The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (17 page)

By the time Terence began classes, the FSM had all but ended, its immediate goals mostly realized. Campus activists had turned to reorganizing student government, forming a teaching assistant’s union, and investigating the ties between academia, corporations, and the military that had become an issue the year before. Many had turned their efforts against the Vietnam War. The historical and cultural fallout from the FSM would linger for decades. The movement remains a kind of model for student protest that is still emulated on campuses today. And the steps of Sproul Hall are still a site for political harangues, a street-theater stage for every social movement from the far left to the far right and everything in between. It’s democracy in action, the way it’s supposed to work. A speech is now given every year in memory of Mario Savio, the most visible FSM leader, who died in 1996. His speeches in 1964 were crucial to defining the movement’s goals and galvanizing support for them among students and the faculty. The role of Twitter and Facebook during the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and other events in 2011 suggest the power of social media as a tool for democratic reform—but only as a tool. As for the retreat of many other causes largely into cyberspace, I doubt that’s to their benefit. The resulting lack of visibility removes them from the radar and affords the so-called mainstream media a perfect excuse to minimize and marginalize their coverage.

Mainstream attention can have a downside as well, of course. Long after most of the FSM’s issues were resolved on campus, the inevitable backlash helped Ronald Reagan get elected as California’s governor in 1966, on his promise to “clean up the mess in Berkeley.” Clark Kerr, president of the UC system, was forced from office in 1967 for allegedly being too soft on the protesters. A similar impact rippled out through the larger culture. While the ideals extolled by the Free Speech Movement continued to spread, so did a reaction against the widespread flouting of conventional mores that appeared to accompany them. The sexual and psychedelic revolutions, along with the strange music and exotic fashions that the young had adopted, all provoked a hostile response from the more rigid members of society, who convinced themselves that the very foundations of civilization were under threat.

The FSM marked the historical genesis of what we now call the culture wars, the split between the country’s social conservatives and its liberals. The lines in the sand have been drawn for decades, and indeed have deepened into trenches from which activists on both sides lob their rhetorical salvos. Freedom of speech is alive and well in this country, thanks partly to the FSM; unfortunately, the spread of free speech doesn’t appear to be accompanied by a concomitant increase in thoughtful listening (or thought of any kind), with the result that political discourse has largely degenerated into a screaming match between ideologues.

That historical shockwave, and the polarization it triggered, were relatively new when Terence arrived in Berkeley, fired up with rebellion, aflame with new ideas, and surrounded by peculiar yet fascinating friends. As I said, he’d been reading Ayn Rand, who ironically is now emblematic of a certain brand of right-wing intellectualism inspired by her “me-first-and-everyone-else-be-damned” philosophy. Indeed, as a college freshman Terence was very much caught up in the exercise of his own freedoms. I dare say he was also influenced by whatever drugs he’d gotten his hands on by then. (There were rumors of some kind of scandal involving either morning glory seeds or nutmeg during his senior year in Lancaster, but I was never told the details). In Berkeley, pot and LSD were easily had, Leary was urging the young to turn on, and there was a great deal of ferment and curiosity about psychedelics, fed by the Acid Tests and other “happenings,” not to mention the live accompaniment provided by San Francisco’s trippy bands.

Terence was spared a probable fate of being enlisted into some cause or movement by sheer good luck. Of the 27,000 students at UC Berkeley at the time, he was one of 150 incoming freshmen admitted that year into the new Experimental College Program. Though plans for the program began before the Free Speech Movement, many later mistook it for a response, given its intent to personalize the learning experience at a huge school where students, especially new ones, could easily feel alone and alienated.

Founded by Joseph Tussman, the chairman of the philosophy department, the experimental college operated as a kind of university within the university. The approach was modeled on a similar experiment established in the 1920s by Alexander Meiklejohn, a thinker and free-speech advocate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Tussman had been a student. Tussman’s program focused on big questions and the periods of historical crisis that had catalyzed fundamental shifts in worldviews going back to ancient Greece. Students and faculty gathered not in a classroom building but on the edge of campus, in a house. No grades were given; evaluations were based on intense dialogues with faculty members and fellow students, and extensive, eclectic reading lists that participants were encouraged to develop on their own.

