The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

  The telephone rang as telephones do, with that long pause between rings that is no more than a second but seems much longer, and he answered. “Dr. Timothy Leary,” he announced in slow, smooth tones. Such a sexy voice. What is it with these Irishmen?

  I told him I was from Washington, DC, and that our conversation required the utmost discretion. He simply said “Fire away,” a phrase I found peculiar. Was I hearing a normal voice, another tone among the human community of voices, or was that voice in fact speaking on behalf of a brain transmogrified by lysergic acid diethylamide? I wondered if Dr. Leary experienced himself as everyone else does, as a thing walking around with a history and a set of attributes. Or by now was he a disembodied soul, strolling through time and space as a human representative from infinity?

  I told him I was no stranger to LSD. I had taken a 300-microgram dose in California with Allen Ginsberg.

  “Ah,” he said. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s from Howl. Allen Ginsberg is a friend of mine.”

  Anyway, I told him, it had been quite a profound experience for me, and I wanted to learn how to run my own LSD sessions. The people I intended to turn on were extremely powerful people in Washington, DC—so powerful, in fact, that their identities could not be disclosed nor their psyches entrusted to strangers. I wanted Dr. Leary to train me in conducting safe LSD sessions, which he found rather amusing.

  “Who are these people you wish to turn on?” he asked, and I reiterated that my friends in Washington were extremely powerful, and I simply could not divulge their names. He grew quiet for a moment and then spoke softly, almost hypnotically. LSD is a revolutionary substance, he said. It causes a quantum shift in the human nervous system. He regarded LSD more as a sacrament than a drug, something that must be approached with awe and a degree of wisdom. He suggested that he and his team come to Washington to run the sessions themselves, and I told him that was out of the question. We arranged to meet in Boston in two weeks, when he returned from Mexico.

  JUNE 6

  Jack had to get the fucking over quickly last night. When I arrived, I told him I had a crucial matter to discuss, but sex took precedence. It was as if he couldn’t open himself to the wisdom of a woman without first establishing his manhood within her. When it was over, I told him that the universe had placed him in a historic position.

  “Mary, why are you using the word universe? Are you some kind of physicist? I’m not bright enough to discuss the universe.” He smiled. “I’m just a politician from the wards in Boston.” I told him to cut the bullshit. We are on the precipice of mutually assured destruction, I said, taking the phrase from the book Understanding Thermonuclear War. He grew quiet. I said a historic opportunity for world peace had emerged: the convergence of his presidency with the emergence of LSD, a drug that transforms consciousness. I knew it was the first mention of psychedelic drugs in the White House in American history.

  JUNE 14

  I flew to Boston Thursday to meet Timothy Leary. I boarded the Eastern Air Lines shuttle, convinced my humble Pinchot trust fund was being harnessed to a noble project. Amos and Ruth, Granddaddy Haynes and Aunt Cornelia—all my forebears on the barricades—would approve.

  We met at a seafood restaurant by Boston Harbor. Timothy is a long, thin Irishman with a mellifluous voice, a handsome and curious character who gives the impression he’s in on a joke you’re not. Was this man a performer or a professor? We ordered lobster and a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate our psychedelic future. Tim is a connoisseur of all manner of substances, the finer alcohols not excluded.

  Retaining a perpetual smile—again, does he know something you don’t?—he told me he was uncomfortable with my idea. He does not approve of people running LSD sessions without the proper consciousness or experience. He’s conducted hundreds of sessions himself and is acutely aware that the nervous system is vastly complex. Just inches from transcendence lies madness. The Tibetans had created a handbook, he said, for people on their journey when the soul departs the body, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It tracks the stages of consciousness that are said to occur during the forty-nine days after death. Tim has created a psychedelic version of this book for those embarking on the LSD journey, and he recommends it as a guardrail against mental chaos. If I insist on ignoring his warnings and decide to go ahead and lead my own LSD sessions, he recommends I use the book as a guide.

  I found Timothy equally adept at cracking lobsters and coining aphorisms. “When the ego dies, the soul must be ready,” he said, a bon mot to which I clinked my champagne flute against his. A foghorn moaned outside.

