by Grace Jones
Finally, after a few months, I wrote, saying I was okay and living in a house in Philadelphia. I kept things vague. I didn’t say I was living with Sam; I said he was a neighbor. The whole time I was in Philadelphia they didn’t see me. They didn’t see me for months, until I suddenly turned up one day on a bike with Sam. We had to pretend that we weren’t sleeping together or living in the same place—Here’s Sam, my neighbor from upstairs! He gave me a lift, isn’t that lovely of him? I was wearing these vivid purple hip-hugging bell-bottoms, and a black wig with this straight, Cher-like hair streaming down to my waist. I had left as one thing and returned as another. They were very relieved to see me, and had obviously decided not to give me a hard time.
At the back of my mind, while I was away, I thought, Well, they’re praying for me! Actually, I wasn’t thinking about them at all, to be honest. I put them through hell. I was totally selfish. I had to be to get away and not weaken and sheepishly return home.
I wasn’t tripping or stoned when I made it back home. I made sure it seemed like I had been looking after myself, and that I stayed away merely because I had found some work. I had been taking drugs regularly while I was away, though, and had taken acid and been on some trips. Very early on, my motto became: Try everything at least once. If you like it, keep trying it.
The first time I took acid at a hippie commune there was a doctor with us to make sure that it was not done too recklessly. In these communes, your first acid trip was a rite of passage. It was almost an initiation you had to go through in order to be accepted. It was part of a general shedding of your old life, designed to make your past seem very remote. It wasn’t about partying—it was part of a series of experiments, under observation almost. These hippie communes were all about creative and personal growth, a celebration of expression, the total opposite of how growth and expression had been stunted in Spanish Town. This was a time when there was a sudden rash of substitute certainties to compensate for the battering traditional forms of authority—parental, religious, and political—had taken in the previous decade. There were new cult religions, emergent self-help movements, and the hippie communities filled with those seeking more abstract, authority-questioning faiths.
The fact that acid was illegal helped create a bond between those willing to take risks in exploring their psyches. It had only been illegal for a short time when I first took it—one day it was legal, and then the next day it wasn’t. The illegality gave it a little more allure. It was first made illegal in California in 1966—other states followed two or three years later and the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act was passed in October 1970, making it illegal across the United States.
I was very open to trying new experiments in living. And when I took acid, it was as part of an orderly line of people in this rural hippie commune, where they grew their own food. It was the summerstock spirit taken a few stages further. There was a creek to swim in, and we all slept together, dozens of friendly strangers. Everyone wore what would be seen on the outside as idiosyncratic clothing, and there were no watches, no schedule at all—which was ideal for me. I hadn’t really had anything secure on which to base normalcy, so this way of living—one that revolved around sharing, intimacy, being concerned for others—seemed as realistic if not more so than anything else I had been shown. It was, at least for a short while, a real attempt to create a paradise, a joyous center of peace and love and expanded consciousness. And it was supervised; it wasn’t a wild free-for-all. It felt safe, which I think helps when it comes to taking LSD.
When the acid came out, there would be a doctor present, the equivalent of a Timothy Leary, with whom I became close friends much later. He was a major, optimistic factor in believing there was a legitimate use for the drug, that it was something therapeutic and transformative. He thought the way it interacted with the nervous system was natural—what he considered unnatural was “four years at Harvard, and the Bible . . . and . . . Sunday School teachings.” He’d established the Psychedelic Research Foundation at Harvard in 1960, was dismissed by Harvard three years later, and in 1966 founded the League of Spiritual Development, with LSD as the sacrament. Leary was in favor of these controlled settings, sincerely believing that psychedelic drugs should be approached in a serious, scientific manner for psychological and spiritual enlightenment.
In the hippie commune, with all this outside space, where we would beat overturned canoes like they were drums, you could feel the change, a roll of the wave at the right time for me. I needed to break free, and there was this movement, all about breaking free, happening all around me at the same time, to take me with it. We would queue up, drop a tab, and the doctor would safely guide us through the trip. It was like a clinical trial, with a bit of anarchy thrown in.
Here, again, I was the first in my family to try something, and acid would have absolutely been considered poison by my parents. It is very difficult to explain what happened to me on that first trip, because the only people who really know are the ones who really know.
I remember walking up to a wall and walking into it and it was full of flowers. The petals spun like sparks. A maze of trees headed off infinitely in every direction. Fireflies scattered through the grass. I could hear the earth breathing: There was an eternity between breaths. I became a naked winged woman perched at the prow of a ship, the figurehead of a ship, embodying its spirit, the woman, eyes bright, that they put there to calm gales and storms, and the ship was parting not water but snakes of some sort, serpents and writhing creatures, and this ship I was at the head of would break through; it was wet and turbulent, but not like the sea, and I was slicing through all this mysterious motion, powering through the snakes guiding the ship to safety. Pirates used to think a naked woman onboard a ship was good luck.
