part0013

Terence Kemp McKenna emerged from his mother’s womb on November 16, 1946. It was the end of a difficult pregnancy. My twin cousins assure me that my brother was a challenge from an early age and quickly earned the appellation “Terrible Terry.” Many infants and toddlers try the patience of their parents, but Terence, a “temperamental” child in modern parlance, apparently pushed ours to the limit. Fortunately, Mom had her sisters to help her through these trying episodes. Their support throughout our childhood was surely a major reason she remained as sane as she did. In fact, our mother was wise and compassionate, and if anything too tolerant. I know we hurt her, profoundly and deeply, many times; and many times in the four decades since her death I have wanted to apologize. I have to believe she knew we loved her despite it all. I suppose this lament is no different from that of any mother’s son. How many of us really honor and appreciate our mothers the way we should? Yet they always forgive us. In my heart, I believe our mother knew we loved her and has forgiven us.

Some time after Terry was born, the little family moved out of our mother’s childhood home to an upstairs apartment in a house near the Bross Hotel (then as now Paonia’s only hotel). They had just settled into their newly built home at Fourth and Orchard when I arrived, on a cold December day in 1950, a week before Christmas. I have no idea if I was “planned” or not, but whatever the case, when I joined the family my parents were delighted. Compared to Terry, I was a model of mellowness, or what some would call a “placid” baby. Though I’m still evenly tempered, certain critics, notably my wife, tell me I’m not as laid back as I like to pretend. Whatever. Compared to Terry, raising me was easy for my parents—at least early on.

Terence was a month past his fourth birthday when I showed up. Until then, he’d been the master of his universe, getting all the attention he craved. Like most any child, he perceived my arrival as a threat to his hegemony, which it was, and for years his primary agenda would be to neutralize this threat by any means. Had I been the elder sibling when he burst into my sweet scene in all his mewling, puking, disgusting glory, I’m sure I would have done the same. I dare say this was probably normal sibling behavior, at least in American society in the fifties. The difference was that Terry, being smart and creative, took brotherly terrorism to some rather interesting places. I see this as a very good reason not to have more than one child, or, if you do, to time them closer together or much farther apart. Four years strike me as exactly the wrong spacing.

There’s another factor that complicates my attempt at an early psychological portrait of Terence. At some point shortly before I was born, when Terence was three or four, there was an incident that drove a wedge between him and our father, changing their relationship forever. Indeed, the moment may have negatively affected Terence’s relationships until the end of his life. According to what Terence told me decades later, he and a friend were playing in a sandbox; being curious, and being boys, they began playing with each other’s genitals, and, somehow, handling each other’s shit. From a modern perspective, this behavior would be considered totally within the bounds of normality for kids that age, and most parents today would laugh it off. But when our dad encountered the scene he apparently freaked out. All his repressed fears about homosexuality, and sexuality in general, instilled in him as a Catholic child, bubbled up in a blind rage, and he spanked Terence rather badly for this transgression. In a way, he was exorcising his own demons from these forbidden realms; the outburst might have been directed at his son, but I am sure it rose out of his own fears.

Terence could not have understood that; all he knew was that his dad had suddenly turned on him in a vicious and painful way and beaten the living daylights out of him. His response, understandably, was one of rage and resentment. He couldn’t really show his extreme anger without risk of another beating; but the resentment soaked in, and lingered forever.

“That was it,” Terence said when he told me the story. “That was it between us.” He slammed an emotional door on our father that was never to be reopened, or so I believe; in that one instant, he resolved to protect himself at any cost, to never show vulnerability, and to put his own (perceived) self-interests front and center at all times. It would seem that, in his own mind, his mistreatment justified his extreme hostility over the years toward our parents, especially our father, and also toward me. As Terence matured he got better at relationships, but they were never easy for him. He told me this story with great vehemence and as if it had happened yesterday. I am left wondering if this experience had resulted in a loss of some essential willingness to trust in others. The story explained my experience of an emotional firewall that I often encountered at the core our relationship, and what I could perceive of his relationships with others. As for me, he eventually discovered that I wasn’t just a younger, weaker brother to torture. He did express his love for me, but only after years of abuse.

I don’t remember when Terry instituted his reign of terror against me, but it must have been when I was about four or five. Terry was a very creative tormentor, and employed both physical techniques and, even deadlier, a variety of psychological techniques to good effect. For physical torture, tickling was his method of choice. It was a good choice; I was very ticklish, probably in part because I became over-sensitized to it during our torture sessions. But it worked for Terry because it didn’t leave marks, and superficially it didn’t seem “that bad” because it made me laugh; but the laughter was not voluntary or enjoyable.

