Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

25. romancing the language wheel

I should have gone to San Francisco. If my objective had been to connect with like-minded people, to fraternize, perhaps on a regular basis, with other travelers home from the rabbit hole, moving to New York was a mistake.

Granted, there were individuals in Manhattan who’d taken or were taking psychedelics, but few in number, they flew well below the radar; and even though I lived just up the street from the iconic Peace Eye Bookstore, where I mingled with luminaries of the Beat Generation and befriended Allen Ginsberg, I never established contact with my presumed kin; whereas in San Francisco in late 1964 there was an infestation of white rabbits and they were multiplying like… well, like rabbits. A radical new music (a mixture of surfer rock, Southern blues, Berlin music hall, and Indian raga), with far-out lyrics was spilling into the streets around Haight and Ashbury, the city’s younger citizens were dressing as if every day was Mardi Gras, and Chronicle columnist Herb Caen would soon be coining the term “hippie.” An incandescent acid rain was sprinkling San Francisco, but Tommy Rotten, oblivious, had fled the thin gray rains of Seattle for the dirty snows of New York. He hadn’t heard the California weather report.

As I look back now, I see that my ignorance had been a stroke of luck. In San Francisco I could have been sucked into the developing psychedelic scene (a scene, man); could have been caught up in the looming politics of ecstasy, another sixties comet chasing its own bright tail. Aside from my conviction that for maximum benefit, the forbidden fruits of LSD are best savored in solitude, the psychedelic experience, as I said, was emphatically nonverbal, and after more than a year during which I was as suspicious of verbiage as of a bigmouthed car salesman with dyed blond hair and three ex-wives, I was, secluded in my New York tenement, beginning slowly to fall in love again with wood pulp and ink. I don’t think they were reading all that much in the Haight.

At age five I’d hitched my little red wagon to the Language Wheel, that disk of verbiage that came rolling out of the grunting and growling mud of prehistory, accumulating variations and refinements beyond number as it rolled headlong into literacy, and — when greased with imagination — into poetry, into theater, ballads, sutras, and rants. LSD’s preliterate/postliterate juggernaut had run me off the road. I’d believed myself stranded there, but now Hermann Hesse had driven up in a vintage Mercedes tow truck, its radio blaring Mozart, and winched my wagon out of the ditch, demonstrating in Steppenwolf that modern narrative fiction indeed could transcend bourgeois preoccupations, and with both an enlightening and an entertaining panache, as playful as it is deadly serious, bind spirit to matter and insinuate for readers those hidden worlds within our world. Das ist gut.

I checked my load. The cargo appeared intact. Transformation, liberation, and celebration; exotica and erotica; novelty, beauty, mischief, and mirth: the goods I’d been hauling around for damn near three decades, all present and accounted for. If anything, psychedelics had cleaned them up a bit, given them a shine. This was encouraging, but having yet to find a literary voice of my own, and not wishing to imitate Hesse (or, for that matter, anybody else), I was to bide my time for nearly three more years before I trusted the muse enough to start my first novel.

In the meantime, however, like a lapsed believer returning to the fold, I commenced to reaffirm my devotion to language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. The adjective in the lotus. The jewel in the inkwell. A blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes.