by Tom Robbins
The sheer novelty, the mystique if you will, of picking wild mushrooms with culinary intent proved captivating to this Southern boy who, growing up, had been warned to never so much as touch a feral fungus. The genes in my old hunter-gatherer DNA were reignited. Even when our baskets were loaded, I didn’t want to leave the woods. Driving downriver to La Conner whence we’d come, I felt like an aborigine being forced off his ancestral lands.
Ah, but the good times weren’t over yet. In the old La Conner farmhouse where my friends lived, we washed the duff and fir needles off the chanterelles, dipped a quantity of them in a thin batter and fried them in butter. Another batch, once cleaned, were chopped, sautéed in butter seasoned with paprika, then simmered for a few minutes in sour cream and served over toast. Chanterelle meat proved thick and firm, and although a wee bit peppery, tasted rather like . . . you guessed it: chicken. I imagined a hen fattened on nettles and apricots.
These days, when chanterelles, morels, portobellos, and other undomesticated mushrooms may be found on the menus of a great many upscale restaurants; and in season, piled in the bins of better supermarkets, it may be hard to understand what a thrill, what an outlandish oddity was my personal introduction to mushrooming in a society still fraught with fungophobia. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spoke for most of the Anglo-Saxon population when he labeled mushrooms as “foul pustules” and a “filthy crop,” a prejudice hardly weakened by the general who described the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in 1945 as having formed a “mushroom-shaped” cloud. Mom! Dad! Bud! Sis! Duck and cover! The mushroom is coming!) Ah, but I was hooked, becoming henceforth an avid mycophile.
La Conner, the picturesque fishing village and longtime artist community where, eight years later, I would settle down (if that’s not too wimpy a phrase), made an excellent home base for mushroom expeditions. From there, friends and I motored into the Cascades all that autumn in search of oyster mushrooms, king boletus, matsutake, and more chanterelles; invaded foothill pastures (sometimes just ahead of an irate farmer or an irate bull) to gather any one of several tasty agaricus species. Winter shut us down, but come late March we turned our attention to the morel, one of the most prized and savory of all wild mushrooms despite its uncanny resemblance to the withered gray penis of a thousand-year-old mummy. We searched, we picked, we cooked, we ate.
Spring mushrooms fancy summer no more than the fall varieties like winter, so by mid-May of 1964 I’d put away my basket temporarily and shifted my gastronomic focus to tamer fruit, knowing that in a couple of months my father would be shipping me tomatoes from his Virginia garden. It was about that time, however, that someone happened to mention an article in a recent Life magazine that went into some detail about a different sort of mushroom, a variety that illuminated not the palate but the mind.
Curious, I tracked down that issue of Life, opened it to the article in question, and whoosh! Up jumped another charismatic cottontail, this one smaller, quicker, more furtive yet somehow more portentous than its predecessors; and I sensed that were I to run after it (speaking metaphorically, of course), it would lead me to a hole, a burrow, a shaft, an underground portal that opened upon some secret cockeyed world that though hidden, lay not far -- not far at all -- from where I sat reading a popular mainstream magazine.
Life was mainstream all right: mainstream, popular, corporate, and slick. Yet there’s reason to believe that Life has probably “turned on,” if I may use that phrase in its street slang context, more individual Americans than High Times, the Berkeley Barb, and all other counterculture periodicals combined. Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call “the sixties.” The pages I read in Life that day definitely catapulted me onto psychedelica’s helical trajectory and I’ve met a number of other (often influential) people for whom that same article was the starting point of a personal magical mystery tour, a bunny trail Frost scarcely could have imagined when he spoke of “the road less traveled.”
The article detailed the experiences of one R. Gordon Wasson, a successful Wall Street financier whose passionate interest in mycology led him to the mountains above Oaxaca, where in the hut of a bruja he ate a sacramental serving of teonanácatl, the so-called sacred mushroom of indigenous Mexicans. Wasson described a cascading ecstasy that lasted for hours, as well as “wakeful dreaming,” which is to say, though he was at all times fully conscious and intellectually astute, he entertained incredibly vivid visions of, among other things, radiant beings, luminous extradimensional landscapes, and melting castles encrusted with precious jewels. The bruja told Wasson that while white men talked to God, the Oaxacan Indians talked with God, back and forth, and that the mushroom was the conduit that made such a two-way conversation possible.
