Then I said, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts." - Is. 6:5

"Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts…"     - Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming

part 1

I believe my life has been a paradigm of both the pitfalls-of and the single way of escape-from the postmodern chaos already upon the generation right behind me. I am equally convinced I was allowed to survive in order, not just to warn, but to point to the only safe exit from the shuddering superstructure of Western civilization snapping apart above our heads.

My message is simple – not even new.   But in my case it does qualify as hard-won,  since it was never prematurely "taken on authority" but has been proven through four decades of stumbling experience.   As mentioned on the Home Page, I am now a 60-something happily married grandfather.  But, big surprise: for the last quarter century I have also been a Bible-believing Christian – of the most odious sort: one who considers the Hebrew and Greek Testaments a radically trustworthy communication from You-Know-Who. (In the originals those texts were probably even inerrant, but why invite tangential arguments.)

My route into this very specific faith, while with respect to its maze-like wandering it has become less rare, was anything but typical for the 50’s generation I knew in my teens.  As this page will record, my circuitous journey back onto the narrow path took foolhardy detours through older, more self-affirming belief-systems.  More than once with brakes nearly locked I have skidded right up to the cliff’s gravelly edge.

But in the process of exploration I’ve learned some spiritual facts of life not widely known.  Therefore, while this page necessarily details personal history, it is primarily written for those rare seekers still able to hope there is a Truth to seek, to encourage them in sorting through the confusing welter of competing worldviews that overlap, swirl, and mix like treacherous crosscurrents in the broad river of human culture where all must swim. (How much more subject to the currents is that one who drifts unaware even of the river’s existence!)

So much for introduction.   If you arrived at this page without reading Chance Meeting, you will find what follows incomplete.   Please click this link before proceeding, since I pick up here where Chance Meeting  leaves off.

As I hinted on the Home page, my "visitation" by the God of all creation left me a trifle unbalanced for many years. On the one hand I soon became self-importantly burdened with a sense of secret destiny, sure somehow that I had been entrusted-with or commissioned-for a significant role in "history" (a "my face will someday appear on the cover of Time" mentality).   On the other hand, not unrelated to this creeping pride factor, I was becoming, by imperceptible degrees, what the Bible bluntly calls "enslaved to sin."

With respect to wonderment at having been somehow "singled out" by omnipotence, my solid upbringing did help me strive to "keep humble."  Besides, I understood well enough that, if I wasn’t circumspect, the late 20^th Century cultural climate might quickly pigeonhole me for mental rehabilitation. But with the accumulating pressure of years during which I became immersed in the evolutionary assumptions of "higher" education, pride was winning out.  Although I kept thoughts about a sense of "mission" almost exclusively to myself, the inner attitude of superiority must have come across. After I had completed a couple of years in the ivory tower, my Dad gave me this thoroughly deserved criticism: "You lack the common touch."   Then, a little later, after eloping with a fellow honors-student at the University of Tennessee (whom I had known for all of two months) my father commented to her father: "He thinks he’s going to usher in the millennium."

This statement shocked me at the time, as my two-percent religious education had never included any serious reference to "the millennium," though it was certainly true that by the end of my sophomore year at UT my head was full of utopian schemes, much to the unsettling of my 19-year-old wife, who had "issues" of her own.

Truth be told, I had grabbed hold of the hoped-for stability of married life in a desperate attempt to overcome an increasing anxiety and sense of alienation from everything around me. The alcohol and football games of college life in "Big Orange country" had been a somewhat horrifying shock to one idealistically pursuing self-betterment. If I was going to change the world, I had to get ready. Dreaming of a career as, perhaps, a Hollywood actor, putting some muscle on my lanky 6-one frame became a priority. Too frugal to buy a dumbbell, I found an appropriately shaped rock for dorm-room workouts. Every ounce of body-fat must be eliminated. In my freshman year at a small college in central Washington state I had been on the track team running the mile and two mile, an excellent introduction into the benefits of robust health – never mind I finished every race dead last. I squeezed piano and art classes into an already full liberal arts load, meanwhile teaching myself to type. At UT I received an award from the Philosophy Department for the best essay on "The Value of Truth" (mine was the only entry).  I began attending the Unitarian Church, attracted by a "broad way" that was at the same time elitist, but put off by political pre-occupations. God for them was a pleasant theory and Jesus a mutant milepost of species possibility. However, like-minded friends similarly determined to "make something of themselves" were simply not to be found.

