Unable to discern faces, my perception dissolved by strong drugs, I feel as if we have been assigned new roles. Pat is a stern mother interested in the social development of her unpopular daughter, Bev. I am a pair of cigarette-scorched lungs and a bladder full of beer attached to a curved spinal cord.

Eighteen-year-old Edgar Donahoe works as an orderly in Lemon Acres nursing home. It's not exactly his dream job, but then he has other things to keep him sane - though perhaps that's not the right word - in his free time: a blissful new romance with Norma Padgett, for example, and the corresponding need to extract himself from his sordid affair with Chula, a married Mexican nurse with a frightening husband. And there's big, brawling Pat Fillmore, his best friend and boon companion. Pat shares Edgar's fondness for drink, drugs, parties and trouble. And trouble is just what they get one fateful night when they succeed in persuading gentle, quiet Beverley, the oldest-serving and most conscientious nurse at Lemon Acres, to try LSD for the first time…