“Lisa,” Christian whispered, seeing the hurt deep and alive in her face. “I’m sorry about this evening. I got accidentally dosed today. I was with you in spirit. I just couldn’t get my body here.”
“Christian,” her voice was private, low, responding to the love she clearly heard. He was asking her to be with him once again, just as she had expected, but the arrogance was gone. “I’ll always love you. But I’ll never be a dealer’s lady. I don’t use drugs. I don’t want to worry about who’s knocking at the front door, or whether you’ve been busted. I don’t want to worry about rip-offs or if you’ve been hurt. I don’t want to see you spaced out, in some other world, eating, not eating because you’re fasting, making it home when you can or when it’s convenient for you, like you made it here tonight. I’m going to India to study.”
Christian took a long, deep breath. “Alright,” he answered in a hushed tone. “I’ve interfered in your life enough. Here.” He handed her the package containing the $3,000. “I pray you find happiness in your path. I do love you, Lisa.”
“Thank you,” she bowed her head. “Thank you for everything.”
Christian raised her face to his, took a long last look with wide, naked eyes, and then turned back down the stairs.
The front door of the ashram closed softly, and Lisa saw that Krishna waited at a discreet distance. She smiled at him and, without words, went directly to her room. She took a seat on the bed, closed her eyes, but could only see Christian’s face.
“Oh, God,” she finally moaned aloud, the sob floating from her throat.
As Christian walked slowly back toward the car, he felt that a vital part of his life had been ripped from him, leaving only a great emptiness. He faltered, stopped, and rubbed his eyes with his hands. For the first time, he truly understood the value of a relationship with a woman. In her person, a man placed the expression of his life, his love, both in his daily actions and in his seed.
Lama Loden, he prayed, I know the essence of the waves, the single moving element through all creation … Only the loss of love could cause this pain.
“How’d it go?” asked Bob.
“I gave her the money. And released her. She’s free to go to India now. Her freedom is my real gift.”
CHRISTIAN
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
NOVEMBER 1967
At two a.m., Christian was still wired and unsettled. They were spending the night with brothers in Topanga Canyon, a lot closer than the drive back to Laguna Beach would have been. Julie had met them here, and she and Bob had disappeared into a room, while Dharma had connected with Julie’s friend Bird for the evening.
Christian picked up the car keys that sat on the counter and took the convertible down Topanga Canyon Road. The car was fast and light, and he cornered easily, driving toward the ocean, his senses concentrated on the driving, the breeze blowing away thoughts of Lisa.
The Pacific Coast Highway was brightly lit, the moon hovering over the water. Strands of hair ripped from his hair tie and slapped his face. His eyes were drawn to the surf—bright silver where it bubbled in the shallows, the ocean dark behind. On the road ahead, framed against the water, a lone hitchhiker pointed with his thumb. There were few cars at that hour, his possibilities slim.
Start giving to someone else, he told himself. Your karma will change.
“Need a ride?” Christian called, revving the engine.
“Thanks!” The kid jumped into the car. “The wind off the water’s cold.”
“Out pretty late tonight, aren’t you?”
“I was at a party and didn’t realize the time. Boy, am I stoned.”
How old is this kid? Christian wondered—sixteen, maybe seventeen. Clean, baby face. Idiotic stoned grin.
“Where to, brother?”
“Pasadena. I know it’s a distance, but you heading that way?”
“I’ll take you there. I just need to drive around. Pasadena sounds as good as anywhere else.”
“That’s nice … that brother stuff.”
Christian pressed the pedal to the floor. The car’s tires spun and squealed, then gripped onto the road, quickly picking up speed.
“What’s happening in Pasadena?” he shouted above the roar of air.
“I live there. And I go to school. California Institute of Technology.”
“You’re in college?”
“Since I was fourteen—four years now. I’m a child genius,” he grinned crazily.
Christian looked over. “What are you studying?”
“Organic chemistry. I’m a great chemist.”
