On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

  —

  After I moved to Los Angeles, I missed my Sunday morning rides to Stinson Beach with my motorcyclist friends, and I reverted to being a lone rider again; on weekends, I would embark on enormous solo rides. As soon as I could get away from work on Friday, I saddled my horse—I sometimes thought of my bike as a horse—and would set out for the Grand Canyon, five hundred miles away but a straight ride on Route 66. I would ride through the night, lying flat on the tank; the bike had only 30 horsepower, but if I lay flat, I could get it to a little over a hundred miles per hour, and crouched like this, I would hold the bike flat out for hour after hour. Illuminated by the headlight—or, if there was one, by a full moon—the silvery road was sucked under my front wheel, and sometimes I had strange perceptual reversals and illusions. Sometimes I felt that I was inscribing a line on the surface of the earth, at other times that I was poised motionless above the ground, the whole planet rotating silently beneath me. My only stops were at gas stations, to fill the tank, to stretch my legs and exchange a few words with the gas attendant. If I held the bike at its maximum speed, I could reach the Grand Canyon in time to see the sunrise.

  I would sometimes pull up at a little motel some distance from the canyon where I would grab some sleep, but usually I slept outside in my sleeping bag. There were sometimes hazards to this—and not just bears or coyotes or insects. One night, taking Route 33, the desert road from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I stopped and unrolled my sleeping bag on what, in the darkness, seemed to be a natural bed of beautiful soft moss. Breathing in the clean desert air, I slept very well, but in the morning I realized that I had bedded down on a huge mass of fungal spores, which I must have been inhaling all through the night. It was Coccidiomyces, a notorious fungus native to the Central Valley that can cause anything from a mild respiratory illness to so-called Valley fever and, on occasion, a fatal pneumonia or meningitis. I developed a positive skin test for the fungus but, fortunately, no symptoms.

  I would spend my weekends hiking in the Grand Canyon or sometimes in Oak Creek Canyon, with its marvelous red and purple colors. Sometimes I would go to Jerome, a ghost city (it was only years later that it was dolled up for tourists), and once I visited the grave of Wyatt Earp—one of the great romantic figures of the Old West.

  I would ride back to Los Angeles on Sunday night and, with the resilience of youth, appear bright and fresh at neurology rounds at eight o’clock on Monday morning, with hardly a sign that I had ridden a thousand miles over the weekend.

  —

  Some people, perhaps more in the States than in Europe, have a “thing” against motorcycles and motorcyclists—a phobia or irrational hatred which may goad them into action.

  My first experience of this was in 1963, when I was riding along Sunset Boulevard at a leisurely pace, enjoying the weather—it was a perfect spring day—and minding my own business. Seeing a car behind me in my driving mirror, I motioned the driver to overtake me. He accelerated, but when he was parallel with me, he suddenly veered towards me, making me swerve to avoid a collision. It didn’t occur to me that this was deliberate; I thought the driver was probably drunk or incompetent. Having overtaken me, the car then slowed down. I slowed, too, until he motioned me to pass him. As I did so, he swung into the middle of the road, and I avoided being sideswiped by the narrowest margin. This time there was no mistaking his intent.

  I have never started a fight. I have never attacked anyone unless I have been attacked first. But this second, potentially murderous attack enraged me, and I resolved to retaliate. I kept a hundred yards or more behind the car, just out of his line of sight, but prepared to leap forward if he was forced to stop at a traffic light. This happened when we got to Westwood Boulevard. Noiselessly—my bike was virtually silent—I stole up on the driver’s side, intending to break a window or score the paintwork on his car as I drew level with him. But the window was open on the driver’s side, and seeing this, I thrust my fist through the open window, grabbed his nose, and twisted it with all my might; he let out a yell, and his face was all bloody when I let go. He was too shocked to do anything, and I rode on, feeling I had done no more than his attempt on my life had warranted.

