It was a February night in Prague, and we were in a neighbourhood called Újezd, sitting on a bench atop a hill, when Richard handed me the small tab of pink paper.

It was a very strange area. Next to us was a cement staircase, which led nowhere, and on the top few steps, stood several life-sized, emaciated, and entirely black sculptures; they all appeared to be models of the same man. A few were missing body parts or patches of skin, revealing their hollow interiors. Some kind of modern art piece.

Richard and I sat overlooking that little bit of the city. The streetlamps cast the cobblestone streets in an incandescent yellow hue. The air was cool and dry. The night was quiet. We sipped at our cans of beer.

Richard placed his tab directly on his tongue and then washed it down with a sip of beer. I followed his lead.

“You’re sure it’s ok to drink while taking this?” I asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, I mean, couldn’t you have some kind of adverse reaction from mixing with alcohol?”

He shrugged. “You’ll just be high and drunk instead of just high.” He zipped up his jacket. “It’s starting to get a little chilly. Do you mind if we step inside somewhere?”

“Yeah sure.”

Richard was my Moses leading me through the red sea. He had done acid before and knew what it was like. As long as he was there to guide the way I felt I would be alright. So I followed blindly in his stead.

We eventually found ourselves in Klub Újezd. It was a bar we’d been to many times before, and it looked just as you’d imagine an old European bar would: a low and vaulted stone ceiling abbreviating the room, wooden tables and stools around the bar, and the same incandescent yellow lighting as the streetlamps outside so you unconsciously felt that the Prague streets continued into the bar. It always smelled of Czech beer and cigarettes.

We sat at a table in the corner, because it felt safer, and the paranoia was beginning to set in. Richard graciously offered to buy the first round. I was relieved that I would not have to speak to the attractive woman tending the bar. I was worried my pupils were dilated and if she saw them, she might give me a strange look. A strange look would have devastated me in that moment.

I was extremely nervous that any minute now the LSD was really going to kick in. Everything I’d heard about acid terrified me. It was literally synonymous with insanity. People said, “are you on acid?” when they wanted to illustrate how insane you were being. Was I going to cross into some kind of new and unfathomable dimension like at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

But that big “tripping balls” moment never came. Instead, all that I really noticed was that I felt more awake and had a greater willingness to laugh.

As Richard and I nursed our beers, talking about God knows what, he suddenly said, “Hey Jackson, look at that guy at the bar.”

“Which guy?”

“You’ll know.”

I scanned the bar. There were a few women in their forties, a couple younger men—and then I saw him. One man, bald and probably around forty, sat at the bar apparently talking to the woman next to him. However, the woman to whom he was speaking was completely turned away from him and fully immersed in a conversation with another woman. But despite the fact that she was looking in the opposite direction, he steadily continued talking to her, as if she were positively engrossed in what he had to say—and he was smiling while he did it.

“I see him.” And then I started laughing, and soon found that I couldn’t stop. My laughter became so contagious that Richard couldn’t help but join in too. And from that moment forward everything we said was punctuated with laughter. The tightness in my chest, that I usually referred to as “anxiety,” had suddenly been transformed into a good feeling: pure and unabashed laughter.

“Look at the eyes—” Richard laughed. The man’s eyes were completely directionless and vacant.

“Oh man he must just be completely blacked out—” laughter.

“I’ve been there too man—”

“Why the hell is he so confident? She hasn’t looked at him once—”

“Just pure game. He’s killing it—”

“Oh man, why is this so funny? He’s just some blackout drunk guy—"

“For me it’s the cocksure grin.”

And this is what made me double over, tears streaming from my eyes. When I finally found the breath to speak, I said, “That’s the perfect way to phrase it: a ‘cocksure grin.’” The man had this cartoonishly mischievous, arrogant—I’m just trying to come up with synonyms here, but this one word describes it perfectly, in all its implications—and cocksure grin on his face.

I couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s the implication of it. He thinks he’s doing so well. That grin says, ‘Yup, she knows. She knows what’s gonna happen tonight. Yup, she knows.’ Meanwhile she hasn’t even glanced in his direction all night.’”

By this point both Richard and I were doubled over laughing. Every time one of us looked back over at him, still talking to the back of her head, and still maintaining that cocksure grin on his face, we burst out laughing again.

“Holy fuck man.” I wiped the tears from my eyes and Richard did the same.

“Ah Jackson, you’re great.”

 “You’re great too man.”

This was so great. Together we had constructed this impossibly funny narrative out of thin air. The situation was inherently funny to begin with, but applying the word “cocksure” to it, as well as describing what he’s thinking, brought the funniness to dangerous heights. I was nearly hyperventilating I was laughing so hard. 

Suddenly the man got up and seemed to recognize us—although it was hard to tell, because both his eyes pointed at the wall behind us—so we did our best to muffle our laughter. The man approached us, beer in hand, and began speaking to us enthusiastically in Czech.

“Sorry mate,” Richard said. “We don’t speak Czech.” He was doing his best to keep a straight face.

The man paused for a moment, and then continued, with renewed enthusiasm, speaking to us in Czech.

“Yup, still don’t speak Czech,” Richard said, and we both died laughing again.

To get away from the man, who had soon become an annoyance, we went outside for a cigarette, and that was where we saw the woman whom the man had been trying to talk to. We said hello, and Richard gave her a cigarette and a light.

“Do you know that man at the bar?” I asked.

“Sorry my English is not so good.”

“The drunk guy at the bar, do you know him?”

“Oh him? Yes, he is crazy man. He come from rich family and always come to this bar and get drunk and crazy. One time he gets so drunk he says to me ‘I kill you and your whole family.’” Despite the severity of this, she sounded a little smug about the attention she was receiving from both him and now us two young men. “He is real asshole but nobody cares about him. We just ignore.”

I suddenly felt bad for laughing. We could have tried to intervene and help this lady—but I also felt bad for the guy. Nobody cares about him. What a sad, sad thing to say about someone. And there we were laughing at him. Of course, we didn’t have much of a choice. We were on drugs and he was being extremely funny, but now his behaviour seemed to take on a certain poignancy.

When Richard and I returned to the bar, the woman and the cocksure man had returned to their places and respective roles. The man continued his monologue, and the woman continued ignoring.

“Man.” Richard shook his head; the humour suddenly lost on him. “That must be one of the seven corners of hell, being trapped in a bar where you can speak as much as you like but no one can hear you. And yet he keeps trying.”

The man continued to speak to the back of that woman’s head, and she continued to speak with her friend. She didn’t even appear to be ignoring him; that would imply some kind of reaction on her part, but there was none. It simply looked as though she didn’t know he was there. The man talked on.

Jackson Mattocks is a writer and academic from Winnipeg, Canada pursuing a PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. He holds an MA from Dalhousie University and has published academically in The Rising Asia Journal and the Cairo Studies in English Journal.