Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties
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ply to show up every Wednesday for a workshop and to write. It didn’t offer very much money, but if one’s spouse worked, life was possible. Mack urged me again to try for it, and this time I did. A few months later I got the letter: I’d received one of the Stegner Fellowships. The thought of it almost forty-five years later makes my heart quicken. Life is short. In the late spring Janice, our small daughter, and I took the train west. It was the first we’d ever seen of the Far West, the first of California. 70 robert stone
SEVEN Janice, Deidre, and I arrived in San Francisco late in the spring, just as the cold seasonal weather was closing in (Mark Twain has been quoted as saying that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco) and the foghorn on Alcatraz sounded the Rock’s last year of its operation as a pen- itentiary. Our apartment had a Murphy bed, the first one I’d ever seen outside a Laurel and Hardy movie. It was on the fourth floor of a five-story building, on the lowest slope of Russian Hill, a short distance from the bay. Walking up the hill at night, we
would fall under the spell of the prison island’s foghorn and the searchlight arcs sweeping the veil of mist. There had been at least one escape attempt while we were in town. A famous local actor was said to have parked a car in the ma- rina, keys in the ignition, a bag of sandwiches on the seat—just in case the cons made it through the currents and dodged the sharks and patrol boats. This kind of gesture defined the city at that time. Halfway up the foggy hill from us was an Italian restaurant, can- dlelit, with red-checkered tablecloths, fiascoes, even a kindly propri- etor who extended credit. “The City,” the Chronicle’s columnist unrelentingly called the place, with a jaunty suburban provincialism that provoked your youthful hipper-than-thou. Herb Caen was the sort of columnist who might refer to himself as a “scribe,” a “scribe” from “Baghdad on the Bay.” My picayune revenge was to call the place “Frisco” at least once a day—call it “Frisco” and watch a moment of well-bred revulsion curl the thin lips of the tweedy, nice-looking people who seemed so large a percentage of the local population in those days. (Around 1960, a New York wit compared the ambience of San Fran- cisco to being “stuck in an elevator in Lincoln Center.”) But it was sweet, a pearl necklace of a city, at once exotic and Yankee, re- strained yet dazzling, possessed of a beauty that went on surprising. And it was charming, a word I could not then honestly employ, be- cause it described qualities beyond my conscious comprehension. No one had ever used it about New York. Both Janice and I held down jobs during our summer in San Fran- cisco. I had the day job, in a shirt factory on Mission Street. Janice worked night shift at the Bank of America while I babysat. When Stanford’s fall term began in September, we moved out to Menlo Park near the Stanford campus. In the autumn of 1962 (a sunny sea- 72 robert stone
son I couldn’t, newly transplanted to California, quite get myself to call “fall”) a number of us set out from Palo Alto to San Francisco in a friend’s Volkswagen bus. At the time I was erotically programmed for Volkswagen buses, conducting an affair, deliciously illicit, with a young graduate-student wife who drove one. I remember anticipat- ing the distant sight of that bus as she approached our rendezvous, recognizing her, honey-haired at the wheel, her groceries and tod- dler secured in the backseat. Illicitness was not going to be around much longer, with its pangs and guilty pleasures. We were about to abolish the very notion. In the days of illicitness one was serious. One struggled against the pressures of one’s early marriage and premature parenthood. One tried to behave like the characters in French New Wave movies—a treach- erous phone call, a shrug, a Gauloise. A busload of youthful libertines, most of us in some manner of postgraduate fealty to Stanford, we drove to San Francisco that day on the Bayshore Freeway, Highway 101. Our objective on the autumn day in question was an evening out, in which it would be possible to catch John Coltrane at the Jazz Gallery and Lenny Bruce at the Hungry i, within half a mile of each other. We had decided to prepare for this embarrassment of riches by ingesting large amounts of peyote, the inoffensive-appearing little cacti which in those days were mainly available south of the border, in Mexican market stalls, offered for sale by tranquilly composed Native American ladies who looked as though they knew something most other people didn’t. As we now realize, this was the case. Certainly they knew more about things than I did, hurtling through sunny California toward the evening’s pleasure. I was not completely checked out on what I knew, as opposed to all the rest. Someone had bought a great many gelatin capsules, available from corner drugstores. Someone else had boiled a huge mass of the slime prime green: remembering the sixties 73
