Chapter 14 - Cannabis: 1966

The fall of 1965 marked a transition for me as well. As a freshman at Paonia High School, I was once again sharing the halls with the older guys who had harassed me in eighth grade, but they left me alone. My friendship with Richard had survived despite his half-hearted alliance back then with my former tormentors. It wasn’t until the spring that I actually started hanging out with those guys, some of whom were destined to become my partners in mischief well into the future. Madeline remained my closest friend, both of us too bookish and nerdy to fit in the other cliques, which worked out well. We didn’t want to be part of those circles any more than they wanted us.

While Terence was starting his first semester at Berkeley constructing his intellectual foundations, I was stuck there in Paonia, a stranger in a strange land—an introverted “extra-environmental” in my sweet and dearly loathed hometown. Paonia was, and is, a nice little community. It never had more than 1,500 residents, and most lived on the outlying mesas. At times I’ve toyed with the idea of moving back, only to realize the dream was impractical. During high school, my attitude was less sentimental. I hated the place and wanted nothing more than to escape. I was insanely jealous of Terence for pulling that off, and I thought I deserved no less. Many of my friends felt the same, though not everyone made it out. Our nicknames for Paonia—“Peyote” or sometimes “Pissonya”—expressed our contempt. Tolkien’s popular Lord of the Rings trilogy provided us with another epithet: Mordor, as in the accursed land of shadows and home to evil sorcerer Sauron. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but we were teenagers and felt our angst palpably.

Like it or not, Paonia was where I’d remain for the time being, and I still had many significant experiences there, being fifteen and eager for novelty and mischief. I also had Terence egging me on from a distance, always ready to lead me into the Next Big Thing.

That school year marked the true start of my pharmacological education, which has been ongoing ever since. The scare movies I’d seen in junior high were supposed to convince us that smoking marijuana even once would lead to addiction, madness, and promiscuity (we wished!). Like any narcotic, that propaganda worked only so long and then began breaking down. As for the morality tales about big-city degenerates getting hooked on heroin, those were simply irrelevant. In fact, I had no interest in “drugs” in junior high, but that had begun to change. Timothy Leary was active on the national stage, and that spring I read The Doors of Perception . Continuing its campaign either to corrupt or educate America’s youth, Life had published its famous LSD cover story on March 25, 1966, entitled “The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug that Got Out of Control.” You had to hand it to Life , even if its editors were motivated by nothing but the most craven sensationalism. While their LSD feature was more alarmist than their landmark article on magic mushrooms in 1957, it probably led millions of otherwise wholesome young Americans down the primrose path to psychedelic perdition. It certainly got my attention.

By that summer I was quite aware of cannabis and psychedelics. Thanks to Terence and my own inherent curiosity, I was interested in giving pot and LSD a try, if either could have been had in Paonia. Like most small-town kids, my first real drug trip would be courtesy of that dreary nerve poison, alcohol. I was hanging out with those new friends who were all a year ahead of me in school. We didn’t do much on the weekends except “cruise” Grand Avenue, all three blocks of it, just slowly driving from one end of it to the other, hoping to attract the attention of girls (not that there were any we could see). We varied the routine by taking off for the city park, often in the company of a guitar or two. We were part of a procession of similarly bored teenagers, in our town and towns across the country, without much else to do.

Despite being underage, we occasionally scored some 3.2 beer, the only kind sold in town. The watery stuff made me a little woozy but had little effect beyond that. So when my friend Tom got his hands on two pints of blackberry brandy just in time for the Fourth of July dance at the high school, we knew we were in for a good time. Tom was older and more sophisticated than I was; I looked up to him. He was good-looking, played a mean guitar, owned a really cool 1948 Plymouth coupe, and knew how to charm girls, or at least I thought he did; he certainly gave the impression of being wise in the ways of love. As we drove to the dance in Tom’s black coupe, our blackberry brandy in the glove compartment, I was up for anything, but the night didn’t go as planned.

I drank three-quarters of one bottle within the first hour, sitting in Tom’s car. I was feeling pretty good, brave and dashing, and had completely lost my usual shyness as I headed for the gym, hoping to pick up a girl, or at least talk to one. I don’t remember exactly what transpired, or what I said or did, but later I learned I’d been pretty obnoxious; in fact, I had acted like a complete jerk. After thoroughly insulting several girls, I was asked to leave. And I did, or rather, Tom steered me to the car, where we drank more, and then he drove me home despite my vehement objections. I sat in my bedroom for a while, furious at him for spoiling my fun, and then decided to return to the dance and set out reeling down the street. I arrived to find Tom was nowhere to be seen. My condition soon attracted the notice of the local cop, who took me home in the patrol car. Somewhat sobered and intimidated, I made it to my room and fell into a fitful sleep. The next day the cop dropped by and talked to my father, who wasn’t too upset; he’d probably done similar things as a teenager. Such was the coming of age for many a small-town boy back in the day.

