It’s a fact that the crown of the common daisy forms a perfect logarithmic spiral. Mentally noting, perhaps, that both our DNA and our Milky Way galaxy are likewise spiral or helical in shape, I began to trace with my eyes the spiral arms of one daisy’s crown, starting with the outermost arm; slowly, slowly moving along the curved plane toward the generation point, the end, the center. And here, I must warn you, is where the woo-woo kicks in with both fairy slippers. When my eyes reached the end/beginning of the spiral, reached the very most pinpoint center of the yellow crown, I abruptly went inside the daisy! That is, my consciousness entered the daisy. Obviously, my cowboy/banker body remained slouched in the armchair, but for an indeterminate number of seconds or even minutes, my entire conscious being was literally -- literally -- inside that flower.
I’ve seldom told this story, all too aware that even a friendly listener was likely to judge me either dishonest or nuts. Those I have trusted to accept the account at face value have invariably asked, “What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?” My answer: “Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.” Ambiguous, I know, but that’s the best I can do. I cautioned you, remember, that the psychedelic experience does not readily lend itself to verbal communication. It was voluminous in there, a kind of parallel universe flooded with sweet golden light enlivened by vaporous progressions of abstract symbols that seemed to assign numerical value to the various magnitudes, tones, and patterns of chi, the energy that courses through all living things. See what I mean? A cathedral made of mathematics and honey seems to best sum it up.
At any rate, a physical description is not what really matters here. The important thing is the knowledge I took away from the event, namely the realization that every daisy that exists -- every single daisy in every single field -- has an identity just as strong as my own! I assure you a revelation such as that cannot help but change one’s life. It altered my view of the natural world and my place within it, top to bottom, and for weeks thereafter I could not see a daisy in a window box or someone’s yard without getting tears in my eyes. The reader is free, of course, to ridicule, scoff, or try to explain it away, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. As the old coots down in Appalachia used to say, “You can burn me for a fool but you won’t get no ashes.”
Growing up, I was freaked out by eternity. Early on, my good Baptist mother had briefed me on heaven, emphasizing how those good enough to land there would be there forever, that their lives in heaven would never come to an end. Never? Not ever, not even after a thousand billion years? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. The prospect of extreme longevity was attractive, but the notion that eternity had no stopping point -- that it never ever, ever, ever, ever ended! -- struck me somehow as horrific. I used to lie awake at night fretting about it. And for naughty Tommy Rotten, the information that time was equally interminable in hell was hardly any comfort.
Under the influence of LSD that sunny July day, I finally lost my terror of the eternal. In a state during which time for me flowed either in more than one direction or not at all, I was hit by the realization that in eternity there is no time: it isn’t a matter of perpetual duration, time simply does not exist there, it was never there in the first place (so, naturally, concepts such as “never,” and “first,” and past-tense verbs like “was,” make no sense in the context of eternity, where it is always the present). Zen places great emphasis on living in the present moment. On acid, it was demonstrated to me that the present moment and eternity are one and the same, whether or not there is any such place as heaven. This all sounds quite sophomoric when I write it down, but that doesn’t negate the fact that LSD served to relieve me of a lifelong secret sense of dread.
Carl Oglesby, the former Berkeley political activist, has said that “Acid is such an immediate, powerful, and explicit transformation that it draws a line right across your life: before LSD and after LSD.” He is doubtlessly correct, although in my case, neither transformation nor that line of separation would have been evident to an outside observer, at least for a few years.
When I walked out of Jim’s studio that afternoon, feeling finally “born again” -- a sensation that had so disappointingly eluded me upon my baptism in the Rappahannock River twenty years earlier -- I remember thinking that if President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were to sit down and take LSD together, the Cold War would end overnight. So many others were to have a similar reaction to LSD that we may conclude that it was acid that fueled the massive antiwar movement a bit later in the decade. In mid-1964, however, the peace movement was still only a throb in some old Quaker’s pulse, and I’d been a confirmed pacifist for years before encountering white rabbits and little blue pills.
