The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

“It’s beautiful out there, isn’t it?” said William as we resumed our places at the table, damping the conversation to a safe neutrality. I said surely that it is, that now I knew where Jack had sailed his boats as a young boy on the Atlantic, that they should all go outside and witness the full moon themselves, but I’m not sure Tony cared.

  MARCH 23

  Timothy Leary called and announced that he is now an official exile of the American imperium. He and Richard Alpert have been kicked out of Harvard. In its place they have commandeered a resort on the Pacific coast of Mexico and established an acid utopia there. I should see it, he implored. I should visit. So I did. Last Friday I flew to Zihuatanejo to take acid.

  It took me an entire day to get there. I had to fly to Mexico City and then hop a little twin-engine to a fishing village in the jungles north of Acapulco. Who could have discovered such a place except Timothy Leary, or maybe some pirates?

  The open-air hotel perched upon a cliff bore the lovely name Hotel Catalina, and in synchronicity, I carried with me in my suitcase my red Catalina bathing suit.

  Tim seemed ecstatic to see me, his gleaming teeth and electric smile clearly arriving intact to the jungles of Mexico. He was bare-chested and wore Bermuda shorts and a captain’s hat perched lopsided on his head. He held a gin and tonic, as if he had arrived in Mexico, but his hand was still back at a faculty party in Harvard.

  “Welcome to psychedelic summer camp!” he said in the melodious voice I had missed. He was, as always, in his own bubble of space independent somehow of his surroundings. When I finally gazed around, psychedelic summer camp seemed more like an island of shipwrecked eccentrics—dazed-looking students, strange characters with hairstyles run amok, playing flutes and strumming guitars, and Harvard professors who seemed dazzled by the exotic classroom they suddenly found themselves in.

  Tim beckoned me to follow him down a long, winding staircase, an endless cascade of wooden steps you had to traverse carefully one step at a time until you finally set foot on a beach of pure white sugar. I wondered how anyone on LSD could possibly walk that staircase without a catastrophe. Then we strolled happily along the beach, green water lapping at our feet. Tim smiled broadly, and I could see he was at some pure moment. It was a moment poised fragilely in time between what would inevitably be debacles: his professor’s life lay in ruins behind him, while assaults of law and media scandals were closing in on him from the future. But for the moment he walked free, infinity opening itself up to him like a flower, a lord of some tropical paradise encountered typically in British novels.

  All was fresh in Zihuatanejo, all was primal. There was no electricity, no intrusions of man’s geometry; we were no longer even under the domination of Anglo-Saxon culture. All was pure air, scented with salt breezes and the perfume of flowers. “There are no clocks here,” he said proudly. “Time is measured by the ancient timepiece our cells have been listening to for millions of years, the surf.”

  Two people approached us hand in hand, giggling like teenagers. They were Richard Alpert, Tim’s Harvard partner in psychedelia, and Prissy Hickock, a beautiful girl in her twenties with wheat-colored hair that floated freely in the salt breeze.

  Later, I would learn that Richard Alpert was homosexual, and his real love was Tim.

  Later, I would learn that Prissy was an heiress to the Mellon fortune, and her real love was Tim.

  Even later, I would learn that she and I were linked by currency and history: just as she bankrolled Timothy Leary’s LSD adventures with the money of her ancestors, those same Mellons of Pittsburgh had also bankrolled my uncle Gifford Pinchot when he was governor of Pennsylvania.

  But in those first moments in Zihuatenejo, I felt my cells decompressing on a Mexican beach, and Richard Alpert was hugging me. I assumed hugging was a ritual of LSD culture; trippers all shared a realm where separations between people were considered an illusion. He introduced himself as Tim’s partner in a victorious expulsion from Harvard University. “Contrary to historical precedent, we were expelled to Paradise, not from it!”

  “Dick is my partner in this spiritual oasis,” Tim said, extending his arm in a wide arc as if to indicate that the whole tableau of sea and sun and sky, it was all there by his careful design. “It is an ecstatic place in which we’re very serious.”

  “We’re very serious about our ecstasy, aren’t we, Dickie?” Prissy Hickock said with a stoned giggle, but Tim remained in professorial mode. I assume he often plays that role.

