Note to folks linked here from Erowid: The post “Datura Lady,” about my experience with datura stramonium is the last chapter at the very end of this.

I’m still working on this memoir and I’ll add several more chapters to this part when I get time. There may even be a third part, if I live long enough.

THE HAIGHT

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With Patty gone, I busied myself with school and work. I still had to take a few classes to finish my undergraduate degree in painting and I was working part-time painting signs to pay for my education — which was easier in those distant times when rents were low and tuition at California universities was next to nothing.

I also sold paintings. In fact, almost everything I did was bought by someone, albeit for fairly modest prices. Starting at the age of eleven when my father took paintings I’d done and hung them at the University, where they sold surprisingly well, painting became a source of both monetary and psychological support. To take simple portable raw materials, canvas and paint, and make something that people would want and even pay for was immensely satisfying.

I came to deeply identify with the role of painter. I invariably had a pair of “paint pants” with so much oil paint encrusted on the front that they were waterproof and could almost stand up on their own. Wherever I lived I became the familiar paint-splattered figure in the neighborhood — the mad artist.

Shortly before I graduated the head of the Art Department took me aside and offered me a full fellowship if I stayed on and did graduate work at San Jose. This came as a complete surprise to me since I felt like an underachiever who usually did a semester’s work in a frantic last week of all-nighters. But my grades had been good and many of my teachers had asked to keep my paintings for their “files” — a subtle form of extortion that I was happy to engage in.

I knew that a fellowship was a fast-track to a career as a college art instructor, but I’d already applied and been accepted into the graduate program at San Francisco State. I was tired of living in San Jose with its oppressive summer heat and lingering memories of my time with Patty.

San Francisco, “the city,” was calling me. So despite feeling flattered and grateful, I regretfully declined the offer.

I sometimes wonder what my life might have been if I’d stayed in San Jose and eventually became a professor of art in the painting department. Things might have turned out very differently.

When I traveled to San Francisco to scout out possible places to live I answered an ad for a flat in the Haight Ashbury district. Nestled between Golden Gate Park and the surrounding hills, where wisps of fog float up gray streets lined with ornate, once-prosperous Victorian homes standing side by side like faded but still beautiful women, the “Haight” whispered of something subtle and mysterious, stirring in me a delicious sense of hidden possibilities.

It was a diverse neighborhood. Russian and Armenian immigrants, who still owned most of the retail shops and restaurants on Haight Street, had moved in when the once spacious homes were first divided up into flats. Now young people attracted by the low rents and funky ambiance were beginning to arrive, bringing with them a culture of art and music, along with LSD and marijuana. The term “hippy” had yet to be coined and the beatnik era of coffee houses and jazz in North Beach was just coming to a close.

The house in the ad was a huge, imposing, cosmically ornate three-story Victorian standing at the corner of Ashbury and Page. It had once been painted white but the delicate woodwork gracing its lofty exterior, complex patterns of ornamental swirls and scallops, was weathered and graying like driftwood in the moist ocean air.

Haight Street was a short block up a slight hill. In the opposite direction, just down Ashbury, was the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, a wide strip of tall trees and lawn between two streets.

The house was owned by a bank in Palo Alto, which meant the owners wouldn’t be a cumbersome presence there. I met the agent out front and followed him under an ornate arch at the entrance and up a winding flight of stairs to a landing on the second floor, where he unlocked the door to the flat.

It was complete mess — littered with trash and debris from the previous tenants.

As I looked around inside, I experienced a subtle feeling, almost like being on LSD. For an instant I sensed the previous occupants drug experiences still hanging in the air like a lingering perfume. Most people would have been put off by the atmosphere inside, but I found it oddly attractive.

The flat had two large main rooms. From the first room a small round balcony jutted out from under an overhanging arch above page street. The second larger room, through double french doors, was lit by a huge vertical window that looked up Ashbury towards Haight Street. Next to that an equally tall bay window projected out around the corner of the room to an ornate fireplace with ornamental mantels and intricate tile-work framing a small gas heater with an open burner behind its decorative metal front.

Past a full length beveled mirror was a small kitchen that looked to have been a walk-in closet at one time. Another door led into a commodious bathroom, where a high ceiling soared up above an extra long claw-foot bathtub.

Since it was such a mess the agent offered it to me for fiftyfive dollars a month with no deposit. I took it on the spot.

After thoroughly cleaning the flat I proceeded to paint the two main rooms, mixing my own paint to get just the right hues — a pale olive green, with a darker shade for the woodwork and trim. I painted the bathroom a rich shade of vaginal reddish pink with darker red trim, and did the tiny kitchen in deep blue.

On Mcallister Street in the Fillmore district, down the hill from the Haight, a trove of secondhand furniture stores provided me with sturdy mission oak furniture for a few dollars apiece and old oriental style carpets in soft faded shades, with sensuous intertwining floral patterns whose psychedelic quality I never tired of looking at.

While I was hauling furniture up the stairs I met the lady who occupied the flat opposite mine on the same floor. Her name was Mary Pat and, as I was to learn later, she was an LSD dealer of some repute. She was nice looking, about my age (twentythree), petite but voluptuous, with sharp features, short black hair, and eye-shadow and heavy makeup over pale skin. All she ever wore was short black slips, dark patterned nylons and shiny black pumps. When she went out she put on large dark sunglasses and donned a black trench coat over her slip.

I immediately felt a certain sexual attraction between us, but I was hesitant to get involved with someone living right next door. I also found her a little scary. Ned, who lived upstairs in the attic flat, would tell me in a hushed tone that she was a witch. But then Ned also had a reputation as a warlock, which I think he cultivated. Mary Pat never had anything good to say about him. When she did refer to Ned her eyes glanced up at the ceiling in his direction and she spat out his name in a venomous tone.

