Since beginning work at the center, I'd dated a few medical residents, then found myself deeply involved for several months with a gentle, thoughtful psychiatrist named Paul. I first became interested in him one evening in the cafeteria when a group of doctors sitting at the far end of my supper table got into an excited, argumentative discussion. Among them was an attractive, pale-haired man with a nice chuckle, who exhibited a character trait which is extremely rare in ordinary people and, among doctors, practically nonexistent: he didn't seem to mind discovering that he had some fact wrong, that he was in error; he appeared to actually welcome having a piece of misinformation corrected. When he remained at the table after the others had returned to duty, I got up the courage to remark on his lack of defensiveness or resentment when contradicted - I said it carefully, as charmingly as I could - and added that this was a most remarkable thing, in my experience, and much to be admired. He laughed and asked if he might join me, and would I like some more coffee?
By the end of that evening, I had discovered that Paul was intelligent, funny, in the midst of a difficult divorce, and that I liked him. By the end of the following week, we both knew we had found in each other exactly what we needed - someone to have fun with, to make love with, to talk and share with.
A few months later, I discovered I was pregnant.
Paul was caught in a terrible ambivalence, having tried throughout his failed marriage to father a child, finally coming to believe that he could not, and never would. It was the wrong time for him to discover that he wasn't sterile, after all. The bitter divorce battle made it necessary that no one else know I was seeing Paul, much less expecting his child. Another sad fact was that Paul and I were not committed to each other for the future, so that what should have been a joyful surprise was, instead, a more than awkward embarrassment. We had begun to talk about abortion.
Nature doesn't give a damn about embarrassments, but she does have a way, sometimes, of executing judgement on certain defects or insufficiencies, and there must have been something not quite to her liking going on inside me, by the time I was about two months along.
One day, alone in my apartment after work, I began having contractions that felt familiar (I had given birth to my son Christopher during a brief, disastrous marriage at age 20) and made my way to the bathroom. Grunting and moaning with the pain, I squatted on the toilet, gazing blindly through trickles of sweat at the black and white floor tiles, until finally I had birthed the fetus. I looked down only once, to see the tiny shape floating in blood, and sent a sad apology to the soul which had intended to inhabit it, "Sorry; it wasn't the right time, my dear Whoever.
Maybe someday -."
After stripping off my stained clothes, I found a clear plastic tablecloth, folded it a couple of times and put it on my bed, then lowered myself carefully into the middle of it and leaned back on heaped bed pillows, exhausted. When I felt occasional soft clots of blood emerging from my body, I thought they were parts of the afterbirth, and continued to drowse, relieved at the absence of pain. Paul was on duty at the hospital that night, and I had every intention of cleaning up all the mess in time for his return the next morning, but for the moment I could only rest until the bleeding stopped and my strength came back.
It must have been at least a couple of hours before I became vaguely aware of a coldness on my skin and opened my eyes, to find myself sitting in blood clots almost up to my hips. I was very light-headed, and it dawned on me that perhaps there was more blood than there should have been with just the losing of the afterbirth, and that maybe I should try phoning for advice. I couldn't think of whom to call -1 certainly wasn't going to disturb Paul while he was on duty - then I remembered the pretty young nurse called Tess who lived in the apartment next door. It seemed a good idea to ask her to take a look at me, just in case I wasn't evaluating the situation as well as I thought I was.
When I tried to move off the bed, a warning voice told me to move very carefully. It said, YOU
MUSTN'T FAINT. I wasn't in the least frightened, but thought it might be sensible to avoid standing up because of the light-headedness, so I crawled slowly on all fours toward the living room, pulling my dressing-gown off the end of the bed as I moved past, until I had reached the phone at the far end of the apartment. I lifted it from the coffee table and put it on the floor, surprised at how heavy it was.
Tess was home, and I crawled to the door to unlock it, then returned to my place - now marked by a small puddle of blood - on the floor. When she came in, Tess took one look at me and grabbed for the phone. I heard her saying something about emergency and hemorrhage, then she knelt down and carefully put my dressing gown on me, and when she had tied the belt, she said only, "Don't move, honey; save your strength," while I smiled happily at her, feeling altogether peaceful and good-humored.
When she went to get a towel for me, she stopped at the side of the bed and muttered something that sounded like, "Jesus!"
Having given me the towel to tuck between my legs, Tess picked up my purse, raised me slowly from the floor, and helped me down the outside stairs and into her car. While she was locking my front door, I sat like an obedient child, slipping in and out of consciousness, feeling safe and content. When we arrived at the Emergency entrance to the hospital, Tess went inside to arrange things, and I opened my purse and took out a compact. I giggled at the reflection in the mirror; I'd never seen anyone that color before. Pale grey, with a faint touch of green in the shadows.
