part0037

The semester I spent with Deborah, the fall of 1970, was one of the happiest times of my life. Even though my mother was dying, even though there were auguries of the peculiar events that would overtake us a few months later, it was a wonderful, emotionally rich time. Even now I look back on it with fondness, despite the pain I’d experience as a consequence of loving Deborah over the next seven years. But that lay in the future. At the time, our little apartment was a blissful refuge. Deborah was not emotionally complex; she really loved me, in a simple way, and I loved her back. I enjoyed introducing her to books and ideas. She was not an intellectual, had never really been exposed to any intellectual stimulation, though I discovered she was far from stupid. I treated her well, and I felt a responsibility to protect her, to keep her safe—and to keep her runaway status hidden.

Since then I have wondered about the ethics of what I did. I was motivated by compassion and love for her and, yes, probably some possessiveness. I was good to her, and she was good to me. For both of us, perhaps, our relationship was a sexual awakening. Deborah loved sex in a way that I have rarely encountered, and I was only too happy to oblige. She was “always up for it,” she told me, and we enthusiastically practiced, as often as we could manage. At that age, one seems to have endless time and energy for sex; how much that has diminished as I have aged is a bit depressing, but I suppose that is the natural order of things.

Besides making love, Deborah and I really enjoyed tripping together. There was some good mescaline around (which was probably really MDA), and what on the street was called “woodrose acid” though I don’t know if it was actually extracted from Hawaiian baby woodrose or if this was marketing hype. Whatever it was, it was excellent, and we took it a few times. And real Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds were also available, through floral shops in Hawaii. We didn’t know the proper dosage, and one sunny Saturday we each took about twenty-five seeds and headed up Boulder Canyon toward Nederland for what proved to be another psychedelic misadventure.

Hawaiian baby woodrose, Argyreia nervosa , contains lysergic acid derivatives, some of which have vasoconstrictive effects not unlike the toxic ergot alkaloids. The prudent dose is actually six to ten seeds, and no more than twelve, so we’d taken about twice that. We were soon having cardiovascular symptoms, difficulties breathing and what felt like a racing pulse. On top of that we were fully loaded, and the physical effects were making me paranoid as well as fearful. We walked into town and went into a bar, where we tried calling Hans to pick us up, but he was out. People were giving us funny looks, or so we thought. I was fairly sure we were maintaining our cool, but it was impossible to know. Worried that someone would call the cops, we headed for the highway and caught a ride as soon as we put our thumbs out. The nice folks shared a joint with us in their car, and we made it safely home.

I’d later try Hawaiian woodrose seeds on several occasions, at more reasonable doses. Doses of eight to ten ground seeds produced a smooth, long-lasting, psychedelic high, not unlike about 100 mikes of acid. At that dose nausea is mild and transient, and there are no cardiovascular effects. Surprisingly, there’s no record that the seeds were ever used traditionally as a psychedelic. There are eleven species of Argyreia native to India, and presumably they are all similarly high in alkaloids, but there is no record of their shamanic or recreational use in India’s cultures. In light of its effects, this particular psychedelic appears to be somewhat problematic, which probably explains why it has not become popular. The seeds can be legally obtained, but there are safer and more satisfying natural psychedelics out there.

While Deborah and I were enjoying our domestic bliss, I continued to take courses in anthropology as well as botany and plant physiology. Terence, still on the run in Asia, had wrapped up his butterfly hunting in Indonesia and was in Tokyo teaching English. We were corresponding more and had begun planning our trip to South America in search of the Secret. What the Secret was, however, we weren’t yet fully sure; the outlines of our quest emerged gradually. We knew it had something to do with DMT. The mystery of DMT became the siren song beckoning us to the Amazon. As I’ve described, the DMT experience is overwhelming and yet ephemeral, lasting only ten to fifteen minutes when smoked. We thought that if we could somehow remain in that “place” a little longer, we’d better understand what was going on. If we could find an orally active form of DMT that might be absorbed and eliminated more slowly, perhaps the high could be extended.

