Hello Darlin' (17 page)

“I’m going to tell you something and you may not realize it now, in fact you probably
wont realize it, but try to focus on it,” he said.

I nodded, waiting for words that would solve my problem.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“That’s all?” I said. “I’m paying you a hundred dollars an hour and you’re telling
me don’t worry about it?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.” He paused. “Look at it this way. You’re in a golden
prison. You’re getting paid a couple of thousand dollars a week to do something you
love, and you only have to do it nine months out of the year. What could be better
than that?”

The next time I saw Sidney, he gave me a copy of
The Joyous Cosmology,
Alan Watts’s landmark 1962 book about alternative ways of perception, consciousness,
and spirituality. It was an influential guide for those on the leading edge of the
changes taking place in the culture,
but hell, I couldn’t make any sense out of it no matter how many times I read it.

Sidney also introduced me to Zen and other alternative ways of thinking I never even
heard about. He told me about Esalen, the Big Sur outpost known for its workshops,
encounter groups, and hot tubs. Maj and I went for the hot tubs, lectures (we heard
Ray Bradbury there), and tai chi lessons. Another time, when I was on a camping trip
with Preston, we walked into Esalen, ducked into a lecture hall, and there was Alan
Watts himself, speaking in his lovely English accent. After listening for about twenty
minutes, I still didn’t understand what he was talking about, but he made me curious.

I finally met Watts at a friend’s house in Malibu. When he came in, my friend asked
what he wanted to drink and I expected this erudite, charming Englishman to ask for
herb tea. Instead he requested a very dry double martini, and I was blown away.

Maj and I also took up flying. Now that I had some money I indulged in flying lessons
for us. I’d always dreamed of learning to fly. Since we had only our student licenses,
we always had to rent two planes if we wanted to go anywhere together. But we got
a kick from flying side by side. One time we flew to Santa Barbara for lunch, and
when we landed back at the Santa Monica airport, the guy who’d rented us the planes
asked how was lunch.

“Great,” I said. “We had hamburgers and shakes.”

“How much was it?” he asked.

“About two hundred and eighty dollars,” I said, adding in the cost of the planes.

One time I flew over the set of
Jeannie
on a day when I was upset about something. I opened the door and tried to piss all
over Columbia Studios. But I didn’t account for the wind, and the spray blew right
back at me. It should’ve taught me something about vindictiveness. Another time, when
we were on location in the Mojave Desert, Maj circled the site for about fifteen minutes,
causing us to shut down because of the noise. The director was standing on the ground
shaking
his fist and threatening to call the FAA until I recognized the numbers on the plane
as the one we’d been using, and I knew it was my wife.

*   *   *

One day in therapy it hit me. I didn’t have anything to complain about. Not anything
real.

“How do you sit there and listen to the woes of people like me?” I asked.

“I’ve trained all my life for it,” he said. “What else am I going to do? Besides,
it’s my living.”

Then Sidney put away his notes. The hour was nearly done. It was the time in our session
when he summed up what we’d talked about or cracked a joke that put things into perspective.
This time he did neither. Instead he held up my file so both of us could see how thick
it was and then asked if I felt better or worse for all of our talks. I had no answer.

“Exactly,” he said. “You’ve been coming here for a couple years and we could be in
therapy for as long as you want. But you’re troubled by the same things you were when
you came here three years ago. As I told you then, you’re in a golden prison. But
life is not so bad, is it?”

“No,” I said.

“Right. You don’t need therapy as much as a lot of other people. I know what you should
do,” he said.

“What?”

“Why don’t you drop some acid?”

T
he idea of trying LSD lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away. Then Maj and I went
to a party at Brandon De Wilde’s home in Topanga Canyon. Peter Fonda was there. We’d
met years earlier in New York and we were glad to see each other again. We led Peter
to our van and told him that we’d recently seen him in
The Trip,
a movie Jack Nicholson directed about a man going through a bad divorce, who in an
effort to understand himself better takes LSD. We told Peter we really liked the film
and thought he was great in it.

I also explained that I’d been thinking about taking acid myself.

A few days later, Peter took me to see Crosby, Stills and Nash in concert. After the
show we went backstage and visited with David Crosby. I expressed my desire to turn
on, and before we left, David handed me a handful of tabs. This wasn’t ordinary LSD.
It was the purest acid available, made by Stanley Owlsley, the famed underground chemist
from San Francisco.

I kept them for close to a month before the time seemed right to trip. My friend Larry
Hall, the grandson of Big Jess Hall from
Weatherford, was in L.A. He’d dropped acid a few times before, and for my initial
journey I thought it would be wise to try it with someone who knew the ropes as my
guide.

The two of us met on a Saturday morning at my house. Maj was out with the kids. I
wanted the environment comfortable and secure, since I’d been told that acid stripped
you of all emotional and psychological protection. I wore a hooded brown terry cloth
robe that Maj had made. I looked like a monk. I’d also fasted for a couple of days
as recommended by Larry. I swallowed a tab, sat back in the living room, and waited
for something to happen.

Without warning, I felt a buzz just below my navel. I thought this must be what they
talked about—vibrations. Boy, was it ever!

Suddenly I saw the entrance to a cave across the room. It was guarded by octopuslike
creatures with long writhing tentacles. There were also two other creatures that looked
like lions with feathers. Then I turned and saw my grandmother, who’d died when I
was twelve. She was to my left, hovering about eight feet above me. She sat in the
same position I was in, and wore the same robe. She didn’t speak or motion. She simply
looked at me with a wonderful, comforting smile and told me not to worry about it.

“All of this is just a natural thing,” she said. “You’re at the gate of all new experiences.
The guards at the gate are to keep you from going in. But don’t worry about it. If
something tries to pull you, don’t resist. Go with it. If you feel pushed, don’t fight
it. Just go with the flow.”

All of a sudden, I got it. I thought about some of the passages I’d read in
The Joyous Cosmology
and the
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
and they all said basically the same thing that my grandma had just told me.

I headed for the cave. As soon as I got to the doorway, BOOM, I was sucked inside
and down a tunnel at incredible speed. At the end, I saw a light. As I came out of
the tunnel, I was in a place where I was surrounded by bright and diffused light.
I saw a person who called out
to me. I didn’t know if it was a he or a she. That person didn’t talk, but without
speaking somehow let me know, “This is a glimpse of where you’ve been, where you re
going, where you are all the time.”

It was too much for me to comprehend. The person seemed to understand I was having
trouble making sense of it all.

“You don’t have to go any further. Having seen this is enough for now.”

At that point, I was pulled back out through the tunnel. The guards at the gate were
asleep. I looked around for my grandmother. She was gone. I hadn’t thought of her
in a long time, yet she had been there when I needed her. I wanted to thank her for
taking me through the entrance.

Then I got an orange from the kitchen. When I broke it open, I saw its cellular structure
pulse. It looked to me like the actual cells were alternating between life and death.
It all seemed perfectly natural.

I was studying the orange while standing in front of a mirror. When I looked up and
saw my face, it was doing the same thing. The cells were pulsing. Some were dying
and some were in the process of being reborn. It was an intricate picture. Every molecule
was in constant motion. I don’t know how long I stared at my face, but after a while
I realized I was a constant flow of energy.

Everything was.

I was part of everything, and everything was part of me. Everything was living, dying,
and being reborn.

*   *   *

I started playing with a sixteen-millimeter movie camera Larry had. He drove us into
Beverly Hills, where we explored the different streets while staring at all the big
old homes. They had beautiful gardens in front. All the colors jumped out at me. I
looked at everything through the camera. As we drove along Sunset Boulevard, heading
into Hollywood, I looked at people waiting at bus stops, exiting stores, and sitting
in coffee shops. I used the camera to zoom in on them until I could look directly
into their eyes. I saw their cells changing too.

