Millbrook A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism By Art Kleps Chief Boo Hoo of The Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church Copyright © 1975, 1977, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998 by Arthur J. Kleps, the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church Revised and republished copyright © 2005 by the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church Library of Congress cataloging information: (1) Millbrook (2) Kleps, Arthur (3) Neo-American Church (4) LSD (5) solipsistic nihilism (6) Leary, Timothy Francis ISBN 0-9600388-6-8 Regular mail and book orders: OKNeoAC c/o NeoACT, Box 3473, Austin, TX 78764 Phone or fax (512) 443-8464; inquiries@okneoac.com The Boo Hoo Bible of 1971 (ISBN 0-9600388-1-7): $35. We pay postage and handling costs in the U.S. Make checks payable to OKNeoAC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations, without permission in writing from the regnant monarch of the OKNeoAC, as that person and organization are defined in the most current writings of the chief boo hoo. This book is dedicated to everyone who helped liberate the working people of Tibet from the oppressive tyranny of the Dalai Lama. Thanks to Michael Green and Patrick Wing for art. Portions of this book that we have uploaded to the Internet may be downloaded and copied for personal use, but all commercial use of such material is prohibited. All words mean whatever the chief boo hoo says they mean. For example, when I refer to "sense impressions," or to "appearances," or employ other conventional terms of the kind, I mean "phantasiai" as that term was used by Sextus Empiricus. CONTENTS PREFACE 1990: The author's well-deserved reputation among persons of good will and sound mind is briefly described by the Archon of Alaska. A WORD OF EXPLANATION 1968: Timothy Leary threatens to "go over to Tommy's side" if he doesn't get Maynard Ferguson's furniture back from the Buddha of the Future. Chapter 1 CAMELOT 1963: JFK is assassinated. William and Thomas Mellon Hitchcock finance and promote Psychedelianism on their 2,500-acre estate at Millbrook, New York. Teenage queens fail to behave in a manner to which the author has become accustomed. Chapter 2 KING ARTHUR'S COURT 1960: Patchogue, Long Island. The author, in his fifth year as a school and clinical psychologist, takes half a gram of mescaline sulfate, with the usual consequences. Chapter 3 KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND 1963: First visit to the Mellon Hitchcock estate. IFIF. The Castalia Foundation. _The Tibetan Book of the Dead_. Drs. Leary, Metzner and Alpert, and the supporting cast of the early days. A professor of art from Cornell loses track of which side is which. Chapter 4 SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST 1964: Cambridge. IFIF. Lisa Bieberman. _The Psychedelic Review_. A eulogy for Aldous Huxley. The author gets stoned and loaded with Alan Watts. Chapter 5 AN INSPIRATION Easter vacation at Millbrook. Lost in a meditation closet. Chapter 6 THE ECLIPSE Solipsism and synchronicity. Enlightenment is a gas. Ideas of reference are where it's at. Chapter 7 MERLIN'S TOWER Dick Alpert's photos of co-educational shit-ins. A trip with Tim aborted by Susans who think I'm bananas. Did Herman Hesse smoke edelweiss or what? Chapter 8 THE BOSS A candle explodes, threatening universal urination. The Zmms; Snazzm, Fazzm and McPozzm are introduced and defined. William Mellon Hitchcock hopes to use LSD to make more money on the stock market. Tim says the author is having a bad trip. Chapter 9 THE TOURNAMENT Fired by a Person person. The hidden hand at work. A visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A refusal to love shit, despite Tim's glowing recommendation. Chapter 10 BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION Morning Glory Lodge on Cranberry Lake. The Neo-American Church, foundation and former and present doctrines and practices of. Peyote to the people. Chapter 11 THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURE Millbrook. Tim's in Nepal with a Swedish model of aristocratic lineage. The author finds it hard to believe that "Poughkeepsie" means "Place of Overflowing Shitholes" in the language of the Iroquois. Hollingshead twirls. Ralph pulls out joints. The author reads a sermon on digestion to paying visitors in bed sheets. A Psychedelian PTA meeting. Chapter 12 SLOW TORTURE Millbrook. Bombed with 1,000 mics. The Kundalini experience. Chapter 13 FREEMEN! 1965-66: Summer at Cranberry Lake. Winter in Miami. Back to the lake. Visitors, including Jack Kerouac, appear for sugar cubes and conversation. In Texas, a Sado-Judeo-Paulinian (these people are not "Christians") punishment freak sentences Tim to thirty years in prison because hemp was discovered in his daughter's pants. Chapter 14 "DEFEND THEE, LORD!" Fun and games in the palaces of the ruling Sado-Judeo-Paulinian serial killers and mass murderers of Washington, D.C. A territorial dispute with a hireling of the American Medical Association, who has a point, sort of. Chapter 15 SANDY'S TALE Meat Hook Baird, M.D., tells the Senate of the United States that acid heads are skinny, bespectacled, hedonistic runts with covert and overt homosexual conflicts, pugnacious noses, receding chins and marked "gratification complexes." The author, front page news, causes Bobby Kennedy to foam at the mouth. Chapter 16 MORGAN LE FAY Stabbed in the back on the home front. Chapter 17 A ROYAL BANQUET Marijuana goddesses galore. Bill Haines and the Sri Ram Ashrama are introduced to Timothy Leary and the League for Spiritual Discovery. Hired by a funny farm in New Jersey, but there are blackbirds on the left. Chapter 18 IN THE QUEEN'S DUNGEONS Really stabbed in the back on the home front. Billy Hitchcock tries to help, but Tim thinks I should go to Alabama. Chapter 19 KNIGHT-ERRANTRY AS A TRADE The author, a cockeyed optimist, finds something good to say about delirium tremens. Chapter 20 THE OGRE'S CASTLE How not to live over a white-lightning run. Jailed in Florida. Back to Millbrook. You're as good a man as I am, Bali Ram. Chapter 21 THE PILGRIMS January, 1967: Tim's in California. Haines is in charge of the Big House. All present are accounted for. The author recovers. Chapter 22 THE HOLY FOUNTAIN Under the benign tyranny of William Haines, a.k.a. "Sri Sankara," a fun time is had in the Big House by Leaguers and Ashramites alike. Chapter 23 RESTORATION OF THE FOUNTAIN Bob Ross, goat lover vs. the author and Otto H. Baron von Albenesius, sheep herders. Chapter 24 A RIVAL MAGICIAN A crazed dentist disgraces the Neo-American Church on the West Coast, but the author excommunicates the rotten bastard. A sociable trip in the Meditation House. Chapter 25 A COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION Tim decides to return, despite a deal he made with the despots of the Place of Overflowing Shitholes to never do so. He demands that we evict Rudy and Jackie first. Chapter 26 THE FIRST NEWSPAPER They are driven forth and the author gets their room. _The Bombardment and Annihilation of the Planet Saturn_ and _Divine Toad Sweat: Bloated House Organ of the Church._ The_ Mysterium Tremendum_ on $5 a day. Chapter 27 THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL INCOGNITO The view from that room was lovely when snow was falling, a hushed surround both brilliant and subdued, which, for all its detail, gave little hint of what century or country we were in. Chapter 28 DRILLING THE KING Barefoot Michael Green, Bill Haines and the author are invited to the Bungalow for drinks. Then Bali Ram (shod in gold slippers), Bill Haines and the author are invited to the Bungalow for a trip. Chapter 29 THE SMALLPOX HUT Suzanne and Aurora are fixing the drinks? Chapter 30 THE TRAGEDY OF THE MANOR HOUSE "The needle leaked. Tee hee." Oh well, in for a dime, in for a dollar. Chapter 31 MARCO Holy shit! Chapter 32 DOWLEY'S HUMILIATION "What do you think this is, Sham? The Calcutta bazaar?" Wendy's offer to strip is accepted, on a trial basis. Chapter 33 SIXTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY Tim returns, but too late. Things have changed. Is "Victory Over Horseshit!" a "gentle love message"? Does Tim have enough clout with the Hitchcocks to evict the Ashram? No, to both questions. Chapter 34 THE YANKEE AND THE KING SOLD AS SLAVES Peggy Hitchcock throws a "psychedelic seder" at her town house in New York. Bill Haines and author prepare the punch for this celebration of mass racist infanticide. An Episcopal priest sees the light. The Neo-American Church gets the Gatehouse. Chapter 35 A PITIFUL INCIDENT The Kriya Press of the Sri Ram Ashrama prints 2,000 copies of the_ Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook_. Tim's "review" thereof. Moonlight madness and the Mellon millions. Chapter 36 AN ENCOUNTER IN THE DARK Billy Hitchcock and the author, now boon companions, do not entirely succeed in resisting the artful wiles of ruthless adventuresses who seek to enmesh our souls in the toils of carnality. Chapter 37 AN AWFUL PREDICAMENT Egalitarian primitivists are all over the place. Tord moves in. The author appears on the _Alan Burke Show_. It becomes clear Tim would rather rule in Hell than share Heaven with the likes of us. Chapter 38 SIR LAUNCELOT AND KNIGHTS TO THE RESCUE The great Fourth of July party of 1967. Champagne Charlie Rumsey, Joe Gross, M.D., Huntington Hartford and daughter, Cathy, dedicated missionary bee hee. A fast forward to a contrasting, occultist kind of party in California in '68. Tim evicts an East Village, freeloading, female freak from the Bungalow. Chapter 39 THE YANKEE'S FIGHT WITH THE KNIGHTS The author is the sanest person on the property? According to Tim and a public poll, yes. Tim pronounces himself a charlatan. Susan is upset, but a Virginian Mellon of Pennsylvania, or vice versa, is delighted to hear it. Capitalism in action. Chapter 40 THREE YEARS LATER An editor pockets an editorial without reading it. Back to 1967. Wendy and author tie the knot. So do Howie and Betsy, with Pat O'Neill dancing naked on the Big House roof at the reception. The repetition compulsion is bad news. Chapter 41 THE INTERDICT The Sado-Judeo-Paulinian Voodoo-Papist gang lords of the Place of Overflowing Shitholes order their minions to assault us, women and children first. Chapter 42 WAR! Tommy deeds territory to all three persecuted sects. Tim invites the author to take over the Big House. Chapter 43 THE BATTLE OF THE SAND BELT Little Billy takes Orange Sunshine. Suzanne is accused of indecent exposure. The author barfs on a limo, and other mopping-up operations. Chapter 44 A POSTSCRIPT BY CLARENCE The author claims to have loved every minute of it, even when he was barfing on the limo. FINAL P.S. BY M.T. Have some solipsistic nihilism with a little Snazzm, Fazzm and McPozzm on the side. PREFACE _It is, of course, a thing which ought to be settled, and I am not going to have anything particular to do next winter anyway._ 22 October, 1990 THE ORATION AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE PROMULGATION OF THE DECLARATION OF THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICTS OF AMSTERDAM As delivered by His Eminence Robert Funk, Order of the Orchid, order of the Toad with Morning Glory Clusters, Boo Hoo General and Archon of Alaska and Member of the Board of Toads of the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, with apologies to T.B.M. My Fine-Feathered Friends: The style of the chief boo hoo is, if not his highest, perhaps his most peculiar excellence. I know nothing with which it can be compared. The noblest models of Greek composition must yield to it. His words are the fewest and the best which it is possible to use. The first expression in which he clothes his thoughts is always so energetic and comprehensive that amplification would only injure the effect. In _Millbrook_ all the peculiarities of his extra-ordinary mind are found in the highest perfection. The aphorisms show a nicety of observation that has never been surpassed. Every part of the book blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many new philosophic concepts. Yet no book was ever written in a more amiable spirit. It truly conquers with chalk, and not with steel. Proposition after proposition enters into the mind, is received not as an invader, but as a welcome friend, and, though previously unknown, becomes at once domesticated. What we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of philosophy, all the past, the present, and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age. The _Boo Hoo Bible_ also, is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than his highness is the first of religious philosophers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worthwhile to place them. His highness is first, and the rest nowhere. Yet, men judge by comparison. They are unable to estimate the grandeur of an object when there is no standard by which they can measure it. One of the French philosophers who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, tells us that, when he first visited the Great Pyramid, he was surprised to see it so diminutive. It stood alone in a boundless plain. There was nothing near it from which he could calculate its magnitude. But when the camp was pitched beside it, and the tents appeared like diminutive specks around its base, he then perceived the immensity of this mightiest work of man. In the same manner, it is not till a crowd of petty imitators had sprung up that the merit of the great Psychedelian genius, the chief boo hoo, is understood. His highness adventured first. He detected the rich treasures of thought and diction which still lay latent in their ore. He refined the ancient doctrine of solipsistic nihilism into purity. He burnished it into splendor and fitted it, through the method of synchronistical analysis, for every purpose of use and magnificence. He thus acquired the glory, not only of producing the finest philosophic and mythic construction of modern times, but also of creating a language, distinguished by unrivaled melody, and capable of furnishing to lofty and passionate thoughts their appropriate garb of severe and concise expression. Although Dr. Leary deserves condemnation when considered as a philosopher, when considered as a propagandist, he is discriminated from the likes of Houston, Grinspoon, Masters, Bakalar, Ram Dass, Hollingshead, Grof, Castaneda and Shirley MacLaine by all the strong lineaments which distinguish the men who produce revolutions from the men whom revolutions produce. The leader in a great change, the man who stirs up a reposing community, and overthrows a deeply-rooted system, may be a very depraved man; but he can scarcely be destitute of some moral qualities which extort even from his enemies a reluctant admiration. In a way, it may be said of Dr. Leary what Martin Luther said of himself, "I am like a ripe shit and the world is a gigantic ass-hole." (_Tisch Rede V_. No. 5537.) What better metaphor, everything considered, could be extruded in either case? The character of the men whose minds are formed in the midst of the confusion which follows a great revolution, is generally very different. They are often little shits at best, and not a few are dingleberries. Heat, the natural philosophers tell us, produces rarefaction of the air, a rarefaction of the air produces cold. So zeal makes revolutions and revolutions make men zealous for nothing. The little shits of whom we speak, whatever may be their natural capacity or courage, are almost always characterized by a peculiar inconstancy, an easy, apathetic way of looking at the most solemn questions, a willingness to leave the direction of their course to fortune and public opinion; a notion that one public cause is nearly as good as another, and a firm conviction that it is much better to be the hirelings of the worst cause than to suffer any inconvenience in the service of the best. At the time when his highness first visited Millbrook, Dr. Leary had already distinguished himself in the Psychedelian movement. An engaging natural eloquence, set off by the sweetest and most exquisitely modulated of human voices, caressing manners, and brilliant wit made him the most delightful of companions. But, as a philosopher, he did not deserve the adoration which he received from those who, bewitched by his fascinating society, and indebted for all the comforts of life to his favor, revered him as the conduit for Mellon money and LSD at the Hitchcock Cattle Company at Millbrook, New York between 1963 and 1968. In the mind of Dr. Leary, unfortunately, reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions, than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them, that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumor does not always prove a fact, that a fact does not always prove a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it. It is only in novels and on tombstones, that we meet with people who are indulgent to the faults of others and unmerciful to their own; and Leary, at all events, is not one of these paragons. His charity is extended most liberally to others but it certainly begins at home. In taste he is by no means deficient, but he perpetually acts against his better knowledge and often attempts to deceive the reader by sophistry which could scarcely deceive himself. His sins are sins against light. He trusts that what is bad will be pardoned for the sake of what is good. What is good, he takes no pains to make better. He is not disgusted by the negligence of others, and he extends the same toleration to himself. His mind is of a slovenly character, fond of splendor, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble, all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables. It would be absurd to read the works of Leary for philosophical instruction. The utmost that may be expected from any system promulgated by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere daydream, a poetical creation, like the Domdaniel cavern, the Swerga, or Padalon; and, indeed, it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those gorgeous visions. Like them, it has some-thing of invention, grandeur, and brilliancy. But, like them, it is grotesque and extravagant. The chief boo hoo, on the other hand, is an almost solitary instance of a great man who has neither sought nor shunned greatness; who has found glory only because glory lay in the plain path of duty. A great and terrible crisis came. A direct attack was made by a bloody tyranny on a sacred right of all men, on a right which was the chief security for all their other rights. The Psychedelians looked around for a defender. Calmly and unostentatiously, the former psychologist placed himself at the head of his religion, and right before the face, and across the path of tyranny. The times grew darker and more troubled. Public service, perilous, arduous, delicate, was required; and to every service, the intellect and the courage of this wonderful man were found equal. He became a debater of the first order, and fearlessly and dexterously defended his religion and the rights of all before every audience, including the Sado-Judeo-Paulinian mass murderers and serial killers of the United States Senate, who dared to hear him. The skills which he displayed are yet to be surpassed. Sudden bursts, which come like lightning, dazzling, burning, striking down everything before them; sentences which, spoken at critical moments, decide the fate of great questions; sentences which at once become proverbs; in these chiefly lies the rhetorical power of his highness. He governs a fierce and turbulent church, abounding in able men, as easily as he governs his own family; and the hardy sect has grown up and flourished, in spite of everything that seemed likely to stunt it, has struck its roots deep into a barren soil, and spread its branches wide to an inclement sky. The history of the Neo-American Church is emphatically the history of progress. It is a history of constant movement of the public mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great religion. We see that religion, just a few years ago, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded sects of the East, such as Tibetan Lamaism, now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of power-crazed Sado-Judeo- Paulinian Republicrats. We see the great body of the population in a state of intellectual slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of twenty-five years, this wretched and degraded sect has become the greatest and most highly civilized church that the world ever saw; has spread her fragrance over every quarter of the country; has scattered the seeds of mighty orders and fellowships over a vast continent. There is much amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the main action. The entire history of the Neo-American Church is an illustration of that great truth, that it is not prudent to oppose perfidy to perfidy, and that the most efficient weapon with which men can counter falsehood is truth. During a long course of years, the chief boo hoo, surrounded by allies and enemies whom no engagement could bind, has acted always with sincerity and uprightness; and the event has proved that sincerity and uprightness are wisdom. Kleptonian valor and Kleptonian intelligence have done less to preserve our religious empire than Kleptonian veracity. All that we could have gained by imitating the doublings, the evasions, the fictions, the perjuries which have been employed against us is as nothing when compared to what we have gained by being the one power in the Psychedelian world on whose word reliance can be placed. No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however precious inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is produced by the "yeah, sure" or the "no way, Jose" of a Neo-American clergyperson. A people whose education and habits are such, that, in every quarter of the world, they rise above the mass of those with whom they mix, as surely as oil rises to the top of water; a people whose high and fierce spirit, so forcibly described in the haughty motto of the Church, have preserved their religious rights, during a struggle of decades, from the encroachments of wealthier and more powerful neighbors; such a people cannot be long oppressed. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority; of mankind. Thus, the great process goes on, till schoolboys laugh at both Sado-Judeo-Paulinian and Psychedelian supernaturalism and occultism, till good old country boys vote for the seizure of the property of the entire ruling class and the delivery thereof to the eternal safekeeping of the only church worthy of their trust. This great and ever-memorable struggle, between stoned and unstoned consciousness, is a struggle on the result of which are staked the dearest interests of the human race; and every man who, in the contest which in this time divides our country, distinguishes himself on the right side is entitled to our gratitude and respect. Such a man is the sublime and incomparable chief boo hoo of the Neo-American Church! [Prolonged and tumultuous applause.] Cries of "Victory over horseshit!" and "Tetrahydrocannabinol genes into the deoxyribonucleic acid molecules of all fruits and vegetables, with the possible exception of turnips, parsnips and persimmons, now!" IMPORTANT NOTICE The following narrative is a veracious representation of my recollection of events and what I have to say about the character of persons and places is a veracious representation of my opinion of those persons and places, as in the following veracious sentence: "Any person who questions my veracity is a filthy swine." Some quotations are exact. Most are approximations. None are deliberately misleading. I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of a few peripheral figures but most of the names given here are the names which I recall being used at the time. One will not read far in _Millbrook_ without encountering hyperbolic idioms and extended rhetorical metaphors. I have made a considerable effort to be factual but no effort at all to write my history in a plonking style. The mental strain produced by attempting to separate style from content under such circumstances may be too much for some people. They are left in the lurch. The lurch, however, is well-provisioned. Take a bearing on the planet Saturn and paddle like crazy. I hope readers who find factual errors will write to me about them. The chapter headings and quotations thereunder are taken from _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_ by Mark Twain and are in the original order. _Philosophers are so far from rejecting the opinion of a continued existence upon rejecting that of our sensible perceptions, that tho' all sects agree in the latter sentiment, the former, which is, in a manner, its necessary consequence, has been peculiar to a few extravagant skeptics; who after all maintained that opinion in words only, and were never able to bring themselves sincerely to believe it._ --David Hume, _A Treatise of Human Nature_ A WORD OF EXPLANATION _Begin here--I've already told you what goes before._ Millbrook, early spring, 1968 "Well, where's that flunky Rumsey and the Mad Scientist?" Bill Haines growled as he stomped into the press room. He was followed, in close formation, by Howie, Betsy and Thorin Druck, a trio commonly and derisively referred to by those of us who knew and loved them as "The Holy Family." There were at least thirty people in the converted garage of the old farmhouse which had sheltered Haines' Sri Ram Ashram since Tim Leary, "the Mad Scientist," had expelled the Ashram from the fifty-room Big House down the hill, in April of '67, almost exactly a year before. Now we were all being ejected, not only from our dwellings, but from the 2,500-acre Dutchess County estate entirely. Tim, Haines and I had been served with eviction notices from the Hitchcock Cattle Corporation, signed by Tommy and Billy Hitchcock, ordering us and all the members of Tim's League for Spiritual Discovery, Haines' Sri Ram Ashram and my Neo-American Church to be off the property by May 22. It promised to be a dramatic meeting. My wife Wendy and I, the Ashram members, and those Leaguers who had survived the winter were present out of immediate, if not desperate, self-interest. But the mixed bag of Vassar girls, freaks from Woodstock across the Hudson and visitors from New York who happened to be hanging around that day clearly expected to be entertained. Except for a few rooms, the Big House had been closed for most of the preceding winter and Tim, who hated cold weather, had been in California. "Tim's somewhere on the property," I replied. "I don't know where Rumsey is. Maybe they're having a little advance meeting up at the Bungalow, or something, ho, ho." The "Bungalow" had been built in 1913, as a gift from Charles Dieterich to his son, Alfred. Rumsey, a non-practicing lawyer, was an old school chum of William and Thomas Mellon Hitchcock, who were twin brothers and bi-products of several generations of venereal congress between members of America's most bloated plutocratic dynasties. The handsome twins had inherited enormous trust funds in their early twenties, purchased the estate in 1963, and then offered the "Big House," a nineteenth-century extravaganza which had been the residence of the original owner, to Tim Leary, Dick Alpert and Ralph Metzner, as a "psychedelic research center." Why? The super-rich do not ordinarily do things like this, or anything remotely resembling anything like this, nor does anyone in any other economic bracket very often do anything like this, for that matter. Youthful folly? Courage of Psychedelian conviction? Sympathy and generosity? Boredom? Innocence? Arrogance? Curiosity? Lecherous anticipation of variegated choirs of marijuana goddesses? The hypnotic spell of Timothy Leary? Did the coup d'état of 1963 have anything to do with it? I asked Billy about his and Tommy's original motivations one time, after the whole project had been beaten into the ground by the powers that were. "It was the only game in town," he replied, which was a very Billyish kind of thing to say, and not inconsistent with any or all of the above. Anyway, this magnificently generous, reckless and astonishing offer, for which both of them, and their wives as well, deserve the eternal gratitude of mankind and the perpetual forgiveness of sins, was made shortly after Tim, Dick and Ralph had been kicked out of Harvard and then Mexico because of their Psychedelian activities. They were desperately searching for a suitable locale and powerful patronage. They took one look at the Big House, two looks at the twins and, as Billy laughingly told a reporter during the latter days of the place, "promptly accepted." The combined wealth of the then resident Hitchcocks: Billy, the prime mover; Tommy, who was always somewhat reluctant; and their sister Peggy, always an enthusiastic participant, was well over one zillion dollars, or something like that, on tap and on order, and raining down from above in refreshing, timely showers. Their father had died in an airplane crash early in WWII, and their mother, who had never remarried, lived in New York City in a Gracie Square apartment overlooking the mayor's house and the East River, and rarely visited her children's private playground. Under the circumstances, at once so desperate and so grandiose, I think my speculation about a little advance meeting was immediately under-stood by my fellow residents as meaning what I intended; that possibly one more Byzantine twist was about to occur and the grand master himself would sell us all down the river. "Let's not get paranoid, Kleps," Haines said. "It's too early in the day." There was a titter from the audience. Our visitors seemed a little stunned to hear such cynical and jocular discourse between the chief boo hoo and the guru of the Ashram. They usually came, drawn by media images, rarely to see Haines or me, but to look the place over in a general kind of way and perhaps catch a glimpse of Tim in action, possibly levitating over hill and dale, or distributing iridescent capsules to the rest of us, whom they assumed to be his faithful and devoted disciples. They usually ended up at the Ashram because the rest of us customarily sent them there. Even if they read the local papers, it was always extremely difficult for visitors to understand what was going on and, very often, not much easier for those of us who lived there and were deeply involved in what was going on to understand what was going on. Haines sat down on a ratty old couch facing the open garage door. He was in full regalia: yellow robes, sandals, beads, heavy cane to poke the female members of the Ashram in the crotch with if he felt they were "asking for it," so to speak. The air was balmy again and full of bird song, the view delightful; gardens, fields, woods, winding roads leading off towards "my" Gatehouse and Millbrook, town of, beyond. All of us were feeling a lot of plain, old-fashioned grief at the prospect of being driven from this earthly paradise but, just like Adam and Eve, what we talked about was how to make as good a deal as possible with the landlord. "I hope you're prepared to explain why you let Marlowe take the furniture?" Haines asked. "Yeah, Kleps," Howie Druck added. Howie, head of The Holy Family, was twenty-six. His wife, Betsy, was twenty-three, and her son by prior alliance, Thorin, the only human being Haines seemed able to relate to without intermittent torrents of abuse, was three. "Why didn't you stop him?" I asked Haines. "I am a man of peace. I keep telling you, Kleps, that one of the principles of yoga is non-violence, but you don't seem to believe me." I sighed. The day before, an excited Howie had appeared at the Gatehouse with a story about how Allan Marlowe was up at the Big House loading a U-Haul trailer with articles of furniture that most definitely didn't belong to him. Tim was away lecturing and couldn't be reached. Marlowe, Howie reported, had said Rosemary (Rosemary Woodruff, Tim's constant companion at the time) had given him permission to take the stuff. Haines had asked him to wait until Tim returned but he refused. According to Howie, Marlowe was crazy. The secret League name he had given himself was Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future and, because he had once thrown a dinner plate at Bill during an argument over vegetarianism, he was "violent." It was time for SPIN to go into action. Frequently, when there was a crisis of this sort on the property, Haines would phone or dispatch a messenger to urge me to "send SPIN into action." SPIN, the Society for the Prevention of Injustice to Neo-Americans, was not exactly operational, as Haines knew full well. Once again I regretted ever inventing the damn thing. I drove to the Big House and found Marlowe, assisted by a confederate I didn't recognize, struggling in the main hall with a ten-foot-high oval mirror in a gilded frame we later found out belonged to Maynard Ferguson, the band leader. Just being in the Big House depressed me. Most of the electricity and water was off, the remaining Leaguers were camped out in the woods in tents, and the mansion was inhabited only by rats and cats and phantasmagorical images of cherished people and weird scenes now long gone. Marlowe had a wild look in his eyes, which showed he was feeling normal, I suppose. Yes, Rosemary had given him permission. His conduct was none of my business since I was not a member of the League and he wasn't a member of the Church. In a way, I was half a member of the League, since Tim had started to initiate me the previous fall when we were both half crocked and he was trying to abandon Rosemary to my keeping while he took off for Las Vegas. Rosemary had reminded him he was violating the bylaws of the League by acting without consultation with the rest of the group and, after remarking that such shit cut no ice with him, he had desisted. No, Marlowe had said, he couldn't wait. The U-Haul was rented for only one day. I shrugged and left. The police, Tim had said, should never be called under any circumstances. Although I thought this a reasonable general rule, I had violated it by calling the state police, not the local county thugs, on two occasions without evil consequences. "I don't see how he can get pissed off at us," I said. "I'm afraid I do," said Haines, puffing on his pipe (strictly tobacco; Haines rarely smoked the Lesser Sacrament, although he enjoyed it in edible form every now and then) and assuming an air of confident but burdensome insight into the minds of men not granted to lesser mortals. Bill's forecasts of Tim's conduct were almost always for stormy weather in the near future, and I had to admit he usually had Tim's moves "psyched out" better than I did, but to predict trouble over a few pieces of furniture, however fancy, at a time like this didn't make much sense to me. For weeks Tim had been preaching to Bill and me that our response to the eviction order would determine the fate of the psychedelic movement and world history for eons to come, so we should all defy that spoiled rich brat Tommy at the risk of imprisonment if necessary. Passive resistance, of course. Caves in the hills. TV crews would flock. The hypocrisy of the Republicrat bosses of Dutchess County, who had been raiding the estate repeatedly to harass any one of us they felt like harassing, while treating the owners and rulers of the place as if they were invisible, would be revealed for all to see. Tim's pitch made sense, sort of. He told us how he had visited Tommy at his apartment in New York, gotten drunk, and ranted and raved at him for hours to no avail. Tommy was determined to play the "aristocrat-serf" game, Tim said. Billy was pretending Tommy was forcing him to go along by invoking hitherto unmentioned rules of their cattle-farm corporation, which held title to the property. Tim assumed, and so did we, that Billy had become as eager as Tommy to throw us to the wolves in order to avoid getting fanged himself and stuck with all the bills for bail and fines. This was only natural, but Tim took a very adversarial position, at least in his speeches to us. Billy and Tommy were playing "money and power games" but we should not allow ourselves to be seduced by mere gold when such high principles were at stake. Although Bill and I now had our own arrangements with the landlords, including deeds of a sort, complete with a map which had been published in the local weekly, Tim had been the instrument of both our original entries. We had come in under his wing. I felt that if Tim wanted to put up a fight, some kind of primal fealty obliged me to stand with him, and I said so. It seems absurd at the time of this writing, but those were strange times and Millbrook was a very strange place. When Bill also accepted Tim's strategy I was astonished. It was the first time in a long time all three of us had agreed to act in concert about anything important and it was a refreshing change. Although we had not distinguished ourselves as models of amicability during times of peace, when it is only natural to go your own way if no great harm is done by it, we were now united in defiance of a common foe. Charlie Rumsey was probably authorized to offer a few thousand if we would leave quietly; Tim would tell him we were staying no matter what; Haines would declare, once again, that if he went to jail "Tommy and Billy will be in the cell right next to me"; and I would, what? Probably tell Charlie, keep it simple, that I was simply following Tim's lead as I had promised. When Tim and Rosemary walked in everyone brightened up a bit, even though Tim looked tired and grim. They sat down in a very unrelaxed way, in chairs which two polite visitors gave up for them. No, Rumsey hadn't arrived yet. Yes, the lecture had gone well, as usual. Awkward silence. Tim was obviously displeased by the large number of people present. Oh well, I thought, we can always move upstairs. Me: "Tim, did you hear about Allan Marlowe taking some furniture from the Big House yesterday?" Tim: "What? Marlowe took my furniture? Why didn't you stop him?" Haines: "He said Rosemary gave him permission. What the hell were we supposed to do?" Tim jumped up and left followed by Rosemary. Fifteen minutes passed during which Haines moodily examined the floor at his feet, employing the tip of his cane as a probe. I closely examined the picturesque landscape framed by the open garage doors. Tim and Rosemary returned, faces rigid. Tim pointed an accusing finger at Haines and me and said (exact words): "OK, YOU GUYS. IF YOU DON'T GET MY FURNITURE BACK BY MONDAY, I'M GOING OVER TO TOMMY'S SIDE." They left without waiting for a reply. The next day a moving van appeared and loaded up all their remaining possessions. There never was a meeting with Charlie, or any other kind of general landlord/tenant meeting. Except for the documents mentioned in this book, nothing was ever spelled out, much less resolved. I didn't see Tim again until fall, when Billy and I went to visit him in the hillside house in Berkeley none of us at Millbrook knew he owned until it was all over. He was sprawled out on a wooden deck overlooking the bay, surrounded by "White Panthers" and others of similar persuasion, who were telling stories about blowing up power stations and other acts of wanton destruction, as was then the fashion. The presence of William Mellon Hitchcock, a capitalist if there ever was one, didn't faze these guys a bit. Were they aware Tim held stock in New England Nuclear, and that they were suggesting that he destroy his own property? Probably not, but it wasn't impossible some of them owned stock in New England Nuclear themselves, such were the bizarre mores of Berkeley in 1968. Had he ever gotten his furniture back? "No," Tim replied with the utmost blanditude, "as a matter of fact, most of it belonged to Maynard." Then he showed me a copy of _Horizon_ magazine that featured an article on Millbrook entitled "Boo Hoos and Gurus," with a nice picture of me leaning out of the top window of the stone tower on the bridge behind the Gatehouse with my arms out as if I were blessing the multitudes or getting ready to take a swan dive. The greatest practitioner of the political arts I have ever known had once more succeeded in changing the subject by substituting an "upper" for a "downer," perhaps his favorite rhetorical trick in a large and varied repertoire. A week or two after Tim's abrupt departure, the Ashram settled for $25,000. The Neo-American Church got $10,000. There were several reasons why I allowed myself to be shortchanged, not one of which, I can now see, was worth a nickel on the open market. Otto H. Baron von Albenesius got $1,500. We will meet the inimitable Otto later. As far as I know, nobody ever found out what Tim got, if anything, for "going over to Tommy's side," whatever that means, if he did. Chapter 1 CAMELOT _"Camelot--Camelot," said I to myself. "I don't seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely."_ In the fall of 1963, a lead photo in the _New York Times_ (or was it the _Herald Tribune_?) with a box story about Tim Leary, Ph.D., Dick Alpert, Ph.D., and Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., moving into the Hitchcock estate in Millbrook showed a corner of the Big House porch. There was a pumpkin in it somewhere, I think. I can't remember who the pictured people were, or even if the story was before or after Jack Kennedy's assassination, although I vividly remember another newspaper picture from around the same time showing Dick walking in the slush with Tim's daughter, Susan, on a Millbrook sidewalk. Susan is looking up admiringly at her tall and handsome, fascinating friend. Sally, my wife of five years, our three-year-old daughter, Susan, and I were living at the time in the small town of Edwards in the far northwestern corner of the Adirondacks. I was beginning my tenth year of work as a school psychologist and, as usual, I had four school districts to serve. I had also worked as a clinical psychologist in various settings, including three New York State prisons, but I liked school psychology better than anything else available to me, and always returned to it. Every weekday morning I would drive my Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible through the misty forests of the northern fall, past sparkling lakes and modest dairy farms, to a "consolidated" school which was always the biggest business and the most interesting place in town. I would give one or two IQ tests in the morning, and in the afternoon give projective tests, advice, and "psychotherapy" to some kid who usually had only one genuine problem: the State Compulsory Education Law, which obliged him or her to attend classes instead of screwing around and/or learning a trade as was consistent with her or his interests, abilities and natural inclinations. The odd "case" was usually more interesting, sometimes desperate, but surprisingly often not; just a bright teenager who, having recognized me as an adult who didn't click when he walked and play pre-recorded tapes when he talked, had decided to come in and chat. In the past, this class of kids had not only entertained me, but had supported and protected me as well, and I them. Positive traits are positively correlated. But the Clinton County kid culture was too primitive and Roman Catholic for informal school psychologists' fan clubs to develop and flourish. Negative traits are also positively correlated. In 1963-64 no sweet nothings or invitations to help myself and the sooner the better were being whispered in my ear by any teenage cuties, which was probably the main reason for my boredom, restlessness, and general sense of dissatisfaction with it all. Little things can mean a lot, after all. The combination of sensations I felt on reading those first newspaper stories about Millbrook was new to me, although it was something like falling in love at first sight. There are ways to explain it. First and foremost, I had taken half a gram of mescaline, a very heavy dose, four years earlier. I didn't know another person, aside from my wife, much less another psychologist, who had any psychedelic experience at all. Attempting to describe the experience and explain why it was important had become so tiresome and unproductive that I had stopped trying. This isolation was probably the main reason I hadn't done it again. The newspaper stories, therefore, had something of the impact that the first sight of Friday's footprint had on Robinson Crusoe. At last! Other creatures like myself were within reach. There were peripheral factors also, all attractive. I had grown up in Westchester, and was nostalgic for the lush Hudson River Valley ambiance of my childhood. I had read lots of English novels, and watched lots of movies, in which old mansions on large estates were a common setting for the action, but I had never visited anything in this splendid class of human habitation. It would be nice to see something like it in living color and three dimensions after seeing so much of it in my mind's eye and on the silver screen. And it was a plus that all three of these guys had been on the Harvard faculty, tossed out or not. Maybe we wouldn't get along, I thought, maybe they're nuts, but could they be stupid, ignorant, uncouth jerks? It seemed highly unlikely. David Riesman, whose comments on American society I thought and still think admirable, taught at Harvard, and had recently written me an appreciative letter about my "Neo-Psychopathic Character Test," which had bucked me up considerably. Yes, _veritas_, with as few reservations as possible. It was just about the only slogan I knew about to which I gave my wholehearted support and always had since as long as I could remember. The truth will make you free. Free of lies, which means free of 99 percent of what's wrong around here. And everyone in the pictures that accompanied the newspaper stories looked cheerful and healthy-minded and they were described as being that way by the presumably cynical newspaper reporters who wrote the initial stories about Millbrook. All of the above taken together, however, didn't seem adequate to explain my excitement and enthusiasm. I was absorbed and fascinated to the point of being spellbound. Why should a few newspaper stories make me feel like I had been granted a "new lease on life"? Somehow, I thought, a mysterious power had been restored to a psychic province long shrouded in darkness. The trip, as is often remarked upon by experienced Psychedelians, starts before the trip starts. My intuition was working right. Something was up. I sent Tim a copy of the mock "test" Riesman had liked, and a brief account of my mescaline trip, and hoped fervently that I would get an invitation. When I promptly got exactly what I wanted from Tim, written on an old picture-postcard of the Big House, I carried it around for weeks in the breast pocket of the gray flannel suits I always wore at work. Between testing kids and meeting with teachers and dictating reports, I gazed at the black and white aerial photograph on the postcard of the Big House in the snow, evidently taken by some scarfed and goggled daredevil early in the century, as if it had magical properties instead of just being an old picture of an old house I had never seen. Chapter 2 KING ARTHUR'S COURT _Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum, or are you just here on a visit or something like that?_ I took my first trip in 1960, on 500 milligrams of mescaline sulfate. A "flying start," one might say. It was a private, ten-hour-long "total visionary." The psychologist who happened to live in the other half of our rented, one-story duplex near the water in Patchogue, Long Island chickened out at the last minute. His wife, he claimed, had nixed his participation in the project, which the two of us had planned after reading Gordon Wasson's and Aldous Huxley's early accounts of their psychedelic experiences. My wife, Sally, in contrast, seemed to have no apprehensions whatever about my risking my sanity, if any, and she was on call throughout my trip, which helped. Two weeks later we reversed roles and Sally, without any objections from me but also without much encouragement, casually took the other half of the gram of mescaline sulfate that I had bought by mail from Delta Chemical Company in New York. I was much impressed by this and, although I have learned since that women, in general, seem to be much less chicken about taking large doses of major psychedelics than men are, I'm still impressed. The whole thing? If I was so fortunate as to have 500 milligrams of crystal mescaline sulfate around today, I would nibble at it, and I advise any novice reading this to do the same. You might end up taking it all, but take your time about it. What's the rush? (Synthetic mescaline is virtually unobtainable today and has been for a long time, although a lot of acid has been sold under the name.) Her trip was more of the emotional-roller-coaster variety than mine had been, with many replays of childhood scenes, but she also saw the same kinds of intricate and colorful displays which occupied almost all of my mescalinized hours. It probably would have been better to have done it together, with no "ground control" personnel on hand at all, as I now advise most novices to do, but the conventional wisdom of the day was all we had to go by. After downing the tasteless, colorless, crystalline powder, I decided to take a walk around the block. The reports I had read held that it took about thirty minutes to rev up. There were no blood-curdling or hair-raising events during this stroll. Every little breeze did not whisper "Louise," or anything like that. But about halfway around, walking along the waterfront, I developed a strange conviction that every tree I passed was alive and moving in the wind. Back at the ranch house and feeling much more alert than usual, I noticed that a red washcloth was gently winding around like a snake in our light-blue bathtub. After a hasty exit from the bright bathroom to the dim den, I was treated to another active apparition. The yellow flowers in a bowl on our TV set had decided to join the fun at the Democratic nominating convention, then in progress. They were definitely dancing around to the beat of the band and the closer I looked, the more enthusiastic the flowers became in their support of JFK's candidacy. At this point, on this kind of trip, it is impossible not to ask oneself, what next? What was to stop a monstrous gobbler from outer space from joining me on the couch at any moment? Nothing. I moved to the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and closed my eyes. Instantly, I found myself watching a three-dimensional color movie on the inside of whatever it is one looks at when there isn't anything there. For openers, aurora borealis-style streaks of colored lights flung themselves from horizon to horizon. Horizons? What horizons? All night, I alternated between eyes-open apprehension and eyes-closed astonishment. With eyelids shut I saw a succession of elaborate scenes each of which lasted a few seconds before being replaced by the next in line. Extra- terrestrial civilizations. Jungles. Animated cartoons. Displays of lights in abstract patterns. Temples and palaces of a decidedly pre-Columbian American type, neither grim nor pretty, but beautifully delineated, textured, colored, and always in perfect perspective. There was no obvious narrative connection between scenes. I'm indifferent to pre-Columbian art. There was no aesthetic coherence to the whole, although every part seemed flawless. When I say, as many others have, that some of my visions compared favorably with the best in Western art, I'm being cautious not to overstate the case. I saw little that was Oriental, aside from some Japanese tree and mountain scenes. There were lots of caricatures, some goofy, some classic, some sentimental and old-fashioned, all kinds. No matter how elaborate the content, there was never any hint of a technical breakdown. If something merely silly was being presented it was always done up with all the slick perfection of a Walt Disney feature, plus all kinds of extra touches Disney could never have afforded. Let's say "despair" was being depicted in the form of the conventional cartoon castaway on a cartoon raft; a two-second throwaway flash. Well, just for kicks and contrast, why not add a transparent ocean, exquisitely tinted in thousands of colors, in which a billion seahorses merrily bob in communal harmony, singing and playing tiny musical instruments? No problem, Sahib. Coming right up. That was the spirit of the thing. No job too large, no job too small. The difficult we do right away, and the impossible ... we do right away also. (The inconceivable might take a little longer.) "Despair" was depicted? Yes, so I concluded later. In the first versions of this book I made the error of saying "words" were depicted (imaged) but it's confusing to say that. People tend to think that they think in words but they don't. We think in images, and then communicate, to ourselves or others, our images in words. On a visionary, you eliminate the middle man, so to speak. You may or may not be aware of your images. Some people never are and do not seem to be much the worse for it. Nabokov, a master word wizard if there ever was one, so envisioned the situation, and so do I. So have many other thoughtful people. (Nabokov also described himself as an "indivisible monist," and even went a bit further, in a glint here and hint there, in his later years. See _Strong Opinions_.) I turned on our bedside radio, hoping to replace the parade of fantastic pictures with something familiar. Enough is enough, I thought. The radio, in an act of brazen defiance, promptly produced a New York City discussion show, full of trivia and inanities. Instead of stopping or slowing things down, this garbage accelerated and variegated the procession even more. It was as if every scene produced by the mindless babble on the radio had been the life's work of generations of media technicians on planets given over to the production of such artistic wonders, all for the purpose of this one showing in Art Kleps' one-man screening room. Adequately describing this kind of thing to those who have no references for it in their own experience is uniquely difficult. It's not only one hell of a literary problem, it's a real doozy of a psychological problem. How can anyone have an experience of this magnitude and intensity without turning into a paranoid, terrorized blob of quivering jelly? How can anyone stand it, much less enjoy it, if it's as overwhelming and irresistible as we say it is? The reader who has had no major psychedelic experience, however sympathetic he was to start out with, will suspect the author of exaggeration and bravado. As always, I advocate skepticism, but some conditional and provisional suspension of disbelief is necessary if you want to find out what it feels like to be someone else or to get some grasp of an alien practice and philosophy. I think much of the resistance is based on the natural assumption that the person who took the pill is the same person who has the following experience, which, after all, is an assumption we solipsistic nihilists can't expect not to be made unless we suggest otherwise. The explanation is just as hard to swallow as the facts which make it necessary, but it's true nonetheless: The constancy of the personality is illusory. I quote David Hume: [An individual mind is]_"a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement."_ [The identity which we ascribe to an individual mind is only a] _"fictitious one since every distinct impression which enters into the composition of the mind is a distinct existence and is different and distinguish-able and separable from every other perception, either contemporary or successive."