“Yeah, I’m pretty sure you take a right somewhere at the end of this lake.”
“What does your dad do that he can afford to live in Hope Ranch?” He must have known I was in bad shape, and just didn’t want to know exactly what kind, because this was the first personal question he asked me, even though he had found me nodded out on the side of the freeway.
“My dad writes those Chicken Soup for the Soul books.”
“Oh…I’ve heard of that. I’ve never read it, but I think I’ve seen that book in my parents’ bathroom,” he said, veering right at the end of the lake.
“I haven’t read it either, but that sounds about right.”
We kept driving around while I pointed out familiar landmarks, sometimes changing my mind and backtracking until the scenery looked familiar again. It was hard because the suburbs all look the same to me. The cop didn’t seem to mind at all. I guess there wasn’t too much crime going on in Santa Barbara at five in the morning. Eventually we ran into a street called Via Manzanita.
“This must be it,” I said.
“Which house is it?”
“I’m not sure. That one, maybe,” I said, pointing to the first house I saw. “I think I recognize that gate.”
“Let’s check it out.”
We drove all the way up the long driveway to the front door before I realized it wasn’t the right house.
“That’s okay. We’ll try the next one,” he said.
He seemed to enjoy seeing all these multimillion-dollar estates. Even when I said a certain house didn’t look familiar, he would say, “Let’s just check it out anyway, just to make sure.”
Hope Ranch is one of those communities with its own private police force, so he probably hadn’t seen too much of it. We entered at least seven or eight more properties before we found my dad’s house. The last time I had been there the driveway was full of luxury cars, but today there was only a neglected Dodge Caravan.
I was sure the cop was going to want to meet my dad or someone who could vouch for me before just leaving me at some mansion in the middle of the most exclusive neighborhood in Santa Barbara, but he just dropped me off and wished me good luck. I thanked him for everything and he left.
The first thing I did was try all the doors to the house, all nine of them. The front door, the back door, the exercise-room doors, the kitchen door, the door to the pool, the sliding glass door to the guest room, the laundry door, and the maid’s door were all locked. Next I tried the cabana, the office building, my dad’s office, and the garage, and finally I walked down the path to the horse stables and checked the apartment above the barn. Everything was locked up tight.
“Where is everyone?” I asked one of the horses, before heading back to the house. The last time I had been here, there were so many employees running around he just left the place wide open. The only reason I could see him locking up the whole compound was if it was going to be empty for a while. It was now about six in the morning and I was so tired from being up for two days straight, completely wasted on drugs, driving eight hours, and chumming it up with the police that all I wanted to do was sleep. I walked back to the house, went to the pool, lay down on a lawn chair, and nodded out. Someone would show up eventually.
nineteen
On how he came to eat a bit of paper that is said to open minds
BOARDING SCHOOL WAS full of drugs, and I found that, for the most part, long hair and tie-dyed shirts meant that you were a hippie as the term related to drug use only. Even though the majority of the student body looked just like the activists and hippies I had grown up around, they had very little in common other than their dress code and sometimes their record collections. None of them seemed to give a shit about anything other than smoking pot, which was so common you could smell it at almost any hour of the day, wafting from various areas of the campus.
In the interest of trying to connect with the other kids, I would take a hit if a joint or pipe was ever passed to me, but most of the time the other kids ignored me. I might not have been the least cool kid in school, but I was pretty close. And I still looked to be about two years younger than my age of thirteen. Add to that the fact that I had absolutely no money and very little to offer personality-wise, and there just wasn’t much reason to give me drugs. Whenever I did manage to get a hit off a joint being passed around, the environment and the people would disappear, and I would be all alone listening to my thoughts, which didn’t have anything nice to say about me or anyone else. I would then go straight to my room and wait out the high with my head under a pillow. Of course, I always smoked again at the next opportunity. My real interest, though, was in getting ahold of some acid, which was also extremely popular but kept much more under wraps.
On a weekend trip to Flagstaff, I had bought a book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for fifty cents. I wanted very much to take LSD and have my mind opened up like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, but the problem was no one would give it to me. Aiden, the school drug dealer, would have sold me a hit for ten bucks, but I would have had to quit smoking for a week to afford it. Waiting for a benevolent older kid to give me some proved fruitless, so when I got back to Berkeley for the summer, I went over to the Hog Farm, a big house where Wavy Gravy and about twenty other old hippies lived, to see if I could get a backstage pass to a Grateful Dead concert at the Greek Theatre. The last time I had asked they gave me one in exchange for volunteering to watch the kids. I must not have done a very good job, because this time they told me they didn’t have any passes left. Period.
“I can teach the kids juggling, or whatever needs to be done,” I told Wavy’s wife, Jahanera.
“Sorry. There just aren’t any passes left.”
I didn’t believe her, but there was nothing I could do.
