There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish. Like Ken Kesey and Robert Anton Wilson, two other iconically loquacious luminaries of the counterculture, Leary was Irish. Irish! He’d kissed the Blarney Stone. He’d French-kissed it, felt it up, rolled with it in the soft grass on the moonlit banks of the River Shannon. Figuratively speaking. Personally, I found him a generous, stimulating, entertaining, always upbeat companion, as full of challenging ideas, sincere flattery, and surprises as blarney. I never once heard him speak ill of anyone, including those who’d set him up and sent him to prison. No, I take that back. He was merciless in his condemnation of Abraham Lincoln, blaming Honest Abe for the rise of Wall Street and corporate fascism in America.
Sitting in his home one afternoon, not long after Tim and his wife Barbara had adopted a huge shaggy dog, I noticed on the coffee table a book entitled There Are No Bad Dogs, Only Bad Masters. When Tim was summoned to the phone, I picked up the book and was idly leafing through it, noticing that everywhere it said “no bad dogs,” Tim, with a black pen, had crossed out “dogs” and written in “drugs.” As in there are no bad drugs, only bad users.
Like many of Tim’s more playful pronouncements, this one needed to be rinsed for a while in the suds of sober reason. Certainly, the downfall of the sixties, that era of such promise and hope, was due in no small part to the misuse of potentially “good” drugs -- such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline -- by “bad” imbibers. When Time magazine published its cover story on the burgeoning psychedelic revolution, kids from Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey, from all over blue-collar America; dissatisfied, rebellious kids from broken homes, inept schools, and boring communities, kids who heretofore would have been stealing hubcaps, cadging beers, crashing cars, and getting one another pregnant, flocked to the Haight-Ashbury to become hippies. Their guide to achieving hippiedom, to fitting into this youth-oriented utopia of unbridled freedom and joy, came (usually second- or thirdhand) from Time -- and the Time article, although generally positive, got it wrong.
For example, one of the ways the early vanguard of psychedelica -- predominately middle class, in its twenties, with at least some college education -- expressed its freedom from social norms, its desire for a more natural lifestyle, was to go barefoot. Well, when you tread city sidewalks without your shoes, your feet get dirty pretty fast. Time’s reporters noticed the grimy feet and deduced that these young people, like the beatniks before them, scorned bathing, whereas in point of fact the cliché “your body is your temple” was mouthed consistently in this milieu, whose members bathed ceremoniously, anointed themselves with perfumes and oils, and spent an inordinate amount of time dressing up, choosing their eclectic -- and clean -- costumes with as much care as a debutante selects her ball gowns. The new wave of Rust Belt and breadbasket kids, however, oblivious to the philosophical underpinnings of this movement they were naively embracing, took Time magazine at its word and thus the myth of the “dirty hippie” became a reality.
It should go without saying, then, that those same boys and girls lacked completely the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional maturity to gain much beyond anxiety and confusion from psychedelics, and Time was apparently incapable of even suggesting (as its older sister Life once had) that in the right circumstances and with proper preparation the experience might have been ecstatically revelatory instead. “Good drugs” perhaps, but “bad masters” all around.
On the other hand, friend Timothy to the contrary, I’d submit that there are some drugs that are intrinsically “bad.” There are, as far as I can see, no hidden virtues, no positive potential whatsoever in methamphetamines or crack, and I’d be inclined to include regular cocaine on the cur list, despite the sorry fact that I extolled the virtues of coke, my biggest regret as a novelist, in Still Life With Woodpecker. Saturday nights in 1978–1979, my beautiful, smart, witty, and thoroughly mendacious girlfriend Ginny Rose and I would sit at her dining room table in La Conner playing cribbage or Scrabble -- and tooting lines of coke -- until ten-thirty or eleven, then head to the 1890’s Tavern to dance to live music until closing time. I suppose it was because I only tooted once a week, and almost never at parties or in groups, that it took me so long to recognize the hairy truth that cocaine makes smart people stupid and stupid people dangerous. Bad.
