Parthenon's OJ

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My friendship with Rick Miller, AKA Parthenon Huxley was cemented on a trip to Mykonos. Someone sold us some orange sunshine and we dropped it immediately. All of us except Rick, who was afraid, having never tried it. Who could blame him? Peter seemed to. Not that he didn't have some antagonism towards Rick anyway, but this seemed to put Rick further out on the fringes of our gang and proved to Pete that Rick was not truly "one of us." Chuck followed Pete's lead and Rick became the butt of their jokes all evening. I chose this particular evening to have my first bad trip and went through a silent hell, assuming that everyone knew what was going on inside my poor fragmented mind and never let on about my suffering. Hours later, when I had come down a little, my friends were shocked to find out that I had been having a bad trip. "I thought you were just being silently profound." said Peter.

We split up for awhile the next morning, still under the effect of the LSD. Peter and Chuck smelled something that reminded them of Aunt Jemima pancakes and were walking to town to find some. I was wandering around when I ran into Rick, eating breakfast at the little cafe on Paranga Beach. He wasn't in a very good mood and not particularly illuminating or even nice to me. It was obvious he wanted to be left alone with his breakfast so I went back to the cave that was our home, where Pete and Chuck had given up their pancake quest and were sitting on our stolen beach chairs. Rick's sacred container of orange juice was at their feet and they both had the same guilty expression.

"What did you do?" I asked them.

"Nothing!" they replied in quick unison. They sounded guilty of something. I looked at the orange juice sitting in the morning sun. I picked it up, opened and smelled it. It smelled terrible and I accused them of pissing in it. They vehemently denied it and told me I was crazy, but I spilled it out on the rocks anyway, just in case.

When Rick came back and looked for his juice they told him I had poured it out. I didn't have the heart to suggest that I suspected his two friends had urinated in his beloved orange juice so I took the blame for being a jerk. Rick stayed angry at me for the rest of the trip and it wasn't until twenty years had passed that I told him why I had spilled out his juice. I figured he could handle it by then.

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