Academically, this was the best thing that could have happened to Terence; he was ripe for something like this. The program also introduced him to others who were similarly brilliant and passionate, in the way that only nineteen-year-olds can be. Some of the friendships formed in that crucible lasted for years and figured significantly in his later adventures.

Recalling how Terence discussed the experience, I can see that Tussman was a significant mentor for him. My brother immensely respected the man, who, as his intellectual match in every way, challenged him to think critically and question his assumptions. Tussman did exactly what any smart philosophy professor trained in Socratic dialogue would do: He dared Terence to think for himself. Did the fact that the man looked exactly like our father (or so Terence believed) have anything to do with it? It’s hard to say, but I suspect so. On some level, Terence may have found in Tussman his intellectual father, one who respected him as a person and yet couldn’t be bamboozled. (That’s not to say our real father was stupid, but that after a while he just gave up). The two-year Tussman cycle was an extremely good maturation experience for my brother. Terence eventually graduated with a self-designed major in shamanic studies from the Natural Resources department, but in many ways the experimental college was the pinnacle of his academic life. It’s significant that Tussman’s program only lasted for a couple of cycles, ending in 1969.

The program continued to enrich both our lives for another reason: It was there that Terence discovered his talents as a bibliophile and a collector of rare books. Both of us had cherished and collected books from an early age, and Terry’s love of reading stimulated my desire to read. As a result, I had pretty much mastered the art well before first grade. I thank Terence, and my own good luck, for that. Reading is the skill most integral to an active life of the mind. I am only happy that I’ve been able to pass on that love to my daughter, a bookworm and an aspiring writer. Reading and loving to read is an inoculation against ignorance, which is on the rise again, I think, partly because people tend to read much less now.

In the pressure cooker of the Tussman program—just because it was unstructured and ungraded didn’t mean there weren’t demands—Terence encountered a vast diversity of ideas, from classic philosophy and Eastern religion to media theory. There he first studied Mircea Eliade, Edmund Husserl and the phenomenologists, and deepened his appreciation for the works of Carl Jung, who in turn led him fatefully to the
I Ching
. He discovered the Western esoteric traditions and explored alchemy and black magic. He began to accumulate a serious book collection, spurred on by Tussman’s encouragement to explore every avenue of interest, and by his own curiosity and passion. And he shared these discoveries with me. Once our geographical separation had brought us closer and fostered a new mutual respect, we corresponded fairly regularly. With Terence in the thick of Berkeley’s intellectual and social ferment, I acutely felt my isolation. Getting a letter from him was like a castaway finding a message in a bottle, a reassurance that beyond the stultifying confines of Paonia there indeed existed an exciting world of ideas. I longed to escape as he had years before. Our extended discussions over his Christmas visits, along with the books he’d bring with him, provided plenty for me to chew on during his absences.

In the fall of 1967, after completing his stint in the experimental college, Terence took off on his first world tour. Before leaving, he packed up his entire library (by then well over a thousand volumes) and shipped it to me for safekeeping. I was extraordinarily proud that he’d entrusted me to look after his books, and that he knew I’d appreciate them. Has ever an older brother given a younger brother a more meaningful gift? I can’t think of one. During that year, my junior year, which turned out to be my last in Paonia, I made every effort to devour as many of those books as I could. I made a fair dent, but I didn’t read them all.

Terence had a reputation for having a fantastic library, and it was. Or rather, both were. He assembled two major libraries during his lifetime, and had bad luck with both of them. After he returned from his first global sojourn in the spring of 1968, that initial collection was shipped back to the Bay Area and stored in the family home of Terence’s best friend from the Tussman program, Michael. The books remained there in the Berkeley Hills until the summer of 1970, when Terence was traveling again in Asia. It was a particularly dry summer, and wildfires swept the area, destroying many expensive homes, including that of Michael’s parents. Terence’s books were carried off as so much ash on the hot winds.