  “We are scientists here. Our main business is continuing our explorations of LSD. At any moment you can see one-third of the group planning their session for the night. Another third will be in sessions, sprawled out on the sand or floating in the water watching the sunrise. Another third will look bedazzled because they have come down from LSD and are reporting the results of their sessions. We’re very productive, right, Dick? Scientific reports, essays, articles for scientific journals.”

  Prissy ignored him. She came up to me and softly rubbed my cheeks and mouth, as if she were blind and trying to discern the lineaments of my face. “In the Nahuatl language, Zihuatanejo means ‘Place of the Goddess Women,’” she said. “We’re home, Mary!” I smiled and hugged her, yielding to the embrace of LSD culture, and felt a warmth emanating from her young body. A thin man with a bedraggled beard and a turbulent growth of hair passed us on the beach, his body covered in what appeared no more substantial than a loincloth.

  “Rolf von Ekkelsberg.” Prissy laughed. “He was my accountant until I turned him on to acid.”

  “Now he’s a no-count!” said Richard energetically.

  Acid Fragment 1

  It is a beautiful Saturday morning. In a blaze of hot sunshine, on a long carpet of white sand, I take 300 micrograms of Heavenly Blue. I can feel the sun radiating its heat into my cells, can feel my body turn into sunshine. I stand up and remove my Catalina bathing suit. I am a creature unburdened with identity, moving slow, slow into wet green liquid, changing composition from sunshine to seawater.

  I become an amphibian, propelled with frog legs through lapping waves. I transform into four-legs, a creature of my racial memory treading some dim pool a billion years ago. Legs, eyes, feathers, eggs, placentas, flowers, I metamorphose into a two-legged human being, an upright person leaving the water and returning to sand. I am a sea nymph. I am a goddess, and Tim is there to greet me, smiling. We start kissing. It is effortless, it requires no setup, it is an act of nature no more significant than the sea rolling in, we fall down, gravity sucks us downward onto sand, and we begin making love in the rolling surf. Am I in a famous movie? Do the movies of life simply imitate the movies of cinema?

  Suddenly, Prissy Hickock is there. She’s been watching over us. She seems a bird at first, and then I see her as an Aztec statue, and then she is a woman who is upset, and I think she must be joking, all human dramas are clearly a joke to me, but she seems serious. She appears to be overcome with jealousy at Tim and me being together. It seems utterly ridiculous—she is enacting a part—but we disentangle and sit up on the sand as water rolls in over us. “I’m not tripping, now, OK,” Prissy says, “and I know that everything is everything and all that, but you know, it’s not OK with me you’re with her.”

  “I’m just dancing with the living situation,” Tim says to her in his melodious voice of quiet authority, and he seems reasonable, but I am naked and a million miles away. I put my bathing suit back on and race into the water, swimming as fast as I can, I don’t know why, and suddenly I don’t know where I am, I am upside down, I am upside up, I’m not sure where the water stops and the air begins, and I decide it is time to panic. And then I am grabbed, lifted up, I am raised by hands of iron. Rolf von Ekkelsberg has picked me up and is carrying me through the water. I feel surely he is a god, I have never met anyone more godlike before, I know it is some version of Valhalla. A part of me knows I might have died then and there, I might have breathed water until I was no longer among the breathing, but I am alive
and Rolf is laying me on the sand and covering me with a Mexican blanket. Tim leans over me, looking deeply into my eyes. “You’re trying very hard to be a mermaid!” he says. His eyes are twinkling, he is serene, he keeps saying “You’re all right, you’re all right,” and I try to tell him I know, I’m all right, but the words don’t come, or perhaps they come and I simply don’t hear them.

  Acid Fragment 2

  I lie on the beach, and Prissy Hickock comes over to cradle my head in her arms. I am so sorry, she says, but the word sorry doesn’t mean anything to me, I look at her and see the wheat-colored hair, her freckly white skin turning red from the sun because it has no defense against it, and she looks like my family, she looks like the girls I went to school with, and I kiss her on the lips. She kisses me back, and I just say “Prissy,” and she says “Mary, I love you,” and I rest my head on her legs and just become aware of breathing for a while. You need to rest, she says, and I lie in the sun, the hot Mexican sun that bleaches the sand and turns the frangipani white and yellow.

