> > << 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