The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (47 page)

Their stay at Villa Gloria, as the place was called, was an idyllic time for Terence and Ev, a chance to rest, eat good food, and enjoy the pleasant company. Terence had a quiet place to work on his writings, which by then were coalescing into a book. He also had a receptive audience for his outlandish and captivating raps. I wasn’t there, of course, but I picture something like what I’d seen in Berkeley where similar scenes played out many times. As for Luis Eduardo, he’d never been exposed to such ideas, let alone to the Santa Marta gold that Terence had brought with him. A former seminary student, Luis Eduardo was leaning more toward Marxism and atheism at the time, but those long talks at Villa Gloria may have encouraged him to revisit an earlier fascination with the mysteries of existence. By the time he returned to Europe, his academic priorities had shifted to physics, chemistry, botany, and neuroscience. He later earned a Ph.D. from the Institute of Comparative Religion at Stockholm University, where his thesis focused on the study of
vegetalismo
—the use of ayahuasca in shamanic practices among the mestizo populations of Peru (Luna 1986). Eduardo is now considered the world’s authority on the ethnography of ayahuasca. I didn’t meet him until 1981, but since then he has been one of my closest colleagues and friends. Following his fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon in 1982, we collaborated, with Neil Towers, on a review of the botany and chemistry of ayahuasca admixture plants that was published in 1986 in the journal
America
Indigena
(McKenna, Luna, and Towers 1986) and later reprinted in a collection edited by R.E. Schultes entitled
Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline
(1995).

Terence and Ev eventually made their way back via Bogotá and Mexico City, Terence’s false passport again serving him well, and landed at my door at the end of January. Or rather “our” door: Beverley and I had been living together for a few weeks. Though she joined me in welcoming them, she might not have been sure what to make of these two gypsy seekers blown up on a southerly wind. I, of course, was delighted to see them. The core of the brotherhood was together again.

Terence’s dubious legal status made it necessary for him to keep a low profile. He and Ev found menial jobs cutting roses at one of the flower businesses near Longmont. They got up early to catch the bus to work and spent all day at their easy task; each night the dope came out and the conversation flowed as we reflected on the previous year and tried to sort out what it all meant. It was a time of bonding and camaraderie for us, but not for Beverley, who felt left out. I must admit I didn’t help matters, partly because of my ambivalence toward our relationship, which I attribute to the sense of emotional unavailability I felt—and may have cultivated, in my attachment to a series of likewise unavailable love interests.

The simple fact was that, instead of getting their own place, Terence and Ev had moved into an apartment that was too small for four people. Ev, who wasn’t apt to be friendly toward any woman who got near Terence at the time, turned Alpha female and made it uncomfortable for Beverly to stick around. After a number of painful episodes, Beverly decided to move out. I behaved quite badly during this episode in not sticking up for her, and yet our friendship somehow survived. Though she certainly had her doubts about Terence, she might have seen something worthy of emulation in his intrepid character. I thought of her as a girl who was afraid of things like bugs, who had no truck for camping or roughing it in any way. But after graduation she went on to work for various relief organizations in some of the most challenging places on Earth: Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Congo, among other countries. You never know what reserves of strength may reside in a person, especially in that untested phase of life.

Over those weeks, Terence and I began collaborating on the manuscript he’d begun, then entitled
Shamanic Investigations
. We even had a few copies bound at a local bindery that specialized in university theses. It was satisfying to see the large volume with its many hand-drawn charts and graphs fixed between hard covers. At least something had resulted from our adventures beyond madness and bizarre ideas. We had no prospects for publication and were not really looking for them.

After a few months clipping roses, Terence and Ev began talking about a return to Berkeley. Before then, however, Terence had to deal with his legal issues. I’m not sure what inquiries were made or how the matter proceeded to be so easily resolved; I do remember that Terence and our father went to the Federal Building in Denver accompanied by a lawyer. As Terence later told it, he announced at the courthouse that he was there to turn himself in, but nobody seemed to know what he was talking about. After a search, someone found the paperwork and had him fill out a few forms and schedule a court appearance. It was all politely bureaucratic—hardly the reception an international fugitive might have expected after eluding capture for nearly three years.