  He likens LSD to a fish swimming in water. The fish doesn’t know he’s in water. He has no experience of anything outside the water, so to the fish, it’s not water, it’s just reality. When you take the fish out of water and then drop him back in, the water is exactly the same, but his relationship to the water is transformed forever. Now he knows he is in water, and that water is just a part of a bigger world, and he can never unknow it.

  “Everyone’s walking around in a fish tank called their mind. Your mind is the water you swim in. You think it’s reality. In the psychedelic experience, you go out of your mind and come back, just like the fish, and you’ll never be attached to your reality the same way again. You need to go out of your mind and come to your senses.”

  Again, a maxim I repeat. You need to go out of your mind and come to your senses. Timothy Leary is a phrasemaker and showman. His neurological ruminations bear the patina of performance, a monologue honed through repetition. But his nuggets bear repeating with my psychedelic wives in Washington.

  I asked if I could count on him to supply the LSD for my sessions. He could arrange it, he said, but I had to document each session meticulously and share the results with him.

  “Let’s change the world,” I said.

  His eyes twinkled. “That’s a wonderful thing to do with it! But they kill people who try it, you know.”

  I didn’t know if he was joking or warning me, because he never stopped smiling.

  “I have friends in high places,” I said.

  “I have friends in very high places,” he replied.

  We cracked up.

  Chantilly Lace and a pretty face.

  JUNE 20

  Who am I to change the neurology of the men who lead the free world? I’m just a blonde with a Marlboro, a woman against the grain of every grain there is—in short, a Pinchot. A family that has been shooting off its mouth for more than a century.

  I descend from a Pinchot who escaped from France, I am told, after he failed in the battle to free Napoleon. I descend from Granddaddy Haynes, who, family lore has it, died fighting to free slaves on the underground railroad. I descend from Daddy Amos, who raged against war in every form, a fatal strain of pacifism from which he never recovered. My mother, Ruth, fought for the women’s right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the vote, was signed the year I was born. And I descend from Aunt Cornelia, who was unstoppable on the picket lines, fighting for miners and demanding civilized wages for workers everywhere. We have all been writers and loudmouths for justice, the women in my family, and I keep on my desk, beside my Russian music box, an essay Aunt Cornelia published in the Nation early in the century. “My feminism,” she writes there, “tells me that a woman can bear children, charm her lovers, boss a business, swim the English Channel, stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord—all in a day’s work!”

  The olive branch doesn’t fall far from the tree. I feel Aunt Cornelia’s blood in my veins, leading me to a battlefield at the precise junction of nuclear annihilation and transformational pharmaceuticals. I have to believe that chemical weapons and chemical salvation have converged at a specific moment in time—the moment Roxanne Arcturis calls the Aquarian Age.

  JUNE 26

  Black Orpheus is all the rage. It is de rigueur now for every woman
in Georgetown to see the movie, and conversations are not so much whether you have seen it as how many times. Bebe Highsmith and I watched it Saturday night at the Trans-Lux, and I was stunned. I thought I had witnessed a dream forged from pure color. Painting had merged with film had merged with poetry. The Brazilians have created the true music of the body, and I wish I were a dancer. I wish Brazilian samba genes could inhabit this body, my Pinchot Anglo-Saxon body as white as paper, that they could melt my flesh, dissolve my thoughts and agitation. There is a frenzy now over the bossa nova, and I can understand why.

  Bebe Highsmith is half Brazilian, granddaughter of the president of Brazil. She loves the pulse of it all, the music and spirit of Carnival, though she has never come even remotely close to the slums and favelas of Rio, where Orpheus and Eurydice reenact their mythological drama.

  Last night at Tony’s house, Ben Bradlee asked Joe Alsop if he’d seen the film. Expectedly, Joe scrunched up his nose. “I don’t believe in romanticizing the poor. A slum isn’t a poem. It’s a slum.” But sociology was beside the point, I thought; perhaps it is always beside the point. It’s clear that a celluloid vision of black people dancing the samba through a carnival of myth was simply beyond the life-crushing grasp of Joe’s WASP nature, far more at home as it is with war. I felt like a Brazilian.

  JULY 8

  Jackie is in Europe. Ruth Selwyn says the First Lady has begun an affair with Aristotle Onassis and likens the relationship to a gorilla mating with a virgin. But—urged on as we all were at Vassar to nurture fierce passions beneath a cloak of sublime femininity—Jackie is no virgin.

