An elderly Hispanic couple from the San Luis Valley, just over the Colorado border a few miles from the Magic Tortoise, pulled over in their equally elderly Cadillac and picked us up at the Taos Plaza.
“Ay, Mi ’jita,” the wife swiveled around to reach for my hand once I had positioned myself between the boys in the backseat. “Does your mama know where you’re at?”
Good question. I thought so, but I may have forgotten to mention it. No big deal. My friend Jessie lived at the Tortoise with her family in a round tower house, and I often spent weekends up there, roaming between the communal households with Jessie and her sisters, foraging for food and assisting grown-ups in throwing pots on the wheel and splitting firewood.
I shrugged, the woman said, “tsk,” and Phillip rolled his eyes. The husband’s face was inscrutable beneath his fedora.
They dropped us off at the bottom of the four-mile dirt road, and we hiked up to the commune through the woods. An onlooker might have wondered what was up with three ragamuffin preadolescents trudging up a mountain. One boy (Phillip) was barefoot, with black hair down to his hips. Wearing torn blue jeans tied with a woven belt and a shirt he made himself from the remnants of an American flag, he carried his dobro in a battered guitar case. The other boy (Hunter), sandy curls pressed into an aviator cap, walked in Phillip’s shadow. The girl (me) was dressed in painter’s pants and an oversized alpaca sweater to hide her blossoming curves, long auburn hair, dark blue eyes, a sprinkle of freckles across her Jewish nose. I had a leather pouch with beaded fringe tied to my belt loop where I kept a chunk of polished agate gifted to me by my father’s friend, a self-proclaimed shaman named Jim, a package of Zig-Zag rolling papers and a pinch of pot (mostly for show), a pencil stub and the folded-up poem I was working on, and a vial of jasmine oil.
When we arrived at the Tortoise, the boys disappeared among the throng of kids shooting baskets on the pounded dirt behind Miles’s house, and I wandered over to the dwelling of an artist named Lalla to find my own friends. I wasn’t feeling much like anyone’s girlfriend and was trying to decide whether that was good news or bad. Inside, women were laying out pots of black beans and brown rice, bowls of salad, baskets of blue corn muffins, and plates of goat cheese. Three guys sat on the floor strumming a dulcimer, a mandolin, and a tanpura. A couple was making out on the tattered couch.
Jessie rushed down the ladder from the loft, followed by Michelle, who had made her way up the mountain earlier that day and was now squealing my name. “Thank God you’re here!” And they threw their arms around me. This was already way better than a boyfriend who had yet to even hold my hand.
Parched from our hike up the mountain, I went over to the food table and poured myself a mug of hand-squeezed lemonade, sweetened with raw maple syrup and infused with fresh spearmint from Lalla’s garden, and gulped it down. Lalla waved at me through the recycled French doors to the back porch, where she was dancing with her toddler, Georgia, to the medieval madrigals wafting from the living room.
“Let’s play jacks,” Jessie suggested, and we sat down on the kitchen floor. Like a professional gambler, Michelle pulled a little Guatemalan woven zipper bag from the pocket of her sweatshirt and shook out the jacks, grabbing the little rubber ball before it rolled under the stove. We were champions. We had long ago graduated from the basic Onesies to Triple Flying Dutchmen and Threading the Needle. My little sister, Amy, and her best friend, Zoe (Phillip’s sister), had become our disciples, and because they practiced so much, they were threatening to outplay us, which was not okay with me. I relished this opportunity to polish my game.
By the time we had finished our first round, I was starting to feel peculiar. The bright yellow ball would fly into the air and not come down for a very long time. A trail of starburst flowed behind it as it landed, bounced, and once again arced slowly into the sky, which had managed to open up beyond the beams of the kitchen ceiling. When I reached to scoop up my pile of jacks, they became tiny bones in my hand, with bits of bloody cartilage still attached. I yanked back my fist and gasped.
“What happened?” Jessie asked.