Once the case was settled, I believe he got three years unsupervised probation in return for telling them “everything he knew” about his hashish suppliers. Terence’s response was a long, rambling account with references to an auto body shop in a back alley in Bombay, as I recall. When I read the statement months later, I assumed he’d made it all up, but it apparently satisfied the authorities. To the best of my knowledge, the whole mess ended there; he never heard another word about it.

Terence and Ev moved to Berkeley early in the summer of 1972. They found a small home only a block or so from the Telegraph House where Terence had lived before his travels began in October 1967. His life soon fell into a familiar routine. He reconnected with some of his butterfly contacts, including a wealthy Japanese broker who had subsidized Terence’s collecting efforts in Indonesia while he was on the run. Before long, new specimens to mount began arriving in batches via the mail, creating a great job he could do stoned, at home, and in the presence of company. After I moved to Berkeley a year later, I spent many an hour in the upstairs loft where Terence worked. Various characters from our eclectic and peculiar circle would stop by for a smoke and a bit of raving. By then Terence had filled a formerly neglected garden out back with various psychoactive species, including a riot of morning glories dotted with a few datura bushes along the fence. He was back in his element.

Terence’s departure for California marked a new stage in the slow bifurcation of our lives. Another familial shift during the summer of 1972 was our father’s remarriage. Lois, a woman from Delta he’d met through his golfing friends, looked a bit like our mother, though the similarities ended there. Dad had been lonely after Mom’s death and was slowly sinking into alcoholism and despair. I was happy when he found a nice person to live with, and, on balance, I’d say his second marriage benefited him. But the union wasn’t an entirely happy one. Nobody could have replaced our mother in our father’s eyes, though I think he unfairly expected that of Lois. She may have resented him for putting that on her, and rightly so; he may have resented her for not being the love of his life. They remained together twenty-five years until my father’s death.

The undergraduate degree I completed in the spring of 1973 was in a thing called “distributed studies,” meaning my coursework had been “distributed” over several areas rather than concentrated in one or two majors. My primary emphasis was in biology with secondary specialties in anthropology and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science. It was a degree that qualified me for almost nothing except graduate school—and certainly not a job.

Nevertheless, my education, post-La Chorrera, was far from a waste; I valued it for helping me make sense of our experiences there and for directing me toward my later studies. I’ve mentioned how my trip to South America left me eager to learn more about science and scientific thinking, if only so I could more honestly reject the scientific worldview. I threw myself into biological studies for the remainder of my undergraduate years, thanks largely to a gifted mentor, Charles Norris, a biology professor who encouraged my interest in the philosophy of science. Under his guidance, I designed my own curriculum and independent-study courses. Instead of rejecting science, I found myself transfixed by the latest thinking in theoretical biology. The works that influenced me included
The Phenomenon of Life
(1966) by the philosopher Han Jonas;
General Systems Theory
(1968) by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy;
Hierarchical Structures
(1969), edited by Scottish thinker Lancelot Law Whyte; the chemist Ilya Prigogine’s ideas about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative structures, and self-organizing systems; and the neurosurgeon Karl Pribram’s holographic model of certain brain processes. Terence was conducting his own inquiry into these and other works. In sharing our insights, we were amazed to discover a conceptual framework in which some of the “crazy” ideas that emerged at La Chorrera seemed not so crazy after all.

Of all these new influences, the work of Alfred North Whitehead had the greatest impact on us. Whitehead’s “organismic” philosophy provided a logically rigorous metaphysics that seemed not only consistent with the current scientific understanding of reality but also fit many of our own speculations. Whitehead’s notions about “process” and the “ingress,” or entrance, of novel events into reality greatly appealed to us. By then, the timewave was on its way to becoming a complex metaphysical system in itself; Whitehead’s concepts seemed a way to describe, and even quantify, its principles. Though Whitehead had been one of England’s leading mathematicians earlier in his career, his later philosophical works incorporate certain aspects of Eastern thought and animism. We realized we had no need to seek a rationale for our beliefs in exotic and alien religions or philosophies; Whitehead’s metaphysics, though ensconced in the Western tradition, had what we were looking for, namely, the perspective that in some sense everything is alive and changing over time.

