The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (60 page)

In 1981, we spent our first Christmas together in Kamloops with Sheila’s parents and siblings. Though her family members were quite different from me—and from Sheila, really—they were kind and genuine people who accepted me, however strange I must have seemed to them. I would have seemed even stranger, I’m afraid, had I really been myself. Sheila knew I was putting on a bit of an act, and she played along, though even she was perhaps not yet fully aware of my peculiar interests—or at least that’s what I felt. For the time being, that I could pretend to be normal would apparently be good enough.

That December in Vancouver, I first met Luis Eduardo Luna, the Colombian scholar whom Terence had befriended a decade earlier in Florencia, after his second visit to La Chorrera. Luis Eduardo struck me as extremely reticent and polite. I knew who he was, of course, and the story of how his time with Terence and Ev in 1971 had affected the course of his life. Their chance encounter was all the more unlikely in that Luis Eduardo was something of a stranger in his hometown, having been away for much of his youth. His early schooling had largely taken place in Bogotá. At seventeen, he’d moved to Spain and begun his studies in Madrid. It was Terence who first told him about the use of
yagé
among the Amazon tribes much closer to Florencia. Luis Eduardo’s father had known, however, and reminded him of an Ingano shaman named Apolinar Yacanamijoy who occasionally visited the town. In early 1972, Luis Eduardo tracked him down and asked him if he’d be willing to teach him about
yagé
. Don Apolinar told Eduardo he’d have to spend an extended time with him mastering the lore and following the apprentice’s special diet.

Eduardo then returned to school in Europe. His immersion in shamanism would have to wait. After finishing his studies in Madrid, he moved to Norway, where he lectured about Spanish and Latin American literature at Oslo University while taking courses in the natural sciences and linguistics. In 1979, he got a teaching job at the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki, which gave him the security he needed to begin his ethnographic research on
yagé
in the company of the Ingano shaman he’d approached seven years earlier.

On a visit with Don Apolinar in 1980, the old man agreed to work with Luis Eduardo over the summer of 1981, if he lived that long, he said. In May 1981, shortly before Luis Eduardo’s scheduled return from Europe, word reached him that Don Apolinar had died.

Unsure of how to proceed with his research, he sought advice from Terence, who suggested he redirect his efforts to the area around Iquitos. There, in 1981, Luis Eduardo met a number of old-school mestizo
ayahuasqueros
—there wasn’t yet a new school—including Don Emilio Andrade Gómez. Don Emilio became Luis Eduardo’s primary mentor and informant for nearly twenty years, until his death in 1997. The use of
yagé,
or ayahuasca, among the region’s tribal peoples had already been documented by Western scholars; much less was known about its role among mestizo practitioners. Luis Eduardo spent the next several years researching that question. His Ph.D. thesis, “
Vegetalismo
: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon” (1986), became the definitive ethnographic work in this field, and he gained a well-deserved reputation as the world’s authority on
vegetalismo
. His 1982 documentary about Don Emilio entitled
Don Emilio and His Little Doctors
has since been recognized as a classic of ethnographic filmmaking.

Sheila and I didn’t do much traveling over those years, tied down as we were by our studies. In the fall of 1981, we’d taken a vacation to Hawaii on some of the funds from the settlement over my bike accident. A more memorable trip occurred two years later, when we drove to California for a brief stay with Terence and his family. That was Sheila’s first chance to spend time with them—and to learn the scope of the peculiar ideas my brother and I had entertained over the years. After a few days, Terence must have realized I hadn’t shared all of my checkered past with my new love. At one point, he turned to her and said, “He hasn’t told you yet, has he?”

And in truth, I had not. I didn’t want to frighten her away. She knew I liked mushrooms and was a bit of a freak; she, too, had been immersed in the counterculture so that didn’t alarm her. My fear was she had no idea how “counter” the counterculture could be. Terence handed her a copy of
The Invisible Landscape
and told her she needed to read it, which she proceeded to do. When afterward she didn’t run away screaming, I took that as a very good sign.

By then, Terence had begun getting a lot of attention for his “rap,” as he called it. His personality and ideas began to attract a wider audience. He’d been doing some radio, notably
Something’s Happening
, the program created in 1977 by Roy Tuckman, alias Roy of Hollywood, on the Los Angeles station KPFK. If I recall, Terence had another work in progress at the time, an audiocassette version of
True Hallucinations
, released in 1984, almost a decade before that story appeared in book form. In May 1983, Terence had appeared at a landmark conference on psychedelics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, alongside luminaries like Albert Hoffman, Sasha Shulgin, Andrew Weil, and Ralph Metzner. His edgy talk was titled “Hallucinogens: Monkeys Discover Hyperspace, aka Return to the Logos.” It was quite unlike anything else presented there and marked an important moment in the emergence of his public persona. People loved hearing his wild ideas, and Terence’s mesmeric voice and articulate presentation made him the perfect spokesman.

In one sense, it might not have mattered what he said. His audiences tended to be uncritical, or at least they seldom challenged him. People usually listened in slack-jawed fascination. I used to kid Terence that he could stand up and read the phonebook and listeners would hang on every word, because it wasn’t what he said, it was that he said it so darn well. His rap was not science, it was not exactly philosophy either; it was poetry, and Terence was inventing himself as the Irish bard of the psychedelic zeitgeist. The things he said resonated with people. Terence became popular precisely because he could say what he said so much better than anyone else, but obviously many had been primed for his message by their psychedelic experiences. His talks were works of art; they were beautiful, and people heard in that beauty a confirmation of their own psychedelically illuminated insights. Through him, many listeners learned to trust their intuitions rather than simply accepting the assumptions of science and secularism, dreary existentialism, and religion. Terence told stories that post-scientific rationalists could believe, and in doing so he re-infused the universe with magic and wonder. He became the wizard-shaman of a re-sacralized cosmos scintillating with psychedelically charged portent and permeated with life and intelligence and love. Having discovered the “machine elves” that seemed to exist in the hyperspace of the tryptamine state, he became their ringmaster, jumping them through their hoops for an enthralled new generation of psychedelic acolytes.

This was Terence’s strength and talent, and I give him his due for being able to articulate that message to so many, and for so long. Indeed, his talks seem as fresh and stimulating today as they were back in the eighties and nineties. Twelve years after his death, they remain remarkably contemporary and timely. He has achieved a weird kind of immortality; he has become a kind of ghost, haunting the back roads of cyberspace, and the vast body of his talks and raps will live forever on the Net. I think Terence would have appreciated that.

I am contacted by many young people who were in diapers or not even born when Terence was at the height of his career, who tell me they first started thinking and wondering about the Big Questions, questions about the meaning of life for us as individuals and as a species, as a result of listening to Terence’s speeches and raps. Many tell me that his work has brought hope and meaning, curiosity and wonder, into their lives. Some of them have become my students and friends over the years, and I owe Terence for that. It’s really Terence they want, not me. I’m much more down to earth, more scientifically oriented, and people appreciate that, too. But if it weren’t for Terence and his cultural impact, no one would care very much about what I might think or have to say. So for that, and for giving me platforms like this book to tell my story and share my ideas, I’m grateful to him.

While Terence had begun forging his public persona, I’d been in the lab in Vancouver, slowly working toward my degree. When he wasn’t teaching in Finland, Luis Eduardo had been making his film and furthering his research with Don Emilio in Peru. Like many others who at some point had belonged to our circle going back to the Berkeley days, we’d more or less managed to integrate the heady ideals of earlier times into our adult lives.

Not everyone had been so fortunate. My last encounter with John Parker occurred in 1983, on our way back to Vancouver after our visit with Terence and Kat. John, an important early mentor, had disappeared from my world; we hadn’t spoken for years. In the interim, I’d heard he’d become increasingly dysfunctional. Erik and Lisa, Terence’s good friends, had by then moved to Ukiah, California, to join a Buddhist community known as the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, founded by Lisa’s longtime teacher, Hsuan Hua. (Lisa, my first real girlfriend, had been following her Buddhist practice since before the two of us were briefly together in 1969.) John, meanwhile, had moved to the nearby town of Willits. Eric and Lisa weren’t in touch with him, but they knew the woman he was living with, a poet; through her they set up a time when Sheila and I could say hello to John at a local coffee shop when we passed through. He had no job; he lived off a California welfare program that gave aid to the totally disabled, which sadly he’d become. He could no more have supported himself with a job than the sun could rise in the West; it was not within the realm of possibility.

