The Assumption

My mother had wanted to try LSD ever since way back in the fifties when she read an article by Cary Grant in the Ladies' Home Journal, telling of the seemingly miraculous benefits he had received from LSD therapy. She would have signed up for it then, if she had known where it was available. It wasn't until the summer of 1965 that she found her answer in a psychology journal. LSD therapy was being offered at the Institute for Research and Human Development in Menlo Park, where a group of doctors were doing research into its effectiveness with therapy. Dr. James Watt offered a combination of mescaline and LSD. He required several preparatory sessions before determining if the therapy was even advisable. The fee for a single twelve-hour mescaline/LSD trip, including preparatory sessions, was $1,000. This was a lot of money on my mom's teacher's salary, but she paid it gladly. Dr. Watt required that a trusted friend or relative stay with the patient for a day or two following the experience, and so I went with her to Menlo Park. We checked into the Mermaid Inn, a nondescript motel a few blocks from the clinic.

LSD was legal at the time and psychotherapy was my mother's main interest. She had undergone fifteen years of psychoanalysis. Her job was teaching emotionally disturbed children—kids with symptoms severe enough that they had been removed from their homes and the public schools, and placed in a live-in treatment facility in the Oakland Hills. Her interest in any new form of therapy was professional as well as personal, and she began to prepare for the experience by reading everything about lysergic acid she could lay her hands on. She left a copy of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell on the nightstand in the motel room. I read while she was a block away, having the experience. Of the cactus Huxley wrote:

To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity."

Late in her trip, when I was ushered into the room where she lay on a sofa with her eyes shut listening to music through headphones, my first impression was that my mother looked like an Indian. This was not a stretch, my mother did have straight dark brown hair and brown eyes. Being Indian is still part of the way I remember seeing her in those first few moments, and it turned out she had been an Indian in her trip. She sat up and reached for her cigarettes. "Oh honey—" she gasped and embraced me. "This was so important to me, I want you to have it too. I want to give it to you as a present." She wept and we hugged each other and rocked in one another's embrace. She told me that at one point in her trip, she had been a little scarab beetle almost drowned by a drop of water falling from a leaf, and now she was just grateful to be alive.

In her initial interview, when Dr. Watt had asked my mom what symptoms she hoped to cure, she had answered "insomnia." Now, in her follow-up interview the very next morning, she said this seemed irrelevant. She didn't know if she had found a cure for her insomnia, but she had found God. And she was ready to pay another $1,000 so that I could find Him too. This was the biggest present I had ever been given.

That afternoon, after arranging to extend our stay at the Mermaid Inn, my mother lounged poolside and wrote at length about her trip while I had my first preparatory session. When Dr. Watt asked me what symptoms I hoped to cure, I named my nervousness and "writer's block." I...