Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

24. the 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.”

Thus spake the Redheaded Wino.

I did keep walking. What else could I do? Just before I reached the Times, I pivoted to see if he might be following. And he wasn’t there! Probably he’d only turned the corner, but I had the impression that he’d vanished in a puff of smoke. In fact, to this day I sometimes wonder if he’d ever been there at all, if he hadn’t been an apparition, a manifestation of Mescalito projected by some cactus-juiced, acid-etched circuit in the recesses of my cerebellum; the one area, perhaps, where neither conscience nor delusion has a place to hide.

In any event, I went home later that afternoon and brooded. All weekend, I brooded and stewed, tossing in a clothes dryer of self-examination. The Seattle Times was no sweatshop, no earth-raping multinational combine, no soulless bank. It was in truth a fine place to work, a public service staffed with intelligent reporters, witty columnists, and responsible editors who went out of their way to be fair to readers and subordinates alike. Still… still, that carrot-topped wraith, real or imagined, had hit me where it hurt; had with one sulfuric laugh shattered my mask and spoiled my act as a regular guy.

Monday morning I called in well. Three weeks later, I moved to New York. I should have gone to San Francisco.