It took him thirty years to reproduce that wonder. His second library is the one that has become part of the Terence McKenna legend. Following his death in 2000, his books and papers were given to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. After considerable struggle I managed to ship them back from the Big Island of Hawaii where Terence had been living before he passed on. Esalen’s curators temporarily stored the collection in an old building in downtown Monterey, awaiting the construction of a proper place for it on the Esalen campus. The century-old structure turned out to be a tinderbox. In early February 2007, a fire broke out in a sandwich shop on a lower floor, consuming a number of businesses, and Terence’s books, which were stowed above. Yet again, a priceless trove had been reduced to ashes in a matter of minutes. The volumes included rare first editions of alchemical texts that existed nowhere else. It seemed almost like a curse, the curse of the Terence McKenna library! It was a terrible, terrible tragedy—for Terence’s legacy, for Esalen, for our family, and for esoteric bibliophiles everywhere.

I was devastated when I heard the news. It was not only the loss of the library, which was bad enough, but it was also, for me, a final, forced letting go of Terence. So much of him was embodied in his library. I felt that as long as it existed, even if it was not within our family, his spirit lived on. Now that spirit was gone forever, finally, irrevocably, utterly, destroyed and expunged from the earth. It was a shocking and painful thing.

Chapter 14 - Cannabis: 1966

The fall of 1965 marked a transition for me as well. As a freshman at Paonia High School, I was once again sharing the halls with the older guys who had harassed me in eighth grade, but they left me alone. My friendship with Richard had survived despite his half-hearted alliance back then with my former tormentors. It wasn’t until the spring that I actually started hanging out with those guys, some of whom were destined to become my partners in mischief well into the future. Madeline remained my closest friend, both of us too bookish and nerdy to fit in the other cliques, which worked out well. We didn’t want to be part of those circles any more than they wanted us.

While Terence was starting his first semester at Berkeley constructing his intellectual foundations, I was stuck there in Paonia, a stranger in a strange land—an introverted “extra-environmental” in my sweet and dearly loathed hometown. Paonia was, and is, a nice little community. It never had more than 1,500 residents, and most lived on the outlying mesas. At times I’ve toyed with the idea of moving back, only to realize the dream was impractical. During high school, my attitude was less sentimental. I hated the place and wanted nothing more than to escape. I was insanely jealous of Terence for pulling that off, and I thought I deserved no less. Many of my friends felt the same, though not everyone made it out. Our nicknames for Paonia—“Peyote” or sometimes “Pissonya”—expressed our contempt. Tolkien’s popular
Lord of the Rings
trilogy provided us with another epithet: Mordor, as in the accursed land of shadows and home to evil sorcerer Sauron. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but we were teenagers and felt our angst palpably.

Like it or not, Paonia was where I’d remain for the time being, and I still had many significant experiences there, being fifteen and eager for novelty and mischief. I also had Terence egging me on from a distance, always ready to lead me into the Next Big Thing.

That school year marked the true start of my pharmacological education, which has been ongoing ever since. The scare movies I’d seen in junior high were supposed to convince us that smoking marijuana even once would lead to addiction, madness, and promiscuity (we wished!). Like any narcotic, that propaganda worked only so long and then began breaking down. As for the morality tales about big-city degenerates getting hooked on heroin, those were simply irrelevant. In fact, I had no interest in “drugs” in junior high, but that had begun to change. Timothy Leary was active on the national stage, and that spring I read
The Doors of Perception
. Continuing its campaign either to corrupt or educate America’s youth,
Life
had published its famous LSD cover story on March 25, 1966, entitled “The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug that Got Out of Control.” You had to hand it to
Life
, even if its editors were motivated by nothing but the most craven sensationalism. While their LSD feature was more alarmist than their landmark article on magic mushrooms in 1957, it probably led millions of otherwise wholesome young Americans down the primrose path to psychedelic perdition. It certainly got
my
attention.