based on actual events
He was driving a car on a mountain road. It was important that he arrive on time, and he suddenly realized there was very little time left. Without his doing anything, the car was suddenly traveling a lot faster—too fast. The road curved, and he pushed on the brake pedal to slow down, but it barely worked. He had to push harder and harder. There was also way too much play in the steering wheel. Somehow, he managed to slow down enough to make it around the curve. The next thing he knew, he was out of the car. Someone else was there, too. He and the other person were having to push the car because the road was now too narrow to drive on. It continued to narrow, and they abandoned the car and proceeded on foot. The road became a path through some bushes. Soon, he had to get down on the ground and crawl on his hands and knees, because there was dense vegetation over the top of the path also. The other person wasn’t with him anymore. He heard some people talking, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He was straining his eyes trying to see where the path was leading, but there was nothing but a thick, featureless fog. All of a sudden, there was a blast of cold air and a dazzling light, and he gasped for breath. That was when he remembered that this had all happened before. Once again, he was a newborn infant. He knew he would soon forget again and would have no concept of being a newborn or anything else. He would have to learn how to sit up, how to control the movements of his arms, hands, and legs, how to crawl, eventually to walk, and talk, feed himself, clean himself, dress himself—the whole shebang. For an instant, he remembered all this, and then forgot.
Two old friends had kept in touch over the years. They had first met when they were in the tenth grade in high school, had been roommates for their last two years of college, and now Jim Chase was a 71-year-old retired philosophy professor, and Blake Huntley, a 71-year-old still active guitar teacher. It was an afternoon in the fall of the pandemic year of 2020, and they were conversing on Zoom.
The two men occasionally reminisced about the early years of their friendship when they took many psychedelic trips together. Jim asked Blake what he remembered about one of those early trips, a time when, unfortunately, they had become separated while out for a walk, and Blake had been arrested and jailed overnight while tripping.
“I remember that I thought time had ended,” Blake remarked. “What do you remember about it?”
“Have I created those clouds?“
Yellow and brown leaves on the driveway flicked past as if on a filmy layer of liquid. Two twenty-year old college students were playing catch with a frisbee leaving traces in the air as it sailed back and forth. To Jim, it felt like a game that astronauts were playing on another planet. Looking up at the sky, he asked himself, “Have I created those clouds?” There were swooshing upsurges of electric bodily and spiritual energy, with a tinge of anxiety about whether anything was wrong or could be wrong.
“I remember that it came on very fast. It was one of the biggest trips I ever had,” Jim replied.
“Suppose someone asks, ‘What did you learn or think you learned from it?’ It’s hard to say, isn’t it?”
Jim continued thinking, “No, I hadn’t created those clouds simply by looking at them, but if I hadn’t paid this extraordinary attention to them, they wouldn’t have done me any good, and they were doing me a world of good.” Then he said, “Yes, it is hard to say, but I’m going to try anyway. I learned that everything is fundamentally all right even when it is building up to a crisis in which the thing that I was worried about the most is happening. That wasn’t the only time I learned that, but it is one that stands out. It reminds me of Art Kleps’s phrase: ‘relaxation at the point of highest tension.’ Another way to say it is that I learned that heaven and hell are both real, but in heaven everything is clear and true, and in hell it’s all lies and confusion. Of course, there is also a neither-heaven-nor-hell, where some things are true and others are lies, but I already knew that.”
“How about the lie that our old hippie trips are part of the dead past?” Blake asked. “I can easily imagine a young person asking, ‘Why should I care about your trips, old man?’ You know how I would answer?”
“How?”
“I’d say, ‘That’s not for me to say,’ and leave it at that.”
“Yeah, good answer. Here is another one I imagine someone asking me,” Jim said: ‘If it’s so great, why did your trips become gradually less and less frequent, so that you haven’t done it for about 30 years?’ And I would say, ‘Eventually, it became a matter of being either underwhelmed or overwhelmed each time. I was trying to control something that can’t be controlled. Then I just couldn’t get myself to decide to take a trip anymore. But I’m forever grateful for the trips I had. I really think it was the work of the Holy Spirit.”
At the time of that big trip, Blake and I had recently transferred from different community colleges to Cal-State L.A., where we were philosophy majors. We were sharing an apartment at the back of a house in Alhambra, a suburb nine miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles and just a few miles from campus. We began to feel the effects of the LSD more quickly than in any of our previous trips, and both of us, at the same moment, decided to go outside. Blake picked up a frisbee on the way out, and we moved to opposite sides of the paved courtyard at the back of the house and began sailing it back and forth to each other. It seemed amazing that we could actually do it, given the eerie rush of reverberating sensations. Soon, we decided on going for a walk. It was autumn, and as we walked down the driveway to the sidewalk in front of the house, the fallen leaves scattered on the concrete rolled by as if on film. Then I looked up at the sky and called Blake’s attention to some grey and white clouds on one side of the partly cloudy sky. The clouds appeared to be not so much moving across the sky as moving alternately towards and away from us—expanding and contracting rhythmically, as if the sky itself was breathing. That’s another thing I could say I learned on that trip: that the sky sometimes looks as though it is breathing in this way. I’ve seen it other times since then, not under the influence of any drug. If you try the experiment for yourself by staring awhile at a cloudy sky, you might see it, too. Sure, you can say, “So what?” But you shouldn’t.
Anyway, that’s when I had the thought that there was a sense in which I was creating the clouds, or at least my perception of them, simply by noticing them, and I said something to that effect to Blake. Many other thoughts and sensations were bubbling up constantly. That one just happens to be one I’ve remembered.
Blake agreed. He had a wild look in his eyes. “I feel so much energy,” he said, with an air of hard-bitten determination.
“Hard-bitten determination? Really? Is that how I looked?”
“Well, that’s how it seemed to me. You seemed to be driven by something. I guess we both were, and you could say it was the LSD, but it began to seem to me that you and I weren’t being driven in the same direction.”
For the time being, though, we continued walking in the same direction, to Almansor Park, about a mile away. We had walked this way many times before, but never before on a strong LSD trip. I’m guessing it was at least 250 and maybe up to 500 micrograms, because we had begun to feel the effects very quickly. Within ten or fifteen minutes after swallowing it, an uncanny feeling had come over me, and ordinary objects around me had begun to squirm and shine from within. It looked like everything outside of me felt the way I felt on the inside. Or maybe it was like a mobius strip, where inside and outside keep changing places. Lower doses take longer to take effect. The female friend who sold it to us told us it was called “White Lightning.” Wasn’t that another name for moonshine—strong, illegal liquor? But then there was also Buddhism’s White Light of the Void.
As we made our way down the suburban street—it was slightly downhill to the park—the world itself, of these houses, lawns, shrubs, trees, and parked cars, was in constant motion but perfectly composed. It felt like the world and I were both taking a walk together. I noticed how all the movements of my body automatically worked together to carry out my decision to walk in the direction of the park, without my having to think about how to do it. Instead, there was a sort of roar of sensuous details flowing along that I was passing by and through, instant by instant. I glanced over at Blake, who had a big smile on his face. There didn’t seem to be the need to say anything. After walking/floating along for several blocks, we turned a corner to the right, a slight jog, and then to the left, and I wanted to pause for a rest next to the grounds of a school. There was a blacktop playground, with an empty basketball court behind a chain link fence. The nets on the basketball goals were also made of chains. I stuck my fingers through the diamond-shaped spaces in the fence and grabbed ahold as I stared at some oozing, shiny black veins of tar that had been used to patch cracks in the asphalt pavement of the playground. Some things were solid. I was standing on the ground and gripping the solid metal links of the fence, but these were islands of solidity floating in a flowing liquid world. And everything was glowing. The streams of tar were arcing across the surface like permanent black, satin-surfaced lightning bolts. They were writhing to a slow pulsing rhythm. Between and around them was a network of many other smaller cracks that weren’t patched. They looked like miniature canyons dividing grey and whitish pebbly plateaus that filled in the surface from one side to the other. I knew that the sun was the source of the daylight raining down and around, but this grey and black asphalt playground, deserted for now because it wasn’t a school day, gave the impression of a screen that was emitting light from underneath the surface of the world, rising to meet the sunlight pouring down from above. As unlikely as it sounds, that asphalt playground was as beautiful as anything I had ever seen. “Even asphalt can be beautiful,” I said.
Blake concurred with an enthusiastic nod and said, again, “I feel so much energy.”
“I always thought they must have added speed to the acid we took that day.”
“I think it was just a strong dose of LSD.”
We never made it to the park. This was the point where we definitely diverged. The sound of my own voice, when I made the remark about the beauty of the asphalt, sounded strange and as if at some indeterminate distance from me. I began to worry about exposure to a hostile public. I wanted to avoid interacting with anyone we might encounter on the way. The thought of trying to make small talk while the world was melting and re-forming moment by moment made me feel slightly sick. We were tripping our heads off outdoors on a Sunday afternoon in a suburban neighborhood, and Blake. . .
“I thought time had ended, and everyone would now know that we are all avatars.”
“I’m feeling a little anxious. I don’t know if I want to go all the way to the park. Why don’t we go back to the apartment?” I managed to say.
“But I’m feeling so much energy,” Blake replied, with a crazy grin on his face. He turned away and walked out into the middle of the street and sat down in a pose like the Buddha’s.
“Why are you doing that?” I thought with rapidly increasing alarm. It was a quiet street in a residential neighborhood without a lot of traffic—there were no cars at the moment, but I was aware of a few people outside on the other side of the street. What was going through Blake’s head? What point was he trying to make? It was the kind of behavior the ‘establishment’ was always warning everybody that LSD would cause. As a car approached, I told him to get out of the street. The car slowed and swerved around him, and, as he was getting up, the driver honked the horn. Blake kicked in the direction of the car and shouted, “Streets are for people.”
“The people in that car are people too,” I thought. What was this extreme behavior all about? Something tremendous was happening. I was well aware of that. I didn’t know how to express it. There were no rules, or, if there were, I didn’t know what they were. But my instincts were telling me to seek safety, and Blake seemed determined on courting danger. “Driven out of his mind by the so-called ‘consciousness expanding’ drug, this young ‘hippie’ sits down in the middle of a street to ‘meditate,’ with no regard to his own safety or to that of others.”
“Come on. Let’s go back to the apartment and rest a while,” I said to him.
He scoffed and shook his head.
“Please!” I pleaded, and immediately realized it wasn’t going to work.
I became aware of a few people on the other side of the street who were looking in our direction. I decided to go back with or without Blake. I hoped he would follow. I even wondered if I would be able to find my way back. The street, the houses, the trees were all in their places but at the same time formed and reformed beautifully intricate patterns that were independent of the practical goal of getting back to safety. I was never in doubt as to which direction to go at any given moment, but I felt like I had to just trust that I would somehow arrive back at the apartment, as each moment sprang into existence all on its own. Nothing was routine. I kept glancing back to see if Blake was following. He wasn’t. His bizarre behavior on the street back there seemed designed to provoke a response. Someone might call the police. Witnesses might report that he hadn’t been alone, and the police might come to pick me up, too.
I just kept walking, step after step. It was difficult to picture the entire route in my mind, which was being flooded with sensations and thoughts and emotions of raw power and baroque detail. I felt like I was taking part in some drama from the beginning of time, being pulled tightly from within outward, and as if there were something just at the periphery which I didn’t want to confront. But I was also equally aware that outwardly it was still a peaceful, suburban, Sunday afternoon, with sunlight and shadows slanting across green lawns bordered by flowerbeds, streamlined cars with muted but insistent colors parked in driveways and in front of houses, with a few people here and there—a man washing his car, a woman working in a flowerbed. I heard a car approaching up the street from behind me. I kept walking on the sidewalk, thinking it would look suspicious if I turned around to look. It passed me by, followed by a long, swooshing tail of afterimages, like a comet’s tail, and I was relieved that the driver seemed to pay no attention to me.
