Another afternoon around this time, I ventured over to Oliver’s place on City Island and found him sitting in the shade of his front porch, deeply engrossed in Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, a pile of folders by his side. He’d been aimlessly leafing through his files the previous night, he told me (rising from the Darwinian loam), and found something he wanted to show me. An unpublished manuscript from his California days, during the early sixties: a celebration of his motorcycle passion.
He handed it to me, it was dedicated to Thom Gunn, and as he watched me scanning the piece’s epigraph (from T. E. Lawrence’s “The Road”), he recited the lines by heart:
A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it
is better than all the riding animals on earth,
because of its logical extension of our faculties,
and the hint, the provocation, to excess …
Whereupon (turning the page) his own typescript launched out:
The Road is straight and white. My shadow gesturing, sweeps before me. I sing aloud in the brilliant sun, but the wind steals my sound before I can hear it. I sit up, in state, upon my saddle. I lie flat and hug the bulbous tank. I swerve inanely to and fro. The bike swings easily with my hips, translating feeling into motion.
Rediscovering the piece himself the evening before had put him in a nostalgic frame of mind. “When I came down to LA, at first I missed the communal outings with my regular cycling mates over the bridge and up Mount Tam, through the fogbanks and out to Stimson Beach. In LA, I reverted to my solo adventures, quitting work Friday evening, saddling up, and heading out into the desert—Death Valley, the Mojave, not infrequently I’d even ride through the night out to the Grand Canyon. Huddling down flat against the tank I could achieve speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour, at which point, racing after the cycloptic light beam piercing the empty road ahead, one began to experience all sorts of curious spatial reversals and illusions, though that might just have been the drugs kicking in. I’d spend Saturday hiking in the canyon and then race back on Sunday afternoon, returning in time for work Monday morning.”
Ah, youth. (Another time he told me of one weekend jaunt, entirely hepped up on speed, all the way up to Crater Lake in Oregon, where he’d circled the lake and then just aimed straight back down, accomplishing the journey of close to 1,500 miles without stopping once except for gasoline.)
“I needed the landscape of travel,” he said. “Strange, in those days I had always to be off, in continual external flight. Now, rather, I am so inner-directed.” The bike passion was tied, too, to that other one, for landscape photography: He took thousands of photos, developing them himself in various makeshift darkrooms, often in otherwise abandoned janitorial closets at the hospital. He wished he could show me some of the resulting images, he still prized them in his mind’s eye, though alas, typically, the suitcase containing his photo archive (both prints and negatives) had gotten lost or misplaced—or who knows what—somewhere along the way amid his many moves. He still harbored the vague hope it might resurface someday.
Speaking of photos, though, he reached into his pile, stammering (was he blushing?), he had come upon a thin folder of shots of himself posing at the peak of his muscle-building days. Handing the folder to me, he seemed proud and abashed in equal measure. And they were something! Grade-A beefcake: Charlie Atlas in a black Speedo, with bulging thighs, as prized from below. “By my LA days, as you can see, I’d become a frail calcareous creature dangerously oversheathed with muscle.”
Whereupon he launched into reminiscences about his months of living in a little apartment in Venice, right alongside Muscle Beach, spending mornings at Gold’s Gym and evenings among the weight lifters in the outdoor cages by the sand, training for his successful siege on the California State heavy-weight-lifting record (600 pounds from a full squat).1
He had many friends there, including several Olympic champions, he says, pretty much all of them oblivious of one another’s ulterior lives, though there was one fellow in particular, clearly a remarkable mathematician, who died tragically young.
And it was in this context that he himself ever so gingerly broached the topic of his own great chaste love from this period, the young working-class sailor from out of Minnesota named Mel to whom both Gunn and Rodman had previously alluded.
They’d met, Oliver explained, in San Francisco, and initially Oliver had “fancied molding and educating the boy, who in turn I think himself fancied the prospect.” Their relationship, Oliver said, was not so much sexual as “increasingly daring—riding motorcycles farther and farther, diving deeper and deeper, climbing higher and higher,” and presently Mel joined him in LA, moving into Oliver’s studio apartment and getting a job in a nearby carpet factory. They’d share breakfast and head off to their own days of work. Mel was confused about his sexuality, as wracked with Catholic shame as Oliver had been larded in Jewish guilt. But he loved wrestling, and Oliver loved wrestling with him. After which Mel (“I loved that his name meant ‘honey’ in Latin”) loved having his back massaged, and Oliver would sit astride him, loving doing so, kneading his broad shoulders, approaching the edge but never going over the brink of orgasm, until one late afternoon (and this part he only imparted to me many years later) he did accidentally climax, spurting all over the young man’s back. Mel stiffened, and without a word got up and took a shower, not speaking to Oliver for the rest of the evening. (Oliver recalled his anguish, falling straight back through to his mother’s dark and accusatory silence—he even found himself suddenly noticing how Mel’s appellation spelled out the initials of his mother’s maiden name: Muriel Elsie Landau.) The next morning Mel told him it was time that he moved out and got a place of his own (there may have been a woman involved). And Oliver was devastated.