  Meanwhile I have been spending hours at the White House, preparing Jack for an excursion into psychedelia. I read him T. S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

  I told him we will only be taking a moderate dose, but LSD removes the filters from our consciousness, and Jack says we need filters, especially the Irish. I tell him to forgo the bullshit, and he laughs—again, no woman speaks to him as I do, but he seems to enjoy it. When the filters disappear, I tell him, there’s an opportunity to reprogram ourselves. I show him my copy of Tim Leary’s psychedelic version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I open to a random section and read aloud: “You suddenly wake up from the delusion of being a separate form and you hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light.”

  “Who is this writer?” Jack asks.

  “Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist,” I say. “He is a friend of mine. He is the chief exponent and explorer of LSD.”

  “So, Mary, you’re trusting our entire sanity and our minds and the future and welfare of the American people to some drug and some Irishman from Boston jabbering about the cosmic dance?”

  “Exactly.”

  JULY 12

  Sometimes I think colors are just sounds my eyes are hearing. We are pushed endlessly into our thoughts, and thoughts are bound up with some mechanism of survival. They move inevitably toward fear and worry. How can I just paint? How can I just be with color, empty?

  JULY 14

  How strange that evolution commands a man to come in order to perpetuate the species, thus assuring that he does, while a woman’s orgasm is quite incidental to the imperatives of evolution. The species can go forth and multiply quite well, thank you, without a woman’s ever being brought to the moaning stage, and perhaps that is why our pleasure is of no concern to men.

  I am having dinner with C tonight at Rive Gauche and hoping for an exception. I am the available woman of Georgetown, and a woman doesn’t live by Jack Kennedy alone. Not yet. C stared at me all evening at the Grahams’, lunging over to light my cigarettes—aren’t men helpful?—wrapping his hand around mine just a fraction longer than it takes to ignite tobacco. The eternal message was communicated. Communication received. It is a telegram of a charge, much finer than the banality of chitchat, more ethereal even than Cicely’s new poem, which she read aloud in iambic pentameter to the great approval and fervent applause of her smiling counterintelligence husband James.

  I will wear L’interdit again tonight when I meet C. Who said “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future”? Probably some adman in the pay of Chanel. And I will eat lightly. Yes, very lightly. You don’t want a cow decomposing in your stomach just inches from where a man will enter. Charlotte informs me that C is on the experienced side—at least it occurred to her that way, especially in matters of tongue—and that his wife has long incorporated his fun as a component of her misery. Tonight it will be viva la vulva. In honor of Bastille Day?

  JULY 18

  Can my life be reduced to pure color? There are a billion sentimental paintings in this world, mounted on a billion walls, but I am not adding to the collection. I am working in the color field. I leave my feelings at the door when I paint. Which means I skip the middleman of representation. Instead of mountains and sea and sky meeting at the horizon of my canvas, each simply an excuse for color, I go to the colors directly. There are no edges to my painting. In color field theory, edges are simply the places where the color field ends. This morning I worked on a circle and built it from four shades of red, each red slightly different. As my teacher Kenneth Noland says, color doesn’t fill in form. Color is the form itself. What you see is what you see.

  AUGUST 1

  Born in time, time melts you. This is the descent of the decent. This is the beating of events that take you down, drop by drop.

  First went Amos, my father of revolutionary wisdom, a man who was equal to his times. That is my highest praise. He was a man equal to his times, and I watched him disintegrate after the death of Rosamond, my ghost sister. In the end, this man who built political parties across the nation and resisted war—even the war against the Third Reich, adopting as his mantra that dangerous thought America First—descended, wrecked and reeking.

  The descent of the decent for the friends of my girlhood, ushered gradually into varying lands of dissolution and madness. Victoria Palmquist from Vassar, in a hospital now in Corning, New York. Jeannine Toover from Philadelphia, gone by her own hands. I never knew what was in her hands. Carla Swain Garrison, queen of my debutante days, days of champagne glasses and swirling entrances onto ballroom floors, became fat and then angry as Kertin Tarlow’s wife, and then one day she too was taken, by pills. Gone, so many of my wayward girls who once carried their future like corsages upon their breasts.

