The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (33 page)

We did not realize then, at the end of May, that there was no realistic hope for a cure. Dad was utterly shattered, but also completely determined to make sure Mom got the benefit of whatever modern medicine could bring to bear on this terrible disease, costs be damned. Dad was fighting to save the love of his life. I was there with him, fighting to save my mother, so long neglected, so wounded by her children. There was no question of staying in Boulder or finding work elsewhere that summer. I needed and wanted to be at home.

What followed was an endless series of trips to Colorado Springs where Mom was given chemotherapy and radiation treatments. That’s what was available in those days, and it’s dismaying how little progress there has been in forty-two years. The radical, debilitating treatments that were applied then are not that different from those used today. They cause severe fatigue, make your hair fall out, and destroy your immune system. The treatments are torture for the person getting them, and a great distress for the loved ones who must watch someone they love suffer so much. Bone cancer itself is extremely painful. Mom never complained. She never said she was in pain, though she must have been. She had severe nausea from the chemotherapy, and I wanted to get her some cannabis to help control the nausea. It was just beginning to be recognized that cannabis could help control chemo-induced nausea and pain. For once, Dad was actually open to the idea that it might help. He was ready to try anything. It was my mother who nixed the idea, mostly, I think, because she didn’t want to offend him. I felt a lot of guilt over what had happened. I understood I hadn’t caused her cancer, but I did feel that the stress I’d caused her during the hashish caper might have compromised her immune system and made it harder to fight off the cancer. This wasn’t rational; she’d undoubtedly had cancer for months before she’d broken her ankle. Nevertheless there was still a feeling that had I been a better son and caused her less worry things might have turned out differently.

So Ahriman and I returned to Paonia and prepared to settle in for what was sure to be a glum summer. By this time, my friend Craze had relocated to Boulder and needed temporary quarters, so I sublet him my apartment after a promise he’d vacate it when I returned for school.

I’d been in Paonia for about a month when my friend Tom, who had been working construction for his brother in Denver, also showed up. His brother’s contract had ended, meaning no job, so Tom decided to see what work he could find around Paonia. I was delighted by this news. We got along well, and he had ready access to good drugs, thanks to the contacts he’d made selling hash. I had few other friends left in town, but it seemed the summer might not be as slow as I had feared.

Tom also had a new girlfriend. By the time I met Deborah she was a teenage runaway. She’d been living with her folks in California near a penitentiary where her father worked as a guard. Like a lot of young people back then, she was in active rebellion against her parents, who were strict fundamentalists. She’d been visiting a cousin in Denver when Tom and a friend had picked them up at an amusement park. The girls were looking for fun and excitement, and Tom and his companion were happy to provide it. It was the perfect concatenation of desire and opportunity. Deborah didn’t want to return to her repressive parents; Tom was interested basically in casual sex, and she was willing. So Deborah went on the lam and lit out for the Western Slope with her new lover. Tom couldn’t show up at his parents’ home with a runaway girl in tow, so they established a remote camp on Hubbard Creek, a few miles past the spot where we’d conducted our psychedelic fishing trips in the fall of 1967.

I first met Deborah when she and Tom made a trip into town and dropped by to smoke a bowl. My mother, I believe, was in Colorado Springs for the first of her radiation treatments, and my father may have been in Delta or Grand Junction playing golf with his friends, as he did most weekends. Deborah was a hippie chick: small and slender, almost scrawny, with long strawberry-blonde hair; she even had blonde eyelashes, and the reddish complexion and freckles typical of redheads. She was not stunningly beautiful; she was merely pretty, and clearly vulnerable. My first impression was that there wasn’t a thought in her head. She was on the run, and Tom was only too happy to contribute to her delinquency. I could fault Tom for being an opportunist, but in ways it was a mutual exploitation. When we met that first time I found her attractive, but she was Tom’s lady, and I wasn’t about to infringe.

