by Howard Bloom
It was only as we were climbing the swaying stairs to the new apartment that I began to put two and two and two together about our ride in the muscular Chevy. As usual, when I added two and two, I got six (arithmetic has never been my strong point, as you’ll recall from the collection of flaws I shared with Albert Einstein). The guy with the V8 engine had no money, no keys, and had made damned sure he wasn’t driving the car. In fact, while he made himself respectable by wearing a suit and looking inconspicuously horizontal, he positioned this guy at the wheel whose overgrown hair and shoeless approach to sartorial elegance would have made him highly suspicious in the eyes of guys in blue uniforms. Me. The car was stolen!
And here I’d been flying it across the desert at slightly subsonic speeds without a license. If we’d been caught, the car’s “owner” would simply have claimed that he’d been the hitchhiker, we’d picked him up, and if there was a theft involved, surely WE must have been the ones to pull it off. God damned beatniks!
But due to some happy accident, instead of landing in the slammer, we were safe at home (assuming the stairs held up until we could get to the third floor, and that the six scorched steel posts supporting what was left of the building didn’t buckle). Maybe there was a God after all!
At any rate, we made it to the upper stories and let ourselves in to the new, unlocked apartment, which was as still as an abandoned buggy whip factory. The floor was littered with nondescript lumps of fabric. At first the early morning light made it difficult to puzzle out exactly what they were. Then one of the bundles came alive. The heaps of rags were sleeping bags. And they were occupied.
The first head to pop out was that of Carol Maynard, the highly tactile female who had found me “cat-like” and had welcomed me to her interior pleasure dome. She screamed my name with a heart-toasting delight, and dashed out of her textile cocoon, totally naked, flinging her arms around me in glee. Her voice woke the others, and within seconds, over a dozen equally unclothed bodies, male and female, had piled themselves in a giant hugging mound around me. It was nice to feel wanted. Alas, it doesn’t happen often.
When the human heap disbanded, I tried to introduce my follower from San Pedro to the crowd, only to discover that he had disappeared. A brisk search revealed him sitting on the creaking stairs two stories below with his head in his hands, the victim of traumatic shock. He’d never seen a naked female before without a staple in her navel, and the sight of a whole tribe of pink-skinned humans with pubic hair had thrown him into panic. In those days, Playboy pretended that pubic hair did not exist. So the smallest hint of hair in the private regions of the body was shattering. And the unclothed pudenda of my friends did a lot more than hint. “I don’t think I can take this,” groaned my hollow-lifed escapee. Within an hour, he was on the highway trying to thumb his way back to San Pedro, his parents, and his job at the post-office. His spiritual quest, had been, how should we say this…brief.
I reentered the apartment, distressed that we’d upset the kid so profoundly. But my friends had incredible news to share. They had discovered the magic elixir that unlocks the secrets of the universe, the mystic potion that allows those in psychic pain to descend into the basement of the human mind and straighten out the plumbing, the lens through which the wonders of the cosmos can be seen in all their glory. It was a substance that the graduate Biochem students at Berkeley had learned to synthesize in their spare time. As you’ve seen, the test-tube twiddling alchemists had been kind enough to make their magic formula available to the world on sugar cubes wrapped in handy, reusable aluminum foil. For this act of kindly sorcery, they were charging a mere pittance—$5.00 a cube. This key to the secrets of a painfully tangled cosmos was called LSD.
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I recognized the name immediately. It was lysergic acid diethylamide, a drug with effects of the sort that Aldous Huxley had lectured about on the BBC when I’d been glued prostrate to my bed as a sixth grader worshipping at the shrine of the breadbox-sized antique wooden Crosley radio on my floor. And it was the drug that had been written up in Parade magazine, a national Sunday newspaper supplement that came with the Buffalo Evening News, roughly a year later for its use by the military in experiments to shove people into a schizophrenic state. Yes, it was the very substance that sadistic experimenters had used to upend the natural order of things and make innocent pussycats fear itsy-bitsy mice. How could a drug that terrifies felines be the purger of psychic pain and the key to Nirvana? I was about to find out.