Ned’s flat, at the very top of the building, was graced with a round turret and cupola where he liked to hold court surrounded by walls decorated with colorful but cryptic pictures of occult subject matter. A cut-crystal globe hung from the center of the ceiling, refracting rainbow colors in all directions. He was a follower of Alister Crowley, one of the original renegade hipsters, who spurned the social and sexual mores of his time.

Like Crowley, Ned reveled in all things magical and arcane, hinting of mysteries beyond the kin of ordinary mortals. Women invariably described Ned as “creepy” and were afraid to be left alone with him. He was of average build, angular, with a high pointed forehead, pale skin, and straight greasy-looking black hair. He told me he’d been discharged from the army on psychological grounds, but he made it sound like it was all part of some larger hidden plan.

On my visits to his turret Ned invariably had something amazing to reveal to me, that he prefaced by squinting his eyes and rubbing his hands gleefully together while chortling like Igor about to unveil some new monster on an unsuspecting populace. I don’t think I ever saw him smoke or ingest much in the way of mind-altering substances himself, but he liked getting visitors high so he could regale them with his various discoveries in the dark arts.

Ned introduced me to the Tarot cards. As an artist I found their suggestive imagery and associations fascinating. I immediately went downtown to a tiny “magick” store and bought several different versions of them.

Lacking curtains, I’d been thinking of painting something on the big south-facing window with water soluble tempera paint, as I’d done on the windows in my last apartment in San Jose. Playing with the Tarot cards it occurred to me that they would be an ideal subject to paint on that window, which was just the right shape for a tarot card, over six feet tall and almost four feet wide.

I separated out the twentytwo “major arcana” cards from the fiftytwo less interesting “minor arcana” which correspond to a regular deck of playing cards, shuffled them, spread them out face down and picked one at random — number six, “The Lovers.”

I held the card up towards the window and squinted. Perfect. The two large widow panes exactly fit the composition. In the lower pane, two naked figures, Adam and Eve, stood on either side of a distant blue mountain. In the upper pane, under a stylized yellow sun and descending rays, an androgynous winged angel with autumnal leaves for hair sat on a cloud with hands out-stretched, as if to join the pair of lovers below.

I’ve always been good at copying things freehand, so painting the large image on the window with high-quality tempera colors was easy. When it was finished I thought it looked even better than the original, especially from down below in the street at night when the interior lights lit it up like stained glass.

I think it became something of landmark in the neighborhood and I even imagined it set the tone for what was to follow. 

CRAZY WISDOM

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                    Shams al-Din
                    I went from town to town
                   and did not see one such as you

                  Can you really say
                  I have seen your face

                                     Rumi

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When I first encountered Wolf he was standing on Haight Street sucking on a lemon half — which I was to learn he did whenever he was fasting.

“Do you know where it’s at man?” he asked

From the way it was uttered, between sucks on his lemon, the question of where “it” was “at” had vast implications. Here was a fellow seeker and spiritual friend.

Although I’d been reading zen books since high school, Wolf was my first introduction to living Zen, or Zen as embodied in real people. With his simple direct manner he sometimes struck me as a total idiot, or at best a god-intoxicated holy-fool. But he could come up with surprising insights into a situation or relationship, uttered in three or four words — that would “stun the common crowd and shut the mouths of the Patriarchs and sages.”

Stocky, with a large squarish head and chiseled features under ringlets of brown hair, Wolf had once been a member of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle club. More artistic than menacing, the Jokers were much admired for their grubby style and charisma, for which they were even respected by their ruder more violent brethren, the Hells Angels.

A man after my own taste in sartorial matters, Wolf would find a distinctive article of clothing, such as his thick, khaki-colored coat with a fur collar, and wear it continually, so it became a part of him, absorbing his energy (along with food stuffs and various other substances), until it had acquired a delicate patina of age and venerability, like the robe of some wandering mendicant. He wore that particular coat until it was hanging in shreds down the backs of his legs before finally relinquishing it.

Wolf had a placid countenance, a calmness that gave the impression of great weight and gravitas. There was also a subtle sadness in his large, liquid brown eyes that belied his gruff exterior. He was an orphan, but when he told me of being shuffled from one foster home to another as a child, he said it matter-of-factly, as if it was of little consequence.

In a neighborhood that was awash in marijuana and psychedelics, Wolf was unusually cautious with drugs, especially LSD. I sensed that he felt somewhat fragile in regard to the ingesting of such substances. I only heard him mention having taken LSD once and when I saw him shortly afterwards he was visibly shaken by the experience. He said that a homosexual had come on to him in the park while he was on it.

Wolf had found the perfect employment for a former motorcycle gang member — driving a Harley Davidson delivery motorcycle around the city.

One day I was treated to a dizzying display of his motorcycle prowess when the sound of a horn honking vigorously outside my flat drew me onto the small round balcony overlooking the corner of Ashbury and Page.

The street below was empty.

Then I heard the roar of an engine coming up Page Street. An old black delivery motorcycle shot into view and zoomed around and around the four-way intersection below, from curb to curb in a speeding blur, with the side-car compartment lifted almost vertically into the air.

As he sped off up Page street Wolf grinned back at me and honked his horn again.

Wolf’s lair, a few blocks down Page Street from my place, was up a flight of steep narrow stairs in a drab Victorian apartment house. On the wall at the top of the dingy stairwell, dwarfing all the other nondescript stains and scribbles, was the word “AT,” crudely painted in large letters.

On my first visit, he reverently handed me his worn copy of “The Three Pillars of Zen” and guided me to the translation of an essay by the Japanese Zen Master Dogen titled “Being Time” — one of the most profound works by that most abstruse and complex of religious philosophers. “THAT’S where it’s at,” Wolf breathed, patting the page tenderly with a big, blocky hand.

