After a while Jeanette went downstairs, but Roy and I stayed on. The three of us must have rapped for a good two hours at least, so I’ll have to leave out a lot.
Roy wanted to know what Doris thought about his being in her house while he was hiding from the Army. She said the place wasn’t hers any more than it was his, since Peter paid the rent, but she didn’t think Roy had anything to worry about on that score. Peter was rabidly anti-Pentagon and liked having opportunities to undermine it.
All the talk was delicious. I wanted to go downstairs and get Nyoom’s tape recorder but Doris said she thought it might “put a crimp in our style.” Doris has a good rap, fast and wisecracky and warm. She uses all sorts of phrases I’ve never heard before, but acid has a weird effect on my memory, so I’m afraid I’ll miss a lot of them. She reminds me of some super-bright ex-stripper you’d see on a late night TV talk show, an older chick that’s lived plenty and really knows where it’s at. Her face does great contortions when she’s making a point. She doesn’t wear make-up, but she’s sort of got make-up scars, as if she’d just plucked her eyebrows and cold-creamed all the paint away about five minutes ago and you can still see where it was. Also her hair is still half dyed (reddish brown like Mother’s) and half not. The real color is brown streaked with white. When it grows out, it’ll be like some real sneaky super-authentic $100 job from Elizabeth Arden’s. She’s tall, too, which I envy, and her body is full with these big cozy-looking boobs that’d be terrific for crying on. (With any luck, mine will be like that in a few years.)
Doris was into a big plastic scene in Los Angeles when she first started going to Peter. That’s how they met—he was her analyst. She was a talent agent in Beverly Hills, very appearance-conscious and ambitious (Aries, moon in Capricorn, Pisces rising) and spent a lot of her time in beauty parlors and fussing with clothes. Lots of things about her remind me of Mother, except that Doris broke out of it. No, that’s not true. She doesn’t really remind me of Mother. They’re not alike at all. It’s just that Doris is Mother’s age and came out of the same bullshit. Seeing how groovy she is makes me wish Mother could have been that way, too.
One of the things she went to Peter for was to get help with this losing battle she was waging with the calendar. She said by the time she got adjusted to being 20 she was 30, and before she could dig being 30 she was 45. ( Sally says Aries are often behind or ahead of themselves in time.)
Doris’s first marriage had given her ego a real beating. She said Peter had done wonders for her head, wiped out her sex guilt almost entirely, and helped her like herself a lot better. I noticed there was still a little residue though. She doesn’t dig her own feet. They’re sort of big and shapeless if you’re into a high fashion bag, and even though she’s out of all that now, she still has this tendency to hide her feet and make slighting references to them, as if they were ugly stepchildren.
The one part of the conversation I’d like to be able to capture here has to do with acid. Doris wasn’t too surprised to learn we were all tripping when she arrived.
“I thought that ceiling was pretty high when I came in,” she said. “Well, how’s it all going? Any bummers?”
She was sitting in one of the easy chairs with her feet tucked under her. Roy and Jeanette and I sat on the floor.
We told her Archie had had a few problems but everybody else was having a peaceful trip.
Roy asked her how she felt about acid in general.
“In a nutshell,” she said, “it scares me to death. I’ve had three trips myself and they were glorious. But awful things really do happen with it. Now look, sweetheart, are you sure you want to go into this now? You’re tripping, and I don’t want to make you anxious.” She stopped to pull a piece of tobacco from her lip. Doris is nearly always smoking. I get the impression she’s addicted to Winstons. “I don’t know what I’m worried about though,” she said. “You seem to be handling it great. How many trips have you had?”
Roy said he’d lost count on about the 30th trip.
“Well, I guess you know what you’re doing by now, don’t you?”
“I think I do. But I’d like to hear your feelings about it.”
“Why, darling? My expertise extends only to gin and tonic. Why should you listen to me?”
“Because I like your head.”