_ To some extent, at least, almost all will grant, one becomes what one beholds. Freak-outs, in a way, are caused by a time lag. The truly terrified person is still imagining himself to be the kind of creature to whom such things simply cannot happen, trying to hang on to his former self. It's an error that lies at the root of much simplistic occultist thinking: I "go," if I get this spell right, find the newt's eye that rolled under the sofa, or say my mantra properly, from one world or level to another world or level. No, that is not what happens. There are no "trips," however convenient it may be to use the analogy. There are only transformations, transformations of everything. Does that help? Visionary experience is always personal and yet almost always fantastic and impressive. One is flooded with it. On a big one there is no way to stop the action to think things over. This is a recipe for fast and sloppy supernaturalist and paranoid ideation, among those who are so inclined. The pace, the scope, and the contents of the experience are not in contradiction to or in agreement with but are irrelevant to and incommensurable with normative psychology and any "depth" or "structuralist" psychological system I know about, Jung's included. An experience of this kind will lead some people to conclude that extraterrestrial and/or supernatural beings are expending enormous amounts of energy to "beam messages" to them or something of the sort. Although there are countless variations on the theme, the ideation which follows will often go something like this: A. They (the good Higher Powers) have chosen me to be their intermediary and a member of the Company of the Elect because of my unique attainments, or B. They (the evil Higher Powers) want to drive me crazy because I am the only person on earth with the spiritual power to defy them, or C. They (the fallacious Higher Powers) erred. This crazy shit was intended for someone else. To hell with it. Aside from C, which is rare, none of these assumptions work out very well in practice, at least not if the paranoid in question continues to take the stuff. Psychedelic experience refuses to conform to any system involving an external dynamic and will inevitably betray anyone who tries to control either his own or his troop's trips. Indoctrination can confuse or delay the correct interpretation of psychedelic experience, can make doing it much more stressful than it needs to be, can sometimes warp the content somewhat, but cannot determine the content. I think this fact drives some people, commonly and accurately known as "control freaks," half out of their minds with rage and frustration, but these are the kind of people who would be displeased to discover that their neighbors think a thing of beauty is a joy forever, so not much can be done for them. Major psychedelic experiences have many highly predictable characteristics, no matter who, where, why, when, what or how the deed is done to, by, for or of. I think that all of these classic characteristics are illustrated somewhere in this narrative. I didn't take another trip until four years later. Fully aware of my lowly status as a wage slave, I was afraid of making such radical changes in my everyday consciousness that I would become unemployable. These apprehensions were largely groundless but the regular use of major psychedelics and a standard 9-to-5 existence in the United States of America, as presently constituted, don't mix well, and it's useless to pretend otherwise. My general way of looking at things had already changed a lot. I found nothing in my visionary experience to encourage me to believe in any occultist or supernaturalist system, which may have been the happy result of taking an "overdose." Instead, dualism of every variety was blown right out the window, never to return. I was now a monist, but what kind of monist? I did not consider myself "Enlightened," and wasn't sure the term meant anything. But I was sure about some things. The visions were my images, my ideas, however incompatible that conclusion was with what I had formerly conceived my mind to be "made of." I no longer find it necessary to believe it's made of anything, but that came later. At one point I seemed to hover over an alien planet, or over a transformed version of this one, upon which were spread various cities made up of grids of multi-colored lights, traversed by thousands of parrot-like creatures. One is tempted to think in terms of Ouspenskian or Tibetan-style grandiose cosmologies but, wait a minute, what's next in line? The professional liar on the radio is selling a deodorant. Sure enough, out of the Precambrian ooze emerge millions of putrid bubbles; and the noxious effluvia which result, represented by pastel swirls and coruscating vibrations, are as complex and beautiful as what has gone before, but hardly "metaphysical." When people throw up, they often do see "piles of jewels." Try to imagine all the images in, say, _Locksley Hall,_ colored, animated, and in three dimensions, not in sequence, but all at once, and arranged in such a way as to be, if not in actual harmony with one another, at least so well-organized as not to be in any mess or collision. If you can do it, and unless you happen to be on a powerful psychedelic and in a frivolous and tenacious frame of mind, you can't do it, the result will be both hilarious and impressive, which is exactly the character of much of the visionary experience I've had myself and have been told about by other Psychedelians. It is a combination of qualities not commonly found in the art works of churches and museums (but is not unknown in such precincts, either, if you look for it). The root causes of much psychopathology are as often compounded of absurd misunderstandings as they are of tragic events. The pre-Psychedelian grand theorists, however, and those who have signed up under this or that grand theorist banner, tend to dismiss as inconsequential any insights that people giggle about and treat flippantly. In their view of things, a bunch of people gathered around a nitrous oxide tank, laughing like fools, cannot possibly be having experiences that deserve to be called "profound" or "spiritual." The idea that the comedic spirit and profundity are highly compatible and often go out together and have a wonderful evening offends them deeply. It is an insult to the firmly held beliefs their barbaric ancestors killed and were killed for. Yes, there is little or no room for the absurd in any of the metaphysical or mythic systems of occultists and supernaturalists. Yet I have never heard one of them say a word during the peak hours of an acid trip about the philosophic hierarchies, organization charts and grim fairy tales that, during normal, repressed consciousness, they say describe everything universal and fundamental. When a person is truly and fully stoned all inculcated ideation about things in general evaporates. Those who are fixated (love and depend) on the crazy ideas they grew up with will usually repress most of what they have learned on their trip or trips in favor of the standard substitutes for the truth with which they are familiar and comfortable. They may renounce psychedelics completely and join the Moonies or, perhaps, declare that only organic psychedelics are any good, not because they are more mild (more manageable) than acid but because of a pantheistic virtue which resides in organicity, a rationalization which will provide them with a new collection of moralistic dogmas to fuss and fret over. If supernaturalism was not supported by my first trip, neither was scientism (the world is clockwork, however complex). Dualism, in all forms, was undermined. I don't think that my character and morals were undermined in any way, nor did I abandon the scientific method and empirical reasoning about particular things because my views on things in general had changed. My ideas about the nature of consciousness and the organization of perception changed, not my ideas about the best way to fix a flat tire or educate people with low IQs. There was nothing about my psychedelic experience which made it easier for me to lie, cheat or delude myself. On the contrary, I would say. Dishonesty became more difficult. During the next three years I thought more about literary, social and political stuff than I did about psychedelics and philosophy. (My literary tastes, perhaps, went up a notch.) As a psychologist, I was probably even more empirical than I had been before the trip. As the memory of the experience receded in time, it seemed more and more like an aberration, similar, in many ways, to my winter in the Alaskan woods after getting out of the army. So, I had done another unusual thing, but how important was it? Was I any happier? No, I couldn't honestly say that I was. When I discovered that a group of purportedly respectable and learned psychologists were taking dose after dose of LSD and psilocybin and apparently functioning with great practical efficiency at the same time, indeed, having a ball, setting forth on great adventures and taking over mansions in Dutchess County, I concluded that I was just being chicken. These experts, I assumed, knew all kinds of things I didn't know and had all kinds of contacts I didn't have. Perhaps I could join them once I caught up to their level of specialized knowledge. If I could find a way to live without the income from it, to hell with clinical and school psychology, at least as it was routinely practiced. Plastering over the growing cracks in the public education system was not my idea of the best way to spend most of my waking hours anyway. Chapter 3 KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND _There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your belittling criticisms and stilled them._ Shortly after Christmas of 1963, leaving Sally at her parents' house in Manhasset on Long Island, I made my first trip to Millbrook, up the gentle curves of the lovely Taconic Parkway, through Westchester and past my childhood village of Crestwood, amidst a snowy landscape, in my dark-red convertible, with a bottle of blackberry brandy at my side. Millbrook was a pretty, bright, white, small town with lots of big trees, the slushy central street of which I hissed through in a matter of seconds. The three-story, stone-walled Gatehouse was about a mile north of town. There was a massive portcullis in its arched entry and a fairy-tale kind of tower at the west end of the building. The whole thing was roofed with curved, light-red, terra cotta tiles. It was lovely. As Tim had instructed, I didn't stop to announce myself at this structure, but entered the grounds by way of an open drive a few dozen yards up the road, drove over a stone bridge, and found myself in Wonderland. From the moment of my first view of the Gatehouse, my critical faculties rapidly washed away under an overwhelming flood of approval and appreciation. It all seemed perfect, all the way up to the Big House, potholes and broken branches included: the winding roads, the little lakes and streams, the fields, woods, and mysterious stone structures covered with snow. Everything was exactly as it should have been, beyond critique or analysis, as in a vision or a dream. I drove through the Big House porte cochčre and parked in a courtyard formed by the main building and a wing which contained the kitchen and laundry rooms, and upstairs, the former servant quarters. Inside, in the main hall in front of Maynard's mirror, which the plate-throwing Buddha of the Future would rip off five years later, I found teenage Jackie and Susan Leary, Kim Ferguson, and a bunch of younger kids taking off skates, galoshes, coats and mittens. Beautiful children with intelligent faces and happy eyes. I was expected. Tim was upstairs. Why didn't I just go right up and introduce myself? As I climbed the red-carpeted stairs of the Big House for the first time, I felt a sense of place again, as in a dream. By the time I found Tim's room I was awash with strange emotions, as well as blackberry brandy, and not in ideal condition to impress my host. Tim was seated at a desk, writing. We exchanged pleasantries, and Tim launched into a description of some recent discoveries in sub-atomic physics which had caught his interest. It was Bronowskian stuff, which is OK in its place. He was trying to play the two-intellectuals-meet game, which normally would have been fine with me, but I wasn't feeling normal at all. I could feel tears forming. This is insane, I thought to myself. It was the first this is insane thought of a long series to come. "I think you've forgotten how bad it is out there," I said. Tim looked perplexed and apprehensive. He suggested that I go downstairs and meet the other members of the household and the current visitors. He would see me at dinner. In the next few hours I met, and without exception instantly approved, in a casting director's sense, everyone then resident in the Big House. I will list and briefly describe them, and the visitors then present as well. Tim. Without a consort at the time, an unusual circumstance. I was somewhat surprised to learn that Lisa Bieberman, who was then managing the IFIF (International Federation for Internal Freedom) office in Cambridge, wasn't present and was not expected to become a resident. I was told that during her last visit to Millbrook she had insisted on a right to move in on grounds of her seniority in devotion to the cause, indefatigable diligence, unimpeachable righteousness and so forth, but had left in a highly disillusioned condition. While she was sitting in the kitchen one early morning (musing, perhaps, on the pronounced similarities between her adored Harvard lecturer and J.C.), the Holy One himself appeared, tousled and bleary- eyed, drew a coffee, and inquired of the assembled breakfasters, "Jesus Christ! Do I have to fuck every girl who comes into this place?" That did it for Lisa. She retreated to Cambridge, where I met her later. As far as I know, she never returned to Millbrook. Soon, IFIF became her baby and hers alone. Millbrook, she often said thereafter, was "a human zoo." Lisa, it turned out later, had been having exclusively "Christian" trips on LSD, or so she interpreted them. In 1971 she had one of the regular kind, and promptly wrote a bulletin to her subscribers in which she renounced acid for Jesus. Lisa, dark of eye and hair, was intense, persistent, and just as impervious to popular opinion as she was to logic. A born slave, she worked her hairy little ass off for whatever she believed in. Tim had probably been as satisfied as he ever was with his latest free hump, and only said what he said because he wanted Lisa to hear it and abandon any hope of intimidating him into conformance with her middle-class standards of "morality." I have made some pretty outrageous remarks myself over the years, for the same reason, to people of Lisa's type. Why argue? It's much easier, and more fun, to demonstrate that you are a "hopeless case" instead. As Sextus Empiricus would have put it, it's the "philanthropic" way to handle the problem. Tim's charm, as friend and foe alike admitted, was awesome. As is often the case, I think much of it was due to his voice, which trilled and tinkled, caressing the ear with gentle melodies and punctuations, vulgarizing by comparison every competing instrument. He almost never raised it. Even when angry or malicious, the voice stayed within the limits of its charm. One might hear a hard rain of sleet or the light clash of cymbals, but never squawks, mumbles, whines or any other kind of ugly noise. Furthermore, his voice, as if it had some separate spirit or function of its own, did not, like most voices, simply carry Tim's thoughts like a load in a cart; it often spoofed and laughed at what it was required to support, thereby anticipating and disarming the critical reactions of his audience. Much of Tim's wit relied on these disarming vocal nuances; it does not come through as well in his written words. Many thought Tim was spoofing when he wasn't, or thought he wasn't when he was. Tim's playfulness had no consistency, no foundation in logical analysis or a stable set of values. It was simply employed to take the edge off, to provide an escape hatch, to disarm. When the natives looked restless, the master musician would shake his jingle bells, perhaps indulge in some goofy histrionics, even take a pratfall. Everyone would smile, and write off their former doubts as "paranoia." Dick Alpert. Tim's closest associate and co-conspirator, a Ph.D. in psychology like his trans-formed buddy, but with superior professional and social credentials. Dick had been on the faculty at Harvard, where Tim had been a visiting lecturer, renowned only as the inventor of an ingenious and novel paper-pencil test of personality factors then in use by the California penal system. Dick was the son of a bloated plutocrat who had been the president of the New Haven Railroad while Dick was at Harvard. The tedium of academic life had been greatly relieved, Dick gleefully told me, by his living in a private railroad car with a teenage brother and sister team who provided both service and recreation, day and night. "Art," Dick said, a look of bemused delight suffusing his open and jovial countenance as he reminisced about the wonders of his fortunate life, "I didn't know what to do to whom first." Dick didn't have an official companion in those days, of either sex. Nor did he ever, during the time I knew him, come to think of it. Ralph Metzner, Ph.D. A psychologist and biochemist in his late twenties. A neat, dry, scholarly man who made neat, dry, scholarly comments but rarely spoke at length. Ralph had a wife in residence, Susan. She was a classic, pretty, blonde and busty American Girl who seemed soft and childlike in contrast to Ralph's Germanic seriousness. Somehow, Ralph projected an aura of conventionality and conformity no matter how unconventional, and even illegal, the activities in which he was engaged. He had the makings of a "master criminal" in this respect. Every time I talked to Ralph I was acutely reminded of the dutiful grinds who had made up my circle of chess-playing friends at Concordia, my Lutheran prep school in Bronxville. Cynical to a fault in private, they had all behaved like perfect robots in public and had routinely collected A's in every subject while I flunked, or barely passed, everything in sight. Jackie and Susan Leary. Both cute kids: sixteen and fifteen, or fifteen and fourteen, or somewhere in that happy bracket. They were happy then, and I don't think their father's oddities, our internal community conflicts or their experience with psychedelics made them unhappy in the days to come. To the extent that they did become screwed up later, those who assaulted their religious community and persecuted their father and their way of life should not only be blamed but also tried and punished for crimes against humanity. Maynard Ferguson. A famous Canadian trumpet player and band leader whose name did not ring a bell with me, which astonished him. Perhaps the sanest guy in the place. Charming wife, Flo; extremely super-charming daughter Kim, thirteen; son, six; baby, two. The visitors were: An aging, blonde blues singer, said to be even more famous than Maynard, but whose name I didn't recognize and can't remember. She looked sad, wore beautiful clothes, and said little. I think she was even drunker than I was, which was pretty far gone as the evening advanced. Not only was there an open bar (a year later, every bottle would have disappeared in fifteen minutes, to be guzzled at once or hidden in self defense) but I also had my usual pint of brandy stashed in the john under the stairs on the first floor. Allen Atwell. A professor of art at Cornell. He was preparing for his first "session," as trips were called in those days, to be held in the tower room, the highest room in the house, that very evening. Allen, who looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln after a hard night anyway, appeared particularly resigned at the time. I went to take a look at the tower room (we will get back to the other visitors) and after many a twist and turn through dark corridors carpeted in worn red plush, I found it at the top of a small spiral staircase. There were windows all around and I could see the lights of Millbrook twinkling in the distance over a landscape of moonlit snow and dark masses of fir and pine. Two fat candles were burning, and some incense, and a cheery fire in a cheery fireplace. Oriental rugs. A low bed. A statuette of Buddha. A statuette of Shiva dancing on Yama, as usual. Trays of candy and nuts and fruit. A copy of the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_. A copy of the _I Ching_. From a speaker in the corner came the drone of a Zen chant, not too loud, and quite pleasant, it seemed to me. Tim's basic method in those days, I later found out, was to attempt to structure other people's LSD experience in terms of the _ Tibetan Book of the Dead_, which is the prime text of the most supernaturalist, deviant and degenerated form of "Buddhism" on earth, namely, Tibetan Lamaism. It's great stuff for the social control of an ignorant peasantry, and that's about it. A first-class horror show to terrify the kiddies into mindless obedience. An infallible Priest-King. Ruthless taxation to build gigantic edifices for the religious bureaucracy. Institutionalized pederastic, homosexual buggery ("celibacy"). Why go so far afield when we have so much of that so much closer to home, like in Massachusetts? Many people who never have visionary experience on LSD learn just as much as those who do, if not more. Elaborate embellishments, crazy or not, tend to distract attention from the present and stagnate thought in a morass of enigmatic imagery. A succession of fantastic spectacles is all well and good, but people must learn to ask the right questions before they can get the right answers. Preposterous stories and garish interior decorations never sent any steamboats up the Ganges. As decor, I like first-class Oriental art and, as metaphor, it's often instructive also, but you don't need metaphors if you have the thing itself, and the thing itself is psychedelic experience. Novice trippers were heavily "guided" in those days. Everyone, me included, thought they could be and should be. It sounds right and reasonable in terms of ordinary life, but it just doesn't work that way. Ralph Metzner was to guide" Allen Atwell. Jack Spratt. (I can't remember his name.) Jack was a "rich drunk from Syracuse" as Tim put it. My university town. Fat, intelligent, about forty-five, the only person present wearing a tie. He was there to be "cured," and was waiting for his second trip. On his first, he had by no means surrendered his bad habit as a result of meeting the Lord of Death face-to-face. On the contrary, perhaps. Albert Mole. Can't remember his name either. A large, flabby and fuzzy clinical psychologist from Buffalo, who was my first introduction to the foil or scapegoat archetype usually present in every Psychedelian community. Would that every one of them were as bumbling, foolish, and harmless as Mole. As Ramakrishna said of his nasty cousin, who was always hanging around, when his disciples would ask him why he patiently endured such an obnoxious presence, such characters "thicken the plot," and it is usually a good idea to leave well enough alone. As often as not, the replacement, and a replacement seems to be inevitable, will be twice as bad as the original. Don't put too much pressure on your casting system. Mole's specialty was snouting out the presumably diseased and clandestine psycho-logical forces at work in the place. I don't think he knew how to do anything else. When I told him that I was having one of the most fantastic and delightful experiences of my life, although I hadn't taken any drugs, he said that though everyone was certainly "very friendly," he couldn't approve "for example, of the obvious seduction of a teenage boy." He glanced suggestively towards Dick and Jackie who were sprawled out in earnest converse under the soft and twinkling radiance of a magnificent demonstration that a gentle joy can be found in the Gothic and grotesque (a twelve-footer). Mole never relaxed, and finally fled. If it was difficult for visiting psychologists and psychiatrists to hang on to the detached, inquisitorial role at Millbrook in the early days, it just got harder later. The place was too seductive for that, even during bad times. Straight newspaper reporters and others bent on "exposing" our hidden agendas were usually disabled for similar reasons. Both cynical and inquisitive, they were fixated on discovering what was "really happening," but no matter how ingenious the questions or ingratiating the style, no cross examination ever revealed anything that satisfactorily explained, within the very narrow and materialistic conception of human nature with which they and their bosses and clientele were familiar, all of the puzzling talk and nuances of feeling and conduct they witnessed. I think this is true of Psychedelian communities in general. The hardest part to swallow, often as not, for a professional shrink or hired scrivener in the service of the Ministry of Truth, is the general high spirits and good-natured camaraderie which prevail. The jokes, frequently self-deflationary, conflict with his most cherished categorizations of human nature. There is so much honesty and spontaneity that he begins to think the whole thing is a put-on. I think Mole was deeply offended by Dick's blithe spirits and unabashedness. Why wasn't Dick wracked with resentment over his loss of status in the academic world? Where was all the self-justification and self-analysis one Jewish psychologist had every right to expect from another? It came out later. Mole could usually be found in the kitchen, nursing a drink, where he brought up, one after another, every historical and theoretical model and just plain silly notion he could think of in the hope that one of them would be accepted by the rest of us as the way to understand psychedelic experience, so he could then dismiss the whole thing as an imitation, probably shoddy, of something else, or not worth bothering about for some other reason. He seemed to wither visibly every time someone insisted, as they invariably did, that although there were parallels, the experience was really incapable of being understood or appreciated by the uninitiated. The terrible burden which this truth, combined with demonstrations of non-harmfulness, places on the flattened and homogenized products of America's psychiatrist and psychologist mills cannot be overestimated. I think most of the anti-Psychedelian academic cant, and the slovenly "research" designed to support such cant, is prompted by the terror which grips these wimps at the thought of being expected to take the stuff themselves. Mole, maintaining his defenses against this dreadful possibility, quickly dismissed me as a credulous fool. (Either you are a credulous fool or I am a coward, therefore you must be a credulous fool.) I was left mostly in the company of my natural ally, Jack Spratt, the only other heavy boozer present. On the late return of Ralph, Susan, Dick, Jackie and Kim, all in a cheery mood with skates slung over their shoulders after a long game of hockey on one of the ponds, Mole shrank once again. "Are they pretending to be normal?" he probably asked himself. To my expressions of appreciation of the healthy-minded, happy atmosphere which prevailed, Jack Spratt replied, "I've got to admit these people know how to make a person feel at home, but I don't go in for all this Boy Scout stuff. Make my own bed and help with the dishes? I have always been happy to pay for that kind of service." It was clear that Jack regarded me as a fellow patient in a strange and very badly managed psychiatric hospital, so I told him about my mescaline trip. "I guess I want to see the Clear Light or achieve Enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it," I said, capitalizing those nouns and tossing down another belt. "I don't go along with all that stuff," Jack replied, and refilled my glass and his own. Later, Maynard told me that during one of his all-night parties in the large room below the tower, during which it was not unknown for a certain carefree abandon to overtake the participants, who might then, as like as not, disport themselves, whatever their age or sex, in a manner inconsistent with prevailing middle-class American mores, Jack Spratt had briefly appeared at the open door, having descended from the tower, where he was having his first trip. "He just stood there gaping at us like he couldn't believe his eyes," Maynard chortled. "Then he said, 'Christ, it's crazy enough up there but down here it's completely insane' and went back up to the tower." Susan Leary showed me to my room, one of eight or nine in the servants' wing over the kitchen and laundry. Everything was neat and clean. I unpacked and took a bath across the hall in a deep, enameled-iron, old-fashioned tub. Conversation at dinner, which was served at a long table (with legs) with everyone seated on chairs (rather than on the rug), was as animated, natural, amusing and educational as anything in my experience with dinner table conversations. Mole wearily punched away at Tim but, after days of failing to connect, it was pretty clear that he no longer had much heart for it. Tim would laugh at Mole's comments and dryly and slyly make a remark which would not directly answer what Mole had said but instead undercut him somehow, sometimes in two or three different ways, making whatever Mole had said seem ridiculous and unworthy of serious consideration. I was impressed by Tim's display of rhetorical skill, and did not think Mole deserved any better treatment than he got. Tim was never reluctant to deliver snap judgments, like an undergraduate psychology student, when he thought the occasion and the person seemed to call for it. It was a habit I shared. When not being paid for my professional services, I see no reason to deny myself the same liberty to bandy ideas around which everyone else enjoys. "Judicious" or even "sober" discourse did not prevail. One might shoot the shit with carefree abandon and not be held to account for every minor error or self-contradiction. Everyone, Mole excepted, was making the standard upper-class assumption about one another's morals and mores: You are an honorable and well-intentioned person until proven otherwise. As (in the best of times) in the House of Commons, so long as this assumption is maintained, people may flatly contradict each other as to fact or theory, argue endlessly about what is logical and what isn't, call an opponent's motives, or even his sanity, into question, and even express moral disapproval, in the sense of differing moral interpretation, without anyone's essential dignity being threatened in the slightest. Even one stupid and/or ignorant and/or deranged person in such a group drastically degrades its quality, like a fly in one's soup. Being an intellectual isn't necessary, but being intelligent helps a lot. I didn't know it but this delightful scene was already doomed, because Tim had decided to play it as a politician rather than as a scientist or philosopher. Charming, modest IFIF was to be abandoned and the grand and mysterious Castalia Foundation erected in its place. Metzner was pushing the books of Herman Hesse, an author not well known in America at the time. Hesse was a talented but virtually humorless fantast whose imagination generally, but with some interesting and pleasant exceptions, ran in the direction of hermetic mysteries, cryptic images and grandiose hierarchical associations. "Meta-political," one might call this model, or "Masonic, sort of." Soon, almost all Psychedelians would be oriented towards appealing to popular tastes, "reaching" the public, "molding" opinion, and changing, or preventing change in, the laws. Nothing wrong with that, but crucial questions about content and doctrine were being swept under the carpet because of the perceived need for popular support. And, stylistically, I preferred the original light-hearted and frankly elitist spirit of things. But popular revolutionary movements do not run on refined tastes and high-class social standards. The "troops" demand easy answers and familiar story lines. They have a limited vocabulary. The politics of the Psychedelian revolution, as Tim saw clearly and early, would be like selling beer, not champagne. Support would come from many odd quarters but the objective, as in all revolutions, would be to "capture the hearts and minds" of the only class with hearts and minds as yet uncaptured: the young. The point of view expressed in my "Neo-Psychopathic Character Test" was something of a novelty then and it may have had some effect on Tim, confirming opinions he already held about the desperate condition of the old culture and the direction in which one ought to look for help. Allowing visitors to drop in and out at all hours of the day and night was a pain in the ass, but Tim could not, as a good politician, prevent it. Towards the end, he withdrew to the third floor and had a private kitchen installed but the public image he projected was usually one of utter accessibility. In the beginning, though, it was a high-class show and the memories I retain of Millbrook as it was then, although many satisfactory things happened later, are lit by a special and magical light, like the memories of the Christmases of childhood, or scenes intensely imagined in one's most cherished works of fiction. Tim, Ralph and I went for a walk late in the evening. Late in our conversation, which was pretty philosophical, I asked, "Tim, is anything more important than anything else?" Tim said nothing for a moment and then pointed to a snow-laden branch hanging down in the roadway. "Look at the way the snow shines in the moonlight. Beautiful, isn't it?" Evasive, yes, but wrong, no, since whatever is right in front of your nose, so to speak, is always the most important thing. But it wasn't the branch that was occupying my attention at the moment I asked the question. It was Tim, and it was Tim who was the most important thing in my world at the time, and he should have said so. But that is a hard thing to say to anyone. I was put in charge of Allen Atwell's music program that night, which amounted to no more than taking records from an approved collection and putting them on the turntable, in a room below the tower. Every now and then Ralph would pop in and ask that something be changed, or to turn the volume up or down. We started off with ragas and Zen chants and such and followed with Beethoven. After an hour or so, Ralph announced Allen didn't want any music at all, so I split for the kitchen. Musical tastes tend to go through some radical changes as people get higher and higher. Indian music seems to help stabilize a high because it in no way encourages you to notice the passage of time, or better, to notice time has stopped passing and instead is sort of loitering around shooting the shit with space. As seriality is re-established, taste seems to depend on what kind of trip you're on, and music problems, if any, are usually the result of idiots controlling what is being played, a role often conceded to them by deaf custom. When some kid puts on the latest rock star, a record he and his friends have been playing repetitiously while inhaling the lesser sacrament, the room will often empty in minutes. Bob Dylan's early songs and almost everything the Beatles produced hold up well (what more can I say?) but rare indeed is the devotee of screaming adolescent anguish who can tolerate his favorites when he is on the Supreme Sacrament, which doesn't mean he won't put them on for everyone else's benefit while he himself departs, perhaps to listen to the music of the spheres and the hooting of owls in a distant pasture or orchard. Bad music doesn't just cause people to scatter. It is also one of the few things, aside from active malice, which can directly and reliably cause bad trips. When someone flips, check out the music being played or what has just been played. Often it will be an exhibitionist making millions from his contemporaries by moaning, groaning, and shrieking about how fucked up he is. Under normal circumstances, a performance of this kind may reassure the similarly afflicted that they are not alone, but it will simply encourage bummers on trips. Older people often like sad, romantic songs involving wails from jails by downhearted quails, and the like. Beware. If such stuff is played on a trip, gloom will prevail and many of the participants will remember previous engagements at the nearest saloon. Haines, who patiently tolerated kid music under ordinary circumstances, smashed quite a few records on trips during the years I knew him. He would point out that the person who put the record on was no longer present, and apparently didn't like the record any more than Haines did, so he felt justified in disposing of it as he pleased. Good point. Late that night, as I was sitting around the kitchen mulling things over with Spratt, Atwell drifted in like a ghost, his big brown eyes shining and dilated. "How did it go?" I asked. “Beautiful, beautiful ..." Allan said, putting some coffee on. "But I seem to have switched sides. My left side is now my right side and my right side is my left side." We didn't know what to say to that. "As a matter of fact, I think I left part of myself up in the tower. I have to go back and get it." He drifted out of the room. I got up and turned off the burner under the coffee pot. Although still determined to do it, I was becoming seriously apprehensive about taking acid. Strange visions were OK, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to know which side is which. And, if at all possible, I like to have all of myself in one place at the same time. I went to bed. The next day, in the early afternoon sunlight, I took Tim and Susan to town to buy groceries. I put the top down, although it wasn't really warm enough, just for the fun of it. In town, Tim was greeted by storekeepers and townspeople alike with what seemed to me an affectionate regard. He amused people. They liked his style and so did I. And Tim seemed genuinely happy playing the role of "one of the boys," fellow villager, and good neighbor, with a few easy bantering words for one and all. I was charmed and impressed. Tim, I thought, was definitely my kind of guy. While Tim and Susan filled up their carts, I popped into the liquor store next to the small supermarket. Eddie, the genial owner, with whom I was destined to have a long and mutually satisfying relationship, introduced himself and had me pegged by asking a few questions. A "Dieterich Estate" visitor who might move in? Fine. Fifty bucks or so more a month more for Eddie. There were ups and downs, but there was very little general animosity towards us from the regular residents of Millbrook until the last months, and even then it was clear that their irritation was not with the us, the established freaks, but with the dregs from New York City who had taken advantage of Tim's blanket invitations to come up and squat. Not antipathy, but civility, tolerance and much more sophistication than I would ever have predicted were displayed by these folks, many of whom were the products of a high-IQ Italian gene pool of masons and other craftsmen who had built the estate. The Ashram got a line of credit at Marona's grocery store, and even minor transgressions of the law were sometimes covered up for some of us who had been around long enough to be trusted. Hollywoodized persons who have been brought up to believe that all small towns are inhabited by sinister and depraved morons who live on the take from unwary motorists may think I am blinded by sentiment, but if there was anything psychologically septic about little old Millbrook, town of, I never discovered what it was. Trixie Belden and Norman Rockwell would have felt right at home and so did I. (Nancy Drew might not have felt at home, but Nancy is a wooden dummy written in leaden English, while Trixie has life, as does the clean, workmanlike prose she is mostly written in.) I bought a case of Hennessy. Tim approved. I gave him $50, which he liked even better, having spent about $300 in the grocery store. We picked up the mail, loads of it, and did a few other errands. When we got back to the house and parked, Dick stuck his head out of one of the windows in the servants' wing and shouted down, "You all look like an advertisement for the American Way of Life," meaning the convertible and the bags of groceries and we three handsome people, I suppose. With Kim's help, I stashed the groceries in the storeroom behind the kitchen, where I couldn't resist re-enacting the classic scene from the romantic novel in which the mysterious stranger embraces the gorgeous maiden. The next morning I went to Manhasset to pick up Sally, and returned. What the hell. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And the whole business seemed saner, somehow, with my better half at my side. Sally's one and only visit to Millbrook was not a success. She was terrified, not by the presence of acid and marijuana, but by the people and the setting, and she stayed in our room almost all of the day and evening. It was "just too much." Her first words in the car the next morning when we drove away were, "Did you see the dresses on those girls?" Sally's father, Murray Pease, was Conservator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she was descended on both sides, Peases and Jewetts, from the theocratical oligarchy of colonial New England. In order to eat, we later sold some documents with Paul Revere's and Daniel Webster's signatures on them. Her parents were part of an exclusive WASP society and cultural world, now much reduced in power and influence by the power of gold but far from dead, which was at that time well-represented by the "real" _New Yorker_ of old and the _New York Herald Tribune._ Despite her family background, Sally either ignored or was aversive to most distinctions of money, power, intellect and even taste. She liked ordinary things to the point of being virtually ambitionless, an appealing trait in some ways, but exasperating in other ways. Billy's sister, Peggy, and a friend had come over for drinks and dinner in $10,000 designer evening dresses or whatever and that was "too much." Dick Alpert wandering around the house looking through "psychedelic spectacles," a tiny strobe just then invented (whatever happened to it?) was "too much." Almost everything she saw and heard at Millbrook seemed to be "too much," which was Sally's favorite superlative anyway, and I later managed to decipher what she meant by it. By "too much" she meant too much. This did not bode well. Susan, our three-year-old, complicated matters also. If we moved in, and I had no paying job, Sally would have to get one, and all kinds of complications would arise. Tim, Dick and Ralph and I had circled around the subject. Assuming I could find a way to support myself and my family, and started gobbling the stuff the way they did, and if Sally decided that it wasn't "too much" after all, well, it looked like a cinch, sort of. The most essential requirement, congeniality, was present to an astonishing extent and everyone seemed to recognize it. I just fit in somehow and that was all there was to it. It seemed inevitable that the relationship would persist and deepen. Do not, and should not, birds of a feather flock together? Sure we should, if only to communicate with each other in a language we all can understand and to scare off birds of other feathers who seek to replace our eggs with their own. "When," it seemed, was the question and I had resigned myself to the possibility that it might be the question for a long time. But, who was to say? Maybe some clinic, hospital or "school" for retardates in the area was looking for a clinical psychologist who would work for a mere pittance. If it allowed me to live at Millbrook, I'd take it. So, maybe this, maybe that. We went back to our rented house in the tiny Adirondack community of Star Lake, where we had moved from Edwards, and I immediately started writing a fantastic novel about the adventures of one Christian H. Christian, who visits the headquarters of "The Flower Fiends" and is transported into other realms. I sent a few pages to Millbrook every other day. It was mildly amusing in spots but didn't really make it, and I eventually consigned it to the flames. Tim, Dick and Ralph's conversion of the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_, a copy of which Tim sent me a month or two later, did not, in my opinion, make it either, but was published by Mystic Arts, a publishing house in Hyde Park, NY, very close to Millbrook, and sold quite well. "See, Arthur?" Tim said, holding up a royalty check for $1,600 for my inspection as we were having coffee across from the courthouse in Poughkeepsie during the final days. I'm sure that what he meant was, "See what I get for publishing horseshit? So why don't you do it, and make me feel better?" but I can't authenticate that interpretation in any way. According to Tim's letter which accompanied my copy of the book, this bowdlerized "translation" of the Lamaist scripture was to be the first of a series which would include _Alice in Wonderland_ and the _Inferno_ . The latter concoction, Tim thought, would particularly please me, although why he thought so he didn't say. The fact is that I had then and have now a low opinion of all of Dante's literary product. As Blake put it, "Dante saw devils where I saw none." Likewise, I'm sure. This may have been the first instance of Tim projecting his neuroses on me, a Freudian mechanism which would balloon to gigantic proportions in times to come. I knew nothing of the "infernal aspects" of psychedelic experience which are so garishly depicted in but, I thought at the time, since my full-scale visionary productions amounted to a measly fifteen hours or so, a trifle compared to the hours logged by the mighty of Millbrook, I felt that I could only politely question, not assault, as I have since, this stupid, ignorant, crazy and evil book. On the evidence of my experience and the experience reported to me by a sample I think representative, I can now say that truly menacing visions almost never occur on acid trips, and the unpleasant spectacles which are sometimes seen, the "cartoon freakies" and such, amount to less than two percent of overall viewing time and have less emotional weight than the standard entertainments for children shown every day on television in the great American Insane Asylum. On the other hand, if you insist on listening to "A Night on Bald Mountain" in a rat-infested cellar with cunning and malevolent acquaintances recently recruited from 42nd Street bistros, all bets are off, and all bets are off if you prepare for your trip by reading "that stupid book of Leary's," as John Lennon called it. Why did Tim go out of his way to evoke these images at the beginning of his Psychedelian career? (Ralph and Dick, I was told by Ralph, had merely "signed off" on it, because Tim said he wanted to maintain an appearance of collegiality, a classic Learian maneuver.) The more I learned, the more inexplicable, except as a cash cow, Tim's pushing of the _TBD_ at the very start of things appeared. It was as if he deliberately and with malice aforethought polluted the Psychedelian cultural stream at its source and gave half the people in Psychedelian society (Lennon being a notable example of a good recovery) a bad set to start out with. For years afterwards, kids told me they had, as novices, attempted to use the _TBD_ as a "guide," and they all reported anxiety attacks and various kinds of craziness leading to eventual frustration and exasperation, for which, at least at first, they had blamed themselves, not Tim or the book. They were not worthy of getting fucked over by class-A Tibetan spooks, or something like that. You had to be a big wheel like Tim, Dick or Ralph to deserve truly ghastly eeriness of this magnitude. To get the Lord of Death on your case maybe you needed a Ph.D., preferably from Harvard. It's true that Tim, as a good, crucifix-wearing Papist boy, had been brought up to believe in the efficacy of god/human sacrifice by means of prolonged torture and all kinds of related Judeo-psychotic ideation, with the usual consequences, and for a short time early in his Psychedelian career had imagined his "head was melting and running down" over his shoulders (personal communication) so I don't claim he projected darkness when all was sweetness and light within. Even so, why push one's personal nightmares on the public? He never talked that way in private, as far as I know. Lamaism bears about the same relation to genuine Buddhism that the bloody-sacrifice doctrine of "St. Paul" and the blatantly insane _Book of Revelations_ bear to the "Sermon on the Mount" and the _Gospel According to Thomas_, that is to say, almost no relation whatever, aside from contradiction. J.C., like Ramakrishna, was probably born stoned, but picked one hell of a time and place to pop out into, as it were. Given the context, it's amazing that he said anything worth repeating. Thomas Jefferson was right about what should be retained and what discarded from the Christian canon. I bought a pound of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds, which were becoming popular because they were legal. Baby Hawaiian woodrose seeds, I learned later, are a better choice because they are much easier to prepare, with about 25 micrograms of lysergic acid per seed compared to one or two mics in Ipomoea seeds, but neither is as good as the New Reliable. (Both are nice plants for the porch.) If you want to try them, remove the shells (soak, dry and peel). As in the case of the humble peanut, it's the seeds inside you're after. The human gut is not designed to digest shells. On seeds one night, I had another visionary trip. In contrast to the mescaline blast, it was "dreamy" in the sense which implies vagueness or abstraction, although I wasn't asleep or sleepy at the time it was happening. There were three distinct worlds, but I retain only fragmentary memories of them (I remembered more the first few days following and should have made notes): a scene in which, on a beam of light, I entered the kitchen of a sort of tower dormitory in a world-of-the-future to remove a hammer from an ice tray; and a fantastic curtain that fell during what was clearly an intermission, depicting thousands of birds in flight in a sky of brightest blue. Chapter 4 SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST _Sir Dinadan was so proud of his exploit that he could not keep from telling over and over again, to weariness, how the immortal idea happened to occur to him; and as is the way with humorists of his breed, he was still laughing at it after everybody else had got through._ When, in the spring of 1964, I had a long weekend free, I made a call, and got an enthusiastic invitation to visit from Lisa Bieberman, and took off for the IFIF office in Cambridge. I had written Lisa, who was the day-to-day manager of IFIF at the time, about my plans for a Psychedelian retreat on an Adirondack lake. I thought I might spend summers at the lodge and find gainful employment elsewhere, maybe at or near Millbrook, in the winter. Lisa thought it was a "great idea." I found Lisa at the modest IFIF office with two postdoctoral residents of the house in Newton which Dick and Tim had occupied while doing research in a local prison on the effects of acid on the recidivism rate. All three were working at routine office tasks, without pay, getting out the _Psychedelic Review_ and a variety of bulletins. Alan Watts was expected momentarily, to contribute something for the forthcoming issue, which was to be a Fe stschrift for Aldous Huxley, who had recently departed this vale of tears in a most noble and exemplary Psychedelian fashion. I established myself in the tiny kitchen of the small house on Boylston Street with a quart of Wilson's, a blend I favored at the time. Watts arrived and greeted everyone like long lost buddies. While waiting for the acid head who was to take his dictation to return from an errand, he enthusiastically joined me in attacking the bottle. Both Watts and I were fascinated by a trashy men's magazine we found on the table, the kind which might depict Japanese nurses attempting to seduce American marines on its cover, with ads for crossbows and mementos of the Third Reich in its back pages. When, somewhat abruptly, but apropos the contents of the magazine we were chortling, cackling and sputtering over, I asked him how he explained the existence of suffering in the world, Watts seemed genuinely shocked. "You're asking me that question?" he asked. I guess he thought the answer was in his books. If so, it's in a corner I haven't penetrated. When the IFIFian typist arrived, Alan put down his drink, stood up, walked up and down, and reeled off his panegyric to Huxley as if it were tape-recorded in his head. He paused only once, in search of another example of the kind of thing academic intellectuals and literary sophisticates scorned but which Huxley was willing to discuss, tolerate or even support, and I supplied it: "The myth of the desert island paradise." It was an amazing performance. Unfortunately, although my appreciation for Watts as a critic of conventional religion is undimmed, my admiration for his philosophic efforts did not survive my Enlightenment, and even at the time of which I speak, I could not work up much enthusiasm for his point of view. He was, I think, essentially a pacifier, a sort of intellectual male nurse, a calmer of the troubled waters. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Watts rarely mentioned his Western intellectual ancestors, but he was clearly a Transcendentalist and, in my book, a "Slobovenoid Blobovenoidalist." With an Emersonian disdain for logic and consistency, he assumed the plurality and independence of minds but ignored or evaded the conflict between this and the supposed existence of a benign "Oversoul" (the "Giant Brain"). Although some Giant Brainers are first-rate poets and essayists, they are always lousy philosophers, but Watts was not so low on my personal moral totem pole as those intellectuals who refuse to try the Higher Sacrament. The latter I see as simply frauds in the same class as the mental midgets of Galileo's day who refused to look through his telescope. At least Watts tried. And Watts, his Slobovenoid Blobovenoidalism aside, was a great conversationalist, a great gossip, a great drinking companion, and a gentleman of the old school. As soon he established that I was literate he warned me he would "steal" anything I said worth "stealing." I told him to help himself, and we had a happy, bleary, gossipy evening which ended in my meeting the Newton contingent. Good heads to the man, but pale, I thought, in comparison to the Mighty of Millbrook, whom I was beginning to think of as virtual demi-gods occupying a world apart, around some trick corner in a magic mirror of my mind. Although Alan and I got along well, he didn't approve of my act. He probably saw, better than I did, the philosophic direction in which I was headed and knew what kinds of conflicts would inevitably follow with people of his ilk and Tim's. When I asked him to grace the rosters of the Neo-American Church with his illustrious name, he replied: "I don't like your boo hoo title. It sounds like a crybaby to me." The stiff upper lip complex at work? I don't know. However frivolous in private, Watts, in the ancient C of E tradition, favored solemn fraudulence in public. It was what the market demanded, after all. He laughed when I suggested that his books were so popular that he could live, if only modestly, on the income from them. His royalties didn't pay for his gin. What did pay off were his cruise ship deals and other more standard forms of lecturing. I would find out for myself in due time. (I have, but I don't think it is absolutely necessary for a person with criminal tendencies to sink so low.) I appreciate the literary and scholarly virtues of Watts and Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell (a very nice and very learned guy who informed me that he had adopted my _Boo Hoo Bible_ footnote, "If you think you are getting anywhere, you're on the wrong track" as his "personal motto"), but I do not belong to the doctrinal congregation for which they were outstanding twentieth-century proselytizers, and I think Watts saw this right away. Although heterodox in minor ways, people of this ilk are essentially Vedantists, Cosmic-Minders, Giant-Brainers or Transcendentalists and thus dualists, although Allan and Aldous and Joe would probably reject and resent the label if they were still hanging around and could read this. Huxley, who dismissed the Zen masters as "unsatisfying," and Campbell were virtually humorless, and, when sober, so was Watts. When I read the philosophico-religious ruminations of these guys, I see (so to speak) the somber and shuddery shades of such as Swedenborg, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus hovering in the background. Back in the mists a few steps and you are in the jolly company of such as Dante and St. Augustine and the early so-called "fathers of the Church" all the way back to St. Paul, every single one of whom was mad. Only an idiot can have any fun, so the only way anyone who is not an idiot can have any fun is to behave like an idiot. The more one thinks, the less fun one has. "Life Sucks" is the technically correct bumper sticker. I prefer, and recommend to one and all, the "Playboy Philosophy" of Mr. H. Hefner over this kind of shit any day. At the beginning of the decade, all kinds of major events seemed to combine to cause a major shift in the general mood of western civilization. In what might be called "meta-historical" terms, LSD and MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) seemed to balance or complement one another, and the assassination of JFK contributed also, as a demonstration on the American stage (other stages had other demonstrations) of the ephemeral and usually fraudulent nature of most political "progress," and the need to change human nature directly rather than to rest one's hopes in moving the furniture around, changing the cast, and tinkering with the plot. It seemed to me it was the style and content of everyday life that needed radical revision in the direction of more variety, freedom, truth, spontaneity and wit. That was what I found so stunning about Millbrook: The names, rules and counters of the ordinary games being played there every day had somehow been changed in a fundamental way. Assumptions which always applied outside meant little or nothing within, and vice versa. Life as it was lived was livelier, more meaningful, funnier, happier. It was an adventure just to hang out, and so it remained, with ups and downs, until the end. I resolved that anything I produced would be along the same lines. Watts was a smooth talker, but Timothy Leary, I thought, was a magician who seemed to know how to change life as it was lived, and he didn't do it exclusively by flapping his gums. He did it by employing a magic elixir I knew from experience could do things that could not be done by all the King's horses and all the King's men flapping their gums in unison. Whether or not the magic elixir could put Humpty Dumpty together again remained to be seen. Chapter 5 AN INSPIRATION _What dream? Why, the dream that I am in Arthur's court--a person who never existed; and that I am talking to you, who are nothing but a work of the imagination._ I waited for Easter vacation with high expectations, and when I entered the Millbrook grounds I was determined to stop treating the place like an amusement park. Instead, I would arrange a "session" right away and be cooperative and act like a "team player" for a change. Humility, that was the ticket. Sobriety. Sanctimoniousness, even. I knew I could do it if I tried. I walked through the wide-open front door. Not a soul in sight, so took a chair in the library and started editing my latest installment of _Divine Toad Sweat_, the provisional title of my surrealistic novel. When the house Lolita came in, squealed "Arthur!" and jumped on my lap and stuck her tongue in my ear by way of greeting, my adopted persona was seriously shaken, but I did not respond normally. Instead, I thought of the classic temptations along the same lines resisted by the heroes of the kinds of myths and literary fables I was reading those days, gave her a peck on the cheek, and said, "How'ya doin', kid?" or something similarly idiotic. I don't remember exactly. This bizarre non-behavior didn't go over very well, as one might expect. I was profoundly shocked myself and, once my vital signs returned to normal, wondered if I had made the right decision. I felt like I had torn up a check for a million dollars. Had I gone totally bananas, or what? Since the truly extraordinary A+ cupcake was soon replaced, as the focus of any stray erotic impulses, by a standard-brand B- Chinese cookie of legal age, secretary to the well-known mad scientist Andre Puharich, who was to function as a thorn in my side during the next forty-eight hours or so, maybe I had. But then again, people have been known to go to jail for a long time for toying with cupcakes, no matter what the provocation, so maybe plain fear explained it better than all that mythic stuff. Ling-Ling was on close terms with Tim at the time, but disavowed any intent to perpetuate the relationship when I inquired. Her reason for being at Millbrook, aside from screwing around and getting stoned, was to advance the cause of a tiny device, contents unknown, which, when attached to any bone of the head, would unfailingly permit the deaf, even those devoid from birth of any auditory nerve, to hear with perfect clarity. This miracle was said by her to have been invented by Puharich and was in his possession. First visit: tiny strobe glasses. Second visit: tiny ear box. OK. Hewing faithfully to my credulity, I took Ling-Ling's word for it, and waxed enthusiastic, although I would have been suspicious, if not derisory, under any other circumstances. She asked me whom I wanted to trip with. I said Tim and any girl or girls who might want to go along for the ride. How about her? She said "maybe" and we went upstairs to talk to Tim, who greeted me with generous praise for _Divine Toad Sweat_ and generally made me feel welcome. Tomorrow night? Sure. He was looking forward to it already. If anyone else wanted to join us we would discuss it. Meanwhile, I should read Hesse's _Siddhartha_, a copy of which he plucked from his bookshelf and handed me. We talked for a while about Hesse, whose _Steppenwolf_ I had recently finished reading, it having been recommended by Ralph Metzner on my previous visit. Tim showed me around. Changes had been made. Someone had created a "meditation room," by padding a closet off the third floor hall. Ralph now had an electronic workshop, with a contraption squatting on the table that looked like a prop for a science fiction movie. In a mimeograph room, stacks of circulars announced the replacement of IFIF by the Castalia Foundation of Millbrook, New York. There was a quote from Hesse's _The Journey to the East_ pinned up in Tim's room, in which the protagonist asserted that the major events in the history of Western Civilization were no more than stages in the history of "our League." This caught my attention, as it had when I first read the book. Interesting. Grandiose paranoia on the face of it, but, well, hmmm. As an allegory for the ancient and various manifestations of Psychedelian religion in human history, "our League" was arguably far more important than the history of war, or any other historical theme for that matter. It was not irrational, or even strange, to say that religion was more important than anything else, and if the use of psychedelics gave rise to the good, the true and the beautiful in religion, as distinguished from all the shit, well, there you were. I had found everything Wasson was saying along these lines to be very persuasive, and I was happy to see that Tim, evidently, did also. Good. Could I run a mimeograph machine? "Nope." I had always been happy to have the taxpayers provide such services. "What, man, you can't run a mimeograph machine? Don't you realize that mimeograph machines are absolutely essential to every revolution?" Tim laughed. I said he was right, of course. Should any tedious but necessary services along these lines be required, I would learn, and put my shoulder to the inky wheel like anyone else around. The whole house had taken on an appearance of contrived bohemianism, with most of the heavy furniture, including the legs of the dining room table, stowed away in the basement and storage rooms, and lots of cushions and mattresses covered with intricate prints substituted. Tim turned me over to Susan Metzner, who assigned me to a room. She said she hoped I didn't mind sleeping on a mattress on the floor. On a group trip everyone had decided to throw the beds out for "aesthetic reasons." "Well, considering what you are trying to do around here, anything disorienting is good, I suppose. Like Tim said in that speech in Sweden," I said, trying to be compliant once again. Susan said I might have the wrong idea about what they were trying to do. She didn't say what it was they were trying to do. Normally, I would have questioned Susan's ability, or anyone else's ability, mine included, to identify with any certainty what a group of people such as this were trying to do, but I was playing the game of taking things at face value, and was therefore appalled, sort of. "Christ, I hope not," I said. The fact was that "we" was being used very loosely around "Der Alte Haus" (as the original owner had called it). Millbrook was riddled with subterranean rivalries and ideological conflicts but everyone was playing it, as a revolutionary cause encourages one to do in some ways, as if no legitimate differences of opinion about anything important existed or could exist. Axes were being ground all over the place. Pronouncements about what "we" are doing are most often used not to cement groups but to split them. The class level had gone down a notch. The game of gentlemen and scholars was over and the games of moralist-sinner and doctor-patient and good guys and bad guys had begun. It's a sad thing to see, and perhaps for the best, I didn't see it, at least not clearly ("accept" it) until much later. After dinner that night, Tim insisted that we all play a "Magic Theater" game. This was to be only a small part of a larger version she and Tim were working on, Ling-Ling informed me. One was asked to write down on a folded slip of paper the first thought one had, on reading the thought of the last person to play, and then to pass the list on with only one's own contribution showing, so a long chain of semi-free associations resulted. This we played on the table top without legs on the rug in the dining room, by the light of candles and the fireplace, while reclining on cushions and pillows and drinking brandy. Living on the floor under such circumstances is an entirely different kettle of fish than doing it in an abandoned house on bare boards and vomit-soaked mattresses surrounded by syphilitic and schizophrenic psychopaths while drinking Sterno and sniffing glue. Poor people need furniture, only the rich can afford to live on the floor. The objective of the game was, Tim announced, to discover how "all of this" would end. I forget what Ling-Ling wrote on her fold of the paper, but the image which came to my mind on reading it was of a dock in Amsterdam, lapped by the sullen Ij. It didn't seem to have anything at all to do with Ling-Ling's contribution. "Really?" Tim asked, when he read the completed page and came to my image. Nothing else was geographic. "God made the world, but man made Holland." It doesn't surprise me that this notably empiricist society has learned, by and large, to tolerate Psychedelianism and often to enjoy the sacraments thereof, while more "romantic" nations generally still see the whole thing as some kind of giant bat out of Hell that everyone should throw rocks at. Wasson and Tim and a number of other amateur anthropologists encouraged legions of kids to identify the psychedelic experience with primitivist escapism. Pueblos and hogans in stark surroundings, complete with charmingly flea-bitten shamans who could be manipulated with the greatest of ease with petty cash, were thought to be "where it was at" for a long time. I consider this whole mystique to be almost total horseshit. Psychedelic experience encourages and, in some cases, demands, the recognition of beauty, both natural and fabricated. There isn't anything uncivilized about this, unless one defines "civilized" in a stupid, uncivilized way. The sacraments will, if you let them, produce a cool and sophisticated perspective, full of nuance and intricate and often ironical allusions and reflections. I got pretty bombed on grass and booze and went to sleep in the meditation closet. The next morning, at breakfast, which everyone fixed for themselves and ate at the kitchen table, Ling-Ling told me she and Tim had gone through the entire house, neglecting only the meditation closet, looking for me the night before. "Why?" I asked. "Oh, Tim had some bright idea he wanted to tell you about." "Well, what was it?" I asked. "It doesn't matter now," said dear little Ling-Ling, girl mystification expert. I never did find out what enthusiasm had animated Tim, since much more important matters were to claim my attention a few hours later. The trip was set for that night. Ling-Ling "didn't know" if she was going along or not. I decided to erase all such social trivia and devious Oriental machinations from my mind, as best I could, to prepare for the no-doubt earth-shattering revelations to come. A quiet morning walk in the sparkling woods was what I needed, I decided. I set off past the Bowling Alley which was an