Tripping on Acid with My Dad
By: Ahmed Kabil
Tags: Family, Lsd, Arab Spring, Acid, Egypt

Over the next four years, my brother and I visit my father in Berkeley on the weekends. The three of us often trip together.

Sometimes we’ll play ping-pong, my brother and I marveling at my dad’s capacity to consistently kick our asses. Sometimes we’ll watch his favorite Marlon Brando movies and Muhammad Ali fights, my dad pinching the air with his fingers after the delivery of a memorable line or right hook, eyes closed like he’s just sipped from an exquisite vintage. We’ll listen to corny Paul Anka tunes as my dad dances, and we’ll try to turn my dad on to the latest electronic music, to no avail. Sometimes we’ll play FIFA on the PlayStation, bursting into laughter as we attempt to maneuver through a green pitch that undulates into fractals. Sometimes we’ll walk down Berkeley streets, my father pointing to the vibrant colors of California poppies and Douglas irises.

My brother and Dad playing ping-pong.

Often, he’ll quite literally stop to smell the roses and whisper alhamdulillah (“praise to God”) under his breath.

Sometimes I’ll find myself deep in a trip, staring at my father walking gingerly into a room, his steps unsteady, and watch as he heaves a sigh and settles into his chair. My expanded aperture captures every detail. My father who once was superman is now simply a man growing old. Every detail rings out like the bell at the San Francisco Zen Center as it strikes against the worn wood, upon which painted words read: “Great is the matter of birth and death. All is impermanent, quickly passing. Wake up! Wake up, each one! Don’t waste this life.”

The best parts are the conversations we have when we’re tripping with our psyches laid bare. Timothy Leary once said he learned more about his mind from one mushroom trip than in the previous 15 years studying psychology. My brother and I learn more about my father and ourselves during these talks than in the preceding decades of long-distance calls and winter vacations.

We peel back the superficial layers of my claims that I find it hard to be intimate with those I date and reveal scars of childhood abuse — a legacy from the neighbor in Egypt who promised candy but provided instead the trauma that teaches a five-year-old that those who reach out are not to be trusted. We talk about the toxic axioms that we’ve been brought up to believe as heterosexual males, about the negative tendency to transmute the flowing, dynamic world into a world of objects to grab hold of. We work through how we might unlearn these ways of looking at the world.

My father talks me through my struggles with sobriety and issues the dictate that defines his faith (and, it should be noted, the third step of the 12-step program): Surrender.

We often circle back to this notion of surrender on these trips. It’s usually brought up in the context of my brother and I aspiring to achieve greatness, a pressure made all the stronger when we look at what my father has achieved. My brother asks what his secret is.

“It’s not the you who achieves these great things,” my dad says. “You are but an instrument of God’s symphony. Surrender your will to be an instrument of God.”

My father says that for him, love of self and love of God are one and the same. And everything follows from an unconditional love of self. I ask him how he’s learned to love himself unconditionally. He says it wasn’t a sudden thing but a gradual process determined by choices he made moment by moment. He says that this unconditional love spreads of its own accord to one’s children, and that there’s a way of acting with your kids that leaves no trace, a way of empowering their choices that resonates as true when you do it. You let go of what you want for them.

The nights end with my brother and me passing out in the living room and my father retreating to his bedroom. I often awaken to the creaking wood and murmurings that signal my father kneeling and bowing his head on his prayer rug—no doubt counting his blessings, surrendering.