Mother American Night Read online

  Still, I wasn’t even slightly prepared for the culture shock I was about to experience. I got to Bombay, as it was then called, early on a very rainy morning. The monsoons were flowing and I had never seen rain like that. It was raining chains. It was raining ropes. The whole damn country was like a cow pissing on a flat rock, and it was something to behold.

  On the bus coming in from the airport, I heard a little commotion in back. The driver stopped and pulled over and went to check it out. When he came forward again, he was carrying a little stick figure of a man who had just died in the back of the bus. Reverentially, he took him to the side door, put him down gently on the sidewalk, and then drove away. Not much paperwork involved there.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to do next, so I thought I would go to the best hotel in town and ask them to recommend a place that might be in my budget. I went to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, and they sent me to a place that had probably been pretty luxurious back during the days of the Raj but had since fallen on dark and musty times.

  I stayed in my room listening to the rain for a couple of days while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. Then I took a train to Lucknow, where I met Kazim’s father for the first time. Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan was a well-known poet and a prominent politician who had been the leader of the All-India Muslim League. He was also a very, very devout Shiite Muslim, and after the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, the Indian government had decided to freeze all of his assets on religious grounds, and so he could not sell or do anything with all of his treasures.

  The family had two palaces. Everybody lived in the city palace in Lucknow, but it had been pretty well stripped of ornamentation by the Hindu government. The one in the countryside was totally extraordinary. It was festooned with things you could have found on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There was Victorian bric-a-brac beyond all comprehension, as well as furnishings and art that dated back to the Moguls.

  There was also a fantastic 700,000-volume library of books dating back to the seventh century. Kazim’s father could not sell any of them so they were all being eaten by book worms. In that library, I once found the body of a dead bat with a two-and-a-half-foot wingspan.

  Kazim’s father had many servants in the palace but no money to pay them. Their families had always been in his service, and so they kept the same arrangement they had always had. I had my own suite of rooms and came and went as I pleased. Often I would happen through while Kazim wasn’t there, but it was still cool.

  I wound up spending a lot of time with Kazim’s dad. He was philosophical about how the government had seized all of his property. It made him sad, but he was almost Buddhist in his nonattachment. What counted for him was being the proper servant for the will of Allah. He figured that was what was now happening, just as I did.

  I was not on a spiritual pilgrimage in India. Instead, I was doing what I always do, which was hanging out with intent. I went to McLeod Ganj in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama had his lamasery in exile. He was there at the time and in the process of giving a cycle of sermons that the Dalai Lama always delivered at a certain age. He spoke in Tibetan so I didn’t understand any of it, but it was still interesting just to be there and listen.

  The thing that had largely attracted me to Dharamsala was the abandoned Presbyterian mission camp on the top of this mountain where a guy with whom I had shared a dorm suite at Wesleyan was then living. It was a dreadful climb getting up there but from the top of this ridge, I could see the entire Brahmaputra basin, which is vast and beautiful. I trekked up and down and back up to that ridge for about a month and a half.

  At one point, I actually found myself on top of a mountain in India with a holy man, a Tibetan lama. He was using one of the cabins to meditate, but was not averse to my coming to talk with him. He knew English pretty well because he had taught for a year at Bryn Mawr, and he was serious about automobile mechanics. In the Tibetan time sense, things happen in synchrony, never with causality except on a spiritual level. Since there is nothing more causal than an automobile engine, the lama felt that if he could understand how it worked, he would have a better insight into how those in the West regarded time.

  I didn’t trip that much on the mountain because it was superfluous, but I did take acid in Khajuraho, a group of nine-hundred-year-old Hindu and Jain temples south of Jhansi that are famous for their erotic sculptures. In splendid isolation, I tripped in those amazing ruins. Looking at all those bas-reliefs of people screwing in every manner and position imaginable while I was high on acid gave me an entirely new sense of the nature of religion.

  I encountered many other hippies on the road; they were pretty common there in those days. Many of them were English and had become highly susceptible to shedding all their Western trappings, putting on dhotis, and wandering across the plains. Sometimes they would be in pretty lousy health, and I would try to persuade them that they needed to come in from the cold for a little while because their bodies had not been adapted by countless generations of parasite gobbling. But they had already cast their lot. They weren’t going to have their minds changed by me.

  I was in India for nine and a half months, always traveling alone. I did not get laid even once. But I did take out the Dalai Lama’s sister a couple of times. She was a schoolteacher, about twenty-five years old. Compared to the Muslims, the Tibetans were pretty easygoing about things like that. I knew this because Kazim had a sister who was about my age, and the family thought it would be a good idea if I took her out to the movies. For some reason, that was something you could do with a girl back then that wouldn’t get anyone culturally stirred up. She would go with me, covered up from head to toe in a burka and looking like a giant black tent, and I would sit next to her in the theater with no idea what she was thinking or what she even looked like. Talk about a blind date. There was actually something pretty sexy about it all, but things never went beyond the movies.

