The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (24 page)

Terence fit right into this scene. His room had become a sort of informal salon where people would show up to get loaded and stay to hear him rant. And he always had something to rant about. Unlike most people, who get high and grow quiet, cannabis never affected Terence that way; it only made him more articulate, more talkative, and more able to weave his enrapturing narratives. He often had a receptive audience of very stoned listeners hardly able to speak or move while he regaled them. He was in his element, and he loved it. That may have been when Terence first realized he had the gift of gab, in spades. People just loved to hear him talk; he could keep a group seated on the floor in his bedroom spellbound for hours. It didn’t really matter what he said; it was the way he said it. Much later in his life when Terence started to address larger groups in more structured venues, he found the old magic still worked, a talent he eventually leveraged into his public career.

Terence was still seeing his girlfriend Elaine at the time, but she must have gone home for the summer. Many of his other friends stopped by, a few of whom I’d later get to know quite well. Some were former high school classmates who, like Terence, were in Berkeley going to the university or just hanging out. Others he knew from the Tussman program. Michael, for instance, was a Berkeley boy; his parents’ home was the one that later burned down, taking Terence’s first library with it. Michael certainly didn’t fit the profile of the down-and-dirty hippie. With his neatly trimmed beard he looked like an Elizabethan scholar and had the eloquence and learning to match. He eventually moved to New York City and became a successful dealer and curator of Asian art. Another friend, Rick, had been a brilliant classmate of Terence’s during his year in Mountain View. Rick eventually moved to England and became a successful dealer of rare scientific books. At the time, Terence admired him for teaching an advanced course in steroid chemistry at Stanford while apparently still a high-school junior.

A third participant was “Vanessa,” a lovely, brown-eyed girl from New York. A fellow student at the experimental college, she shared Terence’s intensity and passion for ideas. I’ve adopted the pseudonym Terence gave her in
True Hallucinations
both to honor her role in our band of adventurers, and to protect her identity, which she’d probably appreciate as a respected psychotherapist. Vanessa was (and still is) a key member of the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. The Telegraph House is also where I first met Erik, an aspiring poet and writer who had been Terence’s best buddy during his senior year in Lancaster, and Lisa, who later became my first serious girlfriend. In 1967, however, neither of us suspected that might happen, let alone that Lisa and Erik would eventually marry. Like Michael, they remained close to Terence until the end of his life.

At the time, Lisa was the girlfriend of the remarkable John Parker, a guy who had an enormous influence on both Terence and me. He’d been another quirky, brilliant, junior-year classmate of Terence’s in Mountain View. I’d met John the previous summer when he’d spent a few days in Paonia visiting Terence. I was shy and didn’t talk to him much at the time, but later he became one of my most important mentors. John did not affect the beard and long hair that was fashionable at the time. He had a diminutive physique and a perpetual twinkle in his eye; his sexuality was ambiguous, a puzzle. He brought to mind what people might cruelly mean when they refer to a gay person as a “fairy,” though he somehow embodied the more literal meaning of the term. John’s father, a researcher at the NASA facility in Mountain View, was known, if I recall, for his work on the fire-retardant paint used in certain spacecraft—a modern alchemist if there ever was one. I only met him once, years later, in 1984, when I was in California searching for jobs after completing my Ph.D. Though he struck me as an odd but harmless fellow in our brief interview, Lisa had a harsher view of him. According to her, if John was a tad eccentric, even a bit mad, his father was partly why.

Whether John got all or some of his funny ideas from his father, he was a fascinating and peculiar figure in his own right. He knew about and practiced black magic, or so he claimed. He was sophisticated about drugs, having tried many kinds, including some I’d never heard of. He knew botany and medicinal plants, chemistry, psychopharmacology, alchemy, yoga, and shamanism. He had very unconventional ideas about drug actions, space and time, other dimensions, aliens, and UFOs. John deserves credit for planting the seeds of many key concepts in my mind over several years of intense correspondence. Many of the ideas we discussed in those letters figured in the conceptual raft that Terence and I constructed before our journey to La Chorrera. All that occurred later, most notably in the fall of 1969 during my first semester at the University of Colorado at Boulder when John spent several weeks visiting me. The extraordinary discussions we had then over many a hashish-stoked evening were the culmination of our long correspondence. Though John did not accompany us to South America, we may never have gone without him; his spirit was with us all the way.

