Peyote, Sweet Potatoes, and LSD
My group of friends spent a lot of time at Fay Roy Baxter's house. (No, he wasn't the one Airplane referred to in the album title After Bathing at Baxter's.) Fay Roy was a man who knew how to throw a party. He loved artists and musicians, so around twenty of us would gather at his house on the weekends for dinner and conversation while he ran in and out of the kitchen joining in the chat and preparing some of the best meals I've ever tasted. Great wine, candlelight, incense, marijuana, and interesting tablemates were a given at Fay Roy's.
A gathering at his house was simply the best.
When I was there, I felt as if I'd been transported back to the salons held by Gertrude Stein. Artists told each other elegant lies and engaged in spirited arguments over the integrity of some author or other. Listening to music through the pleasant alteration of hashish, we were young enough to think that we were the first group of people to really have a handle on IT—the next level of perception in human consciousness. And we thought that all those other “poor suckers” were just plodding along in the old survival grind. Arrogance, indeed—but it was fun buying into our self-created storylines.
Along with the regular jazz musicians, macramé artists, writers, and students gathered at Baxter's, there was also a chemical engineer named Nick who worked for a big oil company. A twenty-two-year-old Brit with pink cheeks, a placid grin, an easy manner, and a Rolls Royce (an appreciation gift from his deep-pocketed employer), he'd invented the glue that adheres those plastic disks (road bumps) to street dividing lines. But industrial-strength glue was not the only powerful stuff Nick knew how to make. After loading us up with all the existing information on the subject, he gave us “homemade” LSD.
Up to that point our group's experience with psychedelics had been pretty much confined to taking peyote, which was a “natural” plant—and that had only occurred a few times. It was at Baxter's house that we'd had our first taste. Peyote (a cactus that was already well known by the desert tribes of Native America), when boiled down to a concentrate, became a vehicle for going out of our minds. Or, in a more gentle interpretation, going from one plane of reality to another (and another and another). Our first peyote experience varied from person to person, but as well as I can use words to describe my earliest psychedelic shift in consciousness, this is how I remember it.
After swallowing the bitter-tasting cactus concentrate with a chaser of water, I sat still and enjoyed the initial sensation, a very subtle tingling or vibrating. Then I became aware of a large, inner area of air that was automatically collecting in my lungs and releasing over and over, without any help or thought behind the process. It reminded me of smoking cigarettes, so I pulled a pack of Marlboros out of my purse. After marveling at the ugliness of the art design, a pathetic blatant red-and-white attempt at flashy modern packaging, I took out a cigarette and lit it, just as I'd done hundreds of times before. But this time, it seemed like a very strange thing to do. As the smoke funneled down my throat, I felt a dry heat and then an interference with the air that was already in my lungs. I put the cigarette out and didn't light up another until I'd come down, about sixteen hours later. Feeling sort of nauseous (people usually throw up at the beginning of a peyote high), I went to the toilet bowl and arranged myself in the kneeling position, but nothing happened and the nausea slowly disappeared.
Since flying off the edge of a cliff or trying to embrace a moving vehicle is not an uncommon desire for psychedelic drug participants (it's not that people become suicidal, it's just that in such a state anything seems possible), just before the six of us had ingested the drug, we'd designated one of the girls, Dana, to be our “straight” person. That was fortunate indeed, since in the middle of our high, we decided to climb a mountain that was close to Baxter's house. Before giving us the okay, Dana discreetly scanned everyone's faces, trying to determine if we were capable of comprehending the functions of simple things like doorknobs, curbs, traffic lights, and so forth.
She finally voiced her approval, and after stepping out of the house (a monumental move into another world), it took us fifteen minutes to arrive at the sidewalk. There were just so many familiar objects that had suddenly taken on new importance, new vibrancy—and each flower, each square of cement, had to be appreciated at length. Children do this. Animals do this. Most adults forget how incredibly complex and beautiful the ordinary world is, but peyote was reminding us.
As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals. Unlike the Marlboro package, it all looked as if it had been perfectly designed.
It and I became this.
This and them became us.
It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process. If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded. Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was all just energy, exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.
We returned to relax at Baxter's house for a while, and waited until we got to a point where we could shift in and out of the various levels of phenomena. Then we decided to head back out to attend some other parties. On the way to the car, as I passed through the kitchen to go to the front door, I noticed a fat sweet potato on the ledge by the sink. I picked it up and watched it radiate. Yup, I could see a kind of living force in the usually dull-brownish appearance of that ordinary vegetable. It felt warm, as if the detachment from its ground home had done nothing to drain its own energy. I liked the feel of it in the palm of my hand, and even though I knew it was a thing separate from my body, it became an extension of me, like my arm or foot.
I took it with me to the various parties; I damn near introduced it a couple of times. But because many of our friends were moving in the same direction as far as the acceptance of unusual conduct, no one was particularly surprised about the inclusion of a sweet potato in the evening's guest lists. As a matter of fact, a few people asked if they could look at it for a while, and I'd watch as they sat in a chair and studied it. Perhaps they'd ingested some kind of chemical themselves that made them potato-friendly.
When I started to return to a narrower consciousness, my body felt puffy, as if my insides were too big for my skin. My nervous system was alert but worn out at the same time—a polarized condition that I balanced by eating some freshly baked bread and drinking two glasses of wine. All in all, it was a highly pleasant experience. Throughout the day, no one had experienced a freak-out or hyperventilation or any other symptom of chemical imbalance, so that ingestion at Baxter's turned out to be a perfect excursion into alternative planes of observation.
I've since learned that, like mutating viruses, psychedelic drugs such as peyote or LSD seem to match their performance to an individual's makeup. The risk varies depending on a person's emotional, physical, and spiritual state. For that reason or perhaps for some other, what a person experienced last week might not necessarily be what he or she will experience next month. Unfortunately, some people have taken acid either alone or in a situation where their vulnerable aspects were triggered, and the resulting hellish hallucinations took them off a rooftop—or to the nuthouse. In short, psychedelics can offer a spiritual gift or issue a death sentence.
Aren't you glad there are extremist human guinea pigs like me who've already performed the nuts-and-bolts experimentation?