The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (35 page)

Back then, before the cell-phone era, this was a considerable challenge. What followed was a series of frantic long-distance calls, first to the airline in Vancouver, who confirmed that he had boarded the plane and would have a layover in L.A. before he flew on to Salt Lake City and then Grand Junction. If possible we needed to get word to him on one of his stops and tell him to turn around. We succeeded in contacting the airline literally as the plane was pushing back from the gate in L.A. Our message was clear: “Do not let him leave on that plane!” Remarkably, they complied, directed the plane back to the gate and let Terence disembark. Even more remarkably, they didn’t ask many questions. In those days, security was almost laughably lax. Today, not only would the airline have refused to divulge any information about a passenger; the mere fact that we were inquiring would have focused attention on Terence, blowing his cover and turning things very ugly, indeed.

In retrospect, I think my father’s paranoia about Terence getting caught was overblown. In the overall scheme of things, he was small potatoes; yes, he was a fugitive, yes, Interpol probably had him listed somewhere, but I doubt they had the time or resources, or even the interest, in following him that closely. The whole drama that played out just after our mother passed may have been more about taking our father’s mind off that fact than about warning Terence. Still, I have to credit Dad; even in his hour of deepest grief he still cared enough about Terence, despite their differences, to take extraordinary steps to protect him.

The four or five days following Mom’s death were a blur. We packed up and checked out of the hotel and headed back to Paonia. “Some doors you never want to open again,” my father said as we left the hotel room. It was true; this was the end of a long and sad chapter in our lives. At least Mom was no longer suffering. It was a cold comfort.

The funeral was held at the Catholic church in Paonia. Relatives came from near and far for the funeral, including my Aunt Amelia, my father’s sister, who drove from Denver, where she was a pastoral counselor at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Many in the community loved my mother, and her funeral was well attended. She had done much for the town’s elderly and sick, checking on shut-ins and widows, simply because it was the right thing to do. Now her friends and those to whom she had been kind came to pay their respects. Only Terence was missing. It was a time of great sadness and grieving for me. I was depressed and felt helpless at the loss. I was nineteen, a little more than a month shy of my twentieth birthday, but I didn’t feel like a young adult. I felt like a child who had lost his mother, which is what I was. I was utterly bereft.

After Mom had been lowered into her final resting place, I returned to Boulder, driven back by Amelia and her companion, a nun who had accompanied her to Paonia. More drama! I was petrified that they would stop and come up to the apartment and discover Deborah there. Until then, I’d kept Deborah’s presence in my life a secret. On the way back, I placed an urgent phone call to Hans and Nancy in their apartment downstairs from ours, asking them to keep Deborah in their place until I arrived, which they did. In the end, Amelia let me off in front of the house and didn’t come upstairs. I have to wonder if perhaps she knew what was going on and didn’t want to make a scene. We were all exhausted from the stressful days just past and tired from the trip over the mountains, so she may have just wanted to get home.

I remember little about the remainder of the semester. I was depressed and sad, and Deborah’s simple and undemanding affection did little to lift my spirits. Terence was still in Victoria, and our plans to go to South America remained on track. His recent love interest had by then moved on, but he’d been joined by his friend Vanessa, a fellow student in the Tussman program whom I mentioned earlier, and “Dave,” a “gay meditator” from upstate New York, as Terence characterizes him in
True Hallucinations
. Dave had been living on the margins in Berkeley when Terence met him one day while both were hitchhiking. He arrived in Victoria with a newly minted degree in anthropology from Syracuse University. The three of them had rented a clapboard house in a quiet neighborhood and had settled in to plan the expedition. They had shared a mescaline trip a couple of weeks after our mother had died that Terence described as “full of elf-chatter.” Swept by intimations of the adventure ahead, Dave and Vanessa were almost as much in thrall to the notion of our quest as we were. The brotherhood now numbered four.

