May 24, 2001 | 3:38 p.m.

Five friends on a Saturday afternoon, sprawling on astroturf at the Central Park Summerstage. Two in enormous sunglasses. Me in a skirt and tank top, trying to sit comfortably without being indecent. One with a little foil package of white pills. I look at them suspiciously, but another tells me they're fine, they're safe, just have one and one drink and all will be well.

I trust her.

:: click ::

Later. The two boys have stolen cans of beer from an unattentive vendor and I am leading a ragtag crew across the Park to Belvedere Castle, where we climb out on the rocks overhanging the lake and pop the cans of Heineken and Amstel Light. Fat raindrops hit here and there but it never really pours on us, just patters and departs. We talk about Shakespeare in the Park, about summer evenings outdoors, about everything and nothing. The dark spots where the water hits the rocks fascinate me, with their total lack of patterns. Bryant's white sunglasses make me laugh. He hands me another pill and we all sit in silence for awhile, watching the baseball fields, watching the sky.

:: click ::

We argue over the King of Poland statue. No one can quite read the olde-tyme letters and it doens't look like it really says Poland. I stare up at the man on the horse, at least ten feet up on a huge slab of marble, and tell everyone else that I want to climb up there. They laugh, of course. They know I mean it, but they know I can't do it all the same. I just want to sit on the horse. Why make a statue that tall and inviting and then put it so far above the ground?

I think to myself that I will come back and figure out how to scale it.

:: click ::

The Diana Ross Playground. We can't believe it's real but the sign is there to prove it. We run across bridges and swing from bars and wonder if we can fit our twentysomething asses in the baby swings.

There is a water fountain and I'm getting the hiccups so I drink madly from it.

The Caterpillar hands me another pill.

:: click ::

Alice in Wonderland. Sitting on the mushroom; the caterpillar is nowhere in sight but that's just as well as we're quite altered already. The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, everyone is there, and we wind in and around the statue, laughing, skipping, reading the quotes ("And beat him when he sneezes!") engraved in the stone. We have a lengthy debate about whether this is Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass as there is a now-dry reflecting pool down a few steps of stone. Alice is in a circle, ringed by benches, and it must be later than we thought because there is no one else around. There is room enough for all of us to sit in Alice's lap, on her mushroom, clinging to her companions. We have no idea where we are, but we find a deli, buy more beer, and return to Alice, not capable of worrying whether or not some bored policeman might decide to ticket us for drinking in public.

:: click ::

Time is irrelevant. Bryant and I are in Alice's lap and everyone else is somewhere nearby, somewhere in our foggyclear world. I've lost track of how many pills I've taken but it's definitely enough to have made me large and then small again more than once. From where we are perched I can see taillights on the street but I don't know if we're on the east or west side of the park, just that they are heading away, that they seem far and faint through the trees, sparkling through a curtain. Someone realizes we meant to go back downtown to a show, and somehow we're moving, finding a subway, making our way to Brownies, though no one ever remembered for certain how we got there or if we stopped for food on the way.

:: click ::

I am wavering, standing barely upright at the show, and Tony is asking if I'm ok. I think it's all I can do to grin in response. We get mad that beer costs what it usually costs there and Bryant goes out for a forty. Through the fog in my eyes I know I am sitting on a videogame, swigging from the bottle and passing it back, and laughing, but I can't really see things the way they are and so my powers of description are reduced. The rest of the story, of the slide show, has been told to me, and I know it like I wasn't even there. The bartender got mad and yelled at us. Bryant walked me to the door of my building. I woke up the next day in my pajamas with no recollection of much beyond a last gulp of beer.

:: click ::

Summer 2000. A first time for a lot of things.