Mother American Night Read online

  But one day I was talking to a friend back in Pinedale whose dad was on the draft board and he told me they were already salivating at the prospect that Little Lord Fauntleroy John Perry Barlow was going to somehow try to get out of the draft. They were going to classify me 1-A so fast that my head would spin, and then I’d be matriculating at the University of Saigon. That was the entire reason I decided to go to college.

  I applied to five or six schools back east and took the summer to go look at them: Wesleyan, Trinity, Columbia, Yale, Brandeis, and Middlebury. I got the feel of all these places and figured that it was highly unlikely that more than one of them would want to admit me. It was also certainly possible that none of them would, which meant I would have to quickly come up with some kind of plan B.

  To my stunned surprise, they all accepted me. What I didn’t know back then was that a bell rang in every college admissions office whenever they got an application from someone in Wyoming. After I got all these acceptance letters, I was stumped. I didn’t know quite what to do. So I took a big old silver coin and shuffled all the letters into two groups so I couldn’t see them. Then I flipped the coin and eliminated three of them.

  Yale, Columbia, and Wesleyan were left. I thought about it a lot. The thing with Columbia was that they started getting needy and sending me all of this stuff like I was a football star. They were putting the recruitment hustle on me, and something about that felt weird and made the place less attractive.

  Then I started to think about all the people I knew who had gone to Yale, which was quite a few. There was a saying: “You can always tell a Harvard man but you can’t tell him much.” Yale was even more like that, except I didn’t think these people were particularly smart. They all seemed kind of correct and dopey and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one of them. I didn’t think New Haven was all that promising, either. It appeared about ready to go into something just this side of a race war.

  At the end of this somewhat weird process, Wesleyan emerged as the one. And God, I am glad that it did, because my time there had a great deal to do with who I became and made it possible for me to be successful in five or six different fields.

  Before leaving Fountain Valley, I used the occasion of my graduation party to break into the headquarters of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command. Had we all been drinking that night? Oh my God, yes. During my last semester at Fountain Valley, 25 percent of my class got themselves kicked out of school for drinking. Not beer. Distilled spirits like vodka and gin were far more highly favored because they always came on strong.

  The party itself was on a ranch that belonged to the family of one of our students, situated right at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. It wasn’t a particularly long walk from there to NORAD, but without having intended to do so, we somehow managed to circumvent all the guard posts. The front door itself was unguarded, and so we walked right into the headquarters.

  Eventually, someone noticed us and called the guys with the chrome-plated helmets and sky-blue uniforms. These special MPs hustled us the hell out of there as quickly as they could, but they didn’t actually punish us. I think they just didn’t want anyone to know that a bunch of drunk high school kids had walked right into NORAD.

  The larger point here is that until I was forty years old, I assumed that at some point during my lifetime, somebody would let a nuclear missile fly and then they would all launch and the world as we knew it would go up in smoke in a mushroom-shaped cloud. Because of NORAD, a high percentage of those ICBMs would have been headed right to where I was going to school. So it certainly looked to me like there was a good chance that we all might die long before we got old.

  As a kid, when I had to go to school part-time in Cheyenne because the state legislature was there, we did frequent duck-and-cover drills. Many of the first major ICBMs, the really big ones that they still use to put stuff in space, were based at the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base right outside Cheyenne, which made it another prime target for nuclear destruction. I’ll never forget being in a room on the fifth floor of the Plains Hotel in Cheyenne when I heard a commotion. I looked out the window and coming down the street was an Atlas missile. It was fucking huge, almost as long as the block itself. I can’t describe how I felt about that. A part of me was still the excited twelve-year-old who had been a member of the science-fiction book club. On one level, actually seeing that Atlas missile was the apotheosis of my dreams.

  Yet, on another level, it also embedded into my consciousness forevermore the very real threat of imminent nuclear annihilation. Every single one of us who grew up back then has this scar that is so pervasive we hardly even know it’s there. It gave my entire generation a soupçon of pure nihilism.

  SIX

  WESLEYAN

  At Wesleyan, I was a total fish out of water. Just about everybody who had been admitted there before me was a really smart Jewish kid from Scarsdale, which I definitely was not. My class was different, because Wesleyan’s new director of admissions had just arrived with a fierce vision to diversify the student body and admit fewer well-scrubbed, well-rounded, well-mannered white boys.

  He went looking for extreme students of all kinds. People with the novelty gene. He was looking for trouble, which in the end was what he damn well got. The freshman class he admitted was 12 percent black, and these were not suburban blacks. They were black kids from little towns in the south and the inner city. They were all just as baffled to be there as I was and, as a consequence, constituted a large percentage of my first friends.

  At the time, Wesleyan was small, isolated, and still an all-male college, which sent us on constant visits to women’s colleges such as Smith and Mount Holyoke and Sarah Lawrence in search of female companionship. In fact, I often say that in college, I majored in back-country motorcycle tours of New England. I also always tended to keep some kind of relationship going with a student at Sarah Lawrence so I could attend Joseph Campbell’s lecture every Monday morning.