I took my first puff of cannabis about five days after that misadventure. Terence had come home for a few weeks after his first year at Berkeley, along with his new cute girlfriend, who I’ll call Elaine. Terence was smitten with her, and it was easy to see why. Elaine was a pretty girl, from upstate New York, if I recall. The fact that she was Jewish may have added to her attraction for Terence; he might have hoped our Catholic parents would be shocked at this liaison, but if so they didn’t let on. Anyway, the two arrived with a lid of what was probably terrible weed and a couple of capsules of acid. Terence solemnly informed me that each contained “a thousand mikes”—1,000 micrograms, an enormous dose. If so, the LSD must have been very pure, because the two large gelatin caps appeared to be empty. I just got to look at them once, and I don’t know if they took them on their visit.

The cannabis was a different story. Terence kept it in a little bottle in a silken Chinese pouch, together with a tiny pipe. One lazy afternoon they invited me to stroll across the street to the park, where we spread out one of Mom’s patchwork quilts beneath a big tree, unpacked some soft drinks and sandwiches, and proceeded to toke up, right there in plain sight. Terence and Elaine didn’t seem too concerned, when I wondered aloud about smoking the “stuff” in public. In fact there were few people in the park that day, and nobody was paying attention. Terence said no one would know what we were doing anyway, and he was apparently right. We shared a pipe or two; nothing happened. I didn’t feel a thing, though the “grass” tasted good going down. But I really didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, and the result was disappointing.

It took perhaps three more sessions there under the trees before I finally got it. When I finally did learn what it was to be stoned—and I think it is a learned state—suddenly everything seemed hilarious. When I closed my eyes and lay back in the sunshine, a flurry of geometric patterns flooded my closed lids; when I opened them and examined the blanket, the texture of the weave was revealed in almost microscopic detail, and I could have scrutinized it for hours. The abstract patterns on one of the stitched-together swatches appeared like writing in an alien language. Thought became fluid, spontaneous. Peculiar ideas, those patterns behind the eyes, sensual and emotional impressions flowed together in a cascading rush of images, memories, puns, snatches of remembered songs, faces of friends—and all of it happening in a circus-like atmosphere of joyousness and hilarity. I thought I must be making a spectacle of myself and actually came to my senses for a moment. But nothing was happening; we were simply three people sitting quietly on a blanket in the park.

This was great! The cannabis high was so much better than the alcohol-fueled debacle of a few days before. I couldn’t believe how crude alcohol intoxication was in comparison. I could handle this. And it was so much more interesting. There was actual content to this experience, interesting ideas and thought fragments, and these in turn sparked scintillating conversation. I immediately understood: this was my drug.

Following my initiation, Terence returned to Berkeley for his second year in the Tussman program. I don’t remember much about that fall except that I missed my brother and the glamorous life he was living out on the coast. I chafed at the idea of being imprisoned in town. What’s more, I had no dope, no cannabis to salve my angst, and no one to really talk to except Madeline, Richard, and the new friends I’d grown closer to over the summer. I welcomed their company, but I couldn’t share ideas with them in the way I could with Terence.

What my friends and I did share was the goal of scoring some weed, which rumor had we could find in Aspen if we asked the right people. Aspen was already notorious as a place for beatniks and weirdos, a bohemian enclave and a playground of the decadent rich. The only person I knew in Aspen who might be able to help was a guy from Paonia who had moved to Aspen to work in construction. We took a trip there one weekend in Tom’s coupe and found him living in a boardinghouse along with a number of other dirty, longhaired people—actual hippies! I was delighted to encounter such kindred spirits just down the road. The feeling was not mutual. They didn’t want to be bothered by some snotnosed kids from home, let alone supply them with drugs. We returned empty-handed and had only weak beer to console us.

Over the summer, drugs had emerged as a bone of contention between Terence and our parents, especially our father. Along with the radical political views, the hirsute appearance, the strange clothing—in other words, the appurtenances of the hippie persona that Terence was adopting—drug use was beyond the pale. All drugs were “garbage” in our father’s view, the worst possible thing one could be into; there was simply no way the topic could be rationally discussed.