  As happens sooner or later to almost everyone who travels in India, I eventually got pretty sick. Fortunately, it was toward the end of my time there. By then, I had become transfixed by the burning ghats in Benares on the Ganges where they incinerated the dead bodies. I could not tear myself away from the sight. I don’t know if it was then or when I took a fairly lengthy rowboat ride on the Ganges that did it, but I came down with this flu-like thing that had me coughing blood for ages after I got home.

  Although my trip to India was not a spiritual pilgrimage like other people back then were doing, very little about my life has not been a form of spiritual exploration. I know that I shed some sort of skin while I was there and came back a different person, in that I could more plainly see the virtues of being more of a Republican than I had been. India, then more than now, was just a grab bag of miscellaneous products of social chaos, some of which were beautiful, some of which were appalling.

  A character in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India says that India will show you your true self. In that sense, it’s like the world’s oldest and most complex Rorschach test. Among other things, it showed me that I was much too susceptible to horror and so when I returned to America, I had a different perspective about all that.

  In terms of what so many people my age were doing back then by wandering the world in search of spiritual enlightenment, the best insight I can offer is something I was told many years later in Japan by the abbot of the Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto, which is the mother lode of Zen. When I walked in to see him, the abbot was sitting next to a paper wall divider with cranes brushed on it that was thought to be the oldest existing painting in Japan. There were signs everywhere that said NO SMOKING, but the abbot himself was smoking like a furnace. As we were talking, he kept lighting up one cigarette right after another. But then he understood irony.

  “You know,” he said to me, “we used to see a lot of your kind around here.” And I said, “My kind? What would that be?” He said, “You know what I mean. Th
e young Westerner who takes LSD and decides that he is a Buddhist. And doesn’t actually have to put in any of the work necessary to become one.”

  I said, “Guilty as charged. I can’t defend myself about that, but did you ever take acid?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah.” I said, “So, what were your thoughts on it?” And he said, “I couldn’t understand why someone would want to take a brief vacation in a place where I was already living and intended to spend my entire life, if I could make myself capable of it.”

  THIRTEEN

  COMING HOME

  I came back to the United States through Logan International Airport in Boston bearing a life-size Buddha head from Kathmandu that I had filled with a kilo of black Nepalese hashish. I didn’t do it for money. I did it in part to determine whether I was going to be a Republican or an outlaw. The lady or the tiger.

  The Buddha head was made of bronze, and I had done my best to fashion what appeared to be a bronze bottom for it out of epoxy and stuff I had picked up off the street. I got in the customs line at Logan and soon found myself face-to-face with a big, burly Irish customs guy who was just like a Boston cop. He took one look at me and said, “I’m going to have to look at everything.” And I said, “I thought that might be the case.”

  He started going through all my stuff, and as he did I realized that I had completely forgotten about the piece of typing paper folded up in one of my shirt pockets that had six or eight tabs of Owsley acid inside it. I had brought a bunch with me on the trip, and this was what was left of my supply. I had taken quite a bit of acid in India and had some pretty transcendental experiences. Not the kind you were supposed to have, but they were definitely something.

  The customs guy unwrapped the sheet of typewriter paper, found the tabs, and said, “What’s this?” And I said, “Well, to be frank, I’m not sure.” He said, “The boys in the lab will know.” And I was thinking, There’s a test for LSD, really? Then he gave it to somebody who took it away.

  At that point, I was in an incredibly elevated state of mind. I figured that my fate had already been decided: The test for LSD was going to be positive and then they were going to drill into the Buddha head and the next thing I knew, I was going to be in the hoosegow, where I would presumably write the second half of my novel. I had never thought about doing that in India, but I had schlepped the bound first half of the novel around with me. That turned out to be useful because as the search went on, the customs guy knew he had gotten me, and I knew he had gotten me, and so we became extremely collegial. At one point, he found the manuscript and began leafing through it.

  “This is pretty good,” he said. “I like this.”

  And I said, “I’m glad you do. I’m supposed to finish it now.” The truth was that I was already feeling alarmed about having to finish it because after nine and a half months in India, I was no longer the person who had written the first half.

  He kept going through all my things methodically and he found a bunch of infinitesimal ivory elephants that kids in India go blind carving and then put into little seed pods. There are about twenty of them in every pod and if you pour them out, it looks like powder. Then if you look closer, you realize it’s actually tiny elephants. He found one of those and said, “Oh, surely this is drugs.” And I said, “No, look close. Look close. Closer.” And he said, “Holy shit! It’s elephants!”

  Then the guy from the lab came back from across the hall, and I could hear him laughing the whole way and he said, “Guess what? We blew up the lab with this stuff.” I was thinking, That doesn’t sound good. At that exact moment, the customs guy pulled the Buddha head out of the bottom of my backpack. He looked at it and said, “Funny casting. Do you suppose it’s hollow?” And I said, “No.” The head itself just radiated dope.