It turns out IT was at many places and no place at the same time.

Wolf showed me through his squalid, disheveled, sparsely furnished apartment like a tour guide in the Sistine Chapel. I couldn’t see what he was so proud of — until he lifted a rear window and gestured for me to climb out onto what I soon realized was a level section of roof high above the streets.

Stretching out below was a magnificent panoramic view of the city with precise rows of buildings shining in the late afternoon light and the bay and Berkeley hills in the distance.

It was there that I first met Hugh Banks, whom Wolf spoke of with rare respect. Huey, Wolf intimated, was some kind of Zen adept who periodically shaved his head and engaged in long bouts of deep meditation with Suzuki, a Zen priest who had recently arrived in San Francisco from Japan. Suzuki had a temple in Japantown on the other side of the Fillmore District, almost visible from Wolf’s roof.

As the three of us lounged on the roof and passed a thick marijuana joint, I took a closer look at Huey. His hair, barely a quarter inch long, was just starting to grow out again. In an era when most of us sported long locks and thick beards, his cropped head gave him the mad look of someone who had just escaped from a prison or insane asylum. In fact, he was a certified schizophrenic (with delusions of grandeur) who had spent most of his early years in mental institutions.

But it was more than simple insanity that set Huey apart from anyone else I’d met up to that point. He had a certain presence that I found strangely appealing. He always seemed to be “on,” like an actor who must pay attention to his every movement in order to fit the part he was playing. He even had a peculiar way of walking, slowly and deliberately, as if watching himself from some distant vantage, with his weight back on his heels and his feet turned outward like Charlie Chaplin’s character, the little tramp.

Later, when his stringy blond hair had grown down to his shoulders, leaving a round bald spot at the crown of his head like a medieval friar, with a thick red beard flowing down from either side of his face, his chin tucked in and eyes gazing upward, he was the image of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism.

When Huey first visited my flat he said that life itself can become a work of art, which summed up my philosophy precisely. His highest compliment was to say that someone was “real,” the implication being that most people were not really real — an estimation which I also tended to agree with.

Huey and Wolf adopted me, informally, as their apprentice. I became their straight man, the foil and audience for their Zen antics. They reminded me of the two legendary Zen cutups, Hanshan and Shide, popular subjects of Chinese ink painters, whose inexplicable banter pointed to deep cosmic truths.

I was happy to let them show me their favorite hangouts around the city — beat generation holdovers like the graffiti and candle wax encrusted Blue Unicorn Coffee House, where poetry was spontaneously recited aloud and intense philosophical discussions routinely occurred.

Finally, Huey proudly escorted me to Japantown to sit with Suzuki. After what was for me an exotic and delicious first taste of tempura in a tiny street kiosk, we approached the ornate wooden facade of the “Soto Zen Mission,” which had formally housed a Jewish Synagogue.

Suzuki met us just inside the door. After we took off our shoes and exchanged silent bows, he ushered us in, moving smoothly about like a solicitous host. He was very small in scale, but with an impressive presence, an erect but relaxed bearing, crisp dark robes over a spotless v-shaped white collar, and a smoothly shaved head.

He and Huey seemed to have a special relationship, circling in stylized  movements and eyeing one another like two combatants, but with obvious enjoyment.

Since I was a newcomer Suzuki escorted me to a sitting cushion for initiation into the Soto Zen style of meditation. Although Huey had shown me the basic posture, I let Suzuki gently place me into position, basking in the warmth of his attention.

I had already meditated sporadically for short periods over the last few years and could sit in the half-lotus fairly comfortably, and even get into the full lotus for a few intense minutes. But I was unprepared for what lay ahead.

Gradually, in my rapidly expanding peripheral vision, others silently entered the room, bowing from the waist with palms together towards round black sitting-cushions, each on its own wide flat pad, arranged in a precise row along an expanse of wall. Turning and bowing again to the room, they sat down on their respective cushions and spun smoothly around to face the wall in meditation posture.

Suzuki moved silently about the room adjusting peoples’ postures, his hands touching their bodies with a tenderness that was remarkably natural and unselfconscious.

I checked my position: half-open eyes gazing slightly downward, the natural forward curve of my lower back slightly accentuated, chin tucked in, the crown of my head pointed toward the ceiling as if suspended by a cable, shoulders and arms relaxed downward, elbows out and hands resting lightly on my topmost foot with palms up and thumbs barely touching at a point just below my navel, making a circle or “cosmic mudra.”

A surge of pride came over me. This wasn’t so difficult.

I went over Suzuki’s instructions, counting my breaths from one to ten, starting over at one whenever my mind wandered into fleeting thoughts or sensations.

After awhile I went to the next step — watching my breath, simply letting it go slowly in and out through my nostrils, slightly emphasizing and prolonging the outbreath. Whenever my attention strayed I pulled it gently back to my breath.

Finally I felt my concentration was sufficient to attempt the final step — Shikantaza or “just sitting,” the ultimate goal, the pinnacle of Soto Zen practice. Concentrating on the blurred light coming through half closed eye lashes, I explored the feelings in my body.

My body!  Holy shit!

My body was screaming at me, “What are you doing, have you gone mad!”

My folded knees were being pierced with hot steel rods of pain while my feet turned into huge, numb blocks of wood. My shoulders and neck contracted like vises cranking tighter and tighter. I broke into a sweat as time ground to a halt, the ensuing minutes crawling painfully past. I couldn’t move or adjust my position for fear of creating a disturbance and distracting the line of silent, perfectly still sitters on either side of me, close enough to reach over and touch. I repeatedly imagined standing up abruptly and dashing for the door.

