The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (16 page)

By then, drugs were just beginning to seep into our personal sphere. At Awalt High in Mountain View, Terence had met some of the friends who figured so importantly during his Berkeley years and beyond, and who may have introduced him to marijuana as Bob had the Fab Four. But drugs had not become a major preoccupation for either of us. My involvement with drugs at the time was nil, and my interest even less. We were shown “drug education” films in school assemblies like
Reefer Madness,
which even then were three decades out of date. While that film is now viewed largely as a spoof, we were expected to take it seriously, and we did. The scare tactic worked. I couldn’t imagine any reason why I would ever smoke that evil weed, ever. Not that it was an option; as far as I knew, there was no marijuana to be had within a hundred miles, although there were probably a few beatniks and bohemians in Aspen who were smoking it. In my universe, marijuana did not exist.

In the spring of 1964, my guess is Terence was far more concerned with sex than drugs. Getting laid, I think, was one of life’s milestones he was determined to put behind him. Predictably, there was a scandal, the details of which remain sketchy to me. According to my aunt, a sixth-grade teacher at the time, one of Terence’s female classmates was a former student of hers. That young woman’s mother, who I’ll call Mrs. Z, apparently had a taste for inexperienced teenagers, and it didn’t take long before Terence got on her radar. There were a number of parties and encounters that spring, according to my aunt. She and my uncle frowned on this, perhaps having prior knowledge of the woman’s proclivities. At any rate they forbade Terence to see her, but of course he ignored them and continued going over to her house. The deed must have occurred at one of these clandestine meetings, because, as my aunt later related, Terence came home one night in an agitated state, perhaps intoxicated, and took several showers in a row. This suggests to me that perhaps the union had been consummated, and the emotional impact was more than he’d bargained for.

A huge fight ensued. According to my aunt, my brother’s defiant act was the last straw in a series of conflicts with his temporary guardians. Since the school year was all but over, they announced they’d had enough: Terence would not be welcomed back in the fall for his senior year. My aunt and uncle drove him home to Paonia when they returned for their summer stay at Chair Mountain Ranch. Terence was quite agitated the entire trip; harsh and hurtful words were exchanged by both sides. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Mrs. Z, the seductress, also drove to Paonia to “rescue” Terence, possibly by taking him to California or absconding with him elsewhere. I don’t know how all this finally ended, except that Terence never did return to Awalt High. In fact, there must have been a concerted effort to protect me from this melodrama, because I was barely cognizant of it then and only learned about it when I interviewed my aunt for this book. I did know, however, that the episode, whatever it was, created a rift between Terence and my aunt and uncle that was never resolved. Terence deleted them from his universe. His reaction was much like that toward our father after Terence was caught doing something naughty in the sandbox and was beaten at age three or four. Before and after the falling out with Tress and Ray, forgiveness was not apparent in Terence’s nature.

It is a pity, really, because it meant he slammed the door on an entire segment of our family—including the cousins we’d grown up with during those long summers on the ranch. My aunt and uncle made several attempts to reestablish ties with Terence, but their efforts were rebuffed. In fact, the next time he had contact with our aunt was in the spring of 2000, only days before he passed on. In those final, heart-wrenching days, he was paralyzed, unable to speak; I was with him at the time. In what may have been a misguided attempt to bring some healing, I called my aunt and held the phone to Terence’s ear. I don’t know what was said, or if it comforted Terence or not. I hope it did. In this awkward situation I was trying, clumsily perhaps, to heal a rift that should have been healed decades earlier, and this wasn’t the first time I’d made such an effort. In my role as Little Brother, I often found myself reluctantly trying to clean up “messes” resulting from Terence’s conflicts with our parents. From what I could tell, once you got on his shit list, you stayed there; there was no going back. This dynamic was a constant throughout Terence’s life and, in my opinion, negatively affected his relationships with many people, including our parents and many of his lovers and friends.