What was Blake doing? Surely, he would get over that phase and decide to come home. We had taken many psychedelic trips together, and nothing like this had happened. After the car went by and turned off at the next intersection, I turned around again and peered into the distance, which at the same time was right in front of my face, to see if Blake might be coming. I didn’t see him.
Suddenly, I found myself back at the apartment. Our frisbee flinging out in the back seemed like ancient history. I felt a sense of relief at having made it back. But had I really gone back? No. Even going back is going forward. Was this really such a crisis after all? What exactly was I afraid of? “Possession of marijuana is a felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison,” our teachers and parents had warned us, and laws had also been passed against the possession of LSD, which was “a dangerous mind drug” that mimicked psychosis and caused people to have hallucinations and lose touch with reality. Yes, in fact, people who used it were just trying to escape from reality instead of rolling up their sleeves and going to work to solve social problems and make the world a better place. This could be excused, perhaps, in the case of residents of the ghetto who had lost hope, but why were these middleclass white kids doing it? Because they had been misled by irresponsible and, in some cases, downright evil intellectuals and celebrities. That’s why!
But we didn’t think Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg nor Cary Grant and the Beatles were being irresponsible and evil when they shared accounts of their experiences. Moreover, we knew people personally—and they were the smartest and kindest friends from school—who smoked pot and had taken LSD and were all glad they did. There was such a vast and discouraging gulf of misunderstanding between those who believed all illegal drug use was dangerous and evil and those of us who believed that these new “psychedelic” (soul manifesting) drugs were ways of becoming enlightened about the nature of reality and the meaning of life.
Blake and I had agreed that what worried us most about the possibility of getting caught was not so much the threat of jail but the worry and disapproval of our parents. And now Blake’s confrontational behavior on the street seemed designed to bring all that crashing down upon us.
But what could I do about it? Maybe I shouldn’t have left him. Was I a coward, just trying to save my own skin, leaving him back there on his own?
“I never thought that, by the way,” said the old guitar teacher.
But what could I do, other than try to talk him into coming back to the apartment to enjoy the trip in privacy and non-confrontation? And I had already tried that.
I felt warm, tired, and thirsty. I stepped inside. The outside door opened into the bedroom, where I now stood. I walked through it to the cool, dark hallway, with its reddish-brown tiled floor, and on into the kitchen. I retrieved a glass from the cupboard, turned on the faucet, and half-filled the glass with cool, clear water. After drinking a little, I returned to the bedroom and lay down on my bed. The sense of crisis faded into the background and I decided that I would walk back to where I had left Blake after I had rested for a little while. In the meantime, I was still having an extraordinary experience just lying there, with fine-tuned senses of electronic precision and, with my eyes closed now, enjoying intricately complex harmonies of abstract conceptualizations that were like brightly colored puzzle pieces solidly clicking into place, all on their own, wave after wave of them.
Time was passing, I suppose, but it was clear it would never run out. I opened my eyes. Sunlight poured through the window in rays along which countless miniature sparkling suns slid up and down slowly. The window was open, and I could feel a delightful breeze and hear car traffic sounds in the distance. I closed my eyes and saw visions of cartoon guys and dolls, arms hanging over the sides of red, blue, pink, and yellow cartoon cars, rushing past each other in both directions, intent on getting somewhere fast. They were instantly transformed into rainbow colored soap bubbles floating on air streams, and then each bubble—and there were many, many, many of them—grew a head and face and arms and legs and was a human being with hopes and fears, working away intently for a long time at some purpose that was not clear, and then they all suddenly looked up, eyes open wide, expressing wonder and astonishment. Or was it alarm?
I was aware of a little knot of anxiety within an overall feeling of renewed strength. I heard some sirens coming closer and closer—Emergency! Emergency! and then receding. In my mind’s eye I saw black and white patrol cars with big golden badges on the front doors, a fire-engine-red fire engine, a stark white ambulance with a glowing red cross painted on the side, all rushing, rushing, sirens wailing, to the scene of the crime? Accident? Disaster? I wondered if they were on their way to deal with Blake. I imagined what would happen and thought that, after all, Blake’s antics were hardly a crime wave, policemen were human beings, and our society at least tried to be humane. It was quiet again. If they had been called to deal with Blake, they would probably take him to a hospital for possible mental treatment rather than to jail. After mulling these comforting thoughts over for a while, I realized that that is all that they were, and I again felt stirred to action.
As I was getting up, I noticed the clock on the bedside table. In a practical, down-to-earth sense, I could see that the position of the hands indicated that only a little over an hour had passed since we each had swallowed a little white tablet, and this reassured me that there was still a chance I might find Blake where I had left him. For all I knew, those sirens I had heard might have had nothing to do with Blake. But I also thought that it was strange, very strange that the position of those pointers on the clock face told me anything at all. I made my way to the door and left the apartment, carefully closing the door behind me, and started to make my way back to the spot where I had last seen him, hoping I would find him there and could persuade him, after all, to come back and out of the danger of being “dealt with” by people who wouldn’t have any idea of what he was experiencing. But I also feared that he had already been taken away by the authorities, as I made my way down the street. I felt a hard edge of anxiety in my side and imagined a sneering bully marching alongside me, poking a finger in my ribs repeatedly.
As I turned the corner by the school ground, I looked around. Blake was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw a boy across the street and thought maybe I recognized him as one of the people who had been there earlier. I approached him and said, “I’m looking for my friend. He was here with me before. Have you seen him? Do you know where he might have gone?” I felt proud of myself for knowing what to say.
He looked at me a little suspiciously and said, “Oh, do you mean the guy in the white pants?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“The police came and took him away a little while ago. He was acting weird. What was he on, anyway?”
“LSD,” I answered. “Well, I’ve got to go. Thank you. Bye,” and I turned around and headed back to the apartment again, feeling a surge of uncontrollable energy and a tightening in the pit of my stomach. I hoped the kid wouldn’t report me to his parents, who might call the cops on me, too. But I felt sure there was more at stake than whether or not that was going to happen, namely, the question: What is the one thing that matters more than anything else? I thought I was finding out the answer, but I couldn’t put it into words. I was amazed I could put anything into words.
“We have been here forever.”
When Jim had pleaded with Blake to return to the apartment, Blake was thinking that he had broken through to another reality where it was perfectly clear that we are all immortal and have been here forever, where there is absolutely no reason to be anxious about anything, and everything that happens is slightly comical. Yes, he was aware of who he was, that he and Jim had taken LSD, which was illegal—blah, blah, blah—that Jim was his friend and that this wasn’t the first time Jim had shown anxiety on a trip. He just knew that there was no way he could go back and stay cooped up in that apartment. The comedy/adventure was out here.
There was a debate going on within him: Was this particular cosmos in which he now found himself a plus or a minus? There did seem to be one problem with it: The people in it wanted to merge, to really understand and love each other, but it just didn’t seem possible. This abstract thought presented itself as a series of concrete images and blueprint-like diagrams of amoeba-like entities that could form extensions to reach out. No matter how close two or more of these transparent little organized blobs intermingled their extensions with each other, they simply could not fuse, but maintained their individuality. They could touch, they could overlap, so that you could see one through the other, but they could not merge.
He sat down in the street to meditate on this. It was like a puzzle that was claimed to be solvable, but maybe the real insight was that it isn’t solvable. He was smiling. It was a multi-level comedy. A car drove up the street, slowed, swerved, and honked at him, and he good-naturedly got up, kicked at it, and shouted, “Streets are for people,” playing along with the game.
Jim came up to him and, with a comical expression of exaggerated concern on his face, said, “Please come back to the apartment with me. Please!”
Blake smiled, shook his head, and said, “No,” with equally exaggerated determination.
“Well, I’m going back anyway,” Jim said and then turned and walked away.
Blake noticed some people in the front and side yards of a house across the street. This seemed interesting. What part were they playing in the cosmic drama or comedy? A man in the front yard was paying out a length of garden hose and setting up a sprinkler. The garden hose wasn’t just a garden hose, and the sprinkler wasn’t just a sprinkler. They were The Garden Hose and The Sprinkler. Two teenage boys with big gloves on their left hands were playing catch with a baseball on the lawn at the side of the house. Blake approached to within a few yards of the boys and stood watching them, fascinated by the forceful motions of their skinny throwing arms and hands, the tracings of the ball through space, and the gloved left hands like lobster claws grabbing and then giving up the ball like obedient servants to the throwing hands. The continuous path of the ball from one boy to the other was both a series of discrete positions and one continuous flow. The boys noticed him watching them, and it made them uncomfortable. They had noticed with amazement and frowns of disapproval when he had sat down in the middle of the street. Glancing to the side between throws, they had seen him rise and kick at a slowly passing car. They had seen his friend walk away and had wondered what was going on. On the one hand, his unusual behavior seemed a little scary. On the other, this was like something you might see in a movie. And in their own, boring neighborhood!
Blake walked up to the one closest to him and greeted him, “Hail, Krishna!”
The boys stopped playing catch and looked at each other and then back at Blake. “Huh? What did you say?” asked the one whom he had addressed.
“Oh, I just said Hi, Old Fellow. I’ve been wondering whether this particular cosmos is a plus or a minus. What’s your take on that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”
“Oh no? Well, maybe you can help me with this one. It seems like an important question to me. Which is the more important holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas?” It was the weekend just after Thanksgiving, and it seemed quite significant to Blake that this breakthrough was happening just then.
The boy smiled a crooked smile and said, “Oh, that one is easy. Christmas.”
“I’m not so sure,” Blake responded. He paced back and forth now and was contemplating this question. He thought that there must be an answer to it, even though he didn’t know what it was. Today was clearly important and a reason for giving thanks for not only this day but for every day. Today—right now—he was having an almost unbelievably astounding mystical experience, but if he were to try to say what it was about, it would have to be something that is true, not just now, but always, and something he had always known deep down. Suppose he forgot it when he came down from this peak. Would it really matter? Or was Christmas more important? It had always seemed so magical when he was younger. But then there was that time when he was twelve years old and his father gave him a rifle as his main Christmas gift. His first firearm! The ultimate gift from father to son! He was well aware that that was the way his father looked at it, so he did his best to pretend to be happy and thankful for it, even though it wasn’t at all what he was hoping to receive that year.
The boys had stopped playing catch, withdrawn to a short distance away, and were talking to each other quietly. “This guy is either crazy or high on something,” one said to the other. The man at the front of the house, the father of the boy that Blake had first addressed, noticed what was going on and called for them to come into the house. They obeyed, leaving Blake behind, and went inside along with the man.
Two amoebas were poking around with their pseudopods, and when they touched each other, they shrank back. Blake wondered why the father had called Krishna and Arjuna back into the house, and he wondered why Jim had wanted to go back indoors. He heard sirens in the distance and noticed they were getting louder, indicating that they were coming closer and closer.
Then the pitch of the sirens ground down and down to a stop, as two police cars with flashing lights came around the corner and stopped a few feet away. Two policemen exited the first car and walked up to Blake. The policemen in the second one remained in their car.
“Oh, okay, playing it for all it’s worth, I see,” Blake thought to himself, smiling with amusement, seeing it as a dramatized variation on the “reaching out” problem.
The uniforms the policemen wore were perfect in every detail—black shirt and neatly creased pants, black tie with silver tie clip, shield-shaped copper and silver badge, polished leather belt with silver buckle, and black leather holsters for service revolver, baton, and handcuffs. Blake’s own hippie uniform was, if not perfect, at least passable. He had a beard and long, curly light brown hair, and was wearing a flowery shirt underneath white overalls of the type a house painter might wear.
The two policemen had serious, businesslike expressions on their faces, which otherwise were as different as any two faces picked at random. One was thin, angular, and tan. The other was rounded and rosy. No family resemblance there. “Their faces aren’t uniform,” Blake thought. He was noticing the nostrils of the one who began to speak to him, the thin one. He could see them flare open slightly and then contract with each breath. He also noticed his eyes blinking at intervals as he looked Blake over.
“I need to see some identification,” the policeman said.