I remember wanting to come down because it was going on for too long. Your brain gets tired after a while, all these fantastic images of enormous plasticity, the kaleidoscopic play of colors, all these patterns that seem to have self-awareness. You want to sleep but you can’t. A little panic. More panic. You begin to shiver. At what must have been the peak of it all, it was like I was going too fast, like when I was on skates careering down that hill in Syracuse. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening, what had just happened, what was about to happen. There was the secret of the universe. Right in front of me. Being whispered in my ear from across the water. Then I fell over on my skates. The world rushed into me. Through me. As if it would take me away with it. The doctor talked me through that. I remember cuddling with somebody. A pulse against my skin. I could see right through whoever was next to me. You couldn’t really have sex—it’s not for sex, acid. I was too high to do anything sexual. We were all bodies laid next to each other and rolling around, but sex was not part of the trip. It’s not physical. It’s all for the mind, hints of the vastness of consciousness, how much is in there, and out there.
I remember us all going out for ice cream outside the commune, among all these very straight country people. They were like, Get your gun—who are these weirdos invading our town? We bought some ice cream and never ate it. We watched it melt in our hands. It was fascinating to watch the ice cream melt, seeing it beyond our normal, limited, and narrow senses. It was like Dalí’s clock. Acid intensifies what is real to such an extent it doesn’t seem real. You understand how the universe is not static or stationary but moves all the time. All the local people had this get the hell out of our town look on their faces.
It was a super-trip pill—STP—a three-day trip. It was not the strength of the pill, it was the amount of time. You don’t know it is going to be three days when you take it. Your whole perception of time is altered. It could have been an hour, a day, a month, a hundred years. It could have been five thousand years. It was now, and then it was later, and now it was beginning. To some extent you dive into reality, not away from it. And you can go so deep into the experience, so deep into what might ultimately be more real than the real, that coming back
into this world seems distorted.
I have had a couple of friends who took acid and never came down. They are still on their trip! I have two girlfriends like that; they don’t know each other, but they are lost to this world in a similar way. Very sweet, but totally not in reality at all. So nice, but still seeing flowers and solid things melting into themselves. They’re stuck having thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.
You have to come down, otherwise you are permanently trapped in a parallel universe. You have to be careful how you come back so that you properly get your bearings. Your ego can get smashed beyond repair if you’re not careful. I was lucky really that my first trip was so carefully monitored under the care of a doctor, like a genuine experiment. Otherwise, it could easily have permanently messed with my mind, so you might say it was wise psychedelic usage.
I still walk around having the kind of grandiose thoughts you might have on an acid trip, but without being perpetually inside the trip. That’s a good balance—becoming aware of how far your mind can expand but understanding that it doesn’t have to expand all the time. Taking acid under supervision taught me to be careful of true extremes. Extreme, but in moderation. Crazy out there, but within reason. Take nothing in your body without being completely fussy. Be very aware.
And that three-day trip taught me to be my own shrink.
* * *
I think taking acid was a very important part of my emotional growth, of becoming myself, which was my mission. The mental exercise was good for me. It’s like achieving accelerated higher consciousness through ingesting sacred plants, like the old Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest would do in order to expand their minds. The European missionaries would call the visions the Indians had “fantasies of the devil.” After all the God I had been subjected to, this was exactly what I needed. My eyes were opened, as it says in Genesis, and I had a better understanding of good and evil than all those hours and hours with the Bible had given me.
Acid helped release me from an accumulation of illogical customs and traditions. In a world that favors mind-dulling substances—alcohol, narcotics, tobacco—it is amazing to sample something that is mind-expanding and that stimulates mental processes rather than suppressing them. For someone who needed to break free of Mas P, the abuser with a holy veneer, it was absolutely perfect.
I am quite psychic. I don’t know if it was because of the acid, or if I was born with it. When I am plugged in I can be scary psychic. Knowing when something is going to happen, when not to get in the elevator—I get a strong feeling. I remember telling everyone traveling with me to get off a plane once. We were all strapped in. The plane was taxiing, ready for takeoff. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, “Okay, if you want to stay . . . but I’m getting off.” The plane never left the ground—there were four attempts, and it never made it.
Stuff like that happens to me, not a lot, but every now and then. If I feel something, I feel it strongly, and I follow the instinct. I think the acid enriched my senses, made them all seem more sensitive. Heightened my emotional and mental processes, or at least made me aware that they could be heightened and accelerated. I think the strong feelings I have about things derive from those acid trips. They do make you into a different person. You see other possibilities.
I was born. Again. This is me. Turn me loose.
* * *
I applied to be a Playboy bunny in Philly after seeing an advert in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. It was one of the few ways a girl could earn more money than standing all day in a shop or sitting down all day in an office. I didn’t think of it as demeaning; I wanted to try it out, to see what it was like. Being in contact with people I had never been allowed anywhere near before intrigued me. It appeared to be glamorous and looked like it might be fun, for a while. I thought of it as a way of assuming another temporary identity, to make me even more elusive. I didn’t see it as a way of submitting to men, rather as a way of getting more information about how the world worked. And I didn’t plan to stick with it for long. It was the kind of job you could move into and move out of: an opportunity. And I was looking for opportunity.