  But no one descended as far and fast as Cord, the golden husband. Perhaps it is a saving grace that he didn’t go the way of death and decay as so many have in my life. Or maybe it wasn’t. I pity him now, a vulture for covert culture. Instead of poetry and lyrical prose—the honed, concise phrase he mastered as a schoolboy—he is spreading the tentacles of Central Intelligence everywhere, planting spies the way I plant flowers. The Congress for Cultural Freedom: a CIA front. Radio Free Europe: a CIA front. The National Council of Churches: a CIA front. The American Newspaper Guild: a CIA front. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop: a CIA front. The Paris Review: a CIA front. All because of Cord Meyer. He began by infiltrating my life, then spread his tentacles to the vast culture around him until culture itself became suspect.

  AUGUST 5

  I went to the Harriman pool party on Sunday. At Averell’s invitation—I’m sure it wasn’t Pamela’s idea. I expected to find Lorraine floating nonchalantly in the chlorinated water, parasol in one hand, cocktail in the other. But she and Vangie were stretched out luxuriously on lounge chairs when I arrived, smoking cigarettes. They waved me over.

  “We’re discussing the origin of husbands,” said Vangie.

  “You mean, anthropologically?”

  “Don’t start, Mary,” said Lorraine, blowing smoke in the direction of Averell and her husband, Ambassador Bruce, both standing waist-high in the pool, two powerful men time had placed in pear-shaped bodies covered in gray hair. “No
, how did you meet your husband? That’s the question.”

  “I’ll pass on that,” I said. “Just as I passed on my husband!”

  “Touché!” said Vangie. “My turn. I was living in London, and David had been appointed ambassador to Britain. Well, he needed a secretary, so friends set up an interview for me. ‘I take it you speak French?’ he asks me.” Vangie imitated the ambassador’s proper accent. “‘Well,’ I say, ‘not as well as I would like’—he nods, ready to say ‘Next’—‘But I do broadcast to occupied France twice a week!’ He’s a bit stunned, so he says, ‘Well, I suppose many young women speak French, but what is really needed is someone who speaks languages from Central and Eastern Europe.’ ‘Would Hungarian do?’ I ask, all big-eyed and naive. So then he says, ‘Well, the fact is, we must be looking ahead to a possible occupation of Japan,’ and I say, ‘Oh, I grew up there, and my Japanese governess spoke nothing but Japanese with us.’ Now he’s perplexed, a bit afraid, so he says, ‘Scandinavian language?’ ‘I’m afraid my Swedish is a bit rusty,’ I say, ‘but I can easily brush up.’ He hires me, then and there. Oh yes, he also asks me out to dinner.”

  “He could never have resisted you,” Lorraine says.

  “We’ve been together every minute since,” says Vangie. “Except of course when we go to sleep.”

  AUGUST 8

  Jack was pensive last night. He is talking more these days and fucking less, as my own chronic detachment wanes and my need for him grows. “I underestimated Castro,” he said. Everything comes back to Cuba. “I never got his appeal. I mean, he’s a thug with a beard. Then at the Bay of Pigs they handed me my ass. Castro was supposed to be knocked off while the troops were landing, but that didn’t exactly work out, like most of the promises over at CIA. A thousand Cubans are taken prisoner on the beach, Stevenson’s at the UN lying about it, and then he finds out we’ve kept him in the dark all along, and Adlai’s ass is in an uproar. Then Bobby goes nuts about this whole mess Castro has put us in, so he throws everything against this son of a bitch. Operation Mongoose, except we’re the goose. They try to kill the bastard, poison him, they try to create pandemonium, foment chaos, sabotage his authority. Nothing can stop this guy. All because of a piece of land you could spit at from the Fontainebleau. I can’t let a thug ranting under a palm tree lead us to nuclear war. It’s time to normalize relations. But I can’t tell anyone. I can’t tell the Joint Chiefs—they’re not on my side. The CIA has gone off the deep end about Cuba. They’ve let these Cuban gangsters in Florida mesmerize them about Castro. They all thrive on the Cold War, they never forget the Bay of Pigs, my calling off the air support, they’ll never forgive me for firing Allen Dulles. I need to crush the CIA, Mary. A bunch of half-crazed Yalies running rogue in this country. I’ve got to smash them into a million pieces.”