Of course, Indians in the Andes have for centuries chewed coca leaves, the mother of cocaine, to relieve hunger pangs and give them needed energy for long treks and hard labor; one example, it seems, of good masters training a bad drug to wag its tail, guard the premises, and refrain from peeing on the rug.
Remembering Timothy Leary now, I’ll contend that even were he wrong about the neutrality of drugs (which sounds uncomfortably close to “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), even were he guilty of the character flaws attributed to him by his detractors, he still stacks up quite well when compared to those shallow, deluded, boring, self-righteous, and often self-appointed watchdogs who are all too willing, especially if there’s a buck involved, to stand guard at the gates of unauthorized mischief.
Still Life With Woodpecker caused me to be investigated by the FBI. Not right away, however, and certainly not for the rosy picture that I (in my own naïveté) painted of cocaine: it’s the substances that enlarge consciousness and open the mind’s eye that worry our government, not the ones that draw down the blinds. No, fifteen years after the publication of Woodpecker -- a novel that examines the difference between outlaws and criminals, between redheads and the rest of us, but whose primary focus is the transitory nature of romantic love and what might be done about love’s vagaries -- fifteen years after its debut, the book led me to be considered a suspect in the Unibomber case.
When someone from the Seattle office of the FBI telephoned one Thursday in 1995 to say that the agency wished to question me, I knew immediately, though no reason was given, what it was about. I knew because a month earlier, a newspaper reporter in Connecticut had contacted me to report that a college professor in that state was telling law enforcement agencies that it was obvious, from what Tom Robbins had written in Still Life With Woodpecker -- the anti-authoritarian sentiments, the warnings against overdependence on technology, the romanticizing of outlaws, and, most tellingly, authentic recipes for homemade bombs -- that he (me) was the Unibomber, subject of a nationwide manhunt. The journalist thought it amusing, considering both the humor and passionate reverence for life that also permeate the novel, and I myself paid it little mind until the Bureau phoned. Even then I wasn’t troubled, and pleasantly agreed to receive an agent at my La Conner home on the following Tuesday. But then . . .
But then, the very next morning, as synchronicity (that boundary-busting logic-mocking clown) would have it, Susan Paynter, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, published in her Friday column the widely circulated drawing of the Unibomber in his hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses, juxtaposed with a recent head shot of me -- in a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses. The resemblance was hard to miss. “Could our Tom Robbins,” she wrote, “who wouldn’t hurt a fly, be the infamous Unibomber?” Susan, who knew me, meant it as a joke, but I assumed they weren’t laughing very hard down at the FBI.
My assumption was correct. All that weekend, day and night, an unfamiliar dark sedan was parked in the one spot that would have permitted its occupant an unobscured view of both the front and rear exits of my house. Had I emerged with a suitcase or a backpack, it wouldn’t have been long before some guy in black shoes was reading me my Miranda rights, and not smiling when I asked if those rights granted me permission to wear fruit on my head like Carmen. Surveillance can be boring, however, for both observer and observed, and by Monday I wasn’t even checking to see if I was still being watched.
On Tuesday, without once asking for directions, the agents arrived at my door. Two of them. Young. Female. Attractive. The FBI isn’t stupid, they knew my weakness. And
the agents knew I now knew they knew. That established, we settled in for a lengthy chat, during which they never once intimated that I, myself, was under suspicion, but were only hoping that I could provide them with leads to follow up on. Leads such as any fan mail I might have received from a reader who’d professed, perhaps in the Unibomber’s prose style (he’d published extremely long missives in the New York Times), an inordinate admiration for my Woodpecker character and his habit of punctuating social commentary with dynamite. Leads such as my source for those unusual explosive recipes (the bomb made from kiddie breakfast cereal, for example) that I’d included in the novel.