As a beginning sophomore in 1959, before I encountered the "redneck beatniks" among whom I found my first wife – her hair fashionably spun up in a fetching green beehive – my loneliness was so intense I sought guilty comfort in compulsive dessert-binges, alternated with 3-day self-punishing fasts, sometimes in combination with solitary walks out Highway 441 almost to the Smoky Mountains: striding determinedly along, freshly minted selections from The Sound of Music on my pocket radio, my tongue meanwhile doing calisthenics with German vocabulary. I well remember one long night huddled by myself in the leaves on a hillside near Sevierville, smelling cows and woodsmoke, a light snow dusting my clothes.

Unfortunately, as to marriage, I was totally naïve about the complexities of human relationships and the unexpectedly awesome uniqueness of individuals. Going in with a Tinseltown view of romance, that first marriage was an initiation into the desperation of sensitive souls who have had a sickly germ of faith thrashed out of them by the academy. My new mate’s major was reductionistic philosophy; her hero the atheist godfather of 60’s peaceniks, Bertrand Russell; her preferred music for lovemaking, Wagner.

Our worried but indulgent parents continued to support our struggles to obtain degrees for the next five years, during which time I dropped out of school at least twice because I "wanted to write."    Intermittently we would take odd jobs as shoe clerk or secretary.

Meanwhile we were without forethought producing two beautiful girl babies that added a new layer of guilt for shameful irresponsibility in remaining so dependent, since our parents were not only paying to finish school, but her father soon bought us a brand new pastel-green compact Renault – our having quickly trashed the old black and white Studebaker he had given us after recovering from the shock of our elopement.   Between these cars and before our first daughter was born our only transportation had been my little 250cc Yamaha motorcycle, my petite and shapely 19-year-old mate gamely balancing sacks of groceries between us.

But my real darkness hadn’t even begun yet.  A bonafide virgin until age 21, I had at last been magnificently introduced to how "really great" "great sex" could be. But my wife, suddenly a mother, grew increasingly melancholic, so that for numerous reasons – including what she called my "animalism" – she quickly grew cooler in the bedroom. Hey, as to animalism, guilty as charged; but what right has she, I thought, to impugn the glorious product of two billion years of biological evolution?  Feeling caught in some diabolical trap, I practically overnight waxed transcendentally insatiable.  Suffice it to say I was led down the devastating descent through Playboy-style pornography and exhibitionism to gross and constantly sought-after infidelity.  Intellectually part and parcel with this moral free-fall was my discovery of the occultically flavored relativism of C. G. Jung, who brought pseudo-scientific validation to the view that healthy psychic balance required giving due exercise to one’s "shadow-side."    (Jung and Teilhard de Chardin were the intellectual godfathers of New Age thinking who provided quasi-academic respectability to evolutionary concepts channeled by the theosophists who preceded them.)   Here was a rational acceptance of spirituality without religious restraints. I received mystical flashes of an ill-defined but clearly rising surf in Babylon; Jungian psychology would be my polished board. As early as 1963 I was no longer in full-time control of my actions, never mind that I had already brought one precious daughter into the world. My sexual fantasies were increasingly being acted out in a secret life outside a fairly conventional home routine.  Fortunately I never raped anyone, but looking back, I was clearly being pushed in that direction.  An oppressive veil seemed to have descended over my mind, while the world too often contracted to immediate sensory consciousness, leaving me operating like a depressed zombie periodically jump-started by risky escapades.