But that’s not all. My companions had managed to get their hands on the plant from which the drug that had entranced Huxley—mescaline—was derived. They’d obtained genuine buttons of peyote cactus—not the dried and shredded remains that Reed College students had baked the potency out of and placed in gelatin capsules, but the genuine article, looking like each bud had just been hand-plucked from the nearest swollen Lophophora williamsii plant. And, miracle of miracles, this stuff had the same kind of mind-unpeeling effect as LSD.
So the next morning, the time arrived to embark on my first Fantastic Voyage and to follow Huxley into the brave new world of the cosmic interior.
First, my companions gave me culinary tips. Peyote cactus tastes about as yummy as fresh-stewed salmonella. Some advised covering it with ketchup. Others recommended blending it in a death-by-chocolate milk shake. But everyone agreed, no human could eat it raw and survive the mutinous violence of raped and ravaged taste buds. So I decided to be brave and munch the stuff without condiments or secret sauce. Indeed, it did taste as if the luckless plant had died of gangrene, and now my mouth was on the verge of following its example. But I brushed my teeth and lived.
A half an hour later, as I lay on the floor in my sleeping bag, the window facing the street turned into the sweeping panoramic windscreen of a space ship cruising the galaxies. Strange since there is no wind in space. Below this windshield was an equally sweeping dashboard replete with knobs and dials to manipulate speed and direction. And the apartment soared between the stars, looking for fresh planets to conquer. But outer space wasn’t the dark place it’d been cracked up to be. It was filled with California sunshine.
Then I noticed the way the sunlight hit the walls. The colors didn’t seem as permanent as usual. They shifted from pink to green to purple, depending on a slight tweak of the control knobs in your mind. I removed the housing from the dashboard of consciousness, and tried to watch the machinery of its innards at work. Sure enough, color wasn’t some external absolute. It was filled in artificially by a network of neuronal machinery between the pinhole opening of your eye and the dark meshwork of your brain, as if the busy sensory cells were children crayoning between the empty outlines in a coloring book. And which color crayon they used was something you could fiddle with.
I poked around a little further in the tangled circuitry beneath the control panel of consciousness. Sure enough, just like all the mystics and Zen masters had said, way down at the bottom of my brain was a small source of spontaneity spitting out instant reactions to everything in sight. But each naked response was strapped onto a gurney and whisked through a massive surgical ward staffed with spin doctors before it was spilled, after some delay, into my carefully tailored consciousness. Every virginal impulse was checked for social acceptability and botoxed and face-lifted to fit my notions of the self that I wanted to be. Then it was given a haircut to appeal to the folks around me, sartorially inspected, and handed an official script to make sure it wouldn’t make me look like a fool. Only after a careful reworking in the makeup department and a final quality check, was the no-longer-spontaneous impulse allowed to step out onto the stage of consciousness to recite its radically reshaped tidings to whoever was unlucky enough to be within listening range. And all of this took place in a sliver of a second.
So that’s how the whole thing worked?!
Then I stared at the ceiling and saw masterworks that Botticelli and Van Gogh had never had time to pa
int, creations that were mine, all mine. I wanted to grab a brush and palette and get them down on canvas. But, in fact, I hadn’t been capable of moving a muscle for over an hour. And I’m an incompetent at artwork. Next, I opened my mouth, let out a soft “ooooh,” and noticed the sound of my voice. What an intriguing noise! I varied the pitch. The fresh resonance was fantastic. It was rough like corduroy. If I altered it a bit, it became as fine as silk. Modulate the noise a bit more, and it became soft as cotton. For half an hour, I lay there “ooohing,” oblivious to the fact that other folks in the room might find this lengthy series of variations on a whale call slightly disconcerting.