The role of certain DMT-containing admixture plants in giving ayahuasca its psychedelic kick was just beginning to be understood, thanks to papers by Ara DerMarderosian and others (1968) as well as Homer Pinkley (1969). Then we stumbled on a 1969 paper by the ethnobotanist R. E. Schultes in the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets entitled “Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen,” an account of his work in the lower Colombian Amazonas among the Bora and Witoto tribes. Both peoples used a most interesting preparation known among the Witoto as oo-koo-hé . It was prepared from the sap of various species of the genus Virola , which belong to the nutmeg family. Reports on the composition of this sap in the phytochemical literature revealed that many species contained high levels of DMT and the related compound, 5-Methoxy-DMT; both were known to be powerful hallucinogens. The sap was used as a snuff by several other tribes in the Amazon, but the oral preparations were restricted to the few tribes whose ancestral home was in the Colombian Putumayo region, near the mission town of La Chorrera, on a tributary of the Putumayo, the Río Igara Paraná. According to Schultes, the effects manifested rapidly and were strong and bizarre. Oo-koo-hé had to be the Secret!

There were intimations in the paper that the Witoto used the substance to see and speak with the “little people.” Could these be the same cartoonish elves that we had encountered smoking synthetic DMT? This was our most solid lead yet; we determined we had to go to La Chorrera and find oo-koo-hé . That exotic preparation took on the aspect of the Holy Grail, the coveted aspiration that any obsessive quest needs to justify the effort and sacrifice.

That fall, a harbinger of what awaited me at La Chorrera arrived in a few puffs of acrid smoke. I had a small amount of DMT I broke out one night, asking Deborah to handle and light the pipe, which is how we did it, one at a time, so the person getting high didn’t have to deal with the pipe, which is quite difficult when you’re deep in the state. After I’d prepared the pipe, Deborah held it to my lips, and I took three or four enormous breaths in quick succession. With that my mind exploded with the force of the primordial Big Bang! This was the strongest DMT experience I’d ever had; I was literally smeared over the entire span of cosmic space-time. I felt like the edges of my mind had expanded to the boundaries of the universe; in fact, there was no difference, the universe and I were one. I had smoked in our apartment, but I had to get outside; I could not contain the energy. I leapt to my feet and raced downstairs into the cool autumn night. I must have presented quite a spectacle as I twirled around on the front lawn, gazing up at the starry heavens and howling with ecstasy! I had to be told about that part; I was unaware of doing so at the time. I was exalted, babbling, weeping, still fully in the grips of cosmic oneness. Gradually the effect faded, and I pulled myself together and climbed the stairs. But fragmented memories of the experience lingered with me for days as I struggled to make sense of what had happened.

By this time, late September, Terence and I had made plans to meet in Vancouver. Terence was sick of Tokyo, sick of the high-density urban environment, and more than sick of teaching English. He’d saved enough to pay for a ticket back to North America. Still an international fugitive, he had luckily met a fellow traveler in Tokyo who was able to furnish him with a false Australian passport. This document allowed him to return to Canada relatively free of scrutiny, though he didn’t yet dare use it to try penetrating the belly of the beast itself. Canada was close enough. The fact that a love interest of Terence’s, Dhyanna, had planned to be in Vancouver about that time was an added incentive for him. They had last seen each other months earlier in Bali, before Terence set out on his last expedition into the outer Indonesian archipelago.

I arrived at the Vancouver airport about a day after Terence had flown in from Tokyo. His bogus passport worked quite well, but things didn’t go quite so smoothly for me. The Canadian customs officers were kind, but not disposed to let me in. They assumed I was trying to avoid the draft like so many of my contemporaries. I had very little money and no real connections in Vancouver. They weren’t buying my story that I was there to meet my brother, and kept asking: “Why can’t he come to the States to see you? Is he a draft dodger, too?” I couldn’t exactly tell them he was an international drug smuggler wanted on four continents. Instead, I stammered out some story about how he had fled the country to avoid the draft, and had found his way to Tokyo because he needed to earn some money—which was at least partly true.

