Mother American Night Read online

  As part of my duties, I was in charge of $600,000 of student funds. There was a group of black students on campus called the Ujamaa Society, which had formed in opposition to the Black Panthers, who were serious as shit even within themselves. In any case, the Ujamaa Society published an open letter in the Wesleyan Argus, the student newspaper, saying that if I didn’t turn over half of the student funds to them as reparations for slavery, they would kill me.

  I knew a lot of these guys because they had been my friends when I first came to Wesleyan. So I went over to the Ujamaa Society shortly before their house (which had previously been where the president of the school lived) burned down and I said, “Guys, this is nuts. You’re not going to kill me.”

  And one of them said, “We just want to kill what you represent.”

  I said, “I want to kill what I represent. If you can help me kill that, it would be great.” We came up with a wonderful solution, which was to have a marvelous concert series that took up a fairly large chunk of the student funds. The performers included Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and a bunch of old blues guys performing on campus in free concerts. The Ujamaa Society was happy because I was helping to bring black culture to Wesleyan.

  In terms of fulfilling the other duties of my office, I decided to do absolutely nothing and remain as invisible as possible. During the annual Wesleyan scavenger hunt, one of the items on the list was to get my signature, but nobody could do it because they couldn’t find me.

  Like a lot of people, I had become convinced over the period from midsummer 1966 to the end of autumn 1967 that we were in something like the Age of Aquarius. I wasn’t inclined to call it that, but I truly felt like we had leapt through the transom of history into a completely new form of human life. All would now be well.

  But then I started seeing increasing evidence that society was simply coming apart. It was suffering from psychedelic toxicity, because what had been a universally shared notion of God-given authority was suddenly something that only the minority believed in. Although there were quite a number of people who could be trusted with having complete self-determination, there were also an awful lot of people who couldn’t.

  The harm, to the extent that I perceived it for a while, was that a fairly large number of us at Wesleyan were taking LSD in a way that caused the kind of social damage and anxiety that just about everybody was already experiencing without necessarily using LSD on a regular basis. At the time, five hundred micrograms was considered a standard trip, which is far more than I would recommend to neophytes today. I was tripping at least twice a week, generally with others. With regard to the categorical imperative, I knew exactly what it would be like if everybody did what I was doing, because on one level or another, they all were.

  And so I was observing behaviors that scared me, and I concluded that something really awful was going to have to happen in order to get people to pay attention to what was now going on in this brave new world we were trying to create as we went along. In fact, that is exactly what happened. Because a year later we got Charles Manson.

  In October 1967, I decided that if I did something really outrageous and horrible, it would make the cover of Newsweek. More to the point, it would cause everybody to take a hard look at where we were headed in terms of consciousness.

  Back on the ranch, I had learned how to make explosives. I think I still have a copy of a remarkable little volume called The Blaster’s Handbook, a publication that taught you everything you needed to know about making your own high-yield explosives. If you happened to have a dead horse that had frozen solidly to a trail, it instructed you on where to place the charges in order to disperse the carcass.

  I mixed up about twenty-five pounds of explosives and put it all into a plastic bag. Then I gathered a bunch of nuts and bolts and ball bearings and shrapnel and started wrapping them all up with duct tape, with the explosives at the core. The whole device wasn’t much bigger than about the size of two bowling balls.

  My plan was to go sit in the lap of the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard and detonate this thing at noon. I didn’t tell anyone what I was going to do, but I was acting squirrelly and must have been radiating something weird, because as soon as I got in my car and drove to Cambridge, they began looking for me at Wesleyan.

  By then, I had already driven to Cambridge and holed up in a friend’s apartment. All the way there, I was as calm as only a crazy person could be. It was like six o’clock in the morning when I arrived. Although I never knew this at the time, my friend must have called the authorities at Wesleyan to tell them what I was about to do. It had been obvious to one and all that I had been up to no good for a while, but I had never said a word to anyone about my plan.

  At about eleven o’clock that morning, I got visited by the president of Wesleyan University, the dean of students, the campus psychologist, and one of my closest friends. I didn’t show them the explosives, but they already knew about them because I had told my friend about my plans and he had told them when they called.

  They immediately snarfed me up and took me back to Connecticut, where they put me into the Institute of Living, a fancy crazy house outside of Hartford. For a couple of weeks, they fed me so much Thorazine that I went to a different part of the phylogenetic chain. I became an invertebrate. I kept begging them to stop, but in order to try to help bring myself back to sanity, I did put together a pretty elaborate model of a whaling ship while I was under the influence.

  When I came out, I went right back into the student community. The whole thing was kept hush-hush, because I was kind of an important personage on campus and Wesleyan was trying hard to keep me there as somebody who was not nearly as crazy as I had been. Not many people on campus even knew about any of this. I had just disappeared for a couple of weeks and then I was back and it wasn’t much discussed.