Entirely professional, the women raised not a pretty eyebrow when I answered that, alas, I’d hauled an accumulation of answered fan mail to the county landfill only a week before, and that, sorry, I couldn’t remember the name of the Seattle sound-system engineer who through an intermediary (also forgotten) had passed along those instructions for turning common household products into things that go boom in the night. I was certain, however, that I could detect something subtle, unspoken, pass between them when I unwittingly volunteered that I’d physically demolished the electric typewriter on which I’d begun composing Still Life With Woodpecker and had gone back to writing with a pen, an obvious Unibomber-like retaliation against technology. And then when I asked them where they were from and they both said Chicago, I’d blurted out that I’d spent time in the Chicago area myself. True enough, it was where I’d once attended weather school, but it was also where the Unibomber posted most of his deadly packages.
For whatever Tommy Rotten reason, I was doing a pretty good job of incriminating myself, in addition to which I caught the agents on several occasions eyeing the nutty, cartoonish assemblage of sticks and twine I’d constructed to support a tall, spindly yucca plant in my studio, a contraption that could have led a suspicious mind to equate it with the jerry-built devices the Unibomber mailed to his intended victims. When the fed femmes left that day, I was convinced I’d not seen the last of them, and something perverse in me was actually excited by the prospect, by the drama of it all.
When months passed without a word from my agents, I went so far as to telephone their office in Seattle to inquire how the investigation was going. I just couldn’t help it. A dead-robotic voice informed me that the agent I sought did not work there. I asked for the other woman and got a similar response. No explanation was offered. Curious. Very curious, indeed. Who were those women, then? Who was their actual employer? What did they really want from me? My imagination, that infernal pinball machine, lit up and I had a truckload of quarters.
Then, around Christmas, I received a holiday card from one of the agents, the one with whom I would have flirted more openly had it not seemed somehow in poor taste. She wrote that she and her sister investigator had been transferred to Oklahoma City to work on the federal-building bombing case there. I wrote back but she never responded -- and eventually the Unibomber was caught and I ran out of quarters.
35
a fool for wonder
In the years since the selling of Still Life With Woodpecker, I’ve finally had the wherewithal to indulge, pretty much at will and in relative comfort, those urges kindled by that world atlas I bought at age eight. When I wasn’t absorbed with writing (including research, editing, and some publisher-generated promotion); and/or extracurricular activities such as reading for pleasure, attending movies, following the Sonics, playing organized volleyball, practicing yoga and Pilates, and periodically running away with Cupid’s circus (knowing full well I’d probably end up selling peanuts or watering the elephants), I was off to foreign lands in pursuit of fresh experiences: cultural, culinary, or simply thrilling (such as the African treks or the white-water rafting I’ve enjoyed on three continents).
My wife Alexa, the wisest person I know, says that all those pursuits of mine, including the love of words and the loving of women -- and certainly not excluding my involvement with psychedelic drugs and Tibetan/Zen “crazy wisdom” philosophies -- have been part and parcel of the same overriding compulsion: a lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder. I’m prepared neither to argue with that observation nor advance it; any reader who’s so motivated can draw his or her own conclusion. My immediate intention is to say a little something about Cuba.
I traveled to Cuba in 1978, partly because it was forbidden (no American had legally set foot there in about twenty years), partly because I wished to see for myself how much of the official picture the U.S. painted of our small island neighbor was just Cold War propaganda. (A fair amount, as it turned out.) I could not honestly say that the Great Mystery was in any way involved, although I did, after an evening of dancing at the fabled Tropicana nightclub, make love with a vacationing French Canadian schoolteacher during a ferocious Caribbean storm, and there was definitely a transcendent presence in the room. Forget Barry White, Percy Sledge, Mantovani, and Sinatra; forget romantic mood music of any genre: nothing surpasses crackling lightning, apocalyptic thunder, thrashing palm fronds (Aphrodite fanning the ozone), and hard-driving torrents of rain as inspirational background audio for a night of tropical love.