Increasingly contemptuous of fundamentalist Christians, I began to hate pointed steeples topped by crosses, church ladies with puky white Bibles, even white automobiles as phony symbols of a purity that couldn’t exist in flesh and blood. Before the term was invented, I inwardly campaigned for unisex bathrooms.   My only inspiration was as a revolutionary for the ultimate self-expression of public nudity, my curse to roam the streets desperately potent as a human blowtorch.  Though I couldn’t acknowledge it at the time, since I didn’t "believe" in it, I was getting my nose rubbed in the old doctrine of human depravity in a way I’d never be able to forget. (There were warnings.   I remember one dream in which the "Jung-vehicle" was portrayed as a child’s pedal-car.  Very puzzling at the time.)

Meanwhile we had moved our degree-pursuits to Nashville where my family lived. About this time I got wind of those harbingers of a new spiritual consciousness up at Harvard – Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. The Bible had so obviously proven inadequate to the challenges of repairing a screwed-up society; indeed puritanical Christianity with its straitjacketing repressions had to be largely to blame. Now here was a technological breakthrough in a material substance called LSD.   Chemistry coming to the rescue at a critical moment to put mankind back in touch with God! Cutting edge, no doubt.  I was born for this!   I’ll show the world millennium ushering.

We had already been introduced to the relatively tame entertainments of marijuana, but in 1963 psychedelic was a brand new word.   Since Mexican mushrooms weren’t plentiful in Music City, the closest relative available to our tiny circle of (one each) poet, artist, writer, and musician was the rotten-smelling squeezed-out scum of ground-up morning glory seeds.   Sure, it gave you an hour of stomach cramps and nausea, but then you could walk across the moonlit campus and easily imagine the pulsing twin smoke-towers of the university steam plant were rather portals of a gigantic gate into another reality.

I awoke one morning during this period with a gentle breeze pushing our gauzy sun-brightened curtains toward me from the window by my bed, but a moment before in my mind they had been instead the glowing tresses of a 30-foot tall female whose booming voice I distinctly heard proclaim: "My names are many."   How intriguingly suggestive!   The spirit realm was beginning to open to me in enticing new ways.  Who was this Goddess?   I had never been taught what the Bible states so clearly: Seducing spirits masquerade as angels of light.

Maintaining a needed B-average in my English-area course work, my really passionate studies became increasingly arcane. I noted with self-congratulatory pride that I was the first to ever check The Tibetan Book of the Dead out of the Vanderbilt library.   My favorite spot for creative study and composition was the balcony of the deserted chapel at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, with its then-modernistic wall of multiple rainbow-hued windows casting orbs of color throughout the sanctuary.  (How naïve I was to consider that citadel of apostasy a safe spiritual harbor!)   William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions, and easy confections like Siddhartha gave way to the Bhagavad-Gita, Alan Watts’ Nature, Man, and Woman, and Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.    Still, in efforts to recall my personal "beatific vision" at age eighteen I would steal moments in our darkened apartment listening at high volume to E. Power Biggs’ A Festival of French Organ Music, whose thundering fireworks hinted at that poignantly fading memory of supernal promise.

With Southeast Asia beginning to heat up, my Air Force Colonel dad had the foresight to direct my fulfillment of military obligation to the Air National Guard, a relatively safe haven from the coming whirlwind of Viet Nam.  In my idealistic but woefully misguided pacifism, after two years of weekend "drills" at the local Air Guard facility, I wrote a high-flown letter to the State Adjutant General warning that in the event of deployment I would be more inclined to take my own life than that of an "enemy."   I also noted that my wife and I had already been in contact with the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich about my enrolling in their program to become a "depth psychologist."  (This too turned out to be a fantasy.)   As to my stance as "conscientious objector," I suppose I couldn’t have hurt my beloved father more if I had physically slapped his face.   Devastatingly embarrassed, he nevertheless interceded with the Adjutant General and I was quietly allowed an officially "honorable" discharge.   Damn foolish kid I was, but this would not be the last time my allegiance to false gods would bring severe disappointment into my Dad’s life.