I shook my head hard, trying to snap back to the familiar world. But I could not clear my head. My friend’s voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away, as if she were calling to me from a deep hole in the ground. I turned to look at Jessie’s face. Her long lashes fluttered; her teeth gleamed.
Michelle caught the ball as it oozed from my other hand, cocked her head at me, and then exchanged a look with Jessie. Weirdo, the look said.
I couldn’t argue with that. I did not feel like myself at all, and the world looked nothing like the one I thought I lived in. I glanced around the room, trying to orient myself with familiar objects: a bottle of ketchup upside down on the Mexican tiled countertop, a string of rosehips drying above the stove, a man named Rama pulling an apple cobbler from the oven. Nothing worked. I was seeing everything as if through the mesh of a screen. I was trapped on the other side of a door that kept me from everyone and everything I had ever known.
“I can’t see,” I whispered. “I can’t hear.” And I leapt up and raced outside to see if the fresh air might bring me back.
The boys were taking a break from shooting hoops and had sat down under a juniper tree to smoke a joint.
“Hey!” Hunter called. “What are you guys doing? Want to get stoned?”
I couldn’t answer. My breath was roaring in my ears, and my stomach heaved as if I were in a tiny rowboat lost on a stormy sea. Michelle and Jessie had followed me out and stood with arms folded while I raced up and down the path to the outhouse, hoping to outrun the nightmare that was crashing into my waking life. They all stared at me, quiet, confused. The look on their faces terrified me.
“I have to go,” I said, my own voice unfamiliar and thunderous. I glanced around, panicking.
Where could I go, and how would I get there?
“You sick?” Hunter asked.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“You can lie down in my bed,” Jessie offered. I nodded.
My four companions enfolded me like a human blanket, and we slithered across the clearing to Jessie’s house. They guided me up the narrow wooden staircase to the open loft Jessie shared with her mother, father, and baby sister. I lay down on Jessie’s foam mattress on the floor beneath the skylight, and Michelle tried to cover me with Jessie’s patchwork quilt. I threw it off as if it were a noose. I thrashed, I whimpered, I stared at the ceiling, suddenly transfixed by the network of cobwebs that laced the edges of the deep blue sky, my gaze dripping down to the smooth mud walls, shot through with shards of mica and slivers of straw.
“You want me to stay with you?” Michelle asked. Stay with you stay with you stay with you, a voice echoed behind hers.
“No, thank you,” I managed. Thank you thank you thank you. Michelle looked relieved.
One by one, my friends squeezed my hand and disappeared down the steps and away from me. At the top of the stairs, Hunter turned and said, “I’ll come back and check on you, okay?” But I could not answer. Some secret hand had reached down through the sky and pulled me up into a shapeless embrace. I had no choice but to surrender. I let go and left this world far behind.
At some point Hunter did come back, as he promised, but I could not speak, and pretty soon he drifted away again.
Finally Phillip appeared at the foot of the bed and crouched down beside me. “My dad came to pick us up,” he said, searching my eyes. I tried with all my might to focus on his face, his lips, the sound of his voice. He almost seemed to know what I was going through. How could he? “Want a ride home?” Phillip asked.
I nodded and sat up. The sound of an electric guitar and a burst of song drifted over the tops of the piñon trees from across the compound. The music was a magic carpet, come to fetch me. I debated climbing on and taking off, decided against it, and forced myself to concentrate on the task at hand: getting home.
I watched myself follow Phillip down t
he stairs and out the door into the brilliant blue and gold of the late afternoon. A short Jewish guy from New York, who looked like my father disguised as a normal person, was standing next to a fancy rental car, scrutinizing me as I appeared, blinking and quivering.
“Where do you live, Honey?” Phillip’s dad spoke fast. I could not make sense of the question.
“I don’t know,” I muttered.
“What?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You don’t know where you live? Jesus Christ.”
“In the Valdez Valley,” Phillip covered for me. “She’s sick, Dad.”
“Okay, let’s get going.” He patted me on my faraway head and opened the back door. I slid in beside Phillip. Phillip’s dad was visiting his kids from somewhere back east, where he made TV commercials for a living.