Outwardly, my life appeared unchanged, I wrote my reviews, cared for Kendall, dressed in the same style and ate the same foods, although I developed a sudden distaste for alcoholic beverages which struck me now as crude, even barbaric; an insult to the senses and the mind, a toxin that inflated the ego and elongated its tentacles, whereas LSD produced the opposite, ecstatically liberating effect. I also found that reading had become unsatisfying, for no words, however artful, on any printed page seemed to do justice to what I now regarded as the “real” real world.
If editors at the Times detected any post-acid changes in me -- the fascinated way I looked now at patterns and colors, for example, as if seeing them with freshly minted eyes -- they didn’t let on; and as for Susan, she was too busy drinking to notice that I was not. Anyway, I only saw Susan when she dropped by to check on Kendall or get laid. (There are limits to abstinence.) At one point, I ordered a box of peyote buttons from the Smith Cactus Ranch in Arizona (it was perfectly legal then), thinking that if Susan and I took a mind trip together, the insights afforded might curb her boozing, help her understand me, even repair our marriage.
After drying the green cacti buttons for a fortnight over a space heater, I ground them up, filled horse capsules with the powder, and with as much pseudo-Navajo ritual as I could stomach, swallowed five capsules, forcing five more each on Susan and John, a friend from the Blue Moon who’d showed up unexpectedly. The peyote proved even harder to stomach than my improvised Navajo mumbo jumbo, but once the cramps and nausea subsided, I commenced to ride a muddy surge of organic visions: dense, earthy, primitive, and chthonian as opposed to the exquisite Escher-like morphology of LSD. I felt simultaneously sick and elated. Susan and John, on the other hand, were sick, uncomfortable, and bored, and after a couple hours of this, they repaired to a neighborhood tavern to drink beer, John, too, being a faithful fan of fermentation.
At one point later in the evening, the Coyote-directed mind movies having mostly tapered off, I decided to walk to the tavern and check on Susan and John. I’d been concerned that their behavior, modified by the peyote, might have gotten them in some sort of trouble. It was a Saturday night, the tavern jam-packed, every booth, every bar stool occupied. When I walked in the door, all conversation in the place abruptly ceased and every eye turned on me. Mind you, there was nothing the least bit unusual about my clothes or haircut, I had no facial hair and wasn’t wearing shades, yet everybody was gaping at me as if I were an alien dropped in from Outer Mongolia. Or Venus.
When I reached the table where Susan and John had spent most of the evening, as if peyote were naught but an annoying gastric upset that could be relieved with beer, they regarded me with alarm. “You better get out of here,” they stage-whispered in unison. I was baffled. “There’s light shooting out of your eyes,” confided Susan. And John added, “Man, you look like you’re fuckin’ on fire!”
I took the hint, retreating from the place with as little fanfare as a man on fire could manage. When I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror upon rushing home, however, I detected no sign of flame or smoke. Writing the experience off to some weird mischief perpetrated by Mescalito, the Native American peyote spirit (from whom we get the pharmaceutical term “mescaline”), I went to bed and dreamed vividly of arroyos, Hopi tr
icksters, and jade-headed sidewinders. I’d pretty much squeegeed the whole episode from my memory when, about three months later, perfectly straight, I encountered Mescalito in person -- in the form of a redheaded wino.
24
the redheaded wino
Happily, I did not turn out to be one of those people who allowed psychedelics to become the center of their universe, although I certainly could understand and even sympathize with their obsession. In the year following my day down the infinite rabbit hole, the excursion was seldom far from my mind. The reflections were entirely positive, the musings burnished with optimism, yet that year was the most lost and lonely period of my entire life. I was at sea, tossed about almost incessantly between intimacy and isolation.
I say “intimacy” because, operating on daisy consciousness, as it were, I felt connected to the natural world and its myriad manifestations in the most personal, caring, comprehending, and bedazzled way. On the other hand, there was nobody to whom I might explain, let alone with whom I could share, such feelings. Oh sure, the Pacific Northwest was crawling with nature lovers, but they didn’t make the connections between the neurons in their brains and the photosynthesis in their gardens; they climbed rocks but never heard geology humming (humming Earth’s sidereal earth song), it rarely occurred to them that perhaps we really are just some butterfly’s dream. They genuinely appreciated the perceived world yet remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds within worlds . . . ad infinitum.
