books

Psychedelic Solution
By Erik Davis

little over twenty years ago, Terence A McKenna was a penniless, globe-trotting freak. He collected butterflies in Indonesia, smoked opium in Jerusalem, studied Tibetan in Nepal, and smuggled hash until he got indicted Stateside. Then he trekked to the South American jungle, where he gobbled so many mushrooms that he became convinced that he and his party had contacted an intergalactic intelligence that foretold the imminent collapse of history. These days, McKenna delivers wild and woolly raps in lecture halls and retreat centers, leads botanical forays into the Mexican rain forest, and occasionally performs at raves with the British group the Shamen. Popular tapes of his talks have led to a string of books, and movie deals are looming on the horizon. McKenna has become the greatest spokesman for the psychedelic experience since Timothy Leary. "I am a rationalist with real access to the irrational," McKenna says matter-of-factly, sitting cross legged on a Persian rug in his Bay Area home. He wears a purple sweater and loosefitting pants, and his face resembles that of a jovial leprechaun. The walls are hung with Tibetan deities and a poster of the Silver Surfer, the floor is stacked with CDs, and the shelves are stuffed with books like The Hashish Eater, Gnosis, and a crinkly 1651 edition of Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, which McKenna once swapped for a pound of mushrooms. But McKenna's preferred environment remains psychedelic space, a realm inhabited by cosmic giggles, UFOs, and what he calls the "self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace." In a world that seems to be shrinking into a grid of phone lines, McDonald's, and free trade zones, where fishermen in remotest Polynesia wear Madonna T-shirts, McKenna seems to have stumbled on a magic formula for preserving an almost boyish sense of wonder and adventure. With five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, he claims every man can be a Magellan in his own mind, though McKenna himself identifies more with the great nineteenth-century naturalists. "They went into a world of utter exotica, not to rape and plunder, but to catalogue what Darwin called 'the productions of nature'insects, birds, shells. I try to catalogue the productions of psychedelic nature. Rather than just sailing through a state, I stop, overturn the rocks, and look around." It's this inquisitive spirit that keeps McKenna from slipping into California's morass of burnt-

In True HalLucinations, cosmic explorer Terence McKenna continues his trip to the end of the world
out hippies or blissed-out New Agers. Most folks who babble on about their psychedelic revelations are hostile or hopelessly selfcentered, but McKenna is an affable gentleduring which Dennis seemed to transform into an alien computer, Terence became convinced they had sparked the end of the world, and everybody else thought the two had lost it. "It was pretty insane," McKenna says. "Life and death were like knobs on a TV." Even as a boy growing up in a small conservative town in western Colorado "where the three seasons were football, basketball, and baseball," McKenna seemed intent on warping the world with his imagination and telling others about it. "I think my first encounter with psychedelics was looking at Colorado and trying to understand that it was once the shores of an ocean with hundred-foot-long sauropods tromping through mangrove swamps." His earliest explorations of the fringes of reason didn't involve drugs, but the spells and incantations of ritual magic. "Ceremonial magic is basically an aping of the Catholic Mass, and I was an altar boy. One time the priest insisted I help him clean out the sacristy and there was a bucket with an aspergillum in it. At High Masses, the priest will sometimes throw holy water on the congregation with this thing, which looks like a baby rattle with holes in it. I said, 'You're throwing out the aspergillum? I'd really like to have it.' He asked why. 'Well the grand grimoire of the Key of Solomon specifically calls for it.' The shit hit the fan. It was like I was fucking buffalo or something. My parents were appalled: 'So this is why you've been stealing your mother's rosemary from the spice shelf and incinerating it.'" As one might expect, McKenna was drawn like a moth to the hazy glow of San Francisco, and in 1965 Country Joe & the Fish guitarist Barry Melton turned him on to pot Soon he had his first dose of LSD, and for the next decade, McKenna kept tripping and trying- to trap what he tripped over. When he and Dennis returned to America after the La Chorrera incident, they did something few heavy heads attempt without turning into drooling nuts: They tried to capture their wriggling visions into the language of

man, as much amused by his own weird notions as he is fascinated by them. Coupled with his dry wit, mischievous singsong voice, and what he calls "the innate Irish ability to rave," his lucid madness makes him a blast in lecture halls. Though his recent books Food of the Gods and The Archaic Revival were compelling, it's his latest effort, True Hallucinations, that captures the personal charm that makes even his most outlandish theories entertaining. The narrative relates how he, his brother Dennis, and some comrades went searching in the Colombian jungle for the exotic drug oo-koo-he, only to be sidetracked into a massive mushroom munching. Along the way McKenna intersperses his jungle book with stories about freaky Mansonesque hippies with names like Solo Dark and tales of "tantric hanky-panky" in Kathmandu. But the heart of the hallucinations is one of the strangest trips of all time: "the experiment at La Chorrera," a weeks-long blast

