"Dad!" I shouted. "You ALWAYS remember this incident!" A gray-haired woman playing two side-by-side slots close to where we stood glared at me for a moment before tossing in more coins and pulling the levers. "You had a big fight; your father hit you," I continued. "You've been telling me the same story at least once a year since I was a child."

"What are you talking about?" he barked, a tad defensively. "How could I have told you about it if I didn't remember it myself?"

"This time I'm going to make you write it down on a scrap of paper with today's date," I threatened. "I'll show it to you next year when you tell it to me again. If a therapy is effective, shouldn't you be able to deal with your childhood traumas and move on?"

"Well, of course," he responded. "So, what's your point?"

This tradition of father-son Vegas junkets began in 1982. On our first trip, Al was fidgeting with excitement from the moment we met at the airport gate. It wasn't until we arrived at our destination and were standing downtown amid the blinking glitz of Fremont Street that he revealed the reason for his enthusiasm.

"Have you ever heard of Timothy Leary?" he asked me, beaming.

"Well, of course."

"What do you mean, 'of course?'" He was incredulous; I had stolen his thunder. "Where did you ever hear of him?"

"Um, Dad? I grew up in the '60s and '70s. How could I not have heard of Timothy Leary?"

"Well," he dismissed me with a wave of his hand, "you probably don't know about the research he and his partner, Baba Ram Dass, did with LSD."

"Actually, I think Baba Ram Dass changed his name back to Richard Alpert and renounced all his former beliefs," I said.

"That must be someone else," replied my father. "You may not know this, but there are Tibetan monks who climb up to the tops of mountains where they live in isolation and meditate for years and years until they reach a state of enlightenment. Leary and Ram Dass discovered that LSD can be used as a shortcut to that enlightenment."

Thousands of blue light bulbs lit up one by one, sending a neon turquoise stripe coursing along a casino's block-long façade and ending at a rooftop star, which exploded with simulated sparks above my father's head.

"Oh, Dad, tell me you didn't drop acid when you were in California!"

He drew away from me. "Oh, no! LSD is illegal. I would never take LSD. But that's beside the point. The important thing is that LSD helps you use parts of your brain you don't normally use. It lets you go back and relive formative events in your life so you can reconcile them with your current problems and move on."

Despite his denial, I realized the obvious. He had indeed taken acid, and on the way back to our hotel the burden of his secret proved too much for him. "We had to go off the Esalen grounds because they would never allow it there," he told me.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.