Blake took his wallet from his back pocket, tossed it into the air playfully, and smiled, as if to say, “We might as well make this fun.” It flew open and flopped end over end, but nothing fell out of it. It landed at the feet of the second police officer. The first one nodded to his partner, who picked it up and handed it to him.
“My father is a cop. He’s a bastard,” Blake stated, in a matter-of-fact manner, and both these statements were, in simple fact, true. His father was a Lieutenant of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and his father was also, literally, a bastard, and was ashamed of it, even though it wasn’t his fault. As a boy, he had already learned the common, pejorative sense of the word and had used it in anger at other kids more than once, before he found out the literal meaning of it one day and realized with a start that, given what he well knew of his own family situation, he was one. He was angry at his parents for this and especially at the father whom he barely knew and who had not only refused to marry his mother but had offered little in the way of child support, of which he heard his mother frequently complaining. It had created in him an iron resolve not to commit the same sin himself. And he didn’t. He did his best to restrain, in accordance with the strict Roman Catholic upbringing imposed by his mother and stepfather, the insistent sexual preoccupations that accompanied his teenage years. He remained a virgin until he was married, and then he fulfilled his duty of financially supporting his wife and the children when they came along. He was genuinely fond of them in his own way, but there was still a resentment that burned inside him, and he made steady progress as the years went on in becoming an intolerably controlling tyrant over his wife and kids, lashing out in fits of frustrated rage, until Blake’s mother finally worked up the courage to ask for a divorce, and he, feeling utterly defeated, agreed. By that time Blake and his next oldest sibling, a sister, were young teenagers. She and Blake were glad when his parents divorced. It was harder on the younger sister and his brother, the youngest of the four children. They both felt that they must have done something wrong.
“Is that so?” The policeman responded to Blake’s announcement. “What is his name?” Blake told him, and he wrote it down on a notepad and went on asking Blake questions about where he lived, whether he had a job, was he going to school, etc., in an effort to gauge his mental condition. It was readily apparent that Blake was high on something.
As if reading his mind, Blake said, “Oh, I’m high all right. But so are you. Everybody is.”
“I’m placing you under arrest for disorderly conduct,” the policeman announced. He told him his rights, put handcuffs on him, and led him to the patrol car.
Second retreat
“That’s most definitely not what I wanted to happen,” Jim thought, after the boy had told him about the police taking Blake away. As he made his way back, once again, through the maze of suburban streets to the apartment, he asked himself, “Should I have stayed with him? But what good would that have done? How would it have been any better if I had been arrested too? Maybe I’ll still be arrested, though. The people in the neighborhood might have told the police that there had been two of them and that one of them had slunk away before they got there. Well, they would go pick up that cowardly rat, too! He was even worse than this one, who at least had the guts to take a stand!”
Jim wondered how this was all going to come out. He imagined how worried and ashamed his parents would be if they could see what was going on. How could he ever get them to understand how amazingly beautiful and awe-inspiring an LSD trip was if all they knew was how it looked from the outside: Blake sitting down in the middle of the street, kicking and yelling at a passing car, and then being picked up and hauled away by the police? What could he possibly say that would explain why this was more than what it appeared to be from their point of view: a young man who was temporarily (at least) insane as a result of taking a drug the authorities had justifiably warned against and forbidden? After all, he himself was alarmed by Blake’s behavior and didn’t understand it. But he also had a conviction of the deep inner beauty and meaning of the universe at that very moment that was stronger than the worry and alarm. He knew that there was no greater authority than what he was experiencing at that moment.
As he entered the apartment in retreat for the second time, he realized that its interior was just as much a part of the world as the surrounding neighborhood with its many residents coming and going into and out of their houses, going about their business or leisure activities day and night, surrounded in turn by many more such suburbs, including both good and bad neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, and that being back inside his apartment was, at best, only relatively safer than being outside in the neighborhood where uncomprehending residents might call the police on one. The absolute safety was the light shining in the darkness, and it was always there, wherever one was; it was never overcome by the darkness. Or, rather, neither overcame the other, for darkness could be good, too. It was pleasantly darker inside than out just now, restful.
He turned on the radio, which was tuned to a classical music station: woodwinds singing, waterfowl landing and gliding on a lake of colored wavelets. The music was pure sound—vibrations in the air, with varying pitches, timbres, and rhythms, a stream of exquisitely granular sonic textures—but also something that could be seen, especially with his eyes closed now, as he rested comfortably in a soft chair. Woodwinds and strings, birds in flight, then slowing down and leaning back with folding wings, moving with infinitely smooth grace over the surface of a lake amid reflections of the sky and wavy columns of trees on the shores of islands threaded by a maze of waterways. He was viewing this scene in his mind’s eye from a shifting perspective and presently glimpsed, among the shadows and between the trunks of trees on the shore of one of the islands, the graceful shape of a woman who was looking out across the water. She stepped out from between the trees towards the shore. The ends of her long, blue-black hair were whipping lightly in streams of air molecules that were flowing past, her blue eyes seemed to be smiling, while otherwise her facial expression was gravely calm. A brown mole on the side of her neck called attention to the perfect shadings of her creamy skin. She was wearing a sheer robe that half-concealed, half-revealed a well-proportioned womanly body. That shape provoked a heady lust that bounced back and forth between them, as she turned towards him, looked directly at him, and said, with a hint of urgency in her voice, “Do you want to screw?”
“And how!” he replied and dove into the lake headfirst in order to swim over to her. As soon as the water touched his body, he felt that something had changed. The water was blue and black and transparent. It buoyed him up and comforted him, and he noticed that his sexual desire was waning. His body felt different somehow. He became aware that his skin was covered in soft, yellow down and that he was paddling with orange webbed feet in a way that felt like easily walking along in the water, as easily as walking on a sidewalk. He tried to say, “What just happened?” But he could only quack. He reached the shore and waddled over to the woman, who picked him up and said, in a sweet, musical voice, “Oh, you darling little duckling! What happened to the handsome man I thought I saw from a distance? I shall keep you in my heart forever, but it looks like we can’t really mate, after all. Why, you’re a duck, poor dear!” She held him against her soft breasts, and sad music was accompanied by a thousand tumbling flowers, each individual one of which had a ruffled and intense pink outer edge leading the eye inward to a bright lemon-yellow core and swirled down with its fellows from the treetops above them. Lazily repositioning himself slightly by pushing against the palm of her hand with his webbed feet, he nuzzled half-heartedly at her breast “in homage to what might have been,” and his mind wandered off, faintly aware of the click-click-click of his orange duckbill. She gazed off into the distance, distracted, cradling him in her left hand and stroking his downy head with the backs of the lovely delicate fingers of her right hand. The music was winding down, and as it faded into the background of faint sounds coming through the window from outside, Jim opened his eyes, amused by the vision that had flashed by during the last few notes of the languorous music, and feeling happy that he was a human being. “Dr. Freud could have a field day interpreting a person’s psychedelic visions,” he thought. “He would have so much material he wouldn’t know where to start! And then he wouldn’t know where to stop.” He rose to close the window, and the music took up again—ah, the final movement—as he lay down on his bed. But now the music was at a brisker tempo, rising and falling, and driving, throughout, to some end. Troops marched up hill and down, men on horses galloped by and across vast fields bordered by emerald hedges, a messenger came with alarming news, battles were fought and won and lost. The key modulated downward, and the galloping was frozen and woven into a complex, three-dimensional, brightly colored memorial tapestry, folding and stretching and waving like a flag, with silver and gold threads curling and intertwining across the visual field, each individual thread itself resolving into a chain of bulging and shiny multicolored hollow plastic baby toys of various shapes. In the gaps between the toys the faces of soldiers peered out, radiating wisdom and sadness, each face, this face, ringed by a halo of scintillating stars, faintly blue and red and green against rich, inky blackness.
The music came to an end, and as the announcer began speaking, Jim got up and turned off the radio. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had tripped alone. He hadn’t begun alone, he hadn’t intended to be alone, but alone he was. He glanced into a labyrinth of thoughts about what it meant to be alone: was he really alone even now? Other people, his parents, Blake, Blake’s parents, the landlord, the people who had called the cops on Blake, the cops themselves, his teachers and classmates at school, former girlfriends, other friends and relatives—they were all there with him at least as images and thoughts in his own mind. Were they ever anywhere else or anything else? Yes, of course they were. Then, was he always really alone?
“Actually, I’m sort of enjoying being alone,” he thought, with a tinge of guilt and worry about what was happening to Blake.
Jail
“This is going a little far with the gritty realism,” Blake thought, as he waited to be processed, along with a roomful of other prisoners sitting on metal benches attached to the floor in a “drunk tank” style holding room in the Los Angeles County Jail. “What fantastic attention to detail!” he thought, as he looked around the room at his fellow inmates, some of them looking glum and resigned, others restless and fidgety. A lanky Mexican youth, who was hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his jaws, noticed Blake looking around. He raised his head and stared at him with a challenging scowl. Blake wanted no part of that challenge and turned first his eyes and then his head in the other direction. There was a man sitting on his right who looked to be in his forties. He had dirty hair and a friendly face and looked like he had had a hard life. He nodded to Blake and spoke up, with bad breath, asking in a surprisingly squeaky voice, “What are you in for?”
When Blake told him that it was for disorderly conduct, the man winked and asked, “What are you high on?”
Blake replied that it was LSD, and the man began regaling him, in a voice that came in halting squeaky spurts, with stories of all the drugs he had known and loved: bennies, ‘ludes, angel dust. “Did you ever smoke any— angel dust? Man, what a—what a high that is! But I haven’t tried that—acid stuff. I hear that shit make you—make you go crazy.”
Blake looked at him with puzzled curiosity and then started to explain that on the contrary it was a key to a level of consciousness where you could see the deepest truth about everything, but before he got very far, he was interrupted by the approach of a guard, who motioned to him to get up and then escorted him out of the drunk tank and, with many turns and long straight stretches, down a hall lined with closed doors to a room by himself.
“You’re keep-away,” the guard informed him.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we keep you away from other inmates in case any of them finds out your old man is a police officer. You’ll get a hearing some time tomorrow morning.” The guard left the room and closed the door behind him. Blake found himself in a small room with a bed, a chair, and a small table. There was a steel toilet with a wash basin on top. He sat down on the chair and noticed that there was a little window in the door with a metal covering. Someone would slide it open and look in from time to time. He assumed it was the guard who had brought him there, checking up on him, but he couldn’t be sure.
It seemed to Blake that he was involved in a cosmic game or test, as if he had been placed in a sort of mental ward holding room in paradise to see if he would realize that he could just walk out at any time to explore this new liquid plastic world in which he and the guards, the other inmates, his father the bastard cop, his mother the devotee of Paramahansa Yogananda, his brother and sisters, his professors at college, his friend Jim, and everybody else were also playing and trying out how to interact. For the moment, he was content to stay in this room, mulling over his situation.
He had not forgotten Jim, and he wondered how he was doing. He hoped Jim wouldn’t be too worried about what had happened to him. The thought, “I’m fine; don’t worry about me,” arose in his mind, and it occurred to him, first, that that was what he would say to Jim if he could, and then, at the next instant, that that is probably what Jim would want to say to him if he could. He knew that Jim had taken the same dose as he had and would be experiencing his own version of what he, Blake, was experiencing now: Here it all is. It’s all yours. All you have to do is accept it, in all its tiny precision and sweeping magnificence. It is all in balance, perfect balance. But. . . what if you do something to make it tip and go out of balance—Oh no! Why did I do that? A huge, precarious pile of boxes was crashing down, over the edge, out of control. Disorderly conduct! But that cascade of falling, angular boxes in his mind’s eye was soon flowing, the angles becoming smooth and being transformed into the hundred dashing waters of a blue-edged white waterfall forking down the cliffside, stirring up a cool mist with a humming roar, the sound of ten thousand individual drops of silvery water, each one reflecting all the others. Could he really believe that there is an ever-increasing tendency towards disorder? He seemed to recall reading that that had somehow been proven, but in light of his present experience, as wild and wooly as it was, it did not feel at all like entropy. Hadn’t it always been instead that crises of disorder, sickness, fear, injury, or insult had been absorbed and transformed into a new, more firmly established and beautiful equilibrium?