If Tom and I had any agenda in Berkeley that summer, it was fairly loose. We wanted, if possible, to get laid, and there seemed a good chance that would happen, what with free love in the air and all. Or so it seemed to a randy sixteen-year-old, but it never happened. We also wanted to take LSD and secure a supply of cannabis and other interesting substances to bring back to our friends. At all that we succeeded.

At some point in our visit, Terence urged us to cross the bay and check out the scene in Haight-Ashbury. He probably just wanted to get us out of his hair for a few days, but he wanted us to investigate the Diggers. The San Francisco Diggers had taken their name and philosophy from a mid-seventeenth-century group in England first known as the True Levellers for their radical egalitarian beliefs, which involved common ownership of property and respect for nature. They became known as the Diggers for their habit of working together in their communal fields. Their hippie counterparts, based in the Haight, gave that ethos an urban spin, opening stores that gave away their stocks and providing free medical care, food, transport, and housing. They also organized free concerts and political street theater, such as the Death of Money parade. They envisioned a society free of money, private property, and all forms of buying and selling.

In many ways, the Diggers tried to actualize the best ideals of hippiedom. Like most utopian communities, however, they found it difficult to make reality fit with the ideal. Inevitably, they seem to founder on the recalcitrance of human nature. For every idealist who is ready to pitch in and work for the common good, there is an opportunist who wants something for nothing, or, worse, to grab power and bend it to his or her own ends. The Diggers were a kind of cult—not a religious but a political cult—and eventually they suffered the fate of all cults. But at the time, the Diggers were happening in the Haight, and it was a beautiful idea.

Tom and I couldn’t really connect; we may have been guilty of wanting something for nothing. Certainly we had very little money, and we needed a place to stay, food, all those necessities, and we had little to contribute. After a few days we decided it wasn’t working for us, and we returned to Berkeley.

Even then you could discern the seeds of destruction in the hippie movement, most notably in the Haight. Trying to run an egalitarian community in a dense city is a challenge under the best of circumstances. And every community that aspires to be spontaneous, to thrive without leaders or hierarchies, must confront the vacuum it creates for the power-crazed. Another factor that contributed to the short life of the hippie movement, at least in the Haight, was that so many of the people who had been drawn there were already damaged in some way. They made the pilgrimage in search of something, though many knew not what. Once they arrived, they were likely to become exposed to drugs and other experiences that they had no tools to deal with, and no clue. Those people quickly became dysfunctional and a liability to the rest of the community. Not everyone suffered this fate, of course. In fact, most people who were motivated enough to make the pilgrimage to California that summer probably benefited from their experience.

Back in Berkeley, we were able to realize our goal of finding some acid. At the time there was little or no quality control on what was available. The LSD of today is pharmaceutical grade compared with what was on the street then. There was no problem locating it; just about every other person you encountered on the “Ave.” had something to sell. We bought a couple of tabs of what looked like aspirin, and were aspirin, but with a tiny dot of some purple substance added in the center. This was the famous, legendary LSD, a couple hundred “mikes”—or micrograms—according to the hirsute stranger who had sold it to us, and who vouched for its purity and potency. We had no way to know, but it was the Summer of Love, man; surely no one would sell us bad stuff! In this case, we were lucky. The dealer was as good as his word, as we found out a few days later.

We did not go off half-cocked. We had read
The Psychedelic Experience
, the LSD user’s guide, and took it all very seriously. I wrote a long, rambling letter to my friend Gary back in Paonia ruminating on the death-rebirth experience, about how one must be prepared to face death and lose the fear of it if one is to be reborn. It was a long, soul-searching screed, but at least it showed I wasn’t taking the event lightly.