enormous chalet, built of huge stones, wherein the former lord of the manor had amused himself and his friends under murals showing famous Hudson Valley horses and horsepersons of the 1800s. The road curved under budding maples and tall stands of spruce which shaded a burbling stream. The stream was captured by a stonework dam and then passed an ironwork gate to a road which led to hundreds of acres of wild country to the north, including the hills later to be named, appropriately, "Lunacy" and "Ecstasy." The road curved gradually back towards the south. To my right was a gentle rising slope planted in baby spruce, which faced some sunlit hills and fields through a frieze of trees lining the other side of the road. I had a drink from an old-fashioned water pump which was conveniently situated on the hill and sat down on the grass to think things over. What went through my mind were the same old questions which world literature and the conversation of drunks will indicate are pretty common concerns. Why am I here? What is all this for? Who am I? Where am I? And other stuff along the same lines. My one and only big trip had not advanced my progress in finding answers to these fundamental questions, but it had prevented any escape by way of reductionism or displacement. I was unable to think of myself as either an odd product of blind chance, or a deity's dummy, being punished for getting my cords tangled, or having my faith tested, or whatever. Until I had good answers, I was pinned in place. So, my mood was one of genuine perplexity, which is a rare and sublime mood, as Lao-tzu observed. On an impulse with no conscious antecedents, I placed my right hand on the earth and crooked my left back toward the sky, and asked, "Where am I?" Nothing happened, but I maintained my position for fifteen minutes or so, rejecting any ideation which rose to the surface, and hoping something remarkable would occur. No soap. I relaxed. As soon as I relaxed it occurred to me that my assumption that nothing had happened was gratuitous. Why not assume something had happened and be alert to recognize it? I got up, dusted myself off, and walked back to the Big House, determined not to alter my mood, no matter what happened. Chapter 6 THE ECLIPSE _The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color._ I don't remember the content of the first synchronistic coupling I noticed, but it was a startling connection between something I was thinking about and a remark made in the kitchen as I passed through. This scrap of conversation, which was not intended, in the usual sense, for me, provided the associational bridge to my next thought, which then became the object of the next synchronistic connection. I missed a lot at first, mistakenly thinking only some "external" events were synchronistic with my "private" ideas. The tyranny of the fundamental spatial dichotomy me/it was not about to surrender at the first blast of heavy artillery from the forces of synchronicity awareness which had suddenly surrounded it. It had governed for a long time, and resisted being reduced to a mere province of an upstart empire. I thought cosmicmindedly for a while. Perhaps "the world" was thinking along certain lines, and I was spiraling around, through, into, out of, over and under another, greater progression of ideas, and the synchronicity occurred when I was momentarily "on the button." This cosmic consciousness crap didn't last long, I'm happy to say. Synchronicity showed me it was false, during the five or ten minutes I spent trying to think of it in a dualistic and spatial way, by providing a flood of images all of which made the same point in different ways: You are that. There is no way to depart from synchronicity, just as there is no way to have a meaningless dream, although meaninglessness itself may be the subject, or the meaning, of certain highly perverse and frightening dreams, dreams designed to demonstrate how nice it is to have meaning to those who have decided they would rather not have any of that, thanks. For the first time in my life, I started to put the concept "external world" in mental quotation marks, and was instantly rewarded by a chorus of approving synch: people saying things like "good," "marvelous," "it's about time"; the sun breaking through clouds; domestic problems turning out to have been foolish misunderstandings; triumphant marches and choruses on the stereo; the sudden cessation of a banging in the pipes; and a host of much more subtle and intricate comments which seemed designed to smooth my way and answer every objection, even the objection that the mere existence of objections, of a dialogue, disproves the thesis, which it does not, because any sane person talks to himself all the time. If one's thesis is that ordinary life is a dream, then anything that can happen in a dream in sleep can happen in waking life also, without disproving the thesis. If you can see that, you can see everything. (Let's say you lose your marbles in a dream and they all appear to roll under a sofa. Are your marbles under the sofa?) I was off to the races. I began to re-examine my prejudices, to flip them over, as it were, and I saw lots of nice, shiny faces in mint condition where formerly there had been only a dull array of tarnished tails. Everything was furnished with new and exciting associational trails and every-thing I heard spoken around me, no matter how trivial the phenomenological context, suddenly became loaded with resonance and the cognitive coherence which had been missing, I thought, on my mescaline trip. I felt, for the first time in my life, an incomparable sensation of being "out from under" which made all other successes in all other games (perhaps excepting release from prison or recovering from a serious illness) seem pale by comparison. It was as if I had entered another country, and had been given a souped-up language-learning capacity by passing through a trick box at the airport, but the image is far from exact, because some, at least, of the people who were speaking the new "language" didn't know it and since my thoughts were still being formed, most often, in terms of my old awareness, I would recognize them, as it were, twice; the first time the old way and the second time the new way. Since these juxtapositions were often hilarious, I started grinning, which made a bad impression. A worried frown, in contrast, is acceptable almost anywhere. Almost everyone who isn't enlightened, my former self included, thinks of Enlightenment as an extension of dimensions with which they are familiar, an increase. They expect to become bigger, better, purer, stronger, wiser, holier or whatever. In fact, there is nothing additive about it. If a structural metaphor must be used, it ought to be subtractive. Enlightenment is the removal of self-imposed delusions which were never justified by evidence or logic (see Hume) in the first place. The experience can be associated with all kinds of glorious imagery or none at all. _Comme décor,_ one might say. While I was going through all this, Zen koans and fables which had formerly struck me as forced conceits intended to disorient the victim took on the objective accuracy of laboratory slides or the common-sense verity of labels on soup cans. (I particularly like "You drop six inches.") I started drifting around the house picking up books at random, and reading whatever came to hand as a response to whatever question was puzzling me. At one point, I even decided to test it out by not even asking a question but just stabbing a randomly opened book with a blind finger and seeing what it had to offer. As a solipsist, I thought, I was simply asking myself for directions. The book was in Tim's room and the word was "automobile," so I walked down two flights of stairs and through the hall and the library and out the French doors in the music room, across the porch, under the porte cochčre and out to the road, on which a light snow had fallen. Maynard Ferguson, borrowing my automobile without permission, was stuck in a rut. Standing there in his camel hair coat, he looked properly abashed by my sudden appearance. "Get in and I'll push you, Maynard," I said, before he could say a word. With only a slight shove, the car came free and Maynard waved jauntily as he slid around the corner. Conclusion: Testing it out instead of using it creatively would produce trivia, embarrassment for others and wasted energy. But why was it an automobile scene rather than something else? Jackie Leary walked past. "Hey, Jackie," I asked, "what are you thinking about right now?" "A dream I had last night," Jackie said, not stopping, but producing a typically Millbrookian knowing smile. Naturally. The language of the unconscious. The car, a vehicle, represented my everyday personality, the means by which I got from point A to point B with maximum efficiency. If I pushed the process too far I would lose control of this valuable convenience. Shouldn't do that. I then began to wonder about the Psychedelian masterminds by whom I still imagined myself to be surrounded. Surely, they had all caught on to this? How could they avoid it? But, if so, why didn't they talk about synchronicity instead of reproducing supernaturalist trash like the _TBD_? If, for whatever reason, they felt they needed a connection with ancient traditions, why not Confucius or Lao-tzu? But, not only had I developed great affection for the place and the people, I had also put myself in a position of dependence. My vehicle was gone, in more ways than one. I had to find excuses for them. It did not enter my head, at that stage of the game, that people who had given up so much, were risking so much, were working so hard, were so entertaining, so congenial, so intelligent, so literate, so sane, and so right about so many other important matters that most people were so wrong about, and who were taking so much LSD, could possibly be inferior to me in terms of philosophic insight and understanding. Perhaps, I thought, they all knew the truth but believed they had to put on some kind of spook show for the public to avoid commitment to the nearest booby hatch. Perhaps there was a kind of "secret society" aspect to the whole thing after all. Most people were not aware they were dreaming but a few were? But, if so, why wasn't I getting a warmer welcome? Perhaps ... perhaps all kinds of weird stuff. I went into the music room and stretched out on the rug next to a giant goldfish tank, inhabited by two very large goldfish and a snail, to think things over. My faith in the wisdom of Tim, Dick and Ralph had served its purpose. Now it was bending and creaking under a heavy load of fresh facts that didn't fit in and couldn't be dismissed. Dick came in and suggested a walk, and we headed up the road past the Bowling Alley. "You've got some people worried," Dick said. "What's going on. You're not on acid are you?" "Nope. I just suddenly caught on to the fact that I'm living in a dream, that's all." "The Dream of Brahman ..." Dick suggested. "Well, I suppose you could call it that. I just see the meaning in everything. No matter what happens, I see it as a message to me, to me personally. It isn't anything grandiose like my mescaline trip. It's friendly and also highly amusing a lot of the time." "I think I know what you mean," Dick said, "but I don't know if 'messages' is the right word." "Yeah," I readily agreed. "Since there isn't anything outside myself, how can I get 'messages' from anywhere?" Dick seemed displeased. "What about me?" Dick asked. "I have a life of my own, don't I?" "I haven't figured that out yet," I replied. We walked in silence for a while. "Well, you must realize what all of us are hoping," Dick said. "No, what?" Dick said it didn't matter. When we came to the grassy knoll where I had gone through my improvised ritual, I told Dick all about it. He didn't say much. Dick was behaving peculiarly, I thought. His "mimic modulation" was off. He wasn't really paying any attention to what I was saying. It became transparently clear to me later that the well-known "glass wall" had come down, but at the time I thought of Tim, Dick and Ralph as being above such stuff. Closed-minded Millbrookians? It couldn't be. The term "enlightenment experience" must have escaped my lips at some point, although I can't remember when or to whom. What (Dick meant) "all" of them were hoping for, or Dick was hoping for, or Dick and his clique were hoping for, or what any or all of the foregoing pretended to themselves and/or others they were hoping for was "the Messiah," naturally. I didn't get it. Despite having been brought up to think along those lines, I had broken the habit at age fourteen or so. My vow of credulity had something to do with it. I wasn't thinking of Tim, Dick and Ralph as fallible and frightened human beings. I had idealized them to an absurd extent. It took me years to get over this. Also, Enlightenment, and simply being stoned also, encourages "absent mindedness" and the first things to become "absent" are the silly ideas the people around you probably have and the silly ideas you formerly had yourself. The Zen story that illustrates this point is shown in a famous picture: Three old men, engaged in a fascinating conversation, have just crossed a bridge which one of them, a recluse, has vowed never to cross. Realizing what they have done, they are convulsed with laughter. It's a classic experience. Why couldn't Dick proclaim his "hope" in plain English? Because he ("we") actually had no such hope. On the contrary, Dick was enormously bothered by my claim of Enlightenment and eager to dismiss whatever I said. He wanted to wear a white robe and be "the Messiah" himself, as became abundantly clear later. Why wasn't this happening to him? (If it was any good, that is.) Chapter 7 MERLIN'S TOWER _Of course I was all the talk--all other subjects were dropped; even the king suddenly became a person of minor interest and notoriety._ When Dick and I got back to the house I saw it was about time for the trip, so I went up to Tim's room, where I found Ling-Ling, but no Tim. She told me he had gone to town for cigarettes, and would be back in a half hour or so. Fine. I relaxed on a pile of cushions. All my fears of acid had evaporated. Ling-Ling went to the bookcase and brought a book over to me. "Have you seen this?" she asked. "It's Dick's." I looked at the book as she paged through it. An exotic historical collection of pornographic photographs including several old French shots of mixed shit-ins, or something--six or seven Parisians of mixed age and sex lined up on a multi-hole bench with their pants down and skirts up. In my condition, the standard pictures of people fucking each other seemed too obvious in meaning to deserve much attention. (Ling-Ling wanted to define the situation in terms appropriate to her paramount interests and skills.) But I was fascinated by the group shit-ins. What in God's name did that mean? I wouldn't let Ling-Ling turn the pages. "Wait a minute, Ling-Ling," I said, "I have to figure out why these pictures are here." "Oh, maybe that was the custom in those days," Ling-Ling replied. "Why are you getting so uptight about it?" "I am not getting uptight about it!" I insisted. Ling-Ling was beginning to piss me off. But she was cute, so I tried to explain. "I'm interpreting everything. Whatever I see or hear has some direct meaning for me. There are no accidents." Ling-Ling was uninterested in what I was doing. All she wanted was that I stop thinking my way and start thinking her way. I could see it plainly, and I could see Ling-Ling could see I could see and didn't like it. When Ling-Ling left the room, the meaning of the co-educational latrine picture seemed clearer to me. The photos represented the condition of Ling-Ling's mind, the current repertoire of her images. One could conclude then, that when she wasn't concerned with sexuality, she was full of shit? And everything she represented was full of shit? Or perhaps, if that was carrying it too far, I should at least be on my guard with all things feminine and Oriental during the acid trip to come. In any event, the pictures were humorous and no grim or diabolical images were present, so the appropriate attitude, perhaps, would be one of good-natured, old-fashioned, red-blooded, down-home suspiciousness of foreign broads. Easy enough, I thought. Had I not attended many "clap movies" warning me against "so-called nice girls" during basic training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in 1946? While I was musing on these notions, Tim came in, and all the while chatting in a natural and amiable manner about various trifles, started arranging cushions in a circle around a candle and a vase of flowers. When everything in the room was to his satisfaction, he went out and quickly returned with a silver platter, on which rested half a dozen tiny tablets, which he placed in the center of the circle of pillows, next to the candle and flowers. "Well, here goes," Tim chuckled and reached for the plate. At that moment, Susan Leary walked into the room and stopped halfway towards us from the door, obviously set to deliver an important message. "Susan Metzner says he's crazy," Susan announced, in the most baleful manner imaginable. I couldn't believe my ears. Neither could Tim believe his, it seemed. He stared at his daughter in astonishment. "What?" Tim asked. "Who's crazy?" Susan pointed at me. "Him." Susan left. Tim and I stared at each other. "What the hell is going on around here?" Tim asked. "Do you know?" "Nope." I shrugged. It was obvious. The female mind was a bummer. Beware, mankind. "Well, it's too much for me," Tim said. "Let's put if off. Why don't you just stay here and read _Siddhartha_. Everyone's going to the barns to watch some cattle come in. I'll try to find out what's bothering Susan." Fine. Supporting my back on a large cushion under the front window, I opened Hesse's book. Although I had a lamp on, the fat candle Tim had lit for the trip, about ten inches high and five inches in diameter, continued to burn not far from my feet. The lightness and sweetness, verging on Bahai-style dopey-mindedness, of _Siddhartha_, in contrast to the dark surrealism of _Steppenwolf_ , and the downright paranoid (and tedious) craziness of most of his other stuff, surprised me. It supported the idea that he wasn't smoking edelweiss up in those Austrian Alps. Anyway, I found it possible to make the transition, and was soon lost in the story. Chapter 8 THE BOSS _To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the onlooking world consent to it is finer._ I had been reading for no more than an hour, and had just come to the riverboat episode, when Tim and Ling-Ling entered the room. "What happened to my candle?" Tim blurted out, looking down at the rug with open-mouthed amazement. "Did you do that, Arthur?" Ling-Ling asked. The candle, which should have burned for days, was all splattered out, in droplets and streaks of wax, in a rough circle about four feet in diameter, mostly on the rug but also on my shoes and on the curtain to Tim's sleeping alcove. At the center of this mess, or magical mandala, depending on how janitorial or poetic you want to be about it, the flame still burned, perhaps a quarter of an inch off the floor, on a bit of wax and string. Weird, very weird, but I hadn't noticed a thing. "Well, I suppose you could say that," I said in response to Ling-Ling's question. "But I'm as surprised as you are." "Art, what in God's name are you up to? You're scaring the piss out of everyone around here, and frankly, you're beginning to scare me too," Tim said. "I don't know why that should be," I replied. Little old me was scaring the piss out of everyone, Timothy Leary included? In terms of my assumptions about this band of hardy adventurers, and the nature of my current persona (very pacific), this didn't make any sense at all. Sure, Susan Metzner had evidently gotten a paranoid bee in her bonnet about something or other, that could happen to anyone anywhere anytime, but general alarm? Universal urination? What about? I was genuinely upset and puzzled. "All I've been doing is sitting here reading _Siddhartha_. Do you think I put a bomb in the candle or something? As for my interpretation of events, it seems to me it's what Hesse advocates. What do you want me to do, be dishonest?" Tim sort of danced around, head down, in a kind of ritual shuffle I had seen him adopt before when he wasn't sure what to do or say next. "I don't think you understand Hesse," he finally said. "Then what is all this supposed to mean?" I asked, tapping the Hesse quotation on the wall next to his bed. Tim's response to this question about a statement he had deemed worthy of typing out and putting up where he could see it when he woke up in the morning (there was nothing else of this kind around) was so defensive, reductionist and generally feeble that I could hardly credit the evidence of my ears. It was "just" psychological, a literary device, poetic license, dramatic exaggeration. Stuff like that. Was Tim saying that all the claims he had been making for the importance of the psychedelic experience and the "movement" were phony? It sounded like he thought the whole thing was an illusionist's trick, more impressive than, but not different in kind from pulling a rabbit out of a hat. "Yeah, sure," I said, and walked out of the room, feeling paranoid. (I now think that Tim was right about my not understanding Hesse. I had given Hesse, along with everyone else around at that time, credit for more genius than he possessed. Hesse had certain intimations of wisdom, best realized in _Siddhartha_ and _Steppenwolf_, and that was about it. Elsewhere, these glimmers are submerged in a Hegelian murk of grandiose moralistic hierarchical fantasies in the worst Germanic tradition, saved, to some extent, by a gloss of irony, but not nearly glossy enough for me.) Sincerely puzzled by what was happening, Tim suspected a con job of some sort. The trouble with that theory was that I wasn't the type, and he knew it. A "no win" situation for Tim. And what possible good did that do me? What was the point? If there was one, I didn't get it. I spent the rest of the evening splitting and bringing in firewood for the six or seven fireplaces in the house. Interpreting life as an ongoing dream, I tried to figure out what to make of the soundless explosion of Tim's candle. As far as I could tell, this odd event hadn't improved my credibility or sanity rating. A fine, upstanding young candle had been wasted and a mess created in order to ... intimidate Timothy Leary? What good did that do? I couldn't figure it out. The obvious Freudian interpretation ("castration") seemed silly, or was it? The river scene in _Siddhartha_ had something to do with it, I thought. Crossing rivers has a well-established meaning in all allegorical literature. Death. The other shore. The flow of time. The progression of the generations. A ferry and a ferryman? Charon. The Styx. Relations intermediate between life and death. Major psychedelic experience, according to Tim at the time, should be interpreted in terms of such conveyance. Perhaps the candle blowing up was a warning not to go any further. If I crossed the "river" to the "land of death," perhaps all kinds of odd and inexplicable things would happen and I would frighten and alienate everyone in sight. Every rug in the house would be soaked with urine. Don't push it too far, Art, or you will isolate yourself. Take it easy. Pretty soon, I started grinning like my new self again. I stayed up late that night in the kitchen to read the Evans-Wentz translation of the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_. Since my own body was as much of an illusion as anything else around, there was no good reason to think of its disappearance as a termination of consciousness. Maybe the book had some useful tips on the topic. So far, I hadn't found any. In fact, the book seemed stupid, ignorant and crazy. Susan Metzner walked in, fetchingly attired in a little-girl nightgown. "Thanks a lot for fucking up my trip," I said, smiling. I had smiled almost continuously since I had left the hill, which led me to re-evaluate my position on perpetual grinners of the Ramakrishna variety, whom I had assumed in the past to be suffering from blindness to the ugly facts. "I'm sorry," Susan said. "Ralph and I have been talking about you and I think I was wrong. Anyway, I didn't expect Susan Leary to repeat what I said to Tim. Susan and Jackie are very protective of their father, you know." Susan and I talked amiably for a few minutes and, for perhaps the first time in twelve hours, I found myself thinking in a "normal" fashion, without paying any attention to what I had decided to think of, pro tem, as "the second level of meaning." "Can you explain what's been happening?" Susan asked. Certainly. Nothing to it. I gave her a detailed rundown on what I had been going through. "And right now, I'm revising my theories on the subject of death," I concluded matter-of-factly, as if I were describing a project in domestic carpentry. "Since the only book on death available at this moment is this one (I held up the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_) it should be the right one, somehow or other. I'm trying to take things at face value, which is one hell of a change for me, Susan." Susan looked slightly glassy-eyed. She protested that the Evans-Wentz translation contained all kinds of disgusting and meaningless undertakers' and embalmers' details which Tim had eliminated in his version, so why bother with the nasty old thing? "Easy," I said. "If I find I am repelled I will stop reading, since it would be contrary to the principle of taking things at face value to continue." Which is exactly what happened. The tantric left-hand path is full of nauseating methods, not the least of which is to dance around with any convenient corpse until its tongue protrudes, at which point you are supposed to bite it off. The tantric literature and its many spin-offs include a wide range of "drug alternative" methods for achieving "higher states" which have this grim, spooky character, ranging from Castaneda's relatively mild lizard mutilations to the ritual murders of the Kali-worshiping Thugees and the bloody-minded crusades of such religious leaders as Charlie Manson and the popes. When our enemies invoke Manson as evidence against LSD, I point out that the statistics are on our side. If the Psychedelian sub-culture has "spawned" one genuine fiend, and there is plenty of reason to believe it was the California prison system, pop occultist novels, and TV horror shows that "spawned" him, he was pretty ineffectual and pathetic compared to such unstoned mass murderers as Adolph Hitler, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who had the drug tastes of the average American housewife, that is, speed and booze. As for Evans-Wentz, I now think he was a learned fool, a kind of idiot-savant, and in his books, as in almost all the academic studies of the subject which have followed his lead, one will find the same sort of hilarious mixture of trash and wisdom which would result if, say a thousand years from now, a modern Tibetan scholar were to resurrect the ancient, mysterious doctrines of Thoreau and Emerson from the rubble of America and present them all helter-skelter, mixed in without discrimination, with selections from the works of Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith and Billy Graham, as examples of the mysterious "Christian" mysticism of the ancient West. Evans-Wentz could not think, a failing which seems almost sublime in a person of such scholarly attainment and mental industry, and makes one wonder, when faced with an example, if one is missing something. In his case, I don't think so. Consider the following remarks taken from _Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines_ (Oxford University Press, 1958) by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, M.A., D.Lit., D.Sc., Jesus College, Oxford: 1. _Were the Heat Yoga to be taught universally in all the schools and to become a world-wide practice, there would be no need for central heating in the dwellings of men, not even in Alaska or Siberia, or throughout the arctic and antarctic regions._ 2. [The graduates of these institutions would also] _become transcendent over gravitation, there would be no need of motor vehicles and airplanes, nor of bridges and boats._ 3. _By Mind the Cosmos was shaped. By Mind the Cosmos is sustained in space. By indomitable control of his mind a supreme master of yoga can control all mundane conditionality; he can make, or bring into visible manifestation from the unmanifested, all the things that men can make, without wearisome tools and clamorous and noisome factories._ 4. _On Earth, as in a University granting many degrees, man shall continue to matriculate at birth and enjoy the long vacations afforded by death, as he passes on from lower to higher degrees of Buddhahood, he quits Earth's Halls of Learning, prepared to perform his duties in the guidance and government of the Cosmic Whole, of which, in virtue of evolutionary growth in Right Knowledge, he has become a spiritually conscious part, an Enlightened One._ No records exist of the learned Oxfordian practicing what he preached. He trudged to the Jesus College mess hall in the rain with all the other Jesusians, resorted to the mundane bridge when rivers had to be crossed, etc. The Snazzm meaning of the _TBD_ being a big deal at Millbrook at that time was, I concluded, cautionary. Don't trust books. Don't trust academic credentials. Snazzm? At about the same time I excommunicated Tim for cometolatry in 1973, I invented a set of epistemological terms, and explained them in a series of _Divine Toad Sweat_s. These terms discriminate between three orders, or levels, of delusionality and thus help to prevent confusion when thinking about such matters as synchronicity, exploding candles, and the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_. Taken together, they are the "Zmms." In descending order of delusionality, they are "Snazzm," "Fazzm" and "McPozzm." Snazzm is ideation founded on the assumption that all experience is (in the nature of) a dream. The externality of relations is denied. The only delusion maintained is that a self exists, within whose dream, and by and for and of whom, all appearances are determined. This is solipsism and is only one step short of maintaining that nothing whatever exists, which is pure Buddhist Nihilism of the old school, into which solipsism must collapse upon close examination. (See Hume re "inattention.") Fazzm is ideation which, although often claiming to be monist, maintains the delusion of multiplicity, plural minds, and a space-time continuum with an independent dynamism, however mutable and related to psychic determinants, and however removed, the particulars therein may be from ordinary experience. Although Fazzm ideation assumes multiplicity and a space-time continuum, those who use it attempt to get over these restraints (transcend them) with word-magic smoke and mirrors. Ordinary, physical things are endowed with psychic and abstract super-natures and psychic and abstract concepts are manipulated as if they were physical objects. "He is trampling out His vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Virtually all myth, poetry and non-supernaturalist, but non-enlightened, "cosmic mind" occultist religion is Fazzm. All "metaphysics" is Fazzm. Straightforward expositions of Fazzm belief systems are rare. Here is an example, an early and unusual quote from America's leading Fazzmaniac, Ralph Waldo Emerson (_Nature_, 1836), in which he actually lays all his cards on the table instead of playing them close to his chest, as became his standard practice later: _Nature is the symbol of spirit .... The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation ... man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are all its; we are its property and men .... That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries embodies it in his language, as the FATHER .... There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit, the visible creation in the terminus of the circumference of the invisible world._ The reader who is reduced to sputtering incoherence in attempting to explain exactly what he has against this kind of stuff (mass-market science fiction is loaded with it) is an anti-obscurantist after my own heart and is in good intellectual company in general. I could try to take the above apart, but dissecting "moonshine," as Herman Melville called it, is no easy task. After all, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? Damned if I know. Yet much that is good and even great in art and literature is Fazzm. "The sun is the width of a man's foot," said Heraklitus of Ephesus, making one of his many startling-but-true Fazzm observations. The best Fazzm always borders on Snazzm. For a good collection of Fazzm epigrams (the ideal form, beware of lengthy expositions) from noble sources, see Norman O. Brown's _Love's Body_, a remarkable book. McPozzm ideation assumes the externality of relations. It is based on the delusion of a self which is one of many other similar and dissimilar (but never identical) objects in a space-time continuum with a dynamism independent of one's own or any other person's personality or life. There is an infinite, or almost infinite, number of things (minds, souls, black holes, light quanta, neutrinos, archangels or whatever) contained within this imaginary universe. Mental and/or spiritual entities and operations, whether or not they have any "existence" other than in the abstract relatedness of physical things, are governed by rules different than the rules that apply to physical things, thus producing a dualist totality no matter how they are construed. The operations described by modern physics, common sense and strict empirical reasoning are no more or less McPozzm than anecdotes about an Eastern Mediterranean tribal deity hardening Pharaoh's heart or mooning Moses, a conviction that one is in telepathic contact with flying saucers, or the proceedings of the Council of Trent. All assume a container/contained epistemological situation: There is something out there; I am within it; and I can know something about other beings and things within it, and possibly something about the whole thing, by one means or another. It's safe to say, McPozzm, that almost everyone thinks in McPozzm terms most of the time. One may, however, develop a capacity for thinking all three ways, or, more often, two ways. Literary intellectuals, poets, prelates and paranoids often think in both Fazzm and McPozzm terms. "I have become Shiva, destroyer of Worlds," thought Oppenheimer, both a scientist and a poetic soul, upon observing the first model of his contraption do its stuff. This beats "gee whiz," one must admit. Genuine, systematic, sequential, analytical Snazzm ideation is as rare as Enlightenment itself but Snazzm, good or bad, is almost always the dominant Zmm at the peak of a Big One. Tim's Kohoutek phase was a good example of bad Fazzm running rampant. The following quotes are taken from a press conference given at the time, prior to the non-appearance of the widely touted comet, by Joanna Harcourt-Smith Leary, in which she asserted that she and Dr. Leary were "brought back" to the United States to "decode" the "message" of this comet. It was reported, without comment, in the _New Yorker_, of all places (the real _New Yorker_, kids, not the vulgar imposter of the present day): 1. _The comet Starseed is to leave the womb planet Earth. The Starseed is a comet of prophesy. 2. Life seeds egg planets throughout the galaxy. When life leaves the womb planet, it attains immortality in the Galactic Star School. 3. When the embryonic nervous system can decipher the genetic code it receives instructions for leaving the earth-womb and contacting higher intelligence. 4. There is no choice. Life must leave the womb planet to survive and evolve. 5. The Starseed transmission was received by Dr. Leary in his cell at Folsom Prison._ Notice the pompous, ex-cathedra tone. The authors of pronouncements of this kind, speaking as they do from Mount Olympus or other famous peaks, would sound even sillier if they qualified anything, and the projection of this omniscient certainty is the actual point of it all. To learn more, one "has no choice" but to "contact" Dr. Leary ... or the viper at his side. This Kohoutek crap, coming on top of _Neurologic_, was too much for me. I made major changes in the language and doctrines of the Church. No matter how poetic or metaphoric the intent, I could no longer bring myself to use terms like "God" or "Self." I abandoned all efforts to be ecumenical. Instead, in a series of _DTS_s of increasing severity, I defined the Zmms, excommunicated Tim, changed the Second Principle, and made the Church doctrinaire, exclusive, hierarchical, monarchical and dynastic. Membership in any other religious organization, including the Masonic Order, Alcoholics Anonymous and the Church of Universal Life, meant automatic excommunication and still does. I didn't want anyone to make any mistake about it. The horseshit Neo-Americans wanted victory over included the metaphysics of my former guru. Better examples of horseshit are hard to find. Thus, in Snazzm and Fazzm terms, Kohoutek and Tim's attempt to exploit it, and the comet's failure to show, helped me to clean up my act and to define the doctrine of the Church. In a Fazzm sense, Psychedelianism underwent a dialectical transformation and occultism got a well-deserved shot in the chops in the time-honored way supernaturalism and occultism get their shots in the chops. Something was supposed to happen but it didn't. McPozzm? It didn't mean anything. McPozzm doesn't have to mean anything, which is the beauty of it. Hard to play croquet or write a uniform commercial code without it. Imputing to Susan much higher intellectual attainments and philosophic sophistication than she probably had or even wanted, I asked her what she thought about the problem of suffering. She said she thought it was all a matter of karma, the first of many invocations of the term that I was to hear from stoned but unsophisticated people for years to come. Somehow, karma (fate) explains how suffering is distributed, and that takes care of that. It's merely an incantation for getting rid of unpleasant thoughts. Just kid stuff. I didn't know what to say. A large moth came zooming into the kitchen and rapped me smartly on the forehead. "That's the kind of coincidence I mean," I said. "That kind of thing has been happening all day." I gestured towards the moth which was fluttering down the hallway to the basement and laundry room. "What coincidence?" Susan asked. "The moth hitting me when you mentioned karma," I said. "I didn't see any moth," Susan said. I said that it had been a rapid transit and she would have missed it if she had blinked, said I was tired, excused myself, and went to bed. So Susan hadn't seen the moth. She should have. I had uttered a fib in the cause of peace and tranquility. OK, what difference did it make? Since I no longer believed in the externality of relations, the degree to which my perceptions seemed shared by others was not of crucial importance. I poured a drink from the trusty bottle at the side of my low bed , and lit a cigarette. Moonlight was pouring into my room through the open window along with a refreshing night breeze. The Bowling Alley and the stark pines looked like an illustration from a book of fairy tales. What if only I had seen the exploded candle? If, as it seemed, strange events were somehow required at this stage of the game, better oddities in the ordinary events of the everyday world than bizarre hallucinations or even mescaline-style visions. I had already been through all of that. Let things continue along these lines, by all means! I put out my cigarette and went to sleep, and slept soundly until awakened in the morning by the cheerful chirping of chickadees outside my window. I was in a good mood. No hangover. My thoughts effortlessly took up where they had left off the night before. When I walked into the kitchen I found Dick Alpert, Billy Hitchcock and a couple other coffee drinkers having a discussion about national politics. Dick introduced me around. Billy struck me as a charming person. It hardly registered that, as one of the two owners of the place, he alone qualified among those present as my actual host. Billy had an open, confident and witty conversational style and perfect manners; a sort of Frank Merriweather archetype who had risen from the depths of Old Money bearing a banner with a strange device. In retrospect, I think he reminded me of myself because he was tall and blond, and had psychological qualities similar to mine, difficult for the person who has them to identify precisely, which produced a feeling of almost instant affinity. He was sure as hell the first zillionaire, and the last, who made me feel this way. Billy asked what I thought of Goldwater's chances in the upcoming elections. I forget what I thought, but I was probably wrong, as I usually am about such things. A day or two later, Tim played some session tapes for me. Part of his routine at the time was to ask people what question they wanted answered by the psychedelic experience they were about to have. Everyone seemed to want the same kind of stuff: "ego-loss" and a "merge" with the "Oversoul," a better attitude, more love, etc. I don't recall any philosophic questions, good, bad or indifferent. As a matter of fact, most of these requests were couched in terms that suggested that the requester understood himself and the world around him perfectly. I was delighted when I put on a tape and heard someone say, in a self-assured tone, "How can I make more money on the stock market?" The voice seemed familiar, but I couldn't place it. "Now there's a question I like!" I said to Tim, who was scribbling away at his desk. Although the wish expressed was devoid of philosophic curiosity, it was also devoid of hypocrisy and pretentiousness. Tim peered at me over the top of his reading glasses. He was grinning. Tim almost always responded happily to demonstrations of humor and cynicism on my part. My philosophic utterances, on the other hand, stimulated what might be called a "fight, flee or steal" reaction. "You do, hmmm?" he said. "Do you know who that is?" "No." "Billy Hitchcock." Tim turned back to his writing. Billy was clearly an uncommon character, but Tim, Dick and Ralph had an established relationship with him, about which I knew almost nothing, and upon which I felt I should not presume to intrude. Also, he lived up the road somewhere in another building called "The Bungalow," which I hadn't seen and didn't expect to ever enter. I went back to my musings, walks in the woods, and firewood splitting on the porch and later in the day went upstairs to talk to Tim. "Listen, Tim," I said, "what I want to know is what am I supposed to do next?" "What do you mean? Are you still on the kick you were on yesterday?" "Of course," I replied. "I know what everything means. Who I am, where I am, and all of that." I airily waved my arm in disdainful dismissal of such elementary matters. "What I want to know is why there is so much suffering in the world. I'm willing to do whatever you suggest. Take a thousand mics, go sit under a tree for three weeks, anything." "You're having a bad trip," Tim said. "Don't worry. You'll come out of it." I was completely baffled. I left the room without saying a word. Down the hall I found Dick seated at a desk in a small room in the servants' wing, whistling a merry tune and signing a big stack of $100 government bonds. "Tim says I'm having a bad trip," I said to Dick. Dick shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "Listen, Art. I'd like your opinion of this." He handed me a periodical reprint of something he had written on juvenile delinquency. I took it down to the front porch, pulled a rocking chair up to the balustrade so I could put my feet up, and read it. Terrible stuff. Assuming all kinds of things which probably ought not to be assumed, his comments were reasonable, but his style was lifeless, academic, pussy-footing prose all the way. I felt like telling him that when it came to writing, he should stick to signing $100 bonds, but that would have been unkind. When I returned the paper, I told him to try to be more natural. My thoughts were beginning to feel relatively clogged and heavy. I was losing my high. I missed Sally and the kids. Most important of all, did I really want to take a trip with Tim? I was having a "bad trip"? What? A flood of synchronicity awareness does not, I have learned since, always cause people to jump for joy. On the contrary, it's often the launching pad for paranoid ideation, delusions and freak-outs. "Messages," already a misleading concept, can be swiftly converted into "orders" if they are misinterpreted in terms of supernaturalist assumptions. The TV set is telling me to kill my wife, instead of showing me some of the repressed feelings I have about women. Or, because of a remarkable association between some Bible verses I have just read and other events, I have been chosen by God to lead the Israelites out of bondage. So hijack a bomber and nuke Mecca, naturally. And so on. A list of the different kinds of synchronicity would be a list of all imaginable relations. The best rule is to stay loose. Synchronicity will teach you how to interpret synchronicity, if you will let it. It is not a foreign language. Anyone who can grasp the principles of cause and effect reasoning in the context of a material universe of space, time and randomness can also grasp the principles of synchronistic relatedness if he is willing to imagine the alternative context of the non-spatial, non-temporal and psychically determined dream. It doesn't require a high IQ to do this; all it requires is an ability to see things in Snazzm terms without freaking out. The _I Ching_ is the most refined synchronicity condenser available to those of us who constitute the only class for whom the _I Ching_ was intended and for whom it works, that is, superior people. It may be thought of as the actual "magic book" of the myths and fairy tales. It's in a class by itself. If you refuse to see things in Snazzm terms, your hexagrams will urge you, one way or another, to settle for coin flipping, tarot card shuffling, daisy petal pulling, or whatever. Always use the Bollingen Foundation edition (which was financed by Paul and Mary Mellon). I won't try to analyze the synchronicity of all the events in this narrative. The reader will see what is meaningful for him, if he's ready for it. Synchronicity resists retrospective examination. It is OK to talk about one's life and note the synchronicity of various events as they occur, but scanning one's memory for startling and entertaining instances and slapping them down like melds in a game of rummy is ridiculous. It implies there is something unusual or meritorious about synchronicity. A thin line separates enlightened ideation from paranoid ideation, the crucial difference being that synchronicity is correctly understood in the first case and consistently misinterpreted in the second. Tim automatically and understandably assumed that anyone talking about "messages" and acting as I was had to be paranoid, in the sense of having a delusional system, grandiose ideas, fears of imaginary enemies, and so on. As a general rule, this is not a bad general rule, but I had decided to regard people who seemed to be screwing me up, McPozzm, as demonstrating certain principles for my benefit and thereby, so to speak, "warning me," Snazzm, not to get involved in this or that bad trip. This is also the way to interpret the changing lines of the _I Ching_. They are warnings or encouragements which, if properly understood, can help bring about or prevent or modify the change depicted. As for grandiosity, I had gone through that phase in five minutes. Pride in my imaginative accomplishments? How about shame for all the misery and horror in the world? Emerson's little gem "Brahma" automatically comes to mind. No moral or even "spiritual" superiority is involved. An enlightened person does not move to the head of his class. He is his class. The best attitude towards Enlightenment for those content without it is probably indifference and inattention. Aside from smiling all the time and exclaiming "of course" and "naturally" over everyday events, there were no dramatic alterations in my character as a consequence of becoming enlightened. My likes and dislikes remained pretty much the same, and so did my favored game routines and styles of expression. Certain fantasies and lines of thought, however, just dropped right out of the picture, never to return, and gradually, over the next few years, were replaced by suitable alternatives. Enlightenment itself is sudden. Learning how to play the games and finding a style appropriate to an enlightened intellect is gradual and tricky. The standard cosmicminder and supernaturalist fantasies, which I had allowed some elbow room in my youth, now walked the plank or were elbowed overboard. They disappeared much as love of the cat does in the life of a woman who has just had a baby, or hobby horses in the life of a boy just given a pony. There is a superficial resemblance between synchronicity awareness and rank, low-down, beware-of-the-black-cat-style superstition. Whenever I encountered a Millbrook Bread truck, for example, from the day of my Enlightenment onward, I took careful note of what I was thinking and what else was happening at the moment. Moments, in general, become the crucial category of time. The numbers assigned by post offices and telephone companies fell into clearly meaningful patterns. I liked Box 191, Star Lake, the first address of the Neo-American Church. Nine was big in the early days. A flat tire caused me to question my intended destination, and still does. Indeed, anything about my vehicle also refers, Snazzm, to the way I'm functioning as a personality. Physical health is more often related to the condition of one's dwelling, not one's vehicle. Psychologically, the body doesn't move around in the world. The world moves around the body. I'm not exactly delighted when a black cat crosses my path, but I wouldn't try to avoid a black cat, any more than I would avoid a "bump" sign rather than the bump itself. Supernaturalism leads to futile avoidance of, while solipsism leads to constructive learning from, the black cat. It's a good way to explain the difference. As for the synchronicity of names, check out the cast of characters in the Watergate affair. Check out doctors' names against their specialties. Now apply the same rules to writers, artists, philosophers and your circle of friends. Smoke some pot. Free associate. If one assumes that life is a dream, there is no difficulty in seeing life in these terms. If you assume that it is partly a dream and partly a machine, you're up the Amazon with the alligators, baby. But, how did it feel, one might ask, to become an Enlightened Being? Vertigo? Groovy vibes? Droopier earlobes? Greater compassion for venomous insects and reptiles? None of the above. In terms of general stonedness, the experience resembled a sinsemilla high lasting about ten hours, or was it two days? It didn't have the wild, speedy, "spacy" quality of an acid trip, the absolutely whacked-out quality that distinguishes the Supreme Sacrament in action, but I was definitely stoned. I behaved myself for two days, just hung around and lent a hand with this and that, and then went home. Let's not forget I had not, at that time, learned all of the above lessons, or, if I had, learned them well. I was enlightened, all right, but in a half-assed way. However, because I had "stolen" my Enlightenment, that is, gotten it from someone who didn't have possession himself but had produced the setting that I needed, I had nothing to complain about, and I didn't. Chapter 9 THE TOURNAMENT _They were always having grand tournaments there at Camelot; and very stirring and picturesque and ridiculous human bull-fights they were, too, but just a little wearisome to the practical mind._ On returning to the North Country and the world of public education, I found I had a new moral problem: I knew about something good, didn't I? Well, unless I was satisfied to play the part of a hack and a hypocrite, I had to do something about it. I had to spread the word. But, I must admit, for almost a year, I didn't. I had a good family and bad habits to support, so I went about my business as usual. When I had time, I worked on my book. Tim, Dick and Ralph, down at Millbrook, were not behaving much differently. The professional, scholarly, literary, and scientific ruts to which we were all accustomed continued to be followed, and the words "revolution" and "movement" had imaginary quotation marks around them if they were used at all. As for religion, well, yes, so far as other people's religions were concerned, and the older, odder, vaguer, more primitive and distant the better, it was now seen, in the light of psychedelic experience, that it was not necessarily all mumbo-jumbo after all. Personally, however, we were above all that. We were psychologists living in the twentieth century. Scientific research was the name of the game. But something known as "visionary experience," as distinct from hallucinations, delusions and imaginings, was back in the lexicon, and with a new twist. This was highly disagreeable to many powerful and entrenched interests, some of whom thought they had slaughtered all these animals a long time ago and sent their lifeless trophies to the taxidermists, but they had not defined themselves as combatants as yet and neither had we. So I finished the school year of '64 without serious trouble. When Sally had thrown her first_I Ching_ hexagram at Edwards she had been informed in no uncertain terms that she was pregnant, and she was. Klytie was born on July 14 at the hospital in Star Lake, another small town to which we had moved; prettier than Edwards, with more and better conveniences Sally, Susan and the baby stayed at Manhasset for the balance of the summer, while I went off on various jaunts. Poker games with old pals and parties with old palettes, in a triangle from Port Jefferson on Long Island to Plattsburg to Syracuse and back again. This sporting life, I found, wasn't as much fun as it had been. I was preoccupied with philosophic questions. When I told my old friends about my new interests, the subject was usually quickly changed to the tried and true, although at Syracuse I found that an old pal, Karl Newton, M.D. (a shrink) was very interested, as were some of the other high-IQ people around. I stopped off at Millbrook two or three times for brief visits during that strange summer following the JFK assassination. Nothing very remarkable happened, but people in general seemed to be in a peculiar frame of mind. Had a cabal of some kind taken over their government? I came to believe this in the years to come, but at the time I was as uncertain and confused about it all as the next guy. Joining the Millbrook community seemed to be an economic impossibility and that was that. At least the place existed. This meant a lot to me, as it did to many other people who had become bored and angry with the materialism and militarism of American life and dazed by the truly bizarre events in Dallas. The main thing I seemed to be doing was wasting money. Perhaps, unconsciously, I was trying to wreck my 9-to-5 existence. I usually had no summer vacations in those days. As I often put it to people who inquired, if I wasn't "in school," I was "in prison." It never entered my head that it was possible to do anything without, sooner or later, working to pay for it. What was I supposed to do, rob banks? When the 1964-65 school year started, Sally seemed happier with two kids to look after than one and we had found a better house than usual in Star Lake, a town with the woodsy atmosphere I favored. Even if my novelistic effort seemed labored and derivative to me, with bright spots here and there, the Millbrookians seemed to like it, and after all, it was only the first draft. Consciously, I didn't want to get fired, but by mid-winter my driver's license was suspended for speeding, and Sally had to bundle up Susan and Klytie every morning and drive me to the schools, often over icy roads in abominable weather. Each of my four violations had been for going ten miles or so over the limit on deserted straight-aways cutting through the forest preserve. Was the well-known "unseen hand" at work? Could be. These ambushes, always by the same cop, may well have been a deliberate shot across my bow, an introduction to harassment by selective enforcement. As I would learn in the years to come, it's the American Way of disposing of dissidents. Virtually every car that passed him was exceeding the speed limit. On the other hand, I was the school psychologist for the area and it was my job to tell people the truth about their kids. My antagonist may have been some local dull-normal kid's mother's brother-in-law, or something, getting even because I had said that it was bad luck with the genetic lottery, rather than bad teaching or moral depravity, that accounted for the kid's low grades. A lot of people, for wildly different reasons, hate to hear this. The FBI paid us a visit, without a preliminary phone call, one Saturday afternoon. Two young guys in gray flannel suits, very polite, very pleasant. They just wanted to discuss the subject. Nothing alarming was contemplated, etc. I asked them to sit down, the usual arguments on both sides were trotted out, and they left. Sally did not appear during this exchange. When the G-men left, I found her crouched at the top of the stairs with my little automatic pistol in hand. I was stunned. The extremely combative inclinations of her illustrious forbearers had apparently risen up, brushed common sense aside, and taken over for a while. I gently removed the weapon from her grasp and spoke a few words of admonishment, not unmixed with awe, and she quickly calmed down. Events cast their shadows before them, all right. In a way, I guess, Sally saw the battle lines more clearly than I did. I knew very well that my new and very exotic way of looking at things, and my new interest in psychedelic drugs, would not go over very well with most of the public school principals and superintendents to whom I reported, but I did my best to continue functioning as I had in the past, on the theory that the fellow professionals with whom I associated on my own time, and the kinds of psychological research in which I took an interest, were nobody's business but my own. I'm sure there were leaks. I had teacher friends, whose views on other matters were similar to my own, in whom I confided. My attitude became public when the rulers of New York State decided to increase the penalties for the distribution of the Lesser Sacrament. Under the governance of mass-murderer Nelson Rockefeller, these sadistic laws continued to escalate until the suffering imposed on pot smokers equaled or exceeded the punishments for robbery and manslaughter. This witch hunt provoked me to write a "general report," which was a mimeographed paper I occasionally distributed on a subject of general interest, on marijuana. There wasn't anything in this brief essay that wouldn't be regarded as standard liberal opinion in future years: Don't become alarmed at a little experimentation; cannabis isn't addicting; it may well have medical and psychological usefulness; the facts aren't all in; the laws are much too harsh and ought to be moderated, etc., etc. What the hell, I thought to myself. If a psychologist with my kind of experience couldn't express a minority opinion on a matter such as this, of what use was the First Amendment to the Constitution? I was fired the next day. The school boards of two of the four districts I served voted for me, and two voted against me, but this was enough to terminate my services, according to the rules then in place. The M.D. president of the school board in Star Lake, a Dr. Person, led the attack. No official reasons were provided, which was legal because I didn't have tenure. Note that two of my school boards stood by me. The public education establishment in those days was not nearly as supine or irrational as it became in the decades that followed, although the first serious capitulations to the forces of unreason were beginning to appear as the parents of low-IQ children organized and pressured the schools to ignore all but the most extreme differences in intelligence and achievement in promotion, grade placement and, eventually, in almost everything else including graduation from high school. Educational psychologists were demonic figures to these people. Since discrimination on the basis of race was bad, all discrimination was bad and all integration was good. The fact is that discrimination and segregation for the right reasons are the corner-stones of all good educational systems. But it was early. The dumbing down of American education had just begun. Because Sputnik was still fresh in people's minds, there were countervailing forces at work, now (1994) almost entirely vanquished. Maybe I got out just in time. Fortunately, I had just borrowed a couple thousand. Instead of buying a new car, I went over to Cranberry Lake, about ten miles from Star Lake, and started asking around for something roomy and isolated off the road and on the shore, 90 percent of which was in the forest preserve and declared "forever wild" by the New York State Constitution. It was nice, if somewhat anxiety provoking, to be free. The major insights gained from psychedelic experience are at odds with the myths and fantasies of institutional life in a dualist culture, and it is most often not a matter of choice that "turning on" and "tuning in" are swiftly followed by "dropping out." It isn't impracticality, per se. Psychedelians worry about survival problems as much as anyone else in trouble. It's often a matter of gagging when called upon to pronounce the prevailing incantations, once one no longer believes in them. The few supposedly turned-on professionals who manage to remain in institutional life doing research and teaching will often be found, on close examination, to be not turned-on at all. Gwenn Longbotham, former bee hee of Burlington, Vermont, told me about some isolation chamber research she had done with Jean Houston, who had been anointed as an authority on LSD by the mass media and mass publishing. Gwenn asked Jean if she had taken much, and Jean said she had had one 50-microgram trip, period. "I'm too analytical," Jean explained, with a brazen smirk. Yeah, sure. That's the problem with all these great-mystery-that-surrounds-the-pyramids kind of people. (See _Mind Games_, Viking, 1972.) They are too "analytical." As an Aries kind of guy (I regard astrology as just another frame for synchronicity, a convenient typology