green cactus meat into a loathsome dinosaur-colored ratatouille and jammed it into the capsules. Peyote tasted even more disgusting than it appeared, and one did anything to suppress the taste. All of us, three or four couples, proceeded to swallow a handful of these things, an average of six or so each. I admitted to six; in fact I had taken twelve. Secretly, I was convinced I knew the score. I had taken peyote before. That I might require twelve capsules of peyote squash to respond to the genius arrayed before us in the night ahead—Coltrane, Bruce—plainly bespeaks an impulsiveness of appetite, lack of judg- ment, and so forth. I can’t remember anyone referring to excess, al- though surely the concept existed even in those times. That afternoon we parked in North Beach, still known as the hip- ster quarter then. (In contrast, Haight-Ashbury in 1962 was a working-class inland neighborhood, full of inexpensive, pretty Vic- torian houses, a secret for the locals and the native born.) We made Coltrane’s first set before dark. As the half dozen of us staggered in, we could feel the Aztec potion stirring inside us ever so subtly, clos- ing down our frontal lobes, awakening the reptilian brain cells we all shared with the Great Lizard of the Dawn of Time. The Lizard was manifest in the hypnagogic patterns inlaid against our inner eyelids, unmistakably pre-Columbian, an angry Chacmool, scorning the white-eyes’ summons. As we took our table, a wind rose from over the edge of some- thing, tasting of the void. The wind grew in intensity until it fixed us to our chairs and threatened to send our drinks flying. We held on. I affected sangfroid but I knew the wind would never stop, that it had come for me. Its force was unimaginable. I turned to the stage, where Coltrane was doing “My Favorite Things.” I suppose my jaw dropped, that I stood agape. I glorified 74 robert stone
the Lizard. The Lizard caused the music from the stage to become visible. This is not a metaphor; on peyote there are no metaphors. From the tenor sax issued festive, gorgeous silk bands of the bright- est richest red, whirling and dancing and filling the space with scar- let bows and curls. The brass produced great fat waves of frost, ice-lightning it appeared, with a razor-sharp serrated edge—the waves expanding and contracting marvelously along the bass line. From each instrument in its kind issued some manner of bright spectacle, not one of which I could handle remotely. Bracing in the terrible wind, stepping carefully over the bright music that was pil- ing up on the floor, I made for the street. I tried to be cool, and showed everyone who glanced at my walkout a grinning rictus of terror. My extremely loyal Janice came with me, as did a guy, one of our number, who had eyes for her. The three of us trudged around the corner into Chinatown. This was, you might say, a Chinatown of the mind. It was actual Chinatown, Grant Avenue, but it was more profoundly Chinatown in no ethnic sense. Rather, the Polanski sense of a lost and terrifying cityscape; its clinky, clunky exoticism, designed to divert the tourists, provided me with an experience much richer and stranger—so rich and strange in fact that as I am a Christian faithful man I would not spend another such a night though ’twere to win a world of happy days (Richard III, act 1, scene 4). It was like drown- ing in a vat of the strangest malmsey. I became persuaded that there was a sharp pain in my foot. I, Jan- ice, and the guy who had eyes for her all went into St. Mary’s Square to sit on a bench, at the foot of the statue of Sun Yat-sen. When I took my shoe off it seemed that my sock was drenched in blood— bright blood, the color of John Coltrane’s soprano sax riffs. I took my so
ck off. My foot looked similarly bloodied. It appeared there was a prime green: remembering the sixties 75
nail in my brand-new Macy’s Palo Alto shoe, purchased a day or two before. The nail was pointed up, the business end half an inch into my sole, hence the sharp pain. Across the path from us, a couple of tough-looking Chinese teenagers were providing wolf tickets, close-ended blank menace. As they watched, we began to puzzle out the mystery of the foot, the shoe, and the nail. Something like this scene ensued. me: Blood! Shit! j (six peyote capsules): That’s impossible. I mean...It’s not possible. the guy who had eyes for her (about the same): Unhh. Blood? Huh? me: Hammered! Some...hammered. In my shoe. j: No you’re... hallucinating. Just look... tgwhefh: He’s hallucinating! You’re hammered, ha ha. (Janice has put her hand to my foot and then into my shoe. Her hand has come out drenched in blood.) j: That’s impossible. Jesus. tgwhefh: Is it blood? me: Yes! Blood! (All three stare harder. Then harder still.) j: Oh my God. Oh my God! (She gets more blood on her hand. TGWHEFH touches her hand, gets blood all over his hand. We stare at our hands.) j (to me): Jeez, your eyes. Pupils. They’re huge! 76 robert stone