  Acid Fragment 3

  The next day was Prissy’s day to take LSD and mine to recover and record my experiences. I lay on the beach for hours, healing in the sun, holding trembly hands with Rolf von Ekkelsberg’s forceful fingers. My “Acid Fragments” were written in the moments in between, when we released hands and I was free to write. Tim demands it. He is a scientist, and everyone in Zihuatanejo must keep a journal. What will become of all these rapturous reports, ecstatic recountings, and delirious diaries about lysergic acid dissolving the mind, erasing the barrier between self and the universe, laying bare the empty hollow air of words and things? A psychedelic journal is a contradiction in terms. At the moment in question, there is no such thing as a Tim Leary, let alone a scientist. At any rate, I am writing. And no one but Tim will ever read these fragments.

  MARCH 24

  At campfire, the group gathered under tropical stars to stare into flames and listen to Tim orate in the role of, as he describes it, not completely seriously, the High Priest. I record what he said.

  “We’re all anthropologists journeying back in time from the twenty-first century. This little place on the Pacific coast of Mexico is a time capsule, set in the dark ages of the 1960s. What do we learn here? That we inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements, of particles, of bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations. We are those configurations. Turn to the fellow temporary configuration next to you and say hello!”

  Perhaps he was driven by Prissy’s outburst on the beach, but Tim excoriated human emotions:

  “Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Romantic poetry and flowery fiction have blinded us to the fact that emotions are a harmful form of stupor. Emotions are simply fear-based, ego-based biochemical secretions in the body, designed to serve during states of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac. My advice to our group here: check your emotions at the door to paradise.”

  I suddenly felt spent. Exhausted. Perhaps using chemicals to expand consciousness beyond the normal human state is simply an unnatural process, one detonating unnecessary strain on the organism. Somewhere on the frontier—where exactly is that frontier?—somewhere on the frontier where physical body meets spirit, the body is stretched or reconfigured and needs time to recover. Maybe my body was simply not ready for the doors of perception to be cleansed. Maybe we live in the comfort of dirty windows. I felt like sleeping for a week.

  And once again, bathed in the heat of the roaring fire, I felt the chill of my isolation. I am a creature of the WASP ascendancy sitting on the sand with a group of eccentrics, bohemians, and misfits in the jungles of Mexico. I am too loud for the cold warriors of Georgetown. Too emotional for Timothy Leary’s icy new chemical version of the human. Too creative for the bourbon-drinking spies at my parties. Too weird for Katharine Graham and Pamela Harriman, even Evangeline Bruce. And too headstrong for my own good. I am deep in Mexico and deep in the in-between.

  I kissed Prissy good night. “All we’re trying to do is see and hear the world as the artist or musician sees it,” she said. I left Zihuatanejo the next morning.

  APRIL 14

  History is accelerating. Nineteen sixty-three hides itself beneath a verdant spring but I can hear the wheels whirring. Strange rumblings begin to emerge from the cozy stage set of Georgetown.

  Last night we feasted on soft-shell crabs. The Wisner house vibrated with the energy of a pink moon, the first full moon of spring, and the energy of those who founded, promulgated, and chronicled the Cold War. Why was Clover Dulles suddenly so friendly? Lorraine Cooper and Kay Graham sat on either side me, yet Clover saw fit to zero in, hug me, and make sure I noticed her pale blue eyes peering into mine. What was the language of her pale eyes?

  Phil Graham had been drinking continuously, his habit of late, and had reached the state of disregard for civilized propriety. He remains brilliant and magnetic—most women would still go upstairs with him in a heartbeat—and he still presides over the Washington Post, but his behavior has grown manic. According to Lorraine, he suddenly bought Newsweek one day, handing them a two-million-dollar personal check on the spot for the deposit. He simply pulled a check from his wallet, asked for a pen, crossed out his own name, and scribbled on it “The Washington Post Company.” Katharine is urging him to get tests.

  Is it a career lived too close to the burning core of power? A black spot on Phil’s soul that whispers that his success derives more from marriage than merit? Is the abuse showered on his long-suffering Katharine simply rage against the fact that her family owns the Post, and he, in the end, is simply an editor-in-law?