Blake tried the door. It wasn’t locked. He went out into the hallway, which was lined on both sides with a number of similar doors, all closed. He could hear the muffled sound of some voices in the distance and the humming of a fan. He walked down the hallway to see what he could see, and with the intention of leaving the building and walking back to the apartment in Alhambra. A guard was seated at a desk some twenty feet ahead. The guard looked up, saw him, rose, and approached him, saying, “Hey, where are you going, Buddy?” He gently turned Blake around, guided him back down the hall and into his cell, and told him he had to stay there until his hearing the next day.
“Okay, that’s fine,” Blake muttered under his breath. He sat down, and the guard left. Again, Blake contemplated his situation. He had ingested an “illegal substance” and was experiencing Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. He had forgotten and now remembered. He might forget again, but he was sure that he would also remember again. It was an old story, but it happened in a completely new and unexpected way each time, and he could no more predict what was going to happen from one moment to the next than anybody else could, assuming there are separate moments, but isn’t it always just this moment? He had been “arrested” for “disorderly conduct.” He was in “custody.” What a strange word! He walked out of his cell again and casually strolled down the hall.
The guard looked up, shook his head, and grabbed something from under the desk. It was an arm restraint. “No. Remember? You have to stay in that room,” he stated firmly, and led Blake back. He told him to sit down in the chair and then slipped the restraint over Blake’s arms and attached it on both sides to the chair. “It’s for your own protection, Buddy,” he said. The contraption was a sort of milder version of a straitjacket. Blake had some freedom of movement of his arms, but he couldn’t get up from the chair.
“When you urged me to go back to the apartment, I wasn’t even considering the possibility that I might be arrested. If you had warned me about that, I think I would have come with you.”
“I don’t think so. Besides, I wasn’t thinking about that specifically, either, at the time. I was feeling an almost unbearable tension of anticipation. Of what? I didn’t know.”
“That will all be taken care of.”
While the guard was attaching Blake’s leash to the chair, nine miles to the northeast, Jim was lying on his bed, tripping and thinking, “Blake is acting like Timothy Leary, and I am acting like Alan Watts. Blake is right. People need to know that LSD is here and that it is a big deal and that it is good. He didn’t hurt anybody by sitting in the middle of the street. And he wasn’t in any real danger of being hit by a car. That is a quiet street, and when a car came, it easily avoided him, and then he got up and out of the street. I don’t like it that he kicked at the car, but that was probably just an instinctual defensive reaction. Yes, society likewise is instinctively kicking back at the perceived threat of LSD, but we will all just have to work through it. It won’t do to try to avoid conflict, as Alan Watts and I have hoped would be possible. People who are afraid of it think they can pass laws against it and make it go away. That just proves they don’t really know what it is. Timothy Leary, by making a big show about it and trying to get the word out to as many people as he can, is doing a better job of getting across what it’s like than Alan Watts is, by showing restraint and downplaying its importance.”
He got up, stepped outside, and stood there for a while, looking at the treetops in the yard next door and the sky above. Days were short this time of year, and shadows were lengthening. There were just a few clouds left, low in the sky. A dog was barking in the distance, and now the neighbor’s dog was joining in. When they finally quieted down, he heard the sounds of cars rolling by on Garfield Avenue, which intersected with his street, Los Higos, just a few houses beyond where his and Blake’s apartment was located. Alone with his thoughts, perceptions, and sensations, he went back inside and walked down the hall to the bathroom. Even though he’d done it plenty of times before on trips, peeing was, once again, a rather interesting experience, in that it brought to the forefront of his consciousness the concept and feeling of an interval of time. It was like watching the sand flowing from the top to the bottom section of an hourglass—only pee and not sand, thank goodness! He knew, intellectually, that there was a finite amount, that eventually it would come to an end and quit flowing, but as long as it was flowing it felt as if it could just go on forever.
Finally, it was over, the last bit of sand over the edge, the last drops of urine falling into the toilet, and he was once again free to move about. He flushed the toilet and washed his hands in the sink, marveling at the sound of rushing water, the slight shock of the cold water on his hands, the sparkling brilliance of the overhead light as he looked up, one part of his mind automatically, effortlessly tracing back each sensation to its source: the light source, the sound source, the hot or cold, rough or smooth source of the moment.
He walked down the hall to the back of the apartment, reflecting on the concept of solidity, as the floor came up to meet each step. “It’s just resistance to touch,” he thought, and was glad for that resistance and for gravity, which kept him and other things, such as drops of urine, from floating around and bumping into each other. Directly ahead was a small, closet-sized room with a tile countertop featuring a kitchen sink filled with dirty dishes, and some cabinets above. To the right was a bigger room with refrigerator, stove, and a breakfast table with two chairs. A clock on the wall and the diminishing daylight reminded him that he hadn’t eaten for many hours. He considered the possibility that he might want some food and noticed that he didn’t, so he walked back down the hall to the front room, turned on the ceiling light and a lamp on a side table, and sat down in the easy chair.
The fact that he had taken notice of the time of day and had thought about whether or not he wanted some food, gave rise to the thought, “I’m past the big peak and am now in the coming-down phase of the trip, but there is still a long way to go, and I’m glad.” He looked around at the walls, the ceiling with its brightly shining light, the furniture in the room, the cone of light from the lamp spreading downward over the surface of the table and a circular area on the floor. Everywhere he looked in this familiar and yet exotic room he saw deep, intrinsically satisfying beauty. He had never seen anything more beautiful than this place where he now found himself. He was convinced now, as convinced as he had ever been of anything, that the world is good, and he was happy to be alive. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but here it was. The worries about Blake, his parents, society, etc. were still there, but he saw them in a new light. “That will all be taken care of,” he thought.
He was now convinced that there was only one thing that mattered: the knowledge—for that is what it was—that Heaven is real. He was quite aware, and had been all along, that the way he was experiencing the world was connected with the fact that he had taken LSD. But he was also quite aware that people who hadn’t yet experienced a psychedelic trip tended to attribute too much importance to the cause of the changes in perception and not enough importance to the changes in perception themselves and what they revealed. The changes consisted in taking in more information, much more. He could still see, for example, everything he ordinarily would have seen in this room, but he could also see much finer articulations of darkness and light, shades of color, and patterns of form. Suppose no one normally had color vision and saw only black and white and shades of grey. Then someone discovered by accident that a certain drug would enable one to see colors. But there wouldn’t even be the word “color” or any of the names of different colors. It would be difficult to explain to other people what the experience was like, what difference such a change in vision made or what practical use could be made of it; but those who tried it would be struck with wonder and enthusiasm, to a degree that might instill feelings of skepticism with shades of jealousy and resentment in those who opted not to try it, out of fear that their sense of sight would be distorted and possibly damaged permanently. “Of course, it’s an imperfect analogy,” Jim thought, “since LSD potentiates not only vision but all the senses, emotions, and intellectual and spiritual powers.”
“Oh, so that explains Charles Manson,” he imagined his mother sarcastically responding to his thought. And his father would be just as disapproving but less verbally combative, more hurt and disappointed. Yes, he had to admit that LSD also increased vulnerability to the sensing of otherwise unimaginable ugliness and the feeling of negative emotions like dread and panic, and that intellectual and spiritual powers could be employed in the service of evil as well as of good. To return to the simplified analogy of a drug that bestows color vision on people who without it could only see in black and white and gray, some ugly things might look even uglier in color than in black and white, and an evil-minded person might discover how to use color-coded graphics, charts, and maps to deceive innocent people and to lure users of the new drug into a trap. But none of that would change the undoubtable fact that the ability to see color is a wonderful gift. Would this analogy help persuade his parents that he hadn’t done anything wrong in taking LSD? Probably not. He wasn’t feeling much confidence in his powers of persuasion at the moment. Suffice it to say he was not anticipating with delight having such a conversation with his parents. But that didn’t matter all that much in the light of the fact that Heaven is real.
His thoughts returned to the question of what had happened to Blake. Where was he? Had the police taken him to an emergency room, to be mentally evaluated and treated for drug-induced psychosis? Jim had heard of cases in which people who had had panic reactions to LSD had been taken to the emergency room. He couldn’t recall hearing of any cases of LSD users being arrested and taken to jail while tripping. Of course, that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened or couldn’t happen even if it never had. And Blake hadn’t been in a panic. It was more the opposite. All Jim knew was what the kid had told him: that the police had come and taken him away. He didn’t know where they had taken him, how long he would be held, or how to go about finding the answers to these questions. He also wondered how Blake was reacting to whatever his situation was. All this not knowing was distressing, but actually being in Blake’s situation might be even more distressing. Then Jim remembered that Aldous Huxley had quoted scripture in one of his books about psychedelics, either The Doors of Perception or Heaven and Hell: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” A feeling of lightheartedness flowed in, and he had absolutely no doubt that the good of this day far outweighed the evil of it—naturally, since Heaven is real.
Blake composes a poem
After the guard left, I noticed that the restraint allowed some free movement of my arms. I tried getting up from the chair, which was attached to the floor, but I couldn’t. I checked to see if there were some way to free my arms, and quickly realized there wasn’t. So, it was now quite clear that, even though I had attained the state of bliss, I had been wrong in thinking that I could just walk out of that jail whenever I decided to. Or was it that I didn’t really want to? Surely, I would walk out of there at some time. The guard had told me I would have a hearing in the morning. But that felt like being told that I would have a hearing in another world. This whole question, of what I wanted to happen as it related to what other people wanted to happen and what was just willy-nilly happening, began to seem like quite a knotty problem. I began to think about strategy.
I noticed the face looking in through the little window in the door more often now. A good tactic, I decided, was to display calm and acquiescence. Fortunately, the intense waves of cosmic energy rays shooting through me had smoothed out, because, despite my reasoning about strategy, I would have still been quite incapable of maintaining any kind of split between how I was going to pretend to feel and how I actually felt.
It was easy to sit there and quietly glow when everything around me was glowing and reverberating. I thought again of that question of whether this world was a plus or a minus, but I wasn’t exactly clear as to what I was wondering. It was as if the question had just appeared in front of me. I closed my eyes and saw brightly colored, three-dimensional letters of the alphabet incised on the sides of cubes like children’s blocks, each block rotating slowly with the same letter on all sides of it but in different colors on the different sides, the letters on the string of blocks forming the words, “Is this cosmos a plus or a minus?” scrolling across my field of vision and then back in the other direction or from behind, “?sinum a ro sulp a somsoc siht sI.” That field, the background on which those blocks, those words, stood out and snaked along, now came to the fore and was not in the least blank or vague, but rather was luxuriously worked in ever-changing, kaleidoscopic jewels forming harmonies of colors, some of which I had never seen before, except maybe on previous acid trips. Some of the jewels were a visible whitish blue that was straining upward, trembling on the brink of ultraviolet invisibility, and some were a darkening brownish red slowly rumbling and sinking into the infrared. In between were glowing emeralds, rubies, and topazes tumbling over each other and flashing on and off like neon lights or electronic switches encrusted in a pinkish silver metallic mesh on the surface of a globe that was somehow a model of the world, suspended in an endless space of royal blue. And I could also hear all of this happening, with almost inaudibly tinny peeps and chirps followed by sweetly high-pitched singing tones, then medium-range pops and gurgles over richly resonating bass tones, and on down into a foundational, slow thumping that I could feel more than hear.
“Why that’s like asking,” I thought, “if this universe is treble or bass. Obviously, it includes both.”
There was an answering voice, which had a sort of wise guy, cynical tone to it, saying, “No. Sorry, Mac. Plus or minus is all or nothing. There’s no smooth sliding from one to the other. Here’s what it comes down to: Is it good or is it evil?”
“It’s good,” I answered myself.
The wise guy voice replied, “Are you sure?”
The word “sure” was echoing and fading in the air and sounded like a sort of scraping sound that caused me to open my eyes, thinking I would be able to see where it came from. Someone was sliding open the cover over the little window in the door, and I saw the eyes of the guard looking in. He was checking up on me again.
