The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (26 page)

Terence had worked all summer mounting butterfly specimens at the California Academy of Sciences and had saved enough money to hit the hippie trail, as many others were, bound for India, Nepal, and Jerusalem in search of adventure, good hash, and spiritual fulfillment. Terence, burning with revolutionary fervor and wild ideas, had a book he intended to write before he returned. The work was destined to be the kind of polemical screed a guy writes when he’s twenty, knows everything, and has bones to pick with everyone; it remains unpublished.

Elaine and Terence were still tight when they set off. After a few months in Europe, they ended up in Jerusalem as planned, but something must have happened along the way, because they soon parted. Elaine joined a kibbutz and remained in Israel. Terence, bereft, continued his wanderings through North Africa to Mombasa, Kenya where he caught a tramp freighter bound for Seychelles, a tiny archipelago in the Indian Ocean a thousand miles east. He rented a place on Silhouette Island a dozen miles off the main island of Mahé. Terence had done his homework before leaving and had identified Seychelles, then a British colony about to become a commonwealth republic, as just about the closest thing to paradise left on the planet. The plan had been to live there in tropical bliss with Elaine while he wrote his book. He arrived with a broken heart and a supply of cannabis seeds he’d brought with him from California; he immediately planted them in the garden behind his tiny house. His plan was to lay off smoking until his book was done. By then the cannabis would be ready to harvest, and he’d reap the rewards born of his patience and discipline. With the seeds in the ground, he started to write.

Back home, life went on as routinely as life can be when one is a restless and rebellious teenager, alienated, brooding, and caught up in the spirit of generational revolution. My closest friends all felt it as well, perhaps even more acutely than other kids because of our isolation as social outcasts. As the town’s first hippies, we were regarded with suspicion. It didn’t really matter to us; it only reinforced our sense of being special, cut from a different and better cloth than that of our classmates. We had each other, our music, and our dope, and we hung out together as much as we could. We were the only stoners in town; all the others were “alkies,” and that only added to our smug sense of superiority. While they were busy getting shit-faced in the gravel pit most weekends, we pursued what we viewed as a better way.

During the week, our little band would often head for my house, haul guitars and albums and pipes and snacks out of the car and sequester ourselves in my bedroom, toke up and spend hours hanging, talking, playing guitars, and listening to music. We’d have amazing conversations, thanks to the fluid thought processes triggered by the cannabis, and we always seemed to end up with at least one key concept or insight. I don’t remember whether my mother was there during these sessions and simply too intimidated to object, or whether we arranged them to coincide with her absences. It wasn’t a particularly terrible thing to do; in fact it was a lot less risky and destructive than a lot of teenage behavior at the time.

One group of jocks included kids from some of the “best” families in town. They disdained us as dirty hippies. It was the typical polarity between hippies and rednecks that was playing out in small towns across America. They were infamous in the town as “wild kids,” much more publicly obnoxious and confrontational than we were. Their main weekend recreation was to go out somewhere in their fancy cars for bouts of binge drinking. One weekend they all got plastered and drove a convertible down the twisty road between Somerset and Paonia at 120 miles per hour until the car skidded down an embankment and landed, miraculously, right side up in the Gunnison River. The car was totaled, but no one was hurt. I dare say getting wasted in my bedroom was much safer. Our belief was that no one knew of our proclivities or newly adopted vices, but some of our peers were on to us, as we soon discovered.

During that fall, a new variable entered my life, in the form of a new friend. Dea grew up on the Western Slope, but she had been living with a dealer in the Haight, a pretty tough guy, I gathered, who was also involved with a motorcycle gang. It was Tom who first encountered her, I don’t know where. It turned out she was a “recovering nymphomaniac,” in her words; she’d returned from the crazy scene in San Francisco to try to get her life back together. Dea, a brown-eyed, longhaired, slender girl a couple of years older than I was, wore knee-high leather boots, beads, bangles, and enticingly sheer blouses. I was immediately smitten with her, but I told myself that if I treated her well our platonic ties would naturally evolve toward physical affection.