On the appointed day we made our way up to Tilden Park, a lovely spot in the hills above Berkeley, and found a secluded glen where we wouldn’t be disturbed. We dropped the acid and waited. I think we were expecting an inner journey filled with visions and cosmic insights. What we got was more like a regression to a primate state. All the trappings of civilization fell away, all our intellectual pretensions and expectations. We found ourselves in the prehistoric, pre-literate, pre-cognitive condition of ape-men. This included howling like monkeys, swinging from branches, beating hollow logs with sticks, and generally carrying on like wild men. It was a blast! The LSD seemed very friendly, and we became quite attuned to the surrounding nature; colors were intensified, and trees and plants and insects were all revealed in microscopic detail. It was a warm, sunny day, and we loved the feel of the sun on bare skin, loved the sensuality of moving, stretching, walking, and running. Having a body, being in a body, seemed like a wonderful thing. There was not a whiff of anxiety or fear. Our antics alternated with periods of rest when we’d sit in the shade, smoke a little cannabis, and rap. I don’t even remember what we discussed, but what we discovered were the first lessons of the first time with this gentle, wise teacher. And we discovered that she was feminine, and had a name: Alice D.

We came back off the mountain literally feeling reborn. It was a wonderful first-time experience, and we were grateful to the anonymous dealer, grateful to my brother for hosting us, just grateful to the universe for being alive. We got what we had come for, having crossed the threshold over to those who were “experienced.” We certainly hadn’t gone mad or suffered harm. In fact, we felt better than ever.

The reality check came quickly, and from an unexpected direction, thanks to that long letter I’d sent Gary back in Paonia a few days earlier. Acting in the foolish way that teenagers sometimes do, I didn’t address it to Gary, which would have been logical. Instead I addressed it, in a stilted way that made it seem more important, to “G. Edward,” a name Gary had used in a previous correspondence—and which turned out to be the way a long-dead uncle had written the name they shared. The local postmaster, seeing the letter, duly delivered it not to Gary but to his aged aunt. Such are the risks of small-town life, where everybody knows everybody. This good soul opened the letter and was, of course, appalled at my rant about love and death, rebirth and transformation. She lost no time in sharing her concern with Gary’s parents, who were even more alarmed; they apparently interpreted the letter as alluding to suicide. That was the farthest thing from my mind when I wrote it, but now I see how it could have been a red flag for them, taken out of context. They were already suspicious of me and took a dim view of my friendship with their son; this only confirmed their worst fears.

Gary’s parents contacted my parents, and the leash tightened. Tom and I were ordered to return to Paonia, and we did. My father and I predictably had a huge fight over the debacle. He was enraged and fearful, I think, that my preoccupations were more than a little unhealthy, if not indicative of a serious psychological problem. I tried to explain that the letter meant to be metaphorical, its discussion abstract. I was not about to commit suicide; in fact the LSD experience had left me cherishing life more than ever. But our father didn’t want to hear about that. Terence earned his share of opprobrium over the matter as well, for having allowed his little brother to stumble into harm’s way.

Chapter 20 - The Secret Encountered

The cloud of tension created by this incident lingered into the fall. I was starting my junior year, but most of my friends were seniors looking forward to graduation and escape. Communication with my father had reached a nadir. He was gone most of the week, so my mother was left to deal with a kid who was getting big and hairy. Though inside I felt like a gentle flower child seeking only to “groove” and avoid conflict, I apparently had trouble conveying that as I towered over my fragile, bird-like mom.

Following our return from California it had emerged that the scourge was not limited to Tom and me. Besides Gary, my friends Richard, Madeline, and Phil had been implicated in my letter as well. While our little group had peripheral members, the six of us formed its core. As ostracized rebels we certainly didn’t fit the profile of our peers, who were too preoccupied with football and other wholesome things like sex and drinking to be interested in something as horrible as “drugs.” Among our group of bad apples, I was the baddest of the bad, because I had brought this “garbage” from California and corrupted my friends.