Lying on a hospital bed, with several people around me - I had the impression of a couple of doctors and at least one nurse - who were trying to find a vein that wasn't too flat to stick a transfusion needle into, I knew I was going to be all right, and tried to tell all the earnest, bustling figures not to worry, that I wasn't going to die. What I got in response was a curt order to keep quiet; they seemed irritated by my good humor. I felt a bit hurt, then angry at the reprimand. After all, I hadn't done this to myself; nature and the gods had made the decision.
Almost immediately, the hurt and anger drifted away. I was left again in the state of gentle euphoria that the ancient Romans must have known all about, when they chose bleeding to death from opened wrists (while sitting in a bathtub full of warm water) as the preferred form of suicide, at least for the upper classes.
A few days later, someone explained to me that most of the clots had not been pieces of afterbirth, after all. They were the result of bleeding from some little capillary inside the uterus which had failed to close off as it was supposed to, after the expulsion of the fetus. I had lost a bit more than six pints of blood; I forget the exact amount, but I do remember being impressed, having been reminded that women's bodies contain an average of only nine pints.
Paul, when he discovered what had happened, went to my apartment and cleaned up what he half-humorously described as, "The scene of a bloody ax-murder." But he was deeply shaken, and found himself contending with too many conflicting feelings - horror, relief and sorrow. He couldn't forget, he told me later, that I had come so close to dying. It was all too much.
It took me six weeks to recover my strength, and by that time I had become miserably aware of Paul's increasing distance and coldness. So we had the inevitable long talk with tears and pain, finally agreeing to be just good friends. I returned to work and did my best not to let myself feel freshly bruised at each occasional glimpse of him in the corridors of the hospital.
Now, it was an evening in March, and I was sitting over cold coffee in the dining room, reading by the fading light from the big window, when a friend of mine slid his food tray onto the table across from me and sat down. Dr. Samuel Golding was suffering through his internship year, headed for a residency in psychiatry. He was only a few inches taller than I, rather chunky, with a head of wiry black hair, and he was one of the most interesting - and delightfully strange - people I had ever met. While he was assigned to the Pathology Department, we had recognized each other as mavericks, and had begun to talk at luncht
ime, and sometimes at supper, if he was on late duty and saw me in the cafeteria.
Sam was absent-minded to the point of near-unconsciousness, at times, possibly as a reaction to the schedule he was obliged to keep and the attention he was expected to pay to things which bored him, all of which he regarded as necessary evils to be endured on the way to the only thing that mattered - becoming a psychiatrist. I was familiar enough by now with the medical world to know that psychiatry was considered an orphan child and its practitioners generally peculiar; at least, that was the standard attitude of the average physician and most particularly of the average medical school professor, so that anyone studying medicine who made it known that his goal was psychiatry was in for more than the usual amount of sarcastic put-downs by the instructors, not to speak of his fellow students. (It amused me greatly that, while - according to at least one study - 98% of medical doctors were Republicans, every psychiatrist I'd ever come across turned out to be a Democrat. Peculiar, indeed.) The most hilarious example I'd seen of Sam's absent-mindedness, however, had nothing to do with boredom, but with its opposite - single-mindedness. One evening, sharing supper in the cafeteria, we were in the middle of an intense discussion about the ritual practices of a certain tribe of American Indians, when I told Sam I had to go to the bathroom, but I'd be right back.
He rose with me, followed me - still explaining and gesturing with both hands - down the corridor to the door marked WOMEN, where I quite reasonably expected him to wait. As I walked into the stall, I heard Sam coming right through the rest room door behind me - still talking - apparently oblivious of the fact that there was no such thing as a unisex rest room in the medical center. I decided not to risk sending him into some kind of shock by reminding him where he was, but simply sat on the toilet behind the stall door and listened, grunting uh-huh's as seemed appropriate, stifling my laughter and hoping desperately that no other nearby woman would happen to have a full bladder at the moment.
When I was finished (a little more hurriedly than usual), we left. Sam followed me back to the cafeteria, his untied surgical smock trailing in the back as it often did; we resumed our places at the table and continued the conversation. I never told him.
We usually talked about the human mind, about the world in general, and occasionally the cosmos, but inevitably - no matter where our conversations started - we would sooner or later get around to one of two subjects. The first was Indian tribes of North and South America, about which Sam seemed to know everything - customs, traditions, rituals, beliefs -
everything; or so it seemed to me. The other was psychedelic drugs, both natural and synthetic. Of course, the two subjects converged easily and often, since every American Indian culture appears to have made use of some kind of consciousness-altering plant, and Sam seemed to know about all of them, too.
I knew only what I had read in books, while Sam had actually lived in the Amazon area for a while among some of the Indians and had personally tasted a lot of different psychedelics, so my role had became primarily that of appreciative listener and learner, which was comfortable for both of us.
With one exception. I had discovered that Sam had a true gift for drawing. He had once handed me a written autopsy report to be typed up, and around the edges of the lined yellow paper there were beautiful little pencil sketches of strange creatures, plants, flowers, trees, and what looked like jewels. When I said, "Good Lord, Dr. Golding, these are incredible!" he looked at me in honest bewilderment, then leaned over my shoulder to see what I was referring to.
