THE PSYCHEDELIC SIXTIES
Back when LSD was legal, back when the CIA was experimenting on people with their Project MK-Ultra, back when Sandoz Labs was sending it to Harvard for Professors Leary and Alpert, back when Owsley Stanley started cooking it for the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, I was just a child.
In truth, I was an adolescent, a boy without any goals or dreams, a teenager in the suburbs that was being led by the nose through a college-prep education that everyone assumed would lead me into an awarding career in the budding field of computers. I’d built an analog computer when I was in eighth grade. I got my picture in the paper. I was a whiz with numbers. I was told that I’d either be a computer programmer or a banker.
During my senior year, I took calculus at Grand Rapids Junior College and ran into a young man a year older than me who was then in college. He got me high on marijuana. Shortly after that, his cousin reported him to the police and he went to jail. Those were paranoid times. I learned that the word “nark” was both a noun and a verb.
My high school sponsored a “vocation day”. Any student that showed a glimpse of potential was driven to some boring place or another to see what their future was going to be like. I was taken to a bank and I got to see lines of sad-looking skinny white men wearing white shirts and ties, all sitting at adding machines, rows and columns of identical-looking men sitting at identical little tables, staring down at columns of numbers and cranking the handles of adding machines. Brought up in a conservative Christian home, I knew this was what Hell would be like for me.
All of us seniors had to write an essay about what it would be like to be a professional at something. I had never played any sport, had never run any race, wasn’t much of a swimmer, was legally blind, and scared of diving off the high dive into the school swimming pool. My essay was about being a professional hockey player. It was not well accepted.
Still, my guidance counsellor had hopes for me. I passed the first class in Differential Calculus and started the second semester in January, 1967. Maybe it was because I’d been run over by a motorcycle and had a blood clot on my brain back in 1960, maybe it was just a genetic flaw. I ran into a brick wall in that second semester at college. While other students seemed to have no problems memorizing theorems and equations, I’d take three pages to solve a question that others would complete in half a page. I kept having to start at a point that everyone else seemed to have passed long ago. I started spending more time at the record shop and riding the escalator at Herpolsheimer’s Department Store. Herpolsheimer’s was a great store. It had a monorail suspended from the ceiling in the basement and kids could ride on it and look down at the toy department at Christmas time. If you pay attention, you might notice Herpolsheimer’s featured in the movie THE POLAR EXPRESS. Isn’t that something?!
Anyway, school kept seeming less and less fun.
On March 21, 1968, actress Dyan Cannon divorced Cary Grant, one of Hollywood’s biggest advocates of LSD.
On October 24, 1968, possession of LSD became a crime.
By 1970, 1 – 2 million Americans had tried the drug. That’s the year I got drafted. Most of my friends in the Army had gotten busted for dealing. I was dying to try acid.
For weeks, my best friends, Arturo Montano, Savas Alvarez, and I had been smoking hashish and I kept asking for LSD. Finally, on a night when I was assigned to be on guard duty at the Headquarters Company barracks at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, they agreed. The only condition was that I had to drop the acid one hour before beginning my tour on guard duty.