The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (34 page)

While Deborah and I were enjoying our domestic bliss, I continued to take courses in anthropology as well as botany and plant physiology. Terence, still on the run in Asia, had wrapped up his butterfly hunting in Indonesia and was in Tokyo teaching English. We were corresponding more and had begun planning our trip to South America in search of the Secret. What the Secret was, however, we weren’t yet fully sure; the outlines of our quest emerged gradually. We knew it had something to do with DMT. The mystery of DMT became the siren song beckoning us to the Amazon. As I’ve described, the DMT experience is overwhelming and yet ephemeral, lasting only ten to fifteen minutes when smoked. We thought that if we could somehow remain in that “place” a little longer, we’d better understand what was going on. If we could find an orally active form of DMT that might be absorbed and eliminated more slowly, perhaps the high could be extended.

The role of certain DMT-containing admixture plants in giving ayahuasca its psychedelic kick was just beginning to be understood, thanks to papers by Ara DerMarderosian and others (1968) as well as Homer Pinkley (1969). Then we stumbled on a 1969 paper by the ethnobotanist R. E. Schultes in the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets entitled “
Virola
as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen,” an account of his work in the lower Colombian Amazonas among the Bora and Witoto tribes. Both peoples used a most interesting preparation known among the Witoto as
oo-koo-hé
. It was prepared from the sap of various species of the genus
Virola
, which belong to the nutmeg family. Reports on the composition of this sap in the phytochemical literature revealed that many species contained high levels of DMT and the related compound, 5-Methoxy-DMT; both were known to be powerful hallucinogens. The sap was used as a snuff by several other tribes in the Amazon, but the oral preparations were restricted to the few tribes whose ancestral home was in the Colombian Putumayo region, near the mission town of La Chorrera, on a tributary of the Putumayo, the Río Igara Paraná. According to Schultes, the effects manifested rapidly and were strong and bizarre.
Oo-koo-hé
had to be the Secret!

There were intimations in the paper that the Witoto used the substance to see and speak with the “little people.” Could these be the same cartoonish elves that we had encountered smoking synthetic DMT? This was our most solid lead yet; we determined we had to go to La Chorrera and find
oo-koo-hé
. That exotic preparation took on the aspect of the Holy Grail, the coveted aspiration that any obsessive quest needs to justify the effort and sacrifice.

That fall, a harbinger of what awaited me at La Chorrera arrived in a few puffs of acrid smoke. I had a small amount of DMT I broke out one night, asking Deborah to handle and light the pipe, which is how we did it, one at a time, so the person getting high didn’t have to deal with the pipe, which is quite difficult when you’re deep in the state. After I’d prepared the pipe, Deborah held it to my lips, and I took three or four enormous breaths in quick succession. With that my mind exploded with the force of the primordial Big Bang! This was the strongest DMT experience I’d ever had; I was literally smeared over the entire span of cosmic space-time. I felt like the edges of my mind had expanded to the boundaries of the universe; in fact, there was no difference, the universe and I were one. I had smoked in our apartment, but I had to get outside; I could not contain the energy. I leapt to my feet and raced downstairs into the cool autumn night. I must have presented quite a spectacle as I twirled around on the front lawn, gazing up at the starry heavens and howling with ecstasy! I had to be told about that part; I was unaware of doing so at the time. I was exalted, babbling, weeping, still fully in the grips of cosmic oneness. Gradually the effect faded, and I pulled myself together and climbed the stairs. But fragmented memories of the experience lingered with me for days as I struggled to make sense of what had happened.

By this time, late September, Terence and I had made plans to meet in Vancouver. Terence was sick of Tokyo, sick of the high-density urban environment, and more than sick of teaching English. He’d saved enough to pay for a ticket back to North America. Still an international fugitive, he had luckily met a fellow traveler in Tokyo who was able to furnish him with a false Australian passport. This document allowed him to return to Canada relatively free of scrutiny, though he didn’t yet dare use it to try penetrating the belly of the beast itself. Canada was close enough. The fact that a love interest of Terence’s, Dhyanna, had planned to be in Vancouver about that time was an added incentive for him. They had last seen each other months earlier in Bali, before Terence set out on his last expedition into the outer Indonesian archipelago.