That changed a few weeks later. I was making periodic trips to Colorado Springs to be with my mother during her treatments, which weren’t helping. My father and I, however, weren’t ready to admit what was grimly obvious. I was in denial; I didn’t want to think about it. We were fortunate, however, in that one of my father’s best friends, a fellow salesman for Central Electric, lived in Colorado Springs and had offered to let my mother stay in his home. This was an excellent and kindly gesture, given how debilitated and fatigued my mother was much of the time. Making frequent trips back and forth to Paonia would have been extremely hard on her.

Around mid-August, I returned from one of my stays in Colorado Springs and made the trek up Hubbard Creek to see Tom and Deborah. Upon arriving, I quickly realized the bloom was off the rose. Deborah’s prolonged stay in the wilderness had taken its toll. She looked even scrawnier than when I’d met her, as if she wasn’t eating well, and was covered with scabs, bruises, and bug bites. Tom, working on various jobs, had grown accustomed to leaving her alone, sometimes for days at a time. As a runaway, she had little recourse but to put up with it. For his part, Tom was growing tired of her. He grumbled to me that she had nothing to say, and she didn’t know how to cook. Having someone to cook forhim was important, something he expected in a woman, but Deborah was“lecherously lazy” as he put it. In his view, women existed to provide sex, to cook, and to keep house, not necessarily in that order. There was no equality in his relationship with Deborah, let alone love or tenderness. For Tom, it was a relationship of convenience that had grown inconvenient.

Deborah could sense this and the situation was tense; she was trapped. I felt bad for her in her obvious distress. My attitudes toward women were perhaps not that much more refined than Tom’s at the time, but I could empathize with someone’s pain. I felt Deborah’s plight and, yes, a strong sexual attraction to her. That was not blunted when I rose from my sleeping bag early the next morning and spied her bathing, naked, in the stream a few yards away. I averted my eyes, but couldn’t help an occasional glance. I said nothing to her about this, much less to Tom; but in a brief glance when my eyes had met hers, I knew I had to “rescue” her.

The opportunity came about a week later. Tom had gone to Grand Junction on a job for a few days, leaving Deborah alone at the camp with barely enough food, and a gun. I knew this was my chance. I started up to Hubbard Creek one moonless night. It was hard to find the trail in the dark, and I hadn’t brought a flashlight. I went crashing through the forest, making a lot of noise. Finally I saw the glimmer of a campfire; then I saw Deborah, standing in the clearing, terrified and holding the gun.

“Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “It’s me!” She lowered the gun as I stepped into the firelight. She was immensely relieved, though not as relieved as I was. It was the second time in the past year that I’d nearly gotten shot.

She was no doubt happy to have any company, but especially happy to have mine. We sat by the fire and smoked some weed, and then some cigarettes, and talked awhile. I expressed my desire and attraction for her, and told her I abhorred the way Tom was treating her and that I intended to help her. One thing led to another, as these things will, and we soon were in her sleeping bag with our clothes off making love. Thus began an attachment between us that would last for years. Whatever Deborah’s faults—and she had her share, as I would learn—she enjoyed sex. Her childlike enthusiasm and seemingly uncomplicated emotions were just what I needed at that moment in my life. Afterward, I promised to get her out of there. She could go to Boulder, I said, and stay with the friend who was living in my apartment. I’d be arriving in about ten days to start the new semester. The next day I took her to Delta and gave her the bus fare to Boulder. I also contacted Craze and let him know what was coming his way. I trusted him enough to believe he’d look after her.

I expected an unpleasant confrontation with Tom when he found out I’d stolen his girlfriend. In fact, I was worried that he would beat the hell out of me, which he easily could have done. But instead he was relieved. He’d gotten tired of her and was wondering whether to send her back to California or perhaps even abandon her, he said, although I doubt the latter would have happened; Tom might have been a Neanderthal but he wasn’t a monster. In any event, it seemed I’d neatly solved his problem.