Eventually, the fascination with the finer nuances of the external senses and the interior mind wore off, and I tried to move. I put on some shorts and a t-shirt and went outdoors. But I had fallen drastically down the evolutionary ladder and was bent over like an Australopithecus. If I’d had my druthers, I’d have knuckle-walked. However, your average hominid throwback was taken perfectly for granted on the sidewalks of San Francisco.
Those are the good parts. My mind has been kind enough to erase the bad ones, but they were legion. Every conceivable demon came crawling out of my internal depths to sculpt its personal hell from the stucco of my conscious mind. Every psychic pain ever imagined by man sloshed boiling oil on the tender walls of my skull’s interior. Twenty-four hours later, I realized that I had been given the greatest tour of the human brain in my life. Assuming my brain is human. I had taken the very trip through the extremes of human suffering that Edna St. Vincent Millay had insisted on. I’d been given the kind of grand excursion through the borderlands of pain that she felt opened the infinite. For twelve hours, I’d glimpsed William Blake’s:
World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
…Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
And for half a diurnal cycle, I’d stepped into the realm of madness where the truths of William James’s Varieties of the Religious Experience lay.
What’s more, I had learned things about my inner workings that would forever alter my outlook. But I also knew that I’d been dragged through circles of hell that even Dante had been unable to imagine, and I never wanted to take the stuff again. I never did.
That may have been a mistake. Some years later, Solomon Snyder, discoverer of endorphins and opiate receptors, would confess that he’d briefly plunged in where I’d left off, emerging with the “American Nobel Prize.”
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On subsequent nights, I would see Carol take these prettily putrid nubbins of cactus and lay on the floor at what were allegedly parties, going through alternate cycles of death and resurrection. One moment she’d be in heaven, wide-eyed at its wonders. The next she’d be in hell’s incinerator, writhing with pain. A pain that I could do nothing to soothe. Little did any of us suspect it at the time, but she was taking her first steps into a desperate world.
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Peyote was just the overture. The opera would come with LSD. We stocked up for a grand expedition to Big Sur to try the stuff out. Big Sur, the place that the poet Robinson Jeffers had praised for its muscular, massive outcrops of rocks stretching from the cliffs far into the sea “with foam flying at their flanks.” All dozen of us were slated for the trip. Some semi-stranger I never met had said we could use his lean-to on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. We’d stay there for two days.
Which meant that we needed all the steaks and Fig Newtons we could get our hands on. I took the responsibility for raiding the local supermarkets.
To understand how I fed this brood, let’s take a brief flashback. Remember how the three murderers lost their appetite when I told them that the smoked oysters and cream cheese in my sandwiches had been transported past supermarket security by jock strap? My career as one of the premier shoplifters on the West Coast began when we were still living in Seattle. I’d dropped out of Reed with roughly $1.35 in my pocket. In the beginning there were just three of us. Later, there would be a dozen. And we needed to eat. Food costs money. We had none. What’s worse, I liked to cook. Dick Hoff explained shoplifting to me. I was horrified. Remember the first rule of science, the truth at any price including the price of your life? I loathed dishonesty. I abhorred crime. But Dick took me to a local supermarket and showed me how easy it is to pick up one of the seven basic food groups and slip it into your pants, securing it in the safety net of your athletic supporter. How I overcame my scruples, I shudder to think. But I did.
By the time the Big Sur expedition was inserted into our calendar of upcoming events, I’d gotten truly brazen. I could carry three oversized sirloins in my pants. Plus, all the trimmings, from A1 sauce on down. And I’d learned a lesson. Defy the scripts of the normal. When you’re being hunted, turn the tables. Hunt the hunters. Very much like Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek turning their instruments in an anti-conventional direction. It worked like this.