I arrived at the Vancouver airport about a day after Terence had flown in from Tokyo. His bogus passport worked quite well, but things didn’t go quite so smoothly for me. The Canadian customs officers were kind, but not disposed to let me in. They assumed I was trying to avoid the draft like so many of my contemporaries. I had very little money and no real connections in Vancouver. They weren’t buying my story that I was there to meet my brother, and kept asking: “Why can’t he come to the States to see you? Is he a draft dodger, too?” I couldn’t exactly tell them he was an international drug smuggler wanted on four continents. Instead, I stammered out some story about how he had fled the country to avoid the draft, and had found his way to Tokyo because he needed to earn some money—which was at least partly true.

I had the Vancouver phone number of the friend of the helpful Australian who had arranged the false passport for Terence. By prearrangement we had agreed that Terence would go to this person’s house and await my call so we could hook up somewhere once I’d cleared the border. The customs officials made repeated calls to the number, but no one there seemed to know of any traveler arriving from Tokyo; Terence was nowhere to be found. About the time they were getting ready to put me on a plane back to the States, someone called and said that, yes, apparently someone had arrived from Tokyo as there was a suitcase in the front hall with a Tokyo tag on it. Apparently that was good enough; the officials agreed to let me enter for a few days. Like most Canadians during the Vietnam War, they were probably sympathetic at heart to draft dodgers. I don’t know if they ever really bought my story, but it didn’t matter.

Terence by this time had secured lodging in one of the sleaziest hotels in Vancouver’s Gastown District, where I finally tracked him down. Today Gastown is a very chichi area of nightclubs and fancy restaurants; back then it was where you went if you were an alcoholic living on welfare, a heroin addict, or otherwise down on your luck. Terence didn’t have a lot of money, but I think his standards had seriously eroded during his months of travel in the jungle backwaters. Our room stank of vomit, and the floor seethed with thousands of cockroaches; waves of them would vanish back into the nooks and corners with a dry clicking sound when the lights were turned on. I didn’t relish the prospect of staying in such a place, but Terence seemed unperturbed. Besides, we had some hash; and we both agreed, with hash we could put up with anything.

It was our first face-to-face meeting since we had said goodbye in Snowmass in the waning summer of 1968; there was a lot of catching up to do. In the interim, I had graduated from high school and relocated to Aspen, the bust had gone down, Mom had gotten cancer, and we were caught up in plans for our trip to South America. The small amount of hash we had was quickly consumed, and we needed more. We walked from Gastown across the Burrard Bridge into Kitsilano, a beachfront community that was the nearest thing to an open-air drug market I’ve ever seen. Every few houses, someone was sitting on the stoop hawking hashish, cannabis, and a smorgasbord of psychedelics, calling out like carnival barkers as we strolled by. It didn’t take long to renew our supply, and we returned to the hotel.

The guy who had arranged Terence’s false passport had connections into a whole scene in Vancouver, a communal household inhabited by a colorful bunch of freaks. None of these people appeared to have jobs. They were creative types, and their chief activities seemed to be making art, making music, and partying. The pubs in Gastown made the latter easy. By law, no food was served, but a glass of beer cost twenty cents, so for two or three bucks you could drink all night and get thoroughly hammered, which we did.

After a few nights of that I was ready to leave. The customs people had made it clear that I should only stay a few days, and my time was growing short. Besides, I missed my Deborah, who was alone back in Boulder, and I had to get back for my classes. Dhyanna had surfaced about the same time, and Terence, clearly in a lustful frenzy, could hardly wait to get her alone and tear her clothes off. From the looks of her, I didn’t blame him.