In Whitehead’s view, everything from atoms to galaxies are “organisms” with their own processes and rules of self-organization. Another key idea is that consciousness pervades the continuum; it is as fundamental to the structure of reality as the electron or the quark. Truth and beauty, even love, are intrinsic to existence, not qualities pasted onto a dead universe by deluded souls longing to find a meaning that isn’t there.

Thus, for us, Whitehead’s philosophy seemed to demolish existentialist despair. Far from being a lifeless, terrifying place, the universe teemed with life; indeed the universe
itself
was alive. All this meshed with what the Teacher had imparted at La Chorrera, and what our own evolving views had insisted upon. Whitehead’s insights were good news for a couple of Catholic kids who had long since rejected the comforting fairytales offered up by their tradition. His philosophy didn’t demand faith; rather, it allowed us to look at the universe through the lens of a metaphysics that was open to scientific insight. My studies might not have made me a scientist per se, but they did give me an understanding of science that went beyond that of many practitioners who hadn’t stopped to think about what science really was, and how it operated. The events at La Chorrera had shoved our faces hard up against those questions, and Whitehead’s ideas in particular provided some answers. Decades later, that’s still true; and to the extent that I have a spiritual belief, it is a secular system based largely on Whitehead’s philosophy.

By the time of my graduation, however, my knowledge of theoretical biology and the holographic brain still had me in the dark when it came to the patterns of my love life. Beverly had finished school and returned to Boston. Peggy was still in Boulder but the fact she was seeing someone else left little chance we’d get together. I had more cause to think that Deborah and I might have reunited now that she’d finished school. Instead, the girl with whom I’d shared some of the happiest times I’d ever known was moving in with a fundamentalist surfer dude on a boat. I should have made that the last heartbreak tied to my unhealthy attachment to her, but, well, I didn’t. Looking back on my romantic misadventures from that era, I marvel at how miserable they made me, and how much time I wasted because of that misery. When my mother left me off in Boulder for the start of college in 1969, I had no idea the years ahead were destined to be so emotionally difficult and lonely at times. Do others become as obsessed over romantic loss as I did then? I suppose they do. According to the familiar adage, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I’m not so sure.

With no prospects for a good job in Boulder or Denver, I figured I might as well relocate and take a menial job in the Bay Area. By late summer 1973, I was working as a porter at a fancy restaurant in Kensington, near Berkeley. My job was to arrive early in the morning and open the place—collect the dirty laundry, mop the floors, chop up a big tub of salad greens, and generally get things ready for the chefs when they arrived around midafternoon. It was a good gig that fit my temperament. I’d get there at 6:30, fix myself a huge breakfast and a pot of coffee and read the
San Francisco
Chronicle
before lifting a finger. Nobody cared what I did as long as I finished my chores on time. In the afternoon, I’d stop by Terence’s, get loaded, and join that day’s activities at the perpetual salon. By the summer and fall of 1973, Nixon’s Watergate scandal had begun to preoccupy the country. Over the months until the president’s forced resignation on August 9, 1974, we followed the television coverage obsessively and gleefully as Tricky Dick became ever more mired in troubles of his own making. Every day, it seemed, there’d be a new outrage reported on the evening news, and we could hardly wait to tune in.

By the spring of 1974, the manuscript Terence and I had worked on in Boulder, and again over the previous summer, had gotten the attention of Justus George Lawler, an editor at Seabury Press. I don’t recall how Lawler, a respected Catholic scholar and author, became aware of our book, but he asked us to submit a copy for examination, which we did. Lawler said he loved the book and wanted to publish it.