Terry was bigger than me, obviously. His favorite method was to hold me down on the floor, placing a knee on my chest and using both hands to pin my arms, then using his sharpened chin to poke and prod me. This became known as the “chin-ee” method. Other techniques were applied as well, but it was the chin-ee that I hated the most. It was all good-natured fun—for Terry. I don’t think he intended to hurt me, at least not with his tickling; but the impulse was hard to resist, because I so reliably reacted in a satisfying way. On other occasions the torture was more overt and I ended up bawling a lot. Perhaps nothing about this was abnormal; siblings compete, a primate pecking order must be established, this is just what humans do. Like most big brothers, I suspect, Terry both hated and loved the little squirmy worm that I was. It was fine for him to torture me, he considered it a perquisite of being the big brother; but if anyone else threatened me, he was there to protect me.

If the physical teasing I endured was mundane and run-of-the-mill, the psychological teasing reached another level. Terry consistently tried to create a climate of fear based on unpredictability. His mischief had to be done under the radar, of course, without drawing my parents’ attention. My reality was one of whispered innuendoes and muttered threats about what would happen the instant they turned their backs: dire consequences awaited me if I failed to toe the line. What was the line? Well, it was nothing less than total subjugation. Often, Terry would thrust his face into mine and rasp, in a low whisper, while staring at me with a hypnotic gaze: “Never oppose my will. Never, ever oppose my will!” I hated this and didn’t react submissively. On the occasions when I dared to express actual defiance, however, his responses got physical, and more often than not I’d end up crying.

I was not always the innocent victim, of course, though I got very skilled at playing one. Like many little brothers before me, I developed offensive countermeasures as well as defenses. My offensives had to be stealthy. I cultivated the art of timing. I became skilled at selecting, or creating, situations in which it appeared that Terry had done something to me, but hadn’t really (or in which I was complicit), and I’d make sure our parents noticed. While presenting a picture of angelic innocence to them, I’d telegraph Terry, via a smirk, that this was sweet revenge. Blame and sometimes punishment would then follow, all the more resented by him because it was unjustified. I knew that sooner or later there would be retribution, but I didn’t care. Knowing that I’d managed to stick it to him for a change was extremely satisfying.

What was driving Terry? By the time I showed up, his encounter with our father was in the past, but I’m sure it still stung. In what must have been a strategy for survival, he had hardened his emotional armor and adopted the “me-first” attitude that persisted well into his adult life. I don’t think he had ever harbored the hatred for our mother that he did for our father. Part of it was, he had learned to trust her as someone who would protect him from Dad—which she did many, many times. She was kind and nurturing and perhaps just a little afraid of her husband. Over the years, she often refrained from telling him about the horrible things “the boys” had been up to in his absence, perhaps fearing he’d overreact in some regrettable way that could not easily be undone. To be fair, our father physically punished us only on the rarest of occasions that even today some parents might view as deserving such a response. Those instances tended to occur on Friday nights after Dad returned from a hard week on the road, only to find we’d been busy in his absence driving our mother crazy. That’s when the belt would come off and we’d get a thrashing. I must also add that never once did I see our father lay a hand on our mother in anger. In our family, that was a line that was never crossed.

Having re-read what I’ve written above, I have to ask myself: are these things I should share with the world? Do others really need to know the intimate details of our early lives? If I am to tell an honest tale, the answer is yes. We grew up in small-town Leave It to Beaver , Father Knows Best America. But there was a darkness hidden beneath that portrayal of middle-class life, as many others who grew up in that era are surely aware. Certain unconscious emotions erupted all the more violently when, in the sixties, the layer of “niceness” was ripped away to reveal the wounds still festering underneath.

So yeah, a lot about that era was ugly and unacknowledged at the time, in our family, and perhaps in most families. Each had its dark secrets, and ours were not particularly that horrible by comparison. Just so I don’t give the wrong impression, let me stress that much—much—about our life together was very good indeed, even if as kids we didn’t always realize it. I know our parents loved us. They did the best they could in raising two difficult and recalcitrant boys. It took decades, but Terence eventually overcame much of his animosity toward our father. He certainly found a kind of love for our mother, which I saw most vividly in the kindness and solicitude he showed her when years later she developed cancer. As we grew up and overcame our sibling rivalries, we developed a mutual sense of affection and respect, and I’m grateful for that. Later, our closeness allowed us to experience some of the strangest adventures two brothers have ever shared. Had we not grown up in the twisted climate of the fifties, so rife with angst and neuroticism, we might never have forged the strong bonds that became the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