“Well! I’m very pleased! Now let’s see. Acid is two years old in my life, four years old in Peter’s. He’s tripped eleven times and once on peyote. Neither of us feels his experience is so impressive as to make him an authority on the subject. But we’ve stumbled upon a few guidelines we follow. The guidelines, by the way, are for ourselves. We’re not out to convert, or to get anybody off the stuff. First—when to drop.” She looked at Roy and me. “How do you decide that question?”
I didn’t know what to say.
Roy told her he dropped acid whenever he thought it might be groovy.
“I think that’s the way most younger people do it, but you’re braver than we are. Peter and I keep wondering about things like long-term effects, so we only take it when we feel we need it to stay high and keep growing. For me, one toke of good hash or grass usually does the job. Peter, too. He says if we took acid just for that, it’d be sort of like using a power crane to do the job of a shoe horn.”
I asked her when she thought the power crane was called for.
“If we feel really stuck in one spot and don’t seem to be moving at all; it’s as simple as that. But first we exhaust every other resource we have, inside and out. Then, if we can’t get things moving, it’s time for soul medicine, LSD, the great spiritual power crane. May I tell you how my first trip came about?”
We all squeaked and nodded and said please tell.
“One afternoon I came to see Peter in a really awful state. This was before we got together. He was just my analyst at this point. Anyway, there I was, suicidal, weeping, hating my life—I forget what the crisis of the moment was, but after I’d blurted it out, Peter stood up and came around the desk and stood next to me. He said, ‘Mrs. O’Neill, do you suppose there’s any purpose to human life?’ I was really knocked off balance. His whole mode and manner was different than I’d ever seen it. Suddenly he wasn’t my doctor, he was just this person, this big terribly impressive man, and he was standing right next to me. He repeated the question, and I said yes, I supposed it had a purpose, but I hadn’t the vaguest notion of what it was. And he said, ‘Oh, yes, you do, you have some notion. That’s how you’ve gotten through it so far. You’ve been riding some notion. Tell me what it is.’ I thought for a while, but I kept coming up with blanks. Then I asked him if he could put the question in another way. ‘I could,’ he said, ‘but it wouldn’t help. Why don’t you just answer it?’ Frankly, I was getting annoyed but I was afraid to say so because I didn’t want him to throw me out. Then he repeated the question. He said, ‘What do you conceive to be the purpose of your life?’ So just to shut him up, I said the first thing that came into my head, ‘To save my goddam soul, I suppose!’ I guess I expected him to be irritated, but he wasn’t at all. In fact it was perfectly obvious I’d rung some kind of a bell. I couldn’t have been more surprised. He was nodding his head and knitting his brow. And then he said, ‘Do you suppose you might have it upside down? Do you suppose the purpose of your soul might be to save you?” I knew he wasn’t just playing with words either. He was dead serious. Bells went off in my head. I was learning something and I knew it was important, and by God I was determined to get it through my skull. You see, all this time, since I was a little parochial school brat with chubby knees and a guilt complex, I thought that I, Doris, was supposed to take this messy little wreck, myself, and make something of her, make her into a Worthwhile Person. Save her soul, in other words. And now here was this great man, who happened also to be a hundred-dollar-an-hour psychoanalyst with qualifications up the iddy-wah, and he was asking me, in all seriousness, if I thought I might have the thing upside down. Maybe my soul was supposed to save
me! I worked the thought over in my head for a few minutes and then I asked the Big Question—How? And at that precise moment Peter ceased being my analyst. He sat down and looked out the window and he said, ‘I’m not really sure how.’ I nearly flipped. My analyst was leveling with me. They don’t do that as a rule, you know. They have this code! Anyway, Peter decided to screw the code and he took me out to dinner. We talked till midnight. Mostly he talked, and I listened. Really listened. He said he’d begun to discover there was a faculty in man that had fallen into disuse, and he had a sneaking suspicion it was the most important faculty of all. The soul. He said it was a constant in each person, the only constant, whether the person was aware of it or not—and it was there to run things, to be relied upon and consulted and to be made friends with. The following Sunday we took LSD together. We’ve been together ever since, by the way, but that’s not my point. The point I’m trying to make is that LSD is soul medicine. It’s like peyote, which is infinitely better and much harder to get hold of. It helps you get in touch with your own soul. That’s the only thing Peter and I use acid for. We don’t happen to think, as so many youngsters do, that it’s just head candy, to be popped into your mouth like a maraschino cherry every time you yawn. Peter researched the stuff, he read everything he could lay his hands on, Huxley, Leary, the works. And he’s convinced it’s a tool for releasing light into man’s consciousness, and that it’s just plain stupid to let in more light if you haven’t already made good use of the light that’s there already. Now I don’t think either of us will be taking another trip until we’re convinced, really convinced, that our daily lives—the way we’re actually living—is already reflecting all the light we’ve gained in the past. I realize full well of course and so does Peter that there are any number of adorable little hedonists with hair down to their butts who think we’re both too rigid on this point. They tell us pleasure is motive enough. Well, perhaps so, but then we’re right back to the shoe horn and the steam shovel. Who needs anything that strong just for pleasure? If you need a little help relaxing so you can enjoy pretty things like bed and food and music, puff on some grass! Nobody worships the senses more than Peter, and I’m in a position to know about that, my dears. He’s marvelous! But I don’t want to spoil his pleasure rap for you. It’s one of his best and he loves giving it. He feels the senses are teachers. They make us more aware of who we are. Look, here’s something he wrote down under peyote.” Doris went over to the bulletin board and came back with a note that had been pinned to it. She read it over to herself first and then read it aloud. “‘Learning the senses is learning to be an animal who is conscious.’ And blah blah, there’s some stuff here I don’t understand, and then it says, ‘When a man becomes truly aware of all the subtle powers of the senses, a terrific magic enters his consciousness. This is the consciousness of God, which is beyond all senses.’ Now that is hardly the manifesto of an old puritan who’s uptight about dope, is it? It’s just that Peter has such a tremendous respect for it he doesn’t like to abuse it. His real hope is that a day will come when a great deal more is known about these things. By then, who knows, the whole world might be having mescaline every Sunday morning for breakfast instead of just going to church. Can you imagine an international sacrament that really packed a wallop? Why, we might even stop blowing one another up!”
All these new thoughts were so exciting I asked Doris if she’d mind if I ran downstairs and got my notebook. She smiled, and then she laughed. And then suddenly she got terribly serious. She looked at me and held my face in her hands. “Good lord, how you frighten me, sweetheart. You listen so beautifully, and you make me feel like such an old fool. Please, I’m not an oracle, truly I’m not. I’m just an old relic from the big-band days. I was weaned on Pepsi Cola and the dollar bill and ‘God Bless America,’ and I’ve made an awful mess of my life. For two years now I’ve been happy, it’s true, happier than I’ve ever been before—but I’m no authority. Neither is Peter. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing, any more than you kids do. This is a whole new age we’re heading into, and nobody but nobody knows what it’s going to be. All we can do is dream and try and hope and flounder. And talk! We can talk, can’t we? God, how we can talk! Forever it seems. I love you both. I loved you both on sight. And now I’m going to bed.”
CANAL STREET, MONDAY NOON, SEPTEMBER 22, 1969
Conversation with Roy:
ROY: I’m an escaped convict. No, I’m not. I’m a fugitive from justice. No, I’m not. I’m a—what the hell am I anyway?
WITCH: What are you talking about?
ROY: Today’s the day I didn’t report for induction.
WITCH: Is it? Is this really it?
ROY: Monday the twenty-second. The letter said seven o’clock this morning. And I didn’t go. Wow, it feels weird. I’m a—what the hell am I—I’m an underground character. I—I’m a draft refuser. No, I didn’t refuse, I just didn’t go. So I’m a—I don’t know what. What am I? I’m in hiding! Witch, do you realize I’m in hiding?
WITCH: Do you think you can dig it?
ROY: No. Not yet. Maybe I’ll get used to it though. But right now I feel awful and it’s some whole new kind of awful.
WITCH: Can you describe it?
