The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (19 page)

We didn’t just smoke up; this called for a special occasion. As luck would have it, my father was set to attend his company’s annual sales meeting in Denver, a three-or four-day affair that my mother, joining him, turned into a short holiday in the big city. They ended up leaving me on my own for nearly one whole glorious week. I was sixteen, after all; and besides, by then Terence and I had terrorized every babysitter in the valley, making it unlikely anyone would have signed up to mind me.

So a window of opportunity quickly opened for Fay and me to have our special evening. Most readers must know by now where this is headed. I was, of course, a virgin, a status I was determined to change. Fay seemed quite willing to cooperate, though we didn’t speak of the matter until that night. I had picked her up in my parent’s Chevy and brought her back to the house, not wanting anyone to see her car parked outside. I had already prepped the house, closing all the curtains and turning off most of the lights. We toked up and drank a little; we got very stoned and hilarious. The next thing we knew we were groping each other, and a minute later we were on the little bed in my room. I was nervous and didn’t know what I was doing. Fay could see this and was kind, and eventually we completed a fairly inept coupling. It’s said that is something you never forget, and I guess that’s true. We hung out for a while and finished up the pipe, she gathered up her things, and I took her home. I made a quick detour to the bridge to smash the wine bottle on the rocks below and crept back home in the quiet night. No security breach, no drama.

We never repeated that experience. I think we were both a little appalled at our recklessness. I continued to visit her once in a while, but we began to worry that people would talk, and our conversations became less frequent. At the end of the semester she moved on. Recently, others have informed me that I was not her only conquest. If those other accounts are true, Fay may have arrived with an agenda to sample the pleasures of the local randy but virginal males; there was nothing particularly special about me. So much for my self-flattering belief that Fay liked me for my intellect! I wish her well, wherever she is. She may have had bad judgment, but she was a good spirit, and I shall always be grateful to her for introducing me to the pleasures of sex, awkward and halting though the occasion was. It’s gotten both harder and easier, somehow, as life has progressed.

One good thing was, I now had a new supply of cannabis, lovely cannabis! I started smoking it on a regular basis, getting completely baked on ridiculously small amounts. Looking back, I think much of my reaction could be traced to the placebo effect, but placebo or not, it was wonderful. Being stoned was the only time I felt normal. I loved nothing more than to sit in my room, have a toke or two, and “ruminate.” The experiences were similar to those first times on the blanket in the park—strange, fragmentary thought processes leading into interesting, often hilarious byways. The cannabis high is like a state of enhanced bemusement. Every thought is interesting; and everything before the open eyes or behind the closed eyelids is endlessly fascinating. There are audial hallucinations, evocations of deep aural spaces, often accompanied by complex hypnagogic tapestries. Music becomes a transformative experience. I noticed in those early days there was a distinct figure/ground phenomenon, where things in the background became the object of attention, while the foreground was not perceived or was relegated to background. I noticed this particularly when reading while stoned. The words would not only resonate in my head, but the spaces between and around the letters became somehow more important than the letters. This happened to the point where it began to interfere with reading. Then, gradually, the problem would fix itself and I could again read smoothly. I’m not sure what was going on, but I think that when one first starts smoking, there’s a period of entrainment or adaptation to the state. Once one is entrained, being stoned becomes a lot like being “normal.” It feels like a normal state of mind; one is comfortable there, but something is lost on the intensity scale. The early experiences were practically psychedelic in their intensity, whereas later I didn’t get close to that when I smoked.

But it took a while to reach that point. For now, I had cannabis, and I was extremely sensitive to it. I loved how I could be completely toasted and yet have a perfectly normal conversation with my parents. They hadn’t a clue. At first, I guarded my tiny stash jealously. I didn’t want to run out, and Terence had sternly admonished me—“You must speak of this to no one!”—in the same tone he used to say, “Never oppose my will!” I got that. After all our talks about black magic and alchemy (Terence had confided that he’d actually taped shut certain grimoires of black magic he had, not trusting himself to open those books) I was down with the idea of secrecy. Cannabis and certain other drugs were really black arts, or at least forbidden knowledge. But the secrecy didn’t last. I wanted to share the discovery with my close friends, and as spring faded into summer I started turning them on, starting with Richard, then proceeding through the rest of our stoner band. By the end of June all six of us were regularly crowding into my bedroom and getting loaded.

I smoked whenever I could. I enjoyed smoking with my friends, but some of my best experiences were when I smoked alone, rambling around the sagebrush-covered hills outside of town. And now, I had access to a car! I could go out to the ’dobes or the gravel pit or sometimes Bethlehem Cemetery and toke up. I’d get totally, utterly wasted on these solitary wanderings. I’d spend that time ruminating, looking at things, like bugs, plants, trees, rocks, whatever—ruminating, and creating a narrative.