Just as I was convinced I couldn’t stand another second, a resonant bell sounded. I bowed to the wall with palms together, following along with the others on either side. We rocked from side to side, got off our round black cushions, fluffed them up with both hands, stood up stiffly, bowed again, turned, and very, very slowly began walking forward, each step taking us only a few inches as we snaked slowly around the room.

I looked over the line of shoulders. Up ahead was an exit that I decided I would bolt out of the instant I reached it. But as the line painstakingly flowed past the doorway I was unable to make my move, as if I was being pulled along like an object on a conveyor belt.

The sharp sound of a wooden clapper signaled the line to speed up to a normal pace — until we each stopped again in front of our black pad and round cushion, bowed, turned around, bowed to the room, sat, swung around and faced the dreaded wall again.

I nervously folded my legs into the half lotus. To my surprise I felt refreshed and comfortable as I renewed my efforts to count my breaths and relax into “just sitting.”

When the second forty minute period neared an end, time once again slowed to a halt. The minutes stretched out like hours and I began to wonder if the timekeeper had fallen asleep on the bell. As the pain became unbearable I did what I’d done many times on LSD when things got too extreme and threatening — I gave myself up, surrendered, and threw myself into the void. The pain didn’t go away, but I stopped fighting it, relaxed and merged with it. Before I knew it the bell sounded and I stood up, exultant to have survived.

Afterwards I felt buoyant and naturally high, my feet seeming not to touch the pavement as we walked back through Japantown. I marveled at how something as simple as just sitting still for a length of time could have such far-reaching religious implications. Facing the wall there was no escape. It was like facing the vast pain of humanity. I thought of Jesus nailed to the cross. Everything, all creatures, the great earth, the entire universe, all of time, was contained within the simple practice of zazen.

After that I started going to the afternoon sittings in Japantown, often walking all the way from the Haight through the Fillmore to get there. My own meditations received a huge boost and a renewed focus. Every morning when I first got out of bed and every evening before going asleep I sat upright in the half lotus and meditated in the manner Suzuki had instructed — for the length of time it took a stick of incense to burn down (about half an hour).

I also went to Suzuki’s weekly talks. I felt like he was talking directly to me — as I suspect many of us did. I’ve since heard people say that his English was poor and he was hard to understand but all I remember is how simple and clear were his explanations of often subtle and recondite matters, even to a neophyte like myself. Unlike the recollections of many of his students, some of whom insist that he never even mentioned the word “enlightenment,” my memory of him is of urgent exhortations to develop a “way-seeking-mind” and to practice with all our might, “as if our hair was on fire.”

Most everyone who sat with Suzuki in those days appeared to be in their twenties like myself. His formal students, a few of whom were already wearing black robes, seemed to be quite impressed with themselves. I sensed that they looked down on Huey and me, as drugged-out, hippie outsiders. But Suzuki himself accepted everyone just as they were.

However, one incident convinced me that Huey was the only one among us who had actually realized Suzuki’s True Mind. I can’t remember where we were or even if we were high, or on what, but I suspect we were, since in those days we were high more often than not.

Huey was sitting off to my left, when suddenly, I “saw” him — not with my usual eyes but with an eye that we somehow both shared. Perfectly still, looking slightly downwards in profile, his face radiant with golden light, he was the Ancient One, completely clear and present, with a Mind that cut through the usual stream of phenomena to give me a glimpse of something eternal, something infinitely mysterious and subtle that embraced all of creation but was still intensely intimate and personal. For that timeless moment we were one being.

Huey was indifferent to the respect I accorded him, pointing out that he was actually a year or two younger than I was — the implication being that as his senior I had no business acting like he was my teacher. Such a relationship was unspoken, but I was convinced that he had managed to drink much deeper from the mystical experience to be found in this life than most of us ever will.

CLEAR LIGHT

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Mary Pat next door periodically came up with the latest LSD to sample, with names like Orange Sunshine and Purple Haze. When Huey and I visited her flat one afternoon, the three of us dropped some tabs of her latest offering.

At the peak of the trip,  as we sat staring into space and the energy got really intense, Mary Pat started emitting a high-pitched keening sound, increasingly loud and rhythmic.

Seemingly propelled by the sound she was making, she slid on her back up the wall and slowly levitated sideways, with limp legs dangling inches above the floor and her arms flapping loosely by her sides, as if held up by invisible puppet strings.

Apparently unnerved by Mary Pat’s antics, Huey disappeared — while I ended up on the bed with her, stroking incredibly smooth, pearly white, perfectly round breasts, which had somehow popped out of her black slip. Although LSD doesn’t usually make me horny, I dutifully lifted her silky slip to reveal a pair of black, brocade patterned panty hose, which I pulled down and off her legs.

Her legs! They looked like they’d been imprinted with brocade stocking patterns, in a multitude of colors, pulsating and flowing like paisleys in a light show.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I “freaked out” and fled back to my flat. Later, after we’d come down, Mary Pat told me that the designs on her legs were from burns she suffered in an automobile accident that killed both her parents. Besides the scars on her legs, she was left with a small trust fund, which was enough to live on, especially with part time LSD dealing.

Although I wasn’t reticent about consuming it myself, I didn’t think everyone should be encouraged to take LSD. Timothy Leary, and others who wanted to turn everyone on to acid, struck me as irresponsible. It was obviously a very potent drug and getting on it was like mounting a high-powered vehicle, which could easily get out of control and crash. Unlike marijuana, which was relatively tame by comparison, LSD didn’t seem like a good choice for a recreational drug.

But, I was convinced it could be a potent tool for inner exploration and spiritual development.

One fine morning, seated comfortably in the half lotus on my favorite chair, an old, faded gold, recliner, I ingested a good dose of LSD, (which in those days was at least 250 micrograms). In keeping with my radical idealism I never locked the door to my flat. People came and went. That day my friend Gary appeared and sat down in the Mission Oak rocker a few feet in front of me. He held a bible on his lap.