The sight of him shocked me. As odd and eccentric as John had always been, he was also brilliant, and I had learned much from him in those early days, especially during our hash-fueled, late-night conversations in Boulder. I had loved him and looked up to him. The staring creature across the table from me in the coffee house, shrunken into a shabby woolen coat, was a shadow of the friend I had known. He had lived a hard life, and it had taken its toll. Bouts of homelessness, serious abuse of alcohol and meth, all had left their mark. His sallow skin was grizzled and pockmarked, his meth-rotten teeth stained with tobacco, his eyes rheumy; he was the very picture of a man caught in a long spiral toward dissolution and death.

Our conversation was disjointed and rambling. His attention wandered, and he did not seem able to follow the thread. Only once did he brighten momentarily, the old twinkle returning to his eyes when he described his encounter with a fairy back in the woods near where he was living in a kind of cave. His spirit and passion had burned so brightly, his quick mind and amazing ideas, his kindness and humor, his freely shared knowledge of the esoteric and arcane; all of it had meant so much to me as a curious young man with an affinity for the peculiar. Now all of that was gone. The wizard’s wand had lost its charge long ago. He was now a pathetic derelict, poisoned by drugs, tormented by delusions and hallucinations, his head filled with voices and visions of fairies. It made me want to cry.

It was the last time we spoke. He was Terence’s age at the time, about thirty-six, though he looked seventy. We fell out of touch again for decades, and I assumed he had died at some point. I was surprised when Erik contacted me in 2005 to say that John had shown up unexpectedly at the office where he worked, and that since then the two of them had occasionally gotten together for lunch. Erik, John’s only link to his former friends, gave me his P.O. box number. Lisa had made it quite clear that she wanted no contact with him, and he had honored her wish.

I sent John a long letter in 2006, a rambling recap full of reminiscences, but we never communicated after that. He died a few years later outside the rotting welfare motel in Willits where he’d been living alone. Someone found him naked in the motel parking lot, draped over the hood of a car. It may have been an overdose, or poor John’s abused body may have just given up. There will never be another John Parker. It was a dismal end for a singular soul.

Chapter 44 - The Plant Teachers: 1985

Despite all its literary associations, the year 1984 turned out to be nothing like the dystopian future we might have feared, even if we were in the darkest days of the Reagan administration. Compared to what we’ve witnessed since, that was an age of enlightenment and reason. In Canada, we were insulated to some degree from the idiocies of American politics, but that was about to change as we both reached the end of school. Sheila graduated with her nursing degree, and I managed to complete my Ph.D. Once I had completed my doctorate, the kind government of Canada, which had supported and paid for my education, let me know that my student visa was about to expire, and that I needed to clear out or become an illegal immigrant. Their message, back then at least, was, “Now that you have your education, go home and help your Third-World country, the United States.”

So I left for California in May that year to seek my fortune. I wanted to leave British Columbia; I didn’t want to leave Sheila. She was open to the idea of joining me in the States, once I’d found a gig. I didn’t know whether I was looking for a job or a postdoctoral fellowship. I was now an expert on the chemistry and pharmacology of two Amazonian hallucinogens, ayahuasca and
oo-koo-hé
. I had a newly minted thesis and several papers “submitted” to prove it. It wasn’t a lot to parlay into an entry-level position in the Silicon Valley biotech industry.

Then I heard about a possible semi-legitimate job as an MDMA chemist. At the time, MDMA, or “ecstasy” among other names, was not yet scheduled as a controlled substance—that is, it was still legal. When I arrived in California, Terence told me about a gentleman in Mendocino, an entrepreneur from Texas who was planning to establish a large-scale MDMA production operation and needed a chemist. I, with my newly minted Ph.D., was an ideal candidate, though I am not really a chemist. This information came indirectly through another friend and mentor, Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin, who is renowned in the psychedelic world as the brilliant inventor of numerous synthetic psychedelics. His important contributions to psychedelic pharmacology grew out of his chosen specialty: investigation of the structure/activity relationships of molecules related to mescaline. Over his career, he created and published on over 300 such derivatives. Sasha had kindly agreed to act as the outside examiner on my thesis, so we were in frequent contact. Though Sasha did not invent MDMA, he had learned of it through his students. After synthesizing and testing it on himself in 1976, he quickly recognized its potential therapeutic uses. By 1984, the drug had attracted the attention of underground therapists, who believed it could be used to facilitate psychotherapy. Though it was eventually scheduled, it is now being evaluated in several clinical studies for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.