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; ktsanford@austin.rr.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 cochère 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
"maybed" 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 r