Albert switched on the living room light and made a sweep of the room, brushing newspapers off the couch and picking up dropped clothing and dirty dishes. The room was in total disarray—a collection of projects, papers of various kinds, and scattered technical journals. “Have a seat,” he invited.
“Albert, huh?”
“My mother named me after Albert Einstein. Seems she knew the old man. It’s not such a bad name once you consider the source. Albert Wright. Can I get you anything? Beer? Soda?”
“Let me see if I have some tea.” Christian looked into his woven bag and found a small box inlaid with different kinds of hardwood.
Albert looked at it curiously. “What’s inside?”
“Look for yourself.”
Christian held out the box, showing the bags of peppermint and chamomile tea, a few joints, hits of acid, two caps of mescaline, and a roach clip.
“Mescaline sulfate?” Albert asked, pointing to the large caps.
“Yes.” Christian looked up, surprised. “How’d you know?”
“I’ll put some water on if you take out one of those joints. Come on into the kitchen.”
Albert filled a kettle and put it on the stove to boil, but his eyes returned to Christian’s box. “Let me see those capsules of mescaline.”
Christian held them out to him, and Albert examined them under a bright desk light that sat on the kitchen table. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell once it’s in a cap,” he mumbled.
“What is?”
“The crystalline structure. I went peyote hunting last summer with my roommate Doug. We collected enough to do a small extraction. We liked what we made so well we could never eat it. The crystals are so beautiful. Want to see it?”
“You still have it?”
“Be right back.”
In a few moments, Albert was back with a liter flask eight inches wide and twelve inches high. Millions of rainbow-colored crystals, each one different from the others, balanced in a climbing pyramid.
“This is a small extraction?” Christian asked in amazement.
“We took a lot of pictures with an electron microscope. Wait until you see those.” Albert rushed around the house gathering pictures and sat down with great enthusiasm to explain his infatuation with the camera that took them. So involved was he in the discussion that for many moments, he did not hear the whistling teakettle.
“Have you ever seen this before?” Christian asked pointing to the tablets in his box. “Pink Wedges.”
“Acid?”
“Two hundred and fifty mics plus 10 milligrams of STP. Ever drop?”
“Oh, yeah. Two years ago for the first time. A group I knew at UCLA thought it might be a good experiment, to see if anything might be revealed.”
“And was it?”
“After I was able to get up off the floor,” Albert laughed. “Sure.”
“What do you think LSD is?”
“A compound made from ergot. Have you ever seen ergot? A friend of mine’s trying to grow it in a laboratory.”
“Really?” Christian’s interest was instantly piqued.
“He’s still working on it.”
Christian knew something of ergot, knew it was a fungus that grew naturally on rye and, to a lesser extent, on other species of grain and wild grasses. During the Middle Ages, it was responsible for mass poisonings. People would harvest the grain and bake the infected f
lour into bread. Whole villages would go berserk. Because ergot caused constriction of the blood vessels, some of those affected had severe convulsions. Others lost limbs from gangrene. From ergot, a good chemist could extract ergotamine, and from ergotamine, lysergic acid. Lysergic acid was the basis of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.
Albert spent a long time telling Christian about the research into ergot production, his anecdotes filled with his own theories about chemical properties and suggestions for new chemical compounds. On an old envelope, he drew pictures of chemical structures, carefully explaining his thoughts to Christian as quickly as they came to him.
“Here’s the chemical picture of LSD. Can you imagine what Albert Hofmann thought when he first synthesized acid? Think about Hofmann’s first trip,” Albert cried excitedly. “No one’s ever been stoned on LSD. Ever. Then all of a sudden, he’s riding his bicycle home, and he starts coming on to several hundred mics. Wow!”
Christian thought for a moment, knew he was getting spacey. “It’s really all because of the choice Hofmann made on that trip, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“The fact that we have acid today. He could have shelved LSD then, and no one would have ever known about it, but something happened to him. He certainly must have realized the enormous possibilities of the mind, and he gave it to us.”