  A second such incident happened when I was driving to San Francisco along the rarely traveled desert road, Route 33; I loved the emptiness of the road, the absence of traffic, and I was idling along at seventy miles an hour when a car appeared in my rearview mirror, going (I judged) near ninety. The driver had the whole road to overtake me but (like the driver in Los Angeles) tried to drive me off the road. He succeeded, and I was forced onto the shoulder reserved for emergencies and breakdowns, a soft shoulder. By a sort of miracle, I managed to hold the bike upright, throwing up a huge cloud of dust, and regained the road. My attacker was now a couple of hundred yards ahead. Rage more than fear was my chief reaction, and I snatched a monopod from the luggage rack (I was very keen on landscape photography at the time and always traveled with camera, tripod, monopod, etc., lashed to the bike). I waved it round and round my head, like the mad colonel astride the bomb in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove. I must have looked crazy—and dangerous—for the car accelerated. I accelerated too, and pushing the engine as much as I could, I started to overtake it. The driver tried to throw me off by driving erratically, suddenly slowing, or switching from side to side of the empty road, and when that failed, he took a sudden side road in the small town of Coalinga—a mistake, because he got into a maze of smaller roads with me on his tail and finally got trapped in a cul-de-sac. I leapt off the bike (all 260 pounds of me) and rushed towards the trapped car, waving the monopod. Inside the car I saw two teenage couples, four terrified people, but when I saw their youth, their helplessness, their fear, my fist opened and the monopod fell out of my hand.

  I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the monopod, walked back to the bike, and motioned them on. We had all, I think, had the fright of our lives, felt the nearness of death, in our foolish, potentially fatal duel.

  —

  As I roved around California on my motorbike, I always carried my Nikon F with a range of lenses. I especially liked the macro lens, which allowed me to do close-ups of flowers and bark, lichens and moss. I also had a 4 × 5 Linhof view camera with a sturdy tripod. All this, packed in my sleeping bag, was well protected against bumps and jars.

  I had known the magic of developing and printing photographs as a boy, when my little chemistry lab with its blackout curtains could serve as a darkroom, and I was to know it again at UCLA; we had a beautifully equipped darkroom in the neuropathology department, and I loved seeing images appear bit by bit as I rocked the large prints in the developing trays. Landscape photography was my favorite, and my weekend bike rides were sometimes inspired by Arizona Highways, which had marvelous photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and others—photographs which became my ideal.

  —

  I got an apartment near Muscle Beach in Venice, just south of Santa Monica. Muscle Beach had many greats, including Dave Ashman and Dave Sheppard, who had both lifted in the Olympic Games. Dave Ashman, a cop, had a modesty and sobriety very much the exception in a world of health nuts, steroids takers, drinkers, and braggarts. (Although I was taking plenty of other drugs in those days, I never took steroids myself.) I was told he was unmatched at the front squat, a much harder and trickier lift than the back squat, because one is holding the bar in front of one’s chest rather than across one’s shoulders, and one must maintain perfect balance and erectness. When I went one Sunday afternoon to the lifting platform on Venice Beach, Dave looked at me, the new kid, and challenged me to match him in the front squat. I could not decline the challenge; this would have branded me a weakling or a coward. I said, “Fine!” in what was meant to be a strong, confident voice but came out as a feeble croak. I matched him pound for pound, up to 500, but thought I was finished when he went from 500 to 550. To my surprise—I had hardly ever done front squats before—I matched him. Dave said that was his limit, but I, w
ith a vainglorious impulse, asked for 575. I did this—just—though I had a feeling my eyes were bulging and wondered fearfully about the blood pressure in my head. After this, I was accepted on Muscle Beach and given the nickname Dr. Squat.

  There were many other strong men on Muscle Beach. Mac Batchelor, who owned a bar to which we all flocked, had the largest and strongest hands I had ever seen; he was the world’s undisputed arm-wrestling champion, and it was said that he could bend a silver dollar with his hands, though I never saw this. There were two gigantic men—Chuck Ahrens and Steve Merjanian—who had a semidivine status and were somewhat aloof from the rest of the Muscle Beach crowd. Chuck could do a one-arm side press with a 375-pound dumbbell, and Steve had invented a new lift—the incline bench press. Each of them weighed close to three hundred pounds and sported massive arms and chests; they were inseparable companions and completely filled the VW Beetle they shared.