(All look at each other’s pupils in turn and at each other’s hands and at their own. They begin to giggle.) At this the teenagers exchanged thoughtful looks and departed the park. One droll thing about taking peyote in 1962 was that hardly anyone knew such a thing existed. The observers of our ob- scenely witless behavior had to ascribe it to either alcohol or mental disorder of an extreme sort. I never got to Lenny Bruce’s stand-up. And I had wasted my first Coltrane concert with foolishness. Events of this sort were repeated; there was lunacy, stark terror, much enjoyment. The upside for me was that in the years of my fel- lowship at Stanford we all—friends, lovers, fellow grad students— saw a great deal of ourselves and each other, which for the most part pleased us mightily. None but ourselves, a small circle of friends, as Phil Ochs put it, would go near us. We grew close. Later that year, a number of us received LSD sacramentally. The celebrant was Richard Alpert, Ph.D., since known as Baba Ram Dass. Ram Dass in the early days would jokingly refer to himself as “Dr. LSD Jr.” Dr. LSD Sr. would be the late Timothy Leary, Ph.D., his partner in acid research at Harvard. One afternoon Ram Dass turned a number of us on to LSD with a lozenge spray, from an at- omizer such as that which hoarse or dying opera singers are repre- sented as self-medicating their tonsils. Among the communicants was Dr. Vic Lovell, the man to whom Ken Kesey dedicated One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ram Dass had been Vic’s mentor in graduate school, and Vic is the man usually cred- ited with turning Kesey on, when the novelist worked as an orderly at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, where its results were being ob- served. The identity of the observers has since been much discussed. prime green: remembering the sixties 77
The afternoon, like so many others, was dappled and lovely. A few minutes after we had fixed, I thought I noticed something peculiar about the back of my hand. Peculiar and nasty. A rash of some kind. Spreading. I gave it the lemur-eyed double scope. It refused to go away; rather, it spread its scabrous net the wider. I made the mistake of consulting Dr. Acid Jr. for a reality check. dr. acid (ruminatively): When we were in Zihuatenejo one of us developed a rash on the back of his hand. It looked a little like that. me: Yes? dr. acid: Yes. It spread. me: Spread? dr. acid: Yes, it spread over his entire body. He thought he was going to die. me: So... what happened ? dr. acid: As a matter of fact...he died. I pondered each word. The man had died. Suddenly this seemed a little amusing. The Doctor’s cultivated serenity, his cosmic disinter- est were comical. I began to laugh, uncontrollably. No one else did. Later, things improved. There was a brushfire, and red or yellow fire engines (who could tell? what was the difference?) and crackling, whining radio equipment. We had not started the fire, but we tried to make the best of it. A beautiful girl sat on a limb playing Bach on her flute until the aromatic smoke of burning leaves drove her down. Horses appeared and chased us until one of the women, an equestri- enne, chased them. 78 robert stone
One party I attended, the establishing event of what it pleased us to call the Suburban Folklife Center, featured a human cat’s cradle. “All the thumbs raise their hands,” called Gurney Norman, the Ken- tucky folklorist who was our founder. It was a kind of square dance. By this time, our community around the edges of the Stanford campus and the writing center had divided over the question of marijuana. Many of us had seen dope up close in urban high schools during the nineteen fifties. In New York it was associated with gangs of the West Side Story era; it went with poolrooms next to the el, zip guns, and fighting with torn-off car antennas. In the Navy, I never went near it; the feeling was that apprehension would entail live burial in the dread fortress at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During the sixties grass became one of California’s bright won- ders and increasingly a social shibboleth. In general, people who smoked tended to socialize with others who smoked. It went with music and it went with sex, which counted for quite a lot. When someone unknown