Although I knew I hadn’t been in San Francisco for the pinnacle of the magic, that was okay with me. I tripped while I was around the Dead and went to the Fillmore and spent time in Golden Gate Park. I didn’t take acid with Weir that summer. To the best of my knowledge, I have never taken acid with Weir. He doesn’t actually like the stuff. It’s not his drug.
Nonetheless, by the time I got back to Wesleyan in the fall, I was pretty crazy. I didn’t chill out in San Francisco or get some vision of peace, love, and flowers. Instead, I decided to become a suicide bomber. If you put it into the context of those times, I think everybody I knew then was completely freaked out, each in his own individual way.
As a freshman, I had helped organize the Students for a Democratic Society chapter on campus. The following year, I became the first sophomore to ever be elected to the College Body Committee, a five-man student governing board much like the Politburo in the Soviet Union. As a senior, I ran for student body president.
I represented the anti-jock faction at the school. There were about seventeen candidates on the ballot, and the jocks were so fucking stupid that they thought if they listed me as number seventeen on their ballots, I would stand no chance whatsoever of winning the race. Thanks to them, when the voting ended, it turned out I had fulfilled the necessary requirements to be elected.
This was a time when everyone was big on participatory democracy, and during the next year, a group formed with the goal of completely changing the system of student government, which was not terribly representative at the time because it involved only the five members of that student governing board. So the group decided to try putting together a student legislative body and a constitution.
I kept trying to help them with this process, but they didn’t want my assistance. Meanwhile, the other students on the College Body Committee all graduated during the course of the summer, leaving me as the only member. That was when I became the de facto student body president, because everyone on campus was waiting for this spiffy new student-government constitution to be created. Actually, I became the de facto dictator of the student body.
As part of my duties, I was in charge of $600,000 of student funds. There was a group of black students on campus called the Ujamaa Society, which had formed in opposition to the Black Panthers, who were serious as shit even within themselves. In any case, the Ujamaa Society published an open letter in the Wesleyan Argus, the student newspaper, saying that if I didn’t turn over half of the student funds to them as reparations for slavery, they would kill me.
I knew a lot of these guys because they had been my friends when I first came to Wesleyan. So I went over to the Ujamaa Society shortly before their house (which had previously been where the president of the school lived) burned down and I said, “Guys, this is nuts. You’re not going to kill me.”
And one of them said, “We just want to kill what you represent.”
I said, “I want to kill what I represent. If you can help me kill that, it would be great.” We came up with a wonderful solution, which was to have a marvelous concert series that took up a fairly large chunk of the student funds. The performers included Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and a bunch of old blues guys performing on campus in free concerts. The Ujamaa Society was happy because I was helping to bring black culture to Wesleyan.
In terms of fulfilling the other duties of my office, I decided to do absolutely nothing and remain as invisible as possible. During the annual Wesleyan scavenger hunt, one of the items on the list was to get my signature, but nobody could do it because they couldn’t find me.
Like a lot of people, I had become convinced over the period from midsummer 1966 to the end of autumn 1967 that we were in something like the Age of Aquarius. I wasn’t inclined to call it that, but I truly felt like we had leapt through the transom of history into a completely new form of human life. All would now be well.
But then I started seeing increasing evidence that society was simply coming apart. It was suffering from psychedelic toxicity, because what had been a universally shared notion of God-given authority was suddenly something that only the minority believed in. Although there were quite a number of people who could be trusted with having complete self-determination, there were also an awful lot of people who couldn’t.
The harm, to the extent that I perceived it for a while, was that a fairly large number of us at Wesleyan were taking LSD in a way that caused the kind of social damage and anxiety that just about everybody was already experiencing without necessarily using LSD on a regular basis. At the time, five hundred micrograms was considered a standard trip, which is far more than I would recommend to neophytes today. I was tripping at least twice a week, generally with others. With regard to the categorical imperative, I knew exactly what it would be like if everybody did what I was doing, because on one level or another, they all were.
And so I was observing behaviors that scared me, and I concluded that something really awful was going to have to happen in order to get people to pay attention to what was now going on in this brave new world we were trying to create as we went along. In fact, that is exactly what happened. Because a year later we got Charles Manson.
In October 1967, I decided that if I did something really outrageous and horrible, it would make the cover of Newsweek. More to the point, it would cause everybody to take a hard look at where we were headed in terms of consciousness.
Back on the ranch, I had learned how to make explosives. I think I still have a copy of a remarkable little volume called The Blaster’s Handbook, a publication that taught you everything you needed to know about making your own high-yield explosives. If you happened to have a dead horse that had frozen solidly to a trail, it instructed you on where to place the charges in order to disperse the carcass.
I mixed up about twenty-five pounds of explosives and put it all into a plastic bag. Then I gathered a bunch of nuts and bolts and ball bearings and shrapnel and started wrapping them all up with duct tape, with the explosives at the core. The whole device wasn’t much bigger than about the size of two bowling balls.
My plan was to go sit in the lap of the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard and detonate this thing at noon. I didn’t tell anyone what I was going to do, but I was acting squirrelly and must have been radiating something weird, because as soon as I got in my car and drove to Cambridge, they began looking for me at Wesleyan.
By then, I had already driven to Cambridge and holed up in a friend’s apartment. All the way there, I was as calm as only a crazy person could be. It was like six o’clock in the morning when I arrived. Although I never knew this at the time, my friend must have called the authorities at Wesleyan to tell them what I was about to do. It had been obvious to one and all that I had been up to no good for a while, but I had never said a word to anyone about my plan.
At about eleven o’clock that morning, I got visited by the president of Wesleyan University, the dean of students, the campus psychologist, and one of my closest friends. I didn’t show them the explosives, but they already knew about them because I had told my friend about my plans and he had told them when they called.
They immediately snarfed me up and took me back to Connecticut, where they put me into the Institute of Living, a fancy crazy house outside of Hartford. For a couple of weeks, they fed me so much Thorazine that I went to a different part of the phylogenetic chain. I became an invertebrate. I kept begging them to stop, but in order to try to help bring myself back to sanity, I did put together a pretty elaborate model of a whaling ship while I was under the influence.
When I came out, I went right back into the student community. The whole thing was kept hush-hush, because I was kind of an important personage on campus and Wesleyan was trying hard to keep me there as somebody who was not nearly as crazy as I had been. Not many people on campus even knew about any of this. I had just disappeared for a couple of weeks and then I was back and it wasn’t much discussed.
For a long time, I didn’t want this story to be in the book, because I didn’t want to announce to the world that I nearly became America’s first suicide bomber. I am pretty sure that I would have done it. At that point, I hadn’t even taken any drugs for a while. That was part of the deal. I thought if I quit taking drugs, I would regain my feeling that the world made sense and I wouldn’t be so terrified that society was headed over the falls. Because to me, it looked like we were all rowing like crazy in the direction of the precipice. But once I stopped taking drugs, it only got worse. I was like the guy in The Scream, the painting by Edvard Munch. I felt just like that character.
It was not suicidal ideation. I didn’t want to die. Nor did I want to kill anybody. But I felt like something was going to have to happen to get everybody to stop and take a deep breath so they could see what was going on. What a waste of a life that would have been.