My reaction to Wasson’s account was immediate and pronounced: I wanted to experience teonanácatl for myself and, by God, I wanted it sooner rather than later! But why?
That’s a fair question. Why? It couldn’t be categorized simply as thrill seeking. As a boy, I’d fantasized about a life of romantic adventure but that was unrealistic kid stuff; influenced by movies and books and, moreover, of a wholly external nature, vastly different from Wasson’s internal expedition. I suppose there could have been an element of the romantic in my desire for the Mexican mushroom, an adult equivalent of stowing away on a smuggler’s sloop or running away with the circus, although in retrospect I think it was something more universally felt if less commonly expressed: a vague yet poignant desire to experience, up close and personal, the fundamental essence of reality, the “which of which there is no whicher,” the ghost in the machine. I guess I wanted to break into that melting gemstone castle and see if there was somebody -- or some thing -- in there who actually knew which came first, the chicken or the egg.
Off and on, for several years, I’d been reading Zen, I’d flirted with Tantric Hinduism, I’d surfed the smaller swells of Sufism, and tried to get down with the Tao. It was all very eye-opening and inspirational, and while Asian mysticism is an easy target for the sneers of secular cynics and sectarian dogmatists alike, it’s far more compatible with modern science than the misinterpreted Levantine myths, ecclesiastical fairy tales, pious platitudes, and near-desperate wishful thinking I’d been fed in Southern Baptist Sunday School. The wisdom in those spiritual texts was obvious, yet I’d integrated it into my daily life with but minimal success. From a practical point of view, it was like trying to teach a monkey to play chess.
I wasn’t unhappy exactly. I had an interesting job, sufficient material comfort, and a congenitally comic sensibility: a lens of levity that not even a neurotic alcoholic wife could fog. Still, something was lacking. Mysticism was too abstract, too remote to warmly embrace; art too concrete, too accessible to resonate for very long in those areas of the brain beyond the optic nerve. In that nondescript period between the end of the beige fifties and the beginning of the Day-Glo sixties, I found myself drifting unfulfilled in an ocean of circumstance. Perhaps I was simply itching to move farther outside the realm of normal expectations, thereby insulating myself from the temptations of bourgeois compromise. Maybe I wanted bliss, wanted freedom, wanted deeper meaning, wanted to experience what Surrealist poets meant when they rhapsodized about the Absolute. Maybe I, too, wanted a tête-à-tête with a supreme being. Or maybe I was just terminally curious. Whatever it was I wanted or imagined I wanted, I intuited, thanks to Life magazine, that there was some fungus down in ol’ Mexico that could very well hold the key to the only treasure -- aside from love, of course -- that really mattered.
What did I do then but pick up the phone and call the botany department at the University of Washington. I asked to speak with Dr. D. E. Stuntz, the resident mycology expert (I’d seen his name in a field guide), and when I had him on the line I, after identifying myself, came right out and asked if he could help me obtain some hallucinog
enic mushrooms. Talk about naïveté! Even in 1963 this was naive. Not particularly amused, Dr. Stuntz curtly suggested I talk to Dr. Varro Tyler in the UW pharmacology department. So I rang him up, too.
With a chuckle, Tyler informed me that while he knew of Wasson’s exploits and was aware of mushrooms with similar psychotropic properties that grew here in the Pacific Northwest (Wow! No kidding?), this was not his area of interest. Before hanging up, however, Dr. Tyler gave me the name and number of an academic colleague, I’ll call him Jim, who had conducted a bit of research in the psychotropic field.
So I rang up this fellow Jim, who proved to be not only a medical doctor with a PhD in pharmacology, he, as luck would have it, was also a Sunday painter and an avid follower of my art column in the Times. Jim suggested we meet for lunch. Later that week, over platters of pasta, we discussed art and philosophy for a couple of hours before getting down to the business of teonanácatl and its gringo cousins. When I inquired if he knew how I might acquire some, Jim smiled and said, “You don’t want mushrooms.”
