Tucson is the setting for David Sheff’s first years at university and for an early convergence of college partying, drug experimentation, and intellectual rationalization. In the memoir, the city is more than a backdrop: its university culture gives David’s drug use a social setting, its desert supplies the landscape for a vivid psychedelic episode, and his eventual move to Berkeley establishes a contrast between leaving Tucson and leaving behind the habits and friendships associated with it.

University and social setting

After high school, David enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a city he describes as even closer to the U.S.-Mexico border than his earlier surroundings. His roommate, Charles, was from Manhattan and had a trust fund; Charles’s parents were dead, and David never learned exactly how they died, though alcohol and drugs were involved. Their household connected university life to a wider world of drinking and drug-taking that Charles pursued with a determination David initially found impressive.

David saw Tucson’s university as divided between two markedly different student cultures. One consisted of students who took college at least somewhat seriously; the other, which he says he attended, had been chosen by Playboy as one of the country’s top party schools. The distinction supplies a compact portrait of the atmosphere he remembers: academic life was available, but partying could function as an alternative campus identity rather than an occasional interruption. David calls himself an amateur beside Charles, whose drinking and drug use repeatedly took precedence over school and other obligations. After hangovers, Charles might resolve to do better, only for Champagne or margaritas to accompany a toast to his renewed diligence. The cycle of regret and renewed indulgence made self-correction seem part of the performance, not necessarily a lasting change.

The social world extended beyond the dormitory. Charles had friends from New York City who shared a pink adobe house on Speedway Boulevard, at the far end of Tucson from the university. They lacked trust funds, but had money for parties and steak dinners, which they earned by dealing frozen magic mushrooms smuggled from the Yucatán. The house links the college scene to a local geography of parties and drug commerce: the substances that circulated among students were not only private experiments but also commodities brought in and sold through social networks.

Psychedelics and the desert landscape

David and his friends encountered drug use through a framework that made it appear to be more than recreation. At the time, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels were popular on college campuses. The books presented a quasi-religious spiritual exploration involving psychotropic substances, including peyote, datura, and psilocybin mushrooms. David recalls that he and his friends used this material to interpret their own experiences with mushrooms and other psychedelics as intellectual inquiry rather than debauchery. That justification sat alongside a broad assortment of other substances: marijuana, Quaaludes, Jack Daniel’s, Jose Cuervo, cocaine, and assorted uppers and downers. The range matters to the memoir’s account of the period: experimentation was not confined to one drug or one carefully defined pursuit.

The red-rock high desert outside Tucson becomes the setting for David’s most striking account of a trip. He recalls watching a Mexican daisy transform into a man’s face, then seeing it and the surrounding flowers change into what seemed to be thousands of angels. Their murmuring appeared to offer an answer to the meaning of life; when David moved closer to hear, the voices gave way to subdued laughter, and the solemn faces became a field of laughing English muffins. The episode moves from apparent revelation to comic deflation without leaving the altered perceptions of the trip. Its desert setting gives the experience a concrete place in the memoir, while its abrupt turn from cosmic significance to absurdity complicates the idea that drug-taking had opened a reliable path to knowledge.

Later that night, after a full moon had risen low on the horizon, David considered whether ladders might make it possible to climb onto the moon, taking the idea from a book the group was reading in a literature class. He abandoned the plan when Charles announced it was time to go clubbing. The moment brings together the period’s literary and psychedelic imaginings with the ordinary pull of nightlife: an expansive idea gives way to the next social activity. Tucson’s landscape and university culture thus appear not as separate settings, but as parts of a life in which intellectual curiosity, intoxication, and partying could readily overlap.

Departure and retrospective significance

Later in the year, another road trip inspired by Hunter Thompson brought David and his companions to San Francisco. He remembers arriving on a pristine early evening, stopping on the city’s highest hill, and feeling the invigorating wind; after childhood in Arizona, he felt able to breathe for the first time. That encounter prompted him to apply to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley. Because his transcript had not yet been damaged, he was accepted and enrolled for the fall. He embraced his studies there, although drugs remained plentiful and cocaine and marijuana were common weekend choices. The move therefore changes David’s setting and academic direction without presenting drug use as something left behind with Tucson.

Tucson also remains connected to Charles after David’s transfer. David kept in touch with him and later describes Charles’s drinking and drug use as having escalated. He contrasts their habits: David might end a night at one or two in the morning because he had class, while Charles treated the evening as only beginning. The memoir later recounts a dangerous episode after Charles returned from a two-day bender: he had passed out in a bathroom, struck his head on the tile, and was found amid blood. David called an ambulance; a doctor warned Charles about his drinking, and Charles promised to stop but did not. The account does not establish that this incident occurred in Tucson, but it gives retrospective weight to the behavior David associates with their university years.

That retrospective perspective is essential to Tucson’s narrative role. David observes that drug stories can make adventure, escape, hangovers, and even emergency-room visits seem glamorous while omitting gradual deterioration, psychic trauma, and casualties. His memories of the party-school atmosphere and of his own experimentation therefore carry both the immediacy of youthful experience and the caution of later understanding. He eventually looks back on Charles’s escalating use with concern about Nic, making the Tucson friendship a point of comparison across generations. The city marks an early period when drug use could be dressed up as inquiry or folded into campus life; its importance lies not in a single decisive incident, but in the patterns and explanations that continued to resonate after David left.