The following is excerpted from Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT, published by Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books.
The notoriety of DMT as a perilously mad trip was amplified in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as author Tom Wolfe related an episode where troubled Prankster Sandy Lehmann-Haupt (aka dis-MOUNT) was administered DMT by “a Main Guru” during the Prankster’s drive-through visitation at Leary’s expansive new digs in Millbrook, New York. It was the summer of 1964, and Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, having been set alight by LSD liberated from a federally funded research program at the VA Hospital in Menlo Park, and having sailed across the US in their re-envisioned school bus “Furthur,” docked at the Big House. They’d parked, that is, in the shadows of a mansion on the 2,500-acre estate. Thanks to wealthy patron Peggy Hitchcock and her brothers, Leary and followers had called the forested wonderland home in 1963, following their expulsion from Harvard (and subsequently, from Mexico and Dominica). The ultimate setting for the psychedelic experience, Millbrook was the center for the diverse activities of the Castalia Foundation, named after the fictional province in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. It would be the first time Leary and Kesey had met. But in Wolfe’s account, Millbrook was an anticlimax to Kesey’s rollicking day-glo American movie, the division between the aloof academic Castalians and the “fierce roan-mad” Pranksters a serviceable fiction for the author, which is amplified in the unhinging of dis-MOUNT, who was one of Wolfe’s primary sources.
Sandy had a mad sense of the world torn apart into stained-glass shards behind his eyelids. No matter what he did, eyes open, eyes shut, the world erupted into electric splinters and the Main Guru said, “I wish to enter your metaphysical soul.” But to Sandy—paranoia!—he seemed like a randy-painted lulu bent on his rectococcygeal shoals, a randy boy-enjoyer, while the world exploded and there was no antidote for this rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing….[i]
Widely circulating accounts of the “East vs West” coast congress portray a cool parlay between alien tribes, a countercultural myth originating in Wolfe’s story. It’s true Kesey and Leary pursued unique pathways into the coming concrescence of psychedelia. Juxtaposed to the scientific research community of the mind that Leary and his colleagues were pioneering, the Prankster approach was protean punk. Kesey’s position vis-à-vis Leary is well stated by Lee and Shlain. “Why did acid require picturesque countryside or a fancy apartment with objets d’art to groove on and Bach’s Suite in B Minor playing on the stereo? A psychedelic adventure on the bus needed no preconceived spiritual overtones; it could be experienced in the context of a family scene, a musical jam, or a plain old party.” And for a mutant “guinea pig” like Kesey who had escaped the laboratory, any “medically sanitized or controlled psychedelic experience was abhorrent.”[ii] He and the Pranksters were disinterested in guided therapy or structured routes to transformation, for as Jay Stevens noted, “the true test of psychedelic selfhood was one’s ability to plunge into the whitewater of this new experience.”[iii] Further than that, programming the psychedelic experience to Eastern religious texts amounted to turning one’s back on what was immediately available in American popular culture. But while one can build distinct and contrastive biographies of these charismatic icons, in a world of hyper-mediated experience refracted through the prism of psychedelics themselves, coherence is a convenient luxury. By the time Kesey met Leary at Millbrook, Leary’s scene had become unhitched from its academic moorings, and was mutating on a day-to-day basis. Millbrook displayed the symptoms of a kaleidoscopic cultural movement in formation. “That place changed every 72 hours,” Leary had once stated. “You’d be there one weekend and we would be doing tai chi and the next weekend we would be following [Aleister] Crowley.”[iv] But within this complexity there remained a common cause—psychedelics, for which Leary and Kesey were freedom fighters. From the Bardo Thodol to Captain Marvel, from the Experiential Typewriter to the Acid Tests, from enhanced psychotherapy to the cosmic carnival, psychedelics were championed for their potential to effect transformation of psyche, culture, and world.
In Wolfe’s warp and weft, Leary snubbed Kesey. But accounts from those present set the record straight. The Pranksters arrived at Millbrook unannounced, the night after an acid party. As Ram Dass (then Alpert) recalled, if they “had come the night before, it would have been an entirely different story for all of us for the rest of our lives.”[v] A candidate, perhaps, for the greatest party that never happened. But Dass, Metzner, Leary, and others, did enter the Prankster movie as chaperones and cameos. The inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (the reading of which had been an inspiration for Kesey’s cross-continental odyssey), Furthur driver Neal Cassady was led up into the Big House where he was welcomed with a shot of DMT in the attic—with views overlooking the grounds of Castalia. Photographs captured the moment. In one, Cassady is lying on the bed, shorts down, with backside offered to administering “nurse” Susan Metzner.[vi] In an after capture, Cassady hovers on the attic bed, which seems to be positioned in relation to the adjacent window as a space capsule is to the outer void. Metzner is lying at his side.