I had the Vancouver phone number of the friend of the helpful Australian who had arranged the false passport for Terence. By prearrangement we had agreed that Terence would go to this person’s house and await my call so we could hook up somewhere once I’d cleared the border. The customs officials made repeated calls to the number, but no one there seemed to know of any traveler arriving from Tokyo; Terence was nowhere to be found. About the time they were getting ready to put me on a plane back to the States, someone called and said that, yes, apparently someone had arrived from Tokyo as there was a suitcase in the front hall with a Tokyo tag on it. Apparently that was good enough; the officials agreed to let me enter for a few days. Like most Canadians during the Vietnam War, they were probably sympathetic at heart to draft dodgers. I don’t know if they ever really bought my story, but it didn’t matter.

Terence by this time had secured lodging in one of the sleaziest hotels in Vancouver’s Gastown District, where I finally tracked him down. Today Gastown is a very chichi area of nightclubs and fancy restaurants; back then it was where you went if you were an alcoholic living on welfare, a heroin addict, or otherwise down on your luck. Terence didn’t have a lot of money, but I think his standards had seriously eroded during his months of travel in the jungle backwaters. Our room stank of vomit, and the floor seethed with thousands of cockroaches; waves of them would vanish back into the nooks and corners with a dry clicking sound when the lights were turned on. I didn’t relish the prospect of staying in such a place, but Terence seemed unperturbed. Besides, we had some hash; and we both agreed, with hash we could put up with anything.

It was our first face-to-face meeting since we had said goodbye in Snowmass in the waning summer of 1968; there was a lot of catching up to do. In the interim, I had graduated from high school and relocated to Aspen, the bust had gone down, Mom had gotten cancer, and we were caught up in plans for our trip to South America. The small amount of hash we had was quickly consumed, and we needed more. We walked from Gastown across the Burrard Bridge into Kitsilano, a beachfront community that was the nearest thing to an open-air drug market I’ve ever seen. Every few houses, someone was sitting on the stoop hawking hashish, cannabis, and a smorgasbord of psychedelics, calling out like carnival barkers as we strolled by. It didn’t take long to renew our supply, and we returned to the hotel.

The guy who had arranged Terence’s false passport had connections into a whole scene in Vancouver, a communal household inhabited by a colorful bunch of freaks. None of these people appeared to have jobs. They were creative types, and their chief activities seemed to be making art, making music, and partying. The pubs in Gastown made the latter easy. By law, no food was served, but a glass of beer cost twenty cents, so for two or three bucks you could drink all night and get thoroughly hammered, which we did.

After a few nights of that I was ready to leave. The customs people had made it clear that I should only stay a few days, and my time was growing short. Besides, I missed my Deborah, who was alone back in Boulder, and I had to get back for my classes. Dhyanna had surfaced about the same time, and Terence, clearly in a lustful frenzy, could hardly wait to get her alone and tear her clothes off. From the looks of her, I didn’t blame him.

In any case, our plans had been set. I had brought many of the key references on oo-koo-hé and other hallucinogens we might encounter, including psilocybin mushrooms and Banisteriopsis caapi , the vine used in ayahuasca. These went into an accordion file of reprints we intended to take on our journey. After poring over the documents, our mission became clear that La Chorrera was indeed to be our destination, and oo-koo-hé our goal. I mentioned earlier how the author William Burroughs had made virtually the same journey in 1953 in search of ayahuasca, or yagé , as it is known in the Putumayo. Burroughs had coined it “the final fix.” We admired Burrough’s work and saw his account of that trip in The Yage Letters as both a call to adventure and an augury of our own success. If a junkie could travel to the Amazon to find yagé and survive to tell the tale, surely we could do no worse. Failure was not a part of what we understood to be our destiny. It was in that filthy Vancouver hotel room that we first coined the name of our visionary band, known thereafter as the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.