Being a Playboy Bunny seemed a classier step up from dancing in go-go clubs at poky hotels. Ultimately, my goal was still the theater, and not to be stuck anywhere, and the theater seemed to be the best way to achieve that. Being a Bunny was a way of making steady money without interfering with the auditions.
Tom had suggested I model and make some money while trying to do the theater thing. At first, I would commute with Sam on his Harley-Davidson between Philadelphia and New York to go-sees with agencies and photographers. Eventually, I learned to ride myself so Sam didn’t always have to bring me. I crashed once, but I wasn’t going too fast. There was no new scar.
I would be at New York auditions ready and alert at 6 A.M. The discipline was always there—that never goes away. I can ignore it for a while, but never completely.
There was one African-American photographer, Tony Barboza, whom I used to visit early in the morning to shoot. I stopped by one day with my portfolio, as I would frequently do to get photographers interested. I was collecting photographs of myself as quickly as I could. It was before I got any work, and I was grateful to any photographer who showed an interest. Luckily, Tony also turned out to be a very good photographer with an interest in African history, and he helped me a lot in my early years. My first professional job, for Essence, the monthly magazine for African-American women first published in 1970, was through Tony. I am photographed with the psychedelic soul group the Chambers Brothers wearing tight, studded brown leather, looking very badass, like a sister of Melvin Van Peebles.
Tony was a hardworking photographer, as well as a historian and an artist, and he really liked me. He said that I wasn’t a classic beauty, but had a very interesting face. He took photographs of me to study my face, but he had time only in the morning to do some tests before his day job. He would take pictures of me in the Afro, wearing dramatic, almost tribal white marks on my face, and sometimes wearing very little. As he would say, I was sweet, but not shy about letting him photograph me nude. I was a nudist! I didn’t think there was anything lewd about posing nude. I didn’t think of it as being sexual at all. The photos were not dirty; they were very sensitive and exploratory.
They weren’t only nudes. Tony took a lovely, unsparing and very peaceful close-up of my face, lips slightly parted in either defiance or invitation, that was the cover of a book called Black Beauty by Ben Arogundade. It was one of the first—if not the first—professional photographs taken of me, a moment of birth. I am not looking behind. I am looking straight ahead.
Here I am. What have you got?
I sent one of those test nudes by Tony as part of my application to become a Bunny—after all, you needed to show your assets to work there. They weren’t pinup photos; they were highly stylized and atmospheric. But you could see what you needed to see.
There was a local businessman called Harry Jay Katz, a very rich, self-made Philadelphia guy, a well-known libertine, bon vivant, and man about town. If anything was happening in Philly nightlife, he was at the center of it, and he was going to open a Playboy Club there after spending some time in Chicago with Hugh Hefner.
He made the papers when he showed his wife the pictures of the nude girls he was going to select to work there. He got about 1,500 applications, and mine was one of them. Few got more press coverage for doing so little. He was ahead of his time in that way. The problem was, ever confident of succeeding in his license application, he had already rented property for the club on a street where all the government buildings were, right by city hall, and the local dignitaries weren’t happy. Citing some problems with his liquor license, the police shut him down before he even began. He had to fight, jump through all sorts of hoops, to try and get the club open.
He saw my picture, and he liked it, and I went for an interview, under my dance name, Grace Mendoza, which became a problem for me l
ater. I used Grace Mendoza when I left home after summer stock, in case my parents were looking for me. I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want them to know what I was up to. There were little photos of the go-go dancers where I worked in the newspaper advertisements. Even though there was no way that would make it to Syracuse, I wasn’t taking any chances. I was in hiding.
After I became well known, as Grace Jones, Harry Katz did an interview, saying I was not Grace Jones at all—I was Grace Mendoza. I just liked the sound of the name, which I think just came from being fluent in Spanish. No special reason, but I liked that it sounded a little Cuban. That’s how he knew me. He thought that I had changed it to Jones from Mendoza. He thought he had discovered the real me. As if. Years later, when this interview appeared on the Internet, it mysteriously, instantly infected existing online information about me, saying I was born Grace Mendoza. Once, not long after 9/11, when I was renewing my passport in Syracuse, there was a lot of trouble—the officials, getting their information from the unreliable Wikipedia, had found out about my other name, there was confusion about my age because of the temp job I had when I was a teenager, and the FBI was called in. They figured I must be on the run or something. I was two or three people in one. There were Grace, Beverly, Jones, Mendoza, I was either twenty-one or twenty-five. My mom had to come down to the building where I went to get my passport and explain the misunderstanding. Luckily, she looked like someone you could trust, and she had her softening charms.
My Grace Mendoza dance act was different from the others because I had a whip. I think that was because of the whips hanging from the wall that we had to choose from when I was younger. Each girl had a specialty, and mine was taking charge of things using a whip. I was a demon with the whip. I cracked it hard, with a hell of a bang, in my tight, tiger-striped clothes. I’d bring it between my legs like a snake, wrap it around my neck, flick it fast toward the customers, with laser-eyed attitude, concentrating like a lion tamer. It was about as far from holy as I could get. Grace Mendoza could make your eyes water without even touching you, and on the local nightclub circuit I got pretty popular.