  For a long time, I didn’t want this story to be in the book, because I didn’t want to announce to the world that I nearly became America’s first suicide bomber. I am pretty sure that I would have done it. At that point, I hadn’t even taken any drugs for a while. That was part of the deal. I thought if I quit taking drugs, I would regain my feeling that the world made sense and I wouldn’t be so terrified that society was headed over the falls. Because to me, it looked like we were all rowing like crazy in the direction of the precipice. But once I stopped taking drugs, it only got worse. I was like the guy in The Scream, the painting by Edvard Munch. I felt just like that character.

  It was not suicidal ideation. I didn’t want to die. Nor did I want to kill anybody. But I felt like something was going to have to happen to get everybody to stop and take a deep breath so they could see what was going on. What a waste of a life that would have been.

  TEN

  FAIR-HAIRED BOY

  By the end of my senior year at Wesleyan, everybody I knew had just glazed over. We’d had 186 psychological discharges in a student body of 1,100 people. But I still had a special role on campus. The president of the university had plotted out this fairly elaborate political trajectory for himself, and for some reason he thought I was going to be his nexus to the new generation. And so I became his fair-haired boy.

  Ted Etherington had been the president of the American Stock Exchange, and now his plan was to go from being president of Wesleyan to the U.S. Senate and then president of the United States. He’d had no idea what he was getting himself into by coming to Wesleyan, which had changed quite a bit since he had gone to school there, and he felt like I was the only person on campus that he could trust. I was weird and I also wasn’t, and therefore Ted thought he could communicate with me.

  One night in February 1969, he called me up at three o’clock in the morning. I had just taken STP, which by then I had come to enjoy. “John Perry,” he said, “you’ve got to get over to my office immediately. The blacks have taken over Fisk Hall,” which was one of the academic bui
ldings. The Ujamaa Society had decided to occupy the building. He said, “We’ve got to figure out what to do.” And I said, “Okay. I could tell you what to do over the phone, but I don’t know if that would convince you, so I guess I’ll just have to come over.”

  Meanwhile, I was coming on to the STP, which was a little bit like getting into an elevator that was about to go Mach 3. I went over to Ted’s office and said, “Well, here’s what I’d do. I’d leave them there. I mean, they’re doing it for attention. If it doesn’t get them much, they’ll quit doing it. It’s not like we can’t come up with enough spare classroom space. People can always teach classes outdoors if need be.”

  He took my advice. The sit-in went on for about a day and a half, and then the Ujamaa folks all slunk out of the building. I came down and greeted them as they were leaving the hall and said, “Boy, are you guys lucky. It’s a goddamn good thing you were dealing with me and not someone who would have called the cops.”

  Etherington also had me writing speeches for him in preparation for his planned senatorial bid. Despite all that, he still had to keep me out of sight, sometimes literally.

  By then, I was living out in the countryside in a wonderful little house in the woods about three miles from Middletown, and riding my BMW motorcycle to campus. There was a curve in the road that I took every morning and evening and never thought a thing about. One day, I was blazing into that curve running a little late and discovered too late that the previous afternoon they had laid down about two inches of pea-sized gravel. It might as well have been gear lube on the road, because I went right down into it. In and of itself, that would have been bad enough, but it was even worse because I was just wearing cutoff shorts with no shirt, helmet, socks, or shoes.

  I was bleeding all over the place, so I got back on the bike and went to the infirmary. I was a horror. There was one area of my back about the size of a dinner plate that had no flesh on it at all. They nursed me back to the point where I asked the doctor what I could wear that wouldn’t stick to the wound. He said, “The truth is that you cannot wear anything. You’re going to have to leave it open to the air.”

  Among other things, this meant that I would have to appear in this condition as the sole student representative on the Wesleyan board of directors meeting later that week. And so I did. I walked in there bare-chested, wearing cutoff shorts, looking like a scrofulous beggar from the time of Jesus Christ. To say the least, at that moment Ted Etherington would much rather have had me go right on being invisible.

  During the period when I was the dictator of the student body at Wesleyan, a photograph of me smoking a joint appeared on the front page of the Wesleyan Argus. That was pretty outrageous, even in those days, but by then I had proven to myself that I could get away with just about anything.

  ELEVEN

  AN INCREDIBLE WEEK

  After graduating with honors in May 1969, I had an incredible week. I had written half of a novel called The Departures about a kid who was a lot like me, and his various ancestors and their relationship to the frontier, as well as his gnawing sense that the frontier was over. Paul Horgan took it to Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and he bought it for five thousand dollars.

  But I didn’t necessarily want to buckle down and write the second half of the novel right away. I wanted to be somebody whom people took seriously and was searching for a way to have a legitimate voice. Even though I had been admitted to Harvard Law School—who thankfully had no idea what I had once nearly done on their campus—I’d decided not to go there. I wore a pin that said TURNED DOWN HARVARD.