We both found this attitude rather puzzling; after all, Mom and Dad were not prudes. They enjoyed drinking and had lived rather wildly as young adults in California before and during the war. But in our father’s mind, alcohol was not a drug; its effects were on the muscles, in his thinking, and not the brain. He viewed drinking as essentially benign, a thing one did recreationally to relax in social situations. All drugs, on the other hand, he equated to heroin—all were addictive, destructive, and evil. Part of his attitude toward drugs resulted from an experience he had during the war (so he said). On a bombing mission over Germany, one of his crewmates had been badly injured by flak shrapnel, but when his buddies broke open the medical kit to give him a shot for his terrible pain, they found that, as Dad said, “Some hophead had stolen the morphine.”

After an incident like that, one could see why he didn’t have much sympathy for drug addicts, but that was irrelevant; we weren’t talking about addictive drugs. To him it didn’t matter. There was no difference between cannabis, LSD, or heroin; all were intrinsically bad. Like many others, he made the mistake of seeing evil as a moral quality imbued in the substances, not a product of how they were used. All of this, of course, was more grist for the ongoing contentious conversations between Terence and our father. Terence was in rebellion against everything our parents’ generation stood for, and drugs were a hot-button issue, another excuse for screaming matches.

Terence didn’t come home for Christmas in 1966. He remained in Berkeley, where my mother and I visited him around the new year. He was living in a kind of scholar’s retreat, a tiny loft in a broken-down Victorian house on Tunnel Road. It was a great place, a kind of aerie surrounded by a walled garden, far from the chaotic scene closer to the university. By then Terence was well into the Tussman program and had accumulated the core of his first library, the one destroyed by fire in 1970. He was reading extensively in many esoteric subjects, including alchemy, Eastern philosophy, and black magic, as well as Jung, Eliade, shamanism, drug literature, and—a new discovery—Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was getting a lot of press at the time, not all of it conducive to being regarded as a serious thinker. As Terence later put it, McLuhan wanted to cultivate a new sophistication about the media, only to see the media parody him to death. Terence and I delved more deeply into McLuhan’s work than most did; I believe he had some rather amazing insights that have stood the test of time. Terence’s eclectic reading was totally in keeping with Tussman’s insistence that his students explore whatever piqued their interest. This came quite naturally to Terence.

For some reason—inexplicably, given the edgy relations between Terence and our father—I was permitted to go to California and stay with my brother right after Christmas. Mom joined us about a week later. Elaine had gone home for the holidays, so Terence stayed at her apartment while my mother and I shared his. But for a glorious week before that, I stayed with Terence, bedding down on a mattress on the floor. I didn’t mind that at all. We were by then full co-conspirators, and I relished any chance to hang with him and soak up the rich ideas we exchanged as the long hours of gloomy twilight dissolved into the evenings and the shadows settled into the corners of our little refuge.

Terence had by this time discovered something else that made those evenings together especially pleasurable: hashish! It was my first introduction to hashish, and it was much stronger and far more interesting than the weak cannabis he had brought out the previous summer. We smoked it in a metal water pipe with a tiny bowl and a curved stem, the kind that you could buy in Chinatown (and still can). We passed many an hour in stoned conversations about everything under the sun, passing the pipe and savoring each other’s company. We had always been kindred spirits, it seemed, but until then we hadn’t really understood that. I cherish the memories of those hours to this day, though time has left only fragments, not a full recollection.

I do remember one important event, however, and that was when Terence persuaded Mom to try smoking hashish. She had been more open-minded about the drug issue than our father, though she had kept very quiet during the arguments of the previous summer. But the topic was in the air, especially there in the Bay Area with the hippie scene in full flower. A couple of years earlier, I’d overheard my mother and two of her friends talking about LSD: It was a drug, she had read, that could teach you about yourself; you might learn you were capable of murder, or that you had unsuspected knowledge and insights. That comment struck me as odd at the time, but it spoke to the fact that my mother was at least a bit open to the idea that these substances were not entirely bad.

So I was surprised, but not too surprised, when Terence gave her the pitch. He made the point that cannabis was really not so bad and indeed there were things you could learn from it. She agreed to try it, and he loaded the pipe and we shared it with her. The results weren’t definitive. Mom was so wracked with guilt, and so afraid of how furious Dad would be if he ever found out she’d actually gotten stoned with her sons, she couldn’t really let herself go and enjoy the experience. She didn’t say much about it afterwards except that she had noticed an intensification of colors. And that was about it. It’s a pity, really. Had we all been able to sit down and get stoned together, it could have done much to heal the strains in our family. But it was not fated to happen, and as a result the tensions over the issue continued for years to come.