The luminous swirls and yawning thrums of the past few hours were beginning to give way to a kind of shadowy quiet that held me in its grip. I could not move—or speak. I could barely breathe, nor did I feel the need for breath. I sat in the backseat and watched the sun fade from the sky and the lights of Taos wink on as we neared the four-way intersection and turned in the direction of the valley where I thought I lived. I hoped the way would reveal itself as we drew closer, but the landscape still made no sense, and the gathering darkness swallowed any vestiges of familiar navigational markers.
“Now what?” Phillip’s father barked from the front seat.
I gazed at Phillip’s profile beside me, pleading with my eyes, which he could not see. He reached for my hand and stroked it.
“Turn toward the Ski Valley, and then go left instead of right. Their house is near the bottom of the road.”
Phillip had only been over to our place once or twice, but somehow he remembered the way and led his father up the deeply rutted driveway. I pretended to be asleep, the only cover I could come up with to justify my utter inability to find my way home.
Mom stepped out onto the porch when we pulled up, and she waved cheerfully. “Did you have a good day?” she asked, as I climbed out of the backseat and staggered toward the house. I shook my head no and rushed inside, straight for my room: a high bed built of pine planks above the water heater in the utility closet. I pushed aside the blanket that served as a door and climbed the ladder to my very own nest, crawling under the covers and straining to feel normal.
It was a long time till I felt anything like normal. Days of dreamlike hours melted into otherworldly weeks, during which I continued to feel as if I were trapped on the other side of a wall, watching the rest of the world through a chink in the stones. Everyone (including radically altered me) was carrying on as if everything was the same as always. It was not the same. It never would be.
On the third day I came home from school, threw myself down at the kitchen table, and began to sob.
My mother came over and sat beside me. She lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. “What is it, my love?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m going crazy.”
“You have always been sensitive,” she said, peeling away a lock of tear-drenched hair from my face, fingering the soft fuzz underneath. “God, your hair is like spun copper!” She loved to say that, parting the dark red outer strands to reveal the pale hair underneath.
“Mom, something’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong, my love. You’re just turning into a teenager.”
Oh my God, was this what becoming a teenager meant? Why didn’t anyone warn me? In that moment, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t make it. No one could be expected to live through this. For the first time (but not the last) I contemplated how I might end my life and escape.
Over the years I would slip in and out of this altered state. Nothing in particular seemed to trigger it. I might be practicing scales on my flute, or stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce, or opening the door to greet a friend who had stopped by for a visit, and suddenly I would feel as if I were dreaming, and I couldn’t tell what was real and what was the dream. Or I would be in the middle of a philosophy lecture in graduate school, where I had a teaching fellowship, and as I was drawing a distinction between rationalism and empiricism in epistemology, my words would begin to slide from my tongue and dissolve in the air like soap bubbles. I would have to stop talking, my heart hammering in my chest.
In my mid-twenties I was living on the edge of an old-growth redwood forest in Northern California. One morning, a few friends suggested that we take LSD and spend the day exploring the deep green woods. I had always been terrified of psychedelics. I had worked for years to wrestle my “episodes” under control and thought the drugs might trigger a fresh cascade of altered states.
I decided the fear had loomed like a beast on the outskirts of my life and paralyzed me long enough, and it was time to face it off. I dropped the acid and spent the day frolicking among the giant ferns and moss-covered logs of the fairy forest, feeling like a woodland nymph, fascinated by the way the drops of dew clung to the face of a trillium blossom and the branches of the grandmother madrones wove a net of belonging for a hundred kinds of creatures.
At some point, as I leapt across a stream and dove into the hollow of a redwood tree, it occurred to me that this was not an unfamiliar experience. I had first noticed this explosion of color and sound that day at the commune in the mountains when I was twelve. My knees buckled and I gasped: I had accidentally ingested LSD that day. Or mescaline. Or some other radically mind-altering substance that must have been floating around the party. I hadn’t lost my mind. I had only lost my innocence. Only I was too innocent to know it.