It was a time of rapid change for all of us. With Mother gone, I felt I had no reason to remain in school. Terence and I had been discussing the ideas that were behind our quest for well over a year. John Parker’s visit to Boulder the previous fall had only fanned the flames of curiosity. If ever there was going to be a time to set out in search of the Secret, it seemed, that time was now. Somehow, we convinced our father that it would be OK for me to go off with Terence to the Colombian jungle on what we presented as a butterfly and plant collecting expedition. Even today, I have no idea why he let me go, given that Terence had proven such a loose cannon, but for some reason he did. My father also agreed to continue sending me the small stipend I’d been getting while in school; this would be mailed to me monthly in care of the American Embassy in Bogotá. He was either incredibly trusting and open-minded or so depressed by Mom’s death that he no longer cared what I did. In some ways, I think he was also a little jealous. As a youth, my father, craving adventure, had been too sickly to act on his dreams. Then the war started, and his combat experiences had afforded him more adventure than he’d ever bargained for. After that he became much more cautious in life, but perhaps his regret over missed opportunities, and a certain nostalgia for how things might have been, still tugged at him. I think he understood, on some level, that this was my chance; I was due for my rite of passage, and this was going to be it. I was grateful to be setting off on this adventure with his blessing.

There was still the matter of what to do with Deborah. We were still very much in love. I did not want our relationship to end, but clearly she couldn’t come with me. She was still a runaway, and our situation was very shaky. We had discussed this several times over that autumn, and finally I convinced her that she should return home and get back in school. For her to remain on the lam, loose on the streets even a place as civilized as Boulder, was not a viable option. She had been lucky to meet someone who had taken her in and protected her. There was no guarantee that whomever she met next would treat her as well. I swore that I loved her, that I would wait for her to finish school and that we would get back together; but for now, going home was the best thing for her, and for me.

I sincerely meant it all; I did love her. But I also felt I had no choice but to pursue the adventure that beckoned. Finally, with some help, I persuaded Deborah to call her older brother. Without disclosing much, she told him where she was and that she wanted to return. Her brother agreed to drive out and get her. When he and his wife finally arrived, the meeting proved unexpectedly pleasant. They were decent folks; her brother was simply grateful to have his little sister back, and happy to see she’d been well cared for rather than exploited or forced into prostitution. They gave no hints of being angry with me. They could see, for one thing, that our affection for each other was real.

And I did care about her. I was sure we’d get back together once she had finished school. As it turned out, that did not come to pass, and in the years that followed I paid a steep price for loving Deborah. When we finally bade farewell on that snowy day in December my heart was bleeding.

Christmas that year was a cheerless affair. Dad and I were both still grieving over Mom’s death, and the last place we wanted to be at Christmas was in Paonia. We ended up going to spend the holiday with Tru and Iris, Dad’s old war buddy and his wife, in Lancaster, California—the couple who had taken Terence in for his last year of high school. They suggested that I take the bus to Disneyland for an overnight trip. I immediately agreed, but Disneyland was the last thing on my mind. I saw it as an opportunity to go visit Deborah, by then resettled in her hometown. I managed to time the bus trip just right to spend a few hours with her and make it back on schedule so no one in Lancaster was the wiser about where I’d actually been.

The trip gave me a chance to meet Deborah’s parents, which was necessary if I was serious about my commitment to her. Like her brother, they, too, were surprisingly friendly, almost more so than Deborah herself. She wasn’t unfriendly, exactly, but I think she’d had time to reflect on her adventures and was sobered by them. The cracks in our relationship were already forming, which I sensed but didn’t want to admit to myself. As things turned out, I would have been far better off had I realized that and moved on. But the Secret lay ahead, and I didn’t spend much time mulling over the uneasiness I felt after the two of us parted.