The problem was that I didn’t know a single other soul who’d taken LSD. For propriety reasons, Jim hadn’t introduced me to any of his lab rats, and at that time the public -- in Seattle, even the hip public -- was securely unacquainted with the awe-inspiring, life-changing alkaloid synthesized from a fungus that grows on barley and wheat. To be sure, Life magazine (who else?!) had recently run a lengthy article about LSD (maybe unwittingly, maybe not, Life’s publisher Henry R. Luce was America’s first Pied Piper of psychedelica), but acid trips were not a subject of discussion at the Blue Moon or anywhere else in town. Lacking confederates, I felt I’d become a minority of one; a nation, a race unto myself.
Thus isolated, I commenced to entertain thoughts of emigration. Secretly, I pined to go in search of my new kin, to mingle somewhere with others similarly mutated. I could sense that they were out there (was I channeling Leary and Alpert?), I just didn’t know where to find them. This reclusion wasn’t all bad, actually. While my acidified self lacked positive reinforcement, it also was not subjected to the enormous negativity that LSD would generate in years to come; the overwhelming hostility, most of it ill-informed if not outright mendacious, from quarters both official and haphazard; from everyone in fact who maintains a vested interest in a suspect status quo.
I’d prefer to deal with this subject more matter-of-factly, as did Apple’s legendary Steve Jobs when he told his biographer, “Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in my life.” The most successful, innovative, influential entrepreneur and businessman of modern times went on to credit LSD with helping to shape his sense of integrated systems and product design, and let it go at that. My mission here, however, has been to try to describe as accurately as possible the state I was in when my path crossed that of the Redheaded Wino.
It was a Friday, payday at the Seattle Times. The Times was located at Fairview and John, the same address it occupied until quite recently. After collecting my paycheck at the personnel window, I hoofed a few blocks up Fairview to the nearest bank. Once I’d exchanged check for cash, I headed right back to the newspaper, where my daily duties included a midmorning trip to the composing room to oversee the makeover of the entertainment pages for the second edition. It was nearly eleven, deadline for the makeover (the Times was an afternoon paper), and I was practically sprinting down Fairview, both the tail of my tweedy sports coat and my carefully knotted tie flapping crazily in the slipstream, my facial expression doubtlessly a stern mixture of fretfulness and determination. That’s when I became aware of a slowly approaching figure, a man who looked out of place in that quiet, sparsely populated neighborhood.
Despite the mild weather, the guy was buttoned up in a heavy, olive-drab overcoat, the kind assigned to soldiers in the First World War, and although he was tall, the old army-surplus coat was so long on him its hem kissed the pavement. His high-top shoes were battered, as was his face, a countenance wreathed with unkempt red hair and peppered with a heavy red stubble. His was not a cultivated beard, it just appeared he hadn’t shaved in four or five days. Everything about him, in fact, suggested a man -- a derelict, a wino -- who’d been on a bender, although if he were hungover it hadn’t darkened his mood, for he was cheerfully singing, singing out loud.
He wasn’t busking, mind you, not performing, just unself-consciously caroling an unrecognizable tune as he shambled up the street. When we got within about ten paces of one another, he broke off his song. He stopped in his tracks. I could tell he was fixed on me, had been for nearly a block, and I was sure he was about to hit me up for some of my payday cash. Instead, as I passed, he looked me over head to toe with bloodshot but piercing eyes and laughed out loud. Laughed right in my face. It was a mocking laugh, imperious even; spiked with the cheap gin of cruelty, but diluted with a splash of amusement, garnished with a sprig of pity; and he soaked me with it, as if he’d emptied a rotgut punch bowl over my head.