  There was a fraternity system at Wesleyan, and I got into Alpha Delta Phi straight away. The Wesleyan chapter was not at all like the one at Dartmouth that became the inspiration for Animal House. Nothing could have been like that one, because they truly were completely off the hook. I went up there once for Winter Carnival weekend and saw a guy squatting over the punch bowl and actually taking a crap. Even back then this was outside behavior. Nothing like that happened in our chapter, because we were the literary house on campus. The most scandalous event to occur in public view was when the poet Charles Olson insulted Richard Wilbur, who at the time was the poet laureate of the United States.

  By far, the faculty member at Wesleyan who was the biggest influence on me was provost Willie Kerr, the well-known historian and the closest thing I’ve ever met to a saint. Willie was a wonderful, wonderful man. He always had a little group of students and alumni gathered around him that I was really honored to become a part of.

  In the best sense of the term, Willie was the most Christian man I had ever met, and he was a continuous light in terms of his moral clarity. We would go out with him to the apple orchards of central Connecticut in his ’49 Mercedes convertible and have picnics where we would resolve not to talk about people but rather ideas.

  At the time, Wesleyan had an academic press that among other things produced My Weekly Reader, the publication that every student in America read back then. It helped shape the consciousness of my generation. Wesleyan sold the press to Xerox for stock in 1965, and the value of that stock just kept right on increasing until it blew everybody out of the water. The result was that Wesleyan eventually became by a large margin the richest academic institution per capita on the planet. They spent money lavishly to bring in guest lecturers such as John Cage, Stephen Spender, and Jerzy Kosinski.

  I spent a lot of time with Kosinski, a truly deeply wild human being who would try goddamn near anything. When Kosinski first came to the United States, h
e had a job in a parking garage in New York City. With the full consent of his customers, he would yank the relatively old engines out of their Porsches and replace them with brand-new ones, a service for which he would then be paid handsomely in cash.

  Paul Horgan, the novelist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for History, was influential on me in another way. He was the one who integrated me into the Center for Advanced Studies, another artifact of Wesleyan’s newfound wealth, intended to foster an environment where unique thinkers could interact with students and one another in order to come up with completely new ideas. Horgan was a provincial gentleman from Albuquerque, as well as a man of great polish. He took me under his wing and guided me and while I didn’t always go through the straits and narrows by following his advice, it was always pretty clear to me what a gentleman would do in certain circumstances based on what he would have done.

  Shortly after I arrived at Wesleyan in the fall of 1965 I went to a mixer at Vassar College. A dapper Indian fellow was hitting on all the girls and seemed to be quite a hit himself. I asked him where he was from, and he said he was staying at a place not too far away. I asked where and he said, “Oh, in Millbrook.” Then he asked if he could get a ride back there. So I took him home after the mixer was over and the next thing I knew, I was at the Castalia Foundation, which was what Timothy Leary was then calling the group of people who were living communally with him and taking LSD together.

  At that time, the scene at Millbrook was just getting started. The place itself was incredible, a huge estate with massive iron gates and a long driveway that led up to a white four-floor mansion with God only knows how many rooms. We showed up there at one-thirty in the morning, and the place was jumping. I was seventeen years old and thinking, Holy shit! This is a new part of reality that I’ve not yet experienced. Music was playing and people were walking around, some of them high on acid. I knew nothing about that, and I didn’t know anything about any of these people. I just thought, This scene definitely bears further observation.

  I’ve remembered going to Millbrook for the first time so many times over the years that it has become coated with a gazillion layers of memory, and so there is no way in the world that I can see it clearly now. What I did know for certain is that something incredibly significant was happening to me when I drove up to the main house. I knew I was at one of those crossroads in my life where everything would be different after that. I didn’t know why back then, and I still don’t.

  At Millbrook, Tim Leary was obviously the guy with the mojo. He looked older than he actually was, but that didn’t matter because in every respect, he was the alpha male. The alpha males I’d known back in Wyoming were all very macho and had a quiet certainty like Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart, but I thought Tim was sort of pesky. Everything he said or did contained a secret trap. He would seem to be going along with you and then he would ambush you with something you had said that you did not see coming, completely changing the nature of the discourse to your disadvantage.

  This was a whole new version of the alpha male, because it was also based on Tim’s understanding of women. He made being charming an end unto itself, and his charm was usually directed at members of the opposite sex. It also had a distinctly theatrical quality, and much of that was also a goal unto itself.

  I hung out at Millbrook for a while and then drove back to Middletown. I then learned that some of my fellow students at Wesleyan had already taken acid, and that there were also folks there who had been involved with Leary during his previous incarnation as the director of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, including David McClelland and David and Sara Winter. They got me interested in a report about the Good Friday Experiment, which Walter Pahnke and Leary had conducted at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel in 1962 to determine whether ingesting psilocybin could help induce subjects to have a religious experience.