If only Wolfe had captured Cassady’s impressions from his vantage. The photographs were taken by none other than cultural mediary Allen Ginsberg, who had arrived on the bus with Cassady and Kesey, and who had in fact brokered the Millbrook mission. Ginsberg was a renowned envoy of experience; he was, for instance, responsible for introducing mushrooms to pianist Thelonious Monk and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. And Ginsberg, having returned from Millbrook with some DMT, made sure that the next time Kerouac visited him at his Lower East Side apartment, the Beat pioneer found himself cranked up on the stuff. To document that experience, Ginsberg took a snapshot, journaling how Kerouac “looked like his father, corpulent red-faced W. C. Fields yawning with mortal horror.”
Another account of the Millbrook meeting, however, offers insights at odds with the impression Wolfe left on his readers. Mondo 2000 co-founder R. U. Sirius provides a new reading in his recent book Timothy Leary’s Trip Thru Time. “Wolfe dramatized the scene, depicting the pranksters sneering at Millbrook’s ‘crypt trip’ . . . but it wasn’t all quite the mano a mano standoff that legend has it. Eventually, Leary came out of hiding. He and Babbs and Kesey injected DMT together and formed a long lasting friendship.”[vii] It is an extraordinary revision of this critical moment in sixties counterculture, with the unfortunate anticlimax at the hand of Wolfe rewoven as a magical powwow, where DMT performs a tribal reconciliatory function. Since the incident neither arises in the autobiographies of Kesey and Leary, nor in any of the many biographies of these and other period figures, and since Sirius has himself been unable to identify his source as he presents it, it appears that his version may have resulted from a misreading and conflation of historical records.[viii] As Sirius was a close friend of Leary’s, it’s also not beyond probability that this revisionism reflects an unconscious riposte to Robert Greenfield’s biographical “hatchet job” on Leary.
As far as I know, there is no evidence of DMT use among Pranksters before the Millbrook meeting. It is plausible that Kesey & Co departed Millbrook with a special gift. We know Ginsberg did, as he noted on his photo of Kerouac, stating: “I’d brought some back from Millbrook where I’d recently been with Neal Cassady in Kesey’s bus.” Any road, the Pranksters soon returned west to Kesey’s place in La Honda. The next mention of DMT use among the Pranksters’ comes more than a year later, as reported by Wolfe. Following Hunter S. Thompson’s introduction of the Hells Angels to the Pranksters at an epic party in August 1965, iron-steed riders became frequent attendees at regular throw-downs. Occasionally, a Prankster would take one of the Angels up into their tree house and dose him on DMT. In Wolfe’s saga, Mountain Girl informs Kesey that a good dose rendered Free-wheeling Frank “as naked as an Angel is ever gonna git.”[ix] In Thompson’s classic biker gonzography, Hell’s Angels, gang members are observed to “gobble drugs like victims of famine turned loose on a rare smörgåsbord,” and DMT is prized among the spectrum of ways to get wasted. Accordingly, “a few will go the whole route and on top of everything else shoot some methydrine or DMT and turn into total zombies for hours at a time.”[x]
…..
DMT was gathering notoriety as an epic rocket fuel . . . It was the ultimate liminal drug, and the most daring of adventurers were reserving its use for epic moments. In The Man Who Turned on the World, Michael Hollingshead—who introduced Leary and many others to LSD by way of his infamous mayonaisse jar filled with acid-paste—includes a narrative journaled by famed bebop sax player, touring car driver, and heroin user Alan Eager, who was at one time engaged to heiress of the Mellon fortune (including the Millbrook estate), Peggy Hitchcock. Eager wrote about a 1964 road trip from New York to Charleston, West Virginia. While it may be among the world’s first DMT road trips, that influence is not exclusive as Eager’s custom was to mix it up.
We decided to take a trip. It was very cold in New York. I was shooting a lot of DMT… at that time a smoking form had not been discovered. Arnie, Cathy, Simba the Siamese cat and me, plus guitar, soprano sax, pocket coronet, phono, records, psychedelic magic kit and a suitcase of drugs piled in the white Alfa and headed for warmer territory. The I Ching might have suggested it, I think.
The total picture we gave freaked out every cop south of the Mason-Dixon line and we were busted every time Arnie drove. . . . Arnie and I were in costume, he looking like Jesus, but in baseball pants, high sneakers, beads, etc., which is quite the mode now… Our clothing was a time trip and it caused short circuits in robot people.[xi]
Leakage from Millbrook or otherwise, only three years after Burroughs’ aborted missions, we have a sighting on the early recreational use of DMT. The Eager party eventually landed in the bridal suite of the Charleston Holiday Inn, unloading “incense, candles, bottles, India prints, mirrors, toys, comics, phonograph, musical instruments, movie camera, fireworks, magic kit and the drugs.” After chasing down caps of beige acid with three quarters of a bottle of JB118 (purportedly NASA’s “space drug”). And with DMT ever present, the Holiday Inn became the scene of a drug ordeal fit for Dr Gonzo.
Suddenly, violently, and with a sickening lurch we were moving faster than light. I fell back on the bed and had a vision of a Roman or Etruscan warrior holding a sword to my stomach. It was no vision. I knew it was real. We had poisoned ourselves. Death was here. Real Death. I remembered and gave in surrendering to it. A pain lanced through my right side and my convulsive gasps stopped. BLACKNESS. And then pinpoints of light in the stygian dark. I realised the lights were stars and we were moving through the very edge of our solar system at some unknown speed, but without the feeling of movement. Then to the front of my mind, I sensed an alien intelligence.[xii]
Eager felt a mind probe which “tripped every alarm in my nervous system and body. I could feel my body on earth panicking, ready to explode with terror.” He eventually returned to the room in the Holiday Inn where his friend Arnie was “moaning and flickering in and out of reality, sanity pain and dimension.” After a visit from a disapproving hotel physician, and a notice to vacate, the Eager party left Charleston “through spiral type buildings, heading south, the top down. By the time we were out of the DMT-coloured city-limits and on the open road, we were feeling normally glorious. The car purred, the cat slept, and overhead the most tremendous, white thunderhead in a purple-rose sky formed a glorious paean to earth and the future and we sped into the technicolour southern dusk.”[xiii]
Fit for fools, madmen, Hells Angels, and for almost checking out at the Holiday Inn, DMT gained notoriety as the cultural outlaw’s weapon of choice; a crystallization of transgression, a shot in the arm for the defiance of authority, with its clandestinity soon enshrined by state, federal, and international edicts. Journalist Joe Bageant recalled the showdown in which Leary, “the most dangerous man in America” (according to Nixon), was the target of a raid by the Dutchess County Assistant DA, G. Gordon Liddy. Later gaining fame as a convicted Watergate burglar, Liddy led a swarm of state troopers into the Millbrook Big House in May of 1966. Here is Liddy’s raid from Leary’s perspective, recounted in 1982 to Bageant in Boulder, Colorado.
It was a Saturday night and we had already been tipped off by all the deputy sheriffs’ teenaged kids, who acted as informants for us. We had extraterrestrial company at the time, all sorts of Buddhists, yogis, scientists, light artists, psychedelic cannibals. . . . The light artists had it all set up to greet the cops with a 40-foot rainbow-colored pulsating vagina over the lawn. But the cops got hung up, and things dragged on, so we all called it a night and went into the bedrooms to smoke a strong hallucinogenic drug called DMT. After a few puffs the room was a glowing and hissing molecular time-space warp.
But soon thereafter, “James Bond Liddy” stormed forth, leading twenty-four armed officers through the door. “Gordon was just beatific. His face was every color of the rainbow, his eyes shot out laser beams, and he had this powerful halo around him. And I cannot even describe what the 24 dinosaurs in trooper uniforms looked like! Whew! Meanwhile, the dope pipe laid there on the bed screaming ‘HERE I AM! HERE I AM!’ My wife immediately covered it with a blanket, then pointed across the room and yelled, ‘Don’t you dare touch my pot!’ In typical knee-jerk storm trooper fashion, 24 cops and Gordon himself stomped across the room and seized a pound of peat moss, and off we all merrily went to jail.”[xiv] You can sense the alien olfactory sting inciting the hunt as the cops, in orange flack jackets, holding rifles and clipboards, made their way up to the third floor and into the bedroom. Rosemary Woodruff diverted police from the smoking gun—the DMT pipe. Although neither DMT nor LSD were yet prohibited, marijuana was: hence the cops falling for Woodruff’s ruse. The charges were dropped when a judge ruled the raid improperly conducted, although Leary would eventually see the inside of almost thirty prisons. Most notable for us, the “smoking gun” reveals that, by May of 1966, DMT was being smoked.
Notes
[i] Tom Wolfe, 1993 [1968], The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, London: Black Swan, p. 101. Associated with an “everlasting paranoia,” the experience seemed to carve a deep scar into Sandy, who, back on the west coast, wigs out and found himself in a Monterey jail.
[ii] Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, ibid, p. 102.
[iii] Stevens, Storming Heaven, ibid, p. 324.
[iv] In Babbs and Paul Perry, 1990, On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture, p. 101.
[v] Ibid, 102.
[vi] Ibid, 103.
[vii] R. U. Sirius, 2013, Timothy Leary’s Trip Thru Time, Futique Trust, p. 40.
[viii] R. U. Sirius, personal communication, 2 February 2015.
[ix] Tom Wolfe, 1993 [1968], The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, London: Black Swan, p. 163.
[x] Hunter, S Thompson, 1967, Hell’s Angels, Penguin Books, p. 221, 223.
[xi] In Michael Hollingshead, 1974, The Man Who Turned on the World. Abelard-Schuman, chapter 5.
[xii] ibid.
[xiii] ibid.
[xiv] Joe Bagaent, 2007, “Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson.” http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2007/05/ghosts_of_tim_l.html. The account was related at the time of a bizarre series of public debates Leary staged with fellow ex-con Liddy that were documented in Return Engagement (Alan Rudolph, dir. 1983).
Lead image by Joe Mabel, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