Tall and skinny with granny glasses, straight shoulder-length brown hair and a full beard, Gary had a slow meditative manner that I always admired. The two of us frequently engaged in intense, metaphysical discussions regarding the meaning of life.

An experienced astronaut of inner space, Gary had reached a point of being more at home on LSD than in the ordinary world. When he was still living with his parents, they went away for the weekend and he and a friend decided to try LSD. They drove to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, teeming with longhaired, countercultural types, some of whom were hawking drugs on the street. They purchased twenty hits of acid from a disreputable looking guy who assured them it was “potent shit.”

Back at his parents house they each swallowed a capsule. After what seemed like a long time (but probably wasn’t) they decided their suspicions were justified and that they’d been ripped off. Still, they did feel something. Thinking that perhaps the LSD had been drastically cut, they divided it up and took the rest of it.

Two days spent unable to see anything but swirling energy patterns convinced them that the LSD had been potent shit after all. Gary was never quite the same.

He was of draft age, and with the Vietnam war raging he worried he’d be drafted into the Army. “If it was me,” I told him, “I’d just commit myself to Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute up the hill from here (the Haight). They can only keep you three days for observation and then they have to let you go. But after that the Army won’t touch you.”

“But what if I find out I really am crazy,” Gary said.

Sure enough, when he got out of Langley Porter and had escaped the draft, his mental state gradually deteriorated, despite group therapy.

As he experienced more mental distress, like many desperate people Gary sought solace in a highly structured religion. That’s why he had a Bible with him that day in my flat and it’s why he started talking about Jesus in a manner typical of zealous converts.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, except that hearing about Jesus triggered something deep within me, probably from my childhood when my mother had made me attend church every Sunday.

As Gary went on about Jesus, I was suddenly transfixed by an ecstatic vision — not of Jesus, but of an overpowering luminous light, both inside and outside, located above and slightly back towards the crown of my head. As it radiated down through me, time and space and the world around me took shape right before my eyes, accompanied by a rapturous elation.

When things finally returned to what passes for normal on acid, Gary was gone. I left the flat, went down the stairs and walked out the front door. Funky Page street, the sunlight through the moist air, the hills in the distance, my body as I walked in tight-fitting homespun bell-bottom pants a girlfriend had made for me, everything was transformed by a beauty so exquisite that as I drank it in my senses joined together into a single voluptuous bliss that was to linger even after I had come down from the drug.

I’d been studying the Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with the other books in that series by Evans Wentz. The intense clear light of the Mind is said to be hard to stay with after one has left the body at death, but those who had practiced and trained during their lifetime could enter it and experience supreme enlightenment. Reading and hearing about it I felt blessed to have experienced even a little of that divine light. But to tell the truth, like a lot of experiences on LSD, when I’d come down and it was gone, I couldn’t find a path back to it.

COMING BACK TO ME

---

It was odd, but I rarely thought of Patty and we didn’t write to each other. It was as if a part of me had been anesthetized and surgically amputated, leaving only a vague lingering feeling of something missing, like a phantom limb. I had several brief relationships with other women but I always felt like I was using them. They in turn could see there was a part of me that was missing in action.

Patty visited me in San Francisco when she came home for the holidays. We smoked some marijuana in my flat while I regaled her with my collection of new music by the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other local bands. She got up and danced, slowly doing a seductive striptease until she was completely naked. She seemed intent on pleasing me and I was happy to oblige.

Later, as we lay on my carpet after making love, she did a strange variation on her old theme of “You won’t love me when…”

“If I died you’d probably forget all about me and find someone else,” she said.

“I could never forget you, even if I wanted to, ” I replied, before adding, “And if I died, I wouldn’t want you to forget me either — but I would want you to find someone else and be happy, because I love you. I’ll always love you.”

That seemed to satisfy her and we curled up in my bed and she fell asleep in my arms.

The next morning we walked up Haight Street, which was just beginning to blossom into the hip center of the universe. We stopped in a little shop run by a jeweler friend and I bought her a silver ring with intricate entwined vines and asked her to wear it so as to remember to come back to me soon. She seemed pleased by my gift and put it on her left hand ring finger.

Later we took LSD together in my flat. When it was coming on I felt like I was returning to familiar territory while Patty exclaimed wide-eyed, “I don’t know if humans beings were meant to experience this.”

We spent the rest of the day wandering ecstatically through Golden Gate park, grooving with the line of conga drums on “hippy hill” and riding the park’s big ornate merry-go-round. It felt like we picked up our relationship where we’d left off, as if we had never been apart.

That night, driving her home over the Dumbarton Bridge, across the long expanse of the shallow lower bay, we hardly spoke. A bittersweet sadness hung over us, like the heavy fog that rolled across the turbid gray water below.

When I dropped her off at her parents house in Fremont I saw them peering out through the curtains. My long hair and beard, along with some hippy regalia, must have been a subject of considerable fascination.

After a last wistful look back at me from the light of the front door Patty disappeared inside.

ACID TEST

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Ken Kesey, on-the-lam for possession of marijuana, was reportedly roaming about incognito that evening on the San Francisco State campus — an unusual site for one of his infamous “acid tests.” The authorities, alarmed by the new counterculture, were desperate to find leaders they could put away in hopes of nipping the movement in the bud. But the cultural eruption in the mid-nineteen sixties, fueled by the sudden availability of marijuana and LSD, was notable for it’s lack of any actual leadership.

After ingesting a big dose of LSD I sat with a crowd of similarly stoned individuals in the dimly lit college cafeteria, waiting impatiently as the Grateful Dead went through one of their interminable tune-ups before segueing almost imperceptibly into something resembling improvisational jazz.