was arriving at a party, or had been invited along on some expedition, the question would be “Is he cool?” Which meant did he do dope. This was partly a question of security, since then, as again now, penalties for marijuana could be severe or vi- ciously absurd. But it was also postadolescent snobbery and self- satisfaction. At least it was with me. Psychedelia became more and more central to our concerns as time passed. Janice continued to help support us by working as a data processor. On one occasion she exchanged some processing, for a foundation that concerned itself with psychedelic drug research, for a free acid trip. The term “data processing” was unfamiliar then. Eventually, it began to occur to some people that the availability of mind-altering drugs and the rise of the transistor-microchip postindustrial revolu- prime green: remembering the sixties 79
tion might not be completely unconnected. There was an idiom, an attitude, around both of these developments that was somehow re- lated. A certain bohemian style informed both. Business histories of the time recount that the sixties were a very bad time for Interna- tional Business Machines, as it then was, holding to white-shirted, Babbitty styles and routines. In Silicon Valley, Homo ludens prevailed among the start-ups, the culture of hot tubs and experimental sab- baticals, grad student life continued by other means. Strange things, a spirit at once elitist and egalitarian, were taking hold. In one of our writing workshops at Stanford, Professor Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize physicist, had come at Wallace Stegner’s invitation to address us. I think it was Wally’s way of addressing the C. P. Snow dilemma, which was still on the mind of the academy. At Cambridge, Snow had deplored the disconnect between the sciences and the liberal arts. Or maybe the initiative was Dr. Lederberg’s. The doctor told us something he thought we should know as writers: that the line between what was human and what was not would presently become uncertain. He was thinking of artificial intelligence. Lederberg’s lesson confirmed our sense of plunging into change, a new oncoming world. I, as a high school dropout whose greatest technical achievement was taking Morse code on a typewriter (long division was beyond me), could only fantasize about connections be- tween this apparently unrelated, but somehow mysteriously covert, research. The Stanford Research Institute, which did a great deal of contract work for the government, was interested in arcane circuits of all kinds. Politics were also newly rich and strange. In New York, the hard Left was still pretty much in ruins, while the Right was essentially out of town. Had the fifties been a time of rigidity and hysteria? Maybe. It depended on where you lived and who your friends were. 80 robert stone
Student demonstrations, youthful crowds battling with the po- lice, were things that happened in Trieste as far as most Americans were concerned. In San Francisco they were getting ready to happen here, in the immediate post-Eisenhower USA. San Francisco had always been a big labor town; maybe that was part of it. Harry Bridges and his longshoremen’s union had survived both congressional investigations and purges by the AFL-CIO. Iron- ically, the port was thriving on American involvem
ent in Asian wars, and the union with it. The locals were often ready to lend their sponsorship to Left-minded rallies. There were those who said that many of the victims of the anti-Communist “witch hunts” back east had made their way to the less accusatory atmosphere of northern California, raised their children there. The red diaper babies, second- or third-generation Communists, Trotskyists, and the off- spring of various Marxist heretics, were ready to take revenge on Amerika. The wave of payback was strong on the West Coast. At the beginning, Berkeley, not Stanford, was the center of neo- leftist politics. By the time of the Berkeley Free Speech demonstra- tions, a few years after we arrived, I had regularly been running into officers of the Young People’s Socialist League, the SDS, the Mili- tant, the Spartacists, the Maoists, the Communist Workers Party, and the Revolutionary Communist Party (not to be confused with the CPUSA). As the Vietnam War intensified, the radical cadres ex- panded as if in reaction. It never occurred to me at first that the Stanford Research Insti- tute, with its enormous Department of Defense contracts, might have served as a leading common denominator for factoring the cul- tural oddities I was enjoying. The breakthroughs in circuitry and transistorizing, so much of the research that led to the formation of start-ups in Silicon Valley, were done at SRI on Defense budget prime green: remembering the sixties 81