with contempt for it. Finally I decided that I was on vacation, and that nothing I did here would matter once I got back to New York. That was how I gave myself permission to wade, if not plunge, into the hot tub of desire that was all around me. Everything seemed inchoate, unstructured, accepting. Any combination worked: hetero, homo, bi, the categories lost their grip. Gender was (ideally) fungible, race was (officially) irrelevant, class was … what’s that? Never mind that these distinctions were still lurking under the long hair and jeans. I was sick of living in a world where the social order was all too obvious. That’s why the hippies were so appealing to people like me. They represented liberation from reality.
Out here in the land of the unrooted I left all my connections behind, among them the woman who would soon become my wife. I had to be mobile; that was my excuse for traveling without her, but actually I needed a break from everything in my life. Though I wanted to marry Judith, the idea of being truly intimate with a woman frightened me at the age of twenty-three. It helped that monogamy wasn’t part of the deal—like many sixties couples, we were free to explore. But cleaving, as my parents had, for better and for worse, seemed so … Levitical. Before it could happen I had to understand who I was. San Francisco was perfect for the purpose, and so was the music that came from there. It felt as wild as British blues were restrained. There was none of the ornate eroticism of the Rolling Stones. The musicians were sexy in an ordinary way, and their sets seemed shapeless, though not aimless, to me. This was rock gone elastic.
The best bands played for free in Golden Gate Park. It felt a little like the folk-music gatherings I’d joined in Washington Square, except that there was no turf to fight for here, no standard of purity to defend. The competition among college students from Queens over who could sing like a native Appalachian was as irrelevant as a medieval debate about the nature of angels. The only offense was ambition. This, I was told more often than I liked, was an ego trip. A game. A curse that could only be explained when I admitted that I was from New York. Then I would receive a look of pity, a hug, and perhaps an exhortation to trip. I became so anxious about being plied with LSD that I refused to drink out of any bottle that wasn’t sealed.
Lots of people told me that the only way to appreciate hippie culture was to drop acid, but I was convinced that it could be explained by theright theory. I had several, ranging from the fashionable postlinear ideas of Marshall McLuhan to a homegrown historicism in which the hippies were an incarnation of the revolutionaries of 1848. In a way they were, just as they echoed the mystical beliefs of the American Transcendentalists, but they were also a manifestation of something timeless and universal. By suppressing the vaunted “reality principle,” LSD created patterns of thought and visual styles that pulsed like the glowing abstractions in stained-glass windows or Tibetan mandalas. It struck me that there was a reason why these disparate mystical traditions produced the same patterns as your average tie-dye. They all evoked the deep structure of consciousness, the interplay of neurons. That was what acid had in common with Buddhist and Hindu meditation; it unlocked perceptions blocked by the organizing power of reason. But unlike those other practices, it did so instantly. The passion for shortcuts, which had always been present in America—Tocqueville noticed it in 1832—was the real enabler of LSD.
It wasn’t until I actually took acid that I encountered the part of me I was searching for, the self I’d denied. It had little to do with my sexuality. Desire, which felt so central to my being, now seemed like only the surface. On LSD, I accessed my subconscious, and it contained not only monsters and immense depths of love but the evidence
Out here in the land of the unrooted I left all my connections behind, among them the woman who would soon become my wife. I had to be mobile; that was my excuse for traveling without her, but actually I needed a break from everything in my life. Though I wanted to marry Judith, the idea of being truly intimate with a woman frightened me at the age of twenty-three. It helped that monogamy wasn’t part of the deal—like many sixties couples, we were free to explore. But cleaving, as my parents had, for better and for worse, seemed so … Levitical. Before it could happen I had to understand who I was. San Francisco was perfect for the purpose, and so was the music that came from there. It felt as wild as British blues were restrained. There was none of the ornate eroticism of the Rolling Stones. The musicians were sexy in an ordinary way, and their sets seemed shapeless, though not aimless, to me. This was rock gone elastic.
The best bands played for free in Golden Gate Park. It felt a little like the folk-music gatherings I’d joined in Washington Square, except that there was no turf to fight for here, no standard of purity to defend. The competition among college students from Queens over who could sing like a native Appalachian was as irrelevant as a medieval debate about the nature of angels. The only offense was ambition. This, I was told more often than I liked, was an ego trip. A game. A curse that could only be explained when I admitted that I was from New York. Then I would receive a look of pity, a hug, and perhaps an exhortation to trip. I became so anxious about being plied with LSD that I refused to drink out of any bottle that wasn’t sealed.
Lots of people told me that the only way to appreciate hippie culture was to drop acid, but I was convinced that it could be explained by theright theory. I had several, ranging from the fashionable postlinear ideas of Marshall McLuhan to a homegrown historicism in which the hippies were an incarnation of the revolutionaries of 1848. In a way they were, just as they echoed the mystical beliefs of the American Transcendentalists, but they were also a manifestation of something timeless and universal. By suppressing the vaunted “reality principle,” LSD created patterns of thought and visual styles that pulsed like the glowing abstractions in stained-glass windows or Tibetan mandalas. It struck me that there was a reason why these disparate mystical traditions produced the same patterns as your average tie-dye. They all evoked the deep structure of consciousness, the interplay of neurons. That was what acid had in common with Buddhist and Hindu meditation; it unlocked perceptions blocked by the organizing power of reason. But unlike those other practices, it did so instantly. The passion for shortcuts, which had always been present in America—Tocqueville noticed it in 1832—was the real enabler of LSD.
It wasn’t until I actually took acid that I encountered the part of me I was searching for, the self I’d denied. It had little to do with my sexuality. Desire, which felt so central to my being, now seemed like only the surface. On LSD, I accessed my subconscious, and it contained not only monsters and immense depths of love but the evidence
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