Oliver soon moved out of the Venice apartment himself, decamping to a cabin atop a remote ridge along Topanga Canyon, where partly owing to the failure of that relationship, and partly as a result of “the waning effectiveness of the travel experience generally,” his involvement with drugs now started to explode. “All my friends on the beach were drinking and smoking marijuana,” he told me, “neither of which did anything for me. My experience with amphetamines, on the other hand, was altogether different, indeed involved a virtual conversion of the will: If I took two, I had to take four, six, eight.
“I was a weekend addict, entertaining long sustained controlled solitary hallucinations. Come Friday evening, by my peak involvement, I’d take upward of a thousand milligrams. Now, a tablet is five milligrams, so I was taking doses of hundreds of tablets crushed and laced into a milk shake. After which I’d experience a pounding orgasmic heart for thirty-six hours straight.
“Another drug I liked was called something like Hackamine; Jonathan Miller for this reason used to refer to it as Wankamine.
“But this was truly my autistic sexual liberation.”
Over the years he regaled me with countless tales of his drug-fueled extravaganzas (which years later he would unfurl in considerably more detail in his book Hallucinations, so I won’t rehearse them all here). During the last year of his time in LA, however, Augusta Bonnard, a psychiatrist (a student and collaborator of Anna Freud) who was also a friend of Oliver’s parents, was dispatched to California as a sort of “emissary of the family” to check on things, and she was appalled at the spectacle of Oliver’s self-destructive behavior. “She insisted that I get myself to a shrink immediately,” Oliver recalled, “and I did, though this first attempt at analysis failed, in no small part owing to my utterly sarcastic and haughty attitude.” He paused, giggled to himself, and as if to confirm the characterization, noted: “The man’s name was Bird, which seemed to me entirely appropriate, since all he seemed to do was peck, peck, and peck.”
The thing was that for all the extravagance of his druggy excursions, Oliver was an exceptionally high-functioning addict and still had much to be professionally haughty about. Working with a colleague at UCLA, he managed to pull together a remarkable exhibit for the spring 1965 meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Cleveland, offering up extraordinary Kodachrome transparencies of the microscopic appearance of various types of vastly extended axons—a display that, with Oliver himself offering guided tours of all the marvels, became one of the hits of the convention. As a result, job offers poured in from all over the country (his UCLA residency was set to expire in June), and Oliver ended up choosing the lab of a dynamic young neuropathologist named Robert Terry at New York’s relatively new Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a researcher whose work on the electronic microscopy of cells associated with Alzheimer’s disease had impressed Oliver when Terry had paid a visit to UCLA the previous year.
“But an abyss of three dangerously unstructured months yawned between my leaving California and my reporting for work in New York,” Oliver recalled, and he went on to recount how he ended up selling his BMW motorbike in LA and buying another one in Europe, where he spent part of his vacation on one last extravagantly meth-stoked affair with a German theater director in a Paris hotel, the drugs inflaming not only the sex but a seemingly heartfelt mutual love that appeared to soar and soar across the ensuing exchange of letters during the months after Oliver returned to America, but then, following an actual visit by the young man late in the fall, came crashing to earth, leaving “a taste of ashes” in its wake. Reeling from yet another broken heart, Oliver’s drug use amped up even higher, “and one day, I found myself looking at my face in the mirror—this was December 31, 1965, so it was a sort of New Year’s Eve glance—and I heard myself say, ‘Ollie, old boy, you keep this up and you will not make it another year.’ This wasn’t some melodramatic cry—rather, a calm, passionless diagnosis, as a physician might give to a patient.
“Whereupon I resolved to put an end to my sexual life—and did—and to begin to come to terms as well with my drug habit and all the roiling deeper life issues that seemed to be compelling it. And so early in 1966, I went in search of another analyst—this time, all I was saying was ‘Help!’—and by sheer luck came under the care of a truly remarkable one, Dr. Leonard Shengold, who completely independent of the transference, seemed to me, and still does, a good, compassionate, sane man. And he saved my life.”
Notwithstanding their three meetings a week, however, the transference took a while to take—for one thing, Shengold was not much older than Oliver, which initially discomfited the latter (how could such a young man be truly wise?). Or maybe that was just an excuse, for in actuality Oliver was not truly ready to give up the drugs.