The experience was extremely unsettling but just about the best thing that had ever
happened to me. It changed my way of looking at people. I saw much deeper into their
emotions. In those hours, I learned how to read body and facial language at a much
more profound level. More than anything else the experience changed my way of looking
at life and death.

I concluded death was just another stage of our development and that we go on to different
levels of existence.

We don’t disappear when we “die.” We become part of a curtain of energy. In almost
every religion I knew about, they say, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be.” I had an understanding of God consciousness. It was so clear. The LSD experience
took the fear of death from me, the fear of manmade heaven and hell. With that out
of the way, I quit worrying.

The amazing thing about this whole experience was that it was so familiar. I’d been
there before, done that before, and it was so, so familiar.

*   *   *

As for the rest of my LSD, I gave most of it away. Then about a year later Maj tried
it. One of the reasons the two of us are still married is that we’e always shared.
LSD was no different. I drove her in the hills above Malibu and we hiked through a
pretty little canyon. I kept a film camera on her almost the entire time. Her experience
was different from mine, since her issues were different. Her upbringing hadn’t been
as tumultuous, but she’d had polio when she was twentyone, and in fact her face was
still slightly paralyzed when we started going out.

She dealt with this as she went through her LSD journey. She became her mother, her
daughter, and herself, and finally, toward the end, she turned to me and declared,
“But I’m beautiful.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that for years,” I said.

LSD was profound for both of us. Maj came out cleansed, just as I’d come out of my
trip full of new insights. I think our relationship was better for it. We’d glimpsed
some of the answers. But that didn’t mean we had quit working at learning how to deal
with life.

*   *   *

There was a lot to deal with at the time. The Vietnam War was going on and I was unpopularly
against it. I’d been asked to tour the bases in Vietnam with Barbara. I turned down
the request because I didn’t want to lend any credence to the war, though I sympathized
with the kids who went there. But even the most patriotic of them were demoralized
by the futility of the war.

At home, there were daily demonstrations at what was seen by many as a racist war
conducted by a country that thought it was superior to the “yellow people.” Then Martin
Luther King was assassinated, and that tragic event brought home yet another instance
of racial hatred. I was watching television in our little house on West Channel Road,
when the bulletin came on saying he’d been assassinated.

I burst into tears. Maj cried too. I thought we’d been making progress, but looking
back, I was naive. After Bobby Kennedy was shot, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t
know if the government was involved. I didn’t know who was involved. I suspected the
government was involved in all of it. Rather than distrust everyone, I felt like I
had to do something myself.

For two years, I volunteered at the Watts Workshop, a storefront writing-and-acting
school in the heart of L.A.’s black community. I taught acting and directing and hired
several of the students to be in
I Dream of Jeannie.
One of my students, Artist Thornton, went on to start a similar workshop in South
Dallas, the Artist and Elaine Thornton Foundation for the Arts, and I support him
to this day.

In the late 1960s, most people I knew were trying to find answers,
or at least bring up the right questions. I remember Peter Fonda asking me to a screening
of
Easy Rider.
I didn’t know if I could make it because I’d taken another hit of acid a few hours
earlier. According to him, that made it more imperative I see his movie. He was right.
I saw
Easy Rider
in a little private screening room, and afterward I glanced at the friends Peter
had invited, maybe a half dozen people, and all of us had the same wild, dazed, breathless,
awed look of having watched something genuinely incredible.

I left itching to get on the highway myself. Since we traveled with the family, I
sent away to the U.S. Department of the Interior for a guide to thermal springs around
the world. I figured the family that bathes together stays together. We went to Canada
and toured the northern United States. Along the way we came to Boulder, Montana,
site of geothermal hot springs, the turn-of-the-century training camp for boxer Gentleman
Jim Corbett, and the historic Diamond S Ranch, a sprawling hotel that was originally
built by a group of San Francisco millionaires so they could frolic with their mistresses.