Originally a typical blues band, “the Dead” also played for free in the Park Pan Handle near my flat, with Pigpen, their formidable front-man at the time, belting the blues. A dark, swarthy, heavyset character who looked like the biker nightmare of every father with a daughter, his throaty rendition of the blues classic “Hello Little Schoolgirl” was, for me at least, the high point of the band’s career..

I eventually wandered out of the cafeteria into a small adjoining room full of vending machines, where a gaggle of outrageous transvestites, sporting both beards and breasts, turned to greet me through heavy makeup and skimpy clothing. Their ambiguous sexuality and hungry looks kicked the LSD into high gear, threatening to pull me into a seductive but frightening new dimension.

I quickly went out another door and sought refuge in the student lounge, an aptly named room filled with similarly sensitive individuals sprawled everywhere over the comfortable furniture under the influence of the potent psychedelic. The thick carpet, breathing and humming like the belly of some huge furry mother of a beast, offered something tangible to cling to in the roiling drug-induced meltdown of normal reality.

I was finally getting comfortable meditating on the shifting colors and incredible landscapes in the carpeting, when Neal Cassady, who I’d sometimes seen careening around the Haight at the wheel of Kesey’s colorful school bus, burst into the room wielding a huge sludge hammer, like the god Thor might carry, which he brandished and shook violently in every direction, sending waves of frenetic methamphetamine energy ripping through the room — which emptied out in a matter of moments

I spent the rest of the evening in the darkened cafeteria listening to the Grateful Dead and marveling at the transformation LSD wrought on the normally staid and sterile institutional scene — unaware that it would soon be the scene of an abrupt end to my academic career.

In my eagerness to escape San Jose I neglected to check out what they had to offer at San Francisco State. When I went to enroll in classes I found that the Art Department there was only a fraction the size of the one I’d left. I’d assumed all California State Universities had large vibrant art departments like San Jose State, with a dozen or more excellent painting instructors to chose from. But at San Francisco State there were only two, and both were into smooth minimalism and stencil-like repetitions of simple abstracted images such a palm trees — rather that the painterly surfaces, loose brush work and detailed imagery I favored.

So I signed up for several printmaking workshops in etching and lithography, for which the Art Department there was noted. Unfortunately, printmaking classes required me to actually be there at the allotted time in order to use the presses and other equipment. At San Jose I’d gotten used to painting on my own, outside of the classroom.

The burgeoning street scene on Haight, with free live music in the park panhandle nearby, and the numerous other distractions my new life in the city offered, along with a plentiful supply of LSD to sample, courtesy of Mary Pat next door and local underground chemist Owsley Stanley — all combined to make me frequently fail to get to my classes.

I was at least able to sketch on a few plates for etching class before printing them at the university, but in end I took several “incompletes” for my first semester of graduate school.

As I waited to register for a second semester of classes, in a long slow line that wound through campus, Dr. Hess, the head of the Art Department, accosted me. “You, I know you, you haven’t been coming to classes,” he sputtered, almost shouting and pointing at me as if to indicate to everyone present what a real reprobate looked like, standing there with a beard and long hair under an old grey fedora, in an ornate secondhand fireman’s blazer with a string of antique beads hanging between the lapels.

I surprised us both by holding up my registration cards, calmly tearing them into pieces, and handing them to him, before turning on my heel and walking away. It seemed a fitting end to my brief time at San Francisco State, but in retrospect I felt some sympathy for Dr. Hess and I was a little embarrassed by my uncharacteristic display of bravado.

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

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I thought I heard a young man morn this morning

I thought I heard a young man morn today

The Grateful Dead

One evening, downstairs working on a painting, I heard a gentle knock at the side door to the Street. Visitors rarely came to my basement studio, especially at that time of the night. When there was another knock, a little louder this time, I reluctantly got up, went through the front room and swung the door open.

There was Patty, standing expectantly on the sloping sidewalk of Ashbury Street, a shy smile spread across her face.

The impact of her sudden unexpected appearance hit me like a powerful physical blow — an explosion of feeling deep in the center of my chest. No wonder the heart is associated with love! I knew instantly that she was returning to me for good.

Typically, I had to have sex with her on the spot, which I was somewhat embarrassed by afterwards. She said she understood and told me to be patient while she went back to her brother’s place for a few things.

She moved in with me the next day. When I let her into my flat, Mary Pat was peering through her door on the other side of the small landing, giving me a look that said, “Wow.”

Patty’s fashionable apparel and impeccable style was an immediate contrast to the hippy chicks I was used to seeing around the Haight. Especially striking were long false eyelashes, and a new haircut — straight shoulder-length black hair and bangs that made her look like a figure from an ancient Egyptian relief painting. I’d been studying Egyptian occultism and was fascinated by the images of the goddess Isis, along with the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti, whose elegant neck, full lips, and straight nose with wide nostrils, reminded me so much of Patty.

There was also a certain hardness to her appearance. She said she’d dated a local gangster in Wheeling who carried a gun, and I wondered if some of that might have rubbed off on her. But after a few days with me in my San Francisco flat, her appearance softened and she was soon her familiar self — adorably waif-like in shorts and one of my old flannel shirts, her dark eyes even more beautiful without the false eyelashes, and her shiny black hair back to its natural, casual waviness. In fact she loosened up considerably and even took to sunbathing naked out under the arch on my little South-facing porch, with a peek of the intersection of Haight and Ashbury just up the block. I think she was ready to become a “hippy.”

The much heralded “summer of love” was in full swing. I’d often wondered if the siren call of music and media attention was having any effect on Patty over on the other side of the country — if it reminded her of the love that waited for her in San Francisco.

Walking with her on Haight street with it’s mad carnival-like atmosphere and the constant parade of outlandish celebrants, listening to live music in the park panhandle, enjoying meals in my favorite restaurants, and most of all, sleeping with my body against hers and making love whenever we felt like it (which was often) — this was indeed paradise, with Adam and Eve looking down on us from my window.