A few years ago I was reminiscing with Lalla about the old hippie days in Taos. We were reflecting on both the magic and the recklessness with which parents went about raising kids at that time, and I brought up my experience of having acid slipped to me at a party up at the Magic Tortoise.
Lalla’s deeply lined face turned pale. She reached for my hand. “It was me,” she said.
“What was you?”
“I gave you that acid. It was in the punch. I thought everyone should trip. I wanted to turn on the whole world.”
“Even children?”
“I thought it would be a good start.”
I didn’t know whether to leap from my seat and shake Lalla by her frail, velvety shoulders or laugh the whole thing off—all those years of terrifying dissociative states that had catapulted me onto a spiritual path and into the clutches of opportunistic teachers.
I took a deep breath. “I understand,” I said. “My father felt the same way, only his target was the government. He thought that if all the most powerful men in the world were to trip on acid at least once, there would be peace on earth.”
Lalla nodded solemnly. “Yes,” she said. “We were trying to make peace.”
Not long after that spring equinox party, a group of kids, including Hunter and Phillip, were playing Sardines in our haunted house in Valdez during summer vacation.
Sardines is the reverse of hide and seek. One person hides, and then each of the other players searches for that person. When they find them, they quietly slip into the hiding place with them, until all they players are squished in together. The end.
It was my turn to hide. Phillip found me first. I was under Amy’s bed in the room she shared with Roy. Phillip crawled in beside me and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, pulling me close in the darkness.
He began to stroke my back.
I turned my face toward his.
He pressed his nose against mine.
His tongue flicked between his teeth and over my lips.
I gasped, drew back.
He rubbed my back, a little lower.
I kissed him.
And then we were melting into each other, kissing, rubbing our cramped bodies together, my new breasts pressing into his chest, his groin swelling against my belly.
Oh, I said to myself. So this is what a boyfriend is. Hunter had quietly faded out of my life before we had eve
r gotten around to touching each other.
Terrified, ravenous, I lay inert as Phillip mashed his mouth into mine and warmed every cell in my body with his breath.
Was this really happening?
This was the boy every girl in school wanted to like them. Phillip was adorable. He played the guitar like Eric Clapton and hung out with the silversmiths in Arroyo Seco. He was aloof and poetic. And now he was kissing me as if I were the most beautiful creature on earth. I tried to ignore his pelvis and focus on his long black hair, his doughy lips, the sandalwood scent of his neck.
When the next kid found us, it was obvious that we were now in a relationship.
The rest of that summer we spent all our time together, and when the new school year started, we couldn’t bear to be apart. If Phillip was not at my house, I was at his. Phillip’s room was a shed built behind his family’s home. It had a huge plate-glass window facing south; posters of Jimi Hendrix and M. C. Escher prints on the plywood walls; his beloved dobro guitar, amp, and a set of conga drums in the corner; and a purple and green Indian tapestry tacked to the ceiling above his bed. Phillip’s mom had concluded that I bore too much responsibility for my younger siblings, so when I was at their place I was forbidden from taking care of anyone, and she insisted on serving me homebaked scones and chamomile tea.
One day Phillip’s mother ran into my father at the food co-op and asked him how he was feeling about our relationship.
“Sensational,” Dad said, filling his bag with lentils from the bulk grains bin.
“Aren’t you concerned that they’re sleeping together? Phillip isn’t even shaving yet.”
“That’s why I’m not worried.” Dad gave Nora a wink and continued shopping. He related this conversation to Mom and me with great glee the next day.
For me, “sleeping together” meant just that: climbing into the same bed and going to sleep. But not for Phillip. He may have been newly pubescent, yet he was losing no time in exploring the human condition with all his might, and he was starting to leave me in the dust. Already a child prodigy musician, he was playing in Taos bars with adult bands, camping alone in the mountains, and attending all-night peyote ceremonies in the tepee at New Buffalo. And he was ready for sex.
Caravan of No Despair Page 3