Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (21 page)

I’d never heard of LSD, but the moment Jim spoke those words, a white rabbit the size of a TV preacher’s Cadillac and as preposterous as a unicorn flashed by the restaurant window and vanished down a rain-swept street.

It should go without saying that I was eager to try this LSD stuff. Jim, however, was cautious. “Let’s have lunch again in a week,” he said, then maddeningly turned the conversation back to art. It turned out he wanted to get to know me better, wanted further assurance that I was psychologically stable enough to handle the drug. So, a week later we lunched again, and this time he went into deeper detail about the substance, describing the reactions of the several graduate students to whom he’d administered it in a laboratory setting. He was curious, I think, to see how a subject might respond in a more relaxed, sensually stimulating environment. In any case, by the time we’d finished dessert, Jim, convinced now of my relative sanity, agreed to guide me on a trip the following Tuesday, the day of the week on which I normally made the rounds of the art galleries and thus wasn’t expected at the newspaper.

Jim kept a painting studio in a Wallingford District storefront, and it was there on a quiet street (mixed commercial and residential), that we met. It was 9
A.M.
but I’d been awake since six, freighting a load of nervous anticipation. I should make it clear that I’d never smoked marijuana, never been “high” on anything. I’d been intoxicated, of course, but while to this day there are ignorant parties who equate being high with drunkenness, the two conditions are diametrically opposed, the one opening up consciousness the way fifteenth-century explorers opened up new worlds, the other shutting it down like a bankrupt pawnshop. At any rate, I showed up that morning at Jim’s studio with an empty stomach (it’s best that way); dressed, as usual in those days, in faded blue jeans and a nice Italian dress shirt, or as one friend put it, “cowboy below the waist, banker above.”

I took a seat in an old overstuffed chair. Jim handed me a cup of water and three small round blue pills (little bluebirds of happiness): three hundred micrograms of pure Sandoz lysergic acid, right off the plane from the manufacturer in Switzerland. Ceremoniously, for drama’s sake, I swallowed them down and tried to make myself comfortable. In the next eight hours, I would get up from that armchair only once, and that walk to the toilet was like an only slightly condensed version of Homer’s
Odyssey.
It would prove to be the most rewarding day of my life, the one day I would not trade for any other.

For the first thirty or forty minutes, nothing happened.
Nada.
Feeling no different than when I awoke that morning, I began to prepare myself for an anticlimax. LSD, this batch at least, was a dud! But then a slow, gentle wave of something like electrical current began washing over me. And . . . huh? What was this? The natural patterns on the unpainted pinewood wall had transformed themselves into an array, a procession, of tiny Mayan and Aztec figures, the kind one sees in any book on pre-Columbian culture, the kind that adorned pottery, stone pillars, and those manuscripts that managed to escape the bonfires of rampaging Spanish priests: brilliantly colored, oddly geometrical, adorned with quetzal plumes, carrying serpent staffs, daggers, and feathered fans, as if on their way to lunar rituals at Chichen Itza. (Which came first, the chichen or the itza?)

I stared transfixed as their numbers multiplied along the wall. Eventually, though, deciding I’d had enough of them, I closed my eyes. Behind my lids, the Mayan figures just kept on coming. Okay then. All right. This was it. Move over Alice, baby. I was down the rabbit hole at last.

23

acid reflux

It’s important to note that those teeming pre-Columbian figures were as close as I would come that day to a hallucination, and even that vision really couldn’t be considered hallucinatory because never for one second did I believe that it was real. Like R. Gordon Wasson’s in Oaxaca, my rational mind was fully operative throughout the experience.

Yes, things got weird, but I was aware always that the weirdness was a product of the drug and would in time subside; not that I was in any great hurry to return to the “real” world. For that matter, in a state where Einstein’s theorems were as concrete, as present and obvious as the chair I sat upon, temporal terms such as “hurry” had little meaning. At the end of what for Jim was a long day, I was convinced I’d only been sitting there for a couple of hours. I was on molecular time, cosmic time, not clock time. My system was in harmony with star systems, with the systems of orbiting particles in an indole ring.

It has occurred to me that the so-called hallucinations commonly associated with psychedelic ingestion are in fact diversionary tactics on the part of the ultraconservative human DNA, whose primary objective is always preservation of the species. (From the DNA perspective, every man is but an ambulatory seed package, every woman a walking egg carton.) When subjected to LSD, there is a portion of our brain that, failing to scare us into a “bad trip,” will then roll out amazing fractal 3-D cartoons, hoping that by sufficiently entertaining us, it can divert us from the existential truths the fungoid alkaloids seem mysteriously designed to uncover. For its narrow interests, our DNA puts on a show, hoping to head off a psychic jailbreak.

As for the nature of those truths, the revelations that scare the pants off of the fusty DNA, they may vary slightly from individual to individual, although in almost every instance they possess overtones that can best be described as oceanic, often suggesting some merging of spirituality and theoretical physics. I must confess, therefore, that I cannot fault the late Bill Hicks, who said that on LSD he perceived that “all matter is condensed energy, we are all one consciousness, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves.”

Let’s not be too quick to jeer Hicks’s choice of words. The psychedelic experience is, I’m afraid, fundamentally resistant to ordinary verbal description, so much so that even a professional novelist can scarcely write about it without swathing his observations in the purple cloak of woo-woo. With that in mind, I shall now attempt to relate with as much reportorial objectivity as possible a taste of the highly subjective and “curiouser and curiouser” business that came my way that day in the storefront studio.

Jim had requested that I bring along my favorite record album, hoping, I assume, to gauge my reaction to familiar music under unfamiliar conditions. The record (vinyl LP, naturally) I selected was
Concert by the Sea,
by jazz pianist Erroll Garner. About midway through our session, Jim put it on the phonograph. I hated it. The tunes I’d previously so admired sounded clunky, harsh, and arbitrary to me now, and Garner’s once-charming habit of grunting while he played was like noises funneled in from an overheated barnyard. If, however, the experiment was a crude failure on a sonic level, visually it led to one of the richest, most astounding experiences of my life.

Visually? Yes, because as the record played I could
see
the sound waves emanating from the speakers. It’s well known that psychedelics enhance visual acuity, but even so I might admit that I was feeling the sonic vibrations rather than literally seeing them -- except for one significant detail: there was a vase of fresh daisies on the coffee table in front of my chair, and I most unmistakably could see the daisy leaves swaying -- almost imperceptibly yet nonetheless gently swaying -- in those sound waves. That, however, was merely the preamble.

There was also a bowl of ripe plums on the coffee table, and earlier (it could have been thirty minutes earlier, three minutes, or three hours), I’d stared at a plum (for what could have been thirty minutes, three minutes, or three hours), discovering that the purple plum skin was in actuality a subtle chromatic interplay of red, blue, pink, magenta, maroon, sapphire, indigo, russet, rose, carmine, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, and even gold: my art-critic nomenclature called to the fore. Beneath its skin, I felt I could detect, having now the time/no-time for limitless concentration, the marvelously engineered intricacy of pulp, juice, and pit; could detect the interplay of acids, salts, and sugars as they coursed (never static) through the fruit flesh at speeds far too slow for a normal eye, even with instrumentation, to detect. For an undetermined while, I’d been awash in pure plumness. But now, led there by discernible jazz waves, my attention shifted to the daisies.

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 tricksters, 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.