Albert leaned back in his chair and studied Christian. “What do you think LSD is?”
Christian fell into thought at the question. Earlier, at the ocean, he had been universal chemistry—the combination of chemicals and the electrical system that produced a human. But there was more. He had known reason and purpose—the presence of an all-pervading force in every conceivable entity, all of it moving toward unity.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” he told Albert. “The discovery of LSD has to have some purpose. Hofmann synthesized it during the height of madness, World War II, when millions were slaughtered and the atomic bomb dropped. The war and its effects made men despair. Acid is God’s way of giving hope back to men. It’s given us a future.” Christian poured more tea and passed another a cup to Albert. Scientist and mystic faced each other.
“I’ll tell you one thing nobody knows,” Albert told him. “No one knows how LSD works.”
“Did you ever think about making it?”
“We talked about it, Doug and I. We even have some papers on manufacturing—some of Hofmann’s stuff, the Garbrecht papers, a few other papers in German. Someday, we’ll see if we can do it for fun—you know, follow the recipe. But ergotamine tartrate is so controlled that it’s impossible to get enough to work with—not even through the school. That’s why we’re trying to grow it.”
Christian half closed his eyes, let his senses float over Albert. Innocence. His short brown hair still had a child’s cowlick at the back, his dark eyes lightened only by the darker rimmed glasses, his grin constant.
What was beyond the facade? Christian could feel no fear in him, no paranoia, even with a stranger in his kitchen looking at a jar of mescaline sulfate. For him, the use of psychedelics was not an act of revolution, but a means to knowledge, interest piqued by the experience itself, by the information revealed. He already knew that Albert assimilated and manipulated an amazing number of facts at the same time, that he focused on meticulous detail. What must it be like to understand space and time differently than others?
“Hey, it’s late,” Albert said, thinking Christian was drifting off. “You’re welcome to spend the night on the couch. You must be tired.”
“I was just thinking. I took a large dose of acid earlier today, about noon. I’m still pretty wired.”
“How much is a large dose?”
Christian told Albert his story, how he suspected something in the milk. Then, for some reason, he went on to tell Albert about Lisa, not just this evening’s visit but the story from the beginning, from when she’d lived with Matt. “She simply couldn’t handle my lifestyle,” he concluded, resignation in his voice.
“Say, if you deal, want to sell some of this mescaline sulfate for us? Cash has been pretty tight around here lately. It’s time for us to let go.”
Christian picked up the flask. The rainbows flashed at his eyes.
“Albert, how would you like to try to make some LSD?”
In the days after the trip, Christian followed his intuition and met Doug, Albert’s roommate. Speaking carefully with the two of them, Christian ran through every possibility and question he could imagine, until he felt they understood what they were attempting. He emphasized the dangers involved in a lab—paranoia, police, and—in the end—the possibility of failure. Manufacturing LSD was a complex process.
Albert laughed at all of it. He knew how to work in a laboratory. Failure? Never. As for paranoia and police, who’d want to bother two brilliant young students who were attempting an experiment?
Christian further cautioned them on the secretiveness necessary to make the operation work. On this they agreed. If it got out that they had a lab going, half the school would want to observe the process.
“There’s a great deal of effort that goes into acquiring base,” he told them. “I have to go to Europe and rummage around. If I take the trouble to do that, I don’t want to blow it.”
No way, they promised, quiet and careful consideration in every detail.
“Alright, here’s $4,000. Rent a place and set up the lab, preferably in an industrial area. Get things going.”
Unaccustomed to large amounts of cash, their eyes bulged at the sight. “Boy, you’re really serious, aren’t you?” Albert said.
“Don’t drop all of this in one place,” Christian instructed. “And don’t come on to your friends like you’ve got a lot of bucks all of a sudden. Stay humble, and the Light will favor you.”
“When do you think you’ll go?”