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science. (They also published the seminal Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide in 1975, which launched the friendly fungus into the underground.) Dennis worked on complex theories about sound, DMT molecules, and resonating DNA while Terence set out to chart his powerful intuitions about time. "A strong psychedelic trip is a rising up into a dimension outside of history. Literally. And you can see the end." in McKenna's view, history does not progress from cause to effect, but is sucked toward its last days like a spaceship in a tractor beam. McKenna has not only hacked his theory onto software, but he's also nailed down the end of timeDecember 22, 2012. Whether or not the rest of us phase into hyperspace on that day, you can bet McKenna will be having a wild time. McKenna's secular apocalypse has a perverse appeal. "People sense that there is a huge aura of transformation or catastrophe that surrounds our experience. I think even straight people must look at the population curve, the AIDS curve, the rise of general bestial behavior, and see that the world as we know it is ending. Before my rap the only place you go with this intuition is Fundamentalist Christianity." Nor is McKenna even slightly humbled by the fact that folks have been proclaiming the end of the world for centuries. "It's like the great California earthquake. The fact that it hasn't happened yet is no grounds for thinking it never will." Besides, even if Gabriel's trumpet doesn't blow, McKenna is certain the world's sociopolitical reality will soon crumble. 'Then there will be a moment of great danger because the irrational will be waiting to rush into the power vacuum created by the collapse of Western reason. Then the Moonies, the Maharishi, Terence McKenna, all of these irrational options will be waiting. And as we get closer to 2012, will I look crazier or more right on?" It's not the least of McKenna's paradoxes that he's fully aware of how mad this all sounds. "To someone not interested in this stuff I don't present a problem. ft's like a case of marginalized schizophrenia. But I live in a world of resonances, where every object and every spoken word has connections which no reasonable person could perceive. There are millions of people who live like thismost of them potheads." But unlike other scruffy visionaries, McKenna has an almost messianic drive to broadcast his ideas. He hopes his cult status in the rave scene indicates the project is on track If all goes well, he can then begin what he calls the " brown-skinned-girl-who-understands-fishtraps" part of his plan. "I will find that brownskinned girl and retire with her to a reef where her skill with fish traps will serve us well, and the world can sort it out however it may wish."
Erik Davis is a Brooklyn-based hvelanee writer.

Read Me
Bottom Feeders
John

Hubner

Man Bites Town: Notes of a Man Who Doesn't Take Notes

Harry Shearer
(St. Martin's) In this "best of" selection from his weekly Los Angeles Times Magazine column, the wit who gave us Spinal Tap's idiot bassist provides a running comic commentary on his hometown's and the nation's cultural and political life. Shearer's musings are easy to get into and hard to put down. Virtually every paragraph can be counted on for a memorable turn of phrase; many columns offer funny, genuinely eloquent insight. Laudably, the former Saturday Night Live writer is not obsessed with The Industry and focuses instead on local L.A. history and politics. Shearer's at his best when targeting public figures: his "first draft" of extop cop Daryl Gates's farewell speech begins, "Mr. Mayor, honorable council members, my fellow citizens, blacks, and Hispanics." The book is filled out with mini-essays on topics like basketball, mescaline trips, and women with silicone implants ("To question these women's choice in Southern California is on par with walking around the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets, in lower Manhattan wondering aloud, What's so good about making money?' "). Steve Bedew

(Doubleday) Fade in: It's the seamier, though intellectual, side of San Francisco following the '60s. Hippies were experimenting with everything, especially the idea of free love. Radical chic was at its chicest, and in this gritty nonfiction account of that era, you'll find cameos of the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Huey Newton. Cut to Jim and Artie Mitchell, brothers who turned free love into large profit by establishing the antiestablishment O'Farrell Theater. At the O'Farrell, everyone was able to think what they wanted, do the drugs they wanted, but mostly watch the pornography the brothers concocted for next to no money. As their business grew, so did their reputations ... and their rap sheets. The Mitchells were true sexual outlaws, pushing the limits of obscenity and getting away with nearly everything, save manslaughter. If you want to know more about Behind the Green Door and Marilyn Chambers, this should be your first stop. However, be warned: Hubner's rambling telling of Jim Mitchell's rise to fratricide obscures what should have been a riveting tale. Douglas A. Mendini

Cheshire Moon
Robert Ferrigno
(Morrow) Writing of a deglamorized Los Angeles, Ferrigno sets this murder-suspense story in the fast-food landscape of freeway offramps and airport runways. His deadpan dick is an investigative journalist named Quinn whose professional and emotional lives stall when he witnesses a killing close up. Lured back to reporting, he teams with a photographer named Jen Takamura to solve the mystery of a friend's unlikely suicide. The brisk plot rounds up all the usual suspects, including a voracious Italian magazine publisher, a savvy Mexican-American detective, assorted seedy Hollywood types, and Sissy Mizell, a talk-show maven whose midday TV smash, Straight Talk With Sissy, is one of the novel's chief pleasures. Less hard-boiled than reluctantly wise, Ferrigno treats even his most depraved characters with tender regard. Their murderous impulses are offered as a fair response to a culture that worships daily at Orange County's South Coast Plaza Mall, a place which he calls "a church of immaculate consumption." John Weir

Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader

Edited by John Martin
(HarperCollins) "How much shit does a man have to take just to stay alive?" asks a character in Charles Bukowski's 1990 book Septuagenarian Stew. It's the quintessential Bukowskian question. Over more than three decades and forty-five books, this renegade American genius and terminal loner has pounded this single theme relentlessly. Bukowski makes bent poetry out of base necessity. He boils his largely autobiographical work, which brims with notso-beautiful losers, down to the grittiest essentials: sleep, sex, defecation, booze, avoiding authority. If you haven't read Bukowski, this idiosyncratic collection, in which the excerpts form a kind of hurdy-gurdy autobiography, is a fine place to start. Then you'll want to search out Ham on Rye and Love Is a Dog From Hell. After that you're on your own. Dwight Garner Apri11993 Details
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