by Erik Storlie
I get up from the table and walk into the front room, facing Grove Street. Except for one old wooden chair, it’s empty. My footsteps on the bare floor echo around the edges of the room, mocking me with Lisa’s departure.
I stand there in the dim room, indecisive. Morning traffic rattles by. The sounds reverberate and die. I want to score another gram of heroin in its delicate, intricately folded paper. But suddenly I know that if I do, something, for me, will be finished.
“What’s happened—to me, to my friends? We were poets, artists, intellectuals, an avant-garde. Alcohol lifted us from dull despair. Then drugs gave us a dozen keys to the psyche, opened doors that no one even dreamed were there.
“But we’re not exploring the frontiers of the mind anymore. We’re not psychonauts—not the modern counterparts of Columbus and Magellan. We’re petty criminals!”
Slumping down on the old straight-backed chair, elbows resting on the front window ledge, I stare out the window. I rest my forehead on my hands and shut my eyes. Traffic shushes by, shushes by.
An image begins to form itself in my mind. A figure, wrapped in swirls of black cloud, deep in space, its hand doing one thing only—injecting the vein inside the elbow of an arm. Over and over, the figure injects the vein.
Then, at last, the hand stops injecting. Alone in that deep, remote space, I rest.
It’s all right. I’ll smash this pattern. Panic? Paranoia? Depression? I can bear anything. I can bear everything this brutal, bullying mind dishes out.
These memories of pain jolt me back to awareness—back to the Crag—and shame fills my body. Shaking my head, shuddering, I groan in an undertone that’s spun off to the north by the breezes. Pores open on my back—hot, prickly. My belly trembles, my pulse races. Leaning forward, I stretch, reaching my hands to grip edges of black rock in front of me. My shirt sticks and clings along the backbone.
A voice in my head moans, “I don’t want to remember all this! It’s over with. Why should I have to? How can things thirty years old still hurt so bad?”
Unsteadily, I rise to my bare feet. Losing my balance as I step off my seat onto the sharp, jumbled boulders, I flail my arms and left leg, suddenly scraping the arch of my left foot on the flinty, broken edge of an upthrust rock.
Holding the foot, I scream out into the empty spaces, “Pull yourself together, Erik, for Christ’s sake.”
I lean back against a boulder and examine the torn place, watching it quickly fill with drops of blood.
Savagely, I pull on my wool socks—first the right, then the left—gratified as the coarse, clinging weave scours and stings the wound.
“Slow down now, slow down,” I whisper to myself.
I take a few deep breaths, sigh, and sink down to pull on and lace my boots. Carefully, I walk down into the sage to pee. Standing, I swing my arms from side to side for several minutes, then rotate them like twin propellers. Finally, I run back and forth a few hundred feet in the grass at the foot of the Crag.
I come to a stop. A voice asks, “Did that young man simply want to wipe himself out? Couldn’t he find a better path? What loss, what waste!
“Oh, yes, what waste. But where would you be now without your passion and intensity?
“You came through. You made it. You’re alive. You’re fifty-four. You’ve got the privilege of zen, of the mind stuff, of the Crag right now, right here, today. Everything shines before you—the wind, the rocks, the grasses, the ancient trees, the dark mountains swirling down to embrace the valleys and bottomlands.
“Remember Dogen’s words: ‘All the universe is one bright pearl.’
“You see it, too. ‘That stalk of grass, this tree, is not a stalk of grass, is not a tree; the mountains and rivers of this world are not the mountains and rivers of this world. They are the bright pearl.’
“And where would you be now without that agony and low despair? A niche in the academy? Full White Male Professor of Deconstructive Literary Analysis? They’d say, ‘He’s a medievalist, did his work at Berkeley, trying really hard to be relevant now. Kind of sweet.’
“So thank your gods for this obscure, nameless mountaintop, for zazen, for the bright pearl shining in every fir twig, grass blade, and stone. ‘Your whole body is a radiant light. Your whole body is Mind in its totality. When it is your whole body, your whole body knows no hindrance. Everywhere is round, round, turning over and over.’”
