The second try at Stanford worked well the first quarter. But during this second, Winter, quarter I fell in love, found my way into a very early psychedelic community at Stanford, and during finals week I heard the irresistible call of a drug experiment at the Palo Alto VA Hospital.
The deep plunge into the counterculture, Stage 4, Late Adolescence, won’t start until Q6, Dropping Out in Earnest. For now, the final fling of Early Adolescence, before the plunge.
Q5 Winter 1964-65, Jan-Mar 1965
PHIL 103 19C-Early 20C, 5, B
ELAG 156 Brecht Works,3, A-
ELAR 145 Russian Lit, 5, C –
GPA 2.8
Rooming with a young jazz giant
I must have gone home for Christmas break, because Winter quarter I had my drum set. Maybe I had already arranged to be living with Tom Harrell and Mike Morris in the little house on Maybell Street about a mile or so south of campus. At any rate there we were. Tom was a brilliant jazz trumpet player who was two years younger than me. We had jammed together and shared our love of jazz during the previous quarter.
When we lived together I remember setting up my drums in the living room and playing together. He once put on a record with a fast Freddie Hubbard trumpet solo and played along exactly note for note. I was awestruck as I kept time quietly in the background. [I was learned from an article 55 years later that it was the year after we roomed together that Tom’s schizophrenia first surfaced.] Mike was a buddy of Tom’s who played tenor sax. I took a lighter load of 3 classes, only 13 units, to go with my new job as a “hasher”, aka bus boy, for one meal a day in my old dorm.
Head over heels
In the first week of Winter quarter I fell head over heels in love with an outrageous new transfer student from Radcliffe named Carrie Heldman. I gawked from a distance at her unique visual presence and told all my friends that I was in love. I wrote a gushy tragic-romantic poem that invoked Amelia Earhart and Camille. I saw the colorful group of friends that she had found and was almost as much drawn to them as to her.
Eventually I mustered the courage to introduce myself and give her the poem. She very sweetly appreciated where I was coming from and said it was a lot like how she deals with things she’s drawn to. She ushered me into the group of her new friends, which turned out to be a bunch of grad students who had known each other at the University of Chicago and were now in various stages of taking LSD, getting into art, and dropping out of academia.
A magical door
Toward the end of the quarter I hatched the idea of having a party at our house, playing with Tom and Mike, inviting some of the colorful crew, and convincing them I was hip enough to be accepted into their group. What actually happened was Norman Linke, who appeared to me to be the kingpin of the group, showed up alone. The result of our conversation was that he drove me up to his house and introduced me to the marijuana experience that night, which is described here.
Homer Lane
I started visiting and hanging out with Norman regularly. We would walk across the wooden bridge behind his house to hang out with his friends in the cluster of cottages on Homer Lane, a center of the then very small LSD community. It was an amazing crew. Besides Norman I felt closest to John Dufford, who seemed like a safe transition figure between the academic world and the wild unknowns of the LSD culture. Finding a family of souls who had already partaken sealed my resolve to take the plunge into LSD.
The Call
I had been reading the books by Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary etc., whose invitations to the wonders of psychedelics were like a call that I heard loud and clear. Local Stanford author Ken Kesey got turned on to LSD as a volunteer in drug experiments at the Palo Alto VA Hospital. I heard through the grapevine that the same series of experiments was continuing there and they even paid you $5 to participate. It looked like I would have my initial trip in the same place as Kesey. I signed up. I didn’t even consider that it was the week before my only final exam.
Drug experiment at the Palo Alto VA Hospital
To make a long story short it turns out that whatever they gave me was not LSD or any other psychedelic. Based on what happened, it might have been some kind of amphetimine. They never talked with me about what was happening, either before or after. The whole thing was treated like a simple perception experiment. They flashed two lights and I was supposed to make a comment about the interval between the flashes. I didn’t pay too much attention because I figured it was just a cover for the super psychedelic experience I would have.
The main thing I remember about the session is that at one point, maybe the third or fourth time they adjusted the feed of the IV, I felt a pleasant warm flow in my body. I said, “I don’t know what that last change you made was, but I’m starting to like you guys a lot more. ” But shortly after that it was over. I was dismissed without any information about what chemicals had gone into my arm. I never was able to find out. I was disappointed and somewhat confused.
The aftermath
I went directly to the dining hall, where it was time for my dishwashing job to start. I was a little spaced out and disoriented from whatever chemicals were in my body. I wandered around and very slowly started collecting dishes from the tables. The other hashers were almost done with their areas and I had barely started. But then my pace picked up speed and I felt like I was moving twice as fast as usual. I finished before the others and walked out vibrating at a very high frequency.
I was still pretty speedy the next morning, but starting a difficult descent, when I had to take the final for the 19th and Early 20th Century European Philosophy course. I had to write essays about what we had read of Nietzsche and Hegel. In my condition, I channeled Nietzsche but found Hegel nearly opaque. I got an A on the Nietzsche part and a C on the Hegel part for a B on the final and a B in the course. I finished Winter quarter in good standing.
But a prospect called to me that made this seem very small by comparison. In the words of William Blake,
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
I was determined to break out of the cavern, and the time was very ripe. But first, back home for Spring Break, to have a lunch meeting to set the stage for the plunge.
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