After Tim Leary went public in January 1995 with the news that he had decided to die rather than fight the prostate cancer that was metastasizing rapidly throughout his body, everyone started coming to his house in Los Angeles to party with him. Tim had always had this incredible ability to set up an energy exchange with the field around him, and being surrounded by all these beautiful, joyous young acidheads so reinvigorated him that he began looking like he was in the bloom of health.
One day I said to him, “Tim, if you don’t get on with this dying thing, people are going to say this is another one of your media hoaxes.” He laughed but it was true, and at that point I think he actually began starving himself to death.
Even at the end, Tim was steady and consistent with the path he had chosen to lead. He realized that the very public way he was staging his death was not just a medicine show with a potent purpose but also the greatest theatrical demonstration he could make to address one of the chief pathologies of American culture. He was going to tame dying, which had disappeared into hospices and emergency rooms and was considered a shameful thing to do. As I have said, to die in America was to be a loser, and it was hard to mourn a loser.
Until the very last moment, Tim was the least spiritual person I had ever known. But when God decides to manifest himself in a human being in some major way, he always chooses someone who is completely undeserving of it in the human sense of the term.
Ram Dass and I were both at the house on the day Tim saw his soul for the first time. I had come to Los Angeles to visit Tim about ten days before he died, and Ram Dass just happened to be there as well. Timmy was pretty reduced, but he was still able to go out to clubs with me at night. We were both down at the Bar Marmont at three in the morning, still charming the ladies.
That day in the house, Tim, Ram Dass, and I were sitting at a round table in the garden. Tim was between us. At one point, he put his head down on the table and went to sleep. Ram Dass and I continued a marvelous metaphysical ramble over his head.
Then Tim woke up, sat up abruptly, and looked back and forth at both of us with something new in his eyes. It actually reminded me of what had happened when my father had been dying and was revived. He’d had exactly that same look on his face when he’d said, “John Perry, are you still alive?”
With Tim, it was as if the infinite black hole of anti-Catholic contempt that I had always seen in his eyes had suddenly been filled with spirit. I looked at Ram Dass, and I said, “Did you see that?” And he said, “Yes, I’ve never seen it before.”
This was a really big moment for Tim, because up to this point his whole faith had been in science, and the only immortality he could imagine would be the consequence of some extremely unlikely biological breakthrough that would be achieved in the unimaginable future. Tim had decided a while back that when he died, he would have his head sliced off and cryogenically frozen. This wasn’t something you can wait long after death to do, and so the equipment was already there in his house.
In order to make light of the grisly procedures that all this entailed, Tim’s people had draped a lot of ghoulish frippery on the equipment. That night, we were sitting around the nitrous tank and Timmy said, “Do you suppose that I don’t have to cut my head off and freeze it?” And I said, “Of course not. What are they going to do to you if you don’t? Kill you? Furthermore, I recommend that you don’t, because this great drama you are conducting on domesticating death and restoring it to its proper place in society will be diminished by what the media will do with you having your head frozen. My recommendation is that you skip the whole thing and hope for the best on the other side.”
Tim said, “You’re right. I don’t have to do that, do I?” And I said, “No, you don’t.” Tim said, “So it really doesn’t matter what gets done with my body.” And I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
I think because Tim had actually caught a glimpse of the spirit, he had been given the opportunity to look over the edge and feel some sense of possibility and solace that immortality was there in the old-fashioned way. The next day, when the people from CryoCare, who were an incredible bunch of bastards, came to remove their equipment at Tim’s behest, it was clear that some of them regarded me as his murderer.
At one point, Dan Aykroyd, who was a part owner of the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, offered Tim and the rest of us the use of the club for an afternoon and part of the evening. To demonstrate solidarity with Tim, who was by then wheelchair bound, we had all rented wheelchairs so the twenty-five of us could also go there on wheels, thereby causing no lack of consternation.
After that wonderful experience, I was driving Tim and two girls back home in my rented Mustang convertible. A song was blasting from the speakers, and both girls stood up in the back seat and began doing this shoop-shoop thing to the music like a pair of prom queens from hell.
The air was like a negligee, and the music was perfect. People were honking their horns in approval. It was one of those great life-affirming moments, and Timmy put up his hand to give me a high five. As I looked at his hand, I saw these flashing lights in the rearview mirror and I thought, “Oh no, here comes Timothy Leary’s last bust.” Because we were packing. Big-time.
Fully expecting that we’d all be arrested, I pulled over right in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. This surfer cop with blow-dried hair came over to us from his squad car. Before he had a chance to say anything, I said, “Officer, I know what we were doing was wrong but you see, my friend here is dying and we were just trying to show him a good time.”
Tim looked at the cop and nodded with this sheepish smile on his face like, “Yeah, it’s true. I’ve just been caught at dying.” Never in his life had the cop had someone admit to him that they were dying. He didn’t even know who Tim was. Just an old dying guy. But an honest old dying guy.
The cop said, “I’d be lying if I said that what you guys were doing didn’t look like fun. But just because he’s dying doesn’t mean you girls have to endanger your lives. So sit back down and buckle up your seat belts.”
One of the sweetest things that Tim ever said to me was that when he left this world, the last thing he wanted to see was my face, and I continue to regret that I was not there when he died on May 31, 1996. However, I do have a wonderful video of Tim rising up out of the coma, looking around at a room filled with people who loved him, smiling, and saying, “Why not? Why not? Why not?” And then he lay back down and died.
Since then, I have made it my mission to take certain portions of Tim’s message and incorporate them into my own life by doing what I can with them. I still feel like it’s my job to do the dirty work of being the apostle. In my view, this is important work. It’s all about giving permission by making an example of your own life. That gives permission.
It’s also extremely complicated because much of what Tim’s life consisted of was behavior that I would never want anyone to emulate, least of all me. He was a terrible son, he was a terrible husband, and he was a terrible father. He spread false mythology and propaganda about LSD that to this day I am still working on correcting. And yet, he probably introduced more people to the spiritual dimension than anyone since Jesus Christ.
Someone who didn’t know Tim very well who came to his funeral in Los Angeles said to me, “The way you’re all going on about this guy, you would have thought he had freed the slaves.” And I said, “That’s exactly what he did.”