Chapter 29 - A Narrow Passage: 1971

John Brown, Puerto Leguizamo, 1971. (Photo by S. Hartley)

Shortly after the new year dawned, I returned to Boulder and stayed with Hans and Nancy for a few days. They had plans to visit Lexington, Kentucky, so I went along for the ride, saving myself a few bucks on airfare. By then Terence and the others were already waiting for me in Bogotá. My journey began in earnest when I said goodbye to my friends at the airport in Lexington and boarded a plane for Miami.

In Miami, I caught a connecting flight on Aeropesca Colombia, a cheap if not exactly safe airline that was later pulled from the skies. “Fish Air” lived up to its name by shuttling fish between Barranquilla, Colombia and Florida. On return flights, Aeropesca offered passage to a few, like me, who were poor or desperate enough to risk it. The ticket to Barranquilla and on to Bogotá cost sixty dollars. The plane was a four-engine prop job, a Viscount 745D. There were no amenities; the seats were made of aluminum, cushions not included, and the interior smelled of rotten fish. Filthy water sloshed back and forth over the floor, and I don’t have to tell you no pretzels were offered. I think we cruised about a thousand feet above the Caribbean most of the way; at least the moonlit waves beneath me looked awfully close.

After disembarking in Bogotá after that hellish and freezing flight, I took a cab to the little pension in the city where I was to rendezvous with my companions. It wasn’t hard to tell which room was theirs; the smell of cannabis in the corridor gave me a pretty good clue. Colombia had just legalized possession of small amounts of weed for “personal consumption,” their conception of which turned out to be quite liberal. It was OK to possess nearly a kilo, and Terence and company had already stocked up on potent Santa Marta Gold, anticipating it might be hard to come by in the Lower Amazonas. We might not have brought the right equipment or enough medicines or food, but we made damn sure we had plenty of dope.

At this point, the brotherhood consisted of Terence, Vanessa, Dave, and me. A day or so after my arrival, we were joined by a fifth, the young woman known in
True Hallucinations
as “Ev.” She and her boyfriend, Solo, had met my brother and the others on their side trip to San Augustín, a hippie destination known for its pre-Colombian ruins and sculptures. Ev and Solo belonged to a radical sect of fruitarians and dressed in white robes and white rubber boots. They eschewed any food of animal origin, and any of vegetable origin for that matter, except fruits that could be harvested without impact on the plant. Even at that, they insisted on using a wooden knife for slicing, never a metal one, lest the blade destroy the fruit’s etheric body. This seemed a bit over the line to me in terms of hippy-dippy foolishness. To be fair, Terence had convinced the rest of us to dress for the jungle in white linen, his outfit of choice while hunting butterflies in outer Indonesia; but compared to Ev and Solo, we were hidebound rationalists. Their oddities went far beyond their eccentric dietary practices, as we later discovered. In San Augustín, Ev and Solo were in the process of breaking up. After they had, Ev drifted back to Bogotá and fell in with us.

Terence and Vanessa had been on-again, off-again lovers over the previous few years, but they weren’t together at the time. When it became clear that Ev was available, Terence implemented a quick seduction (in the same room where the rest of us were sleeping, or trying to) and thus she became the fifth member of the brotherhood, and the only one who spoke much Spanish. Vanessa had no problem with the reconfiguration as far as I could tell. I wasn’t too happy to see our group expanding beyond manageable proportions, but who was I to object? I was the youngest and in some sense the one most along for the ride. Besides, I could see that having someone along who could speak the language would be an asset. Ev seemed pleasant enough, so, why not?

Bogotá in January is cold and wet; though the city is in the tropics, its high elevation gives it, as Burroughs famously noted, “a damp chill that gets inside you like the inner cold of junk sickness.” Fortunately, we were only there a few days. The hostel we’d been staying in was unheated and literally a fleabag; we had all collected our share of bites and welcomed the chance to move to Ev’s apartment after her liaison began with Terence. We were there only a couple of nights and then departed for Florencia, the capital city of Colombia’s department of Caquetá.