for the cast of characters, and not a matter of "influences") and a son of a Lutheran minister, it was unlikely that I could have maintained a fraudulent persona for long, but it took years before I fully accepted this fact. True, I was free of many restraints, but I was also free of $500 paychecks every two weeks, which I didn't like at all. In private, Tim was pretty good at accepting the grimmer consequences. I remember one occasion in particular, when I was bitching to him about the amount of dog, cat and goat shit in and around the Big House during the last few months when the place had disintegrated into a mere comfort station for people and animals living in the woods. Tim, who was very fastidious personally, replied, "Art, that's your problem. You have to learn to love shit." Never! Chapter 10 BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION _I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished._ Morning Glory Lodge (originally named Sunset Lodge) was about a mile south of the public campsites on the eastern shore of Cranberry Lake, and from the real estate agent's description sounded like what I wanted and also what I could afford. A house, four cabins, and a shack out back containing a generating plant for lights and the water pump. No road in. You either took a boat or walked. $15,000, with $2,000 down on a $100-a-month land contract. No title until paid up. This was the spring of '65, but it was a pretty sweet deal even then. The agent gave me a set of keys, and I went to inspect the place with a friend Sally and I called Bucky Beaver, an outrageously misplaced aesthete and snob who was suffering from first-year teacher's culture shock. We walked through the cold spring woods, past small bays and beaches covered with sparkling rotting ice, in the general direction given by the agent. When we stepped out of the woods and into the clearing and saw the buildings spaced out under some tall old-growth deciduous trees, I immediately announced: "This is the place!" I don't think I have ever been happier in my life than at that moment. It was love at first sight. The house had a full-length screened porch, where Bucky and I paused on entering, to survey the view. The dock was about fifty feet long and made of boulders, staked and chained together in an L shape to provide safe mooring in all weather. Decking was stacked on the shore in front of it, along with three overturned wood boats and a canoe. Two old but apparently serviceable outboard motors rested on the porch floor. The furnishings were better than I had expected. A stone fireplace, complete with a hand-hewn oaken mantel. A slip-covered old couch on one side of the fireplace and two old plush overstuffed chairs on the other. A kerosene heater at the other end of the room. Two large propane refrigerators in the kitchen, which would make Sally's life easier, contrasted with a tiny galvanized metal sink, which would not. A bathroom with an old-fashioned tub, sink and toilet, all in working order. Two bedrooms with double beds in each. The second story was one long room under the roof, with four bunks in a row and a desk and chair in an alcove projecting out of the roof facing the lake. Great view. The silence was broken only by the occasional brushing of tree against tree and tree against roof. In the sunlight, last year's grass, now turned silver, rippled and flowed like the sea. A chipmunk darted in and out of the stacked decking. "Hey," Bucky said, "look at this." Bucky had discovered a stack of _The Saturday Evening Post_ and _Harper's Magazine_ from the 1930s. Irresistible. On waves of nostalgia, I was carried back to happy childhood summers at Schroon Lake and North Hero Island on Lake Champlain. $700 for a new Plymouth. Cartoonstrip adventures with Eveready batteries. NRA eagles. Christ! What if some other buyer came along before I could finalize the deal, or the owners changed their minds? All four cabins had water connections and sinks, two had toilets, and one of the toileted cabins sported a bathtub as well. How opulent can things get? The shack out back, we discovered, contained a washing machine as well as the generator. Yards of pipe. Tools. Paint. Oars and oarlocks. A path led us back through the woods to a covered spring in a bed of ferns. Delicious water. I was going berserk with joy. Bucky looked at me with alarm and greeted my ejaculations of delight with sputters of disdain. "You're not actually going to buy this place are you, Kleps?" "Of course I'm going to buy it! Why the hell shouldn't I buy it?" I replied, amazed anyone could fail to fall madly in love with it at first sight, even Bucky. "Well, there's nothing HERE!" Bucky said, waving his fat arms around. "You're too much, Bucky," was all I could think of to say. As we walked back through the woods to the campsite road where I had parked the car, my imagination revved up to full speed. Tim would send me people, certainly. Billy Hitchcock might kick in with some money for promotion and repairs, and the Psychedelian religious association (a "church," in the common parlance) that I had been thinking about organizing would now have a headquarters with room for visitors, privacy, and all kinds of dramatic, scenic and romantic associations which ought to charm any red-blooded American boy, as I understood the term, who happened to be an acid head as well, into a state of mind which would virtually guarantee his enthusiastic approval and maybe his name on the dotted line. Maybe we could winterize the house and travel by snowmobile to town! Vroom, vroom, and over the snow to town we go. How much groovier could life in the winter get than that? There was a tiny island with a cabin on it out in the center of the lake right in front of the lodge. Perhaps we could buy that too, and use it for sessions, and so on and so forth. Perhaps this, perhaps that. I didn't stop speeding for days. It was a fantasy come true. (The term "delirious," unfortunately, comes to mind.) As for members of the opposite sex, well, if they wanted to hang around with real guys they would just have to put up with this kind of shit whether they liked it or not, I thought. And wasn't there something known as an "outdoor girl"? The charm of the place would, I hoped, transform Sally into one of these fabled creatures. By the end of the week we were all moved in and I had invented the Neo-American Church. I ordered 1,000 peyote buttons from a "peyote rancher" in Texas named Elsie, whose name had been given me by Lisa Bieberman. It was legal. Each new member would get five buttons and a membership card. An old artist friend from my days of drunken debauchery on Long Island designed the card. Mystic Arts book society, which published Tim's conversion of the _TBD_, printed the announcements for me for nothing. Aside from signed agreement with the three principles of the Church, which consisted entirely of definitions and claims of rights, there would be no rules. This was a silly notion, but consistent with the emergent spirit of the times. The principles were: 1. _Everyone has the right to expand his consciousness and stimulate visionary experience by whatever means he considers desirable and proper without interference from anyone._ 2. _The psychedelic substances, such as LSD, are the True Host of the Church, not drugs. They are sacramental foods, manifestations of the Grace of God, of the infinite Imagination of the Self, and therefore belong to everyone._ 3._ We do not encourage the ingestion of psychedelics by those who are unprepared._ I changed Principle 2 in 1973, and filed the change with our incorporation papers in Vermont, to read: _To disseminate the principle that the psychedelic substances, such as LSD, are sacraments, in that they encourage Enlightenment, which is the realization that life is a dream and that the externality of relations is an illusion._ But during the time period covered by this book, the original set of principles stood. I tried to include in the embrace of the Neo-American Church Psychedelians of a supernaturalist disposition through the use of terms like "God" and "Self," which, although they only represented poetic or impressionistic ways of talking about the _antakarana_ function of the mind to me, left the door wide open to those who wished to maintain the various traditional externalizations. I chose to be vague instead of clear, always a serious crime for a philosopher and always punished one way or another. At the time of this writing, the complete set of principles reads: 1. _The psychedelic substances, such as cannabis and LSD, are religious sacraments since their ingestion encourages Enlightenment, which is the recognition that life is a dream and the externality of relations an illusion (solipsistic nihilism)._ 2. _The use of the psychedelic sacraments is a basic human right and all interference therewith is an assault on this right._ 3. _We do not encourage the ingestion of the greater sacraments such as LSD and mescaline by those who are unprepared and we define preparedness as familiarity with the lesser sacraments such as cannabis and nitrous oxide and with solipsist-nihilist epistemological reasoning based on such models as David Hume, Sextus Empiricus and Nagarjuna._ Our clergy would be called boo hoos. "Bee hee," to designate female clergypersons, came later. The name just popped into my head, but there are associations on which I may have drawn. "Boo" is old Negro slang for marijuana; John Jay Chapman, for whom I have a very high regard, was known, during his best years, as "the Goo Goo." "Hoo" is Old English for "house." There are plenty of other possible associations, including tears, but I don't think "boo hoo" encourages people to make too much of their sorrows. On the contrary. My conscious motive, if any, was to keep things light. I did not want the Church to appear solemn or Oriental. Nothing like moralistic, ceremonial, ecumenical, consensual "churchianity" would be allowed to take over. Psychedelian religion in general was one thing and the Church, and its doctrines and style and customs and rules, was another thing. We were iconoclasts. Tim accepted a place on the board and played along in some ways, but did almost nothing to promote the Church in public. He called himself a Hindu in his Texas trial, and when that got him nowhere ditched IFIF and started the League for Spiritual Discovery, with pretentious aliases for one and all, secret passwords, robes, and whatever else might appeal to those given to sophomoric fantasies. Did Tim ever sincerely believe that the psychedelic experience was religious? To answer the question, one must penetrate two misty and treacherous realms, the definition of "religion" and the mind of Timothy Leary. I have gone on both expeditions, and I have returned with a few samples of flora and fauna, some photographs of foggy landscapes and ill defined forms, and a few tape recordings, which are mostly commercial messages aimed at a target audience of half-wits and children. Turning them over, I have come to the conclusion that all of Tim's attempts to categorize the experience, particularly those concepts he thought most "scientific," such as the "seeding" of "egg planets" by "comets of prophesy," were examples of genuine religious ideation under the first definition given in _Webster's_ at that time, which was: 1. _belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe._ When Tim used "mystical" terminology at Millbrook it's hard to say if his underlying concepts were supernaturalist or not, but during the _Neurologic_/Kohoutek period in the '70s, he regressed all the way back to the old sod to grovel with his ancestors before imaginary "saviors" from Outer Space. Earlier, however, he called himself a "Hindu" or a "Buddhist" or a "Taoist" as the spirit moved and the wind blew. He was not alone in this. A lot of people in those days who should have known better, tended to treat these distinct ideational systems as virtually interchangeable brand names for a generic Oriental "wisdom" all pumped out of the same hole. The packaging might change, but Slobovenoid Blobovenoidalism was what you got. It's what almost all academic philosophers mean by "monism," since it is the only concept for which they can form any kind of image. You can be a Hindu and think this way, in fact, you can be a Hindu and think almost any way you please, or not think at all. Was Tim ever a Buddhist? Not in my opinion. It did eventually dawn on Tim that genuine Buddhism, leaving Lamaism aside, was alien to his way of thinking, and he said so, at least to me and a couple other guys. I don't know if he ever said it in public or in print. Hinduism hung on longer, but Tim eventually saw the incompatibility of even that extremely plastic religion with his political objectives, and he became, for a crucial year or two at Millbrook which might be called his charlatanic period, a Machiavellian pragmatist politician with no operational philosophic convictions whatever. _Neurologic_ is Roman Catholic recidivism, for sure. The names are changed, but the game is the same. Don't think, pray. The Almighty Comet knoweth all. Am I, and is the Neo-American Church, in the terms currently and generally accepted by scholars of the subject, "religious"? In an important sense, it doesn't matter and never has. Religion defines religion just as philosophy defines philosophy, which is the main reason both are such a problem for lawyers and politicians. But, even by conventional scholarly standards, only the most primitive definition of "religion" will exclude us. In terms of doctrine, if Buddhism is included, we are included. In terms of the antiquity of our practices, we have seniority, and at ecumenical revels should take precedence over everyone in sight, except for the surviving native peyote, mushroom and morning glory seed eaters, who should sit at the head of the table and barf in golden spittoons. We have every reason to look down on the upstart pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church in this respect. It's a synthetic cult, invented to pander to modern tastes. _Webster's_ second definition at that time: 2. _any specific system of belief, worship, conduct, etc., often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy, (the Christian religion, the Buddhist religion, etc.)_ was OK, because it included us. The editors brutally slashed this excellent definition from later editions of _Webster's_, thereby demonstrating the folly of allowing corporate conglomerates to define one's terms. As a nominalist of the old school, I will define my own terms, thanks. "Religion" ought to be broadly defined. It appears that the ink-stained clerk over at _Webster's_ who held down the religion stool in those days was so discerning as to be aware that genuine Buddhism has no idea of God or a "higher power," and wrote his second definition so as to include Buddhism. I hope he got a goose for Christmas, and wasn't fired when his definition was expunged because it might be cited by the likes of us in furtherance of our fiendish schemes. Check the definition of "religion" before you buy a dictionary, to find out if it is a work of scholarship or propaganda. I don't think the Mormons or the Scientologists are not religious. I just think they are wrong, that's all. A name for the generality of Psychedelian religionists is needed. "Psychedelianism," the obvious choice, is OK with me, and I will use it until something better comes along. "Is this man a Psychedelian or a Presbyterian, sergeant? I can't make out your handwriting." "Argh, an' ee's a doity Presbyterian fer sure, sor. When oy haprehended the mutha behin' th' latrine, sor, ee was hunk'ring down upon the cald grass, a fuckin' of a duck by the light ub de silv'ry moon, as Gawd is moy witness, sor, as Ee was ub dat 'orrible scene, begorrah. Th' pitifool quackin' ub dat po' boid still rings in m'eers, gor blimey, sor." Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Charlie Manson, Gordon Wasson, Hunter Thompson and I all are or were Psychedelians, I think, but only one of us is or was a Neo-American as far as I know. Tim and I corresponded regularly during the spring and early summer of 1965. When he wrote me that he was getting married to Nena von Schlebrugge, a popular Swedish model of the day, and going to Nepal for his honeymoon, I decided to squeeze in one more visit to Millbrook before our rent on the house in Star Lake ran out. Sally didn't want to be left alone at the isolated lodge with the kids and I couldn't blame her. Chapter 11 THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURE _There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they were of both sexes._ Tim, never one to diddle around when a trip to Nepal with a Swedish model was in the offing, had already left when I got to Millbrook. Michael Hollingshead, about whom I knew very little, despite his having written me a long and smarmy letter a week or two earlier, was now in some kind of alliance with Dick and Ralph as a co-administrator of the house. Nena's mother and brother were still in town but the baroness never visited the Big House because, Ralph told me, she loathed Hollingshead. I gave Nena's brother, a nice guy, a baron and a sports car enthusiast, a driving lesson. He thought he needed practice with an American car before venturing out on the public roads in one. He was right. My introduction to Hollingshead was appropriately bizarre and vaguely unpleasant. I was in the kitchen during the first evening of my visit, talking to Ralph and Susan, when a tall man with unreadable features, dressed in slacks, a sport coat and a fedora with a ribbon of photographs around the brim, came twirling into the room, revolving like one of those "waltzing" mice which can't move in a straight line because of a genetic fault. They were pretty popular pets for kids back in the '30s. As this apparition spun around the table muttering to himself, Ralph's eyes narrowed and Susan took a deep breath and held it. He acted as though he wanted to sit down on one of the empty chairs but couldn't figure out how to do it. I pulled one out for him, which seemed to piss him off. He moved his arms angrily and sputtered. Still twirling, he moved out of the room. Susan exhaled. "What the fuck?" I asked. "Michael Hollingshead," Ralph said, poker faced as usual. Dick and two young guys with the look of New York hustlers came in. They all seemed very stoned. I was introduced. Ernie and Arnie. They proceeded to mix up some pancake batter while giggling and whispering to each other. "Listen, Art," Ralph said to me in an undertone, "let's go to the music room. I want to talk to you." We sat down cross-legged next to the fish tank in the center of the floor. Ralph pulled out a joint, lit it, took a drag and passed it to me. It was pretty good stuff for those pre-sinsemilla times. "Have you been tripping much?" Ralph asked. I told him about the morning glory seed trip and a small acid trip Sally and I had taken, which had produced some eyes-closed visionary effects and an interesting sequel: I had taken the next day off and while out driving we both had seen Bucky in his car. We waved to him but he ignored us. Later, Bucky swore up and down that he was teaching Latin to future apple knockers at the time and hadn't left the school all day. A hallucination? A mutual hallucination? A mutual hallucination hours after the trip ended? Hmmm. Well, so, McPozzm, maybe the use of psychedelics produces a hallucination, as distinct from a vision, every now and then. So do all kinds of other things, like sudden withdrawal from amphetamines or fasting. It remains sleazily dishonest and typical of the American Psychiatric Association to insist on labeling psychedelics as "hallucinogens." Hallucinations are not among the usual or desired effects and the filthy swine (whom I can see very clearly) know it very well. I refer the reader who doesn't think these distinctions are important to George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which can be found in _Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays_. In fact, in the general interest of encouraging sanity, I refer everyone everywhere to this masterful homily. I told Ralph I was hoping to take a trip with Tim, but since he wasn't around, well, er, hmm. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about," Ralph said. "I don't think you should take anything while the house is like this. Things are really crazy around here right now." "OK," I agreed. I felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. Ralph asked me to drive him to the train station in Poughkeepsie to pick up his sister-in-law. She needed a minor operation and had decided to have it done in a small hospital in Sharon, Connecticut, which wasn't far from Millbrook. When we got into my car Ralph pulled out another joint. It was a very dark night. On the way to Poughkeepsie, Ralph explained the general situation. This was Thursday night and the last chance for people living in the house to do as they pleased, because visitors would be arriving Friday night and staying through Sunday. _Paying visitors_. Economic necessity had reared its ugly head. The "guests" would be met at the train Friday afternoon and not allowed to speak to each other or anyone else until Saturday morning. Then there were lectures and exercises and whatnot and they went home Sunday. No drugs. They had been doing this for the last three weekends and Ralph thought it was working out reasonably well. I could help if I liked. Ernie and Arnie were to put on a "light show," whatever that was, and Hollingshead was a drug smuggler who had provided Tim with his first acid hits. Aside from those bare facts Ralph seemed reluctant to talk about the new residents. He wanted me to see for myself. We then entered the dirty, dismal and decaying streets of Poughkeepsie, New York. Ralph ceased to pull out joints. There was no way that either of us would inhale deeply in an atmosphere such as this. Unattractive as the name may be, I find it hard to believe that "Poughkeepsie" really means "Place of Overflowing Shitholes" in the language of the Iroquois, or that this tribe founded the city and maintained it for centuries as the center of their sadistic "federation," which either destroyed or enslaved all the other tribes in the region. By what means could these savages have cross-bred with a species of giant rodents, now extinct, resulting in the hideous monstrosities who dominate the Dutchess County religious, political and financial establishment to this very day? The answer is blowing in the wind. One thing is for sure: Poughkeepsie does not appear, under any name, on most maps. No matter where one goes in the Place of Overflowing Shitholes, there is always something disgusting either right in front of one's nose or right around the corner. The haggard, slack-jawed, vacant-eyed pedestrians who trudge its streets appear to have been stunned since birth into a condition of chronic somnambulism. All over town, farts of poisonous gasses burst from the cracks in the sidewalks as one treads near or on them. This doesn't seem to bother the inmates at all, perhaps because they know that inhaling these exudations will help to shorten their lives. The angles and vistas are all wrong. Things do not fit together the way they should. Scabrous, Dickensian tenements and crumbling warehouses, used for the storage of bilge from decommissioned nuclear submarines, entirely block the view of the river. Any aesthete worthy of the name would be rendered _hors de combat_ in the Place of Overflowing Shitholes within a few seconds of exposure, but lawyers and publishers, as one might expect, find the place very much to their tastes and often retire there so they can savor the ambiance in their old age. It is said that Theodore Roosevelt had a deep, assured and resonant bass voice until, while governor of New York State, he read the report of a secret commission on the true history of Poughkeepsie. He sank down under his desk and remained there, curled up on the rug, in a kind of hysterical coma for a period of twenty-seven days. On recovering, he had retrograde amnesia for the entire incident, but spoke in a shrieking falsetto for the rest of his life. (The other oddities he developed, such as Eskimo-stuffing, are well known to historians, but too numerous to mention here.) As soon as he was elected governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered to grant full pardons to several Mafia murderers then awaiting electrocution at Sing-Sing, if the rulers of New Jersey would accept the Place of Overflowing Shitholes as part of their state. The Jersey City gang lords of the day rejected the offer, resolutely stating, "There is some shit we will not eat." Ralph's sister-in-law was very appreciative of the third and final joint, which Ralph passed around as soon as we were outside the city limits and on our way back to Millbrook. So was I. I think I have written the above description of the Place of Overflowing Shitholes in the spirit in which Henry Miller wrote his description of the planet Saturn in _The Colossus of Maroussi_. He called it an "emotional photograph." Right. There are some subjects which cry out for this kind of treatment. The comforting darkness and Ralph's generous helpings of hemp greatly moderated the ordeal of this particular visit. Unfortunately, this balm was not always to be available on future visits. Driving while stoned on the lesser sacrament is safer under any and all circumstances than driving while drunk, and may well be safer, for experienced users in general, than driving straight. Stoned drivers rarely, if ever, get on angry, competitive, high-speed kicks, so any errors we make are likely to be trivial. We tend to be methodical, thoughtful, cautious, defensive drivers. It might be a good idea to pass out free Alice B. Toklas brownies at rest stops on New Year's eve, along with the coffee. Then there would be more of a there there for many people for sure. Awareness, after all, is what being stoned is all about and it figures that the more aware one is of one's surroundings, the better a driver or pilot or operating engineer one will be. I think this thesis is supported by the strange absence of any (publicized) research on the subject. The theory could easily be checked out in a triple-blind study of bus drivers, using real and fake Alice B. Toklas brownies. I bet the moderately stoned drivers would prove to be better drivers in every way. LSD-taking that evening was concentrated in the Bowling Alley, where Dick, Hollingshead, Ernie, Arnie, and a rich girl from New York, famous for maintaining dozens of indigent heads in her town house, were camping out, without running water or electricity, for the night in front of the fireplace. I dropped in for a few minutes just to say hello. Hollingshead was still twirling and Ernie, while fondling and kissing Dick's hand, was still mumbling about going up the Amazon to interact with alligators. I exchanged a few pleasantries with the inmates, returned to the Big House and went to bed early. Going to sleep, I resolved to stick with Ralph for the duration of my visit. Hollingshead, Ernie and Arnie were neither scholars nor gentlemen. Life at Millbrook had taken a turn for the worse, with creeps in high places. It was a good thing I had the lodge to return to. If not, I might find myself up the Amazon with the alligators. The next day passed without excitement. I went to a nearby state school, picked up three young retardates to help clean the Big House, supervised their work, and brought them back. High-grade morons. They enjoyed the experience enormously, particularly the opportunity to ogle so many pretty girls. The Fergusons now occupied the Gatehouse. But even with Millbrook's cutest absent from the Big House most of the time, the place was still loaded for bear, so to speak. Psychedelian communities almost always are. Gotama wouldn't let an unattached female "within a hundred miles" of his ashram, Haines would say, every now and then, a somewhat hyperbolic way of putting it. But this attitude, to put it mildly, did not apply at Millbrook. Positive traits being positively correlated, there were "super-girls" all over the place, from start to finish. If that's a curse, it's one I am willing to up with put. The visitors arrived late in the afternoon and quietly trooped up to their rooms in the servants' wing, most of which, I had noticed, had been decorated in a gaudy, spooky style with cracked mirror fragments glued to one wall, swirls of clashing colors on another, magazine photo collages on a ceiling and so forth. Ernie and Arnie at work. I didn't like it. I didn't like the light show that was shown later in the evening either. What was so "psychedelic" about colored blobs floating around? Some very prosaic imaginations were at work, that was for sure. Dinner with the silent guests, however, was hilarious. About twenty of them, mostly conservatively dressed and middle-aged, had come in the front door, smiling grimly but with fear in their eyes, to follow a silent but beaming Dick up the stairs. When they came down a couple hours later, after we had cooked dinner and set it out on low tables around the dining room, a place card in front of every cushion, I could hardly believe the evidence of my senses. The "guests" were all wearing white robes made out of bed sheets. I came close to choking trying to get back to the kitchen without laughing out loud. In the kitchen, Pat McNeill, Susan Leary and Susan Metzner were having a major giggling fit, in which I immediately joined. The robes, they explained, were intended to obliterate social distinctions, but they cracked up over it anyway. A giggling fit, when you are stoned on grass, as we all were, is, one might say, no laughing matter. Susan Metzner, between sobs and gasps, asked me to read some kind of paper, authored by Hollingshead, to the Ku Klux Klan in the next room. "Very simple ... gasp ... you just hit the gong ... tee hee hee ... and read this bullshit ... ha, ha, ha ... until it says GONG ... sob ... when you hit it again ..." she dissolved into tears. Susan Leary had her head down on the table and was shuddering all over, and Pat was not in much better shape. I peeked out at the dining room through the pantry door. Dick, Ralph and Hollingshead were solemnly seated with the guests. They were being silent but not wearing bed sheets. Back in the kitchen, I tried to read the paper to myself, but my hand was shaking so badly from suppressed bursts of merriment that I could hardly make it out ... _with the next mouthful of food contemplate on the wonders of the body; where the food goes, how it is digested._ What the fuck? Mouthful? Where it goes? How it is digested? At a very early age, I had been firmly instructed that the dinner table was not the place to bring up clinical topics such as these. One might discuss them in the doctor's office or the classroom, or maybe on the front porch, but not while people were trying to eat. I made some kind of strangled effort to express my dismay, which merely caused Susan Metzner to collapse next to Susan Leary at the table. In this respect, I was fairly certain, Susan, Susan and Pat had been brought up as I had. Well, I would just have to get a grip on myself. I went out into the dining room and tried not to look at the solemn congregation. Where the fuck was the damn gong? I didn't see any gong. Oh yeah, there was a big gong, at least three feet in diameter, hanging in a frame next to the front door. I went out in the hall and brought it in ... heavy bastard. There was a big beater with it. I heaved the frame up onto a serving table next to the pantry door and gripped the hammer with my right hand while I held the paper with my left. Everyone was looking at me with utmost gravity. I was afraid that I would burst into loon-like shrieks at any moment, but my apprehension struck me as hilariously funny, also. I hit the gong a good whack, with the usual consequences (GONNNNNNNNG) and started reading, pretending all the while that I was somewhere else and that some mechanical dummy was reading the paper. Somehow, I got to the last sentence without incident. _When you hear the sound of the gong _(GONNNNNNNNG) ... Were those screams I could hear coming from the kitchen? ... _observe its structured wonders, skin, hair, tissue, blood, vein, bone, muscle, net of nerve. Observe its message._ (For one awful moment, I considered going on with _appendix, colon, ... memories of a misspent youth_ , but I suppressed the urge.) _Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti._ (GONNNNNNNNG) I fled to the kitchen. No member of my audience had so much as chuckled during the recitation, but the girls in the kitchen had reached the stage of final exhaustion. They were just sitting there, limply, like rag dolls, with tears streaming down their cheeks. "Arthur," Susan Metzner said, a tremor or two passing over her face, "you weren't supposed to use the big gong. There was a tiny one right next to you the whole time." I went out and took the first vacant place I could find, forgetting about the place names entirely. "Hi," I said to the people at the table. At the same time, I noticed that I was Dr. Morris Tannenbaum, M.D., and the guy across from me was trying to tell me something in sign language. I closed my eyes ... _all you have to do is behave normally,_ I told myself. I opened my eyes and turned to the white-robed lady at my side. "Hi," I said in a perfectly normal voice, "I'm Art Kleps, not Dr. Tannenbaum. Where is Dr. Tannenbaum?" The three other people at my table looked at me with consternation and dismay. The guy making the sign language pointed first at his place card and then at his mouth. He was making motions as if to first zip and then sew his lips together. Christ! I had violated the rule of silence. I got up and left, and stayed away from the visitors for the rest of the evening, except to look in on the light show for a couple of minutes. I wondered once again why some people thought floating blobs were "psychedelic." I went back to my book. Late that night, after all the visitors had been put to bed, everyone got together in Tim's room for a critique of the day and plans for the morrow. A hash pipe was passed but the whole scene bored me stiff. It sounded like a PTA meeting. Fortunately, I was sitting on the edge of Tim's bed, which was in an alcove, next to the rich girl from New York. She didn't mind at all being pulled back on the bed for some routine sophomoric behavior. But the reclining position and the long, full day and the brandy and the hash were too much for me. In five minutes I was out cold. Chapter 12 SLOW TORTURE _About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into the glare--it was along there somewhere, a couple of hours or so after sun-up--it wasn't as pleasant as it had been._ When I woke up, my head was clear as a child's and there wasn't a soul stirring. It looked to be about 6 o'clock of a fine, bright morning. I sat up on the edge of the bed, in the same place I had occupied during the Psychedelian PTA meeting the night before, which was also the site of the candle mystery of my previous visit. I looked around for traces of wax and spotted an aperitif glass at my feet with what looked like brandy in it. Well, I thought, the cute rich girl from New York, fully conversant with every known form of human degeneracy, had probably left it there to steady my nerves in the morning. Very considerate of her. Good thing I hadn't kicked it over, although I didn't really need it badly because I hadn't put away more than half my usual intake the day before. Heavy drinkers will sometimes become moderate drinkers if there is plenty of cannabis around. One just forgets about booze, or getting up and finding the next one seems like too much trouble. Hmmm, perhaps it was bad form for me to have passed out on Tim's bed. It might be considered "a sacred shrine area" or something. This idea caused some minor anxiety so I tossed down the brandy and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. It wasn't so easy. I felt slightly dizzy. Things looked a little strange. I headed back towards the bed. The first rays of the sun were coming through the big window on my left, and I turned to get a full view of it. I was knocked to the floor, as all normal sensation and motor control left my body. The sun, roaring like an avalanche, was headed straight for me, expanding like a bomb and filling my consciousness in less time than it takes to describe it. It swirled, clockwise, and made two-and-one-half turns before I lost all normal sense of place and passed out, right there on the floor of Tim's room. The next day, Susan Metzner told me she had heard a thump, perhaps the sound of my body hitting the floor, and had crossed the hall and looked in to see me prostrate and apparently unconscious. "I wasn't stoned in any way," Susan emphasized. No reason why she should have been, at 6 in the morning. "You turned every color of the rainbow and then you disappeared right in front of my eyes!" I don't remember that. The next thing I do remember is rolling around on the floor in Dick's room, which was across the hall from Tim's, adjoining Ralph and Susan's. Although I didn't see myself disappear, there is nothing in my philosophy which would make such an occurrence impossible. You can't see sight, as Buddha often remarked. And Susan was the last person in the house whom I had any reason to think would encourage me to believe anything magical or extraordinary had happened. So I believe her report, but only, I am convinced, because I have a conceptual context in which to place it. I think there are many people who have forgotten equally bizarre occurrences within a matter of hours. The memory of events that don't "make sense" just fades away. On the floor of Dick's room I had what I later found out was called in the East the Kundalini ("serpent power") experience, a kind of mirror image of the vision of the exploding sun. I seemed to be inside a whirlwind of electrical plasma which also made two-and-one-half gigantic turns, this time counter-clockwise. Ralph, Susan and some other people I couldn't identify were in the room trying to get tablets of thorazine, which I couldn't swallow, down my throat. All I could do was roll around and pronounce a few phonemes, such as "ah," "oh," "duh" and so forth. It wasn't that I couldn't think. The trouble was I couldn't think any single thing. It seemed as though all the thoughts which had entered the minds of men and beasts in the last million years were going through my mind at the same time and with the same intensity and velocity, resulting in a kind of violent white hum. I felt a needle in my ass. Ralph had hit me with some thorazine in a way I couldn't refuse. "I'm not ready for this," I found myself saying, much to my surprise. "That's why we gave you a thousand mics," Ralph said. A foolish, arrogant and evasive answer. I think they gave me a thousand mics hoping it would turn me into a cosmic-minder like themselves. The thorazine, if it had any effect at all, didn't have the effect of bringing me down. When I closed my eyes in Dick's room, I found myself in Tim's room when I opened them and vice-versa. I switched back and forth a half a dozen times before I settled in Tim's room, seated in the lotus position, which I almost never adopt unless extremely stoned, on the bed. For a while I sat on the bed with no thoughts in my mind, no sense of personal identity, no feelings about anything one way or another, while the program for the visitors presumably continued downstairs. Since my sense of elapsed time was one of the first things to go, I can't say if this condition lasted for hours or minutes. The third floor was deserted. Then people appeared, clustered around the record player, which was connected to speakers in the visitors' rooms. I heard someone say, "Listen, who does that look like over there?" Someone else said, "Yeah, you're right." Various people, some of whom seemed familiar and some of whom didn't, sat down next to the bed and asked me silly questions. I tried to talk to them but, in most cases, they disappeared in front of my eyes. I remember grabbing Hollingshead by the arm and asking him if he was "really" there. He said he was and then disappeared. At some point in the midst of these absurdities, I made a decision: I did not want to live without the appearance of continuity or cause and effect rationality, at least not yet. I lapsed back into the no-thought world. I would wait it out. Sweat poured from my forehead, but the rest of my body was dry. Months later, while loitering around the library of the University of Miami waiting for a junkie friend of Ed Rosenfeld's to show up, I found myself at eye level with a large volume called _The Serpent Power_, written by Arthur Avalon, pen name of a high English high official who had made, in the old and admirable English tradition of the scholarly amateur, a serious and sympathetic study of Indian religions in general and yoga in particular. I was astonished and delighted, when I flipped the book open, to find my two-and-one-half turns and sweating forehead ("the rain of jewels," I think it was called) described as the salient features of the classic experience. The garish meta-anatomical diagrams of chakras and ectoplasmic plumbing I had seen at Millbrook and elsewhere bore no relation to this classic description or to my experience. The scholar dealing with ancient religious texts can rarely be certain if he is reading the productions of a fantast, a con man or the genuine article. By the time these works are lodged in closed stacks or museums, they are jumbled together in putative value, although the authors may have contradicted and despised one another while they lived. The smallest LSD trip is a more reliable source of information about supernormal consciousness than any book. When I came out of it and started moving around (drink, cigarette, bath) I was still stoned in terms of perceptual enhancement but, compared to what I had just been through, this condition seemed unexceptional. So all the walls and carpets were rippling and glowing with arcane life. What else was new? I was glad to be back in the humdrum everyday world. Ralph stopped me as I was coming out of a bathroom. "How are you doing?" he asked. Knowing smile. "Fine." I shrugged. "Listen, we would appreciate it if you would stay away from the visitors until you're completely down, OK?" No problem. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to someone who was straight. I went to the library and reclined on a couch. Beautiful room. I contentedly looked around admiring the way the lamplight gleamed on a gilt binding or contrasted with a soft nest of dusk under a table. Ernie came in and sat down. He was wearing a Robin Hood hat. "How are you doing?" "Oh, just getting used to it," I said. "Beautiful in here, isn't it?" "Getting used to what?" "Being God, or whatever you want to call it," I said. "Yeah, man!" Ernie seemed delighted with my explanation. "I'm a magician, you know. A few days ago I decided to try it out, you know? See if it really worked? So I got this .45 and shot myself right in the head." "What happened?" I asked. "Nothing, man. Absolutely nothing." "What about your relatives?" I asked Ernie. Ernie seemed upset and frightened at the question. With a hurried "I gotta go, man" he left the room. Some people insist on testing out the theory, which Tim and Evans-Wentz preached, that one could do "anything" if one's "head was right." Later, Tim altered this pitch somewhat to "you can be anyone, this time around," and published a recording on this theme, which has the advantage of being vague and impossible to corroborate or disprove. Dick, at the time of this visit, was hobbling around with a cast on one foot. He had jumped out of a window, intending to flit about like Mary Poppins, and broken his ankle. Susan Leary's favorite was to take off in her Daddy's car without a registration, license or money. It's usually a matter of taking wild chances with the police as a demonstration of one's magical or spiritual "powers." This delusion seems to have lost popularity, for which happy development I give some credit to Tim's series of carelessness-caused busts and his subsequent series of imprisonments, all highly publicized. Kesey's busts probably helped too. If such notable super-magicians couldn't fend off the cops, what hope did junior magicians have of doing it? I can therefore find it in my heart to entertain the notion that Tim's and Kesey's busts did a lot of good although saying that they "deserved" them would be going too far. In Snazzm terms, I think I went through the same kind of shit for the same kinds of reasons. For years, I encouraged people to think in terms of magical powers and supernaturalism, the original Principle 2 and my Senate testimony being the best examples of this shameful compromise with supernaturalist ideation. It's easy to say, "Why not let it go at that? Some Psychedelians will never understand solipsistic nihilism, so why deny them their comforting superstitions?" I no longer worry about it. Those who require comforting superstitions will keep them, no matter what. My incarceration rate, I'm happy to say, moderated considerably after I tightened Church doctrine. McPozzm, I was now a nut case. Wish I had done it earlier. Oh, well. Live and learn. I had asked the question which caused Ernie to flee out of genuine curiosity. Did this troll- like creature have a philosophy or was he just a mischief maker? If he had a philosophy, what was it? Did he believe his punctured corpse and grieving, or celebrating, relatives were to be found in some other dimension, plane, level, bardo, or "multi-verse"? I wanted to ask him what he thought would have happened if, instead of shooting himself in private, he had chosen to blow himself to pieces with dynamite in Yankee Stadium with thousands of witnesses present. I wonder, could Ernie's story have prompted Dick to jump out of the window? If this were fiction, I would write it that way. In a dream, phenomenological order can be preserved by forgetting everything which, if remembered, would make an unpleasant event necessary, and substituting a history of impressions which do not make that event necessary, all without disturbing the "laws" of "physical" causality. It's typical of such transitions that one knows nothing of them, but many people can recall certain discontinuities in their lives, highly improbable escapes from impending disaster, "near death" experiences, and so on, which may be thought of, Fazzm, as transitional. In general, I agree with the classical Greek Skeptics of the West, from Pyrrho of Elis to Sextus Empiricus (about a 500-year stretch there, which produced all kinds of terminological oddities, like the idea of cultivating "apathy" in order to reach a state of "ataraxy") and modern Western philosophers of the empiricist congregation, such as David Hume. The Mysterious East has parallel doctrines, but the semantic murk is even thicker, as one might expect. Nagarjuna, for example, denied that he was an "x," with "x" being the then current label for philosophers of a certain school in his part of the world, now routinely translated as "nihilists" in English. Yet Nagarjuna denied that anything existed. What are we to make of this? In my opinion, not much. It all depends on what you mean by "nihilist," just as it all depends on what you mean by "apathy" and "ataraxy." All words are merely marks and sounds, and have no meaning other than the sensations and images to which they relate. The _antakarana_ of Samkara, although sometimes a useful term when talking about the Snazzm organization of intra-psychic events which appear to be external, is bad Fazzm if a cosmic _saksin_ is implied, a doctrine which leads to a plurality of "selves" in a container-contained dualism. Berkeley's "Mind of God" solution to the (perceived) epistemological "problem" is a fallacy because it is an unnecessary multiplication of entities. There is no problem. Remember Occam's razor. Cut out the Middleman. Poof! Gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Assume a plurality of selves only in a phenomenological sense, analogous to ordinary dream content. The _yogacara_ doctrine of _vijnanadvaita_ and the _atamadvaita_ of Samkara, which postulates a sort of "absolute" or "cosmic" _vijnana_ series, should both be rejected. I see no use for this metaphysical junk or any other kind of space junk or space junkies. I reject _sankya_ yoga with extreme prejudice, as merely a dualistic substitute for the original Psychedelian soma practices which were suppressed by the Brahmanist priests who, unable to control the stuff and too cowardly to take it, abolished its use by political means (fire and sword). A thousand curses on the filthy, flea- bitten bastards. There is no "subtle body" (_linga-sarira_). The phenomenological body is always imaginary. Aloofness from _prakrti, kaivalya_, or whatever you want to call it, is impossible since distance and the space-time continuum itself are _prakrti_, and there is no distance between abstracts, at least not where I come from. The monist Vedanta of Badarayana and his ilk is less objectionable than the Vedanta of Samkara or Ramanuja, but much ado about nothing in any case. All phenomenology is flux (_samtana_) and an aggregate lacking self (_samghata_), as Hume, in effect, says. Instantaneous "manifestation" of capacity instantaneously "obliterated," so to speak. Not only is there no objective "reality" whatever (_sunya-vada_), there is no subjective "reality" whatever. The term "reality" is meaningless. Nabokov, a solipsistic nihilist, was right. It is the only word in the English language that should be placed, routinely, between quotation marks (to emphasize its mere idiomatic utility). All the effort and the "self-discipline" serve to prevent Enlightenment, not to "find" it. This can be overcome by taking large doses of LSD, making the truth irresistible, at least for a few minutes. Snazzm, there is no past, present, or future, only the categorization of images so as to maintain the illusions of seriality and continuity. "That time which we improve, or which is improvable," as Thoreau said, "is neither past, present nor future." Virtually all philosophic difficulties with these concepts may be solved by recalling that life is (is in the nature of) a dream. If you have some event in mind which you think might argue against the solipsist hypothesis, ask yourself if it is possible to dream of this happening. It always is. Read the _Mulamadhyamakakarika_ of Nagarjuna, David Hume's _A Treatise of Human Nature_, and _Outlines of Pyrrhonism_ by Sextus Empiricus. The epigrams of the Zen masters can also help. Abandon all spatio-temporal "metaphysical" metaphors, including (it's all done with mirrors) holography. Use the _I Ching_. Testing it out by jumping out of a window or shooting yourself in the head may lead to your miraculous survival as a basket case or a "human vegetable." There's nothing wrong with suicide, per se, but do not "test it out." I assert the convertibility of phenomenological order, not the characterlessness of fate. All reasoning from cause to effect and effect to cause is founded on "custom and belief," as Hume put it, on a "harmony" with a "nature" entirely composed of impressions and ideas which cannot be demonstrated to refer, accurately or inaccurately, to any objects or relations in an external world. Hume, unfortunately, chose to call this a "problem." There is no problem here at all for solipsistic nihilists, and this fact ought to be mentioned by the academicians who make so much of this supposedly intractable philosophic difficulty when they "do Hume" in the classroom. It may be a serious psychological problem for them but if it is, it's their own fault. If they would only get stoned out of their gourds and deny the externality of relations for a change, they would have some "real" problems to deal with, like keeping their jobs and staying out of jail. The "principle of association of ideas" which the young Hume excitedly promised and for mysterious reasons never delivered, is the principle of solipsistic synchronicity as shown in dreams. Hume had nothing to say about dreams. I think he saw the connection, but backed off when he realized how mad such talk would seem to his learned contemporaries who were, with one or two notable exceptions, as obtuse about all this as are most of the academic philosophers of the present day who delude themselves, out of desperation, into thinking that various specious inKantations "answer" Hume. Nothing "answers" Hume. Hume's epistemological conclusions do not require "answers," and, as far as I know, aside from declaring that solipsism is "insane," nobody who thinks so has ever explained why they should, or why they are "insane." What Hume's insights require is further development, and I am satisfied to see my formulations as contributions to this noble cause. I renounce any claim to be heard founded on the foolish thesis that persons who find candles exploding in their vicinity, or who momentarily disappear from their own or others' fields of vision, are necessarily wise or good or even remarkable. The reader who is put off is a man after my own heart. Take a thousand micrograms yourself sometime, and then look at the rising sun. These strange and impressive experiences have no bearing whatever on the credibility of philosophic or religious assertions made by those who have them or witness them. Likewise, there is no more good reason for modern folks to believe in the philosophic ideas they might get from impressive beings from outer space than there was good reason for the Amerindians to believe that the institutionalized insanity brought to them from across the ocean by Columbus and Cortez was any better than the institutionalized insanity they had cooked up for themselves. Technological advancement is no guarantee of wisdom or virtue, as has been amply demonstrated by the history of this century. Nor are the opinions of an Enlightened person on this or that ethical rule, political party or economic theory necessarily any better than those of Joe Shmoe from Kokomo. Such things are McPozzm and are derived from this, that and the other thing. Enlightenment is Snazzm and concerns the true nature of all things. The Zmms are incommensurable. When I went to bed, a big book appeared, suspended in space, about three feet in front of me. Fine. A little light reading before falling asleep. The pages turned automatically when I finished reading the bottom lines. It was a mixture of Dylan Thomas-style poetry and prose. Unfortunately, I can't remember the content any better than I can remember Dylan Thomas' poetry, but at the time it was all as clear and definite as anything I might have looked up in the _Oxford English Dictionary_. Every letter was illuminated in gold and the pages themselves were sky blue. A Disney-style production, very common in the second bardo. When I got tired, I told the book to go away, which it instantly did, and I went to sleep as quickly and easily as a baby. If all visionary experience were so obedient, agreeable and modest, there wouldn't be any problems with it. It may be that avoiding threatening and spooky experience is a matter of avoiding fear itself, which is easier for some people than it is for others. Folklore has it that dogs attack only if one is afraid of them. Something similar operates in determining the visionary content of trips. If one is afraid, the emotion may be expressed in appropriate archetypal images. When one learns nothing horrific is involved in death/rebirth experiences (what else is new?) anxiety decreases, and visionary experience calms down and becomes part of the background, like vivid wallpaper or a dramatic sunset. But good "control," as such, doesn't impress me as being evidence of anything except good control. Ramakrishna, far from having good control, had to have people around to prop him up and point him in the right direction, as he staggered around making profound statements and giving the Boy Scout salute. If one concentrates, as Ramakrishna did, on the most whacked-out aspects of experience, and virtually ignores everything else, there won't be much in the way of control. Good old crazy Ramakrishna, my favorite "avatar." Since he lived in the nineteenth century, there are lots of primary-source stories and even photographs, showing his life in details highly discordant with the standard myths. His most frequent demand of his disciples was that they "pass the pipe," and his diapers were always falling down. Perhaps his wisest saying was, "When the choice is between up and down, go down." Don't push it, in other words. The next day, Ralph asked me if I had "learned anything." I told him that all my suspicions had been confirmed. Ralph said nothing, but did not seemed pleased with my reply. Ernie came over to where I was sitting at the kitchen table and broke an egg over my head. I backed him into a corner, where he squealed and giggled and begged for mercy. To hell with it, I decided. Anyone who would suggest to someone coming down from a big trip that shooting oneself in the head with a .45 was a harmless diversion was too crazy to be beaten on by me. Let his peer group do it. I washed the egg out of my hair and went home. Chapter 13 FREEMEN! _Here was another illustration of the childlike improvidence of this age and people._ Back in the mountains, Sally and I moved all our belongings from Star Lake to the lodge. The physical activity required to get everything organized was exhilarating. Dealing with the hardness of material things rather than the softness and mutability of human relationships is one of the best reasons for living in the woods as far as I am concerned. It's very nice to be able to stand back from a job and say, "Well, that's not going anywhere," and know that, barring disasters, it won't. I repaired the dock, bolted down the decking, connected the water system, repaired the old water pump under the front porch, which drew through a stop-valve from the lake, fiberglassed and painted our biggest boat, a fourteen-footer, cleaned and repaired the outboard motors and, with considerable help from a seventy-five-year-old handyman who had spent his life on the lake and was full of fascinating historical anecdotes, got the generator out back in working order. I made a trip to town once a day, landing at a floating dock behind the general store and proceeding immediately to the tiny one-room post office across the road to see if enough memberships had come in so we could make it through another day or two. The weekly average was usually enough for daily expenses: milk, cigarettes, beer, wine, kerosene, whiskey, gasoline, gin and food. The mortgage payments had to come from visitors' contributions. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would include a generator in a scene like Morning Glory Lodge, but depend on kerosene lamps, and a small gasoline motor for pumping water. It was nice to have music, however, and I included Susan's favorite, "Linus the Lionhearted," in every evening's entertainment, usually right after Bobby Dylan, whom I had come to appreciate after great initial resistance caused by his phony accent. "Linus" also provided an opportunity to point out to visitors the philosophic and psychological lessons one might learn from a kid's record interpreted in terms of solipsism and synchronicity. I can't cover all the visitors here but I will mention those who turned out to be important later. They almost always showed up at night. Johnnie Merchant's big boat would appear off the end of the dock, pitching and wallowing; people waving, horn tooting. I would throw a switch which activated the generator and turned on a floodlight lashed to a tree overlooking the dock, and we would run out and take the mooring lines. We would then pull some city slickers up on the dock. They were usually stoned on grass and fortified with drinks they had just downed at Johnnie's father's motel-bar, the only such place in town. A merchant named Merchant. Having played the visitor role at Millbrook, I could fully sympathize with our visitors' mixed feelings and apprehensions, as well as with their technique for solving the problem. When Lisa Bieberman and a chemist friend from Boston, Tord Svenson, showed up, however, there was none of the usual nonsense. Lisa and Tord were old hands at the game. Good, I thought. Now is the time to have some fun with the stuff; take maybe 50 micrograms and enjoy the lake. Tord, who had written some flowery letters, proved to be a delightful character. A weight lifter and motorcyclist as well as a "real" chemist, he looked like he had stepped out of a movie about the Vikings of old. His interests were as broad as his chest and he was always up to date on the latest psychological, sociological and political topics and loved to talk about them. His disposition was invariably sweet and almost childlike. When we were settled in around the fireplace with beers, Tord pulled a little bottle from his pocket and proudly announced that it contained the psychedelic bufotenin, normally found in the glands of the common Australian cane toad. He had synthesized only one dose, so he planned to take it himself before they left. Would it be OK if he and Lisa tripped on acid tomorrow? Did we want to join them? Sally had to look after the kids, but I said I would be delighted. Lisa filled us in on the latest developments in the Psychedelian world. The _Psychedelic Review_ was alive and well, as was her own mimeographed bulletin, for which she charged practically nothing. She had carried an announcement of the formation of the Church in this bulletin and was herself bee hee of Cambridge. Since Tord had bufotenin in his possession, I suggested that he take the title of "Keeper of the Divine Toad," which he accepted with glee. This post, ever since, has been reserved for "real" chemists. Let's not forget LSD was legal, more or less, at the time. There were no federal laws and few states had anything more threatening than vague, unenforced and unenforceable laws about "dangerous drugs" in general. Upstairs in the lodge, hundreds of peyote buttons, sliced in half laterally, were drying on the floor, yet I had nothing to fear. People who joined the Church had nothing to fear. As a result, although all of us worried about the laws which we feared might come, a spirit of enthusiasm and wonderment prevailed: Was it possible life could be so fascinating and enjoyable, so free, so full of promise? I didn't know anyone in the movement at the time who wasn't basically happy. What "paranoia" existed resulted from possession of the lesser sacrament. I told those visitors who had any to bury it back in the woods and recover and smoke it one joint at a time. This was the harbinger of evil times to come. The oligarchy's mass media machine routinely ignores the psychological and social damage which the longest "war" in American history has done to us, while going on forever about the horrible consequences of the persecution of other minority populations, even if those persecutions have become ancient history. If the drug laws frighten us as intended, and they certainly do, why don't we give up the criminalized practices? The unstoned are astonished that seemingly rational people continue, under such circumstances, to insist on doing something that isn't profitable and isn't addicting. If the sacraments are merely "recreational" drugs that produce interesting hallucinations, this is indeed puzzling. But even a light marijuana high is much more than a recreational experience. It is a liberating and uplifting experience which tends to bring out the best in people. ("The best" in some people may not seem like much to other people.) At the other end of the spectrum, a death/rebirth trip on LSD generates the religious emotion in its most elemental form, so pure and elemental that few know what to call it, even when they have it, not having been introduced to any pure and elemental things since infancy. Named or not named, it's hard to trivialize it, but they keep trying. The typical liberal, but unstoned, observer cannot see any of this because religion, to the non-religious, is almost always seen as a wish system of fairy tales or mere institutionalized opinion, like political ideology. I ought to know. That's exactly what I thought from about age fourteen to thirty-six. In the terms acceptable to the pampered house niggers of the oligarchy, who are well paid to saturate the airwaves with the official line, thereby controlling the mental lives of the field niggers, the fact that many field niggers and almost all of us swamp niggers are willing to hazard life, liberty and property for certain drugs must be some kind of mass psychopathological aberration caused directly by the drugs themselves. I think most of these people are honestly unaware of any other way to explain it. (You must first con yourself to be a truly reliable and trustworthy house nigger.) In former times, the conflict between Sado-Judeo-Paulinians and Psychedelians would have been seen clearly for what it is, an attack by the established power of religious orthodoxy on religious novelty. Nothing new about that. But we live in a police state in which mass deception is the chief technique of domination. Almost nothing political is what it seems to be or claims to be. Spreading sociological and psychological horseshit around in the mass media is cheap, and the public will always react with gratitude and applause if it is the kind of crap they like to hear. The con artists and swindlers with the gold, the guns and the TV sets at their command can hide the truth from the public and, to some extent, from themselves, behind a smokescreen of benign concern for the "mental health" of their victims and the protection, not of certain institutions they control, but of the "social fabric" or some such seeming universal good. Whose social fabric, yours or mine? That's the real question. If no laws banning LSD had been passed and cannabis had been legalized in the early years covered by this book, the quality of American life would have undergone a radical and pervasive revolutionary change for the better. Large areas where _nacht und nebel_ now prevail would be governed instead by sweetness and light, as some places are in fact so governed in the European Union today. For the oligarchy and the established churches and the military-industrial complex, the drug laws have worked very well, not only in fending off the dreaded specter of European welfare statism (or "socialism" or "social democracy," or whatever you want to call it) but in virtually abolishing the Bill of Rights and constitutional government in general, and dethroning rationality itself as the guiding principle in public life in the United States. The fundamental beliefs of Psychedelians have changed very little since the days I am describing, in the sense that the answers to a questionnaire about attitudes towards drugs would be much different now than then, but the prevailing spirit and the everyday expectations, fears, wishes and attitudes that make up that spirit have been radically perverted because of the unrelenting persecutions to which we have been subjected. Having been brought up in a professional religious household in which the history of religion was table talk, I expected something like this from the start, while hoping that I was wrong, but most Psychedelians at that time thought of the government as a benign but temporarily mistaken parent. All we had to do was "be nice," cite all the objective evidence and ancient precedents, appeal to the First Amendment, and all would be well. Lisa was a classic example of that frame of mind. The following morning dawned warm and blue as usual with just enough of a breeze to make the lake scintillate the way a good lake should. After we had all swallowed our pills, Lisa plunked herself down on the living room floor and indicated that she expected Tord and me to join her. "Lisa," Tord said, "it's beautiful out there. Come on, you don't really want to spend the whole trip indoors, do you?" Despite his efforts to get Lisa to move, Tord didn't seem very surprised by her assumption that we would all be delighted to spend the day squatting on the floor. I could hardly believe it. I wasn't going to stay inside, no matter what Tord and Lisa did. "But I believe in staying in one place during a trip," Lisa said. "That's in Cambridge," Tord answered. "You don't have to worry about other people here. We're out in the woods." "Well, OK," Lisa said, getting up. "This will be a new experience for me." "I'm jealous," Sally said from the kitchen where Klytie was getting cereal spooned into her mouth. "I promise I'll watch the kids next time," I said. Although I pretended insouciance, I felt apprehensive. If another colossal visionary trip was coming up, I might be better off on the floor, but it seemed to me that if I was ever to enjoy acid the way I enjoyed grass and hash, I would have to change set and setting the way Learian doctrine indicated. I was glad I did, because it worked. For the first time I had the kind of trip described in Huxley's _The Doors of Perception_. No visions, just an incredible heightening of awareness. Tim, when in this condition, developed a variety of ploys for avoiding unwelcome visitors. One of his favorites, which never failed to amuse the rest of us, was to say, "Sorry, I can't talk to you now; I'm a cloud of energy. "That's exactly how I felt as I took Tord and Lisa on a tour of the lake, although I didn't need to use it as a reason not to communicate because the only other people around were Tord and Lisa, who were just as stoned as I was. Lisa, once she was out in the open air, fell right into the spirit of things and wandered around freely at our various stops along the shore, exclaiming over this or that natural wonder one would pass by routinely in a normal, stupid, blind and constipated state of consciousness. Our last stop was Birch Island, directly across from Morning Glory Lodge. There was a log cabin on it, surrounded by trees. The owner, a mysterious figure with, I had been told, a heavy Russian accent, never visited during the months we lived on the lake. I hoped to buy it, or find a fellow Psychedelian who would buy it. I told Tord about my plans: "What we'll do is prepare visitors for their first trip at the lodge," I said. "Then, when we think they're ready, we'll have a boat waiting at the dock early in the morning with a mysterious, hooded figure at the oars. The boat will be painted black and have poles fore and aft with weird banners and flags and black gauze billowing out all over. We'll have someone on the island ring a bell or beat a gong during the ride over, starting when the rising sun first touches the island." "Yeah, and just before the boat leaves a marijuana goddess will come running down to the boat and pass around a crystal goblet of champagne with acid in it. They all take a sip, and then the boat leaves for the Dawn of Nothing." Tord, a great giggler despite his bulk, giggled appreciatively. "What kind of a scene will you have over here?" he asked, as we tied up the boat. "I'm not sure. Maybe we should say there are several people on the island who will assist them but actually leave the place deserted. Let them make up their own people. No, too paranoia inducing. I suppose we could just take turns. Everyone who lives here would take shifts on the island to look after people taking their first trips." While Tord and I discussed such plans for the development of the scene, all of which required money we didn't have, Lisa wandered off and then called us down to a mass of shelving rock on the north side of the island which served as a natural dock. She was sitting next to a puddle in the stone, peering into it intently. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to something in the puddle. Tord and I got down to nose level and looked. Some kind of tiny creature was swimming around frantically in the puddle. An immature tadpole, probably. It was hard to make out any distinguishing features. Lisa was fascinated. She didn't want to leave. I rose to my feet and, adopting a mock-dramatic manner, asked, "Ah, you know what this means, Lisa, do you not?" She didn't. Gesturing grandly towards the puddle, Lisa, the rocks and the lake, I gave Lisa the benefit of my interpretation: "This tiny creature, trapped here in its puddle and separated from the great waters beyond by these masses of rock, is your personality!" Lisa seemed a bit stunned but, sweeping metaphors being her bread and butter, so to speak, she seemed willing to entertain the notion. She nodded her head. "Yeah, that's right Lisa," Tord said. "Do you want me to catch this little fella in my hands and put him in the lake? It won't hurt him." Lisa gave the idea a lot of thought, but decided against it. The little fella liked it right where he was, she concluded. It is best not to interfere with the mysterious workings of Mother Nature, and all of that. We went back to the lodge. The tadpole incident was the peak of the trip for Lisa. Mine came when, during lunch, I tried to play the usual baby-style games with Klytie, who was burbling away in her high chair in her characteristically happy fashion. Klytie took after Sally who, leaving aside her hang-ups, was a warm-hearted, good-natured, spontaneous person, while Susan was more like her father, intent on figuring out what was going on instead of simply making the most of it. Playing with Klytie turned out to be more than I had bargained for. I was astounded at the complexity and virtuosity of the wordless games she played. It seemed that Klytie understood, in some weird way, all the implications of what was taking place, and was delighted to stage-manage the whole affair. I felt like I was talking to some fantastically brilliant creature from another planet, rather than a human baby. She was also hilariously funny. It finally got to be too much for me. I began to suspect that I might spend the rest of my life sitting around having conversations with babies, as St. Francis did with his birds, so I suggested that we all go swimming, which we did. Tord's bufotenin trip, a couple days later, was unspectacular, at least from the viewpoint of his audience. He went out to the end of the dock, meditated for an hour or so, and then drank the contents of his vial. To collect bufotenin, I understand, one subjects the Australian cane toad, Bufo Marinus, to a weak electrical current, and the resultant very dangerous exudation, which is a cocktail of poisonous compounds and must be greatly diluted and imbibed in experimental sips, drips into a dish. (If you try this, wear safety glasses.) Tord had the pure stuff. He stayed where he was for about four hours. I interrupted him once, about halfway through. "How's it going, Tord?" I asked. "Well, it's interesting. I'm convinced there is nothing on the other side of those hills over there." I congratulated Tord. A profound half-truth, in my opinion. That was it. The trip lasted four hours and seemed, as interpreted by Tord, to be standard Yogacara Buddhism, which is the eau de parfum of the best doctrine, but about the most you can expect from most people. Even this after-shave lotion was too alarming for Tord, however, as we shall see. Many are called but few are chosen. The "Void," or any one of the many other terms meaning the same thing, is rarely mentioned in casual Psychedelian converse, although it is the central concept of the best classical teachings. People tend to shrink back in fear and trembling from the idea of utter nothingness. Tord, a sweet guy in a desperate search for love and warmth, simply couldn't take it. Before he and Lisa left, Tord told a story about one of his experiments with acid that seemed to sum it all up. He took about a thousand micrograms of Sandoz one Saturday night and then went to a neighborhood Irish bar in Boston on his motor-cycle to experience social interaction while manifesting a play opportunity situation, or something. Once there, he announced he could drink every man in the place under the table. Tord, who was not a heavy drinker, then proceeded to prove his point to the dozen or so Irishmen who eagerly accepted his challenge and his free drinks. "I must have put away a quart at least, Art," Tord said, chortling merrily at the recollection. "The last thing I remember was seeing all these guys crowded into a corner while I was advancing on them. One of them kept yelling, 'Throw him Ernie! Throw him Ernie!' The next thing I remember is waking up on the kitchen floor out back the next morning with the bartender and the cook stepping over me. I didn't have a hangover and there wasn't a mark on me. Never found out if they threw me Ernie either." Tord wanted "involvement," at almost any price. I hated to see Tord and Lisa leave, but they both had jobs. When it was Sally's turn to trip a week or two later, two visitors having arrived whom we mistakenly considered to be our type, we learned that being at the lodge was no insurance against having spooky or frightening experiences. The visitors were Ed Rosenfeld, at that time boo hoo of the West Side, and his girlfriend. They hadn't been in the house fifteen minutes before Ed pulled out a vial of tablets and asked if it was OK if they dropped. It was around two in the afternoon, but I didn't know then that the middle of the day is a chancy time to start a trip, because you come down in the middle of the night. It's best to start late in the evening, so your return to the world of ordinary game routines coincides with the rising of the sun, or in the early morning, so you are well down by your ordinary bedtime. Aside from the shock produced by hearing the crazy laugh of a loon flying over the lake early in the trip (thereafter, I warned visitors to expect unearthly shrieks as the shades of night were falling), Ed and girl had no particular difficulty, but Sally, who was unusually quiet for the first few hours, went through a classic death-rebirth in our bedroom as soon as it was dark. As long as she was agitated, the phenomenal world continued to exist for her. As soon as she relaxed, it disappeared. We all sat on the bed holding on to her and saying the usual reassuring words. After half an hour of flipping back and forth, she came out of it and the rest of the trip proceeded along normal lines in the living room, but Sally remained shaken for hours. When everyone was down, Sally and I drove Ed and girl to Saranac Lake to catch a bus. The talk was almost entirely about death. Ed described several DMT trips he had taken in New York and the effects sounded similar to my peak experiences and, to Sally, a lot like what she had been through the night before, but so fleeting in duration as to be in a different class altogether. Perceptually, Sally was in great shape. The world, she said, looked brighter, sharper, and generally more delightful than it had in a long time. The question was the usual one: Is it "real"? Sally and I had talked about this before, but it's one thing to indulge in philosophic speculation while smoking a joint or two and it's another thing altogether to consider certain fundamental questions after having just died and been reborn on 500 micrograms of the Supreme Sacrament. The images summoned up have a certain immediacy and familiarity unknown to most philosophers. A veritable clamor is heard in the forefront of one's mind that these issues be given prompt attention, as if they were long overdue bills or a toothache. Many virtually illiterate but natively intelligent lads and lassies rush to the library after their first death-rebirth experiences as if their lives depended on it. Similarly, literate people long sunk in naive realism will suddenly awaken to the fact that "naive" is actually the right word for it, and they will reexamine their prejudices. In the early days of the movement this aspect of things was generally recognized, even in the mass media. Writers, painters, musicians, scientists and even mathematicians testified to the stimulating effect of psychedelic experience on their creative work. It was taken for granted that intelligent people who took LSD would develop a serious interest in philosophic thought. Tastes in literature and art would move up a notch or two also. Does one "really" die on a death/rebirth trip? The reason people doubt that they have "really" died is that afterwards they "come back" and people tell them they were never absent for a moment. Furthermore, they witness other people, who later say they died, being right there, breathing, the whole time. Supporting the above arguments, however, is the unspoken assumption of the externality of relations. One's life or death is thought of as something within another, greater continuum of space and time. Reincarnation, as it is ordinarily thought of, is but a special case of this. The entity, whatever its relative power, still exists within a continuum with an independent dynamism. If the externality of relations is denied, on the other hand, there is no reason, Snazzm, to consider a death-rebirth experience as more delusional than anything else around. I have as yet to hear anyone on a death-rebirth trip express a wish to come back as a cherub in a world of pink clouds or anything like it. Every now and then, on or off trips, people will drop dead and stay dead, requiring the disposal of the corpse, but what of it? If people didn't come and go in dreams, things would become unbearably crowded and crazy, and so it is in "real" life. A dream jammed with people who never go away is as good a vision of Hell as I can imagine. A sort of Bangladesh of the mind, but Bangladesh is the Bangladesh of the mind. These "problems" about death remind me of Dick Alpert's question on our walk at Millbrook, shortly after my Enlightenment, "Well, I do have a life of my own, don't I?" Why ask me? All I know about Dick, or anyone or anything else, in waking or sleeping life, is what my sense impressions tell me. And I'm content to have Dick, or anyone else, think about me the same way. I wish they would. Peace on Earth might be the result. When things become extraordinarily non-dualistic or "magical" and the usual guideposts to what is (to be presumed as) external and what is (to be presumed as) internal vanish, some people will freeze, freak out, become paranoid, and so forth, particularly if they recall no previous experience with the state. That kind of stuff cannot be called a reduction of suffering, per se, but the experience of being in this condition and surviving can demonstrate that one is a lot tougher, mentally, than one thought one was, and that can lead to a great reduction in suffering. The Slobovenoid Blobovenoidal variety of monism is no better than conventional super-naturalism for handling this kind of stress and answering these kinds of questions. Just as God may be drunk or insane, so your "Higher Self" may be drunk or insane. There's lots of evidence to support either diagnosis. If He is, and you believe you are merely His creature or holographic fragment or appendage or outpost or whatever, you are not in an enviable position. If one is a solipsist, however, the miserable history of mankind need not oppress, for all of that may have been one's last and final nightmare. How does one know hell has not frozen over? Why assume otherwise? Is there any good reason why one's _antakarana_ functions should continue to be drunk or insane? Perhaps, if one switches from booze to the psychedelic sacraments, the whole world, which is one's dream, will become stoned also, which would be an improvement over its history as recorded in both supernaturalist and secular literature. Perhaps, if one, as a personality, tries to be more honest and kind, the world in general, in the long run, will become more honest and kind also. Give it time. So long as one insists on the illusion of externality with a McPozzm world and everything it entails, there will be ups and downs, _antakarana_ function or no _antakarana_ function. Sally's psychedelic experience did not overcome her imprints and conditioning and since I hadn't yet invented the Zmms, I didn't have the terminology to make the most important distinctions clear to her and, even if I had, living with me at that time required radical changes which Sally was not young enough, or free enough, or rich enough, or brave enough, or crazy enough, or stoned enough, to make. Oh, well. The rest of the summer passed in a succession of neat episodes. Visitors would arrive at our dock, one kind of drama or another would develop, and then they would leave from the same dock, usually happier and perhaps, so some claimed, wiser. A couple of good old transcendentalist boys showed up: a wino professor of English literature from Canton and Walter Houston Clark, at that time a full professor of theology at Andover Newton Theological School, which had been founded by Calvinists to combat the Unitarian heresy of Harvard Divinity. Clark looked and talked like Dr. Spock, and his buddy reminded me of Jack Spratt, but of a somewhat older vintage. All they wanted to do was shoot the breeze, look the place over, and perform their sacred function as general gadabouts and learned gossips of Psychedelia. Fine with me. They had met a few months earlier, they told me, as enthusiastic recruits to what I thought was an extremely interesting experiment. Who conducted it, I can't remember. Some quasi-academic association, I think, of which there were several at the time, and I'm happy to report that one of them did something useful. The subjects, all mature and well-educated adults, took increasingly large doses of LSD every day for several days until they "maxed out." The big surprise at the time was that after three days or so no dose, no matter how large, had any effect whatever on anyone. It's a "trigger drug" all right, as this and many other trials have shown, and so it seems are all major psychedelics. The actual sacraments are in the brain, awaiting activation. According to his buddy, with whom I had one or two private conversations as the day wore on, Clark was a "millionaire" (why is this term routinely applied to both those who have the capital and those who have the income?), but also a skinflint of the old school. "You'll never get a dime out of him," said the Blake expert, "so save your breath." Unabashed selfishness is in the grand old Transcendentalist tradition. Since "everyone" is an "aspect" (or something) of the Giant Blob, everyone must be, somehow, getting what he deserves, Blobwise, sort of. Neither justice nor charity (nor truth, in my opinion) is an important idea among Oversoulians. _"Do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in a good situation. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong,"_ wrote Emerson. No wonder Ralph Waldo, like Tim, did so well on the lecture circuit. He made people "feel good about themselves." If you tell people (who can afford the price of tickets) what they want to hear, they will come out for it. I did get more than a dime out of Clark, however. Along with other notables on Lisa Bieberman's hit list, he put up a couple hundred towards my bail when I was busted in Florida. I didn't pay him back right away and he neglected to mention the Neo-American Church in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ article he wrote on psychedelic drugs and religion shortly thereafter. The Church of the Awakening, of which Clark was a director, and which hoisted the white flag around '70 or '71 after losing some feeble administrative law skirmishes for tax exemption, was mentioned. In the years to come, Clark requested a few dozen small favors of me and I obliged him at no cost, which I figured made us come out about even, pretty much. I think I irritated Clark for the same reasons I irritated Lisa and other academical refugees from the classic New England seance circuit. I wasn't playing by the rules. I wasn't trying to find common ground. I ignored the canon. I showed little or no interest in the various "psychedelic" groups then around which derived from the traditions of the Higher Learning in America and were mostly composed of college teachers and always led by them. Based largely on personal experience, I had developed a very Veblenish view of the professorate and of scholarly traditions and customs in the U.S. of A. in general. However high-minded and sincere the individuals involved, I was convinced that these associations would dissolve on receipt of the first stern memo from the Dean or the Provost or the President or the Chancellor or maybe even the janitor, and so they did. (I was very pleasantly surprised when these people actually put up a fight over Vietnam.) But it was pleasant to associate with book-reading gentlemen for a change, summer soldiers and sunshine patriots though they may have been. Emerson, so long as no donations were requested, was a reliable cheerer-upper in any kind of weather and among all classes and conditions of mankind, and Clark and pal were most amiable also. Shortly before their visit, Sally and I had been ripped off by a mating pair of Jewish heroin addicts from the old-style druggie world, whom we foolishly trusted, simply because they talked like Psychedelians, to deliver her coin collection to a dealer in New York. People of this kind had a field day for a while. Pickings had been slim, and then an enormous flock of starry-eyed lambs had appeared in their midst, ready to be fleeced. But most of the people we met that summer were, like ourselves, harmless unless tormented. Sally and the kids left for Manhasset early in August. Her father had died shortly after we bought Morning Glory Lodge, only a few days after he had retired from the museum to his version of the great American dream, a charming Cape Cod which descended in three levels to front on a small beach on Gardiner's Bay near Southold, Long Island, complete with red sails in the sunset, etc. He died of a fast stroke, standing in the watery morning sunshine, while on the phone with the movers. Her mother was selling the new house and moving to Florida. Sally's help was needed. Perhaps we would move to Florida for the winter also. Since there was no money available to winterize the lodge, and Sally was opposed to staying anyway, it didn't seem to me I had much choice, but I was damned if I was going to leave before things got too chilly for comfort. September is often the best month in the North Country. Most of the tourists are gone, the foliage becomes so magnificent as to verge on ostentation, and the weather is delightful. It's usually warm enough to swim during the day, but clear and cool enough at night so the stars appear in overpowering numbers when one steps out to take a piss or goes down to the water's edge to think something over. After Sally's departure, with a boatload of lesbians from New York City, who had enjoyed freaking freely in the woods like the Amazons of old, I had a few days to myself. Then Kimberly Harrison and Stove ("Ah is all stoved in, man.") arrived, followed by Steve Newell and then Mike and Gai Duncan. It was an entertaining group. Stove and Kimberly had a strange story to tell. They were both from Miami, where Kimberly, a classic blonde beauty, plied her trade as a Miami Beach hooker. She had met Stove after he had freaked out on the most colossal and one of the weirdest bummers I had heard about up to that time. It involved hordes of fleas appearing in his house on some crazy but exact schedule, not being able to take a shower because the water wouldn't touch his skin, and aimless wanderings during which he was pursued by flocks of blackbirds and was picked up on the road by kindly spades driving white cars who knew all about him even though he had never seen any of them before in his life. Kimberly, who had heard about the lodge from a friend of Ed Rosenfeld, had driven Stove up to be cooled out, paying all the bills along the way, in the ancient and honorable tradition of the whore with a heart of gold. She loved every variety of psychedelic drug, and never had anything but splendid and happy experiences while stoned. Steve Newell was something else, also. An alcoholic with a large private income and a family he frequently deserted to go on month-long binges in Mexican whorehouses and amnesic tours of the USA in his big, black Thunderbird, Steve had discovered peyote about a year prior to his visit and, as he put it, had "forgotten to drink." His kick was magic, pure and simple. He used Renard's _Grimoire_ to summon up demons, travel around in his "astral body," and so on. He tripped alone in every one of the cabins and reported that each one had a different set of entities, rather ungeheimlich in the North, but decent sorts in the South, which, I noted, correlated with the quality of the plumbing. Mike and Gai Duncan, not yet married, whom I found sleeping in the grass in front of one of the cabins one morning (not having noticed the arrival of the boat the night before on account of being stupefied), were what I would later come to recognize as classic "heads." They were ragged and appeared to be poor but, it turned out, were well-off, having incomes from trust funds adequate to do pretty much as they liked. Mike displayed, in high relief, every characteristic of the head, or "freak" or "kid" subculture. "Hippy?" The media and media mongers like Tim used the term constantly but the Psychedelians I knew in the '60s almost never used it to refer to themselves. For good or for ill, whatever this population was doing Mike and Gai did also. And they could be counted on to do it early, not being simply imitative, and to do it in a big way. It's hard to name any enthusiasm which enjoyed a transitory popularity in the kid culture in which Mike and Gai did not, at one time or another, participate. For several years, they zoomed around the country in a crazy-quilt pattern, trying every psychedelic drug available and visiting every guru they heard about. The earthly perfection which they sought was always just over the horizon. They wanted someone to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear and to transfer something to them. They didn't know what this was but they knew what it wasn't. They expected, upon hearing The Message and/or getting whatever It was, to be elevated beyond all mundane cares. Their conversation was almost exclusively about drugs and gurus. They were pursuing happiness with the zeal with which the English country gentry is said to pursue foxes. I approved of this, sort of, but found it almost impossible to talk to Mike without losing my temper. He would ask me exactly those questions which I wanted to hear, and I would answer them with a feeling that I was accomplishing something important. Mike would listen attentively and respond in such a way that I was sure he had grasped my meaning perfectly. Then, often as not, a few minutes later he would quote with approval some moronic, supernaturalistic tripe he had picked up from a trashy pamphlet somewhere, thereby demonstrating that my efforts had been a waste of breath. Michael and the class he represented so accurately likewise, lacked the primary requirement for all successful prospectors for gold: the ability to recognize it when you have it in hand. They had read too many dumb books and listened to too many shithouse rumors describing the stuff as, perhaps, heavenly blue in color, at least when Venus was in Aquarius, and as having a powerful odor of sanctity and cant about it at all times. And if the current claimant didn't fit those specs, something was wrong somewhere. Sages are not generally honored in their own country, because their countrymen are so full of self-doubt that they cannot believe anyone who speaks their language and lives the way they live can be worth much, and so it was with Michael. Whatever glittered at the bottom of his pan had to be fool's gold, while anything he couldn't see, but was told, or had read, existed in some exotic place, was most likely the genuine article, or at l east he thought so until he got there and whatever it was became familiar rather than exotic and therefore not good enough for him, more or less by definition. But, despite my irritation, or perhaps partly because of it, I did better than the average guru with both Mike and Gai, and I must also mention that Mike's most characteristic remark was, "Well, since we're already this stoned, why not have one more and get really stoned?" This is an attitude which compensates in my system of bookkeeping for a multitude of sins. I spent a lot of time talking to Stove, whose crazy adventures fascinated me. In former years, I would have regarded him as a "well-defended" paranoid and let it go at that. He would have been considered "well-defended" because he did not, most of the time, do anything particularly bizarre or fail to handle the routines of ordinary life in an acceptable manner. Stove's sense of humor, for example, was intact. He had classic Capricornian saturnine features and a deep, rich voice to match, and his favorite gag was to reply to any blithe or optimistic statement made in his vicinity with a drawn out "Oh, yea-a-a-a-a-ah?" which expressed his earnest conviction that all those who saw the future of Psychedelianism in a positive way were doomed to disillusionment. "Listen, Stove," I said at one point, "why don't we build you a tree house out back? Then, when visitors come we can tell them we have this hermit who will answer one and only one question for each group of visitors. They should take their time and work out some question that's really complex and covers everything. Then they have to prostrate themselves under your tree and go through some kind of mumbo-jumbo to get you to come out on your porch or limb or whatever. You don't say anything. Just listen gravely as the question is read out. Then you say, 'Oh, yea-a-a-a-a-ah?' and go back in your house." Stove thought this was a good idea, but he didn't want to be separated from Kimberly, even though he had been impotent since his strange adventures began. One quiet afternoon, while Stove was on the porch reading, Kimberly came upstairs and knelt on the floor next to my chair, where I had been alternately writing and looking out over the lake. She had a problem. It wasn't that Stove was "uptight," she explained. Far from it. Night after night she would apply every devise of titillation known to a class-A Miami Beach hooker, but Stove would merely gaze at her fondly and compassionately from a million miles away. Resting her lovely head on my knee, Kimberly drawled in her soft Texan accents (her father, she said, was a big shipper in Port Arthur), "Ah jus ' don understan' it, Ahthur. Ahm known on the beach for mah haid jobs. Wah, nobody can resist a good haid job!" Although this was clearly an invitation, Kimberly delivered it as casually as if she had been offering me a stick of chewing gum. "Well, I can resist it if the young lady in question has a boyfriend who is likely to walk up the stairs at any moment, Kimberly," I said. "As far as Stove is concerned, he thinks you're an angel or something. If he allowed himself to have dirty ideas about you, it would break the spell." This analysis went over well, probably because it was correct. I had a private trip with Kimberly a couple nights later, or at least she had a trip and I just smoked a lot of hashish while she told me the story of her life, which hadn't been all that bad, really. When the sun came up, we went down to the dock where, in a matter of two or three seconds, a fish jumped out of the water at our feet, two ducks landed a little further out, and a big tree fell, with a long, rending crash, in the woods right behind the lodge. This was but one of the many times I did not take LSD at Morning Glory Lodge and elsewhere. Stove came down from one of the cabins right after the tree crashed, and reclaimed his prize. Her honor had not been stained in any way. Poor Kim, whom I liked enormously, probably thought she was losing her touch, but the fact was I thought she was pretty inhuman myself, and therefore invulnerable, and therefore not a natural object of masculine desire, or something. That's a pretty vague "fact," I've got to admit. Stove, more often than he wanted, was still having visions with eyes closed and occasionally with eyes open, such as movie-style Indians running through the woods and similar unenlightening absurdities. I told him about the "winkle buttons" I had been seeing, off and on, ever since my Kundalini experience. These were colored, illuminated discs and sometimes sharp glaiks of bright light which appeared for one heartbeat or so from three to ten feet away from me in space. I still get them, although not as frequently as I did in those days. They seem to function as exclamation points or question marks to what I'm thinking or hearing or reading. Most often they are blue, contain many parallel horizontal lines, and are about two inches in diameter, although once, just before coming upon a bear in the road during a night drive from Cranberry to Star Lake, I saw one as big as a dinner plate over the hood of the car, which made me slow down, thereby averting minor or major damage not only to me and my car but to the bear as well. Stove was delighted to hear about these apparitions, since they were evidence a few pseudo-hallucinations here and there were not necessarily fatal, and he listened to my discourse on the subject of synchronicity with intense attention. He had interpreted all the synchronicity he had experienced in terms of vast and impersonal occult forces contending for possession of his soul, in the worst Judaic tradition. Monstrous forces were at work, guiding the historical process and playing with men as if they were toys. I showed him how these events could be interpreted in an entirely different way. I was talking about Snazzm, as opposed to Fazzm, although I hadn't invented the terms yet. It's important, when talking to someone in this kind of fix, to never question the genuineness of the events themselves. I don't think there is much difference between ordinary, down-home paranoids with cheek of tan and people on paranoid trips. Almost all delusional paranoids were labeled "paranoid schizophrenic" in the days when I worked as a psychologist, but most of them were not schizophrenic at all. It has become pretty clear that schizophrenia is a biochemical brain disease. Paranoia, on the other hand, is often entirely "functional" in origin. No disease process need be involved. Paranoids are most often just ordinary people who have noticed the synchronistic aspect of events in their lives, and made the worst of it, frequently as a consequence of supernaturalist ideation instilled in childhood. They can be talked out of it simply through the use of reason. If you're in the business and dealing with institutionalized paranoids who have "acted out," try getting three or four of them together around a table. Have them read sentences in succession from the pages of books picked at random to show how coincidences will, up to a point, fit almost any system, if you're looking out for them. This kind of demonstration can snap some paranoids out of it in one easy lesson. Steve Newell was an entirely different kind of guy. He liked it in the dark and spooky woodlands of Weir, and his "magic" was unusual and, in a way, admirable because his attitude towards it was completely lacking in the pseudo-scientific double-talk and fantastic ontological categorical speculations which pass for philosophy among most occultists. Steve arrived, naturally, on a pitch-dark, windy, rainy night. After he had settled in he let us all know his idea of a good time was to walk through walls and talk to the dead, or at least to beings that did not conform to the usual restrictions of time and space. Could we buy that? Did we think it was crazy? I responded with my standard "life is a dream" pitch. "You can go on any kind of trip you like. I don't think you will learn much by doing that kind of stuff, but maybe that's what you have to learn," I concluded. Steve was relieved at my response. That was how he saw it too. About once a week on average, Steve did the things one reads about in occultist literature, the kinds of things most of the authors of such works have no first-hand experience with at all, but only dabble with and babble about, pretending all the while to be "objective" and "scientific" although very few of them even know the meaning of the words. All occultist-supernaturalist philosophy is based on the fear of death and a wish for personal immortality. In my experience, the difference between people like Steve who practice "magic" and the standard occultists who only talk about it is that the former concede, based on their experience, what the latter frantically deny, based on their ignorance: that the whole thing is mental. The genuine practitioner will admit that walking through a wall and walking down to the corner to buy a six-pack are both illusions, thereby making ordinary life more strange and "astral" life more ordinary. People like Steve have grasped the basic principle of Enlightenment but are having serious trouble with the application. Supernaturalists, on the other hand, attempt to preserve "reality" as an ontological base, and therefore imagine themselves pulled out of shape somehow, or their memories transferred from one box to another, as it were, within a mechanical universe. All they actually save are vague images of moving, labeled blobs, or, to use the term many of them prefer, "souls." As adventure and entertainment, rather than philosophy, a spook show every now and then has its place. And, given the moons and the loons and everything, an isolated lodge in the Adirondacks, in which a heterogeneous group of people, until recently strangers to one another, are gathered together after nightfall for the avowed purpose of undergoing strange changes, is not the kind of place in which to turn on fluorescent lights and listen to the radio, rather than discuss, and perhaps even practice, some of the spookier diversions which such a setting suggests to the imagination. If communicating with the elves is your trip, well, give my regards to the King of the Elves! But in the morning, let's go fishing. An astrologer who had named himself "Yossarian" after the hero of _Catch-22,_ and Anna (I never learned her last name), his newly acquired and extraordinarily voluptuous mistress, showed up and stayed for about a week. They tripped on morning glory seeds, properly prepared, and had a good one, by both reports, mostly private, but partly public, down by a campfire near the shore. Yossarian, however, like most astrologers I have known, showed various paranoid inclinations then and more later, on those infrequent occasions when I ran into him here and there. He didn't think he could hold on to Anna, and, as it turned out, he was right. At the Ashram in Arizona, after Millbrook broke up, Anna switched to Ted Druck, who came to Millbrook with the Ashram in 1966. Fed up with abuse from Haines in Arizona, Ted and Anna moved to Tucson, where they were a big help to me during one of the lowest periods of my life. Hearts of gold in both cases, and good examples of why LSD should not be restricted to the intellectual elite. It can be of enormous service to regular folks also, who have as much right to practice their religions as anyone else. I usually stopped in at Merchant's bar in the morning after picking up mail and groceries, which I stowed in the boat. (Another nice thing about the North Country in those days was that you didn't have to worry much about petty theft.) After I had taken the first sip of my usual Michelob draft, Charlie Merchant, who looked like an old Chinese warlord, minus the pigtail, told me there had been a call for me from Millbrook. I was supposed to call back. When I was connected with the Big House, where a pay phone had been installed at the foot of the stairs, Tim got on the line. He and Billy Hitchcock would be flying up in Billy's plane that afternoon. Could I meet them at the Tupper Lake field? Certainly! Even Charlie Merchant got excited. He was old enough to remember newspaper stories about Billy's father, the polo-playing champ of the '30s. Dr. Leary, the Mephisto of the modern world, would also be worth looking over. I promised to stop in before we went over to MGL. I boated to the lodge and picked up Mike Duncan, and we drove to Tupper Lake, but not before I bought a bottle of Wilson's from Charlie. Tim and Billy arrived on schedule, but so did a vast bank of black clouds, apparently fulfilling an assignment from Olympus to fuck up my most important visit of the summer. By the time we got back to Charlie's bar it was raining cats and dogs. Spears of water were dancing all over the shrouded lake. Mike and I were already smashed on whiskey and stoned on grass. Tim seemed preoccupied and neither smoked nor drank. Billy, since he was flying, wisely refrained. When we got in the boat, Tim crawled under the small covered area in front but even Tim was soaked by the time we came bounding and sliding into the dock. In rough weather it was no joke to land on a lee shore. Aside from one hell of a roaring blaze in the fireplace, practically nothing notable occurred during Tim and Billy's short, wet sojourn at the cabin. The whole thing reminded me of the God-awful ministerial visits to members of the congregation I had to sit through as a child. Here we were, a collection of screwballs such as the world seldom witnessed, and the conversation was downright forced. I found out later that Tim was in the process of losing his fair-haired beauty to a bald-headed, fake-Tantric specialist in coitus reservatus. Billy, unstoned, was worrying about the weather. Mike and I were just plain drunk. I think everyone else was overawed. The professional in the religion racket will not be surprised to learn that Mike and Gai, whom I treated bluntly, to put it mildly, out-contributed Billy Hitchcock, whom I treated with kid gloves, by about 20-to-1 in the years that followed. I hope they became Enlightened Beings with auras at least six feet in diameter (very convenient for stunning mosquitoes) and nice beach houses in Hawaii for every member of the family. Indeed, Mike and Gai became my salvation, which is one of the reasons I have never given up entirely on fake Indians and the occultist multitudes, although, any day now, I intend to discard all hopes of big bucks from the filthy rich. After closing up Morning Glory Lodge for the winter, all visitors having departed (Kimberly had to sell the air conditioner and the radio out of her car to make it back to Miami with Stove), I set out for Southold in the hope that Mary Francis could be persuaded not to move to Florida. The new house was big enough for all of us and, it seemed to me, might make a great setting for a groovy-guru-type Psychedelian psychologist during the winter. Nothing I had heard about Florida sounded attractive to me, whereas the "Far East," Long Island variety, was still a wild and romantic place in many ways, with the kind of population mix that suited my inclinations and ambitions besides. I stopped at Millbrook on the way down. The place was loaded with visitors. Starting from the Big House, cars were lined up along the road halfway to the Gatehouse. Tim gave me a copy of his _Psychedelic Prayers,_ which had just come out. He inscribed it to "Art Kleps, a laughing man with a bad reputation," one of the types listed as "trustworthy" in the back of the book. I liked both the inscription and the "prayers" themselves, which Tim claimed were "based" on the _Tao Te Ching_. I have doubts about that, but this book was a step up from the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_. Tim wanted to hear everything I could tell him about Kimberly, who had stopped at Millbrook for a few days after leaving the lodge and had made a big hit with him. He also wanted reports on some more or less routine cases, usually couples, whom he had sent up to take their first trips away from the Millbrook maelstrom during the summer. When I told him acid seemed to function more as an aphrodisiac than a key to the Mysteries for some of them, he was enormously pleased. Millbrook was definitely on a sex kick, and it was, one might say, an official sex kick, as if Hugh Hefner had taken over. Dick Alpert, who seemed to be enjoying himself enormously, was specializing in producing a sort of Reichian transcendence of "body-armor" and Tim, never content with ordinary objectives, was talking in terms of 1,000,000 "orgasms" a second. His _Playboy_ interview is worth reading, as are many other _Playboy_ interviews from the era. They convey the spirit of the times better than any of the "social histories" published since. Personally, and all of my remarks on this subject are based on my own experience and the testimony of friends, I have found acid to be as sexually distracting as it is intensifying, but the lesser sacrament almost always seems to encourage people to screw like mink if they are so inclined to begin with. Although one should keep in mind that grass highs often have more of a "mini trip" quality for people who have had major LSD experiences, as contrasted with those who have not had such experience, and all kinds of other class and individual variations abound, cannabis, in general, takes second place only to nitrous oxide as an aphrodisiac. Motels owners should provide both substances, as an alternative to overindulgence in booze, and thus do well while doing good, and make life more pleasant for their housekeepers also. Acid intensifies immediate experience like crazy, but is much harder to control. One is directed not only to certain preselected charms, but to all and any charms around, and charms not normally around at all. Under such circumstances, getting laid may seem like something you might as well put off for a while. If you insist, however, it's true that the experience is in a class by itself, especially on a visionary level. Enough variety to satisfy the most jaded palate, one might say. It's like taking on central casting. But, in my experience, those who routinely and exclusively use acid this way are tamasic characters in almost every case, devoid of higher aspirations or interests beyond the satisfaction of their immediate personal impulses and untrust-worthy on that account. If you want to get ripped off, or betrayed, just associate with couples who spend all their time on trips screwing. On to Southold. Mary Francis and Sally thought I should take a train to Miami, where my brother Leonard lived, to look things over and return with a report. This I did. My report was unfavorable. As far as I could see, the place was some kind of giant glob. My-am-I. Possession is identity. The sky was too low. General somnambulism seemed to prevail, even among the heads, several of whom arrived to pay their respects soon after I arrived. My kid brother's middle-class style of life depressed me. Miami struck me as a purgatory world, in which nothing of consequence would ever happen, at least not to me. On the other hand, it would just be for the winter. Sally's mother wanted to go. She had the money. We went. That winter passed like an alcoholic fantasy or coma, or both. We rented a modest house and held meetings once a week. I met some interesting people and got local TV and radio coverage, but the sensation of suspended animation persisted. So I stayed half smashed most of the time, and fooled around with a Tuesday Weld-type University of Miami student, Jean Valier, who deserved better of me, as did Sally, to dispel the general miasmic boredom which seemed to seep out of the ground itself. I couldn't face a full-scale acid trip in Florida. I was sure I would bolt. Sally, aside from the apprehensions engendered by having sacramental sugar cubes in the refrigerator, loved the place. During meetings, she would take the kids over to the uninteresting house her mother had bought. The meetings were fairly sedate affairs, involving, if anything, tiny doses of the Supreme Sacrament. We would have multiple readings, watch TV with the sound off while listening to a radio program to pick up the synch, and discuss the usual Psychedelian philosophic questions. I couldn't allow full-scale group sessions in the house because we were surrounded on all sides by conventional burghers, who never gave us any trouble although they knew what was going on, but who would surely have called the cops if naked freaks claiming to be pelicans had appeared on their doorsteps asking for directions to grandmother's house, or something similar, as would have happened if everyone had been routinely stoned on large hits whenever we had a meeting. The freedom and honesty I had enjoyed so much at MGL and Millbrook had been replaced by all kinds of restraints and compromises. I felt trapped, so I drank a lot. News of Tim's bust in Laredo, Texas, didn't improve my mood. After crossing the border, the Leary family had been turned back on the Mexican side because Tim was on a _persona non grata_ list in Mexico, and they were then stopped and strip-searched by the border guards on the American side. Sure enough, Susan had what was left of the family stash, a very small quantity, in her panties. Her father, as most honorable fathers would in similar circumstances, took responsibility. He refused to cop a plea, and was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in a federal prison, but was released on bail pending his appeal, which he based on a claim that he was a "Hindu," which, if true, he thought, meant that his possession of cannabis was protected under the First Amendment. These events, as reported on TV and in the Miami paper, were almost too crazy and pathetic to bear thinking about but very suitable to drink about. Jack Kerouac called up and then showed up one evening, smashed on wine, and entertained us with great wit, verve, and erudition until the wee hours. We added a little acid to the wine. As luck would have it, I had just finished reading his latest romance and was feeling pretty Kerouacish myself in consequence. Jack was a true monologist of the old school if there ever was one. When smashed, he would go for days without sleep with his friends working in shifts to look after him. His greatest performance when in this condition, according to a story Watts told me, was an appearance before an exclusive group of literary and academic figures at Harvard shortly after _On the Road_ was published. He staggered to the lectern and said, "Well, this is a fine-looking collection of cocksuckers." Then he threw up. His audience, but not, I suspect, the janitor, rose as one man and applauded, with genuine appreciation and respect, according to Watts, this masterful performance. Ah, where is that glorious spirit of yesteryear which once prevailed? Be gone ye dour faced demons! _"A Christian could and should be gay, but the devil shits on him!"