What are your earliest childhood memories? How far back can you cast your mind? Recollecting childhood can be a tricky exercise, because the earliest memories are pre-linguistic; there is no cognitive framework within which they can be placed. Mine are mostly gestalt impressions: my father’s rough, stubbly cheek when he kissed me, contrasted with my mother’s smooth skin when she held me to her breast (though I’m pretty sure I was never actually breastfed—it just wasn’t what “modern” mothers did in those days, and Mom wanted to be modern). The eyes, the breath, the smell of various adults; the icy sting on my face on a crisp, cold morning, or the warm caress of sunshine on a summer afternoon. These vague recollections are entirely sensual and without context. It’s been said that we can’t recall anything earlier than about the age of three or four; others dispute this and assert that one can have memories from a time as early as two—mostly visual snapshots without narrative or structure. Based on my own vague memories, I’d have to go with the latter hypothesis. A recent Harvard study suggests that recalling childhood memories can make one more helpful and charitable, increasing “prosocial” behavior tied to recollections of a time when things were morally clear and pure. Based on my own experiences, I take that with a grain of salt. I have no doubt that childhood memories can stick with one throughout life. If they are good memories, they have a positive influence; if they are bad—memories of trauma, for example—they can be quite profound and even limiting. In my familial universe, Terence’s memories of the sandbox incident would be Exhibit A.

Among the most curious of my earliest remembrances are those that may not be real. I mentioned that our parents left their apartment and moved into their new home shortly before my birth. And yet I have a vague memory of Terence pushing me down those apartment stairs. It’s certainly a traumatic memory, but did it really happen? I have no idea. Maybe it happened to someone else and I falsely remember the experience as mine. Or perhaps I dreamt it. I have a similar recollection of my mother leaving me in her Chevy with the motor running outside her father’s house when I was three or even younger. Though I do believe she actually did this—foolishly, in that era before car seats and seat belts—my apparent memory of the event may actually have been a dream. I “remember” the car rolling slowly down the street a short way until it halted against a curb, my mother by then standing beside it in hysterics. But I’m not sure that part actually happened. To this day I sometimes dream I’m driving in a car, then look down to see there’s no steering wheel, or the steering wheel has come loose in my hands. The issue? Probably losing control, my wife would say. My “memory” of being trapped in the runaway Chevy was perhaps just an early instance of grappling with that in my sleep.

My earliest reliable memories date from when I was four. By then, Terence was often at school for much of the day, giving me a welcome respite from his tortures. That comfort with solitude has persisted throughout my life. I enjoy being alone with nothing but the whisper of my thoughts. And besides, back then I wasn’t alone. I had a whole gaggle of imaginary friends, some of them as real to me as my actual friends, of which I then had few. (With no kindergarten in Paonia, my socializing didn’t really begin until first grade.) I preferred hanging out with my imaginary friends because they were always there and more interesting. Some were even animals; how cool is that? We’d cross the street to the city park or, more accurately, I’d go to the park and “manifest” them, as if they were always there, waiting to play. And play we did! I created all sorts of adventures to share with them, performing all the roles and voices. As a child I had a very active dream life. In fact I’m not sure I ever really slept in the conventional sense. Or maybe I was in a constant state of high REM sleep, always dreaming. My imaginary friends were also available in my dreams, where our little dramas often continued. It was tremendously entertaining and fun, but one sad day I dismissed them, just bade them goodbye. It was all very formal. “OK, I’m moving on, you’re not going to see me again,” I informed them, and they were quite dismayed. But it had to be done. Time to move on. I could not have been more than eight.

Though manifesting various identities or personalities may be a disorder in adults, I agree with those who view such behavior as normal in young children. A child’s personality, or what eventually becomes his or her personality, condenses and coalesces out of a multitude. When it fails to do that, then you have pathology. Reflecting on this, I have to wonder about the similarities between the consciousness of a child and the consciousness of an indigenous person. To a child, these imaginary entities are real, as real as anything in the so-called “real” world. It must be much the same for an indigenous person who inhabits a world of spirits, of human and non-human entities, where the distinctions between dreams and reality are not so clear. I do not mean to imply that an indigenous person is childish, but rather that indigenous people and children may share some traits in their mentation. What I’m speaking of is not an age-dependent characteristic; rather it’s related to a state of pre-literacy. I think that as our brains develop, and particularly as we develop literacy, the brain becomes more compartmentalized. We develop a point of view, an ego, a sense of self, but we also sacrifice a lot to acquire those things. We give up a lot for our left-brain dominance. I think we sense that loss; that’s why we like to step out of it once in a while, using psychedelics or other altered states. Psychedelics make you childlike; they can reconnect you with that primal, pre-literate, pre-cognitive state. How can this not be a good thing? More people should try it. We take ourselves, most of the time, much too seriously!