And yet in many ways Shengold’s wider interests and deep well of cultural reference (Shakespeare, Kipling, Chekhov, Dickens, and so forth, all of whose works and lives he drew upon and explored in his own writings) seemed to meld perfectly with a patient like Oliver. In 1963, Shengold had published a paper on “The Parent as Sphinx,” and in 1967, soon after he began treating Oliver, he published an analysis of Freud’s Rat Man under the title “The Effects of Overstimulation.” More than fifteen years later (when Oliver was still seeing him twice a week, as he would for the rest of his life), and not that long after Oliver began telling me about Shengold, he turned up as an admirable expert side commentator in Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker reportages entitled “Trouble in the Archives” (December 1983), where she quotes him saying, “It is in no way to condone or minimize the often heartbreaking damage done to observe that some victims of soul murder have been strengthened by the terrible experiences they have endured. Talents and, occasionally, creative power can arise from a background of soul murder.” As indeed, Oliver told me how in the ensuing years Shengold had helped him to see his own Second World War hellhole, Braefield, in much the same light.
But not yet. For one thing, the drugs still seemed to be enhancing his workweek performance. As his work focus, Oliver had decided to zero in on diseases associated with myelin, the fatty material that sheathes large nerve fibers, enabling them to conduct nerve impulses more speedily, and since earthworms, as it happens, had unusually thick myelin sheaths around their exceptionally conducive long nerves, and also because he just liked them (as had his hero, Darwin), Oliver chose earthworms as his experimental subjects, as a result of which he was regularly outside in the Einstein gardens, amassing thousands of them, which he then had to individually kill so as to extract the sheaths in question, “like Marie Curie processing tons of pitchblende to obtain the decigram of pure radium.” It would end up taking him nine months to painstakingly harvest the relatively tiny amount of purified myelin soup in question.
In the midst of all this (and he still remembered the exact date: March 15, 1966), he woke up “with an entirely altered state of mind—I felt tremendously energized. I wrote a cosmological poem. I began devouring texts on cosmology, physics, chemistry. In analysis, I’d talk hyperphysics for days at a time rather than anything about me or other people.
“I experienced a sudden upsurge in knowledge. At seminars at which I used to cower in the dark corner, I was suddenly blurting out identifications on microscopic slides, complete with bibliography—I was experiencing a great exaltation of memory. For about six weeks I, who could never draw, drew anatomical drawings effortlessly. I experienced, in addition, a great exaltation of smell.
“Furthermore, I was able to communicate this excitement. My sudden enthusiasm galvanized the entire department of neurology. No less than six major experimental projects were launched, each with me at the head. The entire thing was like a sudden, wondrous nova—for the first time in my adulthood I seemed to be tapping back into the scientific energy or the ecstasies of my adolescence—all of which, just as suddenly, from one day to the next, went dead.
“I woke up one morning about six weeks later, and there was nothing there. Which dumped me into a great depression and indeed dumped the entire lab into a great dejection.
“And to this day I don’t quite know what it all meant, whether it was principally a manic reaction to the ongoing drugs, or what.”
The dejection persisted, his energy utterly drained. Meanwhile, his research began going almost comically off the rails. He had been filling a large green notebook with painstaking records of his myelin extraction program, which one evening he took home to study and the next morning, having failed to secure it sufficiently to the bike rack, he managed to lose as it went flying off his motorcycle and into the rampaging traffic of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Not a total disaster, though, since he still had the precious myelin itself, though he then somehow managed to lose that as well when absentmindedly cleaning his lab bench a few weeks later. He was breaking microscopes, strewing stray bits of hamburger all over the lab and even into the sterilized interiors of the sacrosanct centrifuges. (Strange in recalling all this how he doesn’t even think to blame the drugs, instead attributing it, perhaps correctly, to his innate and age-old ham-fisted clumsiness.)
At any rate, by the fall of 1966, his bosses at Einstein decided to cut everyone’s losses and to transfer him instead to clinical settings—the nearby Montefiore Headache Clinic and Beth Abraham—where it was thought he might do less damage working with mere patients. “I was expelled from academic medicine for being too extravagantly clumsy to be allowed to continue,” he said as he concluded this portion of our conversation, “and my banishment proved my salvation.”
His drug addiction persisted a bit longer. How, I asked him, had he finally kicked it? “Well,” he replied, “for one thing, the medical effects were becoming more and more dramatic, and I was clearly in manifest danger. I mean, some weekends I was giving myself a pulse rate of two hundred plus for forty-eight hours at a time. More important, Shengold told me emphatically: ‘You are putting yourself out of reach. If you continue, we can’t go on.’ And the prospect of such an expulsion truly terrified me, because by then I had become convinced that he really was my last hope. But then there was a curious third factor. Because the fact is that through all of those drug experiences, I had been trying to get somewhere, and finally I did, and what had previously been a febrile incandescence, a sterile awakening, became a fertile awakening. And after that, I didn’t need the drugs anymore.”2