>
> << I just had lunch with a friend today who was sure
>  the Thai iced tea he was drinking had peyote buttons in it. >>
>
> Call him him back and see if he is upchucking, a sure sign of peyote
buttons.
> I wondered where that mason jar I lost 25 years ago went to.
>
> ][<en

Hey, I've got a Times Square and peyote buttons story also.

About '66. Ate a bunch of buttons at my brother's apt. in a loft over the
porn house he managed up on 8th Ave. On my way downtown to meet my wife for
dinner the digestive effect of my snack hit me pretty hard, as did the
temporary rearrangement of my brain cells. I found myself standing on the
curb in front of the Apollo Theater (not the one on 125th St., the one on
42nd on the north side between 7th and 8th- showed reruns of "art house"
fare) puking up a substance the visual awfulness of would not be exceeded
for another thirty years, when special effects movies came into their own.
I was also sweating like I was God's sponge sent down to break his firm
covenant with Noah (the "no more water, fire next time" one).
All this caught the attention of a young beat cop who was not yet so hard
that he couldn't approach me with a little compassion. I mean, amazingly,
this guy didn't assume the worst. He cared.

The only trouble was that the full effect of the Peyote kicked in while I
was trying to reassure him that I was likely to survive. My speech was
probably becoming really strange and I'm sure that I was beginning to seem
as otherworldly to him as he  already seemed to me. His manner began to
stiffen a bit. The likelihood of being hauled to either Bellevue or jail
was beginning to seem inevitable to me. I tried real hard to pull myself
together and act "straight". Not surprisingly, this was all I needed  to
transform myself into a profound and unstoppable chuckling machine, which
at least had the effect of convincing him that I was not dying. I think
that he was just about to walk me politely to the nearest call box when he
was approached by some tourists complaining about the lewd behavior of
someone up the block. He must have found this a more interesting challenge
since, after asking for a final reassurance that I was all right, he
abandoned me to my fate.

Somehow I made my way down to the 7th Ave. downtown platform (subway to you
provincials) where a second but milder round of nausea hit. My response
this time attracted the attention of a Transit Cop who had no interest
whatsoever in my condition, or its cause, but promptly issued me a summons
for spitting in the subway.

Train came. Got downtown. What I saw with my inner eye on my way downtown
had a lot more to do with Tod Browning movies than with the Great Spirit,
though it did have a good deal to do with shape shifting.

Wife didn't talk to me for weeks.

By the way, Nik Cohn wrote a great book about Broadway and Times Square
called "The Heart of the World".

Bruce