When I asked her what happened to the ring I’d given her, she shrugged and said, “I threw it off a bridge into the river.” Some sort of inner struggle must have gone on there, but I didn’t pursue it. I was just so happy that she was with me at last.

She said she was ready to get married, but I told her I wanted to live together for awhile first — that I needed to see some commitment from her. She hadn’t been rehired at her teaching job in West Virginia and I couldn’t help wondering if I wasn’t just a last resort.

“Okay,” she nodded quietly, “But I’ll have to go home to Fremont and tell my parents.”

I was still a little bruised and resentful from having been left behind in San Jose and gun-shy at the amount of suffering I knew she could easily inflict on me. But I wanted nothing more than to be with her, and if marriage was the only way, then eventually I’d have agreed. I think she must have known that.

Near the end of the week she became backed-up and constipated from the blockage in her intestines. Whenever that happened she’d have to go home, where I gathered she would give herself an enema. I told her she didn’t have to go, that she could take care of herself in my bathroom.

“No, I need to get more clothes and stuff anyway. I’ll be back in a couple days,” she said matter-of-factly.

I was sad to see her leave, but I thought it was for the best. She needed to confront her parents. Even if she did still harbor some ambivalence about our relationship, I was confident my love would bring her back to me. It always had.

A few days after Patty left I got a call from her brother Bruce. She was in the hospital and preparing to go into surgery. He said she didn’t want me to visit her there, but that he’d keep in touch.

That night I dreamed I was frantically searching for her, running down endless, pale, putrid-green hospital hallways, thick with the smell of medication and sickness. I woke up filled with dread, powerless to do anything but wait.

The next day Bruce called again and told me, “Patty died on the operating table. They waited too long to operate and gas backed up into her lungs.”

After a pause, he went on, “We’re not having a ceremony or anything, just a quiet family burial.”

I was too hollow and numb to say anything.

“I know how much she meant to you.”

“Thanks Bruce,” I mumbled, “I appreciate your calling me.”

After circling around my flat in a daze, I finally phoned my brother Paul at his place in Berkeley and told him what had happened, “I don’t want to be alone, can you come and get me.”

Traveling over the elevated freeway leading to the Bay Bridge, tears crawled slowly down my cheeks as I gazed blankly out the window at gray, faceless buildings passing below and the fog shrouded hills in the distance. A light, misty rain was falling, unusual for July.

I spent that night sleeping fitfully in a spare bedroom in the basement of my parent’s house in Berkeley. Although I don’t think I had an actual fever, I tossed and turned relentlessly all night in a feverish delirium, unable to think in any organized fashion, engulfed in a tangle of sweaty sheets and an all-encompassing anguish.

The next morning, I absentmindedly opened the drawer in the nightstand by the bed. Inside was a paperback of the Diamond Sutra that I’d left there on a previous visit. Between the pages as a bookmark, was a photograph of Patty. It wasn’t a very good picture of her — she’d briefly toyed with becoming a fashion model but abandoned the idea when it became apparent that she didn’t photograph well.

As I gazed at the photo, I suddenly remembered the dream I’d had several years earlier, which I’d written an account of for a class. I soon found it in another part of the basement, in a box of my papers and books.

With a growing sense of prescience I read what I’d written — I dreamt I was riding a bicycle along a country lane lit by golden early morning light. Gliding effortlessly I seemed at times to float blissfully above the bicycle, almost as if I were flying. The bicycle slowed as I came alongside a lush hedge of flowers and vines enclosing a garden gate. A slender girl about the same age as myself appeared behind the gate. As her dark eyes looked up from beneath lowered lashes a wave of intense longing and recognition welled up from deep within me.

The next thing I knew the bicycle was moving again, slightly faster this time, the country lane widening into city streets lined with gray faceless buildings. A faint but ominous groaning of human voices could be heard, growing gradually louder. Rounding a corner I came upon the source of the disquieting sound. A small parade was marching up the street towards me, holding aloof a huge photograph, followed by several figures bent under the weight of a dark coffin. As they came closer I realized the photograph they carried was a portrait of the girl I’d seen at the garden gate.

The photograph in the dream was the same one I held in my hands! How could I have dreamt about Patty years before even knowing her?

I spent the rest of the day reading the Diamond Sutra. It’s relatively short, with a lot of repetition and formality, almost like a mantra meant to be memorized and recited. One line struck me — The past mind cannot be grasped, the present mind cannot be grasped, and the future mind cannot be grasped. Was death also something that could never be “grasped?” It felt like I’d come up against a dark impenetrable wall, an unfathomable mystery, where only faint hints and shadowy intimations could be discerned in the darkness.

One phrase that occurs repeatedly throughout the sutra is the exhortation to “never cherish the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality.” Meditating on that line, my mind emptied out into the present. In that familiar peaceful moment of emptiness and calm, with its unique blissful feeling, I realized neither Patty nor I existed as separate beings — that she would always be with me.

But that was cold comfort indeed! A separate being and individuality, her physical presence, is what I would always miss and long for. Emptiness cannot be caressed or held like a soft warm body against my own. Emptiness doesn’t look shyly back at me with lowered eyes and a quirky little smile when I say, “I do love you. I always will.”

Later that day I hitched a ride back to the city from my familiar spot on University Avenue near the freeway. I needed to finish the mural in the store on Haight Street and I hoped that working on painting again would take my mind off Patty’s death.

Back in my flat I set about gathering up the clothes she’d left in my closet, to donate them to the Salvation Army thrift store. Among her things was a lovely pair of small, silky, embroidered white undies that she’d recently worn. I buried my face in the soft fabric, inhaling the sweet smell of perfume mixed with the intoxicating odor of her sex.

