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C H A p T E R 1 4 O N D O y l E O N D R U G S I GREw up in Timothy Leary’s old neighborhood. Newton Center in the mid-1970s was past the glory days of Orange Sunshine, but a few kids knew about it. We did all right though, with our Blotter, Microdot, and Windowpane,which catapulted me,one fine afternoon,after a whole hit and an emergency purchase with shaky fingers (I was not a smoker) of a pack of Marlboros, and a harrowing walk that turned into a run, from Murray Road, the oldest alternative high school east of the Mississippi, a converted elementary school with a Ping-Pong table in the front entrance across the street from which in a swampy outback where we had tried unsuccessfully with our thumbnails to slice the tiny cellophanelike tab, I ran from the newly iridescent white ball and my friends, the older one of whom had told us to just take a whole one and, smoking with us, that marijuana always helped him come down and that no one was going to die or anything, with that word die in my mind, newly transfixed and pointing toward me, I ran from them (who would later come to my house looking for me and hear blaring what they thought was my stepfather yelling at me), miles along Commonwealth Avenue, wild-eyed thinking about how I could understand how Art Linkletter’s daughter committed suicide, seeing now a street sign called HOMER, which took on a veneer of cosmic significance, the inside becoming the outside as it renewed me in my efforts to get back, home I must get 200 C l O S I N G T H E O p E N C I R C u I T home, until a cab driver friend of the older boy who told us it was a good idea to take a whole square of eight-way Windowpane, recognizing me and asking me if I needed a ride where was I going and I said Home, 106 Gibbs Street, inside the green house on top of which I now found myself blasting the television and being freaked out by an ad with a female model with nail polish on her claws, that not helping I fixed myself some chocolate milk, spilling it on the counter beneath the blaring radio I had turned on with my shaky hand, another misguided attempt at comfort, to run to my room. Hours later, after shaking on my single bed near the multicolored peace and love logos I’d affixed to the black-painted wall of my teenage attic room, unable to distinguish among my senses, unable to tell if my eyes were open or closed, looking through the ceiling directly into a cosmic abyss that I would later describe as eternally recurring metaphysical evil, I found myself on our front porch asking my brother for a cigarette. Calm now from all the shaking,not having expected to ever return,the experience of being outside of time so unlike any other, I now, incredibly, believed myself when I told my brother that I had not taken anything, explaining I had just taken a nap! It took me days to piece together my whereabouts during the trip and, despite all the running I’m not sure I ever did arrive there, that house where we had earlier watched the moon landing in the dining room, not quite, not as I left it. If yOu BElIEvE in the genius loci, the spirit of the place, then you could make the case that my friends and I were raised in the bosom of psychedelia , or in one of its other erogenous zones, in suburban Boston across the Charles River from the university, Harvard, where the West Point military academy graduate Leary had gone from straight-laced psych professor to free-love guru and self-described high priest teaching the gospel of turning on,focusing on the inner world,which can be infinite compared with the limited past and future, and dropping out of school. But while Leary found it necessary,or at least easy,to cut his ties with repressed academia, basking in the cult of personality and the women and freedom his counterculture fame afforded,others did not sever their ties with academia and its more rigorous if conservative protocols. They pushed forward with the goals of showing the value...

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