Upon learning that there were regular flights from Canada to Cuba, I’d phoned my friend James Lee Stanley and convinced him to join in the escapade. He canceled a few gigs (James Lee is a singer/songwriter), we booked a fifteen-day excursion, and a month later flew from Montreal to Havana on a Russian airliner. On the hour-long bus ride from José Martí Airport to the small, funky seaside resort which was to be our headquarters during our visit, our hosts passed around bottles of rum, and it wasn’t long before James Lee had his guitar out and we all -- Cubans, Canadians, and us two Americans -- were singing “Guantanamera.” We were already having fun, and I hadn’t met the schoolteacher yet.
James Lee and I, in fact, had rambunctious fun the entire time we spent in Cuba, which set us apart from the many Russians there and endeared us to the natives. In those years, Cuba was the Soviet Union’s Hawaii. If, for example, Ivan’s section of a Russian tractor factory met or exceeded its production quota, Ivan and his family might be awarded a holiday in a tropical paradise. Just how paradisiacal Ivan found Cuba, however, was open to question. The Russians would not even attempt Latin dances, they eschewed local rum in favor of their own vodka, and when besotted would sit around teary-eyed, singing old mournful nationalistic songs. You’d see a busload of them on their way to the beach and from their expressions you’d think they were being shipped to a gulag. In private, Cubans -- a warm, ebullient people who love love love to dance -- mocked the Russians, referring to them as “square heads.”
What became apparent during our visit is that ordinary Cubans were deeply grateful to the Soviet government for its assistance in a time of need, but were somewhat contemptuous of the Russian people. Conversely, they despised the American government but maintained a genuine fondness for individual Americans. That dichotomy is easy to understand if you know anything about Cuban history and America’s long record of oppressive behavior toward the island, but I shan’t get into that here. I will say that while I came away with sympathy, even admiration for Cuba, my favorable impression did not extend to its socialist economy, whose austerity and uniformity was itself oppressive. The conspicuous consumption in capitalist countries such as ours is deadening to the soul, but an absence of variety and choice can be psychically impoverishing, as well.
The lone pizza parlor in Havana did not sell beer, although it would have been entirely legal to do so. In no beer garden could you buy a snack. When you hailed a taxi, the driver would pick you up only if he happened to be going in the direction you wished to go. The cabbie earned the same amount each day regardless of how many fares he picked up, the merchant’s profits increased not a peso when he moved more product than expected. Was the average citizen happy with this rigid and prescribed arrangement? Despite his or her fier
ce (and understandable) pride in the 1959 revolution that overthrew the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista and evicted the U.S. businessmen and Mafia dons who supported him, I suspected not. Secretly, when they felt they could trust James Lee and me, the Cubans we’d befriended would plead with us to somehow get them cassette players, radios, rock albums, or blue jeans.
There are things in this world -- even material things -- that supersede politics, exhilarating things that support a personal liberation of the spirit; and on a crude, unevolved level may even represent a longing to connect to the Mystery.
Suzette from Quebec notwithstanding, my most cherished memory of Cuba stems from an occasion of mechanical and linguistic miscarriage. A party from the gringo resort was off on a day trip to the Bay of Pigs when our vintage bus stalled near the center of a small town. It was midday, hotter than the fiddles of hell, and having no luck in restarting the engine, our driver urged us to get off the bus and find a place, if we could, in the shade. We huddled beneath a lone tree in the square, preparing for a long wait as he tinkered with the engine. We should have known there would be bad juju associated with the Bay of Pigs.
James Lee retrieved his guitar and commenced to strum, even to quietly sing a little. Up to that point, the town had seemed unoccupied. There wasn’t a soul or a sole in the square, the surrounding houses showed no sign of current human habitation. Someone suggested that Castro had drafted the entire population to go cut sugarcane, someone else dismissed that as U.S. propaganda. James Lee continued to play. And slowly, very slowly, one by one -- kids first, then adults -- people came out of their homes and drifted into the square. It was as if James Lee was an immobile Pied Piper.