Overcome, I sank to the floor in a paroxysm of grief and longing.

After I’d recovered my composure I wondered if I should I save the undies to remember her with. “No,” I thought, “that would only be torture,” So I reluctantly crumpled them up and tossed them into the trash.

The next few weeks were a welter of conflicting emotions — one minute consumed with anger that she would die and leave me again, the next minute overcome with guilt, wondering if I’d contributed to her death by insisting on living together instead of getting married right away. Was the stress of telling her parents she was moving in with me too much?

At other times I sank into abject paranoia and denial. Maybe she hadn’t really died and this was just a ruse to get her away from me for good. Perhaps she would change her mind and show up at my door again. “No,”  I told myself, “that’s ridiculous.”

I could hardly blame her for dying. Our prospects had been pretty dim. She’d recently lost her job and I’d essentially flunked out of graduate school. Neither one of us had much money or any way of making a living. Plus I was a drug-addled, long-haired, bearded hippy. Such practical concerns hadn’t occurred to me. We were young and healthy, and in love. What more could anyone want?

It was as if she had deliberately returned just to give me one beautiful week with her before she died — her way of saying goodbye and expressing her love for me. I was so grateful for that. I felt blessed to have such deep feeling for someone. Not many people are able to experience that in their life.

Everywhere I turned I saw reflections of our relationship. It suddenly appeared portentous that I’d been drawn to blues music, with its repetitive cries of lost love and abandonment. The figures of Adam and Eve in the painting of the Tarot card on my window and the duality of male and female, I now saw undergirding the entire universe. Patty and I were like two archetypal lovers around whose polarity of love and attraction all of creation revolved, ceaselessly being born and dying, for all eternity.

I thought of the Greek story of Orpheus who went into the underworld to bring his beloved Eurydice back from the dead, but just before guiding her into the light of day, he couldn’t resist the urge to look back at her — at which point she fell again into the land of darkness.

I took LSD and meditated, desperately trying to find the entrance into the afterlife, an opening in the veil, some way I could find her again. I longed to just see her face once more, but strangely, I could hardly even remember what she looked like. Although I’ve always been able to bring up people’s images clearly in my mind’s eye with uncanny reality, I was completely unable to visualize Patty. I couldn’t catch so much as a glimpse of her, not even in a dream. Was she lost to me forever?

The mural on Haight Street was taking on new significance. The initial figure I’d painted, the blue, horned daemon above the door of the small restroom where I mixed my paints, looked up at the other figure of the mysterious lady taking shape on the wall above with a hunger and yearning I’d barely noticed before, seeming more than ever to be trapped below in the ornamental decorative boarder I’d painted around the door, from which he was trying to emerge, forever unable to untangle himself.

part of a later chapter, as the Haight declines

Although he was so adept in many ways, Huey was definitely crazy. In fact it might have been that craziness, his schizophrenia, that allowed him to realize such states. Even his schizoid delusions were just rational enough to make me wonder if there might be some truth to them.

Like most of us he frequented the incredible array of concerts in San Francisco during that time, some for free outdoors in the Pan Handle near my flat and others at places like the Avalon Ball Room and the Fillmore Auditorium. He claimed that various bands, most notably Buffalo Springfield, had asked him to travel with them, presumably to be an “audience,” a shill, who could generate the ecstatic energy that would bring everyone together with the music in a crescendo of bliss.

Through meditation one can become more aware of such states as they come and go and it’s easy to imagine that one is consciously creating something, especially under the influence of marijuana or LSD. I had experienced such moments at concerts myself — the difference being that I wasn’t convinced that I was causing them to happen, but that I was probably just part of a spontaneous arousal.

One day he came into my flat manically exclaiming about an experience he’d had sitting in the front row at one of Suzuki’s talks. He said they were both vying (with their minds) to control the flickering of the flame on a candle nearby and at the end of his talk Suzuki pointedly strode over and blew out the candle.

Much of Huey’s delusive thinking was self-referential in the connections his mind made. Following, or “tripping,” on a string of personal associations, like verbal puns and double meanings, can be very compelling. I found that if I fixated on a certain word or phrase that it would start appearing everywhere, as if in a mental mirror. It’s natural for the mind to pick out such connections but this seemed to go beyond that.

I was amazed at how easily I was able to adopt his view of causation — as if schizophrenia could be learned or caught from someone else.

As his mental state deteriorated, Huey’s delusions and hallucinations became more prolific. He told me that little men were all over his apartment — a common apparition in both schizophrenic and shamanistic visions.

He had started injecting meth, which was beginning to invade the Haight with malefic consequences, destroying minds and casting a dark pall over the neighborhood. I had instinctively avoided using speed, except for the occasional Dexedrine when working all night painting for classes, which, while quite effective for putting off sleep, didn’t produce the best work,

I did smoke what was probably an early form of crack cocaine with Huey and some of his friends. After a few deep hits a stream of bliss engulfed me, lighting up all my senses, especially my visual sense, with indescribably ecstatic feelings. It only lasted a few minutes and I was left wanting more and bereft of any of the insights LSD and marijuana sometimes provoked. I could see that it was highly addictive and indulging in it further would be a mistake.

Huey finally ended up injecting “speed balls,” a combination of meth and heroin. Before long he reported that his wife had taken their young son and left the City. He spoke longingly of how smooth her skin was and how much he missed her.

After I’d left town myself I heard that Huey was living on the street and had lost all his teeth. I recalled how he had once told me that nothing really mattered and it was all right to take drugs because this was all an illusion anyway.

The last time I saw Wolf he was managing a head shop in Marin County north of San Francisco. He had grown his curly brown hair out into an impressive Afro and was wearing bell bottom pants.

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