ROY: Well, it’s like I’m used to breaking laws, right? Because who isn’t? If you don’t break the law, you can’t, you know, do anything. I mean you can hardly breathe or smoke pot or you-name-it without breaking some law. So I’m used to that. Only now, for godsake, my whole entire life is illegal.
WITCH: That’s really heavy.
ROY: It’s heavy all right. It’s as heavy as boiled shit, and I don’t dig it at all.
WITCH: I don’t think I would either.
ROY: I wonder what it would be like to live in a free—you know—country.
WITCH: In Sweden I hear they go around depressed a lot.
ROY: Yeah, but not because they’re free. It’s the weather.
WITCH: They are free though, I hear.
ROY: Yeah, that’s what I hear.
WITCH: Where else are they?
ROY: I suppose on some islands somewhere there are free places. You know, the South Pacific and places like that.
WITCH: Really?
ROY: I don’t really know. Maybe not. Maybe there aren’t any yet.
WITCH: Actually the entire world is struggling to be free. Isn’t that fantastic? Wouldn’t you think it could just be free without all this bullshit? (Long pause.)
ROY: You know what today is for me? Today is the first day of the revolution for me. I mean from now on there’s no kidding around about it. I am a fucking revolutionary.
WITCH: Committed.
ROY: Right. Committed. Whether I can dig it or not. That’s the part that really frosts my balls. I don’t have any goddam choice!
WITCH: Except to go be a hired killer for the imperialists.
ROY: That’s a choice?
WITCH: No, you’re right. There isn’t any.
ROY: You know what I’m doing today?
WITCH: What?
ROY: I’m getting so stoned my eyes’ll float right out of my head.
WITCH: Me, too.
ROY: In fact I got to split right now. I’m meeting Archie in the park.
WITCH: Oh. Right.
ROY: I’d ask you to come but . . .
WITCH: Oh, no, listen, go ahead. I’ve got stuff to do. Are you and Archie having a thing?
ROY: I don’t know what we’re having. It’s weird.
THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY, 10 P.M. OF THE SAME DAY
I sometimes wonder what’s running my life. This afternoon I went tearing uptown on the subway, got off at Columbus Circle, ran all the way to Central Park J.C., up to the third floor, and by two o’clock, there I was, out of breath, waiting for Contemporary History to begin, and wondering what other plans I had for myself that I hadn’t let myself in on yet.
However, once there, I decided to make the most of it, observe H. Gliss in action, and try to keep
from making a fool of myself. The hour went by quickly. He gave a really interesting lecture on the Constitution, and there was not one word of hate-America in it. In fact, he praised the Constitution so extravagantly you’d have thought he was being paid by the State Department. Then he did something truly sly. He asked if anyone knew or could guess which of our old World War II allies had admired the American Constitution so much he’d copied it for his own country’s use. No one knew. No one could guess. Then he announced quietly it was Ho Chi Minh. I got so caught up in what he was saying that once or twice I forgot who he was and why I was there. By the time class was over, I sort of liked him, and I began to realize I intended to go up and talk to him, which sent me into full panic. Especially since I didn’t know what I’d be saying to him.
So! While I was waiting to catch him alone, I cooked up a plan. And when everyone else had left, I went up to him and asked permission to audit his class. Without actually lying, I made it sound like I was enrolled at the University. He asked me why I wanted to audit; and I said I was interested in knowing why, if the Constitution was such a fabulous document, America was in such rotten shape, and I had a feeling I could probably learn that in his class. I thought it was a fairly mealy-mouthed little speech, but he actually got so excited by it he invited me for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. Mostly I think he believed me, that I was really interested in government. But it was probably unusual for him to be sought out by students, so he was a little suspicious of me. Still, he kept on talking, answering all my questions, and every once in a while slipping in one of his own, like where do you live, and what’s your major. He even asked me if I was a hippie. I said I believed in peace and love, but I didn’t belong to anything—except the human race. Then he asked me if I believed in free love. I said I didn’t know about any other kind, so he dropped the subject. Now I remember feeling a certain relief. I guess I knew even then he was having some ideas about what might happen between us. I suppose I kept them out of my mind because I wanted so much to keep them out of his.
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