Slowly, I climb back up to take my seat. My heart and breathing have slowed. I unlace my boots, remove them, and carefully peel off my left sock. There’s a sharp sting as the wool fabric peels soft clotted blood off the wound on the sole of my foot. I pick it out of the wool knit with my fingernail and flick it into the rocks.
At the center of a patch of reddened, scraped skin, the beginning of the scab remains, sticky and dark brown, beading with fresh drops of blood where raw flesh is again exposed. I tenderly squeeze and massage my foot, watching the red drops begin to thicken and get dark.
“What in the world is it,” asks the voice in my head, “what in this body is it that so quickly moves to heal a clumsy scrape? Ah, of course. It’s the bright pearl. Yes, oh, yes. One bright pearl is its name.”
4
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25
IT’S THE SPRING OF 1964. I’VE COMPLETED MOST of my course work and am teaching at St. Mary’s College, a four-year Catholic men’s school a dozen miles inland from Berkeley. An old friend from Minneapolis is teaching there. He convinced John Logan, a poet who chairs the humanities department, to hire me.
And I convince Celeste to move in with me at Grove Street. She is a black girlfriend from Kansas City. We met one summer in high school at a Unitarian church camp in the midwest. As undergraduates, we visited each others’ hometowns several times. After Lisa moved out, I wrote Celeste enthusiastically about the wonders of Berkeley. She came for a visit—and stayed.
Other old friends from Minneapolis are arriving, too—gathering, drawn to this scene that now the whole country hears and wonders about.
Acid has arrived in Berkeley, and Telegraph Avenue is erupting in rainbow colors. No more black Sartrean turtlenecks. No more existential leather jackets and nihilistic motorcycle denim. Now, a bedraggled beatnik slouching with baleful eyes down Telegraph Avenue endures friendly but impatient stares from the multitude. He is accosted by Montrose, a swarthy man sporting a neat black Vandyke and shod in Elizabethan boots with flaring tops. Montrose wraps himself in a flamboyant robe sewn from a dozen brilliant fabrics. He wears a wide-brimmed hat trailing an ecstatic golden plume.
“Why so down, man?” he asks, soothingly. “You can get with it. I know you can. You’ve got to groove, man. Life is a flower, a gorgeous huge flower. I’m smelling it, right here, right now. For real. Can you dig it, too? And right here, right now, I’m ready to change your world.” Montrose leans forward, stares intently into the other’s eyes, and plucks his sleeve. “I’ve got something that will blow your mind, pop your cork, bring a smile to those sad, sad lips. For real, man. For real. Just say the word.”
Everybody’s talking about this stuff. It’s the drug that tops all drugs. It’s incredible—and scary. Old-time hard-nosed beatniks take it and bathe, shave their beards, barber themselves, and in a frenzy clean out their pads, sheepishly emerging onto Telegraph Avenue the next morning, trying to explain themselves to staring comrades.
And dedicated Berkeley engineering students suddenly shuck slacks and white shirts with plastic pocket protectors filled with ballpoint pens, skip classes, and appear cautiously at evening in coffeehouses wearing jeans and torn T-shirts, hair unkempt, wondering about the action, ready to talk the meaning of life.
Celeste, Right Hand, and I take our first acid trip one afternoon at Grove Street. I’m beyond debating whether to do it or not. “I’ve tried everything else,” I think. “I’m not stuck on anything. Let’s just see. It won’t beat me!”
To our surprise, Joy and Elton refuse to join us. They tried it a week ago and
had to hospitalize themselves.
“Someone fucked up on that batch,” Joy grumbles somewhat defensively. But they get us two vials of a mysterious blue liquid. We carefully divide them in the kitchen among three glasses of plain tap water and drink them off.
A bit edgy in the dingy apartment, we wander into the front yard and sit idly on the tailgate of my old green Studebaker wagon, parked at the curb. Celeste carries a single red rose she plucked from a vase in the dining room. We kick our legs back and forth—smiling, giggling, poking each other. In wonder, we stare all around, pointing out gleaming pebbles suspended in the concrete beneath us, taking turns handling and seeing and smelling the single red rose.
As afternoon rush hour traffic builds and cars slow down, we’re suddenly self-conscious—two white boy beatniks on either side of one black girl beatnik, all three sitting in a row on a Studebaker tailgate, kicking their heels back and forth, back and forth.
