By the time the sun had set on that Fall day, I was beginning to feel the effects of the acid. Consequently, when I got to the Queens College student union building I was flying high as a result of the acid.
Although I was able to find the unmarked back entrance door to the student union building that Barry had mentioned, a Queens College women student with a walkie-talkie, whose work-study job was apparently to patrol the student union building's stairwells, coincidentally, was walking down the stairs in the hallway near the back entrance of the student union building at the exact moment when I made my entrance.
"Let me see your I.D.!," she called out to me immediately after she spotted me while, at the same time, walking towards me quickly in order to block me from going down the stairs to the basement cafe.
Surprised by being spotted so unluckily, despite Barry's promise earlier that day, that there was no unforeseen difficulty in getting into the student union building by the unmarked back entrance, and being so high that I wasn't as quick-thinking as I might otherwise have been, all I could think of doing was to smile sheepishly and whisper to the woman student patrol monitor, "I''m a friend of one of the security guards and he told me I could use this back door to come into the building."
"You say you're a friend of one of the security guards and he said you could use this entrance to sneak in?" the woman student patrol monitor asked in a suspicious voice. "What's your friend's name?"
At that point, however, I suddenly realized that I'd better try to bring myself down quickly from the acid before I got Barry into trouble and possibly cost him the weekend job that he liked so much. And I somehow managed to start retracting my story about "my friend" telling "me I could use this back door to come into the building," by answering "I was just putting you on. So why don't I just leave now, since I don't have a student I.D.? And we can forget the whole thing."
The woman student stairwell patrol monitor, however, was apparently still suspicious and, blocking me from leaving the building through the same door through which I had entered, she said "Why don't you just wait a minute, while I call my supervisor?"
She then spoke a few words through her walkie-talkie and, a few minutes later, an African-American man in his late 20's, who was dressed in a mod way, appeared.
"Now why don't you tell him what you told me about how you got into the building without showing a student I.D.?" the woman student patrol monitor said.
Thinking quickly, I winked at the African-American man and said: "Look, brother. I'm too high to recall how I stumbled into this building. You know what I mean. But now that I know you need a student I.D. to get into the building on Saturday night, I promise I'll never try sneaking in here again."
The African-American supervisor laughed and replied: "Well, we'll let you go now, brother. But if we ever catch you inside here again without a student I.D., we might have to just call the police to take you away."
"Thanks a lot, brother," I said in a grateful tone as the student parole monitor and her supervisor led me to the exit door through which I left the building.
Once outside the Queens College Student Union building I breathed a sigh of relief that I was able to retreat from the building without apparently costing Barry his job. And by the time Barry returned from his security guard job around midnight to the Jamaica basement apartment, I was asleep. The next day, however, Barry asked: "What happened to you? I though I'd be seeing you in the basement cafe last night?"
Laughing, I replied: "I was on acid and it turned out I couldn't find the back entrance door. So I ended up just coming back here early and listening to music until I started to fall asleep.".