He was looking through me like I was a plate-glass window, reading me like a Las Vegas billboard. His gawk was virtually audible. “You think you’re a special case,” it seemed to say. “You think you’re liberated, enlightened, evolved or something, but just look at you: young man in a hurry, busting his nuts to please a corporate boss; ambitious and uptight, one more teeny replaceable cog in the money machine, dressed like a high school civics teacher, frowning like you lost your smile in a card game you knew was rigged from the start. Get your pathetic ass on down the street, you’re spraying worry and discontent the way a skunk sprays stink.”
Thus spake the Redheaded Wino.
I did keep walking. What else could I do? Just before I reached the Times, I pivoted to see if he might be following. And he wasn’t there! Probably he’d only turned the corner, but I had the impression that he’d vanished in a puff of smoke. In fact, to this day I sometimes wonder if he’d ever been there at all, if he hadn’t been an apparition, a manifestation of Mescalito projected by some cactus-juiced, acid-etched circuit in the recesses of my cerebellum; the one area, perhaps, where neither conscience nor delusion has a place to hide.
In any event, I went home later that afternoon and brooded. All weekend, I brooded and stewed, tossing in a clothes dryer of self-examination. The Seattle Times was no sweatshop, no earth-raping multinational combine, no soulless bank. It was in truth a fine place to work, a public service staffed with intelligent reporters, witty columnists, and responsible editors who went out of their way to be fair to readers and subordinates alike. Still . . . still, that carrot-topped wraith, real or imagined, had hit me where it hurt; had with one sulfuric laugh shattered my mask and spoiled my act as a regular guy.
Monday morning I called in well. Three weeks later, I moved to New York. I should have gone to San Francisco.
25
romancing the language wheel
I should have gone to San Francisco. If my objective had been to connect with like-minded people, to fraternize, perhaps on a regular basis, with other travelers home from the rabbit hole, moving to New York was a mistake.
Granted, there were individuals in Manhattan who’d taken or were taking psychedelics, but few in number, they flew well below the radar; and even though I lived just up the street from the iconic Peace Eye Bookstore, where I mingled with luminaries of the Beat Generation and befriended Allen Ginsberg, I never established contact with my presumed kin; whereas in San Francisco in late 1964 there was an infestation of white rabbits and they were multiplying like . . . well, like rabbits. A radical new music (a mixture of
surfer rock, Southern blues, Berlin music hall, and Indian raga), with far-out lyrics was spilling into the streets around Haight and Ashbury, the city’s younger citizens were dressing as if every day was Mardi Gras, and Chronicle columnist Herb Caen would soon be coining the term “hippie.” An incandescent acid rain was sprinkling San Francisco, but Tommy Rotten, oblivious, had fled the thin gray rains of Seattle for the dirty snows of New York. He hadn’t heard the California weather report.
As I look back now, I see that my ignorance had been a stroke of luck. In San Francisco I could have been sucked into the developing psychedelic scene (a scene, man); could have been caught up in the looming politics of ecstasy, another sixties comet chasing its own bright tail. Aside from my conviction that for maximum benefit, the forbidden fruits of LSD are best savored in solitude, the psychedelic experience, as I said, was emphatically nonverbal, and after more than a year during which I was as suspicious of verbiage as of a bigmouthed car salesman with dyed blond hair and three ex-wives, I was, secluded in my New York tenement, beginning slowly to fall in love again with wood pulp and ink. I don’t think they were reading all that much in the Haight.
At age five I’d hitched my little red wagon to the Language Wheel, that disk of verbiage that came rolling out of the grunting and growling mud of prehistory, accumulating variations and refinements beyond number as it rolled headlong into literacy, and -- when greased with imagination -- into poetry, into theater, ballads, sutras, and rants. LSD’s preliterate/postliterate juggernaut had run me off the road. I’d believed myself stranded there, but now Hermann Hesse had driven up in a vintage Mercedes tow truck, its radio blaring Mozart, and winched my wagon out of the ditch, demonstrating in Steppenwolf that modern narrative fiction indeed could transcend bourgeois preoccupations, and with both an enlightening and an entertaining panache, as playful as it is deadly serious, bind spirit to matter and insinuate for readers those hidden worlds within our world. Das ist gut.