What, I was asked, have I been reading? My friend was merely passing time; it wasn't a question that called for an honest answer. I provided one anyway; I have been reading, I told my friend, something I have written. Part of a book project that I started in 2001, with some welcome assistance from the Sundance Institute. What follows is a chapter, it's funny, I wrote it, and not only that, it happened just this way.
Peyote In Babylon
I was out of touch with spiritual matters at any early age. I did, however, have a divine experience, at 16, the kind of thing that back in the 1960s kids would call a “god trip,” and would earn the label “far out.” In the Book of Family Lore, it was the first sign of big rain moving in from the horizon, heralding a series of storms that during the next four years would change all of us – my family, and everyone elses.
My story - disappearance, death, and denial in a family of FDR Liberals – began in a small Long Island town named Babylon. It’s a handle as unlikely as the outpost was ordinary – built around bomb shelters, bourbon, and the L.I.R.R. I had my first sex in Joanne Fortinelli’s father’s underground refuge. Lawns were thick as cholesterol. Religion was taught at the parochial school, St. Josephs, where the priest was an alcoholic with an unwholesome interest in children. In the fall of 1961, Maggie Harper – age 14 – prayed at St. Joseph’s every day after school. A friend had told her a girl could get pregnant from “French Tongue Kissing.” She’d spent one Saturday night that September, making out with Cliff Everett – she had plenty to pray about. Social and cultural life was stunted and earthbound. I was -- god strike me if I’m lying – in my third year at a far away boarding school before I learned that my hometown had a Biblical antecedent.
On the day in question, my generation was in the early stages of full-scale ‘60s uproar. The date was June 26, 1966, and I had, in my pocket, a button of peyote, a cactus native to Mexico and the southwest that is essential to the religious ceremonies of certain American Indian tribes. It had recently gained status as a favored psychedelic by young, non-native youth.
My friend William Brown gave me the drug; peyote was relatively common in those days. In any case, William – who sometimes hung out with kids years older then himself -- was tight-lipped as to its origins. I asked no questions – nor did I know what to ask. Because above all else one thing was true; our experience with mind-altering drugs was at that time limited to spreads in **Life** and **Time** magazines I didn’t know what would happen. I was in a hurry to find out.
Two hours before twenty-five guests were to arrive to celebrate a cousin’s birthday, I boiled the drug until it was soft, swallowed it, and drank the bitter tea that it produced. Had I remembered that visiting relatives were headed in my direction – all of them anxious to congratulate me for gaining admission to Princeton the previous month - I wouldn’t have changed my plans; in fact, I had no plans. I had no idea what lay ahead.
At 5 pm, as friends and family arrived, I was curled in a fetal position on an upstairs bed. My lower backed ached like an abscessed tooth, the muscles in my calves and thighs were cramped, too painful to move except when I had to vomit. I had the flu, I thought, and sent regrets to the assembled. 15 minutes later, the cramps suddenly eased, and a tremor ran through my arms and legs and into my groin. A thousand previously unknown nerve cells came to life. I had an erection. Perhaps I wasn’t sick. A few minutes later, I was accepting congratulations concerning my academic triumphs.
Had I not been asked repeatedly how I was feeling, I’d have forgotten the cramps as thoroughly as I’d forgotten my erection – which was brought to my attention by a 25-year-old neighbor named Aileen. Pulling me gracefully into the dining room, she adjusted my shorts strategically, expressing interest in a conversation later that evening as she slid her right hand into my left pocket and introduced herself.
The number of nerve cells on full alert – thousands, I’d imagined minutes ago –swelled exponentially until millions if not billions of sensory receptors stirred. My skin, my stomach, my tongue, my eyes, my legs, my bowels, my testicles, my feet, my penis, my fingers, eyelids, went on full alert. I was, I thought, transmitting human energy, humming like late night radio signals that would sometimes bounce off the stratosphere from the Gulf Coast to a trucker in Omaha. I listened to myself, got scared and shorted the circuit, generating a squall of feedback so loud that when I turned a corner and saw Jimbo the black lab, he laid back his ears and howled. The hair on my arms stood up straight, and I could my feel my heart – every miraculous muscle fiber, every valve, every square inch of bloody, wet, red flesh. I was aware that I felt thoroughly alive for the first time in years.