The cover slid shut again, and I looked around my cell, which looked the same as before, except that there was something about it, some elusive quality of an incalculable amount of time having passed since I last looked at it. Following the visions and thoughts I had entertained with my eyes closed, it looked as if the room and everything in it were trying very hard to look as ordinary as possible, as plain, as functional, as impersonal as it could. Trying, but not succeeding. It couldn’t fool me!
Some words were coming into my mind in that high-pitched tone with tiny flecks of static that I heard before, as if from some great distance, or through a tiny, cheap electronic speaker somewhere close to my ear. I could just begin to make out the words, and then I recognized the lines from the Coleridge poem I had partially memorized for an English class in high school:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
“True, true,” I thought, “but also, . . .” As I looked around my cell, my mind went working away at assembling words, words that lined up and tried to fit into slots, many of them failing and fading away, others falling into place. After a while I was left with this, reciting it to myself in my mind’s ear so that I heard what sounded again like that tinny voice but now joined by others through all the ranges down to that deep, thumping bass, in a slow, rote-like chant:
In Solemn Land did Those Who Can
A spirit-taming cell decree:
Where once a tripping hippie ran
Through changes unknown to ‘the Man’
Arms yearning to be free.
At that very moment, I swear, the door opened, and the guard came in. He asked how I was doing.
“Fine,” I answered, “except that I would like to be able to get up from sitting on this chair. My skinny butt is killing me.”
Hearing such sane talk apparently reassured him. He loosened and removed the arm restraint, saying, “OK, but don’t go roaming the hall again or it goes right back on.”
“I won’t,” I promised, as I got up from the chair and stood there, feeling awkward, waiting for him to leave.
“Good,” he said, and turned and left, shutting the door behind him.
The ontological argument
It was well into the evening by now. “Despite Blake’s being arrested, despite society’s statement that LSD is illegal, despite not knowing what is going to happen as a result, I have tapped into a primordial goodness today,” Jim thought. “And everything bad that has ever happened or will ever happen doesn’t have a chance against it,” he continued thinking, throwing down the gauntlet. And the Devil made many weak, despairing, parasitical efforts to prove him wrong, as the evening progressed into night, conjuring up seemingly interminable hours of coming down, with images of cruelty, ugliness, and filth, interspersed increasingly frequently as a response to every effort at constructive thought or repose.
None of it was very original. Jim could just make out things being said as if in an unpleasantly warm and moist whisper in his ear: snide put-downs disguised as witty repartee; nasty insults peeking from behind insincere compliments; stale, demoralizing catchphrases pretending to be hard-headed realism.
Jim was thinking about Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God, which he and Blake had been studying in their Philosophy of Religion class at Cal-State. One of their favorite professors, John Burroughs, who was also chairman of the department, was teaching that class. He was working on a book on the Ontological Argument. He was modest and earnest. Jim could picture him striding briskly into the classroom to begin a lecture, a big man, wearing a suit and tie. What he had to teach was exactly what he himself was most interested in understanding. He didn’t care about being popular with the students, or with trying to prove to them or his colleagues how intelligent he was. He just wanted to share his thoughts about what was most important.
“It’s really wonderful the way you adore your modest hero that way,” whispered the Devil, “as in, ‘I wonder how you overlook his mediocrity.’”
Ignoring this, Jim asked himself, “How does the argument go?” Then, slowly formulating a sentence at a time: “Let’s see. I can conceive of a being than which none greater can be conceived. (Pause.) There is nothing self-contradictory about that concept, as there is, for example, in the concept of a round square or a number that is greater than five and less than three. (Pause.) And that means that it is at least logically possible that there is such a being. (Pause.) But logical possibility doesn’t get us very far. I can conceive of things that are logically possible (self-consistent without regard to any other facts) but that don’t really exist, such as a volcano that has suddenly emerged today in the middle of Almansor Park. At least, I assume I am only imagining it, and it doesn’t really exist. To be sure, I’d have to go there and look. (Pause.) But what about the being than which none greater can be conceived? Is it something that is logically possible but doesn’t really exist, like that imaginary volcano, or does it really exist, like that lamp on the table right there? (Pause.) If it really exists, there are no limits to the good it can do. If it doesn’t really exist, it can’t do any good at all. So, it would be greater if it really exists than if it doesn’t really exist. That is pretty clear. Therefore, the concept of a being than which none greater can be conceived but that doesn’t really exist is a self-contradictory concept. There is one that is greater, namely, the one that exists. Therefore, there is a being that really exists corresponding to the concept of a being than which none greater can be conceived. ‘God’ is the name for a being than which none greater can be conceived. Therefore, God really exists.”
“Replace ‘greater’ with ‘worse’ and ‘good’ with ‘evil’ and you will have a proof that your humble servant exists,” whispered the Devil.
This was a problem Dr. Burroughs and the students had discussed. Jim tried to recall the discussion but couldn’t remember what solutions had been offered.
“Hey pal, this is just a preview of when you won’t be able to remember the word for a spoon,” said a hissing voice.
If parallel reasoning proves that both God and the Devil necessarily exist, on the grounds that each of them wouldn’t be the greatest or the worst, respectively, if he didn’t exist; the question arises: how can they both have the maximal power that would be required for each to be the greatest or the worst?
“We can’t. I’ve got maximal power, but I’m playing with Mr. Goody Two Shoes like a cat with a mouse. The game will end when I so choose,” said the Devil, smiling and showing blood-dripping fangs and a forked tongue. “Hey, who thayth I alwayth have to be thubtle?” he added with a drawl and an exaggerated lisp.
Jim shook it off and continued trying to think out a solution. “Maybe the being than which none greater can be conceived IS the being than which none worse can be conceived. He has the power to force you to do good, and He has the power to force you to do evil, but He doesn’t do either. He does all He can to persuade you to do good, but always within the limit that He sets for Himself to leave it up to you, so that the choice really is a choice for which you are responsible. The Devil is the one who tries to persuade you to do evil. He doesn’t have the power to force you to do evil, so he isn’t the being than which none worse can be conceived. So, there is a sense in which God is worse than, i.e., more to be feared than, the Devil. But be not afraid, because even though He could force you to do evil, he doesn’t want to. And that is the sense in which the Devil is worse than God. He would force you, if he could. He really wants to, but the best he can do is to try to persuade you. And it is worse if he succeeds in persuading you to do something evil than it would have been if he had forced you to do it. But it would be worse still if he really had the power to force you, because he would do so, in every case, and then you wouldn’t even exist as a person. But because the Devil doesn’t have that power, bad as he is, he is not the being than which none worse can be conceived. That would be God, who has the power to force you to do good or to force you to do evil but chooses not to use that power.”
The Devil didn’t like being talked about as if he weren’t there. To assert himself, he resorted again to sarcasm, “Breaking News: College boy takes acid. Understands everything.”
But Jim didn’t understand everything. For example, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t find a comfortable position in which to rest. He got up and walked around the confined space of the apartment. He momentarily considered going back outside and walking to the park, as if to accomplish unfinished business—verify that no volcano had emerged? But it was dark and cold outside now. In southern California in the late fall, it can be bright, sunny, and even hot during the middle of the day, but when the sun goes down, the air gets quite cool. And he was tired. He lay down again but was restless. He felt a slight burning in his eyes, and when he closed them, the visions he saw were more hellish than heavenly. And when he opened them and stared at the ceiling, it, too, just functioned as a screen on which ugly things were projected. Is it possible to know too much? He reminded himself that he had realized that Heaven is real, and he still believed it, but now he faced a long, tiresome process of readjustment, familiar to him from previous trips. The defenselessness, the vulnerability that had opened him up to all the life in everything earlier in the day now rendered him helpless against images and thoughts associated with suffering and death. But not entirely helpless, after all, because what he had gone through that day had created a seed of doubt against the thought that death was a final end. Why couldn’t the final end of everything be followed by a new beginning of everything? Hadn’t he, in fact, experienced something just like that earlier in the day, when he was peaking? The intensity of the ecstatic moment when he had stared at the shiny, tarry thunderbolts on the asphalt playground had consisted of a series of endings and beginnings each of which was a culmination of everything up to that point. At each of those moments, it was as if all the light he had ever seen was shining on and through the ground, all the knobs on the control panel were turned up as high as they would go, and then everything intensified still further, it all came to a complete and final end, with the sound of machinery descending in pitch and volume into silence, and immediately started back up again from nothing (silence and darkness) to fulness (a bright hum) in an instant. Then he spoke to Blake, and Blake started calling attention to himself, and he had to deal with that. Wasn’t that a kind of death from one world and rebirth into a new one?
He hadn’t forgotten any of that. It had led through a lot more changes to this moment, and it was why he was now so tired, and wondering if this was the inevitable price to be paid for the realization that Heaven is real. Did he know too much? Or not enough? When other people die, it sure doesn’t look like everything just immediately starts up again for them. It looks like they just die and stay dead. But maybe from their point of view, it is like peaking on acid and other people just can’t see it and have forgotten that that was what it was like the last time it happened to them.
These were the kinds of thoughts he was having as he was struggling against fatigue, discomfort, and discouraging words.
Tired of jail
Of course, it was a great relief to Blake that the guard had released him from the arm restraint. But having been restrained like that had shaken his confidence more even than the arrest. Back then—it now seemed like a lifetime ago—the policeman had put handcuffs on him, which might have been humiliating but which, in fact, he had barely even noticed. The difference in how these two incidents of being forcibly restrained had affected him was probably due to the fact that at that time the LSD effect was at its strongest, whereas now he was coming down. “Okay, I get it,” he imagined himself saying to the authorities. “You have the power to keep me from going where I want to go in our common space.” He was under no illusion now that he could simply walk out and go home. He was tired of having to stay in this room or cell or whatever it was. He wondered why they didn’t just lock the door, since they had been willing to put that arm restraint on him and attach him to his chair. But he didn’t dare to try the door now to see if it was locked, for fear the guard would leash him to the chair again. He surmised that this section of the jail was reserved for “mental cases” who were deemed to pose little threat of violent resistance. Realizing, now, that he was under their power, he was grateful for the relatively gentle treatment that he was receiving. He could easily imagine how it could have been a lot worse.
Since the guard left, he had continued standing there for a few seconds and had then begun to pace around the very small space that was available to him, while he was thinking about his situation. It felt good to be standing rather than sitting in that chair. But now he realized that he was tired, and he lay down on the bed.
Tired, coming down, confined to this room, he was still quite noticeably under the influence of LSD. There was no clear and bright separation between abstract thought and vivid sensory imagery. Maybe there never really is. After all, Plato himself resorted to allegory in trying to convey what the Good is like. Blake wondered if he had made a mistake in switching majors from music to philosophy. Jim had done it first. Was he just following Jim rather than making a decision on his own? Well, he certainly hadn’t done so this morning (this morning!), when Jim had begged him to return to the apartment. And each of these thoughts was not just a string of words, as it appears to be in this account, but was like a little movie playing, complete in itself but also connected to the one before and the one after. “And here I am,” he thought, “in this jail cell or whatever it is, while Jim is presumably cooling his heels back in the apartment, wondering where I am and what has happened to me. For my part, I wonder how long they’re going to keep me here.”
He wondered, too, if he would ever be able to communicate to anyone the reality that he had experienced that day. Was it something that everyone else really knew but was pretending not to know? That was how it had seemed at first: that all he had to do was shine, and the light would be passed on. But Jim, who, if anyone would get it, should be one, had walked away. He remembered that the boys playing catch had seemed intrigued, but he had also picked up on hints of disapproval; and someone, probably the man with the sprinkler, had called the police. “And now here I am,” he thought, “awaiting my hearing in the morning. But that still seems so far off.” The transcendent reality that he had been touching that day wasn’t something that could be explained in words, not even to himself. But it was real knowledge and not some kind of delusion. He was convinced of that. He knew words would be expected of him, though—and they would be required to be the right words, from the point of view of the authorities. Otherwise, they could just keep him here or somewhere else as long as they wanted. And he had a good idea what would be the right words from the point of view of the “justice system.” It was not for nothing that he was the son of a cop. They were words of contrition, of obedience, of respect for law and order. Well, he did respect law and order in general. It was just certain laws that he found objectionable. He knew very well that pressing those objections would only make it harder for him to be liberated from the control they held over his location. The authorities would want him to take the point of view that he had been deluded in thinking that an illegal drug could result in anything good. It was quite clear he was going to have to be dishonest, or else risk prolonged restriction on his freedom of movement. The only other alternative would be to convince himself that they were right to some degree. After all, he knew from past experience, and was even now beginning to be reminded the hard way, that the “ten thousand years of coming down” could be quite unnerving.
