That’s where I met those newlyweds who’ll be testifying after me—Dr. and Mrs. Patrick Scannell from Kosackie, Indiana. They were standing outside the Automat whispering to each other. When they saw I didn’t have the pop-eyed, zombie look, they fell all over me.

They’d come into New York late the night before and registered at a hotel. Being, you know, honeymooners, they hadn’t climbed out of the sack until almost two in the afternoon. That’s what saved them. Months before, when they’d been planning their honeymoon, they’d bought tickets to a Broadway show, a matinee, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and they’d charged out of the hotel room fast not to miss it. They’d run out without breakfast or anything, just a candy bar Mrs. Scannell was carrying in her purse.

And from the way they described it, that production of Macbeth was like nothing else anybody ever saw on land or sea. Four actors on the stage, only one of them in costume, all of them jabbering away in speeches from Macbeth, Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Oedipus Rex and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “It was like an anthology of the theater,” Mrs. Scannell said. “And not at all badly done. It hung together in a fascinating way, really.”

That reminds me. I understand a publishing house is bringing out a book of the poetry and prose written in New York City on this one crazy LSD day. It’s a book I sure as hell intend to buy.

But interesting or fascinating or what, that oddball show in a professional Broadway theater scared the pants off them. And the audience, what there was of it, scared them even more. They’d walked out and gone looking around, wondering who dropped the bomb.

I shared my soda with them, using up the last of the six-pack. And I told them how I’d figured out it was in the water. Right away. Dr. Scannell—he was a dentist, I found out, not a medical doctor—right away, he snapped his fingers and said, “Damn it—LSD!” I bet that makes him the first man in the country to guess it, right?