“Oh, but I do. I really do.”
“No,” he said. “Mushrooms aren’t trustworthy. The amount of psychoactive properties varies from season to season, locale to locale, even mushroom to mushroom. Two mushrooms growing side by side will often contain different amounts of the mind-affecting agent. It’s impossible to gauge a proper dosage.” He paused, registering my disappointment. “There’s something much cleaner, safer, more reliable, and equally effective. Actually, it’s even more effective, if that’s where you want to go.” He paused again. My forkful of tiramisu froze in midair. “It’s called,” he said, “lysergic acid diethylamide-25.”
I’d never heard of LSD, but the moment Jim spoke those words, a white rabbit the size of a TV preacher’s Cadillac and as preposterous as a unicorn flashed by the restaurant window and vanished down a rain-swept street.
It should go without saying that I was eager to try this LSD stuff. Jim, however, was cautious. “Let’s have lunch again in a week,” he said, then maddeningly turned the conversation back to art. It turned out he wanted to get to know me better, wanted further assurance that I was psychologically stable enough to handle the drug. So, a week later we lunched again, and this time he went into deeper detail about the substance, describing the reactions of the several graduate students to whom he’d administered it in a laboratory setting. He was curious, I think, to see how a subject might respond in a more relaxed, sensually stimulating environment. In any case, by the time we’d finished dessert, Jim, convinced now of my relative sanity, agreed to guide me on a trip the following Tuesday, the day of the week on which I normally made the rounds of the art galleries and thus wasn’t expected at the newspaper.
Jim kept a painting studio in a Wallingford District storefront, and it was there on a quiet street (mixed commercial and residential), that we met. It was 9 A.M. but I’d been awake since six, freighting a load of nervous anticipation. I should make it clear that I’d never smoked marijuana, never been “high” on anything. I’d been intoxicated, of course, but while to this day there are ignorant parties who equate being high with drunkenness, the two conditions are diametrically opposed, the one opening up consciousness the way fifteenth-century explorers opened up new worlds, the other shutting it down like a bankrupt pawnshop. At any rate, I showed up that morning at Jim’s studio with an empty stomach (it’s best that way); dressed, as usual in those days, in faded blue jeans and a nice Italian dress shirt, or as one friend put it, “cowboy below the waist, banker above.”
I took a seat in an old overstuffed chair. Jim handed me a cup of water and three small round blue pills (little bluebirds of happiness): three hundred micrograms of pure Sandoz lysergic acid, right off the plane from the manufacturer in Switzerland. Ceremoniously, for drama’s sake, I swallowed them down and tried to make myself comfortable. In the next eight hours, I would get up from that armchair only once, and that walk to the toilet was like an only slightly condensed version of Homer’s Odyssey. It would prove to be the most rewarding day of my life, the one day I would not trade for any other.
For the first thirty or forty minutes, nothing happened. Nada. Feeling no different than when I awoke that morning, I began to prepare myself for an anticlimax. LSD, this batch at least, was a dud! But then a slow, gentle wave of something like electrical current began washing over me. And . . . huh? What was this? The natural patterns on the unpainted pinewood wall had transformed themselves into an array, a procession, of tiny Mayan and Aztec figures, the kind one sees in any book on pre-Columbian culture, the kind that adorned pottery, stone pillars, and those manuscripts that managed to escape the bonfires of rampaging Spanish priests: brilliantly colored, oddly geometrical, adorned with quetzal plumes, carrying serpent staffs, daggers, and feathered fans, as if on their way to lunar rituals at Chichen Itza. (Which came first, the chichen or the itza?)
I stared transfixed as their numbers multiplied along the wall. Eventually, though, deciding I’d had enough of them, I closed my eyes. Behind my lids, the Mayan figures just kept on coming. Okay then. All right. This was it. Move over Alice, baby. I was down the rabbit hole at last.