_ (Martin Luther) Although Jack and I hit it off very well, I forgot to ask him to sign up, or to invite him to visit MGL or even to get his phone number, which is as good an illustration as any of my characterological inability to imitate Tim in the mass-media-mongering way of life, much less compete with him. Tim would probably have appeared arm-in-arm with Jack in front of a TV camera within a few hours of meeting him. I'm convinced, based on my record, that I'm not only not very good at that kind of stuff, I'm downright subnormal. We did manage to enlist some useful members in Miami, although only a few lasted very long. I was greatly surprised when a Jewish psychiatrist from New York, Joe Gross, signed up after attending a meeting. Almost all of the psychiatrists I had met in my career had struck me as being so far beyond redemption that only shock treatments or lobotomies could shake their rigid orthodoxies. Accordingly, Joe's adherence to the cause lifted my spirits considerably. If a psychiatrist could defy his trade association, so could almost anyone, no matter how depraved. I stopped drinking for about twenty-four hours to celebrate. However, the most fateful event which occurred that winter in Miami was also the most disgusting first trip I had ever witnessed. Steve Newell showed up one evening with a friend, a lawyer named Frank Green, whom Steve had convinced to try acid as a possible cure for his psychopathological disorders. Throughout his trip Frank blubbered about his ex-wife. She had recently divorced him, getting custody of their only child and denying Frank any visiting rights. He rolled around on the floor in front of the couch on which Sally was sitting, moaning and groaning and occasionally addressing Sally by his first wife's name. Sally, he asserted, was the spitting image of this unfortunate woman. When he went to the toilet, which was frequently, it took two of us to get him past the gas heater in the hall, which he thought was "a passageway." It had been placed there to suck wife beaters down to their just rewards in the infernal regions. When he left, after Steve apologized profusely for his friend's behavior, I thought no more of the matter. Little did I realize that this monumental creep would be the proximate cause of much suffering for me in the future. In Miami, I also learned that there are people who seem to be constitutionally incapable of tripping, no matter how much LSD they take, and that individual reactions to identical doses may vary widely. Light and infrequent users may have fantastic and glorious experiences on a few tokes of the Lesser Sacrament. And others, who take what would normally be staggering amounts of LSD, may experience only minor changes in perception and learn comparatively little from it. These are the extremes of a distribution which seems to be normal (bell-shaped), so the reactions of most people are about what one would expect, but the reactions of any particular person, chosen at random, can't be predicted with certainty. A prosperous, middle-aged couple from Coconut Grove, who showed up at about the same time a drunken reporter and a photographer from _Life_ magazine were hanging around, demonstrated both extremes of the distribution. The wife was so eager to try the stuff she almost drooled when she talked about it. For years, she had devoted her spare time to checking out the standard swamis and such and, much to her credit, had rejected them all. Then she had read about Tim, IFIF, the aborted Zihuatenejo experiment, the Castalia Foundation, and the rest of it. This was it! She dragged her husband, a good-natured and open-minded person, hundreds of miles to hear Tim speak, and contributed generously to the cause, but somehow could never lay her hands on any acid. My appearance in Miami, therefore, struck her as a godsend. I made arrangements to turn her on at her house one morning, when everyone would be away. They had two college-age sons living at home. Since I had just put a gram of new crystal in vodka in portions of 250 micrograms per drop, I gave it to her right on the tongue, after signing her up. With rare exceptions, I didn't turn anyone on who hadn't joined the Church. An hour later, nothing had happened. I gave her another drop. She seemed to become slightly nervous. So did I. I took her over to my house, half convinced by this time that there was something seriously wrong with the acid, if it was acid at all. I gave her a sugar cube from a former gram. Nothing! I was dumbfounded. By evening, she had taken 2,000 micrograms from both the new gram of supposed crystal LSD and the previous gram, which I knew from personal experience was as good as it gets, with no observable or reported effects whatever. When her husband came over I had twenty or thirty Necco wafers, with a drop from the new batch on each, drying out on the coffee table in front of me but I wasn't sure what I ought to do with them. I wanted to nibble some myself but I still believed in the "ground control" idea, and for all I knew, the 2,000-microgram woman, still an utter novice, would suddenly start tripping like crazy at 3 a.m. and need my assistance. "I guess I'll just hand them out free to some of our most experienced people but I will have to warn them," I said. "The fact is that I don't really know what this stuff is." "Why don't I try one?" her husband suggested. I handed him a slimy pink disc, thinking he would take it later, but he popped it down without a second's hesitation. Off they went in their Cadillac. I lit up a joint, poured a drink and turned on the stereo. The phone rang. It was the 2,000-microgram woman, still straight. "Everything" was "fine" but she thought I ought to come over to their house. Whew. When I walked in I found her husband, wearing a bathrobe, seated in an easy chair, surrounded by his adoring family and beaming away like a lighthouse. "Ask me anything!" he announced, making a lordly gesture. He was on one of the most beautiful, well-balanced, dignified, humorous, kind, loving, optimistic and altogether glorious trips I have ever witnessed. The man was brimming over with good cheer and happy news for one and all. His sons both had good trips in the days that followed, but their poor mother never got an inch off the ground, although she tried several times. When _Life_'s hired scrivener asked for the name of someone to interview, I arranged a meeting for him with my favorite new Psychedelian family. His article, entitled "A Midwestern Businessman's Trip,” appeared on the first page of _Life's_spread on LSD. The Neo-American Church wasn't mentioned, so I put a curse on _Life_ and it has since become a mere shadow of its former self. Miami was educational and I had some fun, but it was largely a big drag. I could hardly wait to get back to MGL. When, in the merry month of May, I heard that the ice was melting in God's country, I packed up the car and told Sally, who was unwilling to leave so early, to follow with the kids by plane as soon as she could. Things were not going well domestically but it seemed to me that once we escaped from Florida this would change. We had enough money to pay the bills. An enjoyable spring, summer and fall at the lodge stretched before us. Surely Sally would see how lucky we were to have escaped the dreary lockstep of the typical American family. Right? Wrong. Unfortunately, I decided to drink my way back north. No doubt certain anxieties were gnawing away at the back of my mind, despite the pleasant prospect at the forefront. Most heavy drinkers have an alternate personality which takes over when they are drunk, and I was no exception. Arch Kleps, whom I might as well call this character, was generally nonviolent, but extroverted, boisterous and reckless. Drunken consciousness can have a delightfully dramatic and magical quality, and it's no accident that the best poets are so often lushes as well. Used just right, alcohol (and barbiturates, which are much more dangerous, also) can produce a state in which there is no difference between thought and talk; it all just reels out effortlessly, without any sense of alienation or self-doubt and, assuming one has interesting ideas (Watts comes to mind), the results can be worth the cost and risk, both of which are high. Unfortunately, just a couple drinks beyond this happy state, in which everything appears clear as a bell, lies the land of the stupid, drunken slob, in which there is no tomorrow and no yesterday, a world which will vanish when the hangover starts. I see it all in terms of split personality. Arch would have been better suited to former times, when life was generally nasty, brutal and short and the only way to live was to forget about personal safety and try to generate as good a show as possible with whatever was at hand before the inevitable happened. It was a matter of style, as if Arch were an actor on a stage. Drama was what he was after, and what he fled was boredom, futility and routine. I guess it was some such consideration for keeping the script lively that moved me to offer a gas station attendant in central Florida, who seemed disgruntled, a sugar cube. Here, pal, try one of these sometime. It will cure what ails you. Middle of the night. Black as ink. I had no idea where I was. Ten minutes later I pulled up in front of a closed grocery store and went to sleep in the front seat. I awoke to find a cop shining his flashlight directly in the plastic bucket of foil-wrapped sugar cubes at my feet. "Whatcha got there, buddy?" he asked. "I have nothing to say," I replied, as all students of ACLU pamphlets are taught to respond under such circumstances. I felt no anxiety. The meaning of the word "anxiety" was as unknown to Arch Kleps as it was to Superman, Batman or Captain Marvel. How can you have an adventure unless it looks like the villains may win? At the same time, Batman, or his author, knows in his heart it is all a farce and he just can't lose. At the police station I was locked in a featureless holding cell painted a sickly yellow, while my captor called his captain. During the hour or so while I waited for his arrival, I actually dozed off for a few minutes, although I was thinking with perfect clarity and was by no means "stupefied" or in any similar state of mental inefficiency. When I was ushered before the captain, he asked, "Do you care to tell me what this is, Mr. Kleps? We can have it analyzed, you know." The correct words seemed to come out of my mouth as if the whole exchange had been scripted and I had it on tape. "No, I can't tell you exactly what it is but it is the sacrament of my Church." A brief summary of the practices of the Native American Church and our belief that our organization has the same legal rights under the constitution reeled out of my mouth. Click. "Exactly what does it do to you?" A brief summary of the mystical tradition in Western and Oriental literature, brilliantly and modestly expressed, reeled out. Click. The captain sat back in his chair and fingered his chin. Maybe he had a personal interest in my cubes. Maybe this, maybe that. "Captain," I said, "I don't blame your man for picking me up, and I understand that you have to hold on to what you have confiscated. If you like I will give you a release for it. But all I am interested in right now is being on my way. I have an appointment with a writer who is doing an interview with me for _Pageant_ magazine up north and I don't want to be late for it. All I can tell you is that if you arrest me your county is going to have one hell of an expensive case on its hands." Click. What I had said about the _Pageant_ article was true. Bob Eddy, an old college friend who had become a Unitarian minister in Michigan, had asked me to fly over from New York to his place to do an interview as soon as I got there. "OK," the captain said. "You can go. But I have to hold this stuff." It was a mixed blessing to be introduced to the anti-Psychedelian cold war this way. It encouraged me to entertain the foolish notion that I might be invulnerable to such inconveniences as being arrested and incarcerated for my religious practices, although it was routine for less noble mortals. Did I have a metaphysical "get out of jail free" card? Why not? Offhand, I couldn't think of anyone more deserving of the honor. Without a worry in the world, Arch went on to Gainesville and dropped in on the local bee hee for some well-deserved rest and recreation, but Art woke up with the hangover, and all kinds of worries. The usual. Pregnancy? Clap? Divorce? Where is my wallet? And, holy shit, the unusual but distinct possibility some junior G-man was busy analyzing my sugar cubes soaked in LSD at that very moment. Once this virtual certainty became a clear image in my mind, the entire affair didn't appear at all to be the amusing adventure Arch had described to the fascinated and wide-eyed young scholar the previous night. In a matter of minutes I was out of the house and into my car and I didn't stop except for gas, until I was out of the state of Florida. The only real stop I made all the way back to New York was in Pennsylvania, to visit a couple old friends, Jean Lewis and Brad Jones, who had married and were living in Bethlehem. In the '50s, Brad had looked a lot like Warren Beatty, but taller, and with soft brown eyes, instead of that ethereal blue, the looking into of which became so tiresome to Queen Victoria. To continue evading descriptive details by means of what might be called the Hollywood shortcut, Brad behaved, even more than I did in those days, like Errol Flynn, an inclination he did nothing to hide from Jeannie, who merely frowned like Natalie Wood would, and perhaps tapped a little brown loafer, when neglected because of such diversions. It didn't seem to annoy Jeannie much more than poker nights. "Boys will be boys," one could almost hear her thinking. Or perhaps, "Men are like putty in the hands of these sluts. What can one do?" I had shared an apartment in Syracuse with Brad one summer, and Jeannie and I had known each other since she was fifteen and I was twenty-one, back in Utica in 1949. In many ways, pretty but deliberately unflashy Jeannie and handsome, charming Brad embodied the essence of '50s coolitude, as I had known it. Jeannie had long, light-brown hair, a red MG roadster, into the passenger's seat of which I could fit only by jamming my knees against the dashboard, and a seemingly unlimited supply of plaid, pleated skirts and muted, matching sweaters. She belonged to Alpha Chi Omega, the "best" (richest) sorority adorning the University at the time. Brad, also faultlessly attired in the collegiate styles of the day, drove a big Buick convertible, seemed to know everyone and something about everything, at least glancingly, had a hollow leg and, naturally, was a member of DKE. The three of us got along fine. I can't remember exchanging as much as a cross word with either Brad or Jeannie. I met Sally while sharing the apartment with Brad. After reviewing the psychological profiles of the four of us, I'm pretty sure most good psychologists would have advised us to switch partners immediately, for the greatest good of the greatest number. Yet, improbably, Jeannie and I had always been "just friends," and we stayed that way. Whenever our paths crossed, the party of the second part was involved in an entangling alliance with a party of the third part which the party of the first part could not but respect. On arrival, I was happy to see that J&B had acquired a cute house and produced two cute kids but it swiftly became apparent that all was not well. Jeannie gamely tried to catch up with my intake all afternoon as we talked about old times. It seemed strange to be on such intimate terms with an unstoned person. "Shouldn't have wasted those cubes," I said to myself as I turned back onto the interstate, and also, "I have got to sober up," which I did. The last ice of winter was still on the lake when I arrived at Cranberry Lake, although the air was balmy. The wind was from the west. Fountains of sparkling ice crystals spun up in the sunlight where the last long, wide, thin sheets crashed against the shore. To fully appreciate this display of aesthetic whimsicality on the part of Mother Nature (a wonderful, tinkling music is part of the show), I stayed with the rocks and boulders and cobbles and stones and pebbles and little sandy beaches along the shore as much as I could, all the way to the house, which was unchanged. It didn't even seem weathered, much less, as I had feared, vandalized. There is no joy like being exactly where you want to be. I flew to Michigan to do the interview. It's in the _Boo Hoo Bible_, just as _Pageant_ magazine printed it, complete with the god-awful "With LSD, I Saw God" title they slapped on it. This stupid concept haunted me for years but I came to regard this as just punishment for the sloppy language I used in those days, long before I learned that if you give the bastards an inch they will take a mile or more. On my return, I spent a happy week with various tools in hand, getting everything in order, and not thinking about slithery semantics in the slightest. Since I had to walk to town before the ice went out and I could use a boat, I had plenty of time to notice how the state campsite road was being extended in loops and tentacles down the shore and towards MGL. Land in the forest preserve in New York State is protected, not by ordinary law, but by an amendment to the state constitution which declares that it shall be "forever wild," an amendment which the Conservation Department has attempted to overturn, unsuccessfully, several times. The amendment is also peculiar in allowing any citizen of the state to bring a suit against the state for violations. What the Conservation Department was doing was clearly illegal. I wrote and threatened suit if the road went any further. They wrote back and said they had no such plans and the road they had put in was for "fire control" purposes only. Provisions for campers were "incidental." Sheer horseshit, no doubt. But such facilities are better than a lot of garish motels in the towns. I let it drop. So did the other owners in the region. The principle is clear. When, in the United States, a government agency breaks the law because the law fails to take everything into account and gets in the way of genuine and pressing human needs, the individuals whose rights are violated thereby are expected to adopt a liberal attitude and let it pass, and usually do. The "Golden Rule" comes first, in other words. When, however, a mere citizen of this republic violates the law, an entirely different ethic, based on what might be called "the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life" rule, derived from the tribal customs of an insane and murderous mideastern cult, and perhaps imposing thirty years in a dungeon for anyone whose daughter has the wrong kind of flowers in her panties, applies with unforgiving wrath. Chapter 14 "DEFEND THEE, LORD!" _I would have considered this a doubtful errand, myself._ I was talking the matter over with Charlie at the bar one morning when a call came for me. It was Carl Perian, who worked for Senator Dodd's (the elder, kids) Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee. Senator Dodd was under heavy attack at that time for accepting bribes, and did not seem to figure at all, as planner or participant, in the scenario Perian painted. He and other members of the subcommittee staff had formed a favorable impression of me when they read an article in Walter Bowart's _The East Village Other_ magazine which quoted, in full, my letter to the Food and Drug Administration demanding that our Church be exempted, as the Native American Church had been, from the peyote prohibition of the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965. They wanted me to testify at one of the hearings the subcommittee was about to hold. Tim had already testified, before a different committee, but, in Perian's opinion, had badly let down the home team. The religious case for psychedelics deserved to be made, Perian thought, but Timothy Leary had not made it. Tim hadn't even bothered to prepare a written statement but had aimlessly rambled, Perian said, making quite an ass of himself in the process. Based on the "great job" I had done in my FDA letters, Perian hoped I might make up for some of the damage Tim had done to our cause. My expenses would be paid in full. They would mail me a ticket and a check to cover my hotel bill. Would I fly down as soon as possible so they could help me prepare my statement? I certainly would. Holy shit, it was like something in a Frank Capra movie. Could it be that I had become overly cynical about the powers that were? I instantly forgot about the state campsites, MGL, family problems and the nature of the universe. National publicity! My name and doctrines, very possibly, broadcast far and wide! An opportunity to make my case directly to the highest powers in the land! Feelings which, with some difficulty, I identified as being patriotic, or at least semi-patriotic, crept into my cranium, which I had thought fully inoculated against any such invasions. For a very brief period, there was some excuse for such idiotic emotions. At least at the federal level, a number of people who actually knew what they were talking about on the subject of psychedelics were granted an opportunity to protest the laws against us which were already in place and the new repressive measures being contemplated to extend the "tyranny" over "the mind of man" which Thomas Jefferson swore "eternal hostility" against "every form of." Me too. It's the "eternal" and the "every" that make this such a great line. Never again has there been anything resembling fair and open public hearings on the subject of psychedelic drugs and religion at the federal level. Instead, we have the "drug war," and as is oft observed, the first casualty in any war (or "war") is truth. Flat-out lies are the standard weapons for daily use but much of the deception is more sophisticated and harder to spot. The established power defines its enemies through control of the media. Revolutionary movements have always had this problem. For years, during a period of enormous growth of the socialist movement throughout Europe, the name of Karl Marx was never mentioned in the popular press. Jonathan Swift had it right: "Should a man of genius appear among you, you may know him by this infallible sign; all the dunces will conspire against him." No doubt about that, but the dunces will often conspire against each other, also, thus confusing matters considerably. Modern technology has made this old scam easier for its practitioners in some ways and more difficult in others. One sub-trick that's now easier is to expose parts of an opposition player in the mass media while leaving out other parts, thus putting some very hideous (or, worse, pitiful) freaks on the field. On the other hand, it is much harder now than it was a hundred years ago to totally suppress anything. Does it all "balance out"? Damned if I know. I decided to drive to Millbrook and take the train from Poughkeepsie to Washington. When I got to the turnoff for Millbrook, however, I pulled over at a rest stop, opened a beer and thought it over. Tim's Laredo bust and the extremely high probability that his appeal would fail greatly confused matters for me. Would it help or hurt to talk to Tim in his present condition? Hurt, probably, I decided. Tim's defense against the Laredo bust had pretty much rested on his declaration that he was a "Hindu." ("Hindu" is not a good term, but its usage is so well established that there isn't much sense in fighting it.) Although many Hindus smoke cannabis, and little is thought of it one way or the other by Hindus who don't, there is no Brahmanical Vedantist sect I know about that religiously obliges or even officially encourages the practice. To try to overturn the marijuana laws of the United States with such flummery seemed senseless, if not suicidal. Why hadn't he copped a plea? And if there was any hope at all for a religious defense in a pot case at that time (I don't think there was), why didn't he just say he was an Emersonian or "a William James kind of guy," a transcendentalist, or something else an American judge and jury might feel they ought to respect? All of this was crazy and hazy then and it's crazy and hazy now. Those of us who admired him thought of Tim's latest moves and pronouncements, including his declaration of a "moratorium" on the use of psychedelics and the persecution of Psychedelians, as the aberrations of a mind unsettled by desperation and the Kafkaesque quality of a thirty-year prison sentence for entering the United States, when he hadn't really left it, with a daughter who had a few shreds of a common plant on her person. How rational would I be if I suddenly found myself looking at thirty years, even if I deserved it? One thing was sure. I didn't want to hear anything from Tim, or anyone else, about a "moratorium" on my constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. To hell with it. Advice from Tim, in his present condition, would be a distraction. I would go directly to Washington and stop at Millbrook on my way back. I tossed my empty Budweiser can into a trash receptacle provided by the State of New York, took a piss in a state urinal, and passed Millbrook by. On the train, I reviewed my correspondence with the FDA, as printed in the_ East Village Other_:
NEO-AMERICAN CHURCH GIVES 'EM HELL by Walter Bowart _Kleps told EVO of a letter received from Carlton Sharp of the Food and Drug Administration's Division of Industry Advice, Bureau of Education and Voluntary Compliance, stating that the Neo-American Church would not be allowed to administer psychedelic substances but that "based on the centuries of traditional use of peyote by Indian members of the Native American Church and the intent of the Congress as evidenced by the legislative history, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration has exempted this church and this church only from the registration and record-keeping requirements of the Act for peyote use for bona fide religious ceremonies." The letter said that peyote was not exempted from the requirements of the Act under any other circumstances. "We do not know of any similar justification for exempting LSD from the requirements of the law," said Mr. Sharp. In answer to Mr. Sharp, Kleps posed the question of exactly what constitutional amendment it was that gives to Congress the right to establish a religion on the basis of longevity. "As I read the First Amendment, it says Congress shall make no law respecting the establishing of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. "If you seriously maintain you can make a legal distinction between one church and another on the idiotic basis that one is older than the other you are propounding a doctrine that would give Catholicism a higher standing than Protestantism, and Judaism a higher standing than Catholicism and Animism a higher standing than Judaism. "If you maintain that religion has nothing to do with it, and your favoritism is merely a recognition of a cultural difference, then I would like to point out that I am an intellectual person with an interest in mysticism, and that for thousands of years, members of my sub-culture have experimented with consciousness expanding substances for religious purposes; or is the distinction you make strictly racial? "The fact of the matter is that you would not have made this exception if the Indian use was merely social, no matter how ancient the custom, and that you have made it because of court decisions favoring the Native American Church based on the First Amendment. "You also establish a religion in exempting what you refer to as 'ceremonial' use, while presumably not exempting the use of peyote by, say, some heretical Indian who prefers to take his peyote alone on a mountain top as an aid to meditation, who, indeed may be obliged to do so because he is not permitted in the Church, on account of his heretical opinions on theological matters." Kleps asked, "Exactly what do you intend to do about splinter groups from the Native American Church? "I suppose the non-orthodox will be put in prison? "If our church adopts the use of peyote instead of LSD, will we be granted an exception? What about mescaline? These distinctions, as you know, are all superficial; the effects are pretty much the same except that peyote makes many people sick. "In the event that a clergyman of our non-established church is sent to prison for distributing the sacraments to his congregation, and he recants and embraces the doctrines of the established church and is accepted into the established communion, may his membership in the established church be made retroactive, thereby legalizing what was formerly a crime, on account of his heresy?" Boo Hoo Kleps continued: "If these substances have nothing specially holy about them, then the state may prohibit them. But if they do have something specially holy about them, then the state may neither prohibit nor control them, nor even encourage nor discourage their use, for they are entirely outside the province of government and are under the protection of religion and conscience alone. "It is not the business of legislatures to define what is holy and what is not, although the courts may rightfully inquire into the sincerity of religious assertions, if those assertions lead to a proper question of law. "The discovery of LSD may be taken as the intervention of God in human history; if the government says this is not possible, then the government has in effect made a law respecting an establishment of religion, disallowing all that is present and future and permitting only what is past. "To define these divine bio-chemicals as 'drugs' in statutes is to do nothing but render an opinion, very possibly wrong, and no one is obliged to act accordingly, for, in the same manner the wine of the Christian communion might be called an intoxicant and narcotic given to minors and the Jewish circumcision termed an assault on infants. If sane and orderly men say that a thing is religious, and the thing is no murder or robbery, then it is their natural right to have it, no matter what multitudes of believers in the holiness of other things, or even in the holiness of nothing, may be arrayed against them. "We do not believe these substances may be taken from us by whatever means, under any circumstances, no matter what the courts may decide, for free men have a natural right to the exercise of their religion which transcends all ordinary laws should conflict arise, so long as the matter in dispute is integral and essential to the practice of the religion and involves no direct injury to the person or property of non-participants. "This is the official position of the Neo-American Church on the question of government control and/or prohibition. It is not binding on the clergy or membership of the Church, but I intend to steer by this course, and those who disagree should make their views known, so there will be a minimum of confusion." Kleps took issue with Dr. Timothy Leary stating that he specifically rejects a "moratorium" on the use of LSD until its legal status is cleared up, or any acquiescence to government controls of any kind, however mild. Kleps expounded: "No court exists with such jurisdiction." Kleps encouraged all Church leaders, called Boo Hoos, to defy the law and continue to celebrate holy communion as they have in the past, but said that "Timothy Leary continues to be the single most respected spiritual guide of the Church, and we will do all in our power to save him from persecution and the torture of imprisonment."_ Good stuff, I thought. It had been written at night with pen and pad at the lodge by the light of three kerosene lanterns. Nice shadow effects. Cozy, also, with a cheery fire going. Synchronistic with the Age-of-Enlightenment, eighteenth-century, Rights-of-Man tone of the thing. If I could maintain the "grand manner" in my statement to the subcommittee, I thought, I might be wafted to the Elysian heights of national media coverage. The dreary landscape of industrial New Jersey arrived and departed in segments through the train window. I wasn't drinking. Don't fuck this one up, Kleps, I kept telling myself. I thought of the train trips I used to take between Crestwood and Scarsdale or Bronxville during the war, to go to the movies when I was a kid, and how I fantasized I was an important adult on some great expedition. Well, here I was. To get smashed would be to betray my youthful image of myself as an adult. Fuck this one up and I won't have anything more to do with you, I told myself. In D.C., I quickly found a nice room at a reasonable rate in a small, old-fashioned hotel near Union Station. The weather was ideal. I strolled up to the Old Senate Office Building. There was a small town atmosphere about it all? No guard checked me out as I entered. I walked right in and got on an elevator with Ted Kennedy, who gave me a big but appealingly shy grin as we elevated. Déjŕ vu feelings washed over me. My emotions were similar to those I had felt on first entering the grounds at Millbrook. What in God's name was happening to me? I felt at home in this sinkhole of corruption amidst this gang of blackmailers, extortionists and serial mass murders? To this day that feeling remains in my memory as one of the weirdest I have ever experienced. This down-home feeling increased when I introduced myself at the subcommittee offices. I instantly liked everyone I met. Their motivations and attitudes seemed clear and reasonable; they wanted to put on a good show, and if any truth emerged in the process, so much the better. Carl Perian explained the situation to me. Senator Dodd's Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee, of which Carl was the administrator, had been holding hearings on drugs for some time, but Senator Bobby Kennedy, scenting publicity, had decided to muscle in on the act, and was now ringmaster of a Shrinks & Cops Show before a different subcommittee. Tim had appeared on 13 May but, according to Carl, hadn't made much of an impression. We got right to work. Carl showed me to a desk and offered me a pad and pencil with which to write my statement and said one of the three secretaries in the office would type it up for me. Bernie Tannenbaum, one of Carl's two assistants, would help me editorially, if need be. Far out, cool and groovy. I settled down behind the desk and started writing. Nothing to it. Not only did the words roll out effortlessly, but the synchronicity in the newspapers was ideal. A lady in California had just been ordered sterilized because some marijuana was found in a room in which she was present. I included that information in my presentation. Senator Murphy of California had testified about a friend of his children who had been bombed by some acid-spiked punch at a party? Good for him. I worked that in, too. Carl and Bernie were delighted with the pages I handed them. Visions of blanking out Bobby started dancing in their heads, no doubt. His next hearing was to be held at exactly the same time as ours. A spirit of enthusiasm prevailed. At closing time, I went out and bought a new shirt and tie, had dinner, and went to bed, cold sober. This, I thought, is the way to live. There's no business like show business. The next day, as I sat at my desk, surrounded by displays of machine guns and other lethal weapons left over from former subcommittee hearings on gun controls, I could see I wasn't the only one who liked show business of the Senatorial sort. A parade of dark-suited and frowning professional thugs came and went. Most of them were lobbyist hirelings of the AMA, according to Bernie. They were there to beseech Carl for an opportunity to speak, lest the Psychedelianisticalonian power fall into the hands of the likes of me. On the way out, they favored me with dirty looks. One minion, more courageous than the rest, came over and introduced himself. Doctor so and so. Had met Tim and did not share the usual view that he belonged in a snake pit. Just an irresponsible visionary. He went into a song and dance about the necessity for "medical control," and the great loss to the healing arts that would occur if the police were allowed to have their way and ban all psychedelics. Having had a few small doses himself, he knew what I meant about the "religious aspect," but other people would never understand that. One must consider what "other people" would think, etc., etc. I was getting bored. "What other people?" I asked. His mouth fell open, just as in the movies. He got up from his chair. "My God, are you going to talk like that tomorrow? You're confusing levels! You can't confuse levels, Art!" "What levels?" I asked. He had a point, but I just wanted to get back to work. Lamentably, I did not intend to "talk like that" in there, partly because I did not yet have a satisfactory vocabulary to do it with, but mostly because I was suffering from the delusion that my role in the Psychedelian world was political, not philosophical. I intended to deliver high-class smarm like a loyal Learyite. He lifted his arms, looking heavenward, and left. Sandy, a cute secretary from another office, who had been hanging around, came over and firmly nudged the back of my neck with her left tit as she looked over my shoulder at what I was writing. "Mmmm, good stuff, Chief!" Did I want to come with her? She had to go out and buy the morning papers. Aha! Fun and games in the places of the mighty! Walking over to the store, she pointed out the building where Bobby Baker's club used to operate. "Boy, we used to have some high old times in there!" she said. In the store I got a few more nudges and bumps amidst the stacks of papers and mags, and she showed me the announcement for the hearings in the _Washington Post_. Sure enough, there I was, listed along with a Dr. Baird, a Dr. Berger, and Sergeant Bellinger, a narcotics cop from Miami whom I had met on a TV show the previous winter, before there were any possession laws banning the Supreme Sacrament. They were all scheduled to speak before I did. Good. "Why don't we have a couple drinks after work today?" I asked her, as we walked back to the office. Sure. Bernie and one of the other girls would probably like to go, too. Fine. By 7 p.m., my statement was finished and mimeographed. Carl was delighted with it. He asked a lot of intelligent questions and confessed to a great urge to try some acid himself. "God knows I wouldn't have any supply problems," he said, laughing and opening a drawer in his desk to reveal a truly impressive collection of psychoactive drugs. There was enough potential "energy" in that drawer to lift Washington (heavy hydraulic metaphor) six inches off the ground. Bernie and the two secretaries also seemed to take a lively and personal interest in Carl's collection. How would I like to be the guest of honor at a party on the following evening? Sure. Well, here we go again, I thought. That night, in Sandy's apartment, I asked her if she had had much contact with Senator Dodd, whom I hadn't seen once since arriving, although his name was often invoked. "Yes," she said, "all the time. He's a nice old man, and I really feel sorry for him. He's so sick and unhappy and can hardly do anything anymore." "Well, he sort of deserves it, doesn't he?" I asked. Sandy didn't think so. He didn't do anything the rest of them didn't do. No, they were out to get him for other reasons. The "gun people" were behind it all. "You know what?" she asked. "No, what?" "His arms are covered with tracks. I saw them myself." Well, could be this, could be that, I thought to myself. I had better things to think about than Senator Dodd's drug use. I have found lots of heavy synchronicity associated with the damsels who have appeared and disappeared in my life. There is no such thing, Snazzm, as a chance encounter and no matter how casual and transitory the relationship, the person you are with will tell you a great deal about yourself as of that moment. I know you guys who hang out exclusively with stupid, ignorant, crazy sluts don't want to hear this, but so it is. In this case, I'm sorry to say, the girl I was with did better in public than she did in private. She even apologized. Lying flat on her back, closing her eyes and, perhaps, gritting her teeth, was the best she could do. Up-tight Southern Baptist upbringing, she said. I told her not to worry about it. She might be in for one hell of a pleasant surprise in twenty-four hours or so, if the party we had planned took place. Chapter 15 SANDY'S TALE _The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little too simple: the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail, this throws about them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all alike: a couple of people come together with great random--random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter, and so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others, but land! a body ought to discriminate--they come together with great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake his neck, and then there's another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to figure up results, you can't tell one fight from another, nor who whipped; and as a picture, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! why, it's pale and noiseless--just ghosts scuffling in a fog._ The next morning, an hour before the hearings were scheduled, I went for a long walk around the Capitol area in an attempt to become a little physically tired. I hate giving speeches and lectures, except perhaps to small groups of high-IQ, college-age kids and, even then, only when I'm well prepared and stoned out of my gourd. Reducing physical tension reduces emotional tension, and I was tense. I had one double vodka and 7-Up, not more, no more, Kleps. The scene at the sub-committee office reminded me of the hustle and bustle backstage just before a church service. In a group, we took an elevator and walked down a long hallway. I was getting tenser by the moment. Lockjaw or a complete mental vacuum seemed to me a definite possibility. Suddenly, however, I was stoned. I felt like I was walking on air. There wasn't a trace of anxiety in my body. I looked forward to the whole scene with buoyant anticipation. I felt like the corrupt pope who remarked, "God having seen fit to give Us the Papacy, let Us enjoy it." I started talking animatedly to Bellinger, who had been saying something to Carl a moment before that I could hardly hear, such had been my concern for my internal condition. In the hearing room, Baird, Berger and I were seated directly behind Bellinger, who was shown to a table in front of us adorned with several microphones. Senators Javits and Burdick and a couple others I didn't recognize were seated behind a long, high, curved, paneled bench facing us. Behind them were secretaries and assistants. Sandy gave me a big wink. She was behind Javits. To my left were two television cameras, which started humming, but soon stopped, as first Bellinger, then Baird and then Berger, delivered their statements. Bellinger's statement was standard copovenoid logic, not unreasonable if you granted certain utterly undemonstrable copovenoid assumptions, but Baird's statement was so crazy and incoherent I must have reacted with a look of astonished disbelief that such horseshit should be tolerated without derisory comment. Here are some selections: Dr. Baird: " minority of the college professors have been spewing this poor propaganda upon the college campuses that there is nothing wrong with marijuana and LSD. It was just recently we had a professor from Adelphi University who stated that marijuana does not necessarily lead to addiction. It is this type of propaganda when foisted upon the children at our colleges and high schools which is causing more and more of a problem of drug addiction. And he came out with another remark. I would like to know which Senators they are. He said, 'Many Senators, doctors, ministers, and theology students and thousands of others use LSD for their betterment.' I would like to know the doctors and Senators who use the LSD for their own improvement. Also, he came out with another remark." Senator Javits: "I can assure you, Dr. Baird, that I have not seen any evidences of hallucination of Senators." Baird continued: "I plead with you that this problem of drug addiction and narcotics addiction is spreading rapidly more and more every day. "Now we are concerned with the increased consumption of LSD, which to me does not mean just lysergic acid. It stands for a nasty little word, 'Let's sell decadency or let's start degeneration.' "The individuals that I have seen on this have been chaps that, No. 1, are very hedonistic with a marked gratification complex; two, extremely insecure people. One, they are psychologically unaware of their own mental inadequacies. No. 2, they are extremely hypercritical of their own physical shortcomings and project their hostilities sometimes overtly, and these are generally people who have many of these things in common. "Now I know we all wear glasses, but some of these people suffer from severe strabismus; they are extremely thin, very asthenic type, have receding jaw, large pugnacious nose, or they might be short, but their own physical defects bother them. "Then you have latent homosexual or overt homosexual conflict. "Then you have a group of the young college intellect or the self-taught pseudo-intellect, and these are mostly students who are being trained for the arts, music, and literature who will take LSD. "Then you have the college marijuana graduate. He is the chap who goes to college and thinks there is nothing wrong with marijuana, and then after having been on this hallucinogenic marijuana wants to increase his consciousness and then he starts to take LSD. "And then the last group you have are escapists from the stark world of reality of education, economics, and social business. "I would like to just give you a few sad stories of this LSD, this great drug which I think can be great if it is used under very careful limitations by physicians and only by physicians ..." Bernie came over behind my chair and whispered in my ear. "Don't lose your cool, Art," he said, "but cut out the contemptuous smile. You gotta play it solemn in here." I nodded, and adopted what I hoped was an appearance of stoical unconcern. Baird went on and on, as monomaniacal paranoids tend to do. Finally, one of the Senators cut him off. Berger gave a brief, fairly liberal and rational statement, granting his undemonstrable assumptions, which were pretty much those of Bellinger, except that medicos, not cops, should control by force everything and anything people ingested that was not commonly sold in grocery stores. It was my turn. Here's how it went: Senator Javits: "The chairman wishes me to announce that Mr. Kleps was called as the director of the Neo-American Church located at Morning Glory Lodge, Cranberry Lake, N.Y. "Mr. Kleps is essentially a psychologist with a bachelor's degree from Utica College in New York, and a master's degree from Syracuse University in school psychology. "The purpose in calling Mr. Kleps is that he represents another discipline which has experimented with or used LSD without medical supervision, apposite to the testimony we heard from Dr. Leary, representing the largest group of users in the country on a scientific basis, and as some allege, a pseudoscientific basis. "Mr. Kleps represents a religious approach to the use of these drugs, and hence the possibility that his testimony may be of use to us in determining what legislation shall be passed. "Mr. Kleps, again may I ask you to confine your statement if you can to ten minutes, and it will be received without objection and printed in full." Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir, my statement is fairly brief. It's an honor to be here. I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to present my views." Senator Burdick: "Mr. Kleps, would you mind telling me if you are really called Chief Boo Hoo?" Mr. Kleps: "I am afraid so. It is difficult to explain this. That is always the first question that comes up. The reason we do it is to distinguish between the church and the religion. We think it is very important not to take ourselves too seriously in terms of social structure, in terms of organizational life. We tend to view organizational life as sort of a game that people play." Senator Burdick: "So is the appellation a spoof?" Mr. Kleps: "It is sort of a spoof." Senator Burdick: "Sort of a spoof." Mr. Kleps: "It is so people will not get beyond themselves too much." Senator Burdick: "Please proceed." Mr. Kleps: "It is a help to me to have a title like that because I do have to explain it as I am doing now. "Listening to the testimony before your subcommittee on Monday, I was, of course, struck by Dr. Goddard's characterization of what we call consciousness expansion as 'bunk,' and I would like to reply to the reasons he gave for making such a judgment when Senator Dodd questioned him further. "Dr. Goddard said that consciousness expansion did not occur with LSD because the results of objective tests of intelligence and so on given during the session showed negative results; a drop in performance. His argument contains the unspoken assumption that consciousness expansion is necessarily associated with a rise of measured IQ during the psychedelic session. I do not know of any psychedelic person who would agree that that is the case. "If I were to give you an IQ test and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you a vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional color movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test. "LSD puts you in the mind of God, and God has little interest in our IQ tests. We might say that God has no IQ. God is not a verbal being as we are to such a large extent. "Now this assumption that consciousness is somehow equated to, or is an aggregate of, those mental faculties which are measurable by objective tests is representative of an entire approach to the subject of psychedelics which is superficially plausible and yet is fundamentally erroneous. It is the only approach which finds favor in the eyes of those administering research grants. It is based on the assumption that if you cannot measure something, it does not exist. In psychology it is rooted in a kind of professional, if not personal, atheism. It produces the horror stories we read about in the field of animal vivisection experimentation resulting from a narrow-minded fixation on trivia, an almost trancelike inability to see the forest for the trees. It results in thousands of people each year earning advanced degrees because they have proved, in effect, that when you put 13 rats in one end of a box, lo and behold, 13 rats come out of the other end of the box in some combination or other. "Senator, I spent ten years working with young people in the public schools and in my career as a psychedelic activist, since then I have come to know the younger generation very well. They do not buy the kind of pseudoscience I have described. They are looking for the truth, they are trying to find out 'what life is all about.' Their cynicism about the conventional answers, the conventional routines, the conventional games is so profound as to pass beyond cynicism into a kind of entirely praiseworthy honesty and bravery of the highest type. Their eyes are open in the midst of all the death and heartlessness around them. "It is difficult for us to imagine what it is like to have been born in 1948, but it is very much like being born into an insane asylum. I will not repeat what Dr. Leary told you; I am referring to his concern with the lack of communication between the generations; but I will draw your attention to this week's issue of _Life_ magazine which contains two articles very apropos of LSD and the gap in communication between the generations. "The first article is about Allen Ginsberg, the poet, who is also a member of our Church. In your generation or in mine, this man, who is the living antithesis of all that is officially pronounced admirable, would have made, at best, some small stir in Greenwich Village. Today, he is a folk hero. The article does a beautiful job of explaining why that is so. "It is because he is a man who has always disregarded the conventions when they have interfered with his personal quest for beauty and truth. Today's young people insist on direct experience; they are suspicious of all secondhand reportage; what they admire above all else is honesty and personal commitment. I think we can see this in the civil rights movement. "The second article concerns the latest style in discotheque interiors, which may sound trivial, but is actually very revealing. The synchronization of light patterns and sounds, the cryptic flashing pictures, the constant random flow of colors; these are all well-developed techniques for approximating that inner world which is the common experience of all of us; a world both exquisitely private and yet wholly universal. To those of us who have had the experience, it is very obvious that all of this is the result of LSD, right down to the fact that little alcohol is consumed in these places. The people who go there do not need to get drunk, they have found something better. These are the style setters, not people in some cultural eddy or backwash. "Now before I get into the religious aspects of this, I would like to say that the incident Senator Murphy described as occurring near his home, Senator, in which some LSD was surreptitiously introduced into the punch at a party, is not the kind of thing I advocate, nor does anyone I know advocate it. It is a very silly and cruel, or at least thoughtless, kind of thing to do. If you pass laws against such sneak attacks with LSD, none of us will object. But we are surrounded by all kinds of potentially dangerous materials, machines, and chemicals. Book matches, for example, or automobiles. How many children are killed each year from drinking cleaning fluid? If safety were the only goal of life, we would have to prohibit everything, and not even that would work, because as far as I know, life itself is invariably fatal. "It is our belief that the sacred biochemicals such as peyote, mescaline, LSD, and cannabis are the true host of God and not drugs at all as that term is commonly understood. We do not feel that the Government has the right to interfere in our religious practice, and that the present persecution of our coreligionists is not only constitutionally illegal but a crude and savage repression of our basic and inalienable rights as human beings. "The leader of the psychedelic religious movement in the United States is Dr. Timothy Leary. We regard him with the same special love and respect as was reserved by the early Christians for Jesus, by the Moslems for Mohammed, or the Buddhists for Gotama. I am merely the head of one of several psychedelic churches. "The psychedelic churches exist to promote and defend the psychedelic religion, a religion which sees in the transcendental experience produced by the sacred substances the key to understanding life and improving the condition of man on earth. "We have been in existence a year; I am speaking of the Church; and have 500 members. Perhaps if the growth of the peyote religion and the Native American Church is any guide, we will have 500,000 members in a few years. Perhaps the psychedelic people will find some other church more to their liking. It is not important. What is important is that the religion, as distinguished from the Church, is spreading at a fantastic rate, and the Government, in the case of Dr. Leary, and the repression in general, has put itself in the position of attempting to destroy by force a genuine indigenous religious movement. I see no moral difference whatever between putting our religious leader in prison for thirty years and the incarceration of a rabbi in a concentration camp by the Gestapo of Nazi Germany. Perhaps Hitler was less hypocritical. If he operated the way our religious enemies operate in this country, he would not have mentioned Judaism at all in the laws designed to oppress the Jews; instead, he would have (a) made ceremonial wine illegal on the grounds that it was a narcotic intoxicant given to minors; and (b) made the nonpayment of so-called wine tax result in enormous confiscatory fines and thirty years in Buchenwald or Treblinka. "The history of Treblinka, by the way, constitutes a perfect example of how the psychedelic people of the United States will not respond to persecution and imprisonment. The Jews, in that instance, cooperated completely in their own destruction. We have no intentions of cooperating. "On the day the prison doors close behind Tim Leary; if these ill-considered laws of religious suppression are upheld by the courts, this country will face religious civil war. Any restraint we have shown heretofore in the dissemination of psychedelics will be ended. We can, without difficulty, render most of the prisons in the United States inoperative, if it comes to open conflict. Open conflict will most certainly result if the courts uphold these laws against us, if our men are imprisoned, our wives sterilized, our children consigned to unloving institutions and so-called reformatories; and I would most certainly advise my people to use LSD to fight back, to make life impossible for the prison administrators, rather than resort to actual violence. But I will never ask them to passively submit to such outrages. The police of the United States, ordered by their superiors to function as terrorists, as destroyers of happy and decent families who only ask to be left alone to practice their religion as they see fit, will have to make a moral choice, just as did the police of Germany when Hitler took over. Those who remain would do well to regard themselves as a military rather than a civil force. If I seem to exaggerate I direct your attention to a story in yesterday morning's paper about a woman who was ordered sterilized because a quantity of marijuana was found in a room when she was present. This was in California I believe. I personally will never forget sitting in on the assignment board at Sing Sing and watching a parade of armed robbers and grand larcenists go by with three- or four-year sentences, only to be followed by a poor weak little Puerto Rican with an IQ of 85 or so who had been sentenced to seventeen years because three or four sticks of marijuana had been found in his possession. At the time I was under the common illusion that marijuana was a dangerous drug, but I was still shocked. Now I know marijuana is a mild psychedelic and I am no longer shocked, I am numb. I have seen so much cruel injustice it seems commonplace. "The Food and Drug Administration has seen fit to attempt to establish one psychedelic church as legal, the Native American Church of the Indians, on the grounds of historical longevity, leaving the rest of us open to the kind of punishment visited on Dr. Leary. This is a constitutional outrage, of course, and I would like to submit my full reply to the FDA letter announcing this attempt at the unique establishment of a religion in the United States for the committee's study. However, I see in this exemption, unconstitutional though it may be, some grounds for hope that the people responsible may come to their senses. Apparently those in control of the instrumentalities of coercive power in the United States have no difficulty in recognizing that a psychedelic religion is a psychedelic religion when that religion is safely encapsulated in a racial minority group living outside the mainstream of American life. All that is required then is that we should follow the Indian example and make ourselves as peculiar as possible. Perhaps the Government would allow us to live unmolested on reservations. We would be willing to discuss this, if it would prevent open conflict. Possibly the Government would negotiate a treaty with some foreign power which would grant us religious sanctuary in return for receiving to its shores the large numbers of scientists, technicians, teachers, doctors, and intellectuals of all kinds who constitute a large proportion of our members. Most of us love this country dearly. It would break my heart to think of never seeing the Adirondack Mountains again. But we must think of our children, and we could always hope that some day the Government of our beloved country would return to that fierce defense of human rights, to that spirit of freedom and tolerance under which it was founded, and we could come back. "But there will either be some kind of accommodation or there will be conflict. We are not drug addicts. We are not criminals. We are free men and will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted to persecution. "There is no reason why anyone need be surprised by all this. To understand our emotions and our attitudes it is only necessary to imagine how you would react if we were in the majority and passed laws making the practice of your religion a criminal offense." "Senator Burdick: Thank you, Mr. Kleps. I have a few questions here that I would like to ask you." Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "Would you care to tell us something more about your Church? How does one become a member?" Mr. Kleps: "It requires agreement with three principles, the principle that the psychedelic substances are not drugs but actually sacred substances, that they are a sacrament. "It requires agreement to the principle that people are not to be given these substances unless they are prepared for them, and agreement to the principle that everyone has a right to free access to the sacred substances, since they are a gift of God. If one agrees to this, we make him a member of the Church. We do not make distinctions on the basis of intellect, education or anything of that sort. I feel, by the way, that this is the difference between a church and a cult. We are frequently called a cult, but cults do make these distinctions. They are small groups. They want to be small groups. We are a church. We will take anybody. We take people at face value." Senator Burdick: "Do you contend that the substances, whatever they are, do not have harmful effects?" Mr. Kleps: "Not entirely. In very rare cases, particularly when they are improperly administered, if they are taken by people who are unsuspecting of the results, have not done any reading on the subject, have not discussed it with anyone who knows, they can have bad effects. I have seen some bad effects myself. But there are many, many, many other substances in this world that are much more harmful, much more dangerous." Senator Burdick: "Does your order appeal more to the young people than to old people, or of all ages?" Mr. Kleps: "Mostly to young people. I would say at least 50 percent are college students, perhaps more." Senator Burdick: "How many churches are there like this in the country?" Mr. Kleps: "We have twenty boo hoos, approximately twenty. We are getting new people all the time. We have a fairly large group in Miami, fairly large groups in New York State, California. There are about 500-plus members at the present time, but we have only been in existence a year. I hope for better things to come." Senator Burdick: "You have 500 members in your Church?" Mr. Kleps: "There are 500 members in all of the organization." Senator Burdick: "All of the churches?" Mr. Kleps: "In the whole country." Senator Burdick: "Well now, you have told me something about membership. What about the tenets, the precepts of the Church?" Mr. Kleps: "We mainly we feel that these psychedelic substances give you a vision, an entry, a ticket, a trip ticket in a sense, to a higher level of awareness, of an expanded consciousness. It is almost impossible to describe in words if not in fact impossible to describe in words what this is. Words fail. As I said, God is not like us. He does not have an IQ. He is not a talker. When you are in the mind of God you are beyond everything that you ordinarily experience. Everything that you ordinarily consider to be real. There are higher levels of reality than this one, and I believe it is very important for people to see this. It gives them an entirely new outlook on everything, a better outlook, a much better outlook." Senator Burdick: "Is it correct to say that your Church does not have any creed?" Mr. Kleps: "No, we do not." Senator Burdick: "Or any tenets or anything like that." Mr. Kleps: "Tim Leary is generally accepted by most of us as the equivalent of Christ for the Christians and so on, not in any foolish way. I think Tim makes mistakes and so on, but we look upon him as a great religious teacher, the books he has written, the papers and so on constitute the creed of our Church, if there is any creed. But we do not have a dogma in the usual sense. You might say that it is more like the Society of Friends in that regard. We do not insist on any specific definition of these things." Senator Burdick: "Do I understand you correctly to say that in view of your establishment of twenty churches, in view of your membership, that you believe this organization will grow?" Mr. Kleps: "I believe it will, sir. I believe it will." Senator Burdick: "In what proportion in your opinion?" Mr. Kleps: "I honestly believe that we will have a million members in ten years." Senator Burdick: "Are these churches located near college campuses for the most part?" Mr. Kleps: "Many of them are. The older members of the Church and the many, many people who are associated with our Church but who do not join are the older and the more respectable people, the people with something to lose. We are being persecuted, and the people who fight persecution most effectively are those who can take some chances, who do not have families to worry about, who do not have to worry about their jobs and so on. The older people are very hesitant to join up because they are afraid to stick their heads above the ramparts. They are afraid to be known in public, but they are there. They are there in very large numbers." Senator Burdick: "How frequently do you have church services, if that is the correct word." Mr. Kleps: "Usually there are meetings once a week. There are some of the local groups that just function as information centers. Lisa Bieberman of Boston runs information centers, a newsletter. People come and discuss problems. She does not hold any regular meetings. I understand she is planning on setting up a seminar this summer. It all depends on the individual. Now as we grow, I am sure that we will develop more structure. There will be an accumulation of hallowed patterns, traditions, and so forth. This is the way these things always grow. But at the present time it is all pretty loose and free and we like it that way." Senator Burdick: "You mentioned the American Church of the Indians." Mr. Kleps: "The Native American Church." Senator Burdick: "The Native American Church, that is right. Is this patterned much after that church?" Mr. Kleps: "I cannot say that it is except that we also use a psychedelic as they do. From what I understand, they do have a very definite ritual that they follow, and they do not deviate from it very much. We do not have any rituals. I am not saying that we do not develop them. There are some things that are already in the process of development. The use of the techniques I described in the case of the discotheques, the light machines, certain kinds of music, this kind of thing can be used to heighten your experience, and even to produce it in some cases without the use of psychedelic substances." Senator Burdick: "You said not infrequently but it does have a harmful effect. Being on the Indian Committee;" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick (continuing): "I have learned that this peyote does have an ill-producing effect. It causes vomiting." Mr. Kleps: "I know. I have tried it, and I have had the same experience." Senator Burdick: "Does this drug which your Church uses have the same effect?" Mr. Kleps: "No. Very, very rarely people will suffer some discomfort during the early stages of an LSD experience, but that is a psychological conversion of anxiety in the physical form. Peyote does, however, routinely produce intestinal upset and this is a very negative way of going into the experience, throwing up. I do not know how the Indians manage to do it. Somehow they have overcome the nausea." Senator Burdick: "You think that the experiences that the members have makes them compatible with society, makes them eligible for pursuits that the nonmembers follow?" Mr. Kleps: "Sometimes yes and sometimes no. We have members in almost every walk of life. We have people who are successfully pursuing almost any career you can name. "On the other hand, some people who are of religious temperament perhaps to begin with, there are degrees of true religiosity in our Church just as there are in other churches. I would say Tim is more religious than I am perhaps. These people, the people who are extremely religious, may want to withdraw from ordinary life for a period of time. I personally see nothing wrong with that. It is accepted in other traditions, the monasteries and so on. Why not in this?" Senator Burdick: "If you will permit a personal question, do you participate yourself in these ceremonies, the use of this drug?" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "And part of your answer is based upon your own personal experience." Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "I have heard that these drugs produce a 'color television effect.'" Mr. Kleps: "It can do that. It depends on the individual. There are a lot of people who have had many psychedelic experiences and have never really had that kind of a vision. They come back with the same messages when they are all through. This is very strange. Other people will have extremely colorful and brilliant detailed three dimensional movie kind of things. I have had both. I have been in both situations." Senator Burdick: "I wonder if you would also tell us whether this practice is indulged in every time there is a Church meeting." Mr. Kleps: "No. The Church actually is more in the tradition of the mystery religions of ancient Greece. The key experience is not the weekly meeting as it is in the Christian tradition. The key experience is the big transcendental experience that comes to you maybe once or twice in a lifetime. But we center around this. The meetings are secondary. Now at the meetings perhaps a very tiny amount of LSD, 5 or 10 micrograms, will be distributed, just to increase the feeling of communion, to produce some of the effects. Or marijuana may be smoked for that matter. None of this is laid down in our regulations. It is up to the individuals." Senator Burdick: "When this substance is distributed you say to the members, who pays for it? How is it acquired?" Mr. Kleps: "Well, it is easily available. That is all I can really say. To discuss the details of the economics of the matter probably would not be proper for me." Senator Burdick: "Does it operate like a farm cooperative, which I am acquainted with?" Mr. Kleps: "Well, I would say this. That it is not at all like the heroin world. The people in the psychedelic world are kind and loving people. It is almost like automatic affection. Oh, of course there are exceptions, but it is not this sick, greedy, vicious world of the addicts. Nothing could be more dissimilar." Senator Burdick: "The committee knows that it is acquired. We do not know how it is acquired but it is paid for, is that right?" Mr. Kleps: "That is right, sir." Senator Burdick: "And you cannot enlighten us any further." Mr. Kleps: "I really cannot." Senator Burdick: "But whether it is given to these members of the Church or whether they buy it for themselves, they do participate as a group in this." Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "You mentioned marijuana. Is that brought into religious services, too?" Mr. Kleps: "Occasionally. We regard marijuana as being a very mild psychedelic. It is very similar to a very tiny, tiny amount of LSD. The effects are almost identical. One of the best things about marijuana is that it is very easy to control the amount ingested because you are smoking it. If you take something orally, you are leaving it more to chance. When you are smoking, there is very good control. I consider marijuana to be a completely benign substance." Senator Burdick: "You see no harmful effects." Mr. Kleps: "None at all." Senator Burdick: "Have you read or heard the testimony given before this committee?" Mr. Kleps: "I have." Senator Burdick: "And you dispute that?" Mr. Kleps: "Completely." Senator Burdick: "The results and findings?" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "Is it your intention to continue to personally experiment with and to advocate the use of LSD by the others?" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "Would your answer be the same in regard to marijuana?" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "Or similar drugs?" Mr. Kleps: "Any drug; I do not even like to call them drugs." Senator Burdick: "Substance." Mr. Kleps: "Any of these substances that are psychedelic that are not narcotic I believe to be sacramental. I believe that they come under the protection of religious freedom, the right to practice one's religion as one sees fit, and I do not believe that there is any evidence to the contrary, no real evidence to the contrary." Senator Burdick: "You think there is no evidence to indicate that marijuana is habit forming or a narcotic?" Mr. Kleps: "There is no evidence to indicate that marijuana is a narcotic. In fact even our most severe critics admit that. To say that the substance is habit forming is really to say nothing, because Rice Krispies are habit forming in the sense that if you like something you do it again. This is true with a lot of things." Senator Burdick: "You should not equate marijuana with Rice Krispies." Mr. Kleps: "It is even better." Senator Burdick: "What was your answer?" Mr. Kleps: "I would, sir: I would say that marijuana is a very good thing. I believe in it very strongly. It is certainly better than alcohol." Senator Burdick: "Just for the record, are you aware of the testimony before this committee which indicates that the uncontrolled, unsuspected use of LSD can result in panic reactions, psychotic episodes, suicidal tendencies, and other bizarre reactions requiring hospitalization?" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir: and I do not dispute these things have happened, but it must be understood in the context of the broader picture. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are having these experiences and out of this tremendous number there are going to be a few misfortunes. It is inevitable. If these people were taking LSD under religious circumstances, if they were allowed to, if they were given accurate information, if they were warned of the dangers, if they were asked to read the literature on the subject, they probably would not go through these things." Senator Burdick: "Have any of these effects that I have related to you here visited upon any of your Church members?" Mr. Kleps: "Not that I know of. I would like to say in this connection too that much is made of people being hospitalized after LSD, but this hospitalization in most cases is just a simple matter of someone having a panic reaction because they do not understand what is happening, and there is no one present who does, being taken to a hospital, given a shot of a tranquilizer, spending the night in the hospital and going home the next day. Sometimes they are kept for longer periods, but this is because the psychiatrist in charge says that the man is sick. And then if you ask him are these people sick, he will say, 'Yes, they have been hospitalized so they must be sick." Senator Burdick: "In view of this conflict in testimony that has developed in this committee, would you agree that we should establish control over private and unsupervised use of LSD until we can make a scientific determination both of the potential harmful and useful properties of this drug or substance as you call it, either way?" Mr. Kleps: "No, sir; I do not believe that you should." Senator Burdick: "Do you not think it would be safer for the community to find out scientifically what the effects are?" Mr. Kleps: "I do not believe that there is any scientific relevance in this area. Science is not competent to deal with this. This is religion. It is philosophy. It is a philosophy that goes beyond the narrow confines of the kind of science that we accept in our society. Science will never accept the psychedelics. It may pretend to, but it will not. "One must understand how terribly threatening this kind of experience is to the average scientist, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist. Just to hear about it is an insult to his whole notion of the world and of what is real and what is not real and so on. So they go into it with a tremendous desire to destroy it, to bring about its downfall." Senator Burdick: "We referred to the fact that most of your members are young people, college students, and that most of your churches are located near college campuses." Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "I wonder if you could generalize and tell me in what area of the country are your churches most prevalent?" Mr. Kleps: "In the Northeast and Florida." Senator Burdick: "The Northeast only?" Mr. Kleps: "Northeast; Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York State, and in the State of Florida. This may not be the eventual pattern. We have just started. It has only been in existence a year." Senator Burdick: "Do you think that this committee should recommend any legislation regarding the sale, distribution, or possession of LSD?" Mr. Kleps: "I would have no objections at all, and perhaps it would be advisable to prohibit the giving of LSD to people unsuspectingly, a sneak attack of LSD." Senator Burdick: "The punchbowl type." Mr. Kleps: "Right, this is very cruel, very dangerous, I think." Senator Burdick: "Should any criminal charges be imposed on administering LSD to an unsuspecting person?" Mr. Kleps: "No. Oh, well, perhaps so. I am not an expert in law enforcement. I do not know what would be the most effective thing. I am against this kind of practice. I think it is socially destructive. I would not recommend any penalty going further than that." Senator Burdick: "I do not think in your statement you gave me your personal educational background." Mr. Kleps: "I have a master's degree from Syracuse University. I was a school psychologist in New York State for ten years. I also worked as a clinical psychologist in a prison, Sing Sing, Dannemora, on a summer per diem basis." Senator Burdick: "Did you have any particular major?" Mr. Kleps: "Psychology. I was a psychologist for ten years." Senator Burdick: "And it is your purpose to dedicate your life to this church work rather than to follow the scientific areas." Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir." Senator Burdick: "Why?" Mr. Kleps: "I feel it is more important. I think the profession of psychology is going around in circles." Senator Burdick: "First of all I ask you if your statement contains this language: you threatened civil war by saying you would make the prison system inoperative. In a previous letter to this committee you stated you would contaminate the entire Nation's water supply. Did you make a statement like that?" Mr. Kleps: "No, sir. I did; what I said was that in the event that our religion is persecuted, if our wives are sterilized as in this hideous example in California, people are imprisoned for a term of thirty years as in the case of Dr. Leary, a sentence anyway, if these laws are upheld by the courts, if our basic human rights are violated, then there is going to be some kind of conflict, and I would much rather, if the conflict does occur, I would much rather do it nonviolently, turning on prisons, to use the vernacular, which would do less harm than shooting people." Senator Burdick: "But you at no time threatened any uprising." Mr. Kleps: "I have not threatened; no, sir." Senator Burdick: "Violence." Mr. Kleps: "No." Senator Burdick: "Not having law and order." Mr. Kleps: "No, sir. I am speculating about a possible future which I would hate to see come about." Senator Burdick: "Apparently the basis of my question is as follows from your statement: 'I would most certainly advise my people to use LSD to fight back to flood the prisons with LSD and make life impossible for the prison administrators rather than resort to actual violence.'" Mr. Kleps: "Yes, sir. If that was the choice, I would rather see the prison system made inoperative, and it would be if enormous amounts of LSD, in terms of LSD; an enormous amount is an ounce, for example; could just be delivered into a prison and distributed among the inmates, it would be impossible to locate it. The entire place would fall apart as a functioning operation very quickly. I know how absurd this sounds." Senator Burdick: "What would your mechanics be? How would you intend to flood the prisons?" Mr. Kleps: "I do not intend to flood the prisons, sir. I am talking about a possible future. It could be done in hundreds, in thousands of ways. Smuggling things into prisons has always been very easy. The places are designed to keep people inside, not to prevent things from coming in from the outside. You could shoot it over the wall in a slingshot, with a slingshot." Senator Burdick: "Do you not consider this a breach of law?" Mr. Kleps: "We would have to regard these places as concentration camps; if our people are being imprisoned because they are practicing religion, then it is a concentration camp. It is not a prison anymore. It is outside the framework of decent law. We would have to think about it the same way the Jews in Hitler's Germany thought about it." Senator Burdick: "But this is a product of one of our institutions, a product of our country, the laws of our country." Mr. Kleps: "Well, we would maintain that it would be unconstitutional. That to persecute us would be a violation of the first amendment." Senator Burdick: "And to that extent you would take the law into your own hands?" Mr. Kleps: "Rather than submit to the violation of my basic human rights, I would if I had to, I would resort to violence. I think free men have always done this. This is the way this country started." Senator Burdick: "But a free country does not maintain itself without law and order." Mr. Kleps: "I believe in law and order, but I also believe in basic human rights. Basic human rights I believe come first. This is the most important thing." Senator Burdick: "Is there anything further?" (No response.) Senator Burdick: "Well, I must say that your testimony has been forthright and most unusual." Mr. Kleps: "Thank you, sir." Senator Burdick: "I cannot agree with your conclusions, but it will all be considered with the rest of the testimony." Mr. Kleps: "Thank you very much." (Whereupon, at 12:40 p.m ., the committee was recessed, to reconvene subject to the call of the Chair.) The TV cameras had covered the other guys very briefly, but had remained live throughout my testimony and the questioning which followed. When the show was over, the reporters concentrated on me while Baird and Bellinger, ignored, sulked in a corner. Berger vanished. Back at the office, everyone was in a gleeful mood, but there was a fly in the ointment. Carl had just put in a call to someone he knew in Bobby Kennedy's office. It was already clear, from local coverage, that we had deprived JFK's kid brother of the space-time he expected to get, more or less as a divine right. It was obvious, Carl said, that we would get all the national coverage too. "He's foaming at the mouth, Art," Carl said. "My friend says you had better get out of town fast. I guess the party is off. I wouldn't put it past him to have you picked up. If you play against Bobby Kennedy and win you've made an enemy for life." Delightful prospect. Ironic, also. Compared to most politicians, I liked the Kennedys. I had actually gone to the trouble of voting for Jack. "What about you?" I asked. Carl grinned. "Oh, I'm not worried." So I packed my bags and took the next train. On the way up the Hudson on a local, I sat in the back of a car and read all about myself in the _New York Daily News_. Not only was the story in the front of the paper, I rated a photograph, which represented me as looking pretty much the way I hoped I looked. A dozen or so of my fellow commuters were reading the same paper. One girl turned around and looked at me intently for a couple seconds. When I grinned, she looked away. The sensations engendered by knowing that millions of people were having my ideas, second-rate and imperfectly expressed though they were, implanted in their craniums was not at all disagreeable. At the time, I liked it, although it didn't seem all that amazing and wonderful to me that a good sermon would attract a crowd. Tell people stuff they like to hear, and they will come out for it, etc. My father had done it for as long as I could remember, very often twice a Sunday, once in English and once in German. But where was the collection plate? For that matter, where were the church, the steeple, and all those furiously wiggling peeple? Now, I thought, is the time to get busy. I would, I resolved, concentrate on writing and trying to set up lecture appearances. "Enough of this penny-ante shit, Kleps," I instructed myself in no uncertain terms. "Strike while the iron is hot, and all that sort of rot. Grasp the day, for many a rose is born to blush unseen and waste its fragrance on the desert air," and so forth. A little of this stuff goes a long way. Being hectored by myself is worse, in some ways, than listening to someone else do it. "Ah, the conquering hero!" Tim said, when he saw me. As it turned out, the benefits I anticipated from my penetration of the frequency spectrum turned out to be far from spectacular. I just wasn't ready to exploit that kind of publicity. I didn't have anything to sell. No book. No magazine. No regular public appearances. NO MONEY. On the other hand, much later, Carl would tell me he thought my testimony that week did more to hold up the passage of federal possession laws, for about two years, than any other single factor. (The laws already passed only covered distribution.) I had convinced a few key Senators, Carl said, that belief in the religious nature of psychedelic experience could be passionately felt by a person who appeared otherwise rational. Could be, I guess, but how much difference did it make? Most of the heat came at us at the state level anyway, in laws passed by Republicrat punishment freaks to satisfy the needs of their brainwashed and sadistic constituents. Nelson Rockefeller showed no sign of having been impressed by my testimony, nor did any of his counterparts and imitators in other statehouses around the country. Snazzmly speaking, I didn't deserve better results because, imitating Tim like some kind of god-damned wooden dummy, I had resorted to the "Mind of God" image and invoked other cosmic crap as well, although I knew it was public-relations smarm designed to suit the mentality of my audience and not the pure and highest doctrine. The laws would not have been delayed if I had preached the pure and highest doctrine, and there probably would have been less coverage, but it would have cleared the air, and distinguished Neo-American doctrine from the general media mulch then being spread around by all and sundry of a Psychedelian persuasion. So, shame on me. Millbrook, I found, was practically deserted. Dick, Ralph, Maynard, Hollingshead; all gone. Tim showed me a "shrine table," with flowers and incense on it, standing next to the front door. The centerpiece was a nicely framed photograph of a dark-haired young woman with large and lustrous, if somewhat vacant-looking, brown eyes. This was Rosemary. Not my type, but very good-looking by the usual standards. Tim seemed sincerely smitten, and assured me that I, also, would revere this woman as a virtually celestial being, as did all who knew her, when I beheld the whole works going in all four dimensions, although I don't recall that those were his exact words. Rosemary, and good for her, was confined to the Dutchess County jail for refusal to testify at a grand jury hearing about Tim. There had been a major assault ("Liddy's Raid," April '66) at a time when the Big House happened to have an unusually high number of straight visitors on hand, including reporters and photographers, who had never before been treated like enemy aliens. Once released, these people saw to it that Liddy and his thugs did not enjoy anything resembling a public relations triumph, but they could do little more. I had managed to miss it. Blatant civil rights violations all over the place or not, grand jury hearings were being held in the Place of Overflowing Shitholes, and Liddy was not the target, as he should have been. Tim introduced me to a tall, saturnine new recruit named Bob Ross. According to Tim, Ross, who seemed to want to turn the place into a cabbage patch with himself as chief manure spreader, was one of the leading lights of the Psychedelian world. It was my first contact with a true acid-head primitivist, and I wasn't impressed. Ross's motto, I learned later, was "Don't think!" But Tim and three or four other newcomers appeared to be following Bob's lead. The house looked like a deserted cattle barn, everyone was dressed in dirty, colorless clothes, and grunts and terse comments about the weather seemed to be the general order of conversation during the day. Once the sun had set, however, and we gathered in the kitchen to drink red wine and exchange gossip, I got the feeling that perhaps things at Millbrook hadn't changed so much after all. I asked Tim about the old crew. Where were Dick and Ralph and, whatshisname, Hollowhead? Hollingshead? Well, Dick was here, Ralph was there (I really don't remember) but the subject of Michael Hollingshead seemed to interest Tim a great deal more than the locations and activities of his former close associates and he proceeded to acquaint me with some of the facts of Hollingshead's gyrations which he later wrote about in _High Priest_. "I keep getting reports on him that are hard to believe, Arthur. He's in England now and I hear he is doing all kinds of really diabolical things." "Like what?" I asked. "Like turning people on to LSD and then turning them in to the police." "Jesus H. Christ," I said, and then mentioned that it had been Hollingshead who had bombed my morning brandy during my visit when Tim had been away in India, although I remembered a comment of Ralph's which strongly suggested that he had at least known about it in advance also. Now it was Tim's turn to be astonished; nobody had ever said anything to him about it. I told him the whole story and it immediately became clear to me that it was to be a case like the exploded candle all over again. He didn't want to believe it and didn't want to hear about it, so I changed the subject. Later, when Tim wrote a review of the_ Boo Hoo Bible_, it dawned on me that Tim's reason for refusing to believe that I had been bombed, despite the presence in the house at the time of someone whom he knew to have the character and inclination to do it, was the classic quality of the trip I reported. I had to be lying about that, according to his scheme of things, so I probably was lying about everything else also. I had once pretended to have an "Enlightenment" experience, hadn't I, complete with some kind of trick candle explosion? Well, I had probably looked up the Kundalini experience in a book and faked that also. Such things were not supposed to happen to Art Kleps, who was filed in Tim's highly compartmentalized cerebrum under "comedian, alcoholic, paranoid inclinations." I was not worthy of the honor. Such things were supposed to happen to Timothy Leary and, I imagine, when they didn't happen to him, he decided they were a crock of shit anyway, and gave up the Tantric kick he had been on and returned to his first loves: gigantic entities from outer space, science fiction and mob politics. "An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him ..." says George Bernard Shaw. I think Tim and Shaw had a lot in common: faddishness, Mephistopholean conceits, philosophic barbarisms (Shaw's "Life Force" and Tim's Genetic Code God) and great talent largely wasted on the ingenious seduction of fashionable simpletons. Tim also, as H.G.W. said of G.B.S., was a "philanderer with facts," which can be highly amusing unless you, yourself, happen to be the fact being philandered with. Once loosened up, Tim wanted to know every detail of my adventures in Washington, and he seemed particularly impressed by the good treatment accorded me by the Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee staff. When he had appeared, he hadn't bothered to prepare a statement, and he admitted to being disappointed with his own performance on that occasion. To make matters worse, Ted Kennedy, who was a member of the Dodd subcommittee, although he usually didn't show up for hearings, had walked in after things were underway, and barraged Tim with a series of hostile questions. "I tried to be conciliatory," Tim said. "I can see now that I shouldn't have done that." The fat little volume of the _Congressional Record_ which contains the transcripts of these hearings makes fascinating reading. Every Psychedelian activist of the day, with the odd exception of Ken Kesey, seems to be represented, including Walter Bowart and Allen Ginsberg. Tim had been conciliatory all right, as the following examples of his testimony demonstrate: "... As, for example, in Mr. Tannenbaum's testimony, you notice that the LSD users are very eager to talk about their experiences. They weren't like junkies. They didn't feel like criminals. They wanted to have this committee and have Mr. Tannenbaum know why they were using these drugs." Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts: "Mr. Leary." Dr. Leary: "Yes." Senator Kennedy: "Mr. Chairman, I am trying to follow the best I possibly can some themes that must be coming out of your testimony here this morning, and I am completely unable to do so. You talked in the beginning about the communications problem which exists between different generations, and then you indicate and describe why that exists. Then we hear a description and analysis, as valuable as that might be, about the different reactions to different drugs. You talk about the statistics which are going to be larger next year. Then you say you are not alarmed by them because if they are in training, people have them, and there is a careful distribution, then this isn't really a problem. And then I hope we are going to have at least a discussion on who those trained people might be and what the regulations might be. "I am completely unable to follow anything other than just sort of a general hyperbole of discussion here. Since your testimony isn't written, and this is a matter with which we are deeply concerned, I hope at least for those of us who are not inimitably as familiar as apparently you are with LSD, that you will try and see if you can analyze this somewhat more precisely. At least I would find that helpful. As I say, I haven't had the background or experience in this area as I am sure the other members of the committee have, but I think it would be extremely valuable to the members of the committee if you could at least outline to some extent what you are going to try and demonstrate here today, and then if you could somewhat more precisely and exactly come to those points." Dr. Leary: "I was, Senator Kennedy, just about to do that. I am pointing out the differences that exist among drugs, and I am going to suggest that special types of legislation are needed." Senator Kennedy: "Are you going to talk about the lack of communication between the generations before that or after that?" Dr. Leary: "I finished doing that. I hope that that is clearly on the record. I feel that constructive legislation is obviously and badly needed, and I recommend respectfully to this committee that you consider legislation which will license responsible adults to use these drugs for serious purposes, such as spiritual growth, pursuit of knowledge, or in their own personal development. To obtain such a license, the applicant, I think, should have to meet physical, intellectual, and emotional criteria. "I believe that the criteria for marijuana, which is the mildest of the psychedelic drugs, should be about those which we now use to license people to drive automobiles, whereas the criteria for the licensing of LSD, a much more powerful act, should be much more strict, perhaps the criteria now used for airplane pilots would be appropriate." Senator Kennedy: "So we are going to train high school students? Are we going to have high school courses as well?" Dr. Leary: "I would let research, scientific research answer the question as to at what age the nervous system is ready to use these new instruments." Senator Kennedy: "Then what are we going to do now for the boys that, say, go into the Army prior to the time they get to that age? Are we going to have the Army give training courses too on how to use it?" Dr. Leary: "I should think that in the Army of the future, we all hope there won't be, but in the Army of the future LSD will be used to expand consciousness so that these men can do their duties more effectively." Senator Kennedy: "That is very responsive. Now you feel that anybody who distributes this ought to be carefully trained, is that correct?" Dr. Leary: "Yes, sir." Senator Kennedy: "And you admit that it can leave an individual so that he does not know the difference between right and wrong in the socially acceptable terms, is that right?" Dr. Leary: "Yes, sir." Senator Kennedy: "So that he is relatively unaccountable for his actions?" Dr. Leary: "Well, I don't think anyone." Senator Kennedy: "Does he know the difference between right and wrong?" Dr. Leary: "You are talking about hypothetical persons." Senator Kennedy: "I am not talking about hypotheticals." Dr. Leary: "What are we talking about, sir?" Good question. Of course, Tim went on to say that he was against criminal penalties for use, even for unauthorized use by non-holders of "pilot's licenses," but he had given Kennedy all the opening he needed to make Tim sound like a nincompoop: Senator Kennedy: "I could not agree with you more, that he mentioned in there about when it was used, particularly for terminal cases, administration in the case of intractable pain, mostly in patients with terminal cancer, we do not question that. "We do not have any dispute about that, Mr. Leary. But I think what you have testified to is indiscriminate possession of this, as well as use, that it is dangerous, and I think the question now is for legislators to determine whether it can be controlled by legislation or whether it cannot be. "I think that you have testified as well that you want to see the control over its being brought into the United States, its production, and you have also testified that you think the indiscriminate use of this is dangerous, and I think you have pointed out what you feel personally are some of the advantages of it. You feel as well that it is a matter which cannot be legislated over. I think that is a question for the Congress. "But is seems to me that your testimony has been extremely convincing about the dangers of this drug, as well as its opportunities. And I think for someone who has been associated as long as you have been, have been intimately involved in it as long as you have been, I think that is extremely weighty evidence which you have given to this committee this morning, and we want to thank you." Dr. Leary: "I cannot agree with that summary, respectfully. I must disagree, Senator Kennedy, with your statement." Senator Kennedy: "Let's take the various aspects of it. You feel that there ought to be control over at least importation?" Dr. Leary: "The sale, manufacture or distribution, yes." Senator Kennedy: "The sale and manufacturing?" Dr. Leary: "Yes, sir." Senator Kennedy: "Why do you think that this should be?" Dr. Leary: "Because these are matters of commerce and manufacture." Senator Kennedy: "And that is the only reason you think this because it is a matter of interstate and foreign commerce? Is that the only reason? I mean, we have things which are produced, textiles in Massachusetts, furniture in Massachusetts that are not restricted, Dr. Leary. "You have testified. Now why do you think they should be?" Dr. Leary: "I feel that activity, particularly commercial activities involving the manufacture, sale, and distribution of these substances definitely should be controlled because you do not know about quality, you do not know about safety, you do not know what you are buying. Obviously you have to have laws, just as you have laws about the amphetamines. I want the amphetamines and the barbiturates controlled." Senator Kennedy: "Let's go back." Dr. Leary: "I do not want people who use these, who have a handful, put in jail." Senator Kennedy: "You said you do not know about the quality. What is it about the quality that you are frightened about?" Dr. Leary: "We do not want amateur or black-market sale or distribution of LSD." Senator Kennedy: "Why not?" Dr. Leary: "Or barbiturates or liquor. When you buy a bottle of liquor ..." Senator Kennedy: "Why do you not want the indiscriminate manufacture and distribution? Why not? Is it because it is dangerous?" Dr. Leary: "Because you do not know what you are getting." Senator Kennedy: "Is it because it is dangerous? Are you interested only in the consumer and whether, like truth in packaging, whether there are too many strawberries or not enough strawberries in the pie, or is it something more dangerous than that, Dr. Leary?" Dr. Leary: "No, sir; I think LSD is much less dangerous than the amphetamines and barbiturates." Senator Kennedy: "I am not asking that. The reason, as I would gather it, is because this is a dangerous drug; is that right?" Dr. Leary: "No, sir; LSD is not a dangerous drug." Senator Kennedy: "Why have you admitted then, why you have latched that onto the other questions of the control and distribution and manufacturing of drugs?" Dr. Leary: "I feel the same as I do with alcohol, you want to know what you are getting. It has to be supervised by Government FDA standards of health and packaging." Senator Kennedy: "Do you not agree that alcohol can be dangerous?" Dr. Leary: "I think that alcohol is probably the most dangerous drug around." Senator Kennedy: "All right, it can be dangerous, can it not?" Dr. Leary: "Yes, sir; if it is used improperly." I will draw the curtain at this point. The exchange between Tim and Teddy became even more incoherent thereafter, although restricting the use of LSD to people who qualified for "pilot licenses" was probably the craziest idea of all. The most astonishing thing about Tim's testimony was what he didn't say. The religious nature of the experience, and the First Amendment rights that therefore applied, were never alluded to in any way by the creator and leader of the Castalia Foundation, chief instigator of and participant in the Marsh Chapel "Good Friday Experiment," and all of that. For a person in Tim's position, facing thirty years in some hellhole, and determined to defend himself with the First Amendment's "free exercise" clause, this seems like self-destructive madness. Was he trying to make some kind of a deal? (OK, so it isn't religious. I was just kidding. Let's be scientific about this. Drop the charges and put me on The Dope Commission.) There doesn't seem to be any other explanation. Had I known about this testimony before I made my statement, I could not have defended Tim as our religious leader. Instead, I might have attacked him as an insidious menace to the religious spirit and to human freedom in general. But that would just have solidified Tim's position. As it was, he dropped his pilot's license horseshit soon after and came over to my side, maintaining that the psychedelic experience was religious and therefore no laws could interfere. Exactly what kind of lunatic bureaucracy would have arisen if Tim's proposals had been taken seriously and the government had attempted to regulate Psychedelian religious practices is difficult to imagine. I suppose supervised trips would be part of it. Imagine coming down from a big one in a happy state, only to be confronted by Meat Hook Baird, M.D. with a tape measure, ready to determine if your nose has become more prominent and pugnacious, or your chin more recessive, or whatever. Trying to control other people's choice of mental states by force has nothing to do with what I mean by elitism. I mean meritocracy. Tim's pilot's-license nonsense was just standard We Are the Masters of the Universe and Everyone Will Think and Act the Way We Do, or Else absolutism. Old as the hills. The villain with a thousand faces. Well, we all have our "off" days, and Tim deserves credit for admitting his error and reversing his course as he did. Residents of the United States are assigned, by who knows whom, a kind of bureaucratic pope of an established meta-church, which rules over all associations claiming to be religious by granting or denying them tax-exempt status on the basis of who knows what. During the late '70s this tyrant was known as "E.D. Coleman" and his title was Chief, Exempt Organizations, Technical Branch, Internal Revenue Service, Department of the Treasury. If you doubt this, just initiate a Freedom of Information Act correspondence with the IRS and demand to know under what laws and rules of evidence and procedure a mysterious bureaucrat is allowed to promote the welfare of the Church of Satan and the Native American Church of South Dakota and the Church of Scientology, but deny equal treatment to the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church. If you get anything back from the IRS resembling a straight answer, let me know. Tim looked tired. Not only was he pulling weeds and milking goats, he was also speaking at any college that would have him and working on his next book. He was explicit about his strategy: we had to take our lead from the kids from now on. If we had them with us, it didn't matter what the government did. Could be. Thereafter, whatever Tim said in public was almost entirely determined by what he thought "the troops" wanted to hear. The whole idea was to keep abreast. If they wanted to pretend to be simple peasants, fine. If they wanted to dress up in robes on Saturday night and pretend they were weird monks, who cared? Black pajamas and Molotov cocktails? Why not. Tim had made a fundamental decision about himself. This frame of mind left me cold. Never in a million years could I act that way. Yet, as head of the Church, wasn't I the one who ought to be doing that kind of thing, while Tim, our spiritual leader, spoke the truth without fear or favor? After all, I had just seen a demonstration in Washington of what the political game was all about: a mad scramble for media space-time. Tim was better suited, despite his poor showing in D.C., for playing that game than I was. Another identity crisis? Not on your life. When you have had one identity crisis, you have had them all. Let everyone do his own thing. I would go my way and Tim would go his and we would see how everything turned out in the end. What I would like to see is the substitution of "instruments of torture or images thereof" and "forced circumcision of an infant" for the names of the currently prohibited drugs and the substitution of "negative" for "positive" and vice versa, in all statutes governing urine testing. All property held by the punishment freaks should be transferred to their victims. That would only be fair, and would invigorate the American economy with "fresh blood," so to speak. Chapter 16 MORGAN LE FAY _If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable places to seek hospitality in._ Back at Cranberry Lake, Charlie Merchant greeted me with great excitement. All hell had broken loose. I had been on the national morning and evening news. The Watertown paper had put out a special edition with a full page devoted to the North Country's latest tourist attraction, me. Some guy had driven over to sell it at the Star Lake high school and had been thrown off the property by Person in person. The name of Art Kleps adorned every lip. Charlie was delighted. Any publicity for Cranberry Lake was good publicity as far as he was concerned. I called Sally a day or two later and told her to get on the first plane she could manage. Things were looking up. With all the publicity we earned from the Senate hearings, it would be duck soup to fill MGL all summer with paying visitors. There would be a ready market for anything I wrote. Suddenly, the mailbox was loaded with membership applications for the Church every morning. All we had to do now was attend to business and in a short time our troubles would be over. There would be enough money by fall to winterize the lodge, or we could rent a house in Syracuse. Every prospect pleased. Good scenes coming up. Sally, it turned out, wasn't exactly seeing things in these terms. She liked Miami. She wasn't even sure she would come up during the summer. It wasn't that she had given up chemicals. Far from it. She was hanging around with the college kid speed freaks and paregoric heads whom I had tried to convert to finer things while I had been there. She described a fight she had witnessed between one of our boo hoos and a junkie who had burned him in an acid deal. She was helping her mother look for a house in Sarasota. Good old Frank Green, the wife beater, who lived there with his mother, had suggested the area. Jesus Christ! Ramakrishna, whenever he was informed that a nice, "spiritually inclined" young man he had just met was married, characteristically responded as if he had been told the man had a bad case of tuberculosis and wasn't expected to live. If it turned out the guy had children, Ramakrishna would, as oft as not, burst into tears. In terms of social control, it is no accident or trivial matter that the state almost always gives all the property and custody of the children to the mother. This simple threat has probably nipped more potential revolutionaries in the bud than all the armed might in Sado-Judeo-Paulendom. Social deviance is no less common in women than in men, but the form it takes is rarely a threat to established institutions, since it's usually mere escapism or misbehavior like hanging out with the "wrong" crowd. No matter how radical her opinions or how intelligent and elevated her tastes and ideas, a woman with children will almost always behave according to tamasic values. The state can depend on her, as long as she has food and a roof over her head, not to give too much trouble. I have not seen many exceptions to this rule, I don't expect to see many and, because kids need protection first and foremost, I don't really think there ought to be many. At a time when all flags flying seemed to signal fair weather, I was holed below the waterline by a torpedo from left field. With all the assurance in the world that the law was on her side and there wasn't a thing I could do about it, Sally was telling me I would either do things her way or I could forget about my kids. My mental condition went directly from euphoria to black depression. I couldn't write. I did nothing to encourage visitors. Cranberry Lake, glittering in the early summer sun, might as well have been a gigantic cesspool for all I cared. I started drinking quite a bit more than was good for me. I'm not interested in contributing another account of emotional misery to the already swollen collection. When one is caught in one of these situations the best thing to do is fight like a cornered beast to rectify matters and, if that proves to be impossible, crawl into a hole somewhere and pray for a speedy recovery, but I don't have any respect for the condition itself and I didn't then. This bummer lasted from the time of which I am speaking, early summer of '66, to January of '67, when I moved into the Big House at Millbrook, divested of everything except the clothes on my back and my indomitable will, etc. I'm going to give a sort of telegraphic account of the high and low points just to keep the record straight, and resume a more discursive style when I'm on the train headed back to Millbrook from Birmingham. A teenage boy and girl, who had joined the Church in Miami, came up to visit, flat broke. I let them use a cabin but told them to forget any delusions they might have formed about my willingness to feed the poor while in the same condition myself. Dorothy, the marijuana goddess, was a hot little number, in a scrawny kind of way, but I couldn't have cared less. They were classic Miami-style nitwit street druggies. They didn't even try to find jobs. I went to visit Bob Eddy for a few days. When I returned, I found my best boat half under water on the town beach. Fortunately, I had preserved enough common sense to stow my outboard motor, a charming little Mercury, in the trunk of the car before I took off, along with my charming little semi-automatic Browning rifle chambered for .22 shorts, the prettiest and most fun firearm ever manufactured, in my opinion, and cheap to use also. Back at the lodge, I discovered that most of my library was gone, including all my letters from Tim. Sally flew up for a three-day visit in a supposed attempt to "adjust." It was as if I were asking her to move into a tenement in Harlem for the summer. She returned to Miami. She flew up again. Money for which there were much better uses was being wasted. The whole family was back together, but "only for a month." It was a demonstration of the ancient truism that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him wash his armpits. We had some interesting visitors who didn't steal anything; we went swimming and fishing and such almost every day; but there was no genuine enthusiasm or satisfaction, because we both knew there would be no happy ending. Sally intended to return to Miami. I didn't know what I would do, but whatever it was, I knew I wouldn't like it. Sally's mother sent her tickets. The next day she and the kids left with Yossarian and Anna, who gave them a ride to the airport in Albany. My Life in the Woods adventure had been converted into a stupid soap opera. Because of the kids, I just couldn't say to hell with it and find another girl. I went to Syracuse a couple times and screwed around, but didn't enjoy it much. I returned after one such excursion around 3 a.m., drunk and stoned on hash. In the boat, when I wrongly thought myself about halfway home, an elaborate and gigantic image in neon blue, which resembled a Sanskrit letter or a Chinese ideogram, appeared in the pitch darkness in front of me. I cut the motor. The vision vanished. As my eyes refocused, I saw that I had taken a false bearing and had been seconds away from piling up on some rocks which were a well-known hazard in the north-central section of the lake. The emotional effect was close to zero. To the question "sink or swim" I would have answered "as you like it." This state of mind, at that point, represented progress. It didn't bother me at all to sell the outboard and the rifle for half of what I had paid for them. My car having been confiscated by one of my creditors, I hitchhiked and then took busses from Saranac Lake to Millbrook. J.D. Kuch, bee hee of Washington, D.C., and husband had agreed to pick me up at Millbrook in a few days and then drive me to Steve Newell's place in New Jersey. Steve had good connections. Perhaps he could get me a job for the winter. Chapter 17 A ROYAL BANQUET _I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious._ I arrived one evening in a well-lubricated condition. The place was virtually overflowing with attractive young ladies of frivolous, lascivious and tolerant dispositions. Most were wearing "ecstatic clothes." I knew only two or three, but the rest seemed to know me by reputation, and to have liked what they had heard. Tim and his inner circle of the moment were away on a lecture and light-show date somewhere, but the partial resurrection of the furniture and the spirit and attire of the home guard made it clear that another ideological corner had been turned. I had no trouble finding drinking companions. I should have concentrated on Betsy Ross, Bob's sweet, sensible and sexy sister, but when I woke up in the morning I was all tangled up on a mattress on the floor with a true air-head Learyite named Karen Detweiler, who, although far from repellent, wasn't my type. A typical alcoholic misunderstanding. Oh well, any port in a storm and, as it turned out, this port had interesting connections. Karen, in a way, wasn't a troop after all. She was just visiting, on what might be called a vibe-gathering expedition, from a yoga ashram across the Hudson. A complicated story unfolded. Karen's ashram, Ananda, at Monroe, N.Y., had been started by a Dr. Rammurti Mishra from India, who was a psychiatrist, a yogi and, in Karen's opinion, a "beautiful person." Until the advent of the Psychedelian age, the place had potted quietly along supported by a gaggle of middle-class, middle-aged fogies in search of the kind of cheap miracle the less opulent sought at Madame Igapoo's corner seance. When the acid hit the fan, however, the demographics altered radically. All kinds of young people showed up who could not be turned away, because they were willing, if not eager, outwardly anyway, to follow all the rules for full-time devotees. The older generation, known collectively as "householders," basically treated the place as a weekend retreat. Now, Karen told me, all "the kids," such as herself, plus their new and groovy guru, a certain William Haines, were about to be evicted for general stonedness. By the time the older crowd, who had firm control of the place administratively, discovered that all the kids were zonked and intended to remain that way, the kids had bombed Haines, who was about a year older than me and had been functioning for some time as Mishra's right-hand man, or vicar or straw boss, or something. Panic! The Devil was within the gates! As things stood, Karen told me, all the young people and Haines had been given thirty days to leave. The householders had hired an armed guard who was patrolling the property. Mishra had refused to take sides. On one occasion, however, when asked his opinion of the drug movement by an older resident, he had replied, "Drugs? I love drugs!" so the kids had some hope, but less and less as time went by, that he might change his mind and save the day. Did I want to visit? I would love Bill Haines. He was just my type, Karen asserted, a jovial Sagittarian gorilla with a checkered past. Of course I did. At the Ashram, which turned out to be much more splendid than I had expected, with a small lake at the center and several pleasant wood-frame buildings, I was introduced to Haines, who was holding court in a small room jammed with Oriental objets d'art, and people crammed into every chair and corner. In the center of the floor a small person with a shaved head, whose sex I could not determine, was squirming around and giggling every time anyone said anything. Aside from this creature, I really liked the looks of the kids. They were happy, open-faced types. The girls were all pretty, with one or two knockouts. I immediately liked Haines, just as Karen had predicted. He had spent nine years in India and was telling outrageous and hilarious stories about the private lives of the leading lights of modern yoga and Hinduism, although he himself, and most of the kids, were dressed in the proper robes, beads and sandals and were surrounded by authentic signs and symbols of the ancient Eastern traditions. A picture of Mishra, seated in the lotus on a rug near the lake, was on the wall, with fresh flowers under it. He looked dark, stern and well-barbered. After a pleasant hour or two during which I heard, for the first time since Watts, someone who knew what he was talking about discuss the religions of the East, the speaker, none other than Bill, a.k.a. "Sri Sankara," Haines invited me to join in the evening "meditation" and tell everyone all about the Neo-American Church, which sounded "perfectly reasonable" to him, he said. On the way over to Mishra's residence where the meeting was to be held, Karen told me it was obvious to her I had already made a big hit with Haines, because he was "the kind of guy who puts everything down, no matter what." It was unheard of for him to say anything good about a visitor's trip. Instead, he told everyone who showed up at the place how full of shit they were, right off the bat. I could well believe it, and I could well understand it, and I have generally followed this policy myself, with the result that I am usually one step away from the poorhouse but rarely obliged to endure obnoxious company unless locked up with it. After my presentation, which was well-received by one and all, Karen took me to her room in a dormitory close to the lake, where several Ashramites joined us in practicing, by inhalation, what I had just been preaching. Haines, the kids said, didn't smoke grass, but ever since his bombardment at a big weekend religious festival, he had been taking large doses of acid at least once a week. I signed up boo hoos and bee hees right and left, and met a couple of older Ashramites: Tambimutto, a relic of the old Greenwich Village literary scene, who conned me out of a six-pack; and a guy who was recovering from several years in a Buddhist monastery, using that well-known tranquilizer, lysergic acid diethylamide, to make a smooth adjustment to the outside world. I also met my future wife, Wendy Williams. She flitted in and out, but didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. The next morning, hearing that I needed a bottle, Narad, the "man of iron," offered to drive me to town. Narad was famous as the young lover of a well-known female teacher of hatha yoga described in a fairly popular book of the day by Jess Stearn called _Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation_. Narad, Karen had informed me, was "quite a character." According to her, he spent much of his spare time rolling huge stones around the property and welding furniture out of steel parts so heavy that a coffee table, for example, might require six men to move it from one room to another. He was also incredibly horny but none of the girls would have anything to do with him. His basic technique was to cast horoscopes which invariably demonstrated that the young lady in question must either submit to his embrace or, in consequence of her failure to obey the stars, miss out on her only crack at Nirvana. "I used to live next door to him," Karen said, "and he drove me crazy. You'll see." Haines told me later he had once heard Karen, who claimed to have distinct memories of prior lives, including one tour as Queen of the Nile, or something similar, slam a door behind her in the middle of the night and flee the building screaming, "No, never! I didn't love you in the sixteenth century and I don't love you now!" Narad lived up to his reputation. During the trip to town and back he didn't stop talking for a minute. This kid, if there was any truth in what he said, should have been ruling the universe with an iron fist and steely nerves since he knew exactly how it was screwed together down to the last etheric nut and metaphysical bolt. Oddly enough, for someone who could tell you in exactly what "vibration zone" anything was located, Narad apparently had a lousy memory. He made three wrong turns in the short trip to town and back. One should not be too hasty in ejecting irritating but harmless paranoid characters like Narad from Psychedelian communities. It's probably better to have one severe case who will serve as a bad example than six mild cases who will hide or disguise their delusional systems. Enlightenment is impossible for anyone caught up in "metaphysical" ideation. Give me a naive realist or an old-fashioned supernaturalist any day. It was clear to me that Bill Haines had to meet Timothy Leary. I got on the phone, after Bill said he would be delighted, and set it up. We were all invited to the Big House for dinner. All the Ashramites were excited about it. Sarasvati, the girl who was rolling around on the floor the night before, had to be locked in her room lest she throw herself in front of Haines' car as she had on a prior occasion when he left the property without her. Sarasvati, so called by her own election, had first appeared a few weeks earlier at a wedding Haines had attended at a fashionable synagogue in New York City. She was a junkie, a hooker, and obviously stoned on acid. In full view of the crowd on the sidewalk after the service, she had thrown herself at Bill's feet, calling him "guruji" and begging to be accepted as an Ashramite. She would do anything he said, she said. Haines had accepted her, sort of, but had made several attempts to dump her after she appeared in Monroe. One fairly serious attempt to do so, after she had been found taking a bath in Mishra's apartment, which was sacred territory, had resulted in her cutting all her hair off. Haines seemed resigned to his fate. Although he grumbled and growled at Sarasvati constantly, he had acquired an industrious housekeeper at the cost of her room and board. I later discovered that Sarasvati took "the teachings" very seriously, which explained much of her mirth about lesser matters, her own fixation on Haines included. Sarasvati was always asking good questions like, "Is this for real or am I going crazy?" or, "Who's doing it, that's what I want to know?" or, "If I'm God, how come you all aren't scared out of your wits?" and then giggling uncontrollably until Bill told her to go mop a floor or do some laundry. Everyone dressed up, some of us took a little acid and Haines took a lot, and we drove over to Millbrook in two cars and a VW van. High drama, I thought, as we crossed the Hudson River in the fading light. At the Big House, which was all lit up and looked like a gigantic and fantastic ornament set in the unbroken darkness of the trees, Haines immediately demonstrated his ability to hang on to his sense of humor while elevated on the Supreme Sacrament. When a scrawny Ashramite named Jean-Pierre emerged from the van wearing a bed sheet, Haines, who had also alighted, boomed out, "Ah, Jean-Pierre! You look like Jesus Christ after a hard night!" I wish someone had taken a group photograph at the first meeting of the Ashram and the League. Everyone except me seemed to be dressed to kill in the best beads and batik money could buy. Flowers, candles and incense galore. The meeting was held in the dining room, which the Leaguers had arranged and decorated for the purpose. Tim's people sat on one side of the low table, Bill's on the other. Bill and Tim bowed to each other with fingertips together at the forehead, as was then the fashion. Everyone sat down and several lit up and passed joints. Bill puffed on his pipe. Pleasantries were exchanged. Finally, Bill opened the serious part of the proceedings by announcing, "I often think, Dr. Leary, that if we could only get rid of the Holy Mothers we would solve all our problems, ho, ho, ho." Tim refused to bite. Instead, he readily agreed to Bill's thesis. Meetings between established teachers are, in the ancient traditions of Oriental gurumanship, highly stylized performances put on, presumably, for the benefit of the audience. There is supposed to be an argument which continues until one party admits he is wrong or drops from exhaustion. On later occasions, as we shall see, Bill and Tim had no difficulty finding things to argue about, but on their first meeting, everything was sweetness and light, even though Tim's group included three or four women who probably regarded themselves as "Holy Mothers," one of whom, Bhavani, had actually consulted primary sources and seemed to know what she was talking about. Tim, immediately aware of Bill's condition, asked some questions about how Bill reconciled yoga with the use of LSD and Bill responded for fifteen minutes or so with an earnest and sensible account of his feelings and attitudes on the subject. He stressed the idea that the whole purpose of yoga was to reach Enlightenment and that this could only be done through intense personal experience of the kind the psychedelic drugs provided. Good show. Tim seemed satisfied he was dealing with a fellow maniac, and suggested that everyone just do as they pleased and we would all have dinner together in a couple of hours. Bali Ram led some women from both groups into the kitchen, where, he said, he would show them how to prepare a vegetarian feast worthy of the King of Nepal. The boys started milling around checking out the girls and the girls started milling around checking out the boys. Dinner was delightful, as Bali had promised. Later, I found Bill in the library, staring moodily at the fire, and took a seat near him. "Did I make an ass of myself, Kleps?" Bill asked, in a childlike way. Among his other attractive characteristics, Bill became emotionally vulnerable on trips. So did Billy Hitchcock. Tim, in contrast, became cold, brilliant and decisive. I think I'm somewhere in the middle, but such things are for others to judge. "Hell, no, Bill," I said. "You did beautifully. It was just right for the occasion." "Well, it's hard to tell when you're on this stuff," Bill said. "Did the kids tell you how they bombed me the first time? The place was jammed with straight Ashram members from New York, all the Holy Mothers, and all kinds of visitors and it was up to me to organize everything and there I was on my first trip, and it was no baby dose either, let me tell you. I had only two thoughts: Who is high and who isn't, and who did it? ... because I'm going to kill the son of a bitch!" Bill laughed ruefully and shook his head, "What really got me was that these dumb little buggers had been doing it for years, some of them, and the whole time I was trying to tell them where it was at. Why did they listen to me?" "Just because they take a lot of acid doesn't mean they have learned much from it, Bill," I said. "That was a mistake I made for a long time. I'm not sure I'm enlightened either. I'm sure I am sometimes, but then at other times I seem to forget, or at least I don't live up to it. I guess I'm enlightened in a half-assed way." "You're enlightened, Kleps," Bill said. He seemed a little embarrassed at having made this pronouncement. "Well, I guess I had better go find the Mad Scientist, swallow my pride, and beg for sanctuary. You really think I did all right, huh?" "You've got just the style that's needed around here," I said. Bill went off to find Tim. A couple days later, J.D. and her husband, whom she would shed shortly, dropped me off at Steve Newell's house, a few miles from Princeton and Humphry Osmond's New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. Before we take our leave of J.D., whose name appears to be forever enshrined in American legal reference books as a representative of the Neo-American Church (_United States of America v. Judith H. Kuch,_ Criminal No. 1473-67), I must mention that this ignorant, wealthy, creepy little occultist, who in appearance so much resembled a moldy dumpling, had a character to match. She attracted creeps and creeps attracted her. Along with her closest associates such as Donald Mead and Kevin Malone, all she actually represented was an occultist-creep network extending from Boston to Washington, D.C., which degraded the image of the Neo-American Church in many places in the early years of the movement. I didn't know. If I had, I would not have been asking for or accepting favors from her. It was appropriate that it was J.D. who delivered me to a place where I was to suffer the worst blow of my Psychedelian career up to that time. Steve's setting was in perfect keeping with his mental set: an isolated old house in the country with a crumbling graveyard behind it and an old stone barn next door inhabited by an incommunicative "mad" inventor whose large and incomprehensible constructions Steve had only glimpsed through briefly opened doors. Steve seemed to be in fine fettle, and thought it likely he could find me a job for the winter. He introduced me to his boss and lover, who struck me as a nice, sensible woman who didn't have the slightest idea of what acid was all about. She was one of the few members of the research staff of the hospital who had never tripped. I filled out a questionnaire and was interviewed by a staff sociologist. I met Humphry Osmond. Instant feelings of affiliation. Sure enough, two days later I had a job at another nuthouse right up the road from Osmond's place. I noticed, however, as we drove back and forth, that flocks of blackbirds constantly appeared on our left. A sign of impending murder, according to the Thugee superstitions of India. Did this apply in New Jersey, and if so, to whom? Chapter 18 IN THE QUEEN'S DUNGEONS _No, confound her, her intellect was good, she had brains enough, but her training made her an ass--that is, from a many-centuries-later point of view._ It didn't take long to find out. When I called Sally to tell her the good news and ask if she wanted a house on the hospital grounds or off, the answer was neither. She wasn't coming up and I shouldn't come down. Good advice, in more ways than one. Frank, the wife-beater, had found the key to her heart. I had the exquisite pleasure of envisioning my two daughters being brought up by one of the biggest assholes I had ever met. The first thing Steve did, when he got home and heard the news, was to mutter "that miserable bastard" and then hide his beautiful S&W .38 Special revolver which, although I hadn't mentioned it, was the only thing in the house in which I was interested. I took a bus from Princeton to Miami and called up Karl Newton in Syracuse from my brother's house. Karl had visited MGL a couple times and loved it. $2,000 for my equity? Fine. The money came by Western Union. I bought an old panel truck for $600 and went to collect Sally and the kids. It was night. I was smashed. A cop started following me. There was every probability a warrant was out for me in Florida because of the old seizure of the sugar cubes. Delightful. I stepped on the gas and careened around Miami's chessboard of look-alike blocks until I lost the cop, then abandoned the truck. The next day we all took a plane for Syracuse. Airplane fares, incidentals, and a month's rent and a month's security on an apartment in Syracuse near Sally's old sorority house quickly disposed of the two grand. Broke again. I remembered that a visitor to MGL had claimed to have seen marijuana growing next to the highway between Star Lake and Cranberry while hitchhiking home. My Syracuse boo hoo and I went up to check it out. Sure enough. To celebrate, we got drunk, got picked up for P.I., and spent the night in jail. But we returned with the goods. Sally wasn't pleased with these developments. The next day, when I returned from shopping, she and the kids were gone. Two days later, divorce papers arrived. There was no way I could return to Florida without going to jail. I had sold Morning Glory Lodge for nothing. Karl gave me his old Volkswagen convertible and I drove down to Millbrook. Tim wanted to know what I wanted to do. I told him I seemed to have two choices. I could either stay at Millbrook or go to Alabama. An admirer from Birmingham had offered cash for the trip, but the letters he had written were almost illiterate, so I had grave doubts about the wisdom of accepting his offer, although he had also said he owned land in the region, some of which he might give to the Church, he said. "Listen, Art," Tim said, "you're no more fucked up than I have been several times in the past, and don't think I haven't considered committing myself. I may yet, if it's the only way to avoid prison. But I have decided that if I do, I will pick some nice quiet VA hospital in the South. I can't stand this place in the winter. I think you ought to go down there and let this character pay your bills while you work on _Divine Toad Sweat."