The problem was that I didn’t have money for a ticket. I’d been working as a busboy at a restaurant in Jack London Square until one of the regular clients said she would no longer eat there if I didn’t cut off my dreadlocks. I was becoming sick of them, too, but getting fired over it gave me a new resolve to keep them. I got very self-righteous about the whole thing, but really I just didn’t want to work. It was a pain in the ass, and some days I would only make five or ten dollars in tips. I went back to folding newspapers at five in the morning, which gave me just enough money for cigarettes and coffee.
Even if I did have the money for a ticket, I wouldn’t have bought one. I didn’t like the Grateful Dead at all, and frankly, I felt it was beneath me to hang out in the audience with the fans. The only reason to go was to hang out backstage, eat free ice cream, and play the arcade games they always brought on tour with them. In a last-ditch effort, I called Trixie, a girl I had met at camp the previous summer. I didn’t know her that well, but it was rumored that she had a crush on me, and I knew she couldn’t run out of passes since she was Jerry Garcia’s daughter.
Trixie sounded excited to hear from me, but unfortunately I just wasn’t interested in her that way. I felt a little guilty when I picked up my ticket at will-call. I found her backstage, though, and after a little catching up, I asked her if she had ever taken acid.
“No,” she said.
“Really? I figured all you guys had done it before,” I said, referring to the children of famous hippies.
“Not me. You want to do it?” she asked.
“Yeah. I just read this book. Your dad is in it, by the way…but yeah. I think I’m ready to try it.”
“Okay. Let’s try it,” she said.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Taking acid for the first time with Jerry Garcia’s daughter was a way better story than doing it at school, although the desert would have probably been a more conducive atmosphere than being stuck in an amphitheater with ten thousand people.
Trixie led the way out to the soccer field, which in Berkeley served as the makeshift parking-lot scene. We walked around until we passed a hippie saying “doses” under his breath. Neither of us knew what we were doing, and Trixie
gave me twenty dollars to give to the guy. I knew Aiden was a scam artist, but I had no idea how much of one until this guy handed me a grayish piece of paper with twenty hits of acid on it. At a dollar a hit, I could have made a fortune back at school and run Aiden out of business.
We took one each and wandered around the soccer field, which was really just a big flea market for hallucinogenic drugs, tie-dyed shirts, and paraphernalia, while we waited for the acid to take effect.
Nothing happened, though. Dejected and feeling ripped off, we walked back to the amphitheater. I wanted to go backstage, but it wasn’t often that Trixie got to hang out in the audience and see her dad play, so we went up to the lawn area. It was there that things started to get weird.
The first thing I noticed was that the band didn’t sound half bad. They actually sounded really good, which was strange since I had heard this shit a million times before. Despite my dislike for them, I knew most of the words to their songs simply from singing them so many times at summer camp. But I had never heard the songs played like this. It seemed as if every note had some hidden meaning that I wanted to unlock. But the notes were coming so fast, it proved hard. Or maybe the meaning was actually coded into a series of notes. I couldn’t figure it out exactly, but whatever they were trying to tell me was very deep.
The people around us were twirling around in circles or bouncing up and down on one foot, moving their hands around in what seemed like a sign-language translation of something impossible to describe with words. I chose to lie on the grass and dug my hands into the dirt so I would have something to grab onto if I started floating away. I didn’t understand how these other people could hop up and down or twirl around as they did without falling over. It was all I could do to keep myself horizontal. Unable to maneuver through three-dimensional space, we stayed in the same spot till the show was over, and there were fewer obstacles between our destination and us. The audience was long gone and the crew was starting to clean up the unbelievable mess that was left before Trixie and I got it together to make our way backstage to meet up with her dad. I had been so consumed by my own thoughts that it had never occurred to me to ask Trixie what she was going through. She seemed happy, though, when she introduced me to her parents.
I shook Jerry Garcia’s hand and said “nice to meet you,” even though I had met him, shaken his hand, and said the same exact thing at least twice before. What really sent my acid trip in a whole other direction was when Trixie introduced me to her mom. She must have been in her mid-forties at the time, but when Trixie said, “This is my mom, Mountain Girl,” her mom instantly morphed from an old hippie into the eighteen-year-old Merry Prankster from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I had finished reading it only a few days earlier and had fallen in love with the Mountain Girl character in the book. I had no idea she was Trixie’s mom.
“No way,” I said, totally overwhelmed by it all. “I just finished reading The Acid Test.” She gave me what appeared to be a polite smile but didn’t respond. I couldn’t come up with anything to add, so I stood around awkwardly until Mountain Girl asked Trixie if she was ready to go, and the three of them walked off together. They looked like a happy little family.
Even though Trixie and I hadn’t talked a whole lot, I felt very alone the moment she left. I hung around the backstage area in the hopes of running into someone I knew, until it dawned on me that running into people was the last thing I wanted. What had I ever had to say to these people anyway?
“Hey, how have you been?”
“Good. How have you been?”
“Pretty good. What’s been going on?”
“Not much. How about you?”
“Same.”
