Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

At one point later in the evening, the Coyote-directed mind movies having mostly tapered off, I decided to walk to the tavern and check on Susan and John. I’d been concerned that their behavior, modified by the peyote, might have gotten them in some sort of trouble. It was a Saturday night, the tavern jam-packed, every booth, every bar stool occupied. When I walked in the door, all conversation in the place abruptly ceased and every eye turned on me. Mind you, there was nothing the least bit unusual about my clothes or haircut, I had no facial hair and wasn’t wearing shades, yet everybody was gaping at me as if I were an alien dropped in from Outer Mongolia. Or Venus.

When I reached the table where Susan and John had spent most of the evening, as if peyote were naught but an annoying gastric upset that could be relieved with beer, they regarded me with alarm. “You better get out of here,” they stage-whispered in unison. I was baffled. “There’s light shooting out of your eyes,” confided Susan. And John added, “Man, you look like you’re fuckin’ on fire!”

I took the hint, retreating from the place with as little fanfare as a man on fire could manage. When I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror upon rushing home, however, I detected no sign of flame or smoke. Writing the experience off to some weird mischief perpetrated by Mescalito, the Native American peyote spirit (from whom we get the pharmaceutical term “mescaline”), I went to bed and dreamed vividly of arroyos, Hopi tricksters, and jade-headed sidewinders. I’d pretty much squeegeed the whole episode from my memory when, about three months later, perfectly straight, I encountered Mescalito in person — in the form of a redheaded wino.

Happily, I did not turn out to be one of those people who allowed psychedelics to become the center of their universe, although I certainly could understand and even sympathize with their obsession. In the year following my day down the infinite rabbit hole, the excursion was seldom far from my mind. The reflections were entirely positive, the musings burnished with optimism, yet that year was the most lost and lonely period of my entire life. I was at sea, tossed about almost incessantly between intimacy and isolation.

I say “intimacy” because, operating on daisy consciousness, as it were, I felt connected to the natural world and its myriad manifestations in the most personal, caring, comprehending, and bedazzled way. On the other hand, there was nobody to whom I might explain, let alone with whom I could share, such feelings. Oh sure, the Pacific Northwest was crawling with nature lovers, but they didn’t make the connections between the neurons in their brains and the photosynthesis in their gardens; they climbed rocks but never heard geology humming (humming Earth’s sidereal earth song), it rarely occurred to them that perhaps we really are just some butterfly’s dream. They genuinely appreciated the perceived world yet remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds within worlds… ad infinitum.

The problem was that I didn’t know a single other soul who’d taken LSD. For propriety reasons, Jim hadn’t introduced me to any of his lab rats, and at that time the public — in Seattle, even the hip public — was securely unacquainted with the awe-inspiring, life-changing alkaloid synthesized from a fungus that grows on barley and wheat. To be sure, Life magazine (who else?!) had recently run a lengthy article about LSD (maybe unwittingly, maybe not, Life ’s publisher Henry R. Luce was America’s first Pied Piper of psychedelica), but acid trips were not a subject of discussion at the Blue Moon or anywhere else in town. Lacking confederates, I felt I’d become a minority of one; a nation, a race unto myself.

Thus isolated, I commenced to entertain thoughts of emigration. Secretly, I pined to go in search of my new kin, to mingle somewhere with others similarly mutated. I could sense that they were out there (was I channeling Leary and Alpert?), I just didn’t know where to find them. This reclusion wasn’t all bad, actually. While my acidified self lacked positive reinforcement, it also was not subjected to the enormous negativity that LSD would generate in years to come; the overwhelming hostility, most of it ill-informed if not outright mendacious, from quarters both official and haphazard; from everyone in fact who maintains a vested interest in a suspect status quo.

I’d prefer to deal with this subject more matter-of-factly, as did Apple’s legendary Steve Jobs when he told his biographer, “Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in my life.” The most successful, innovative, influential entrepreneur and businessman of modern times went on to credit LSD with helping to shape his sense of integrated systems and product design, and let it go at that. My mission here, however, has been to try to describe as accurately as possible the state I was in when my path crossed that of the Redheaded Wino.

It was a Friday, payday at the Seattle Times . The Times was located at Fairview and John, the same address it occupied until quite recently. After collecting my paycheck at the personnel window, I hoofed a few blocks up Fairview to the nearest bank. Once I’d exchanged check for cash, I headed right back to the newspaper, where my daily duties included a midmorning trip to the composing room to oversee the makeover of the entertainment pages for the second edition. It was nearly eleven, deadline for the makeover (the Times was an afternoon paper), and I was practically sprinting down Fairview, both the tail of my tweedy sports coat and my carefully knotted tie flapping crazily in the slipstream, my facial expression doubtlessly a stern mixture of fretfulness and determination. That’s when I became aware of a slowly approaching figure, a man who looked out of place in that quiet, sparsely populated neighborhood.

Despite the mild weather, the guy was buttoned up in a heavy, olive-drab overcoat, the kind assigned to soldiers in the First World War, and although he was tall, the old army-surplus coat was so long on him its hem kissed the pavement. His high-top shoes were battered, as was his face, a countenance wreathed with unkempt red hair and peppered with a heavy red stubble. His was not a cultivated beard, it just appeared he hadn’t shaved in four or five days. Everything about him, in fact, suggested a man — a derelict, a wino — who’d been on a bender, although if he were hungover it hadn’t darkened his mood, for he was cheerfully singing, singing out loud.

He wasn’t busking, mind you, not performing, just unself-consciously caroling an unrecognizable tune as he shambled up the street. When we got within about ten paces of one another, he broke off his song. He stopped in his tracks. I could tell he was fixed on me, had been for nearly a block, and I was sure he was about to hit me up for some of my payday cash. Instead, as I passed, he looked me over head to toe with bloodshot but piercing eyes and laughed out loud. Laughed right in my face. It was a mocking laugh, imperious even; spiked with the cheap gin of cruelty, but diluted with a splash of amusement, garnished with a sprig of pity; and he soaked me with it, as if he’d emptied a rotgut punch bowl over my head.

He was looking through me like I was a plate-glass window, reading me like a Las Vegas billboard. His gawk was virtually audible. “You think you’re a special case,” it seemed to say. “You think you’re liberated, enlightened, evolved or something, but just look at you: young man in a hurry, busting his nuts to please a corporate boss; ambitious and uptight, one more teeny replaceable cog in the money machine, dressed like a high school civics teacher, frowning like you lost your smile in a card game you knew was rigged from the start. Get your pathetic ass on down the street, you’re spraying worry and discontent the way a skunk sprays stink.”