Why did he have to leave paradise? Why had the stately pleasure dome turned into a spirit-taming cell?
Dialogue
“I think it’s because that’s what you really wanted,” 71-year-old Jim told him, when they were discussing this point so many years later. “Or, well, I’ll just speak for myself. I don’t want to stay forever in ecstatic bliss. I can’t come up with any good reason why not. It just reaches a point where I can’t stand it. It’s not that I think that I can’t stand it, while somebody else can. I don’t think anybody can—at least not anybody who isn’t fully divine.”
“But maybe you are fully divine while you’re in it,” Blake answered. “So, is it that you don’t want to be fully divine?”
“Yes, I think that’s right. I don’t want to be. I want to do God’s will without being God. I think there must be some good reason why God made me who I am. It’s not a mistake.”
“But why can’t it be that you are God, or Brahman, or the Ultimate Reality, but you have forgotten who you are?”
“Well, I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be on a big acid trip, nor other miraculous moments in my life, so forgetting doesn’t seem to be the problem. In fact, I’m saying it isn’t a problem that you can’t stay at the peak of an acid trip or that you don’t experience a miracle at every moment. I’m not saying there aren’t any problems in life. There are plenty, both large and small. But that isn’t one of them. At least, I don’t perceive it to be.”
“Then why don’t you take LSD anymore? For me, the disappointment of always coming down is what spoils it.”
“For me, the ecstasy and the agony became more and more inseparable. It wasn’t like the bliss of the peak followed by the disappointment of losing it, at least not for me. I don’t remember any agony on my first trip. It was pretty much just all wonderful discovery. And the coming down wasn’t a problem, either. It was just a long afterglow. Do you remember? It was mescaline, and I took it at the apartment of Margie’s friend, near UCLA. You didn’t take any. You were my guide, and some time that night or early in the morning, you drove me back to your and your mom’s apartment in Venice.”
“Yes, I remember that. I could tell it was a really good trip for you. It made me wish that I had taken some too.”
“Everything was new. I remember thinking the next day at the beach, while looking at that bed of diamonds that was the path of the sun on the water, that it was the Day of Creation. But then, the very next trip—I think it was probably the next weekend, at the apartment in Venice—was a bad trip, for me but not for you. At least, I hope I didn’t make it bad for you.”
“No, you didn’t. It was a good trip for me.”
“You wanted to do it more than I did. I was on the fence, because I had told my parents I would be home that evening. I thought the effects would have worn off enough by then that I would be able to drive home and act like everything was normal, but I wasn’t sure. Then, when you announced you were going to do it anyway, I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to expand my consciousness again. Of course, as soon as I began to feel the effects, that plan of being down and able to act normally within eight hours became incomprehensible, and it completely messed up the trip. Do you remember? I even got sick and vomited.”
“Really? I had forgotten that.”
“I’m afraid so. I was trying to practice acting ‘normally.’ I went ahead and ate something at ‘lunchtime’ even though I wasn’t hungry. I guess the agony of nausea was the closest I could get to feeling ‘normal’.”
Blake smiled. “Aha! So, you admit, after all, that being down is dismal compared to the peak experience!”
“Well, but I wasn’t down, and I wasn’t having a peak experience. I was stuck in between, trying to control something that can’t be controlled. Anyway, after that, I realized my mistake of thinking I could take a trip without being totally committed to it. But being totally committed is easier said than done. And that bad trip didn’t make me doubt in the least the reality and goodness of what I had experienced on my first trip, so there were plenty more to come, both good and bad, but by far most of them good. And there were plenty of moments of pure liberation. But, as the years went by, the time between trips gradually lengthened more and more, not because I was disappointed that I always came down, but because with small doses the whole trip was disappointing, and with big ones the result was deep contentment after an ordeal, and over time I became convinced I was content enough without having to suffer the ordeal. Taking a trip itself came to seem like a way of trying to control what can’t be controlled. The decision to take a trip or not to take a trip at any particular time eventually came to seem, in retrospect and hence in anticipation each time, as either not momentous enough or altogether too momentous. Just not taking it came to be the only happy middle ground.”
“But what if you could have perfect contentment without any ordeal, or the high and exalted state of pure being, without having to come down? What if you could take a pill and the result would be that everything was just exactly how you wanted it to be from then on, forever? Would you take it?”
“Why, yes, I think . . . of course, I would.”
“Well, maybe that really did happen, and the way things are is the way you really want them to be. Hasn’t every ordeal turned out to be something you succeeded in enduring and becoming a new improved version of yourself, and hasn’t every obstacle in the way of what you thought you wanted turned out to be a lesson in what you really want? Sometimes I think maybe I never came down from my first trip.”
“That’s crazy talk. But I like it!”
Long night into morning
Jim got up and turned the radio on, hoping that listening to some beautiful music again might lull him into sleep. Then he turned off the lights and lay back down. It was no use, though. He realized that even listening to beautiful music required an effort he was unable or unwilling to make at this moment. So, he rose again and turned it off, then lay down again and tried to be comfortable. It didn’t work, so next he tried giving up on trying to be comfortable. He was going through a period of suffering and wishing that it would go away. It was relatively mild suffering, really. He could certainly imagine worse, but the imagining something worse was part of it. He was in that state of being too alert to rest and too tired to enjoy being alert. The ultra-vividness of the LSD effect was still there. Only, now when he closed his eyes, he saw brightly cartoon-like and highly detailed glowing visions of ugly and depressing sights and sounds: for example, an old man was eating soda crackers and talking with his mouth full, cracker bits flying around his rubbery, flapping lips, as he spluttered, “Matter of fackally, spackally, grackally. Um hum, gum hum, smack. I took Nadie Splokins to town in the Desoto,” and now Jim saw that the old man was behind the wheel of an ugly old car with a torn, faded tan headliner hanging down like a cobweb from the roof of the car. He was just sitting there for no particular reason, going nowhere, on a hot and dusty afternoon.
What was the point of trying to figure out why this was making an appearance before his mind? His own mouth parts felt stuck together, dried out, and stale. OK. So maybe that was why. But so, what? It was all just tiresome now. It went on long into the night. He wished he could shut it off, but it wasn’t up to him.
Eventually, though, brief moments of relaxation began to come, followed each time by a return of alertness and the thought that he had just been on the verge of falling asleep. When the alertness returned, his mind was busy connecting up thoughts that had occurred to him, and he understood as or more clearly than he ever had the connection between beauty and truth, and now he could see as plain as day that it is impossible to be permanently unconscious. The moments of relaxation became more frequent and enduring. He woke up and it was daytime, late morning, and he was rapidly forgetting a dream. He felt renewed and purified, but he also felt a duty to do something to try to locate Blake. He dreaded calling Blake’s mom to tell her what had happened, but he knew he would have to do it, unless it somehow became unnecessary. The hope that Blake would just show up had shriveled and curled like a dead leaf after all this time had passed. It occurred to him that if Blake had been jailed, he should have been allowed a phone call. Whom would he have called? Maybe his mom. It seemed highly doubtful that he would have called his dad. So, maybe his mom already knew. Or maybe he would have called Margie or some other friend who was a fellow tripper. “But then why wouldn’t he have called me?” he wondered.
So, Jim called Margie first, and asked if she had heard from Blake. She hadn’t, but naturally wondered why he was asking, so he told her what had happened. “Oh, you guys!” she responded. “His dad isn’t going to be happy about this! So, you think he’s in jail? What jail?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that the kid told me the cops took him away. Should I call the police department to find out?”
“No, don’t do that. Why don’t you call his mom to see if she has heard from him? She’s pretty cool. She knows you guys trip, right?”
“Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure. Yes, I’ll call her if I can’t find out some other way. Let me know if you hear anything.”
“I will, and you let me know when you find out, OK?”
“Sure.” He went into the kitchen and got a bowl and a spoon. He poured a bowlful of cold cereal and milk and sat down to eat in the adjoining room with the little table. He thoroughly enjoyed it.
The hearing
That morning, Blake, feeling a mixture of dread and curiosity, had waited his turn to be arraigned on the charge of disorderly conduct. He reassured himself that he was just down enough to be able to do this. And now it was happening. He was standing before the judge, who was a middle-aged man wearing a black robe and black plastic-rimmed glasses, with salt-and-pepper closely cropped hair, sitting behind a raised desk. The judge read out the charges against Blake, advised him of his rights, and then, looking him in the eyes, asked in a pleasant and frank manner, “Are the bats out of your belfry now?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Blake replied with a sheepish smile.
The judge asked him if he was employed or enrolled in school, and he answered that he was working part-time at the South Pasadena Library and was a full-time student at Cal-State L.A., majoring in philosophy. The judge then remarked that it was a mistake to think that taking drugs had anything to do with spiritual enlightenment, and that he thought Blake was in need of spiritual counseling. (Apparently, the arresting officers had written in their report some things that Blake had told them on the way to the police station.) “But that’s not my job. Do you attend church or belong to any other kind of religious organization?”
“I am a member of SRF, Your Honor.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s the Self-Realization Fellowship. It was founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, who came here from India in the 1920s to teach Kriya Yoga. We believe in meditating to achieve peace and divine consciousness.”
“Does this organization believe in using drugs to achieve this divine consciousness?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Is there someone in the fellowship to whom you could go to seek counsel?”
“Yes, I’m sure there is.”
“All right. The court sentences you to pay a fine of $100 and to be on probation for a period of one year. You are released on your own recognizance on condition that you report to the probation officer who will be assigned to you and that you seek the counsel of a spiritual advisor. You are free to go.”
And that was that. Now he could walk back home.
Reentry
After his telephone conversation with Margie, Jim had put off calling Blake’s mom by trying to think if there were any other friends whom Blake might have called. But, again, he couldn’t imagine why Blake would have called anyone other than him or his mom, if he had been given a call from jail. So, he steeled himself and telephoned Blake’s mom to find out if she had heard from him and, if she hadn’t, to tell her what had happened.
No, she hadn’t heard from him, and she was characteristically calm when he told her that Blake and he had taken an LSD trip, that Blake had been taken away by the police, and that he, Jim, did not know where they had taken him or how long he would be held, or, well, anything more than that he had been taken away. He thought her calm demeanor had something to do with her devotion to Paramahansa Yogananda. Normally, it irritated him, because it seemed like an act she was putting on, but this time he was grateful for it. He could stand a little calming down himself just now.
He was pretty sure that she had known that Blake and he had taken trips sometimes when he had stayed at their apartment in Venice on weekends. She had never openly acknowledged it, and she usually wasn’t around while they were tripping, but Blake had told him that he had discussed with her the topic of using psychedelics for spiritual enlightenment. He knew, too, that her jazz musician boyfriend, Rex, had taken at least one LSD trip. One day, before either he or Jim had tried it, they were going somewhere with Rex in Rex’s car, and Blake asked him about his LSD trip. Rex told them he had learned a lot from it, but then he added that it wasn’t something to be trifled with and that he wouldn’t advise them to try it because they were too young. Blake had informed Jim that his mom didn’t believe that psychedelics could produce the true, lasting consciousness of the divine that could be achieved by following the teachings of the Master (Yogananda), but she thought all sincere seekers were honorable, even those who hadn’t yet found their guru. “Oh, how did my dad and my mom ever get together?” Blake asked. “And how I am supposed to integrate those two opposing parental influences?”
