As I fell deeper down the rabbit hole of digital technology, I gravitated toward virtual reality, which in many ways was pretty much what I had been into all along. In 1987, I saw a picture of the data glove on the cover of Scientific American and a bell went off. I knew immediately that something was going on and that maybe it was time to revisit my notion of how one interacted with these rough beasts called computers. If one could actually reach into the data sphere and grab hold of it with a hand, that was completely different from doing so on a keyboard.
In any event, I became enchanted with people who were involved in this new form of technology, and I met a fellow named Erik Gullikson, who was working on a virtual reality project at Autodesk. He thought it might be a good idea to recruit Timothy Leary to include virtual reality as part of his latest medicine show.
By then, Tim had been in prison and in exile in Algeria and had then spent more time in prison only to emerge and somehow become the toast of the town in Los Angeles. He was living in a house in Beverly Hills with Barbara, his fifth wife, going out to clubs on the Sunset Strip about every night, delivering three or four lectures a week at colleges and universities for ten or twelve thousand dollars a pop, and playing small parts in movies and television shows.
Although I had not seen Tim since I had spent time with him and the Grateful Dead at Millbrook in 1967, I went down to Los Angeles to interview him for the book I was still purportedly writing. At this point, I had been off mind-altering substances for a long time. The first person I met in the house was Barbara, who said that before I could even talk to Tim I had to eat some of these brownies. Which of course I did.
The three of us then went out on this wild cruise through the hills where we got totally lost. Barbara was screeching at us like a harpy, and Tim and I were laughing like crazy and bucking her authority. It was like he had found an ally in me. The two of us were catching up on old times and new times. It was a truly wonderful night as well as the birth of a brand-new deal between us.
The way I understood the deal was that periodically, we would have these intense distilled encapsulated familial Irish moments. Blood was not even thick enough to describe the nature of our new relationship, because we were both outlaws in the primordial sense of the term. As Bob Dylan had once famously said, to live outside the law you had to be honest on a certain level. You can’t be a proper outlaw without some kind of touchstone of deep morality, and Tim and I understood that about each other. Just like him, I also loved state change. How about we try this and see what happens? Life endangering? Too bad.
This was truly a Nietzschean condition that was beyond good and evil. It was recognizing that you had a message to share that was far beyond this binary framework, and if they judged you, then they judged you. You had to absorb that, but it had little to do with your real purpose in life.
If I looked at Tim’s purpose in life and mine, it was all about trying to demonstrate to humanity that reality was an opinion and not a fact. And that authority was not God-given but earned and also transitory. Once we began spending time together again, Tim introduced me to people as the most American person he knew. It was intended to be both a compliment and an insult. “Here’s Barlow. He’s an American.”
Although I had always been proud of my ability to not judge people, Timmy pressed harder on that than anybody I had ever known. He wanted to force you into this point of choice where if you were going to judge him, you had both ample opportunity and plenty of evidence. He gave us all so much rope to hang him with that in the final analysis, not many people who really knew him were actually willing to use it. Those who didn’t know him judged him harshly, and they had every reason to do so because of how much damage he had done by espousing the use of LSD as the sole solution to all of the world’s many problems.
Tim was all about real redemption, and while it is easy to redeem the holy, it is far more important to redeem the base and the depraved. It’s easy to love your friends, but what Christ asked us to do was love our enemies. It’s easy to forgive the minor transgressions but not the real sins, and that’s where it all really comes down.
Tim’s morality, such as it existed at all, was incredibly flexible. If you looked at yourself as a freewheeling instrument of the God-knows-what—which I think he did and I certainly did as well—you never knew when you were actually being summoned to do something important as an agent of instruction and when you were just acting out.
Tim knew he was catalytic and that real catalytic behavior has no moral reference. You just smelled the air and made your decision on the basis of things that did not have rules. Throughout his life, Tim went back and forth between being a good Irish boy and the devil’s top hand.
Tim viewed love as both a necessity and a weakness. He was really the most complex, divided human being I had ever met. The Catholic Church was always the deal for Tim. It was the heart of the matter, and he spent most of his life being the anti-Christ while at the same time wanting to be the Christ.
Tim also worshipped at the altar of all that was female. When I reconnected with him in Los Angeles, he and Barbara had been married for about twelve years. I always saw her as something the devil wore when he was in a particularly sporting mood. She was dire and difficult but also a wonderful human being in an extremely weird way. She was the great love of his life. Tim said that to me numerous times.
I began spending a good deal of time with them, and then Tim basically gave me permission to be her lover. He couldn’t be for her what she needed sexually, so it made more sense for him to anoint someone to do that for him. We had a wild relationship.
At one point, Tim and I went off on a speaking tour together in Europe. It was right after his daughter, Susan, had committed suicide by hanging herself from the bars of her jail cell after she had twice been found mentally unfit to stand trial for having shot her boyfriend in the head while he was sleeping. In many ways, Tim was still possessed by this and very much of an emotional mess.
I was much more of a moralist than Tim, and thought the best way to judge a person was by their children. Thus, I felt that the man who in some weird way was now my master had failed the ultimate test. While we were in Europe, I was out on the road acting as his foil with this terrible sense of “You are the ultimate loser, pal.” I tried to get him to talk to me about it, but he could never explain why his daughter had died this way. He spoke about her suicide with the terrible abstraction of pain while alternately blaming himself. He did not have a position about it; actually, he had so many that they added up to not being one. He was really deeply troubled by her death and never did manage to work it out.
Part of Tim’s thing about boredom was that in boredom lies responsibility. In that still moment when nothing else is going on, you actually have to confront yourself. And that was the last thing he ever wanted to do. The bargain Tim had made with himself was that he was denied a view of his own soul until the very last moments of his life.
But he really was a messenger. Only someone so demonic and so equivocal about all the normal tendencies of morality and faith and decency could have been the proper vessel for the spiritual message that Timothy Leary brought to the world. He was possessed. He was a demon. A very special demon. In order to spread the message, one of the fallen had to rise up. And that was Timothy Leary.
I honestly believe Timothy Leary was the handmaiden of God in the strangest possible way. I’d always felt that one of the people in Christianity who got the short shrift was Judas. Without Judas, what would there have been? No crucifixion, no resurrection, and no redemption. You had to have Judas. Somebody had to be the Judas, and that was absolutely who Tim was. I knew he would never betray me, because in many ways, I was as bad as he was.