  The other thing that happened during that incredible week had to do with the draft, which I had been thinking about for years. I knew the draft board in Pinedale could not wait to get John Perry Barlow to Saigon, if only to take some of the snot nose out of me. My real fear was that I was going to wind up killing people with whom I did not fundamentally disagree. If the Vietnamese had been attacking us, I might have seen it differently, but we were an occupying army in their country. As the great Muhammad Ali said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” and neither did I.

  I’d read enough history to know that Vietnam was not about to become a proxy for China, because the two cultures had hated each other for thousands of years. So it wasn’t like the domino theory was going to work. Anyway, I didn’t want to do it, and I didn’t want to split to Canada.

  I thought maybe I would try to become Mexican enough that I could own property there. Mexico wouldn’t deport you if you owned property there, but you couldn’t own property as a gringo. I would have to become a Mexican citizen. I knew a professor who had a little bed and breakfast in Guanajuato that he was selling for not too much money, and he told me he could take me to the people in charge down there to pay them the mordida. I was about to do that when I said to myself, Wait a minute, Barlow. You can’t be a Mexican. You barely speak Spanish.

  So then I thought, My other choice is two years in a minimum-security federal prison in Safford, Arizona. Which seemed pretty tolerable. I mean, I could write there. I was sure the company would have been interesting. I had started to accommodate myself to doing that, but then, right as the ultimate hour was rushing toward me, I decided to take one more stab at finding another solution.

  I figured I needed several physicians’ letters attesting to the fact that I had severe stress-induced asthma. Such a condition does exist, but I did not have it. I went into the offices of three different doctors, stole their letterhead stationery, and created letters using all of the medical terminology I had learned about the subject. Then I went to the Salt Lake City induction center for my physical exam. If I passed they would put me on the bus and I would be in the army.

  I showed up in Salt Lake with my letters but also fully prepared to go to prison, because there was no way I was going to let them induct me into the army. I stood in a long circular line where everyone had to get undressed to their skivvies to go through the physical. That was a little weird because I hadn’t worn underwear since age fourteen, when I learned that James Bond never wore them, either. So I was naked while everyone was clothed.

  At the end of the physical, you saw a doctor whose job it was to review all of the medical petitions. He was an Italian guy from Long Island who didn’t really want to be in Salt Lake either, and he read my asthma letters and gave me a 1-Y, which meant I could be drafted only in the event that the Vietnamese actually attacked us. Otherwise, I was free. While remaining perfectly impassive, inside I was actually jumping up and down, head over heels.

  As I was walking away, the guy said, “Hey, come back here. I want to take another look at those letters.” And I went, “Aw, fuck!” He began looking at them and then started to chuckle.

  “You really put a lot of work in on these, didn’t you?” And I said, “What makes you say that?” And he said, “If it had been me, I would have used a different typewriter.” I had typed all three letters on the same Smith Corona, one with a very distinctive typeface.

  Then he said, “This changes things. I’m going to have to ask you to get on the bus.” And I said, “I’m not getting on the bus.” He said, “What do you mean you’re not getting on the bus?” I said, “I’m not getting on the bus. I’m not.” And he said, “You mean you’re going to resist?” And I said, “Yeah. You’re going to have to call the marshals or whatever it is that you do.”

  He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “You know, I get about twenty-five cowboys in here every day who cannot wait to go kill gooks in Vietnam. I can’t see any good reason to make you kill one.” While I would never have gotten away with this at Whitehall Street in New York City, he was clearly no more in favor of the Vietnam War than I was. I had been in a completely decompressed state, but the huge steel band that had been around my entire being for so long suddenly broke.

  Another thing that happened during that week was that I got
a letter from my friend Kazim Khan, whom I had met at the London School of Economics while I was hanging out there during the summer after my sophomore year. At the LSE, Kazim had been enrolled in a few different courses, but had never gotten his degree, which may have had something to do with the fact that his father was a maharajah near Lucknow, India.

  In the letter, Kazim said he was going back home for the first time in twenty years and he would dig it if I came and visited him so he wouldn’t feel completely estranged from the world he had been living in. I don’t know why he picked me. It was just a simple twist of fate, but he did and so I decided to land on that square.

  I had just graduated from college and been admitted to Harvard Law School. I had just sold my novel. I had gotten out of the draft. Pretty much purely on a whim but also because of something that has plagued me throughout my life—coming right to the precipice of success and then backing away from it—I decided to take my book advance and use the money to go to India.

  TWELVE

  THE JOURNEY EAST

  I flew to London and then to Luxembourg and then I got a ticket on what later became the national airlines of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, or Southern Yemen, but was then called Brothers Air Services. Their fleet consisted entirely of DC-6Bs, but at least they were pressurized. We made a stopover in Cairo and then lumbered on through the night. I was the only sahib on the plane, and all the Indian passengers put down their seats and spread out these futons and the whole plane suddenly became a living room where people were having tea.