Blake’s mom said she thought she could find out where the police had taken him by making some phone calls. At worst, as a last resort, she could call David, her ex-husband and Blake’s father, and he would know how to find out. She would call Jim when she found out anything.
As a courtesy, one of the officers at the jail had telephoned Blake’s father to inform him of Blake’s arrest. Blake’s dad, Lt. David Huntley, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, lived and worked as an administrator at the Wayside Honor Rancho, a detention facility in Castaic, in the northern part of L.A. County. He had been under a lot of pressure lately in both his personal and professional life. The night before, he had had a quarrel with his girlfriend that was all too reminiscent of fights he had had with his ex-wife while they were still married—different subject matter but same emotions. He was also angry at his boss for some unfair critical comments the latter had made on his recent annual evaluation. But this betrayal by his own son hurt even more. He politely thanked the officer who had given him the bad news and then hung up. He was embarrassed and furious. Why did Blake have to do the exact opposite of what he wanted him to do? Was he such a bad father? He phoned his ex-wife, Blake’s mom, to tell her what had happened and to see what her reaction would be. The effect he hoped for was spoiled when she told him that she had already heard about it, from Jim, Blake’s roommate.
“Then why didn’t you call me?” he asked. “Were you going to keep it your own little secret?”
“No, of course not. I was just about to call you when you called,” she answered.
“Yeah, sure you were. Anyway, how did Jim know about it, as if I didn’t know?”
“He said he and Blake both took LSD and went for a walk. Then Blake started acting strange, and he tried to convince him to go back to the apartment, but he wouldn’t go. So, Jim went back without him. Then, when he went back later to try to find Blake, a boy in the neighborhood told him that the police had picked him up. That’s all I know. I was going to call you to see if you knew how to find out where they would have taken him.”
“I already know. My friend downtown who told me about it said that Alhambra P.D. transferred him to county, and they took him to the drunk tank at the L.A. County Jail. They’re charging him with disorderly conduct, and he was supposed to be arraigned this morning. He might have been released by now. I’ll call down there to see if I can find out and then let you know. Then you can deal with it. I’ve had it. I’m disowning him.”
“Well, I’m not. I think you’re making a mistake, Dave. What good will that do?”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the one paying his allowance. Maybe it will teach him a lesson. That kid needs to learn to face reality.”
When Blake had first become friends with Jim, in their junior year of high school, Lt. Huntley had hoped Jim might be a good influence. He had good manners and seemed like a bright kid. Maybe Blake wouldn’t spend so much time with that girl Margie who lived across the street with her communist sympathizing parents. But it didn’t take long for Jim to show his true colors. There was the time Blake was babysitting the kids of some neighbors. Blake had invited Jim over, and the parents had come home early and caught them drinking. The father had called him to tell him what had happened and that he should come get Blake. The friend, he said, had run away. As soon as he and his wife arrived home, he had taken off out the back door, leaving Blake to face the music. And then, the two had been caught cutting school and getting away with it by forging their parents’ signatures on fake absence excuse notes. And now this. Yes, Jim was a bad influence. But still, Blake was responsible for his own bad behavior.
It bothered him that even now his ex-wife was talking in her usual maddeningly calm voice to try to smooth things over, instead of holding Blake accountable, as she said, “I’m worried about the drugs, too, Dave. But it’s not like they robbed a bank. And Blake is working and going to school. He’s doing well in school, too.”
“I can’t believe it! You’re going easy on him even now. Do you realize your son now has a criminal record—for taking drugs?”
“My son?”
“I told you I’m disowning him.”
“Oh, Dave! Besides, you said the charge was for disorderly conduct.”
“That’s just what they charged him with, but my friend told me that the Alhambra P.D. officer who arrested him knew that he was on LSD. He’s seen it before. We all have. We’re not dummies. Deanna, you’re too soft on him, always playing it down, always making excuses for him.”
“No, I’m not. I just don’t think that disowning him is the answer. Well, would you please just make that call to find out if he’s been released and let me know?”
“I’ll do that,” he replied, and hung up.
A little later he called back to tell her that Blake had been released on his own recognizance. That was all he knew, and he didn’t want to talk to her about it anymore.
“Did your dad really disown you?” 71-year-old Jim asked Blake.
“Yes, for about a year. He had been giving me $50 a month to help with rent while I was going to college. He cut that off and refused to have anything to do with me for a while. But I can understand his point of view,” Blake answered.
“Well, I remember a time after that when he must have changed his point of view. Do you remember when he put us in touch with someone who had some mescaline? Did he ever take a trip himself?”
“No, I don’t think so, but he did get disillusioned with the whole War on Drugs approach and with his job in general.”
“I remember vividly that hot summer night when we driving to somewhere way out in the San Fernando Valley. I thought it was really weird that he had told us where to get some mescaline.”
“I think he thought it was safer than LSD. It was sort of like that attitude of ‘I would rather they not do it at all, but if they’re going to do it, at least it will be better if they do it in a way that is safer.’ He did mellow out somewhat when he got older, but, still, he had his problems with alcohol and could be a difficult to deal with,” Blake said.
After his phone call with Blake’s mom had ended, Jim set about thinking what to do next. He thought it likely that, sooner or later, Blake’s mom or dad would call his parents to tell them what had happened. He hoped there wouldn’t be some sort of summit meeting of both sets of parents sitting down to hammer out what should be done about their lawbreaking sons. He decided things would go better if he took the initiative and told his parents on his own. His dad would still be at work, which was good, because then he could tell his mom first, and she could decide how and what to tell his dad about it. He expected them to be shocked by his confession and disappointed in him, but he couldn’t think of any easy way out. It was quite clear that their view of the situation would be hard to reconcile with his. All this crazy drug taking (as they would see it) by young people had taken them and other members of the older generation by surprise. When they were Jim’s age, prohibition of alcohol had only recently been repealed. Marijuana, opium, and other illegal drugs were completely beyond the pale. Only criminals and pitiful failures in life became drug addicts. Smoking tobacco, on the other hand, was perfectly respectable for everybody. Drinking alcohol socially and in moderation was also acceptable, but there were many, including Jim’s parents, who still thought temperance, which had come to mean total abstinence, was morally preferable. Jim’s mother’s older sister, Francine, and her husband, Chet, both smoked and liked to drink, and they were the relatives with whom Jim’s mom and dad most enjoyed socializing. But neither of Jim’s parents smoked, and they rarely drank any alcohol. They, like everybody else at that time, had heard news reports and had seen TV dramas about “hippies” taking supposedly “consciousness expanding” drugs, with a strong emphasis on how dangerous and misguided it all was. Episodes of the television series “Dragnet”, with no-nonsense cop Joe Friday, played by actor Jack Webb, now often featured nasty punks wearing tie-dye shirts and bell-bottom pants, who seduced naive college kids into a seedy and criminal lifestyle in which the boys pushed dope and the girls rented out their bodies, all the while spouting idealistic-sounding pseudo-religious claptrap. On a serious discussion show, a host would interview an expert in a starkly lit studio. Both host and interviewee would be men wearing business suits and ties, smoking cigarettes, gesticulating and frowning, as they probed the sociological causes of all the experimentation with drugs by the “dropout generation” and its connections to protest against the war in Vietnam.
Jim was well aware of what he was up against. To his parents, it would be like one of those “Dragnet” episodes, with their son and his best friend as the naive young victims, or like their son had become a textbook example of what the expert on the discussion show was attempting to explain: how young people were tempted to escape reality by using mind-bending drugs, because the threat of a nuclear war that would wipe out all life on earth hung over our heads like a sword suspended on a thread.
On second thought, it was more likely that his parents would see it as their job to teach Jim that he shouldn’t make any such excuses for himself. What had gotten into him? He was responsible for his own decisions in life, and he knew better than to be fooled by these smooth-talking phonies in hip clothing offering their magic pills as a solution to the world’s troubles. If he and his friends were so worried about the world’s political situation, then they needed to get involved in society to try to make it better, and not “drop out” and risk imprisonment by using illegal drugs.
“Well, I agree that I’m responsible for my own decisions,” he thought. “But my parents don’t know what psychedelics are like. They’re wrong in thinking that this class of drugs are just like a souped-up version of alcohol or heroin or something like that. Taking LSD isn’t a way of trying to escape from grim reality. A psychedelic trip requires you to be ready to face all the grimness you can imagine, but the result is that you learn that you can handle it, and there is a world of truth and beauty all around, just waiting for you.”
He knew that simply telling them that wouldn’t convince them, but remembering it himself lightened his heart, and he dialed home. His mom answered, as he had hoped. He got straight to the point and told her what had happened: he and Blake had taken LSD; they had gone for a walk, and Blake had gotten weird; he had tried to talk him into going back to the apartment, but he wouldn’t do it; he went back later, and a kid told him the police had taken Blake away; he had called Blake’s mom, and she was going to make calls to see if she could find out where he was.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“I want you to come home. I want to see with my own eyes that you are all right.”
“OK. I’ll come right now.”
Forty-seven years later, in 2016, Jim’s mother was in hospice care at home, attended by his sister, Charlene, while Jim was teaching his usual load of philosophy courses, but this time in Spain, to a group of students from a consortium of colleges back home, in a Study Abroad semester. He phoned Charlene to ask how their mother was doing.
“She’s hanging in there,” she replied. “They have her on Atavan to reduce her anxiety. It does do that, but it’s almost like she’s dreaming while she’s awake. She said something yesterday that made me wonder how old she thinks she is, so I asked her. She thought about it a few minutes and said, ‘Oh, I think I’m about thirty-seven, aren’t I?’ I said, ‘Mama, you’re ninety years old.’
“She laughed and asked, ‘I am? Really?’ and I answered, ‘Yes, really.’ Then she said, ‘Oh, so that’s why the nurse comes to visit. How am I doing?’
“‘Well, Mama, you’re dying,’ I answered, and she just said, ‘That’s sad,’ but she didn’t seem afraid or upset about it. Would you like to talk to her?”
“Yes,” Jim answered.
When she came on the line, her voice was slurred, and she seemed confused. She didn’t remember that he was in Spain. She seemed to think that he was at his house, which was only a block away from hers. He knew that it was the effect of the Atavan. He had seen it a year before when his father-in-law was in hospice care. She had been characteristically bright and alert when he had left for Spain a month before, and she had urged him to go ahead and go, despite her worsening heart failure. But now she told him, in a pitifully slurred voice that made her sound drunk, “I want you to come see me.”
“I will,” he answered, “but I can’t come right now. I’m in Spain, and I have to stay here a couple of more months, but I’ll come see you as soon as I can. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she replied, with a tired voice, and added again, “I want you to come see me.”
His sister came back on the line, and they talked a little while longer. She reassured him that she and her husband were taking good care of her and that there was no need for him to come home.
After the call ended, he told his wife about it, and, choking back tears, said, “She told me she wants me to go see her, and I know I’m not going to do it—not now anyway.” She died a few weeks later.
When he walked in the front door, sure enough, there she was, looking him up and down. “Well, you don’t look any different,” she said. Beneath her official disapproval, which wasn’t feigned but was not the whole story, she was also just genuinely interested in this new development. He loved this about her. He was often stricken with an awkward self-consciousness when he felt her bright, penetrating eyes observing him as if he were a specimen, but he could always count on her to be interested in his life and his point of view, even when she thought it was her duty to correct him. He knew that his reserved personality frustrated her sometimes, but he couldn’t help it. He was like his dad in this way. He loved his dad just as much, but in a different way. He seemed to have inherited most of his personality and temperament from him. When they were alone together, they both found it difficult to keep up a conversation. His dad respected his children’s privacy, whereas his mom always seemed to be prying for details. But his dad wasn’t shy about expressing his disapproval when he thought Jim or his older brother or his younger sister was behaving foolishly, and he could do it in what seemed to Jim thoughtlessly hurtful ways. He certainly wasn’t shy or diplomatic on those occasions.
Despite being in a weak position in terms of moral claims recognized by society, Jim was in a strong position in terms of self-confidence, due to having received the revelations and endured the trials of the past twenty-four hours.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” his mother asked.