  Huge though he was, Chuck was eager to become even huger, and one day he appeared suddenly, filling the entire doorway, while I was working in neuropathology at UCLA. He had been wondering, he said, about human growth hormone—could I show him where the pituitary gland was located? I was surrounded by pickled brains, and I pulled one out of its jar to show Chuck the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain. “So that’s where it is,” said Chuck, and, satisfied, took his leave. But I was disquieted: What was he thinking of? Had I been right in showing him the pituitary? I had fantasies of his raiding the neuropathology lab, going to the brains—a little formalin would not deter him—and plucking out their pituitaries, as one might pluck blackberries, and, even more gruesome, of his initiating a string of bizarre murders, in which the victims’heads would be cracked open, the brains torn out, and the pituitaries devoured.

  Then there was Hal Connolly, an Olympic hammer thrower whom I often saw in Muscle Beach Gym. One of Hal’s arms was almost paralyzed and hung loosely from his shoulder in a “waiter’s tip” posture. The neurologist in me instantly recognized this as an Erb’s palsy; such palsies come from traction on the brachial plexus during delivery if, as sometimes happens, a baby presents sideways and has to be pulled out by an arm. But if one of Hal’s arms was useless, the other was a world-beater. His athleticism was a moving lesson in the power of will and compensation; it reminded me of what I sometimes saw at UCLA—patients with cerebral palsy and little use of their arms who had learned to write or play chess with their feet instead.

  I took photographs on Muscle Beach, trying to catch its many characters and their haunts; this went hand in hand with a project for a book about the beach—descriptions of people and places, scenes and events, in that strange world which was Muscle Beach in the early 1960s.

  Whether or not I could have written such a book, a montage of descriptions and verbal portraits interlarded with photographs, I do not know. When I left UCLA, I packed all my photographs, everything I had taken between 1962 and 1965, along with my sketches and notes, in a large suitcase. The suitcase never arrived in New York; no one seemed to know what had happened to it at UCLA, nor could I get an answer from post offices in L.A. or New York. So I lost almost all the photographs I had taken in my three years near the beach; only a dozen or so somehow survived. I like to imagine that the suitcase still exists and that it may turn up one day.

  —

  Jim Hamilton was one of the weight-lifting crowd on Muscle Beach, but he was very different from the others. He had a huge head of curly hair and a huge curly beard and moustache, so very little of his face was visible except for the tip of his nose and his laughing, deep-set eyes. He was broad, barrel-chested, with a belly of Falstaffian proportions; he was one of the best bench pressers on the beach. He walked with a limp; one of his legs was shorter than the other and had surgical scars along its entire length. He had been in a motorcycle accident, he told me, sustaining multiple compound fractures, and had been in hospital for more than a year. He was eighteen at the time, just out of high school. It was a very difficult, lonely, pain-filled time, which would have been unbearable had he not discovered, to his own surprise and everyone else’s, that he had a remarkable mathematical gift. This had not shown itself in school, which he had disliked, but now his only demands were for books on mathematics and game theory. The eighteen months of enforced physical inactivity—he had had nearly a dozen operations to reconstruct his shattered leg—was a time of great and exciting mental activity, as he moved with ever-greater power and freedom in the universe of mathematics.

  Jim had had no idea what he would “do” when he graduated from high school, but when he left the hospital, his mathematical abilities got him a job as a computer programmer with the Rand Corporation. Few of his friends and drinking companions on Muscle Beach had any idea of Jim’s mathematical side.