In any case, our plans had been set. I had brought many of the key references on
oo-koo-hé
and other hallucinogens we might encounter, including psilocybin mushrooms and
Banisteriopsis caapi
, the vine used in ayahuasca. These went into an accordion file of reprints we intended to take on our journey. After poring over the documents, our mission became clear that La Chorrera was indeed to be our destination, and
oo-koo-hé
our goal. I mentioned earlier how the author William Burroughs had made virtually the same journey in 1953 in search of ayahuasca, or
yagé
, as it is known in the Putumayo. Burroughs had coined it “the final fix.” We admired Burrough’s work and saw his account of that trip in
The Yage Letters
as both a call to adventure and an augury of our own success. If a junkie could travel to the Amazon to find
yagé
and survive to tell the tale, surely we could do no worse. Failure was not a part of what we understood to be our destiny. It was in that filthy Vancouver hotel room that we first coined the name of our visionary band, known thereafter as the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

Chapter 28 - Our Mother’s Death

Over the weeks of early autumn, our mother’s condition steadily deteriorated. All her chemotherapy and radiation treatments had led her inevitably to that depressing threshold when the doctors say, “There’s nothing more we can do.” We all knew that was coming, even our father, who hadn’t wanted to admit that the end was near.

The message arrived on a gray and drizzly day in late October, delivered to my door by a fellow CU student from Paonia. I didn’t have a telephone at the time, so her parents asked her to pass on the word that my mother was sinking fast. It was time to get to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. I’d been expecting something like this, but it is one thing to expect and another to hear. I remember staring out the rain-streaked window. “Everything is dying,” I said to Deborah, “Mother will be dead soon.” There was little she could say to comfort me as I gathered my things and left for the airport.

By the time I landed in Grand Junction, where my father met me, it was late evening, around nine or ten. We went directly to the hospital and were ushered to Mother’s bedside. The lights had been turned down; in the shadows I could barely make out her tiny form huddled under the covers. I was appalled to see how shrunken she had become since I had said goodbye to her in Paonia before returning to Boulder. There is nothing pretty or uplifting or in any way inspiring about a death from cancer; it ravages the body, and eventually renders the victim into a hollow husk. This it had done to Mom, my beautiful mother, the prettiest girl in all of Paonia. When I approached the bed, she opened her eyes; she had been sleeping or dozing, it wasn’t clear which. She could not speak; she was too far into an opiate fog to do that. I covered her withered, shrunken hands and kissed her gently on the brow, whispered something meaningless to let her know I was there. I don’t know if she was even conscious enough to know I was there; she made a whimpering sound but no wordscame out. I was crying; I tried through my tears to tell her that I loved her, and that I was sorry for all the ways I had hurt her.

She managed to say something like “humph” or “oomph.” I don’t know what it meant. It sounded to my ears, and in my grief, like a rejection of what I had expressed to her. It was too late now, too late to fix those wrongs. I was overcome by grief, and guilt, I begged for her forgiveness; but all that came back was “humph” or “oomph.” I broke down, all efforts to hold back the tears were abandoned, and I had to be led out of the room. That was the last time I saw her. By this time it was late. I was tired from the trip, and Dad took me back to the hotel room that he had rented a few blocks from the hospital. He suggested I try to get some sleep; he was going back to the hospital to be with Mom, and would come and get me in a few hours. I could not fall asleep. Images from childhood, images of Mom and the times we had shared kept appearing behind my closed eyelids. Finally I must have fallen into a troubled sleep, for the next thing I knew Dad was shaking me awake, saying, “Mother’s gone.” And so she was, and so she has been, gone for more than forty years. The day dawned. It was October 25, 1970.

It was bad enough for us to endure the tragedy of Mom’s death at the young age of fifty-seven, but our grieving was complicated by another drama. While Mom was on her deathbed, Terence was keeping vigil, in close touch via telephone from Victoria, British Columbia, where he had relocated after my visit a few weeks earlier. He was prepared to risk crossing the border on his false passport in order to reach her bedside, and by the time Mom passed he’d already begun the first leg of his trip and was airborne somewhere between Vancouver and Los Angeles. Dad feared the law was tracking Terence and would pounce on him the moment he got off the plane in Grand Junction. Now that Mom had passed, there was no point for him to complete the journey; we needed to get word to him to abort the trip and return to Canada.