Psychedelic Beef

When I was in my early twenties I had a meal which launched me toward a big decision. Details of the meal have faded, but I always refer to it as life-changing.
The meal occurred during my three “gap” years away from college. My friend Fred and I had gone to the Cape in the summer after my junior year and we discovered Provincetown. After going back to college for one more semester, I returned alone to Ptown, and wound up staying. Fred was called Frisco Fred because he had dropped out and traveled to San Francisco to frolic in Haight Ashbury. Fred was very experienced in the use of psychedelic drugs and I was partly attracted to him because of his hip reputation. He had a big bushy black beard, long hair and looked older and wiser, though he was just two years older.
One hot day that summer, Fred and I dropped LSD (acid) out at Race Point Beach. It was a good trip, as we were fond of saying, but all I remember is sitting in the sand next to Fred and gazing transfixed at the ocean and eating lots of peanuts in the shell. Fred and I remained friends for years, until he became a follower of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a high lama who helped bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West.
Two years after Race Point, David, with whom I became friends in junior high, and who was either finishing up at Columbia or had just graduated, invited me to a dinner party being held in an apartment located a few blocks into Harlem. I was in the city to visit David and other friends, but was staying with Fred, who had a railroad flat next door to a men’s shelter in the Lower East Side. When leaving or returning to Fred’s place, I often encountered hobos and drunks sitting on nearby stoops or sleeping in sheltered doorways or alleys. They seemed harmless, but sometimes their semi-coherent attempts at communication could sound like threats or demands for sex. I mention this because I was determined to experience New York with psychedelically enhanced senses and it seemed brilliant and hip to take some LSD and then travel through the city to the dinner party in Harlem. I had by then taken more than a few acid trips, including a monumental excursion at the Woodstock Festival, so I was confident about my ability to handle the drug and to deal with anything (or anybody) I might encounter.
I have memories of leaving Fred’s apartment and viewing the street people in the Lower East Side with a kind of elevated, philosophic detachment. My trek uptown was uneventful and, even riding the crowded subway, I was able to restrain myself from dancing in the car to music only I heard. Once I exited the subway in Harlem, the evidence of rampant poverty and littered streets could have been a downer, but I took it all in with the same “groovy” attitude.
David was the only person I knew at the party, but because acid tended to made me feel good, I know I was unusually garrulous and social. I didn’t tell anyone I was tripping, but, in hindsight, I’m pretty sure my over-the-top, laugh-at-anything behavior tipped my hand. Other guests were smoking pot, but I knew I was the highest person there. In those days, that distinction was occasionally important.
After a hang-out, socializing hour or so, we were called to the table, which was long and narrow. At least eight people were seated. The food dishes were brought out, with the main entrée being a large roast beef. In those days, I was as eager to eat meat as anyone. Growing up, my family had a typical American, middle-class, meat-centric diet and, after I left home for college and later, working as a cook in Provincetown, I ate anything and everything.
At the dinner party, everyone was loading their plates with side dishes, but no one had stepped up to slice the beef. I must have looked especially spaced out, because someone said, in a teasing tone, “Hey, Rachel, think you can do the carving?”
To this day, I remember the question made me feel queasy, even as I took the carving knife and fork in my hands. Some part of me was definitely reluctant to do something which had heretofore been ordinary. But, I figured I was so high it was because didn't want to do anything functional. So I giggled and put knife to flesh.
However, I had no more than cut off the first slice and seen the red blood dripping than I flashed into a very realistic, 3D vision of the cow from whom this meat had come. It was as if the living bovine was standing in front of me, looking at me with its big brown eyes, while I stabbed it with the knife and fork.
I don’t remember much of what happened after the vision. I’d like to say I refused to finish the carving and also refused to eat any of the beef, but that would be wishful and speculative. Knowing how goofy I was in those days, I probably shrugged off the cow vision as just another interesting hallucination.
Unlike many other acid-fueled experiences, the cow stayed with me and, in the months that followed, I began to consider vegetarianism. Finally, when I was 24, I committed to stop eating meat, especially beef. I tried Macrobiotics for several years and brown rice became the mainstay of my diet, though for years I could still talk myself into occasionally eating fish or chicken.
In the 45 years since that memorable meal, I have remained a vegetarian and was even, for several years in my 30s, a complete vegan (no food from animals, not even eggs or cheese). I acknowledge and support the many other good reasons for not eating animals, but to this day I still see that bloody cow I see when I walk through the meat section in a supermarket or watch people eat rare steaks.