Guests had gathered on the patio. I walked out the screen door, raised my hand in greeting. One of the soft, yellow peaches in a basket of fruit on the table suddenly exploded in a brilliant flash of neon orange, and I flinched – the next day my cousin Bobby claimed that in fact I had tried to duck under the table. I recovered quickly – I was pretty sure of that – although I had a vague impression I might be making people nervous. I laughed heartily. No one seemed to respond, so – as several pieces of fruit began to pulsate in subdued neon tones -- I decided that sitting down would be a good thing. I tried to sit down, only to discover I was already in my chair.
I could hear a radio playing music inside the house, and had to stifle an urge to drum with my fork and knife. I was briefly consumed by the tricks my eyes were playing-- refracting objects, for instance, in such a way that what seemed to be located directly in front of me was actually to the left by some 40 degrees. I decided to run a test to make sure. “Afternoon Uncle Roy,” I said heartily to Roy Blodgett, who was not my uncle, but a second cousin’s law partner. I extended my hand in what seemed to be his direction, and sure enough, an odd look flickered across the face of Vi Valentine – Uncle Howard’s first ex-wife, who subsequently married great-uncle Peter and on this day was seated two feet to Roy’s right and my left. She reached a liver-stained hand out and briefly touched mine had my eyes been working I’d probably have caught the same murderous squint she’d shot my way the day I found her passed out on Aunt Ginny’s bathroom floor after a quick perfume bender. My theory of refraction was proved.
I needed a diversion to get them off the trail. “Hey hey Jimmy boy,” I said to my great uncle James, who had never been called anything but Uncle James. Uncle James was wearing a white linen sportscoat with the initials JMT monogrammed on the breast pocket, and a soft pink button down shirt. Had the middle button of the three-button jacket not been fastened, the same monogram would have been visible on the shirt. He started slightly at my greeting. The rest of the table stiffened and smiled hard.
A pair of pale-green wing-like pods from an overhanging maple swirled slowly down through the thick late afternoon light, their path lit up like burning tracer rounds. On the table in front of me, the dark, carefully polished salad bowl was throbbing in concert with the green-blue artery in my left wrist. Large leaves of Romaine lettuce were crinkled like sheaves of plastic. The bright, soprano chatter of ice cubes against the side of a glass reverberated above the table and faded slowly. My left eye was leaking.
I noticed that dinner had been served. To my left, I saw a long silver fork spear an iridescent red slab from a platter of thick, rare meat floating in molten blood. My stomach heaved as I stared at the carnage; I was seized by an uncontrollable burst of shivering. The experience was strong enough to make me remember my erection and Aileen – and to forget, as I raised my hand sharply skyward, that I had been holding a goblet of ice water. The manouver was more complicated than I anticipated,and I was several words into something reassuring – “don’t worry, it won’t break” – when the glass hit the blue flagstone patio and shattered. Uncle Theodore cleared his throat, as eloquent a gesture as he possessed, while the rest of the table stared in scarcely masked horror.
Before I could say a word, a feeling that if not Divine was certainly divine, flooded my body. I felt lit up, as my body were pure neon hotwired to the third rail. I felt like I was about to burst with an exhilarating, all-consuming joy. My thoughts raced in circles like the crackling end of a downed power line.
I grabbed my chair for safety and hung on, wanting to shout, to weep, to laugh, to express something that had never been said before. This seemed like a moment that should be shared. I had insights into life; marriage counseling for my sister? Sex for Uncle James; a drink for Lil’s brother Lew whose hands rarely stopped trembling. Beneath the nervous tics, stiff spines, and forced expressions was a family that cared for each other, I believed that passionately and – I realized - irrationally. Was there a reason for the tension that was crippling the afternoon – other than me, of course? An explanation was overdue, although it was bound to cause trouble.
I stood up, took a deep breath, and began to speak, just as I felt hands pulling me back, hard. For thirty seconds my eyes went into a kaleidoscopic mode, like a tv news camera at a street riot when the operator is knocked to the ground and subsequent shots come in wild jerking random bursts. I saw chairs shooting by, a ceiling, a perplexed face, stairs, and then a door.
I found myself upstairs on a bed, sitting upright and breathing hard. I was exhilarated. I wanted a cigarette. The hard edges of a mahogony desk glowed maroon, my cousin’s eyes were impossibly large. I shut my own and rubbed them, then looked again. “That’s better,” I said.
“What’s better?” he asked warily. I shrugged my shoulders. He looked at me carefully. We were best friends and partners in crime, but – we both understood this – only up to a point. He would spend his adult life apologizing for his youth; I was just getting warmed up.
“I don’t know what you were going to do down there,” he said to me after a
few minutes of silence. “But I knew that it wasn’t going to be good.”