“I mean…” he hesitated, trying to think of what to say. “I told you what happened.”
“It wasn’t something that just happened to you. You did something. Are you proud of yourself?”
“Well, I’m not ashamed of myself.”
“You should be.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You broke the law.”
“Yes, but I don’t agree with that law.”
“Oh, you don’t agree with it. Do you think you can choose which laws to obey and which ones to break? What if everyone did that?”
“Maybe everybody does do that. You drive faster than the speed limit sometimes, don’t you?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she replied, exasperated. “You know your daddy is not going to be at all happy about this.”
“I know,” Jim replied, and began to think how he might be less defiant while still being honest. Then he said, “Doing what’s legal and doing what’s right aren’t always the same thing.”
“Oh, and you’re going to be the judge of that?”
“Everybody has to.”
“How do you think we get the laws we have?”
“Oh, you know, people vote for their representatives, and then the representatives vote on laws. But I haven’t been allowed to vote yet.”
“You will be able to for the next election. But the point is that the majority get to decide, and then the ones on the losing side can’t just break the law because they don’t agree. If they did, there would be no point in having elections in the first place.”
Jim hadn’t anticipated this sort of civics-lesson style of argument from his mom. This was more like what he would expect from his dad. Maybe she was trying to represent his dad since he wasn’t there. He feared he would have to go through the whole thing all over again when his dad came home. “Well, what if it was legal to take LSD?” he asked her. “It used to be legal until just a few years ago. Was it all right to take it then? Would it be all right if the law changed again?”
“I don’t think it’s ever right to try to escape reality by using drugs,” she replied.
“It’s not escaping reality. You become more conscious, not less. You’re not escaping anything.”
“Well, that’s not what I’ve heard. I’ve heard some people have jumped off tall buildings, thinking they could fly.”
“Oh, that story about Art Linkletter’s daughter. I heard that she was depressed and suicidal before that—probably because he was such a lousy father. The LSD didn’t cause it.”
“Oh, sure. It’s always the parent’s fault.”
The phone rang, and his mom answered it. He guessed from hearing her end of the conversation that it was Blake’s mom.
She listened for a while, and then said, in a cold voice, “Oh? I understood they took LSD.” She was listening again, and then said, “Yes, he’s here.” With an angry look on her face, she held the phone out in his direction and said, “She wants to talk to you.” To Jim this seemed odd, and he thought it seemed that way to his mother also. He walked over to her, and she handed him the phone.
“Hello.”
“Jim, this is Deanna.” Jim’s family was from Texas and had been living in California for a little over five years. It didn’t feel right to him when Blake referred to or addressed members of his parents’ generation by their first names. He had the same reaction to Blake’s mom identifying herself to him this way. He made a mental note to examine this prejudice of his later, in the light of the unprecedented nature of this new psychedelic age. “As I was telling Helen,” Blake’s mom continued, and this use of his mother’s first name while addressing him also seemed of dubious propriety, “I found out from David that the police took Blake to the L.A. County Jail downtown. He was charged with disorderly conduct, which is the same thing as public drunkenness. That’s why I told Helen that you two had been drinking when Blake was arrested. I didn’t want to be a tattletale about you and Blake taking LSD, but apparently you already told her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sure you and your parents will have to work that out. I want you to know that I don’t approve of you boys taking LSD either. I believe you are trying to find the divine within, but I believe that meditation is the way to do that, and these drugs don’t really help.”
“Oh, yes they do,” he thought but didn’t say, instead answering, “OK,” noncommittally.
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you that Blake had a hearing this morning, and he was released from jail. Has he called you?”
“No.”
“He hasn’t called me or David either, so I’m assuming he will return to the apartment you two share in Alhambra. I’m not sure how he is planning on getting there. Maybe he will take the bus. I would gladly go pick him up and give him a ride if I could contact him.”
“Yeah, I would, too,” Blake interjected.
“But I definitely want to see him as soon as I can, and the only thing I can think of is to go to the Alhambra apartment to see if he’s already there and, otherwise, to wait for him there. So, I’m wondering if you would meet me there to let me in to wait for him in case he doesn’t arrive before I do. Besides, I think it would be good for you to be there to keep him company. You both have classes tomorrow, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Jim replied. “Would you please hold on a minute while I ask my mom something?”
“Sure.”
Under the circumstances, he thought it would be polite and respectful to ask his mom’s permission before agreeing to grant Blake’s mom request. He told her what Blake’s mom had asked him to do, and she replied, in a resigned, weary tone, “Go ahead. I don’t have any control over what you do anyway.”
With a look of chagrin on his face, pointed in his mom’s direction, he spoke into the mouthpiece of the telephone, saying, “All right. I’ll meet you there. It will take me twenty or thirty minutes to get there.”
“Thank you, Jim. I’ll see you there.”
When he hung up the phone, his mother said, “I’m mad at her. She told me that you and Blake had been drinking, not that you had taken LSD. She lied to me. I don’t think I want to talk to her again. I don’t trust her.”
“She meant well,” Jim said in her defense. “She was just trying to protect me from you and Daddy being too hard on me. She told me she doesn’t approve of our taking LSD either.”
“I don’t care what she approves or disapproves of! It’s not her place to try to protect you from us! We’re your parents; she isn’t.” his mom insisted adamantly.
“I agree. She should have just told the truth,” Jim said quite sincerely. The prospect of both sets of parents ganging up on Blake and him seemed much less of a threat now.
Twenty-eight years later, in 1997, Jim was in graduate school, in the final stretch of his work towards a Ph.D. in philosophy. He had just finished giving a talk on a paper he had written about what it means to say that other possible worlds exist, and was still sitting around the seminar table with other doctoral students, when Leah, the department secretary, came up to him and asked, “All finished? How did it go?”
“Oh, it went well, I think. I enjoyed it,” he replied, and some other students chimed in with, “It was interesting,” and “He gave us some things to think about.”
“Well, it’s getting late. Maybe you should go on home now,” she suggested.
So, he gathered his papers, said good-bye to his friends, and started for home. He didn’t quite know what to make of Leah’s behavior. Maybe she was just anxious to close up shop and go home for the day, although it wasn’t all that late.
As he drove up to his house, he noticed that his parents’ car was parked in front, and he wondered why. He turned into the driveway, gathered his books, and was headed towards the back door, when Cecelia, his wife, came out. The look on her face told him something terrible had happened.
“Babe,” she said and hesitated for an awful moment, “your dad died this afternoon.”
“How? What happened?” he managed to say, in shock and dismay. It was totally unexpected. Just a week before his mom and dad had taken him and Cecelia out to lunch to celebrate Cecelia’s birthday. His mom had recently recovered from a long bout with colon cancer, involving surgery and radiation, while his dad’s good health had just been reaffirmed by his doctor at his annual checkup. His parents had even half-jokingly talked about picking out a new wife for his dad to enjoy after his mom died—talk that Jim and Cecelia considered to be in poor taste.
Cecelia explained that it was a massive heart attack, and that the doctor had said that he would have almost immediately gone into a coma and then quickly died.
“Almost,” he thought, “almost immediately,” and he imagined and tried not to imagine what those final seconds were like. The fact of death hit home as it never had before. His dad was alive and well this morning, and now he was dead. He would never see his father alive in this world again. Grief swept over him like a black, choking cloud.
Blake’s return
It didn’t even occur to me to call you or anybody else to give me a ride. I was so relieved to be free! I just wanted to get away from there as quickly as possible, so I started walking. I didn’t have a map or directions, but it really wasn’t that hard finding my way back. I just headed towards the mountains and to the east. Yes, it was a long walk. It took me several hours, and I got tired and hungry and thirsty towards the end, but it gave me time to think and to enjoy our weird world just the way it is.
The first part was in downtown. I was walking along sidewalks by big buildings, cars whizzing by in the street. City Hall was just down the street, and there were other government buildings with statues and flags out front. I walked a few blocks in the direction of the mountains and then under the freeway. It was like walking under a river of noise. It was a little trashy under there and along the street on the other side, but it didn’t bother me. It seemed as natural as trampled grass on an animal path for there to be all those bits of visual evidence that humans had passed this way, when hundreds of them were rushing by overhead as I walked through. Walking, walking, walking, I recognized Union Station on my right, on the far side of a big parking lot, with a bright star reflection of the sun flaring up from one surface to another in the sea of cars. Soon, the street became a long overpass above a section of railroad with seven or eight parallel tracks. After crossing the overpass, I walked for a mile or two through an area with small businesses like plumbing parts and tire and auto parts stores, and then I crossed a concrete bridge over the wide, concrete-paved channel of the L.A. River, dry except for a shallow stream of water running down the middle. There were scores of power lines dipping and rising between giant skeletal metal towers. On the other side of the river, I walked for a long way through a hodgepodge of old residential areas and workshops and warehouses, and then, on the left, the welcoming greenery of a big park came into view. I stopped there a while in the shade of a tree to rest. I heard the curious hollow clacking sound that a raven will sometimes make. I looked up to the branches of the trees around me and then saw him on a branch of the one I was sitting under. It was hard to spot him at first because he was black and in the shade. He stiffened and thrust out his feathers each time he made the sound. I was pretty sure that he was aware that I was watching him. It seemed like he was trying to communicate something to somebody, but I didn’t see any other ravens around. Of course, there may have been some nearby in other trees, or even in that one, that I didn’t see. Anyway, I didn’t understand him. But then I thought that maybe he was trying to say how strangely beautiful the world is, the way I felt yesterday, when I was peaking on the streets of our neighborhood, and the way I was feeling again.
I walked on through the park, parallel to the street. It was more pleasant walking on grass than on the sidewalk. Then I saw a black and white patrol car slowing to a stop along the curb on the other side of the street, and I could feel my heart rate increase. Had the judge made a mistake? Was there really such a thing as being released “on your own recognizance”? The police car pulled away from the curb, drove on, and disappeared in the distance. I wiped my moist palms on my pants legs and walked on.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of that long walk home, except to say that seeing the San Gabriel mountains rising above the urbanized plain, with the ridges and canyons making bluish branching patterns of sun and shadows, gave me a wonderful feeling of comfort. Also, when I recognized that I was in the neighborhood of Cal-State, it seemed strange and familiar at the same time, and I wondered what Burroughs had covered in class that day. The odd thing was that, although walking from downtown to our apartment in Alhambra took a lot longer than it would have to drive that same distance, it made the two places feel closer than they had seemed before. I guess it was because I saw how each little section connected to the next, which showed how the beginning and ending points were connected, too.
But telling about the feeling I got when I saw that police car has reminded me of something. Do you remember how we had said that we were more afraid of our parents finding out we were taking LSD than of just being arrested?
“Yes, I do remember.”
Well, first of all, that meant my dad and your parents finding out that we had done it at all, and, in the case of my mom, it meant her finding out we were still doing it, because she thought we had only done it once or twice in Venice. Anyway, now I know that we were pretty dumb if we really believed that. The threat of being under the thumb of the courts is far worse than what our parents would have ever considered in their attempts to control us.
“In hindsight, that’s pretty clear.”
Right. But at that time, after just being released on my own recognizance—but having a fine to pay and being on probation for a year—I had the thought that it was lucky that I was released after only part of a day and that long night, because that way, our parents need never know. I didn’t know then that my dad had already been tipped off, or that you had called my mom and told your mom also.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t know where you were and felt like I had to do something.”
Oh, I understand. Don’t worry about that. I’m just remembering the mixed feelings I had when I got home after that long, tiring walk and saw my mom and Kathleen there waiting for me. I was surprised and disappointed that my mom already knew about it, and not too happy that my sister was there, too, acting all worried about me. At the same time, I felt guilty for being disappointed, because it was nice of them to be so concerned.
“I remember that after your mom interrogated you briefly, Kathleen said, ‘Oh, my god, you’re still high, aren’t you?’”
She did? I had forgotten that. And yes, I guess I was. That really was a big trip, wasn’t it?
“Yes, like life.”