"Those? Oh, I doodle that kind of stuff all the time. What's incredible about them?"
It turned out that, growing up in a family of physicians, he had never heard anyone remark on his ability to draw; no one talked about art of any kind. Apparently his parents were not interested in, nor did they expect their children to have any interest in, anything that did not have an obvious application to medicine. Having drawn and painted all my life, I was outraged at such neglect, and offered to teach him the simple rudiments of painting.
Sam was touched by this unexpected interest, and had agreed to come to my little apartment on Tuesday evenings, unless he was on duty at the hospital, to find out how to use different brushes and watercolors and pastels. I had never properly learned to paint in oils, and couldn't afford to buy a set of them, but I taught him what I could of the other media.
He worked on scenes which he told me were visual images he'd had while using psychedelic drugs, as a member of an ongoing private experimental research group, headed by a friend of his called Shura - a name I promptly forgot - and he talked about these sessions as he painted. He had also been involved with a series of Saturday drug experiments conducted a few months before by an innovative instructor at the psychiatric teaching clinic attached to the main hospital, who believed that anyone planning a career in psychiatry should experience the effects of some of the most widely used drugs, since they would undoubtedly have patients in their future practice who would be influenced by the use and abuse of such chemicals.
This group of experimenters - most of them third-year residents in psychiatry - had made movies of themselves under the influence of heroin, marijuana, LSD and mescaline, one day on each drug, and Sam talked to me for hours in the cafeteria about the sessions and what he had learned, and during our Tuesday evenings he painted some of the images which had appeared in his mind during both the clinic and Shura group experiments, telling me as he worked about the emotions and concepts he had experienced, interrupted only by my occasional demonstration of some useful trick or technique with brush or smearing thumb.
Late one Tuesday evening, while we were putting away the paints and brushes, I had dared ask him if I might possibly take one of these drugs someday, with him as my guide.
"I don't see why not," he said, "Which one do you think you'd like to try?"
Since I'd read Huxley's beautiful account of his mescaline experiment, as well as Andre Michaux's bitter story of his day with mescaline, I told Sam it seemed to me that the peyote cactus, after all, had been used for centuries by thousands of people, which was a pretty impressive track record, and that I would really love to try it. I added that I wasn't sure what the difference was between mescaline contained in the peyote and mescaline synthesized in a laboratory, but I was ready to take whichever one he could get hold of.
Sam said he would do his best to arrange it, though he couldn't guarantee anything. I thanked him and promised myself not to hope too much, in case it never happened, for whatever reason. Knowing Sam's absent-mindedness, I knew I'd even have to be prepared for the possibility that he might just forget about the whole thing.
That had been two weeks ago.
Now, putting my book down with a paper napkin tucked in it to hold my place, I grinned at my rumpled friend, who was wearing his green surgical smock, untied at the back again.
"How ya doin', Sam?"
"I thought you'd like to know," he said in his usual abrupt way, tearing apart a piece of sourdough bread, "I have come into possession of some peyote buttons, enough for both of us."
I stared at him, my mouth open, "You got some? How wonderful! You really have it?"
Sam swallowed some soup, then asked, "Do you still want to try it?"
My stomach was doing a small up and down dance, but I leaned across the table on my elbows and peered at him, "I really want to do it, Sam. Very much. Just tell me when and where?"
"How about next Sunday?"
I nodded, "That's fine. Next Sunday." I thought frantically, is there anything happening next Sunday that I should remember?
No, Paul isn't with me and it isn't my weekend to be with Christopher.
Once a month, I spent a Sunday with my young son, who was living with his father and his father's new wife in Marin County because she didn't have to work. They didn't want me visiting my boy more frequently than every four weeks because, they said, it was disruptive to him.
Nothing is happening next Sunday.
"Where do we do it, Sam?"
Sam ate more soup, then said, "Where would you be most comfortable - how about your place? We could start there."
"Yes, of course. My apartment." I was in a state of confusion. I'd never taken a psychedelic drug before. I hadn't even smoked pot. Now, all of a sudden, Aldous Huxley's miraculous world was going to open up
- or perhaps that of Michaux's demons - and I didn't know what to ask next.
Sam was sopping up the last of his soup with a piece of sourdough, and I hoped he wouldn't sense my brain-fuzz.
He mustn't change his mind, he mustn't!
"What time?"
"What time?" asked Sam, looking up, "Oh, you mean what time on Sunday. Well, how about 9:00 in the morning? Don't want to start too late; it's going to be a long day, remember."
"Yes, of course." I mentally reviewed what he'd already said, and wondered what I should ask next. I felt like an idiot. How do you go about preparing for a day under the influence of something like peyote?
"We won't be spending much time inside," said Sam, "Maybe we can walk down to the park, once you've got your sea-legs. It's always best to be outside, in natural surroundings, during this kind of experience."
Suddenly, Sam was no longer the young man who failed to check whether his socks matched and managed to forget half the conferences he was supposed to attend; he was a knowledgeable person, a teacher.
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