My aged landlady, nervous and disapproving since Lisa left, now upset with Celeste’s arrival, huffs by in a halo of white hair and carries her grocery bag into the house without a word.
“Celeste, Right Hand,” I say in a voice of mock alarm. “We’re not watching them anymore. They’re watching us. Let’s get out of here.”
“Cool, dude,” says Right Hand.
“Fine with me,” says Celeste.
We jump in the old wagon and I drive randomly around the neighborhood. Right Hand’s in the back seat, functioning like a compass. Whenever the car points in the direction of the Berkeley police station, he moans, “No no, man, not that way, we’ll be busted. I’m a fuzz detector, I can feel the cops. Turn, turn.” Celeste and I dissolve in laughter, trying to reassure him. “Forget it,” Celeste says in a soothing voice, “we’re not holding, we’re just innocent little hippies out for an afternoon drive.”
Half laughing and half serious, Right Hand cries out again at the next turn toward the station. “No, man, no, I feel ’em, they’re just three blocks down. Please, man, please, any direction but that.”
I begin to drive uphill at each intersection, and soon we’re climbing out of the Berkeley flats into the hills, our heads bobbing like balloons on wiggly stalks as we zoom around twisting curves and up steep, roller-coaster streets. Soon we’re in Tilden Park, the hills falling off into the bay behind us.
Driving by a grove of eucalyptus, Celeste shouts enthusiastically, “Oh, man, I mean men, look at that huge tree. I’m in love. Erik, stop, stop, I’ve got to go see it.” I stop and we slowly, carefully climb out and step into the grove.
Inhaling pungent smells of leaf scatter and earth deep into our lungs, we pace reverently to the great tree. Gently, Celeste and I place both hands on the smooth, scaling bark. Right Hand strokes it with his right hand. Smiling, eyes alight, we hold our tree, then sit down in the leaves at its base.
I lie at full length on my back and, entranced, stare up at the leaf canopy above us—a living cathedral bower swaying in the breezes. Celeste stands over me, then straddles me, one foot on each side, and slowly bends her knees to sit comfortably on my stomach.
“Erik, look at you,” she says, smiling, reverent, staring down into my face. “You’re a god.”
I smile back, admiring her, loving her black eyes, the glowing nut brown of her face, her glossy hair intricate in black curls and kinks, each harboring a flash of diamond.
“Oh,” I murmur, “Your hair! Your hair! It’s . . .”
“What? What about it?” she breaks in, face suddenly clouding.
“Nothing.” I say. “Nothing at all. It’s just beautiful.”
Suddenly Right Hand groans, his voice a strained whisper, “Oh, fuck, no, man, no! No! No!” He’s staring at a squad car that’s just pulled up behind the Studebaker. An officer, blue-uniformed, opens the passenger’s door and climbs out.
We struggle up to our feet. Celeste smiles broadly toward the squad car. Right Hand grabs my left arm with his right hand, hissing, “You left the goddamn car in the middle of the parkway—we’re busted for sure!”
Heart pounding, I look at Right Hand and Celeste and whisper, “Be cool, be cool, be cool! For God’s sake, we can handle this. We’re not holding. Just look normal as hell.” For an instant, Celeste’s beaming face freezes into a scowl. Then a series of snorts burst through her nostrils, turning into irrepressible giggles. “Celeste, Celeste, be cool!” I whisper urgently. “Be cool! You guys just stay up here and I’ll go down there.”
Drawing myself up, brusquely walking down through the scattered leaves to the parkway and the Studebaker, I observe the two cops. There’s a tall one; he’s out of the squad car, looking over the Studebaker. The other, the driver, is on the radio. I’m astonished to find myself calm, amused.
“What’s the problem, officer?”
“Whaddaya think? You can’t park in the middle of the street. Let’s see your license.”
“Sure. No problem.” I fish for my license, noticing my fingers vibrating with a microtremor. I worry for an instant, then conclude that no normal eye can register it.
Handing him the license, I say sincerely, “I’m really sorry, officer. We got curious about that huge eucalyptus up there. My girlfriend’s new to the area. I teach at St. Mary’s College. And my friend there missing his arm is just back from Vietnam. Had a pretty bad time. I was just driving my friends back the long way around through the park for a view of the bay.”
