I came back to the United States through Logan International Airport in Boston bearing a life-size Buddha head from Kathmandu that I had filled with a kilo of black Nepalese hashish. I didn’t do it for money. I did it in part to determine whether I was going to be a Republican or an outlaw. The lady or the tiger.
The Buddha head was made of bronze, and I had done my best to fashion what appeared to be a bronze bottom for it out of epoxy and stuff I had picked up off the street. I got in the customs line at Logan and soon found myself face-to-face with a big, burly Irish customs guy who was just like a Boston cop. He took one look at me and said, “I’m going to have to look at everything.” And I said, “I thought that might be the case.”
He started going through all my stuff, and as he did I realized that I had completely forgotten about the piece of typing paper folded up in one of my shirt pockets that had six or eight tabs of Owsley acid inside it. I had brought a bunch with me on the trip, and this was what was left of my supply. I had taken quite a bit of acid in India and had some pretty transcendental experiences. Not the kind you were supposed to have, but they were definitely something.
The customs guy unwrapped the sheet of typewriter paper, found the tabs, and said, “What’s this?” And I said, “Well, to be frank, I’m not sure.” He said, “The boys in the lab will know.” And I was thinking, There’s a test for LSD, really? Then he gave it to somebody who took it away.
At that point, I was in an incredibly elevated state of mind. I figured that my fate had already been decided: The test for LSD was going to be positive and then they were going to drill into the Buddha head and the next thing I knew, I was going to be in the hoosegow, where I would presumably write the second half of my novel. I had never thought about doing that in India, but I had schlepped the bound first half of the novel around with me. That turned out to be useful because as the search went on, the customs guy knew he had gotten me, and I knew he had gotten me, and so we became extremely collegial. At one point, he found the manuscript and began leafing through it.
“This is pretty good,” he said. “I like this.”
And I said, “I’m glad you do. I’m supposed to finish it now.” The truth was that I was already feeling alarmed about having to finish it because after nine and a half months in India, I was no longer the person who had written the first half.
He kept going through all my things methodically and he found a bunch of infinitesimal ivory elephants that kids in India go blind carving and then put into little seed pods. There are about twenty of them in every pod and if you pour them out, it looks like powder. Then if you look closer, you realize it’s actually tiny elephants. He found one of those and said, “Oh, surely this is drugs.” And I said, “No, look close. Look close. Closer.” And he said, “Holy shit! It’s elephants!”
Then the guy from the lab came back from across the hall, and I could hear him laughing the whole way and he said, “Guess what? We blew up the lab with this stuff.” I was thinking, That doesn’t sound good. At that exact moment, the customs guy pulled the Buddha head out of the bottom of my backpack. He looked at it and said, “Funny casting. Do you suppose it’s hollow?” And I said, “No.” The head itself just radiated dope.
The lab guy suddenly turned slightly more serious and handed the typing paper with the tabs of acid back to me. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but I wouldn’t take any of it if I were you.” At that moment, the customs guy, still holding the Buddha head, said, “I think we can just let you go.”
Now that all my adrenaline had been completely released through my system, I started packing everything back up. The whole time I was shaking like a leaf. As I was getting ready to leave, the customs guy said, “So, if you’re writing that novel and you’ve got some kid carrying dope through customs in it, think of me.”
Back in Connecticut, a friend of mine had rented a house in a little beach town called Clinton, the kind of place where orthodontists spent the summer. It was completely dead in the winter and seemed sufficiently out of the fray that I could write the rest of the novel there. At least, that was the concept.
I was getting money from my folks during this period, so I never did sell any of the hash from the Buddha head. I gave a fair amount of it away in the service of getting something done. At one point, someone walked into my living room in Clinton and there were four or five of us there, stoned off our asses. He looked around for a while and then said, “Welcome to the wax museum.” Everyone was just that stoned. Petrified.
I worked on the novel but not very successfully. The next spring, in May 1970, I helped bring the Grateful Dead to perform at Wesleyan. The point of the show was to get people out dancing and celebrating and being together because the school was in complete shutdown due to a student strike protesting the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia. So the Dead played a free show and Sonny Heard, who claimed he was one of their roadies but was just a grotesque parasite who would sometimes carry the band’s equipment around, got a gun shoved into his stomach. I loved that, because Sonny Heard was possibly the most vile human being I had ever met.
What happened next was that a set of promoters in New York City decided to duplicate Woodstock at a ski resort in Connecticut called Powder Ridge. It had once been called Powder Hill, but that was too true so they renamed it Powder Ridge. The highest slope had a vertical descent of about four hundred feet, the ski-hill equivalent of a putt-putt course. I used to give night-skiing instruction there to businessmen who wanted to look good over the weekends with their girlfriends.
To play at what was hyped as a huge three-day rock festival on July 31, August 1, and August 2, 1970, the promoters booked Sly and the Family Stone, Delaney and Bonnie, Fleetwood Mac, Melanie, James Taylor, Joe Cocker, the Allman Brothers, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Jethro Tull, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, Grand Funk Railroad, Richie Havens, John Sebastian, Spirit, and Ten Years After. After everything had been set up, I volunteered to help out in some capacity, and they put me into a security position. Then a local faction who had looked at Woodstock and decided “Not in our backyard” went to court to stop it. They got some Connecticut judge to issue an injunction declaring that if any of the musicians entered the site, they would immediately be held in contempt of court. Which resulted in none of them showing up.
However, about thirty thousand people came to the festival grounds anyway. Even though there were no acts, they didn’t want to leave because they were having a perfectly grand time. Or an imperfectly grand time.
At that point, the professional security company that had been hired decided to leave the premises. In my capacity as the nominal head of the volunteers, I then became head of security, which was like putting the inmates in charge of the institution. I was dealing with problems that didn’t come up every day, like a large bunch of kids who had picked a lot of poison ivy, used it to start a bonfire, and then danced around naked in the smoke. They all had to be hospitalized, and I had to find the ambulances to take them there because getting anything onto or off the site was insanely difficult.
For reasons I have never understood, the Connecticut State Police refused to let anyone leave. People were trapped and the entire site quickly became a hippie ghetto. Because I was the head of security at an event that could not be secured, I had to send a lot of the drugs that people had bought on the site to the Connecticut Valley Hospital for chemical analysis so I would know what they had taken. As it turned out, much of it was strychnine and niacin and a bunch of other awful stuff.
The only artist who said “Fuck the judge” and actually performed was Melanie. There was no electricity on the site so I helped rig up some speakers and an amp and a mixing board to the power supply from a Mister Softee ice cream truck, and then she stood on top of it and sang.
The “festival” itself went on for three days, and a lot of people were really messed up. We set aside a big room at the ski resort as a freak-out center, and during the second night, nine hundred people came through. Some of them were stark raving bonkers on shit that has not been available since. We didn’t have any doctors or Thorazine to help us bring them back down.
A woman who was standing right next to me, looking at all this, said, “This is so awful, I feel like killing myself.” And I said, “I know what you mean. I kind of feel the same way.” Except that right after our conversation, she went upstairs and blew her head off. It was yet another time when I was forced to take suicidal ideation seriously. It’s statistically high enough to assume that when somebody says something like this, they actually do mean it.
Powder Ridge made Altamont look like a walk in the woods. After three days, the cops finally opened the gates and let people leave. At that point, they were only too happy to do so.