Another Little Piece of My Heart (23 page)

I’ll call the kid Denny. (It seems apt to name him after a fast-food chain that probably supplied a major part of his diet.) He’d grown up in a tract-house exurb of San Francisco, amusing himself with war games in the chaparral. Then came puberty, and he met its tests in the usual budding rocker way: he withdrew to his guitar. That was when he began to create his own songs—typical shit about flowers and gentle people. His mother listened like a fan, and she told him that he had an enchanting voice. His father said nothing. He’d hoped for a son more attuned to the manly arts of football and fishing, but Denny dreaded the sight of a salmon squirming on the hook, and as for sports, when he was remanded to a neighbor’s care for lessons in the pigskin arts he stood dreamily with the ball at his side, immune to all coaxing. The neighbor gave up, and his father retreated, subtly but permanently.

This is the scenario that disposes a boy to become an artist, and, listening to Denny’s bio, I decided that he had the makings of the real thing. Maybe it was just the genius that I ascribed to anyone who turned me on. There was nothing terribly original about his songs—they were Beatle-bangle
chazerei
to my jaded mind—and his professional life wasn’t special: migration to L.A., small gigs in smaller clubs, a nibble from an independent label with ambitions to be gobbled up by the Warner combine. I asked if he had an album in the works. “Eventually,” he sighed, which I took to mean,
I need your help.

I was sure I could wring a story out of Denny—every child of the vast basin between the Pacific and the desert had a sensitive soul to reveal. More to the point, I got the gist of his message: I could have him if I was willing to write about him. I felt the indisputable evidence of a
stiffie, but I was sure he couldn’t possibly find me attractive. It never occurred to me that we might have enough in common to inspire a buzz between us. It could only be my power to promote his career. I had been in such situations before, and I saw the exchange of sex for publicity as a kind of payola, so I always backed away. I might have made an exception for Denny—he was such a classic of the nerdy/arty type. But I could tell from the way my fingers trembled as I gripped the phone that this wouldn’t be the forgettable sex I was willing to have with guys. He would ride off into the neon sunset, while I would think of him forever, just as I still think of Groovy. I couldn’t afford another phantom lover; so, no, I wouldn’t have a “gay-off” with this dude.

I told him that I couldn’t make time for him—too many deadlines to meet. I expected him to sound disappointed and maybe a little hurt. Instead, he said something that hit me like a bullet. He said I was afraid to let myself love.

I was used to people making inappropriate remarks. The sixties were an age of faux candor, nuggets of wisdom meant to be therapeutic but actually just manipulative. And here was this kid implying that I didn’t want to write about him because I dreaded the way he made me feel. Troubadours from the land of eternal sunshine weren’t supposed to be wise. It pissed me off, but I was stunned by his insight.

“That’s why you’re such a good critic,” he said. “The music is an echo.”

“Of what?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Of what you need.”

I didn’t have to respond. He seemed to sense my thoughts. “Stop worrying about getting laid,” he said. “Start thinking about giving love.”

That was pretty much where the conversation ended. I shook it off as hippie drivel—a more genital version of the injunction to “Be here now!”—and I never wrote about Denny or saw him again. But I’ve thought a lot about the spell he cast. Groovy had the same ability to propel me into a state of childlike wonder. I realize now that this allure was a quality my favorite rock stars also possessed. Something about their bodies bathed in light, slamming into their axes or wrapped around the mike, captivated me. It could happen in the clamor of a hard-edged blues or the ebb and flow of a ballad. When it came from a woman, I felt a deep identification, as if I were inhabiting her. With a man, it was a different sort of
intimacy—I was jamming with him, locking guitars. I didn’t think of these sensations as queer. All I knew was that they were thrilling.