  All that really hit home with me, because I was a formerly religious kid who had fallen from grace. I wanted more than anything to return to a sense of belief, and the idea that I could take something that would do that for me appealed to my American sense of engineering. I was all over the idea, because it seemed to me that I could pull a lever or yank a chain and somehow deliver the mechanical into the spiritual.

  In the spring of 1965, I took LSD for the first time in a fairly controlled setting at Wesleyan. In a sense, there is only one real trip, the first one. After that, you are only confirming what has already been revealed to you. I’ve probably taken psychedelic substances of one kind or another more than a thousand times, but my sense of the universe was changed forever the first time I took LSD. From then on, I was permanently rewired.

  My first trip was all positive though a little scary, but I was somebody who had always worked on scaring himself. Wesleyan had a distinguished world music program that brought in people such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan and others of that caliber. Every Friday evening, there would be a concert and a curry dinner in a converted farmhouse outside of Middletown. Before the concert began one Friday night, a friend whom I had always regarded as a darkly magical character handed me a capsule of LSD. I took it when Ali Akbar Khan started playing, and I sat down to listen to the music. About half an hour later, I could literally feel the music on my skin. Then I could taste and smell it as well. All my senses were fusing into one. I also had the strong perception that with every beat of the tabla, a splash of what I now know to be fractal webbing would leap from that area of the room and sparkle across all the walls.

  Seeing and feeling those fractals in the music, I experienced the complete connectedness of everything. At that moment, I knew for the first time that I was experiencing things as they really were, which is utterly continuous. There was not one thing and another thing. It was all the same thing, the Holy Thing.

  The Holy Thing I experienced that night didn’t seem to be related to a God that was actually only a greatly enhanced version of someone like me. Rather, it seemed to me that God was the universe and we were God and that it was all God and that everything was holy.

  I had taken a significant dose and couldn’t speak when the concert ended. A couple of my friends took me back to where I was staying. We lit some candles, put on some music, and sat there listening all night long without attempting to say very much. For the first time in my life, I seemed able to let everything go through my mind without straining the system. I went someplace overwhelmingly different that night and, to a large extent, I have stayed there throughout the rest of my life.

  I subsequently had trips where that same kind of opening felt terrifying. On those occasions, I couldn’t sustain enough conventional reality to feel that I was still myself. Instead, my self had become so fragmented that its bits and pieces seemed like they would never reassemble into something that was recognizably me. But I learned how to be grateful for those horrors as well, in that they helped me understand the fragile miracle of my own being.

  Another thing that happened to me that night was that I began believing again that the universe had a purpose and was in fact working fine. Not that the meaning or direction or shape of that purpose could ever be understood by anyone, but that it is possible to have faith in it without knowing any of those things.

  With the possible exception of having children, taking that trip was the most important thing I have ever done. In terms of creating the person I am now and how I approach the world, why I do what I do, and what I think it’s all about, no other experience in my life has been so transforming.

  It certainly changed the focus of my intellectual interests. Up to that point at Wesleyan, I had been preparing myself to major in physics. Suddenly my focus was oriented much more toward religion, especially the Eastern philosophical traditions that seemed to describe the insights that I had been given that night. I began reading mystical literature from other traditions, including such seers as Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, and Saint Teresa of Ávila. B
y doing so, I learned that it was possible within the Western tradition to engage in mysticism, which was generally held in low regard in our culture.

  I also subscribed to the Psychedelic Review and got into it all in a very academic way. After reading what Gordon Wasson, Aldous Huxley, and J. B. S. Haldane had written about psychedelics, I switched my major from physics to comparative religion. I was thinking that what I really wanted to be was some kind of new minister without portfolio, a seeker for spiritual experience.

  Millbrook itself became like Byzantium to me. We were the Eastern Orthodox religion, and I had visited Byzantium once in a dream and created this huge castle of my own devising around it. Although I didn’t return to that scene for a long time, there was this other thing on the West Coast that was going on that, in my Eastern Orthodox way, I regarded as the ultimate heresy. Which was Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and the Grateful Dead.

  SEVEN

  GOOD OLD GRATEFUL DEAD

  To my great surprise, I found out that my best friend, Bob Weir, from whom I had been disconnected for years, was now a member of the house band of the Western apostasy. One of the straightest guys from Fountain Valley, who was serving as a lieutenant JG in the U.S. Navy, wrote me a letter and said, “I don’t know if you know this, but your friend Bobby Weir has resurfaced and he’s part of this whole shebang.”

  In June 1967, the Grateful Dead were going to play their first East Coast gig at the Café au Go Go in New York City, so I went down there to see them and reconnect with Weir. This was also when the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in America. It was a week of great potency, and for me personally it was a very good week to be Zelig.

  The first time I saw the Grateful Dead perform, they were playing through Fender Princeton amps in a basement with brick walls in Greenwich Village. I got what they were doing right away. I also got to reconnect with my erstwhile official best friend, Weir, who had been off doing Acid Tests for a while, none of which he had seemed to have completed. His hair was down to his waist, and he had the thousand-yard stare to the max. He was way the fuck out there. He could see all the way to the other end of the cosmos and didn’t have much to say.