The man curls his lip, eyes me with disgust, and looks at his partner, who’s now out of the car.
“Car okay?” he asks.
“Checks out.”
“Okay, just get this thing moving.”
“Sorry, officer. Thanks a lot for your patience.” I beckon Right Hand and Celeste to get in, pursing my lips, scowling at Celeste, trying to get her to wipe the wide grin off her face.
Once we’re in the car, pulling away slowly with the cop car behind us, Celeste collapses into stifled snorts and giggles. “Those c-c-c-c-creatures,” she stammers. “Imagine spending your life in a blue suit hassling people who have simply fallen in love with a tree.”
I start laughing quietly, the squad car still on our tail.
Right Hand breaks out furiously, “Holy Christ, you two, shut the fuck up and for once pay attention to the road. I know these Berkeley cops. Jesus, take a right up here, get us the hell away from that fuzz.”
“Okay, man, okay, I’m cool.” I pull off the parkway into a golf course parking lot. Taking a vacant spot in the crowded lot, I announce, “Well, here we are. Let’s play.”
Right Hand groans. “Oh, man, I just want to be home, even if it means walking through the living room past the old man and his fucking TV. We can’t go in there. Look at us. Maybe you think you belong in a country club! C’mon, man, let’s get going.”
But Celeste and I are half out of the car. “Hurry up, Right Hand,” she smiles, “or we’ll leave you here alone to talk to the parking lot attendant.”
With Right Hand trailing disconsolately, Celeste and I walk serenely across the parking lot into the clubhouse. Suddenly parched, we feed quarters into a Coke machine that sits by the front picture window overlooking the course. In minutes the three of us guzzle four cans of Coke.
“Oh, delicious,” says Celeste. Then, choking with giggles, she points out the window. “Look, I see strange animals out there wearing funny clothes and hats and hitting little white balls back and forth with sticks. This is weird. This is very, very weird. Anyway, let’s go home now.”
An hour later, Celeste and I drop a subdued Right Hand at his house in Oakland and return to park the Studebaker at Grove Street. Then we walk up to Telegraph Avenue, excited, eager to catch the late afternoon action.
The street crowds with men and women, mostly young, in wild, natural hair and extravagant costumes. An old, gaily painted van disgorges hippies, in from some country retreat. On the way to the Café Mediterranean for a cold drink, passing the laundromat, Celeste looks in the picture window and sees a yo
ung, lanky black guy, high school age, sitting on the floor against some washing machines, absorbed in playing a twelve-string guitar.
“Let’s go hear him,” she says, a broad, happy smile on her face.
“Groovy,” I say.
We walk in through the open door. The air is suddenly hot, the room filled with the sounds of washers churning and buttons and zippers ticking on the revolving drums of dryers. A young couple, normal-looking college types, are washing and drying laundry at the rear of the establishment. We sit down on the concrete under a row of washers opposite the guitarist. Now cool air flows in over us from the street.
The guitarist doesn’t look up. He pretends not to notice his audience, but we feel his excitement. His playing falters for a few seconds, becoming precise and self-conscious.
Celeste turns to me, whispering in my ear, “Oh, look how dark his skin is, how glossy. My people are so beautiful!”
I murmur assent, brushing my lips on her cheek. He glances up furtively and sees we’re taken with him, and he’s inside his music again. The twelve-string becomes intense and resonant, pouring out notes, filling us with sound that aches with longing and joy.
We listen, swept away for long minutes.
Then the couple passes between us on their way out the front door, the man carrying white laundry that swells up from the basket like fresh-baked bread. Brought back to the hard, concrete floor of the laundromat, to ourselves, we look at each other, smiling, shaking our heads in disbelief. Is it just us?
The guitarist pauses and looks up, shyly smiling. Embarrassed, we smile back and nod to him, murmuring our thanks, and slip out the door.
“Let’s skip the Med,” I say. “It’ll be mobbed. How about a walk up into the hills?”
“Oh, yeah,” Celeste says. “That’s a really good idea.”
We start walking up into the hills, block after block, following our feet. As we get further up, the streets steepen, and we stop again and again, turning to view the city, where a few lights begin to wink on. A golden sun drops into the bay.