23
acid reflux
It’s important to note that those teeming pre-Columbian figures were as close as I would come that day to a hallucination, and even that vision really couldn’t be considered hallucinatory because never for one second did I believe that it was real. Like R. Gordon Wasson’s in Oaxaca, my rational mind was fully operative throughout the experience.
Yes, things got weird, but I was aware always that the weirdness was a product of the drug and would in time subside; not that I was in any great hurry to return to the “real” world. For that matter, in a state where Einstein’s theorems were as concrete, as present and obvious as the chair I sat upon, temporal terms such as “hurry” had little meaning. At the end of what for Jim was a long day, I was convinced I’d only been sitting there for a couple of hours. I was on molecular time, cosmic time, not clock time. My system was in harmony with star systems, with the systems of orbiting particles in an indole ring.
It has occurred to me that the so-called hallucinations commonly associated with psychedelic ingestion are in fact diversionary tactics on the part of the ultraconservative human DNA, whose primary objective is always preservation of the species. (From the DNA perspective, every man is but an ambulatory seed package, every woman a walking egg carton.) When subjected to LSD, there is a portion of our brain that, failing to scare us into a “bad trip,” will then roll out amazing fractal 3-D cartoons, hoping that by sufficiently entertaining us, it can divert us from the existential truths the fungoid alkaloids seem mysteriously designed to uncover. For its narrow interests, our DNA puts on a show, hoping to head off a psychic jailbreak.
As for the nature of those truths, the revelations that scare the pants off of the fusty DNA, they may vary slightly from individual to individual, although in almost every instance they possess overtones that can best be described as oceanic, often suggesting some merging of spirituality and theoretical physics. I must confess, therefore, that I cannot fault the late Bill Hicks, who said that on LSD he perceived that “all matter is condensed energy, we are all one consciousness, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves.”
Let’s not be too quick to jeer Hicks’s choice of words. The psychedelic experience is, I’m afraid, fundamentally resistant to ordinary verbal description, so much so that even a professional novelist can scarcely write about it without swathing his observations in the purple cloak of woo-woo. With that in mind, I shall now attempt to relate with as much reportorial objectivity as possible a taste of the highly subjective and “curiouser and curiouser” business that came my way that day in the storefront studio.
Jim had requested that I bring along my favorite record album, hoping, I assume, to gauge my reaction to familiar music under unfamiliar conditions. The record (vinyl LP, na
turally) I selected was Concert by the Sea, by jazz pianist Erroll Garner. About midway through our session, Jim put it on the phonograph. I hated it. The tunes I’d previously so admired sounded clunky, harsh, and arbitrary to me now, and Garner’s once-charming habit of grunting while he played was like noises funneled in from an overheated barnyard. If, however, the experiment was a crude failure on a sonic level, visually it led to one of the richest, most astounding experiences of my life.
Visually? Yes, because as the record played I could see the sound waves emanating from the speakers. It’s well known that psychedelics enhance visual acuity, but even so I might admit that I was feeling the sonic vibrations rather than literally seeing them -- except for one significant detail: there was a vase of fresh daisies on the coffee table in front of my chair, and I most unmistakably could see the daisy leaves swaying -- almost imperceptibly yet nonetheless gently swaying -- in those sound waves. That, however, was merely the preamble.
There was also a bowl of ripe plums on the coffee table, and earlier (it could have been thirty minutes earlier, three minutes, or three hours), I’d stared at a plum (for what could have been thirty minutes, three minutes, or three hours), discovering that the purple plum skin was in actuality a subtle chromatic interplay of red, blue, pink, magenta, maroon, sapphire, indigo, russet, rose, carmine, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, and even gold: my art-critic nomenclature called to the fore. Beneath its skin, I felt I could detect, having now the time/no-time for limitless concentration, the marvelously engineered intricacy of pulp, juice, and pit; could detect the interplay of acids, salts, and sugars as they coursed (never static) through the fruit flesh at speeds far too slow for a normal eye, even with instrumentation, to detect. For an undetermined while, I’d been awash in pure plumness. But now, led there by discernible jazz waves, my attention shifted to the daisies.