  Jim had no fixed address; looking through our correspondence from the 1960s, I find postcards emanating from motels in Santa Monica, Van Nuys, Venice, Brentwood, Westwood, Hollywood, and dozens of other places. I have no idea what address he had on his driver’s license; I suspect it may have been his boyhood address in Salt Lake City. He came from a distinguished Mormon family, descendants of Brigham Young.

  It was easy for Jim to move from motel to motel or to sleep in his car, because he kept his few possessions—clothes and books, mostly—at Rand and sometimes spent the night there. He devised a variety of chess-playing programs for its supercomputers, and he would test them (and himself) by playing chess with them. He especially enjoyed this when he was high on LSD; he felt that this made his games more unpredictable, more inspired.

  If Jim had a circle of friends on Muscle Beach, he had another circle, of fellow mathematicians, and like the famous Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös he might drop in on them in the middle of the night, spend a couple of hours brainstorming, and then stay over on their sofas for the rest of the night.

  Before I met him, Jim spent occasional weekends in Las Vegas observing the blackjack tables, and he devised a strategy that would allow a player a slow but steady success at the game. Securing a three-month leave of absence from Rand, he ensconced himself in a hotel room in Las Vegas and played blackjack through his waking hours. Gradually but steadily, he won and accumulated more than $100,000, a very substantial amount in the late 1950s, but at this point he was visited by two large gentlemen. They said that his steady winning had been noted—he must have a “method” of some sort—but now it was time for him to leave town. Jim took their point and cleared out of Vegas the same day.

  Jim had a huge, dirty once-white convertible at the time, filled with empty milk cartons and other rubbish; he drank a gallon or more of milk every day as he was driving and just tossed the empty cartons behind him. He and I took to each other in the muscle crowd. I liked to get Jim onto his own special passions—mathematical logic, game theory, and computer games—and he drew me out on my own interests and passions. When I got my little house in Topanga Canyon, he and his girlfriend, Kathy, would often visit.

  —

  As a neurologist, I was professionally interested in brain states, mind states, of all sorts, not least those induced or modified by drugs. New knowledge about psychoactive drugs and their effects on the brain’s neurotransmitters was rapidly accumulating in the early 1960s, and I longed to experience these myself. Such experiences, I thought, might help me understand what some of my patients were going through.

  Some of my Muscle Beach friends had urged me to try getting stoned on Artane, which I knew only as an anti-parkinsonian drug. “Just take twenty tablets,” they said, “you’ll still be in partial control. You’ll find it a very different experience.” So one Sunday morning, as I described in Hallucinations,

  I counted out twenty pills, washed them down with a mouthful of water, and sat down to await the effect…. I had a dry mouth, large pupils, and found it difficult to read, but that was all. There were no psychic effects whatever—most disappointing. I did not know exactly what I had expected, but I had expected something.

&nbs
p; I was in the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, when I heard a knocking at my front door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy; they would often drop round on a Sunday morning. “Come in, door’s open,” I called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room, I asked, “How do you like your eggs?” Jim liked them sunny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs—there were low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we could hear each other easily. Then, five minutes later, I shouted, “Everything’s ready,” put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room—and found it completely empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost dropped the tray.

  It had not occurred to me for an instant that Jim and Kathy’s voices, their “presences,” were unreal, hallucinatory. We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always; there had been no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, at least their side of it, had been completely invented by my brain.

  I was not only shocked, but rather frightened, too. With LSD and other drugs, I knew what was happening. The world would look different, feel different; there would be every characteristic of a special, extreme mode of experience. But my “conversation” with Jim and Kathy had no special quality; it was entirely commonplace, with nothing to mark it as a hallucination. I thought about schizophrenics conversing with their “voices,” but typically the voices of schizophrenia are mocking or accusing, not talking about ham and eggs and the weather.

  “Careful, Oliver,” I said to myself. “Take yourself in hand. Don’t let this happen again.” Sunk in thought, I slowly ate my ham and eggs (Jim and Kathy’s, too) and then decided to go down to the beach, where I would see the real Jim and Kathy and all my friends, and enjoy a swim and an idle afternoon.