So the kid was right about why I was an effective critic. It wasn’t just my way with words. It was my passion about the music and what it meant to me. I might pretend that virtuosity was what counted in rock—that was the manly thing to admire—but actually it was about longing and craving, the need to possess and to adore; desire in all its permutations, unbounded and uncanny. I tried to evoke that mythic dimension in my pieces. I’d described Mick Jagger as a pop incarnation of Shango, the African thunder god, and Jim Morrison as the Lizard King. But I never really captured the emotions that rock conjured up in me. The terror of knowing myself stopped me from writing about, or even perceiving, what I really felt. It was accessible only with my eyes closed or in the darkness of an arena, when everything repugnant about me vanished in the sound, and I was lost in ecstasy. Music was the only way I could connect with my latent feelings, the only time I felt whole, and this had been true ever since I was a teenager, locked in loneliness. Like Jenny, the sad girl Lou Reed sings about, I was saved by rock ’n’ roll.

Despite all the amputation

You could dance to the rock ’n’ roll station …

Baby, baby, ooohhh.

The encounter with Denny made sex with my wife even more intense. The feelings I had for her were genuine, but they also affirmed my membership in the holy order of heterosexuality. I still had doubts, and I eased them with the occasional chick. (I actually had a wrestling match with another rock critic over a woman—he got me in an illegal hold, and I was on crutches for several weeks.) But my greatest escape from myself was what it always had been: writing. Ironically, the best way to flee into reality was to cover the new unreality, and it wasn’t hard to find. As the order lost credibility, so did its spiritual consistency. A Mexican peyote shaman seemed far wiser than the Cardinal blessing the troops in Vietnam. Krishna Consciousness was a lot more devout than a catered bar mitzvah. The problem was that anything could be a mantra, just as anything could be a jingle. How to tell the polyester from the polytheism?

I saw a role for the critic in me. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t dislodge the slogan of the moment: “Be here now!” Its inventor, Richard Alpert, had morphed psychedelically into Baba Ram Das. I couldn’t resist referring to him as “baba au rhum.” Still, I had my moments of weakness when it came to free-floating religiosity. I remember remarking to Judith, in an intoxicated state, that Jesus was in all of us. (She kicked me.) Before my military physical I consulted an ancient and very trendy Chinese work of prophecy called the
I-Ching
. There were hundreds of passages in the text, and throwing coins would lead to one of them. By pure chance, I got a passage called “The Army.” It was a
Far-out!
moment, tantamount to realizing that, though I didn’t believe in astrology, I was a classic Gemini. I never lost myself in the cosmic vibes, but I could understand why people with mystical leanings were drawn to Alpert’s partner in revelation, Timothy Leary. In certain enlightened circles, he was referred to as an incarnation of the divine. To me, he was all too human—and that’s the kindest thing I can say about him.

No one knows how many young people took LSD in the sixties. Several million is my best guess (and what’s a memoir if not a guess?). I suspect that most of them look back on tripping as an adventure they don’t regret, though they wouldn’t recommend it to their grandkids. For some, it was a very important experience; I have a friend who was inspired to become an artist while tripping. The comix, the posters, the curvaceous mode of music and decor, all attest to the profound influence of acid on the counterculture. But the drug was a crapshoot. It could access parts of the brain where inspirations reside, or it could induce a harrowing panic attack—the infamous “bummer.” You might be a very fucked-up person and have a wonderful time, or be very together and end up in a state of dread. Most people came to their senses after the drug wore off, give or take a few recurring “flashes,” but some acid-heads never came down. Others believed they were endowed with the power to control others, and still others decided to follow them. Cults arose around this mutual illusion—can you say Manson? On LSD, it is easy to see God or be God.

The most dangerous trips involved a lasting confusion of fantasy and reality. I never had that problem, perhaps because my suspicions cut so deep that I always knew when I was having a hallucination. I wasn’t tempted to leap from a ten-story building, convinced I could fly, and I never became psychotic, though I knew people who did. I had friends
who struggled for years to climb out of the rabbit hole they’d fallen into. One of them joined a rehab program that required him to perform elaborate rituals of neatness. He had to iron his socks and hankies every day. To me, that was worse than ego death.