As I have said, Terence seemed not to have an empathetic bone in his body; and yet that capacity was there somewhere. Although he seemed to have cut himself off emotionally from our parents, I later realized he still loved them. I saw that in the spring of 1964 when we learned our mother had breast cancer. Treatments were crude in those days, as they are still, and such a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence. The doctors performed a mastectomy and started radiation treatments. We were told there was a fifty-fifty chance the cancer would go into remission. If so, and if the cancer did not recur for at least five years, that would be interpreted to mean she was cancer free. When we got this news, five years seemed like an eternity, an abstraction that paled beside the shock of realizing our mom might die within months. I was “lucky” if you can call it that; I was still at home to give her daily support and comfort (though whether I rose to that challenge as I should have I can’t recall). For Terence, in California, the impact of the news was less immediate, but his reaction surprised me. He undertook to send our mother a postcard every day until he returned that summer. The cards said nothing of importance; they were general expressions of encouragement and love. But when they began to arrive every day it was very moving, and I think it helped our mother immensely, just to know her eldest son cared enough to write. It helped her to realize that this headstrong, rebellious teenager who had done so much to hurt her over the years still loved her, and chose to express it in this way. I was impressed as well.

The summer following the Mrs. Z affair was tense around our house. In letting Terence attend school in California, our parents had trusted him to act responsibly, a trust he had breached. They would have been justified in telling Terence he’d now have to finish high school in Paonia, but they didn’t do that. Terence continued to press for some other outcome. Common sense might have led him to be a little conciliatory, but he remained confrontational. Finally our father relented, again, and persuaded his old war buddy Truman to “take Terence on” for his last year of high school. Truman and his wife Iris lived in Lancaster, California, a community near Edwards Air Force Base about seventy miles north of Los Angeles. Truman had been a pilot in the war and still had close connections to the military, working in some capacity on the nearby base, if I recall. My father might have thought that a few months with a military man might be good for Terence. In fact, if the goal was to “reform” Terence or “make a man out of him,” so to speak, perhaps it was already too late for that.

Terence spent his senior year at Antelope Valley High in Lancaster, a school whose graduates included the musicians Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. His tenure there had its moments, but it wasn’t as bad as the year before at Awalt, at least from our parents’ perspective. By then Terence had rejected all adult authority, including the kind that came from family members or family friends like Truman and Iris. They were all impossibly lame and irrelevant in Terence’s view. It was Terence against the world; adults and authority figures were the enemy. J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
and Ayn Rand’s manifestos influenced Terence’s thinking heavily at the time, and validated, for him, his anti-authoritarian stance as well as his belief that it was perfectly OK to be totally selfish. In this respect, he wasn’t the first headstrong seventeen-year-old to feel this way. In the zeitgeist of the day, rejection of authority, particularly parental authority, was what you did.

Chapter 13 - The Experimental College: 1965

I’ve already admitted that when Terence first left Paonia I was happy to see him go. I enjoyed my new status as an only child, feeling it might lead to more attention from our parents. But it wasn’t long before I started to miss my brother, the first signs of how our relationship would change. Over the next few years, Terence ceased to be the resident tormentor-in-chief; instead he became my absent mentor. And I was less the little brother to be alternately ignored and harassed than a colleague and intellectual equal.

In California, he met others every bit as “out there” as he was, an interesting bunch who presented new opportunities for mischief and outrage, but also for intellectual stimulation and growth. I had a chance to meet some of them on their summer visits, and a few became important influences for me as well. Terence and I discussed many of his newfound “funny ideas” in our occasional correspondence and on his visits. Some of our common interests existed before he’d left, others we explored together after he’d been exposed to them and passed them on. By then he’d realized, to his surprise, that I had my own intellectual chops. I grew to look forward to his returns, knowing we’d engage in hours of engrossing conversation on topics utterly foreign to almost all my peers. There was a certain smug satisfaction in knowing that we “knew stuff” no one else knew we knew.