That never happened, but I still enjoyed hanging out with her. She had a van we’d take on day trips to Hayes Creek Falls or other sites along the Crystal River. We’d sit in the back of the van and get thoroughly baked and then go climbing on the cliffs above the waterfall, giving me a chance to admire her slender grace. We kissed occasionally, and she seemed to enjoy it, but she refused to go beyond that, insisting her past behavior had been a moral failing she had to overcome. Instead, Dea became a kind of muse for me. I wrote poetry and haiku about her; I dreamed of her. She disappeared suddenly from my scene after a series of unfortunate events. For one thing, my father hated her, hippie that she was, and the fact she was older made her a threat to me in his eyes. After we’d drifted apart, she went back to her former lover in San Francisco, or so I was told. I never heard from her again. She was a fragile figure in many ways, destined, I feared, to break in the course of life; I hope I was wrong.

It wasn’t too long into the fall semester of my junior year that our tiny stoner band met its inevitable and humiliating end. I mentioned that we often gathered in my bedroom after school; I’d break out the hash and we’d pass the pipe and have a good time getting quietly baked. My first inkling that security had been breached was when a classmate who lived across the street asked me one day, in a snarky way, “Can I have a drag off’n that there opium pipe a yers, McKinney?” Believe it or not, that’s how people talked in Paonia in those days. I barely knew the guy, and his question wasn’t welcomed. He and his pals must have been eavesdropping underneath my bedroom window. Though I never knew for sure, I assumed he was the one who informed on our sweet scene and brought us down, an event that branded me as a figure just short of the Antichrist and brought our psychonautic adventures to a temporary end.

On the morning of the day it happened, I had gotten up early and driven to the airport outside of town to meet Dea. Our plan was to smoke DMT together while parked at the end of the runway and watch the sunrise. This we did, without incident. It was just the start of another ordinary school day except that we had gotten together to breach the cosmic portals for a few minutes before the 8:30 bell. Afterward, I said goodbye to her and arrived in class still shimmering from my teleportation and probably reeking of DMT. The day passed uneventfully until the fourth period, when I was in my advanced English class, taught by a teacher, and a good one, we cruelly called “Large Marge.” Thing is, she really wasn’t large at all. She was a good friend of my mother’s, which didn’t make what happened any easier. Most of my partners in crime were there as well, though they were seniors and I was a junior. It was the last class of the afternoon.

About midway through it, Large Marge singled out the six of us in our group and sent us to the office. When we got there, the school principal told us to get our collective asses downtown to the city hall, just a couple of blocks away, where all of our parents were waiting. Thank God my father was traveling that week and only my mother was there. Most of the other rebels weren’t so lucky. The jig was up. The sheriff and his deputy took turns lecturing us on what a terrible thing it was for us to be doing, and making sure that I was singled out as mastermind and ringleader. I was defiant; I tried to argue with them about the merits of cannabis versus alcohol, but they were not there to be persuaded; they were there to shut us down, hard, which they did.

The parental reactions ranged from extreme anger to stunned incomprehension. Gary’s parents were especially furious. They’d never liked me, and here was incontrovertible proof that I had led their precious son astray. He was forbidden on the spot to ever see or associate with me again, a ban that actually held up through most of the year. After that session, all my friends sheepishly filed out, accompanied by their parents. I was not let off so lightly. They kept me behind, and gave me a stern lecture, calling me lucky not to be headed for jail. I was sobered and subdued by that time. I realized that they were right. They said that they knew I had supplied the drugs, and that I had the drugs, and that what I needed to do was to go with them back to my house and give them my stash; if I did that, they would overlook this offense, for now. They pressed me on where I had obtained the dope, suggesting that a certain figure from town then living in Aspen had been my source, which I denied, because he hadn’t.