SINCE I HAD NO interest in finding out how seeing my mom might affect what was turning out to be a somewhat negative acid trip, I decided not to go home. Instead, I wandered aimlessly around Berkeley, analyzing everything in the universe and what my place in it was. Eventually, when the sky started taking on a blue tinge, I walked back toward my house.
Mom was more then a little shocked to find me wide-awake and cleaning my room when she came to wake me up at eight in the morning. I had moved from my room in the attic to the seven-by-ten-foot addition on the back porch, so there wasn’t a whole lot to clean. Even so, it was always a mess. By the time I got home, though, the world looked so ugly to me that, for the first time in my life, I started to collect my dirty clothes, organize my tapes, dust, and even clean the windows without the threat of being grounded, or not eating dinner, or whatever Mom could come up with. Cleaning helped take my mind off the unbelievably sad state of affairs I had concluded the world was in.
“You’re up? Whoa, what’s going on in here?” she asked. One look at Mom told me that she knew exactly what was going on. My mind was still reeling and had come up with the idea that the only reason I would ever be up so early cleaning was because I had taken acid, and she was just trying to get me to tell her.
“Oh come on, Mom. You know,” I said.
“Know what?” she asked.
“You’ve done it. You know exactly what.”
“Hey, Ory. Are you okay? Really, I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Acid,” I said, and gave her a moment to pretend to figure it out.
“Acid what? Seriously, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if it gets you to clean your room…”
“I took acid last night,” I said a moment before registering that she really didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. This was possibly the first time in my life that I had seen Mom confused. Not confused about what I had told her, but confused about what she should do. It was momentary, though, and when she regained her composure, she said, “Okay. Are your bags packed?”
I nodded.
“Then I’m going to get ready, and we can discuss it in the car. Okay?”
We had a big day ahead of us. First, I had to go to a wedding with her. Then I was to get on a plane with Jack to go to a summer camp in Southern California. He was in town giving one of his self-improvement talks to a captive audience of teachers, who I’m sure would have much rather been enjoying their time off. Although I was over the hump, I was still catching visuals from the LSD and felt like a total wreck.
I really hadn’t thought about how Mom would react to my admission since she had done so much of the stuff herself. We were on our way to a wedding that would be a who’s who of the early ’60s psychedelic movement. Not the Merry Pranksters, but the academic faction who had PhDs and were working as psychiatrists before hippies even existed. The groom was an old colleague of my mom’s who had been involved in Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments at Harvard.
There was a good chance that Timothy Leary would be there, but my mood had really turned sour, and I no longer cared about meeting any more of these people. I just wanted to stay in the car and hide from the world.
“Seriously, you’re only fourteen years old. What were you thinking?” she asked me once we were in the car.
“But you’ve told me so many stories about it,” I tried to defend myself.
“Ory, I…We were conducting academic experiments with well-known doctors and professors in an attempt to see what kind of impact these drugs would have as they related to psychotherapy and personal growth. No one knew anything about LSD back then. You just turned fourteen years old, and this is a very different time period from the 1960s.”
I was intentionally tuning her out until she brought up Jack.
“…and it’s totally unfair for you to ask me not to tell Jack about this. He is your father.”
“What! Since when have you ever felt the need to tell Jack anything? Now all of a sudden he’s my father?”
“Okay. I won’t tell him today because I realize how awkward that could make things, but I have to tell him.”
“That’s fine. I just really don’t want to deal with it today,” I said.
The wedding was in a redwood forest on top of a beautiful mountain overloo
king the ocean, and all I could think about was how ugly everything was. Mom wouldn’t let me stay in the car, but I was spared from having to talk to anyone because we were late in meeting up with Jack.
By the time I met Jack at the airport I’d mostly come down from the acid but was tired and in a foul mood. Seeing him was always awkward, because I had no idea how fathers and sons were supposed to relate to one another, but today felt way more uncomfortable than usual. He didn’t have any experience either, but had spent the last thirteen years instructing teachers about instilling self-esteem in their students and teaching parents how to love their kids. Supposedly he was pretty good at it.
Agitated, irritable, and cranky, I reluctantly returned his hug. Making up a lie about recovering from a recent bout of insomnia, I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep the moment we got to our seats on the plane. I did the same thing during the drive to his house in L.A.
twenty
Recounts a daring heist from the police and a subsequent visit to the psych ward
HELLO…CAN I help you?” I heard a voice say. I opened my eyes and looked around, trying to figure out where I was.
“Uh…hi. I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked a woman who was standing on the other side of the pool at Jack’s house.
“Can I help you with something?” she said, looking as though she was just about to dial 911 on the phone she was holding.
“Hi, I’m Jack’s son” was all I could come up with for an answer.
“Okay…and?”
I was hoping that was all I would have to say, but she wanted more. “Well, I’m kind of in a situation. I ran out of gas on the freeway, and the cops towed my car, and…and this was the only thing I could think of to do.”
“And you say you’re Jack’s son? What’s your name?” she asked.
“Oran.”
“Okay, Warren. Just stay there. I’ll be back in a minute.”
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