When Terence arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, for the fall semester in 1965, he was still in full rebellion against those “authoritarian oppressors” who embodied everything he condemned. While he often lumped our parents in that group, he was happy to let them pay for his college education—an ethical dissonance that infuriated him when reminded of it, as my father made a point of doing on Terence’s Christmas visit. I recall those confrontations as quite uncomfortable. Terence would accuse my parents of being fascists, a word that was often brandished thoughtlessly in those days, and in their case, unjustifiably. Our father never supported the war in Vietnam and was never fooled by government doublespeak. Given that he’d risked his life to fight real fascism in World War II, my brother’s accusation struck me as offensive and unnecessary, but not surprising. Terence was always and ever the master of the provocative statement, as those familiar with his work are well aware. He frequently said outrageous things just to get a response. Whether there was any truth to his claims hardly mattered.

But thanks to our parents’ tolerance, and our father’s checkbook, which remained open despite the insults and invective, Terence’s wish to begin his academic career at Berkeley had come true. As far he was concerned, he’d reached the Promised Land. Berkeley—or “Berzerkeley” as it was sometimes called in those heady times—had a longstanding reputation as a hotbed of radical ideas and social change. During the 1950s, the University of California made its employees take an anti-communist loyalty oath, leading to charges of McCarthyism. Not only was Berkeley the epicenter of the protest movement and the burgeoning counterculture, both of which Terence threw himself into, but also this time, for the first time, he’d escaped all adult supervision. Many of his high school friends from Mountain View and Lancaster were fellow students at Berkeley; others migrated there just to be where the action was. The transition thus did little to disrupt his previous circle, which soon encompassed a broader set of intelligent, interesting, wild-eyed characters. The staid conventions of the fifties were under full assault, and we all wanted to help bring down the old order, and usher in the new—though we had little idea what the “new” would look like.

The pressing issues of the day were Vietnam and civil rights. In early March 1965, some 3,500 Marines had been sent to defend the American airbase in Da Nang, becoming the first combat forces to arrive in Vietnam. On March 7, Alabama State troopers violently blocked a peaceful crowd of 600 as it left Selma on foot for Montgomery, a turning point in the civil rights movement remembered as Bloody Sunday. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King tried again, leading another march that reached its destination. In September, a reporter for the
San Francisco Examine
r, in a story on life in the Haight-Ashbury district, became one of the first to use the term “hippie” in print.

Writing in
The Nation
, Hunter S. Thompson examined Berkeley’s “nonstudent left,” that is, the growing numbers who were part of the local scene but not officially taking classes. In the wake of the Free Speech Movement, California had passed a law that was supposed to keep outsiders from disrupting university affairs, but the forces of change were everywhere. Draft-card burnings and Vietnam protests continued to grow in Berkeley and beyond, and many of the bands that generated the sounds of the psychedelic sixties had just been formed: The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground, The Doors, Pink Floyd. By year’s end, Ken Kesey and company had begun staging the first LSD-driven “Acid Tests” in the Bay Area. Timothy Leary’s prominence culminated in a bust for marijuana possession in December as he tried to reenter the country from Mexico.

The Free Speech Movement is worth a closer look, in light of its impact on Terence. As described earlier, the FSM coalesced in the fall of 1964, after university officials tried to curtail certain forms of political activity on campus. In the first protest, a crowd surrounded a police car outside the administration building, Sproul Hall, and trapped it there for more than a day. The protesters, led by student Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker, and others, insisted the school was infringing on their right to political expression and assembly. Some were also demanding academic reforms at an institution less committed to educating students, they said, than producing parts for a social machine shaped more and more by corporate interests. Events went critical in December when 2,000 students occupied Sproul Hall after officials said they intended to punish four FSM organizers for their part in the disturbance two months earlier. Some time after midnight, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Edwin Meese III (later California Governor Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, and later yet President Reagan’s attorney general) ordered the mass arrests of “the 800” as they were known, though the actual count was slightly less. A strike ensued, halting campus activity for a couple of days. In fact, the FSM’s demands were quite reasonable, and in early 1965 the university agreed to most of them, lifting the rules against political activity on campus.