We went back to the house, and I pulled out a dresser drawer behind which I had sequestered a lovely, silk-lined box I’d purchased with my pipe in Chinatown that summer. The box held my cannabis, the hash, several tabs of acid and mescaline, and the DMT. They took it all. The search wasn’t too thorough; they didn’t even check behind the dresser drawer to make sure they had gotten everything, and in fact they hadn’t. They’d missed the bottles of brucine and yohimbine (both reputed aphrodisiacs) that I’d ordered from Sigma (anyone could in those days) as well as a bottle of adrenalin. I had an “experiment” underway, an effort to produce adrenochrome, a purported hallucinogen, by irradiating a solution of adrenalin with ultraviolet light. A black light I’d bought to put a glow on my psychedelic posters now illuminated a flask of adrenalin on the shelf above my bed. Perhaps distracted by the wild posters themselves, they didn’t even notice that purple solution. After they left I flushed it down the toilet, which was probably just as well.

The following months were tense for our tattered band. We weren’t hailed as fearless warriors of the new psychedelic revolution, not by a long shot. We were more isolated than ever, shunned as the school’s untouchables for the rest of the year. We were defiant, of course, and for the most part, stuck together more tightly than ever. It wasn’t long after the bust that some of us started smoking pipes and cigarettes. It became our custom to spend our lunch hours sitting on the hood and fenders of Tom’s Plymouth, parked in the lot across the street in plain sight of the school, and enjoy a good long smoke.

This drove the principal crazy, but we weren’t on school property, and tobacco wasn’t restricted in those days. Our smoking was both perfectly legal and a defiant political statement. It’s ironic, really. Pipe smoking became a habit that I’ve only been able to give up in the last couple of years. Of the various drugs I’ve taken over the years, pipe smoking was probably the most harmful, and also one of the most pleasurable. Such is life. Tobacco was not particularly addictive for me; it was easy to quit when I finally made the decision to do so. The fact is, I enjoyed it, and that is why I had persisted in using it.

The principal disliked us, and the feeling was mutual. I recall a coincidence that has stayed with me for being so odd. I was in the library one day under earphones listening to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Bob Dylan’s portrait of the clueless square, on the school’s cassette recorder. By then its refrain had already become the hip world’s view of the straight world reduced to a few words: “Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?” In the last verse, the thin man walks into a room, eyes in his pocket and “nose on the ground,” as the balladeer concludes, “There ought to be a law / Against you comin’ around / You should be made / To wear earphones.”

And that’s what happened. Just as the song neared this point, the principal stepped into the library, walked toward me, and picked up an extra set of earphones just in time to hear Dylan’s last verse for himself. The timing was perfect. It was too perfect! I looked up at him and smiled. Not a word passed between us. He took off the earphones and left.

A defining event that school year turned out to be my encounters with a new English teacher. Mack Faith had actually been teaching junior and senior English for a year, but as a sophomore I had not been in his classes. Mack was a recent graduate of the education program at Western State College in Gunnison. He turned out to be a fellow subversive and befriended our alienated group. He and his wife Diana made a charming couple, but like so many faculty who came and went from the local high school over the years, they never quite fit in.

New faculty members were not always welcomed with open arms by their peers. Most teachers had been hired because they could coach a sport, not for their classroom skills. Mack, an intellectual, was different; he loved to teach and was damn good at it. He and his wife were what would be called “liberal” today, often with a sneering tone. They believed in a lot of subversive things, like racial equality and social justice.

The town’s xenophobic warning systems marked them immediately as radicals, subversives, effete intellectuals, and “not like us.” They were outcasts, and so was our little group of proto-hippies; naturally, we were drawn to each other. They welcomed us into their home on many occasions, where we would do pretty much what we did when we got together on our own, sans the dope. Mack wasn’t a hippie, or at least didn’t look like one, and he never got loaded with us. We respected his decision, knowing he respected ours and never pressed him or brought dope to his house. He became a friend and a mentor to us for most of that year. I think he was still close enough to us in age that he could empathize with many of our concerns. We were all preoccupied with civil rights and the Vietnam War, strongly in favor of the former and vehemently opposed to the latter. The conversations we had with them in the living room of their tiny, rented house served to heighten and focus our political consciousness.