  The lab guy suddenly turned slightly more serious and handed the typing paper with the tabs of acid back to me. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but I wouldn’t take any of it if I were you.” At that moment, the customs guy, still holding the Buddha head, said, “I think we can just let you go.”

  Now that all my adrenaline had been completely released through my system, I started packing everything back up. The whole time I was shaking like a leaf. As I was getting ready to leave, the customs guy said, “So, if you’re writing that novel and you’ve got some kid carrying dope through customs in it, think of me.”

  * * *

  —

  Back in Connecticut, a friend of mine had rented a house in a little beach town called Clinton, the kind of place where orthodontists spent the summer. It was completely dead in the winter and seemed sufficiently out of the fray that I could write the rest of the novel there. At least, that was the concept.

  I was getting money from my folks during this period, so I never did sell any of the hash from the Buddha head. I gave a fair amount of it away in the service of getting something done. At one point, someone walked into my living room in Clinton and there were four or five of us there, stoned off our asses. He looked around for a while and then said, “Welcome to the wax museum.” Everyone was just that stoned. Petrified.

  I worked on the novel but not very successfully. The next spring, in May 1970, I helped bring the Grateful Dead to perform at Wesleyan. The point of the show was to get people out dancing and celebrating and being together because the school was in complete shutdown due to a student strike protesting the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia. So the Dead played a free show and Sonny Heard, who claimed he was one of their roadies but was just a grotesque parasite who would sometimes carry the band’s equipment around, got a gun shoved into his stomach. I loved that, because Sonny Heard was possibly the most vile human being I had ever met.

  What happened next was that a set of promoters in New York City decided to duplicate Woodstock at a ski resort in Connecticut called Powder Ridge. It had once been called Powder Hill, but that was too true so they renamed it Powder Ridge. The highest slope had a vertical descent of about four hundred feet, the ski-hill equivalent of a putt-putt course. I used to give night-skiing instruction there to businessmen who wanted to look good over the weekends with their girlfriends.

  To play at what was hyped as a huge three-day rock festival on July 31, August 1, and August 2, 1970, the promoters booked Sly and the Family Stone, Delaney and Bonnie, Fleetwood Mac, Melanie, James Taylor, Joe Cocker, the Allman Brothers, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Jethro Tull, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, Grand Funk Railroad, Richie Havens, John Sebastian, Spirit, and Ten Years After. After everything had been set up, I volunteered to help out in some capacity, and they put me into a security position. Then a local faction who had looked at Woodstock and decided “Not in our backyard” went to court to stop it. They got some Connecticut judge to issue an injunction declaring that if any of the musicians entered the site, they would immediately be held in contempt of court. Which resulted in none of them showing up.

  However, about thirty thousand people came to the festival grounds anyway. Even though there were no acts, they didn’t want to leave because they were having a perfectly grand time. Or an imperfectly grand time.

  At that point, the professional security company that had been hired decided to leave the premises. In my capacity as the nominal head of the volunteers, I then became head of security, which was like putting the inmates in charge of the institution. I was dealing with problems that didn’t come up every day, like a large bunch of kids who had picked a lot of poison ivy, used it to start a bonfire, and then danced around naked in the smoke. They all had to be hospitalized, and I had to find the ambulances to take them there because getting anything onto or off the site was insanely difficult.

  For reasons I have never understood, the Connecticut State Police refused to let anyone leave. People were trapped and the entire site quickly became a hippie ghetto. Because I was the head of security at an event that could not be secured, I had to send a lot of the drugs that
people had bought on the site to the Connecticut Valley Hospital for chemical analysis so I would know what they had taken. As it turned out, much of it was strychnine and niacin and a bunch of other awful stuff.

  The only artist who said “Fuck the judge” and actually performed was Melanie. There was no electricity on the site so I helped rig up some speakers and an amp and a mixing board to the power supply from a Mister Softee ice cream truck, and then she stood on top of it and sang.

  The “festival” itself went on for three days, and a lot of people were really messed up. We set aside a big room at the ski resort as a freak-out center, and during the second night, nine hundred people came through. Some of them were stark raving bonkers on shit that has not been available since. We didn’t have any doctors or Thorazine to help us bring them back down.

  A woman who was standing right next to me, looking at all this, said, “This is so awful, I feel like killing myself.” And I said, “I know what you mean. I kind of feel the same way.” Except that right after our conversation, she went upstairs and blew her head off. It was yet another time when I was forced to take suicidal ideation seriously. It’s statistically high enough to assume that when somebody says something like this, they actually do mean it.

  Powder Ridge made Altamont look like a walk in the woods. After three days, the cops finally opened the gates and let people leave. At that point, they were only too happy to do so.

  FOURTEEN

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  I spent the summer living in a house that belonged to one of my Wesleyan professors. It was way out in the countryside and looked like a Korean temple, and that was where I finally finished writing the second half of my novel. I submitted it to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and waited. They took their own sweet time to get back to me, so in the fall I moved to New York.