The casualties of acid were easy to spot. They had a floating look, and if you let them they would share all sorts of exotic beliefs. Pharaonic spirits were inhabiting the body of my buddy Joel, who, by 1968, had left his communal farm in the Catskills and renamed himself Mithra (though he preferred the more casual Ra). Planets were converging in apocalyptic signs for him, amid astrological calculations that went beyond any Zoroastrian scheme. And Joel was far from unique. Even freaks who functioned well might harbor ideas that failed the test of reason. The truth was in the vibe, the higher reality made sensate. LSD was an agent of this thinking, but not the cause. The psychic chaos that the drug sometimes produced was consistent with the climate of the time. Acid is a template on which many things can be inscribed. For all that it might put you in touch with your inner drives or enable you to access the oversoul, it could also inspire an undue confidence in your feelings. LSD rarely fostered doubt, but, then, very little in the sixties did. It’s often said that the boomer generation was narcissistic, but the real problem was negligence—of one another and finally of reality. That was the decade’s greatest contradiction: its capacity for radical change was also a tendency toward madness. Acid fostered both.

The original advocates of LSD understood its power, and they urged careful attention to what was called “set and setting.” I heeded their advice to trip in parks or forests, and always with a “guide,” a kind of designated driver who could talk me down from a panic attack or give me Valium if all else failed. I was much too self-conscious to drop acid at a concert or a tribal gathering; the prospect of blowing my mind among thousands of similarly disoriented kids didn’t appeal to me. And as for psychedelic sex, I can only say that orgasm is not the point. I would get lost in the fleshiness and forget the need to come.

I was reckless about all sorts of things in the sixties, but not LSD. The same cannot be said for Leary. To him, acid was an elixir that should be widely and casually dispensed. Dosage was whatever it took; undesirable effects were the remnant of ego games that could best be dealt with by taking more acid. Working to better the here and now through politics was futile. It would merely lead to more of the same.
The only activism worth embracing was to change the world by altering consciousness. This was a just-add-water cake-mix vision of America, where the spirit would triumph over Moloch, courtesy of chemicals. The counterculture had its own version of the Rapture; John Lennon would call it “instant karma,” a flash of revelation that could happen through either meditation or the shortcut of a drug. Though the mystique of acid has long since faded, something like that concept has survived, thanks to the rise of an industrialized pharma culture with labs churning out mood-altering meds for an ever more diagnosed nation. This is Leary’s real legacy.

Class consciousness was not his strong suit. He was ignorant (willfully, I thought) of the impact that racism and poverty might have on someone’s drug experience. The distance between Leary and Martin Luther King was unbridgeable, and since I was closer to the idea of passive
resistance
than I was to pacifism, I approached his psychedelic revolution with my antennae of doubt bristling. At least the Beats had embraced the idea of voluntary poverty; Leary preferred pleasure to self-denial. He was quite willing to hole up in an estate about an hour north of New York City, in a part of Dutchess County where the horses were better fed than the help. There, under the auspices of a nonprofit called the League for Spiritual Discovery—LSD, get it?—he hosted various illuminati (Allen Ginsberg hung out there) along with renegade academics and any guru who could shake his ashram. I didn’t merit an invitation to Leary’s lair, but I was useful enough for him to grant me an interview in town. Like many of my subjects, he couldn’t resist publicity.

I met him in the East Village, outside the theater where he was holding forth weekly at a “psychedelic celebration” called
The Death of the Mind
. It had something to do with everyone’s favorite incarnation of the Buddha, the young seeker Steppenwolf. It featured a light show by Leary’s associates, the same pair who had advertised themselves in the
Voice
as being available for psychedelic fashion shows, industrial shows, and bar mitzvahs. Everything fit together: enlightenment, entertainment, subsidiary rights.

As we walked up the street Leary greeted admirers among the passersby, his hands folded together, guru style. We popped into the Second Avenue Deli. It struck me an odd haunt for a man whose followers would probably regard everything on the menu as the product of a savage slaughter. But I could tell from his expertise in ordering pastrami that he
knew his way around a mile-high sandwich dripping grease. This was another earthly delight for a man of big appetites, as was sex. From the way he cased out the room, I had the feeling that he would just as soon fuck a woman with one of the pickles in the briny bowl on the table as eat it. Lust was an acceptable lifestyle in the sixties, but the idea was to be casual about it. Leary had the lubricious air of a man who had come only lately to the sexual feast. He’d arrived at every pop spiritualist’s dream, a milieu where prophecy is a greater aphrodisiac than even power.