  Phil suddenly tapped a metal pitcher to get the room’s attention and raised his glass in a toast to Frank Wisner. Frank was wary of the attention, the inventor of covert operations naturally phobic about commanding the limelight himself. I have always loved Frank. He too has a manic energy, molded years ago into a bizarre obsession with Communism, but he is an awfully sincere man, a dutiful soldier who happened to be present at the birth of our Intelligence. And he is not the man he once was. Secrets attach naturally to a man of secrets. Intimations of breakdowns, of electric shock treatments, of the Agency’s relieving him of his duties quietly and graciously. So Phil Graham, a damaged man, drew the room’s attention to Frank, another damaged man.

  “Ladies and . . . non-ladies! Welcome to another party at the Wisners’, otherwise known as government by invitation!” He unfolded a piece of paper and began reciting a doggerel poem he had penned in tribute to Frank Wisner.

  I write this with no mania / Nor Princess from Romania . . .

  A shock wave pierced the room. Phil had dropped a bomb with the first sentence, an embarrassing allusion to Frank Wisner’s not-so-secret affair with Princess Caradja of Romania, back when he was stationed in Bucharest with the Office of Strategic Services. The affair had been brutally revealed by J. Edgar Hoover, who alleged that the princess was a Soviet agent, and the scandal had nearly ended the Wisners’ marriage.

  Polly Wisner left the room abruptly. Kay Graham shouted, “That’s enough, Phil.” Frank Wisner watched Phil with a pained attempt at a grin, but Phil continued:

  This is for Frank, our gentle host / Far too secretive to boast.

  Let’s pull out the stops / and celebrate his black ops!

  Frank stiffened, the sad memory of a smile frozen on his cheeks.

  Here’s to Albania, the Al-Bane of your existence,

  And Guatemala, which offered minimal resistance.

  It was a directory in rhyme of the CIA coups and assassinations orchestrated by Frank Wisner.

  Here’s to Iran / It went according to plan,

  And Brazil / How unfortunate those leaders fell ill!

  Anyone in the house / Like what we did to Laos?

  And how about Chile? / Where you got a bit silly.

  But, Frank, we all wish you well / Which is m
ore than we can say for Fidel.

  Phil Graham was struggling to focus on the scrap of paper in his hand, and it was James Angleton, of all people, who stopped him. He suggested another drink, which of course was the last thing Phil needed, and led Phil from the room and into the garden. The chill of embarrassment remained, but in a room of diplomats, spies, and the women who keep their secrets, stiff drinks and even stiffer upper lips prevailed. Joe Alsop tried to lighten the mood. “Anybody have any hobbies?” he said with a grin, sitting down beside me.

  “I think it’s an omen,” I said very quietly. “Things are falling apart.”

  “Things are always falling apart, and we are constantly putting them back together. It’s been ever thus,” he said, sucking on his ivory cigarette holder and blowing smoke calmly into the air as if blowing away the discomfort of the evening.

  “Joe, we have so many secrets.” I touched his arm softly, realizing that I had never touched his arm before—what woman has? “We live in secrets, and I’m afraid we’re all going to die in secrets.” He looked at me without expression. It was a simple meeting of eyes, communicating somehow that he knew that I knew his deepest secret, and that it was all right with him that I knew. I wondered if his eyes also communicated that he knew my deepest secret.

  “Joe, your friend and I are in love with each other.”

  I had said it.

  “I have so many friends,” he said gaily, turning away abruptly and smiling at Allen Dulles. My reading of the unspoken continued, and I took his statement to mean: you can make insignificant things significant, which is what occupies us most of the time, or you can make significant things insignificant, which is a far rarer and more important endeavor.

  “You’re not a big fan of love, are you, Joe?” I asked.

  “Love?” he repeated, turning the word over in his mind. “Love is infinity made available to poodles.”

  MAY 5

  Kentucky Derby Sunday at the Wisners’, and the hats proliferated. Polly’s living room became a bestiary of birds and flowers, the heads of my friends bedecked with lace and feathers. I hid beneath a tan pillbox with matching veil.