A security guard in a big, airy, modern supermarket begins to suspect you. How do you know? When you walk from aisle one to aisle two, so does he. Though he’s trying to look unobtrusive by staying at the aisle’s other end and blending in with the Campbell’s Soup cans. Once you know he’s on to you, do not get furtive. Do not look abashed and ashamed. Don’t shrink as if you would like to be invisible. Do the opposite. Walk right up to the security guard. Watch him shrivel as he realizes that it’s he who is in your sights, not the other way around. When you reach him and he’s fidgeting pathetically, ask him how to find the Worcestershire sauce. Ask him politely. He will stop giving you trouble. And remember something. This worked in the days before ubiquitous security cams. God knows how it works today.
But the psychological lesson is still alive and kicking. Sometimes you need to turn the tables. Sometimes you need to break the frame. Sometimes you need to toss the conventional scripts away. Let’s skip forward ten years. I was living in New York City. I’d helped found what would become one of the leading avant-garde commercial art studios on the East Coast—Cloud Studio. Since my wild-eyed illustrators and I all began as starving artists, our studio was in the below-low-rent district, the slum, a neighborhood where drug dealers shot each other with a regularity that subway scheduling executives would have envied. It was the Lower East Side. I was walking toward the subway station on Bowery, a decrepit avenue known for its high-density population of homeless alcoholics begging on the sidewalks. The ones known in the twentieth century as Bowery bums. I was passing Third Street. A hundred yards down the sidewalk to my right, I could see two very big men kicking a formless object three feet into the air, waiting until it landed, then kicking it into the air again. Each time it fell, it made a sickening, breaking sound. At first I assumed the object being launched repeatedly into a very low earth orbit was a sack of potatoes. Then some sixth sense pinpointed the sound. It was not the widely-distributed crunch of smashing Idaho spuds. It was the sharp, concentrated crunch of breaking bones. The object being catapulted by kicks was a human being.
I’d learned in my childhood that if you see a monstrous deed unfolding and you don’t stop it, you become an accomplice to the crime. I had two choices. Use a conventional script and run up to the perpetrators of this bone destruction shouting at them to stop it. No. If I came up to them with dominance gestures and a language that opens a normal showdown, they would know how to respond to it. They would take me up on it. Showdowns were their normal fare. But not mine. I’m small and was floored with one punch within the first fifteen seconds of the only boxing match I’d ever entered. At least the only one I’d ever entered voluntarily. So showdowns were out.
What was the alternative? Run up to the thugs shrieking insanely as if I were a lunatic. Even thugs withdraw from the unpredictable. They are confused by things that don’t fit any script in their repertoire. And, in fact, at the sight of a raving, undersized madman heading toward them like the meteor that eradicate
d the dinosaurs, the enforcers stopped what they were doing and ran. Under some conditions, it pays to abandon the scripts of social convention. Or to reverse them.
But back to feeding a dozen hungry drug experimenters. I supplied the provisions for the trip to Big Sur. Then, through some means of transportation I’ve long since forgotten—some variation on an automobile—we ended up on the wild and nearly untouched shores of the Pacific.
Our lean-to was just that. It had a roof and one measly wall for the overhang to lean on. But the three empty spaces where the walls of a more complete building would have been had a terrific view. If you swung your gaze to the right, you looked two miles north along the narrow cliff ridge that hung out over the beach 300 feet below. If you swung your head left, you looked south to a ridge that swept in a gentle curve and posted a stone parapet far out into the ocean a mere hundred feet away. If you looked straight out, you stared west over the corrugated, gray waves that eventually led—if you happened to be a purposeful and persistent porpoise—to Hawaii. Behind your head and on the other side of the lean-to’s single wall were mountains covered with evergreens. But thanks to the screen of that single wall, you couldn’t see them. Your gaze was focused on the flat that led to the cliff and past the drop to the endlessness of the sea.
Despite Robinson Jeffers’ Big Sur poems hinting that he’d visited the place, it was hard to believe that any human except for the Tarzan who had built our lean-to had ever been here. It seemed to look exactly as it must have appeared before the evolution of the earliest upright creature with an oversized brain, an ocean away.