Bethlehem Cemetery was especially inviting, a small, pretty spot nestled in a little bowl on the drive up to Pitkin Mesa. There was never anyone there, and it was peaceful and shady on a summer’s afternoon. I’d get totally loaded and wander around looking at the headstones, speculating about the lives of the names there. Once I found a gravestone bearing the names of a husband and wife, the husband having died a year to the day after her. It was clear to me that he had died of a broken heart. This little vignette, like the others I imagined, seemed enormously romantic and poignant to me. I suppose it was a passionate time of life. I felt things strongly, and the cannabis only made them more intense. On a recent visit to Paonia, I drove up to the cemetery around dusk on a beautiful fall evening. It was just as peaceful and lovely as I remembered it, as though the world had passed it by for the last four-and-a-half decades. It was a timeless little glade, a sanctuary in the midst of an impermanent world, and most reassuring. I did not smoke this time; I had no cannabis with me. It was not necessary. As I wandered along the paths gazing at the old headstones, the memories and the contact high were more than enough.

Once loaded in one of my various countryside haunts, there was the small matter of driving back into town. The main challenge for me was the time-dilation effect. Everything. Was. Really. Slowed. Down. But at least I wasn’t tempted to break any speed limits on the way home. In fact I would creep into town at about ten miles an hour. Nobody ever stopped me or even seemed to notice, probably because in town nobody drove much faster than that anyway.

I wrote less over those months. I had kept a journal the previous summer and written quite a lot. I had discovered Taoism at the time and was fascinated by it, by the idea of living in harmony with nature, so gracefully that one’s imprint on the earth was as light as a feather. Taoism seemed to me at the time to be one of the few religions that made sense. It is actually more a philosophy than a religion, and that was appealing. No faith or dogma, just learning to live in harmony—what’s not to like about that? Much of my journal-writing over the previous summer had been devoted to exploring the character and actions of the ideal man, in Taoist terms, which I aspired to become. I tried to start that up again, but my efforts were half-hearted. Ironically,
not
writing about the man in Tao was probably a more Taoist thing to do than to write about it. You don’t write about the Tao; you live it, or try to live it. But when I was stoned, thoughts came too quickly; they were too interesting, they could not be pinned to the page! Yeah, yeah, I know: Pot makes you lazy. There is something to that. So my literary productivity over the summer suffered. But that was OK. I was too immersed in the richness of rumination to worry about writing it down.

Chapter 16 - A Psychedelic Education

Now that I’ve conveyed a picture of my teenage self lost in thought, I want to take a wider look at what Terence and I were actually thinking about. As must be clear by now, we lived largely in our heads. Ideas and concepts were what most excited us, and being bookish was a point of pride. We fancied ourselves scholars with more depth than our friends, let alone the “meatheads” we had to suffer on a daily basis. Though we were certainly immersed in the memes then permeating mass culture, our serious interests also colored our worldview. Indeed, both scholarly and popular ideas figured in our efforts to understand our early psychedelic experiences. Together they formed the conceptual toolkit, however inadequate or incomplete, we later took with us on our South American quest. As such, our influences played a crucial role in what happened to us at La Chorrera.

Our psychedelic education began with cosmology and astronomy, both of which were more my pursuits than Terence’s. I mentioned my early dream of studying astrophysics under George Gamow, an originator of the Big Bang theory. I played at observational astronomy without being very good at it; what really excited me was reading about cosmology. I devoured books by Gamow and his scientific rival, the English astronomer Fred Hoyle, along with anything else in the field I could get my hands on. I loved how those ideas freed my imagination. Cosmology deals with the really big questions: How did the universe originate? How did the solar system and the planets form? What will happen to the universe in the distant future? For a twelve-or thirteen-year-old just beginning to realize the tenets of his faith were wearing a little thin, the thought there might be scientific answers to questions about humanity’s ultimate fate had great appeal. What faith I had I put in science, no longer wasting it on God or the church.

Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis.

Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the “elegance” of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone.

This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it “makes sense.” It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.) Based on past experience, one may hope that science will eventually produce a valid cosmological model that encompasses all we currently know—at least until new knowledge requires that the model be discarded or radically revised.

In the meantime, we are free to speculate, and to watch the cosmologists battle it out via their conferences and writings. Terence and I found our vicarious participation in that process to be great fun. Thinking about cosmology forces one to stretch his or her imagination around some pretty wild ideas. Parallel universes, other dimensions, space-time dilation, black holes, and time travel are alien concepts to most people, but they are bread and butter for amateur cosmologists, among others. In pondering such ideas, one is led, inevitably, to gaze up at the stars and wonder what other entities are gazing back, perhaps pondering the same things.

Another major early influence was science fiction, and for that I credit my father. Along with the “men’s magazines” we weren’t supposed to see but did, he occasionally brought home issues of
Fate
, with its focus on the paranormal, and sci-fi pulp mags like
Analog
or
Fantasy and Science Fiction
. His reading was another way he wasn’t “average” despite insisting that he was—and, more irksome, insisting we should be as well. I doubt his peers were reading this stuff, but Terence and I were all over it. I still enjoy science fiction, and much of what is written today is far superior to what we read as kids. Science fiction is good for the mind. It keeps one open to possibilities and, more than any other fictional genre, helps one to anticipate and prepare for the future. In fact, science fiction
creates
the future, by articulating a vision of what we as a culture imagine for ourselves. The world we live in today is, in part, a sci-fi vision of the future from the 1950s made real. We now have, and take for granted, pocket phones, global telecommunications, personal computers, genetic engineering, bioterrorism, and environmental collapse; sci-fi writers anticipated them all. They also foresaw much that hasn’t been realized, and failed to foresee much that has. The lesson, if any, is that reality will always be stranger, richer, and more complex than fiction.