dandy. It was perfect for me and I knew every piece of how it was put together. I helped coach the women's group through Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little, knowing, as I did, minute details about how it should be done. Looking back I might have been annoying to everyone, but I was really trying not to be an asshole.

It was, of course, an unusually good high-school production, excellent in every part.

They gave me a $500 scholarship; my dad had connections at the local CBS affiliate and somebody there submitted my name. I always enjoyed making speeches; that helped me later when I started teaching.

I scanned a print to capture this image; it's massively damaged. I've rebuilt the faces but left the rest extant to show the original state. I don't care enough about the image to put in the hours it would take to rebuild it. And it would have to be rebuilt rather than restored, like the Ship of Theseus. Every pixel would be recreated. It would be inspired by the original image but ultimately a pixel-by-pixel recreation. Like they say in Hollywood, "based on a true story."

The closest we get to a sense of fate is our dorm assignment. And the roommate that accompanies it, naturally. In my case the roommate was gone after a couple months; he was an actor who laughed a lot and hung out with a group of friends from high school. They seemed very young and irritating; I was glad when they all moved out of my life and into another dorm. I had the place to myself for a few months but then was assigned a new roommate, a Cincinnati kid named Barry. He was an engineering major who hid his nerdiness well. Like all of us, he had committed to a second major in pot smoking. We got along fine, so well we spent the next few years living together.

In the long term the dorm assignment was far more significant than the roommate. I spent years believing it was just one floor of one dorm like all the other dorms in the world of 1971. Looking back and researching this a bit, I no longer believe that. For better or worse, the place was unique.

Charlie Manson in the dorm. I got my hair as long as possible as quickly as possible after graduating from that last Catholic school. Because of the dress code I was always the guy with the shortest hair in the band. I was also the bass guitarist, so my live appearances were mostly anonymous. I played a dance for my own high school once and asked a girl in the audience how she liked my band. "Oh, that's your band?"