“Just after the New Year. I’ll probably be gone for a good six or eight weeks.”
Christian knew he was playing a hunch. If he gambled and lost ten grand on Albert and Doug, he would have learned something about them, maybe about trusting people without an introduction. But if Albert and Doug came through, together, they would make hundreds of thousands of dollars and put out some really good acid.
By the first week of January, he’d be on his way to Amsterdam.
JERRY PUTNAM
UC BERKELEY EXPEDITION, AMAZON JUNGLE
DECEMBER 1967
Jerry Putnam thought the heat in the Amazon relentless. A headscarf kept the sweat from his eyes as he trudged through jungle, his shirt drenched and clinging to him. Dense growth had overgrown parts of the trail, and the occasional whack of machetes became a background beat to the trek. In the hot and steamy air, he believed he could actually see the plants grow before his eyes, sense the pulsating motion of their breathing. The space around him vibrated with the hum of thousands of unseen insects. A sapphire hummingbird flitted into view, then disappeared. Overhead, a band of squirrel monkeys chattered loudly.
He smiled, content.
I don’t care about the heat, the sweat, or this backbreaking pack, he thought. This is a hell of a lot better than prison.
Six months ago, he had been nineteen years old, conscientious in his work, curious about the world, and already beginning to understand that what he was learning would help to protect ecosystems in the future. When his attorney had tried to explain his age and talents to the DA, none of that had mattered. The DA had slammed him, in good part because he wouldn’t give the investigating agents the name of his contact. His conviction had been quick and without trial, a plea bargain worked out. Guilty. He’d been sentenced to three months in the Santa Rita County Jail—July, August, and September—and a three-year probation. A felony record and three months in prison had destroyed his dreams of graduate school and a university professorship.
Just before that terrible, heart-pounding day when he would have to surrender himself to the prison, he’d gone to Dr. Miller’s office to explain why
he couldn’t make the Cuernavaca field trip. Standing before Dr. Miller’s desk and telling him that he was going to prison was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. He’d almost crumbled where he stood. But grant money had been allocated, reservations made, and even with everything else happening, Jerry had a sense of obligation to the team. Dr. Miller had asked no questions, and Jerry had offered no explanations.
On nights in the prison when he could not sleep, the lights and noise and snores of men keeping him awake, Jerry thought of his mother and the painful phone call he’d had to make to tell her he’d been arrested. His emotions in that semidarkness, lying on a thin mattress and staring at a concrete ceiling, had been an uncertain mix of shame and gratitude. His mother had put up her only security as bail, a small house left to her by his father. On visiting days, he was haunted by the sadness in her eyes. When she had asked him why this had happened, he’d told her he smoked pot occasionally and had tried to do a friend a favor.
Prison had given him a good deal of time to think, and he knew the real reason he had gone to jail: Myles Corbet. Myles had deliberately set him up. Myles, his Little League teammate, his Boy Scout comrade, his camping buddy, expedition partner, and best friend. Myles, who never visited or wrote or offered an excuse for his absence the evening of the bust.
The only thing he didn’t know was why.
In hindsight, going right in and having it over was the best thing he could have done. Cal began in October, and he’d been able to return to school at the beginning of the semester. Remarkably, Professor Miller had sought him out, told him it was time to get back to work, and had given him the opportunity to take part in this field trip to Ecuador between the fall and winter semesters.
The university team had flown into Quito, and from there, had slipped through mountain passes in a small twin-engine plane to a missionary landing strip near a tributary of the upper Amazon. The jungle where Jerry now trekked was one of mist and wet and heat, protected from contact with the outside world by high Andean mountains in the west and the broad expanse of Amazon jungle to the east. Water from snow and rain coursed through the high-walled valleys, becoming the swift rivers that formed the waterfalls sacred to the tribes who lived in this green world. Eventually, the wild rivers left the foothills to quietly flow across northern Brazil as the Amazon.
A Nation of Mystics Page 30