_ Yeah, well, I don't know, maybe so. My only genuine interest at that point was making sure I had enough whiskey on hand. During a slide show in a darkened room that evening, Billy Hitchcock appeared and asked me what I was up to. I told him. "My wife left me, I lost the lodge, and I'm a complete fucking drunken mess." "There's no room in the house," Tim said, from the other side of the projector, which was producing the usual squiggly forms on the wall. "Well, what about the Gray Buildings out back?" asked charming Billy, and may the heavenly hosts forever praise his name, for that one, anyway. "I think we could fix up a room," Billy said. The "Gray Buildings" were a farmhouse, garage, stables, carriage-house combination into which the Ashram would move in '67. One of the farm hands, Hurdle, and his family lived in the house section but there was plenty of empty space at the other end which I could have fixed up. "No," said Tim, flatly, from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke in the gloom. "I think Art ought to go down to Alabama for the winter." I looked at Billy, rolled my bloodshot eyes, and waived with a wave. Billy slouched down in his chair a bit and started nibbling a fingernail. Chapter 19 KNIGHT-ERRANTRY AS A TRADE _And, moreover, when you come right down to the bedrock, knight-errantry is worse than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left, and so somebody's benefited, anyway; but when the market breaks, in the knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what have you got for assets?_ On the way to my parents' retirement house in Booneville, up in the Adirondack foothills north of Utica, where I intended to dry out, I was picked up for having an expired registration (one day over) and spent the night in jail. For the first time, my withdrawal symptoms included the delirium tremens hallucinations I had often heard and read about but never before experienced. The visionary content differed little, if at all, from what I had experienced on mescaline, acid and morning glory seeds. I have learned since, from extremely primary sources, that the bugs and snakes of the fabled DTs are rare. With complete disregard for everything the pop culture and learned opinion has depicted, most alcoholics going through withdrawal see the same beautiful and elaborate spectacles witnessed by peyote eaters and acid heads. With my eyes open, I seemed to be inside a tiny cathedral. The spaces between the bars became stained-glass windows. With my eyes closed, I seemed to be somewhere in Southeast Asia under an enormous multi-chambered tent in which old men with long white beards, seated on elaborately figured cushions and rugs with hookahs and objets d'art at their sides, were silently meditating. The only hint of anything repellent in these visions was a tarantula, which seemed to be a pet of one of the old men, but there was nothing at all menacing about it. Everything I saw was stable, well defined and serene. But I wasn't, at least not on the "physical plane." I was shaking all over and convinced I would hemorrhage any moment from the continuous retching. I didn't. The visions faded after a few hours and so did the shakes. My father drove down and paid the fine, and I dried out in the guest bedroom. My parents, as usual, were kind, but not understanding. Kind is good enough, usually. Chapter 20 THE OGRE'S CASTLE _This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out a peaceful revolution in his mind._ I now found myself dependent, at least for the roof over my head, on the charity of a bootlegger, or rather, a rentier to bootleggers. Jim was much too disorganized to manage anything as complicated as a white-lightning run. His spacious brick home, in one of the wealthiest sections of Birmingham, was a mess within, strewn with cheap occultist literature and all kinds of trash and garbage of a less abstract variety. In the basement, carefully tended by two "good old country boys," an enormous, galvanized tank poured out a steady stream of that substance with which I was least competent to cope, at the turn of a tap. A short walk down the cellar stairs and I was in the presence of a fountain of forgetfulness. In a way, one might say, my "prayers" had been answered, damn it. The country place, which I had all to myself, wasn't so bad, but my depression was so deep I couldn't write a word or do much of anything, except walk around in the dreary woods. Legal problems Jim had neglected to mention in his letters prevented him from giving the Church any property. He was the black sheep of a "good" family, and everything he had was tied up in trusts. Brandye Maske, a southern peach who had joined the Church in Miami, and who was then bee hee of Birmingham, where she attended an exclusive school for girls, drove up with the best intentions in the world. It was useless. I had the libido of a jelly donut. A big trip probably would have brought me to my senses (wise idiom), but those who need a trip the most are the least likely to want one, and I was no exception. Should Brandye have bombed me? Yes, I now declare with great confidence. If all the other ducks are in order (they were), a good friend of a Psychedelian who is clearly depressed should at least throw a Ching about it. But those were the early days. Almost everyone was uncertain about such interventions and it was against the prevailing doctrine. Through a private detective friend of Jim, I found that there was, no surprise, a warrant out for me in Florida, and I got Sally's address in Sarasota. One more try, I told myself. I took the bus. Sally wouldn't budge an inch. She was staying in Florida and the kids were staying with her. If I wanted to visit, I would have to take my chances with the police. Waiting in the train station in Sarasota to return to Alabama, I had one belt too many of Jim's 190-proof product. White lightning is also known, for good reason, as "sneaky Pete." I passed out on a bench and woke up in the city jail. The next morning I was transferred to the county jail. The old warrant had turned up. The Sarasota County jail must have been a real dungeon even during the off season, but this was January 2, 1967, so it was also overbooked. No daylight. Twelve men, on average, in a tank with six beds, so late arrivals, me included, slept on the floor on flat and filthy mattresses. The dominant inmate was a deranged gorilla, ordinarily good-natured but given to sudden bursts of mindless violence. He had been in this dismal hole for nine months for lack of bail. Two seventeen-year-old boys, who had passed some bad checks, had been there for six months for the same reason. The gorilla usually picked on them. When he got overactive, the custom was to smile, and attempt to treat it all as playful roughhousing. When he approached me during one of these outbursts, I said, meanwhile breaking out in a cold sweat, "George, if you lay a finger on me, I'll bang a ballpoint pen through your ear with a shoe in the middle of the night." I meant it. George treated me with utmost politeness thereafter. After a week or so of this shit , I was transferred to a newly built slammer in Ocala and bail of $1,000 was set on a charge of possession of a dangerous drug. It took Lisa Bieberman a couple weeks to raise the bail from various Psychedelians around the country. The first thing I did after being released was buy an orange from a nearby open-air stand. Citrus fruits, which grew all around, were never served in the two jails I had been in. Spending some time behind bars became fairly common among white, middle-class American kids in those days and, in a way, it was a good thing it did. In this area, there's no substitute for personal experience. Few people who have fallen victim to it fail to notice that the American criminal justice system is organized to protect the rich and to rob and demoralize the poor. What justice is available is sold, virtually as a commodity, to those who can pay for it. As Defoe put it, "Knowledge of things would teach them every hour that law is but a heathen word for power." All governments are fascist at heart and are restrained, if at all, only by fear of French or Russian Revolution replays, one of which has been overdue around here for a long time. For solipsistic nihilists, however, there is another side to it. One must also wonder why, Snazzm, one has brought this kind of nightmare on oneself. I do not say this to excuse in any way the cruelty of the punishment freaks who have created and who operate the barbaric American system. If you are attacked by a monster in a nightmare, and have a shotgun handy, let the creature have it with both barrels. But nightmares cannot be conquered or ameliorated or avoided merely by deploring them. Honest analysis is called for. Trite as it is, it will often turn out that one's errors are due to bad habits and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Frivolity with money doesn't help either. No agitator, revolutionary or professional criminal should expect to escape unscathed forever. John Jay Chapman is very good on this topic. Resolutions made in jails may hold up better than those made in less stark surroundings. In any case, if one is stuck with a dangerous line of work, one ought to give serious thought to how best to protect oneself while doing it and get advice from seasoned professionals. Back in Alabama I found Jim's place deserted. Checks for several hundred dollars which I had been expecting in the mail were nowhere to be found. The still was gone, and there wasn't a drop of anything alcoholic, legal or illegal, in the house. The phone rang. It was Jim. The distillers had gotten word of a raid only a few minutes before it was scheduled to take place, and had fled at once, leaving the evidence in place. Jim had taken my checks to a bank and tried to cash them, but the teller had gotten suspicious, so he had stepped outside and thrown them down a sewer. He was now in Florida, hiding out at a girlfriend's house. No, I had better not sell his furniture. The boys suspected me of being the rat. I had better get out of town before I got killed. Delightful, first Bobby Kennedy and now this. I called Millbrook and Bill Haines answered. Tim was in California. The Ashram had moved into the Big House and Bill was in charge. They were broke, but he would try to scrape up $75 to get me back to civilization. The next day, the money was at the Western Union office. Bali Ram had come up with the cash. He had had a vision that I would pull them out of their difficulties. You're as good a man as I am, Bali Ram. Well, that was that. As I write, "The Prisoners' Chorus" from _Fidelio_ is on the stereo, and my mood on the train going north was on the same track. Even the industrial wastelands of New Jersey looked good, but the snow-covered landscape of the Hudson Valley looked like fairyland. My depression was lifting: I could distinguish between good places and bad places. Compared to my days at MGL, I was still in sad shape, but I could now see how fortunate, in many ways, I was in my condition and my prospects. I had friends and I had a place where I could go. Only suffering and loss will show many of us, born in luxury relative to the mass of mankind, how lucky we are, and how important those simple requirements are to a happy life. I took a cab from the Place of Overflowing Shitholes. The driver got a lot of kidding from his dispatcher when he reported his destination over the radio. There were two changes in the outward appearance of the Big House. A giant face, called the Universal Man, had been painted on the facade and a formidable metal monstrosity of vaguely telescopic appearance squatted on the roof of the porch. It had been built by Narad, the Man of Iron, who had left without explaining what it was for. Someone eventually disassembled it. The Universal Man was not much admired. He looked more like a leering gigolo than a hero or philosopher, but the visiting artist who had painted him had known well what he was about. He had left his Mark upon us, and there was no way to stash it in the storage room with all the other bizarre productions left behind by less audacious artists. I think most of us, although nobody ever said so, became sort of fond of the old boy. Chapter 21 THE PILGRIMS _It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious, happy, merry, and full of unconscious coarseness and innocent indecencies._ Bill Haines was nominally in charge of the whole works but the house, I swiftly discovered, was split between Ashramites and Leaguers. There had been some crossovers, largely the result of love being blind, or something. Although the house was not as jammed as it had been during my last visit, when there had usually been some visitors sleeping on the floors in the dining and music rooms, almost every space that might be called private was now taken, including the wine cellar, where Otto slept, and the attic, where Jean-Pierre and one or two others had made cubicles for themselves. I will list all inmates, and try to describe them in terms of place and role and outstanding characteristics, although, as we shall see, nothing remained stable for long. Bill Haines had taken a small but beautiful, parquet-floored, bay-windowed room center front, second floor, opening on the landing and also, by way of a sliding door, onto a large room with a fireplace that served as the Ashram's common and meeting room. Bill's captains cabin contained all his Oriental bric-a-brac and had two framed photographs on the wall over his desk, one of Tim Leary and the other of W.C. Fields looking crafty over a hand of cards. Haines refused to discuss his pre-yoga past, but hints would drop here and there. As near as I can figure, it went something like this: Well-to-do parents in New York. Strict upbringing. Joined the Army at seventeen at the end of WWII, about a year before I did, just in time to be present as the concentration camps in Germany were discovered. Stationed at Berchtesgaden, of all places. Struck an officer, and spent two years in stockades. Theological school? The Sado-Judeo-Paulinian (Dutch Reformed) ministry? Nine years in India (that's definite). Back to the United States as some kind of show business impresario. Every now and then, the Ashram showed a film in which Bill introduced Bali's performance at a U.N. gala. The Ananda Ashram at Monroe, New York. Bombed. Haines, it must be said, never advanced himself as a model personality for others to imitate or anything like that, nor even pretended to play with a full deck at all times. Once, in Arizona, exasperated by some characteristic act of folly, I said, "You know, Bill, sometimes I think you really do have a screw loose somewhere." "Never said I didn't," he cheerfully replied. He didn't double bind himself over his own failings, which gave his abrasive traits and occasional outbursts of blatant irrationality an open and frivolous air that seemed to me, most of the time, reason enough to excuse them in favor of the appreciation, which was general, of his wisdom, humor, candor and vitality. Sarasvati. Already described. She and her little daughter, the offspring of a union with a Chinese cook who visited occasionally bringing presents, had a small room in the back of the house. Sarasvati spent as much time as she could manage in Bill's presence. If banished, she hung out with Susan Shoenfeld and Bhavani. She was banished regularly. One morning, noting that Bill seemed to be in a particularly black humor, I asked him what was wrong. Sarasvati was slumped in a corner, head down. It was impossible, as usual, to tell if she was giggling or crying or both. Bill pointed an accusing finger at her. "She smiled at me!" he growled. That serious error got her three days in outer darkness. Tambimutto. Tambi had the room next to Bill's on the side opposite the common room. Through the wall, Bill could hear Tambi chanting and retching during his bouts with the bottle. "I am not a pot-head. I am an alcoholic!" Tambi had announced with imperious Anglo-Indian dignity when the officials of the Monroe Ashram descended on the place with their armed thugs. True. Tambi, at this point, was edging away from Bill and identifying with Tim, who had flattered him outrageously because of his supposed excellent connections in the literary world. Tambi was graying and toothless and looked at least slightly angry and/or malicious at all times, even when he was unconscious. Later that winter, Tambi's hostility towards Bill became deep and "metaphysical." During one long period when Sarasvati was banished, Bill maintained he could hear the two of them through the wall plotting his destruction, with Tambi egging Sarasvati on to take "decisive action" against the "evil one." When, at last, she did, her assault was dramatic but ineffectual: She put her fist through a stained-glass window between Bill's room and the landing. As was usual at Millbrook, the whole drama thereupon mysteriously vanished into thin air, and Sarasvati was once again permitted to clean up Bill's room and to be present during discussions so long as she kept her mouth shut. Tambi stayed with Tim when the Ashram moved out of the Big House but did not remain in Tim's orbit after the general collapse. Howie Druck and Betsy Ross. Betsy was a crossover from the League. They had a room in back, on the second floor, on a corridor off the landing. Because of Thorin, Betsy's son by a former alliance, whom Bill loved dearly, and because Betsy's family was well-off and, I hope, because Betsy was an OK person, Haines was not at all displeased to see one of his most devoted followers given this subsidiary domestication. Betsy had successfully run a jewelry shop in Greenwich Village before coming to Millbrook to join her goat-loving brother, and Haines hoped that the Ashram, once it had some capital, could at least partially support itself with a similar operation, but this scheme never came to anything. Howie was at that time in charge of the Ashram's finances. As is traditional for those who play this role in spiritual communities, he was regarded with suspicion and envy by the rest of the boys, including his brother. He did little useful work but always seemed to have money and was rarely subjected to the kind of verbal abuse meted out daily by Haines to the rest of his followers. Perhaps Howie reminded Haines of the sick and starving prisoners he had helped to liberate in Germany. No matter what his actual condition, Howie seemed to project emotional vulnerability and a need for support. These traits, combined with Howie being a likable guy, deterred me from making a play for Betsy, who flirted with me whenever an opportunity arose and turned me on in a big way. Jean-Pierre. A wispy, cheerful man who dressed in a vaguely Levantine manner, with absurdist touches all his own. One evening Wendy and I met him at the railroad station in the Place of Overflowing Shitholes and he stepped down from the crowded commuter train wearing a fancy lamp shade on his head. Jean-Pierre was in the background category, at least as far as I was concerned. It was said that he had a famous father, of whom I had never heard, a French Dadaist poet or something of the sort, from Tambi's old circle. Looking back, I'm fairly sure Jean-Pierre, who left at the time of the great split, rather than choose sides, was waiting for "something to happen" of a general and spectacular nature, such as mass levitations or balls of fire from outer space. He wasn't the only one. I heard it all the time during the counter-revolutionary "drug-alternative" period of the '70s, when the establishment hacks, media moguls and academic frauds of the United States discovered nadirs of blithering idiocy unplumbed in human memory, in an effort to smother what had gone before in smarm. People would say, "But nothing happened. In those days we all expected something would happen." Well, it all depends on how you look at it. I happened, and from my point of view, that makes mass levitations and balls of fire pale by comparison. Marshall and Pat McNeill. Leaguers to the bitter end. Marshall was a sturdy yeoman type, big, good-natured and earnest, who always looked somewhat dazed by all the lunacy going on around him, while his wife, Pat, was the image of the cute Irish tomboy type one could almost always find in the '50s at the corner bar on Saturday night, swapping dirty stories with the boys. They had two very young daughters and lived on the second floor, in two rooms off the main corridor, across from Tambimutto. John and Vinnie. Ashramite couple. A pair of clean-cut American kids who never seemed to think of anything except how best to enjoy themselves. Vinnie was one of the sexiest little nitwits I have ever encountered, an opinion universally shared. When she discovered I had literary inclinations, she suggested that I collaborate with her on the story of her life. It would be "very pornographic," she assured me. Wouldn't John mind? Why should he? Despite my libidinal lassitude, there was something about this concept that appealed to me, but John, it turned out, did mind. He thought we should sell her as a _Playboy_ centerfold instead, he said. John and the Druck brothers had visited Israel together, before their Ashram lives began. Wendy Williams. Ashramite. Wendy had a room in the servants' wing. Pretty in an unremarkable kind of way, clever but not a serious reader; the child of a wealthy but not opulent New York Jewish family. According to Bali, who was usually right about such things, Wendy was "really" interested in "only one thing," because she wasn't really much interested in it at all, a common syndrome among females with inherently low to moderate sex drives, which has been the foundation of many fortunes in the late twentieth century, when it first became popular dogma that this normal variation, like normal genetic variations in intelligence, could and should be "cured," by various lotions, potions and incantations. Lou Friedlander. Ashramite. Lou, who was about my age, seemed seriously troubled by chronic internal conflicts and philosophic questions so dark and ominous as to not bear utterance. Although he had a room to himself in the servants' wing, and was one of Wendy's admirers, he also spent a lot of time in the meditation closet, where he was given his meals on a tray. We hardly ever spoke. When the snow melted, Lou departed. Michael Green. League. A commercial artist of almost arcane facility, Michael, who created the church seal and the cover for the _Boo Hoo Bible,_ had abandoned Mad Ave at the age of twenty-three to devote himself to getting stoned, painting elaborate mandalas and such, and learning how to go barefoot at all times, even in the snow. He had a room in the servants' wing and a tiny studio, converted from a bathroom, off the music room. A nice boy with a good sense of humor despite it all, he was Wendy's latest at the time I arrived. Prints of Michael's posters were popular head shop items for years afterwards. One shows a series of Jesus Christs jetting out of a central maelstrom of forms, and another is Timothy Leary's face composed of hundreds of tiny figures and designs. Oh well. Ted Druck. Howie's older brother. Ashram. An ex-teacher of Hebrew recently divorced, Ted was tall, gaunt, sad-eyed, and unimaginative but a very warm-hearted and good-natured person. Ted slept in the common room in those days. Fred Blacker. Ashram. A dealer, petty thief, and small-time con man, Fred slept in the common room but later moved to the Bowling Alley with his girl, Alexandra, a super-cutie who sometimes dressed like a Hollywood harem dancer, even going so far, if in a particularly decorative mood, as to leave the bra off. Years later, Alexandra told me that Fred, who seemed harmless enough in public, was often crazy and violent in private, beat her up, and so forth. I guess darling, romantic Alexandra, who could have done much better without half trying, it says here, thought she could and should reform Fred. How oft it is. Susan Shoenfeld. Susan, a tough-minded but amused and amusing bi of about thirty, was one of Bill's hopes for a big bundle in the future, since her family was seriously rich and Susan was scheduled to collect a full and fruity trust fund in a year or two. Servants' wing. Originally Ashramite, her true allegiance, if any, was a mystery to me. Bhavani. League. Nobody ever called her by her outside name and I don't know what it was. About my age or a little older, Bhavani looked like everyone's ideal of serene American motherhood. According to Bill, she was the only Leaguer who could discuss philosophic and religious subjects with any degree of knowledgeability or rationality. Lesbian. She occupied Tim's room during his absence, and was in charge of the Supreme Sacrament supply. Any resident could knock on her door, and name a quantity (within reason), and Bhavani would supply it. It's probably the best arrangement for Psychedelian communities in the U.S. One person should be responsible for what might be called "the central stash," and be prepared to flush it or burn it fast if the community is attacked by the mind police. Bob and Carol Ross. Bob has already been introduced. Both were decidedly, almost ferociously, League. Carol, a tall, gray-eyed blonde, swept around in diaphanous, pastel gowns, put up admonitory signs in the kitchen addressed to "Loved Ones" and otherwise generally behaved like the headmistress of a school for juvenile delinquents. Her admonitions, although always derided, were usually deserved. They occupied the tower room where guided "sessions" had been held in the early days. Bob was the leader of the anti-Haines forces. From his perch above, he controlled the music heard from those speakers in the house which had not been disconnected, and surveyed the progress being made by his filthy goats in covering the sacred environs with a sprinkling of turds. Susie Blue. An African-American teenager who had been a maid during the early days and was now just one of the kids. Beset by weird superstitions and paranoid fears, she had retreated to the animism of her ancestors and was said to worship various trees and rocks in the woods. Arthur Frelinghausen. Probably more similar in outlook to Susie than anyone suspected. Arthur had been instructed by Tim to produce a newsletter for the League. Instead of news, his productions consisted mainly of mini-sermons declaring that we were all unenlightened searchers in the maze, bewitched, bothered and bewildered, and so forth. This didn't go over very well with Tim, and Haines and I informed Arthur that he could leave us out of this generalization also. His journal didn't last long, and neither did Arthur, who left a few weeks after I arrived. At the Millbrook Diner, where I happened to run into him while he waited for his bus out, Arthur responded to my astonishment at his abrupt departure by telling me the one and only horrific bad-trip story I ever heard at Millbrook. He then informed me, with great emphasis, that he was "a seed-bearing young male," Tim's favorite euphemism for horny young guys in those days. Although this undisputed fact struck me as highly irrelevant, given the opportunities for sowing wild oats herein described, it seemed to be the crux of the matter as far as Arthur was concerned. I wished him luck and left the diner for the snowy street, none the wiser, but a little the worse for wear. The only genuine newsletter produced at the time was a mimeographed sheet cranked out irregularly by the McCready boys called _The Daily Blah_. It was read avidly by everyone in the house as soon as it appeared, and frequently contained highly embarrassing quotes of comments people made when they thought they were speaking privately to their respective cliques. The kids also kept track of the game of musical beds and, as far as I know, they were never wrong. Arthur lived in a room on the third floor with Jill Henry, which may explain his problem with his nuts. Jill, a transfer from Vassar, so to speak, was said by all to be recovering from a love affair with her ex-roommate. Jill was a cool, delicate, intelligent, dark-haired beauty. Old-fashioned, sort of. Glossy, even. League, but not fanatical and well liked by one and all. I took her to dinner at Noel Tepper's house once, shortly after the other Arthur left, and we fooled around a little, but we were not really each others' types. I think we felt sorry for each other. She gave me a gold, three-eyed-toad pendant which I thereafter wore, almost at all times, during the years covered by this history. Jill later married Nicky Sands, a nice guy and a West Coast underground chemist and co-conspirator with Billy in the Orange Sunshine acid manufacturing deal, for which, along with Tim Scully, a real prick, he took a fall while Billy walked. How much did they collect for doing Billy's time? Who knows. Jean McCready. League. Recently divorced, in her early thirties, with two small boys, Jean was the archetypal Learyite. Her selfless devotion was demonstrated by her doing Tim's typing and filing although Rosemary was the broad in his bed. Bill, who treated Bob and Carol with derision, was wryly respectful to Jean. She was a lady, and her goody-goodyness had no hidden malice behind it. She seemed serenely oblivious to most of the conflicts around her, however much they occupied the attention of her fellow residents. Jean's most recent ex-husband, not the father of the children, Walter Schneider, a Navy pilot, showed up every now and then during the winter to visit, and eventually took a trip, quit the Navy and joined the League in the woods, where he became a kind of super flower child. After the place broke up, Walt became one of the founders of "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love" in California and, occasionally, Billy Hitchcock's co-pilot. He also wrote an interminable blank verse epic about our struggle with the Dutchess County Sado-Judeo-Paulinians called "Millbrook Thanksgiving," which eventually appeared in print in a condensed version. I unreservedly recommend this work to those historians who may feel that I have not adequately conveyed in these pages the full aromatic force of the flower-power mystique. Allan Marlow. Already introduced with a wild look in his eyes. Allan lived with his consort, Diane Di Prima, in the Bowling Alley, along with two of Diane's daughters by former alliances, a nine-year-old, and a little brown charmer, the child, reputedly, of some well-known spade literary figure. One time I ran across this doll in the hall early in the morning and asked her if she had had good dreams the night before. She thought about it for a moment and then replied, "They're not on my diet." Haines made a point of sneaking candy to Diane's kids whenever he could. League. Allan and Diane were constant thorns in Haines' side but had brought with them treasures which Haines coveted and later acquired: complete letterpress and photo-offset systems and all the necessary equipment to go with them. Diane had some reputation as a writer in certain circles, but her poetry struck me as being lifeless, trivial and uneasy, just like her husband. After Allan and Diane moved out in the spring to find more congenial pasturage, Allen Atwell and his new girlfriend, Susan Firestone, who looked like his twin sister, took over Allan and Diane's old quarters in the Bowling Alley, and stayed until mid-summer, spending most of their time with the League. Atwell once prostrated himself on the road to town from the Gatehouse when he saw me coming, which resulted in a modesty contest of extravagant pantomime gestures, which amused our companions and maybe passing motorists as well. We were both members of the first graduating class of the place, so to speak. I liked Allen, but I did not appreciate his "psychedelic" paintings, which mostly looked like interlaced guts to me, and I couldn't pretend otherwise. One critic, writing in _Horizon,_ declared Allen's paintings to be "one of the high points of the psychedelic art movement" and employed the phrase "a hot, molten fantasia" to describe one example of the period pieces of which I speak. Well, to each his own is what I always say. After Allen Atwell left, we half expected Alan Watts or Allen Ginsberg to show up to claim the "AL Ranch," as it might well have been called, but then Alexandra and Fred moved in. Far out. What did it mean? I haven't the foggiest, except to say that massive frivolity was heavily involved all around. Len and Teresa Howard. A couple of noncommunicative Leaguers from Las Vegas, who seemed to me to be just passing through, they were so impassive, but stayed for a long time. I guess they were just born loyalists, as some people are, both to each other and to Tim. Len, a former dealer, always seemed like a man with difficult business problems on his mind, while Teresa, a former showgirl, appeared absorbed by an intense consciousness of her body, which richly deserved the attention she paid to it. One time I patted her on the ass (she was standing on a chair, putting away dishes) while passing through the pantry and got slapped for this sincere expression of aesthetic appreciation, a rare example of hideous brutality blotting our noble, peaceful record. Aside from Fred Blacker's private conduct, I can think of only two other examples. Clum once hit Jackie for moving a log Clum had placed across the road to block traffic, and once I had a small scuffle with an uninvited and hostile visitor who wouldn't leave. An astonishing record, considering. No deaths, either. No serious fires. No serious illnesses. Otto H. Baron von Albenesius. Otto lived in a small wine cellar under the kitchen with his German shepherd, Winnie. I hesitate to attempt much of a capsule description of Otto. He will be introduced gradually as the story unfolds. Too much Otto at one time might cause the reader to wonder if I might not be exaggerating things for effect. I'm not. Allegiance? Hmmm. Bill Sheatsley. Sheatsley was the rugged, hardworking, sandy-haired son of the superintendent of a midwestern-Protestant private school system. He had been Haines' roommate during the Ananda ("bliss") period. "Sheats," as he was known to most of us, was having difficulty adjusting to the elevation of his filthy-mouthed, drug-soaked former buddy to the status of guru. He was the only member of the Ashram who never took psychedelics, major or minor. The kids had bombed him once at Ananda, Wendy said, and he had fought it all the way. Sheats worked about sixteen hours a day, half of them in the Place of Overflowing Shitholes' morgue, doing his conscientious objector time, and half back at the ranch, usually building things or repairing them or maintaining them or making scale drawings of them or reading about them or figuring out how they worked or why they didn't. Sheats seemed to have the generalized aptitude for such stuff that Teutons are thought, possibly correctly, to be born with more of than is generally handed out in the genetic crap shoot. "Karma yoga," we would almost always say, with a smile, when his way of life was remarked on by visitors. Sheats, like Haines, was celibate, although later, at the Arizona Ashram, after throwing up a few ingeniously designed buildings almost single-handedly, he took up with a local "hot tamale," as Haines called her. Then he left to form an ashram of his own composed of people who shared his belief that the Devil finds work for idle hands. (There is a lot to this, I would say.) He had a room, suitably furnished with Spartan simplicity, in the servants' wing. Ed Kalujuak. Ed, a very large, red-headed, slope-shouldered Canadian, usually hung around with Marshall. He never said much and was perpetually mild and good-natured. I have no idea where he slept. Perhaps in a hollow log. League. Howie Klein. Howie was the second banana of the Ashram. He was a classic funny Jewish boy from Brooklyn, with a big nose and an enormous bush of red hair. He couldn't say "shit" without getting a laugh. Servants' wing. Although his nose was large, he was of normal height. Chin did not recede. No overt or covert homosexual conflicts that I ever noticed. 20/20 vision. Zen. League, but not really. Zen, a tiny, bearded man with a rural Southern style of speech, who rarely appeared on the scene, even for lunch, lived in the cavernous depths of the Bowling Alley where he reputedly absorbed 1,000 mics every three days. Well liked. Paul Faggot. League, he said. Paul, a mournful little Jewish swish, was always attired in a dirty brown velvet robe, with hood, and possibly slept in the Bowling Alley. Whenever Haines spotted him gliding around a corner somewhere (he seemed to appear from and disappear into the woodwork like a rat) he would yell, "Would somebody please tell me who let that faggot in here?" As far as I know, this question was never answered. Later, we put Paul to work typing the _Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook,_ which task he performed with the greatest reluctance. Charlie Hitchings. Charlie was just an ordinary American kid and never pretended to be anything else. Ashram. Slept in the common room most of the time. Victor. A Puerto Rican boy in his early twenties, Victor was a good carpenter and highly thought of by Haines on that account. He was also a nice, open, unpretentious person, but seemed always to be suffering from the pangs of unrequited love. He later became paranoid on trips and thought Haines was out to kill him, or something. Bali Ram. A former boy dancer in the court of the King of Nepal, Bali was a true child of the East and, rumor had it, Bill's ex-boyfriend. He carried around a bundle of traditional, crazy superstitions, many of which seemed to work, sort of, and was devoid of the routine Sado-Judeo-Paulinian hang-ups associated with his sexual orientation. Bali was proud of his promiscuous sexual conduct, which, Haines informed me, had caused many "close calls" of "morals" charges, since Bali did not discriminate based on age, religion, allegiance or condition of servitude, only gender, and scorned all precautions and disguises. As almost anyone would have predicted, Bali and Sarasvati didn't get along very well. Their spats usually began with a disagreement over what Bill had said or not said about something or other or, if an orthodox text might be said to exist, exactly what Bill had meant by it. The more trivial the issue, it seemed, the more prolonged and bitter the ensuing exchange of insults would become. Those of us fortunate enough to be present when one of these scenes erupted would invariably be highly amused. The idioms employed were often drawn from the New York City underworld of the 1950s, on the one hand, or the Katmandu bazaar on the other, and although vividly picturesque, were even more incomprehensible and surreal to Bali and Sarasvati than they were to rest of us. "What in hell is that supposed to mean?" the two combatants would often ask of each other, to no avail. Since most people have a hard time staying angry if mirth and hilarity prevail all around them, Sarasvati would usually crack up at some point, start giggling, and throw in the towel. Bali, with rare exceptions, remained stern and unforgiving to the bitter end, no matter what. He had not been brought up to throw in the towel, I guess. ("Throw the towel? I do not throw the towel. I wash and dry the towel. I leave it to you sluts to throw the towel. And what is that supposed to mean, anyway?") Bali had Maynard's former large room at the west end of the second floor where he could practice his dancing free of distractions. Nobody who had seen him in action begrudged him the space. Charles Ashmore. Charlie didn't show up until April or May, but then he stayed with the Ashram for the move to Arizona, after which he disappeared into the University of Arizona fringe world in Tucson. Homo black, with the temperament of a pussycat. Nothing ever bothered Charlie, who seemed to grin and giggle from morning to night. For a while, Tim made a point of taking Charlie along on his lectures to function, as Haines put it, as his "stage nigger." I think Tim stopped this practice because Charlie, when asked about it, showed either no interest in the race issue at all or such a lackadaisical interest that it offended the black militants in the audience who had been anointed by the establishment media by this time as their kind of folks, as it were. And I'm sure they were, for the same reasons Tim was. Rudy and Jackie. This (heterosexual) couple were subjects of the Queen of England, on loan, so to speak. Former devotees of Tim, they had become disillusioned for reasons which remained obscure no matter how much they talked about it, which was a lot. They had come in to put on "light shows" for Tim's "Psychedelic Celebrations" in New York. Young, uptight and in limbo so far as group identification went, they lived in a room next to Howie and Betsy. Karen Detweiler had disappeared during my absence, but later returned. Along with a few other people who were absent too often to be called "residents," exactly, but too familiar to be called "visitors," exactly, Karen tended to "sleep around" and to resist group identification. Since my libido had dimmed down to pilot-light status, I hardly noticed her absence, and Karen, demonstrating some common sense for a change when she did show up, had clearly concluded that I wasn't her type anyway. During my first two or three weeks with the Ashram at Millbrook, I was content to do housework and hang around the common room, where I slept on a couch, swapping stories with the boys. My imagination was firmly set on idle, to match the pilot lights in my balls. My fellow inmates seemed to be behind the justly famous psychological "glass wall," but they were so engaging a breakthrough was inevitable. Chapter 22 THE HOLY FOUNTAIN _The pilgrims were human beings._ It was almost unheard of at Millbrook in those days for anything of consequence to happen in a routine and predictable way. When visitors asked what was "happening," a question we got pretty tired of hearing, the standard reply was, "I haven't the slightest idea. If you ever find out, please let me know." This was a somewhat evasive response to a question for which there never was a simple answer. Anyone who had been there for a while could have gone on for hours about what he thought was happening. One could have gone on indefinitely, telling only the truth as one saw it, with the general picture probably seeming more and more obscure, if not totally crazy, to the listener as fact was added to fact. Describing observable behavior would not have been all that difficult. But what were we all thinking about and why? What were we trying to do? What was the point of it all? What were our motives? Why this and why that and why the other thing? In these terms, a coherent overview was very hard to come by. At any particular time, a reasonably accurate psychological, social and political atlas of the place would have shown lots of hidden corners, culs-de-sac, secret passages, trapdoors, brave highways leading nowhere, evanescent establishments, established evanescences, sanctified misunderstandings, whims of iron and resolutions of sand, as well as the usual stuff, and plenty of it. There were ironic kickers to almost everything, which Psychedelian life tends to promote. The stylistic aspects of the Neo-American Church that are the most incomprehensible to outsiders derive partly from this . It's an acquired taste, to be sure, and lousy politics, at least in the short run. But, however irregular or just plain twisted, everyday life in the Big House in those days was, in general, a continuous source of instruction and amusement. I've lived in standard ways and in peculiar ways, and I think life in Psychedelian communities is best, if there is no great anxiety about money for basics, no great fear of the mind police, and room enough so factions can maintain a reasonable distance from one another. Three big ifs. Routine housework, for one thing, had some fun in it most of the time. Kitchen duty was shared on a rotating schedule. Swabbing up after a dinner for thirty people, which was about average, is no pleasure in itself, and every night two of us had to spend about four hours washing up and mopping the floor. But we were usually well-entertained while doing so, since the spacious kitchen, complete with a walk-in refrigerator and an enormous table, was the forum of the community, and it was there that the issue of the day was often defined, although rarely resolved. There was always an "issue of the day," besides all the ordinary gossip and routine quarrels. Should people be permitted to have private stashes? Should so and so, a visitor, be allowed to move in? Should we switch to vegetarianism? Although Art Kleps was certainly a prince among men and a handsome devil besides, did he have the right to close off the music room so he and Wendy Williams and Michael Green could work on his book, wonderful beyond description though it was? Was Meher Baba full of shit? And so forth. It was an oral group. People smoked one or two substances, drank three or four beverages, and cried, laughed, complained, bragged and told funny stories from morning to night. It was a rare night when, even at 3 a.m., one could not find an intense conversation going on somewhere in the house. Although depressed during my first weeks in the Big House during the winter of the Haines interregnum, I was never bored, and I frequently found myself, to my astonishment, laughing out loud, such was the quality of the comedy. Much time was spent telling each other about our trips. One of the most popular was Howie Klein's account of his latest big trip that winter, which I asked him to retell, and recorded, as he was going up on some STP in Arizona: _Howie: This is good music. Well let's see. I don't know, don't know if I can do this. OK, when I was on this trip, let's see I was, well I wanted to walk in the woods to see if I was afraid and I knew I was going to be. So I started walking and all the trees looked really weird ungngngngngnggggggggg all the branches were just out! Kleps: You wanted to know why you were afraid? Howie: No, I just wanted to see how I'd do it. How I'd get into these things. So I started walking, I said this is very weird, very weird, very weird. (Chuckle) I said go out a little further: you can always turn back. So I kept walking and I said why don't you walk in the other direction and you'll still be walking home! (Laughter) So I started walking and I said, don't get into a thing where you'll never get back to the house, you'll fall in the snow here and you'll be laying in the snow here, and all that. So I started to run and I got about fifty steps and I said SHSHSHSHSHSH look, you did it! So I was still pretty screwed up: so I thought I'd go and see Zen at the Bowling Alley; and I'd sit down; and he was getting high. He didn't know I was on a trip, so I sat down and, Oh, I don't know, Ahhhhh, I don't know. I always get into this thing! (Laughter) Then I got pissed off: you know, "What do I do this for?" So he says, he said, something that really turned me on, you know, "It's all God, or something like that." So I said, yah, I was reading this book that said when you ride on the train you carry all these suitcases and you really don't carry them cause the train will carry them. (Chuckle) So that sounded good, you know, so I said, yah, I don't have to carry them, give them all up. So then I felt good. So I felt I made a discovery, so I went to the Big House and told Victor, and I said, I came to the conclusion that everything is God. So Victor said that God wasn't found in a conclusion. (Laughter) So I didn't really get too screwed up, but I started to think about it, so I went up to see Charlie, who was in the bathroom in Bill's room, and I said, Victor said God isn't found in a conclusion but since everything is God it has to be a conclusion too. So we drew a conclusion and it came like two cones coming together and it continued. And so from then I discovered it continued. So then I saw Lou cleaning the bathroom and I said, I discovered God, I found God. So he says now that you've found him don't let him out of your sight. (Laughter)_ Despite Bill's extremely Buddhist orientation, "finding God, or something like that" was considered synonymous with "finding Enlightenment" for most of the kids in the Ashram and Howie was definitely a "kid." It is difficult to extirpate the term if one has been brought up with it, no matter how abstract, or even meaningless, it becomes, as my own history shows. If the reader had been present as an invisible man in a variety of these scenes, and heard A telling B something, he would have heard B respond with laughter, perhaps 7.6 times out of 10. The transparent reader might not have laughed at any given story and perhaps not at any of them. Tastes differ, as does how much trust or distrust one has for one's inherited terminology and the received wisdom, which is often the crux of the comedy. Stoned people often say things with great solemnity and then laugh at what they have just said, along with everyone else present. Lisa Bieberman, had she been forced by some cruel twist of fate to live among us in our "human zoo," would definitely have been in the 2.4 minority, as would almost all of those who found life at Millbrook so dissonant with their ideas about the way things ought to be that they could not enjoy it the way it was. Almost all who remained, however much they differed in opinion, had the same general outlook on things. As Goethe put it, "Men are divided by their opinions but unified by their outlooks." Nor, although it looked pretty heavenly to me, was Millbrook to everyone's taste in architecture and landscaping. The scale and style of things did not suggest heavenly realms to everyone but, to many, only illustrations and backgrounds from Tales of Terror comic books and Dracula movies. There were oddities all around: cavernous root cellars under the road between the Big House and the Bungalow; an abandoned kennel which seemed to stretch on forever; beautiful and ingeniously constructed wooden round barns scattered through the woods; the remnant foliage of ruined gardens creeping up and over the walls that had once contained them; and the great stone barns elsewhere described. Although, in general, everyone who stayed fell in love with the place, Tim and Bill disparaged the architecture whenever the subject arose and so did most of the troops. Only Otto, Billy and I seemed satisfied with Old Man Dieterich's contribution to the Andrew Jackson Downing Hudson River School of Picturesque Architecture, broadly defined. Variety is the spice of life. Most people professed to more rarefied tastes, or something. Perhaps one reason Tim would rusticate the League in the hills in the summer of '67 was the grotesque and grandiose character of the Big House and its surroundings. The image was inconsistent with his public relations objectives. It didn't fit in with the ascetic simplicity then fashionable. It wasn't egalitarian, it wasn't primitive and it wasn't "nice" (harmless seeming). After the League moved out to the woods, Otto stayed in the basement of the Big House, which he loved, although he spent most of his waking time at the Ashram. "I wasn't brought up to live in the woods like a bunny rabbit," he said. Me neither. Although Wendy and I sometimes visited what came to be called "League Country," which comprised about 2,000 acres of fields and woodland on the northern half of the estate, I never felt any urge to camp out. If a lake had been among the attractions, with shack, it might have been a case of one hermit coming up. There were two major hills. Lunacy had a magnificent sweeping view of the Hudson Valley and most of the League clustered there in their tents. Ecstasy was further back by a mile or two. In good weather, Tim and Rosemary lived there in a tent with a view of a sequestered bosky dell full of tall grass and wildflowers. Almost any place where one has good trips becomes sanctified and glorified thereby, I would say. I recall the surprise I felt when, on my visit to Cambridge and IFIF, Lisa showed me her tiny, ordinary upstairs den in a frame building on Boylston Street and asked me if it wasn't the most beautiful room I had ever seen. For her, I now know, it seemed full of the presence of her ghostly Lord. I forget what I replied but, whatever it was, it probably made Lisa wonder if I was a dullard, as her question made me wonder if she was mad. There was a tendency among true Millbrook lovers to assume that everyone saw the place as we did, that is, as an almost miraculously perfect enclave in which to lead a stoned life, free of the daily grind, parking meters, etc. Haines, in particular, at first assumed that everyone who visited automatically conceived a secret passion to move in and, it seemed to me, was overly defensive because of this frequently mistaken view. However, when I brought up the subject one day, maintaining that as many people were frightened, repelled, or just plain bored by the place as were attracted to it, he thought it over, agreed with me and even called a meeting of the Ashram to discuss the matter. Powerful psychological forces kept many people attached to their cities and suburbs, and the imprints caused by death/rebirth trips taken in such familiar surroundings reinforced those forces. Our peculiar, semi-rural, neo-medieval enclosure appeared to many as an irrelevant and "counter-revolutionary" oddity in which no normal person would want to live any more than he would want to be locked up in the Egyptian Rooms of the Metropolitan Museum. On the other hand, whether one wanted to move in or not, it didn't take long before the invocation of the name "Millbrook," which had previously sounded no more exciting than "Maple Street" or "Riverdale," began to ring in the ears of seriously stoned people as "Mecca" or "Jerusalem" or "Lhassa" did in the ears of followers of the religions associated with those places. When those of us who lived there happened to be somewhere else, I noticed a flicker of reverence frequently accompanied the pronunciation of the two syllables. A kind of ideal image had been invoked. The obvious associations are appropriate and attractive; the effortless flow of the river does the work of the world, the jolly miller cannot be faulted in any way for the work he does or the way he does it, and the pond behind his mossy dam is a nice place to fish and swim. Art and industry, nature and civilization, all combine nicely in this pretty Fazzm picture. In some ways, it does seem incredible that the William and Thomas Mellon Hitchcock Center for the Distribution of Illegal Drugs at Millbrook, N.Y., wasn't swamped with customers right from the beginning. Its existence was known to acid heads all over the world and it wasn't hard to get in, get some, and get out, if one put one's mind to it. Our official policy was always no admittance without an invitation. Later, as Keeper of the Gate, I would tell almost everyone who showed up without an invitation that the place was not open to the public but, unless they were obviously uncouth, I would give them the Big House pay phone number and the Ashram number and tell them they could call if they liked and try to get an invitation. Many, however, would simply climb over the wall or go around through a side gate rather than engage in any such disagreeable concessions to the standard canons of polite conduct. They would appear in the midst of a League or Ashram scene without saying anything at all to anyone about who they were, what they wanted or where they came from. Things would then go something like this: Envision the Ashram going about its business. Pots are being made by potters. Two or three people are working in the press room. Two or three are preparing lunch in the kitchen. Sarasvati is mopping floors. A favored few are sitting out front on the patio shooting the shit with Haines. A pair of bearded, long-haired characters with glowing eyes appear on the outskirts of the group and sit down on rocks bordering the flower garden. They say nothing, except possibly "Hi," to whomever is nearest them. If asked, they give their first names. "I'm Jerry, this is Flash." Consider the disagreeable task confronting Haines under these circumstances. Asking them what they wanted wouldn't get him anywhere. Almost invariably, they would reply with, "Oh, just looking around," or something equally meaningless, and volunteer no information whatever. Haines usually reacted in one of two ways. If stoned, he would patiently ask questions until he was satisfied that the visitors were harmless, and then tell them they could stay for dinner but not overnight. If he wasn't stoned, he would say, with rising emphasis and amplification, "Oh, just looking around, huh? Well, this isn't a zoo! You are on private property, and unless you have been invited here by someone who lives here, I'm afraid you will have to leave!" They would leave, but then they would go to the Big House, where someone would direct them to the woods, where the same scene would be repeated, except the signals would be more scrambled and susceptible to misinterpretation. Some would try to ignore all of this and hang around until they realized that they would not be accepted because of their sublime vibrations. Then, with one or two outstanding exceptions, they would go. In the final months, when Tim, in effect, declared the place to be a public park, all of this changed. Even the chicken coops filled up. Many of these uninvited guests, who crept in like lizards, were anti-Psychedelian activists. They were Jesus Freaks, Scientologists, Meher Babaists, Macrobioticoids, Transcendental Meditators, Hare Krishnas and so forth, who intended to show us the True Path. One would suddenly awaken to the knowledge that, over there in the corner of the room was a weirdo who just didn't fit in and who was staring fixedly at someone; most likely Tim, Bill or me. That stare seemed to be a universal weapon of choice for all of these fantasts. Stare the victim in the eye, and he will recognize the flame within, or something. When Bill realized what was going on, he would ask, "Who let this fruitcake in here, anyway? Didn't your mother teach you it was impolite to stare at people, young man? What group of con artists do you represent, anyway?" and other queries of the same type, few of which were answered. No Millbrookian was ever converted, as far as I know. These groups were and are competing for a slice of a potential market of born hypnotic subjects which comprises about 20 percent of the human race, minus those members of this core group who have been successfully inoculated against any shift in allegiance by massive and repeated indoctrinations during childhood in a standard-brand form of supernaturalism, and mindless reverence for the priesthood thereof, with plenty of booster shots thereafter. (Even such as these will sometimes crack, if your timing happens to be right, because gullibility is a hard thing to control.) To gather together a core crew of zombies of this kind, all one needs is a forceful manner, balls of brass, and the conscience of a worm, which may help explain why this trade has always been so popular in India and the United States. Being somewhat crazy helps, if it is the right type of craziness; namely, a "well-guarded" form of grandiose paranoia. Out of a captive audience of 100, if you have mastered the right line of patter, twenty people will see whatever they are told to see and feel whatever they are told to feel. How long it will stick is another question. All professional magician-hypnotists know this. There are simple tests which will identify the good subjects before the show starts. The more public the proceedings, the brighter the lights and the louder the voices, the easier it is. Once you have a cadre, all you have to do is teach them, or some of them, how to do the same thing to others, and encourage everyone to believe every example of sy