The situation was a lot more complicated when I showed up in Boulder. It turned out Craze had immediately pounced on Deborah, and she’d given in. I guess you could say her boundaries were loosely defined. Then again, what are you going to do when you are a desirable and naive waif dependent on the kindness of strangers? Their brief fling quickly ended. All Craze had to do was to be his usual weird self and that put Deborah off. By the time I arrived, she’d taken refuge next door with Hans and Nancy.

I wasn’t angry with her, but I was furious with Craze, and not only because he had moved in on my new girlfriend. He also refused to give up my apartment! But another unit had just opened up, and better yet it was bigger. Deborah and I were soon installed in Number 9. Craze remained in Number 7, but he appeared to have been neutralized.

Part Two - Into the Abyss

(photo by S. Hartley)

Chapter 27 - The Brotherhood Forms

The semester I spent with Deborah, the fall of 1970, was one of the happiest times of my life. Even though my mother was dying, even though there were auguries of the peculiar events that would overtake us a few months later, it was a wonderful, emotionally rich time. Even now I look back on it with fondness, despite the pain I’d experience as a consequence of loving Deborah over the next seven years. But that lay in the future. At the time, our little apartment was a blissful refuge. Deborah was not emotionally complex; she really loved me, in a simple way, and I loved her back. I enjoyed introducing her to books and ideas. She was not an intellectual, had never really been exposed to any intellectual stimulation, though I discovered she was far from stupid. I treated her well, and I felt a responsibility to protect her, to keep her safe—and to keep her runaway status hidden.

Since then I have wondered about the ethics of what I did. I was motivated by compassion and love for her and, yes, probably some possessiveness. I was good to her, and she was good to me. For both of us, perhaps, our relationship was a sexual awakening. Deborah loved sex in a way that I have rarely encountered, and I was only too happy to oblige. She was “always up for it,” she told me, and we enthusiastically practiced, as often as we could manage. At that age, one seems to have endless time and energy for sex; how much that has diminished as I have aged is a bit depressing, but I suppose that is the natural order of things.

Besides making love, Deborah and I really enjoyed tripping together. There was some good mescaline around (which was probably really MDA), and what on the street was called “woodrose acid” though I don’t know if it was actually extracted from Hawaiian baby woodrose or if this was marketing hype. Whatever it was, it was excellent, and we took it a few times. And real Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds were also available, through floral shops in Hawaii. We didn’t know the proper dosage, and one sunny Saturday we each took about twenty-five seeds and headed up Boulder Canyon toward Nederland for what proved to be another psychedelic misadventure.

Hawaiian baby woodrose,
Argyreia nervosa
, contains lysergic acid derivatives, some of which have vasoconstrictive effects not unlike the toxic ergot alkaloids. The prudent dose is actually six to ten seeds, and no more than twelve, so we’d taken about twice that. We were soon having cardiovascular symptoms, difficulties breathing and what felt like a racing pulse. On top of that we were fully loaded, and the physical effects were making me paranoid as well as fearful. We walked into town and went into a bar, where we tried calling Hans to pick us up, but he was out. People were giving us funny looks, or so we thought. I was fairly sure we were maintaining our cool, but it was impossible to know. Worried that someone would call the cops, we headed for the highway and caught a ride as soon as we put our thumbs out. The nice folks shared a joint with us in their car, and we made it safely home.

I’d later try Hawaiian woodrose seeds on several occasions, at more reasonable doses. Doses of eight to ten ground seeds produced a smooth, long-lasting, psychedelic high, not unlike about 100 mikes of acid. At that dose nausea is mild and transient, and there are no cardiovascular effects. Surprisingly, there’s no record that the seeds were ever used traditionally as a psychedelic. There are eleven species of
Argyreia
native to India, and presumably they are all similarly high in alkaloids, but there is no record of their shamanic or recreational use in India’s cultures. In light of its effects, this particular psychedelic appears to be somewhat problematic, which probably explains why it has not become popular. The seeds can be legally obtained, but there are safer and more satisfying natural psychedelics out there.