By 1964 I had a Master of Arts in Teaching and my wife her BA in Philosophy. The next two years found us in the cottonfields of north Alabama where I taught English at a small junior college.  Deeply impressed as ever with the strategic power of movies to shape society, I teamed up with a talented young film artist from California who was finishing his duty at Redstone Arsenal.   Then, recruiting the aid of other faculty and students I forayed into independent filmmaking, while my wife and I both grew more open in our infidelities – or rather, I usually tried to hide mine while she confided all of hers to me as trusted sounding board.   I was riding a red Norton 750 Atlas with a frame-mounted bubble fairing to work and experimenting with artsy nude films on the side, my Isadora-like wife the obliging model.  Zorba the Greek, La Dolce Vita, and Dr. Zhivago were the big movies then, but I later had to confess I had watched the last in another city with another woman.  We were pretty ‘hip’ for Alabama, except our life had become a continuous aerobatic display of maxed-out emotion, with occasional threats of suicide by my moody partner.   Her considerable giftings as artist and intellectual left her feeling trapped in the home-maker role with two children in a single-story two-bedroom brick house stuck on a narrow country lane in the middle of racially retro Alabama.   This restlessness soon led to her getting accepted into a Master’s program in Psychology at the University of Florida.

So I set out for Gainesville on my latest Norton with its less than legal mufflers and – amazingly – acquired a college teaching job and house to rent all in one long weekend. God was clearly with me!   Our daughters then being about three and five years old, I gave up what in retrospect was probably the best job I would ever have and loaded the proverbial 16-foot U-Haul to set out for the final chapter of our marriage.

Florida in 1967 was way further into the future than Alabama.  Gainesville had its own psychedelic "head shop" called The Subterranean Circus.  We soon had a connection for a more serious brand of recreational devil-weed and, before the year was out, our first actual LSD.  For a short time I even took up cigarettes, until one evening found me excitedly chain-smoking on the front row of a lecture at the University by the already bug-eyed Huston Smith.  Before he was well started I had to walk out in order to spend the next fourteen hours hugging a toilet.  No more tobacco smokes for me.  I partook in the radicals’ march on the Pentagon (but didn’t see Forrest Gump).  To tell our horrid story in a few words, at the beginning of fall classes my wife fell madly in love with her married philosophy professor; in self defense I soon afterwards began a flaming affair with one of my creative writing students; the professor and I wrote and filmed a deeply symbolic opus called Dawnsong on Flagler Beach near St. Augustine, for which we were thrown in jail for three days; then our entire foursome and two children moved into the same house where I had been busily constructing a "meditation space" featuring thousands of 10-inch strips of purple crepe-paper glued to the ceiling like upside-down grass. With the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour coloring the air in every remotest corner, this living arrangement lasted about a month, until the professor suddenly remembered his wife and children. To escape the explosion my new love and I hastily moved about a block away – hardly far enough as there was a near murder or suicide now happening on a schedule of once a week.   ("Jimmy, where have you hidden the guns?")   We found escape in marathon sex and the music of The Doors’ latest album, Strange Days.    I shot a second movie with my 16mm Bolex called Hippie Love and Hippie Hate, which, along with a recommendation from my Redstone Arsenal friend, got me noticed by the director of the film department of Georgia Educational Television in Atlanta.

Suddenly just when I needed it most, I had a job offer in a field where I might finally be able to "influence a mass audience," frightening as that prospect might be had it succeeded.   Cherry, my new lady – "boy-woman" as she was now known due to her having chopped all but a quarter-inch of her hair off in protest of generally intolerable circumstances (I forgot to mention she was also already legally married to someone else) – my new co-conspirator and I split for a fresh start in Atlanta in a dependable car her heartsick but exasperated parents had donated to the cause.  There, settled into new jobs and after appropriate divorces had been served all around, on Valentine’s Day of 1969 my former student easily became my shiny late-model wife, courtesy of a weary justice of the peace in a dingy Decatur, Georgia office. (I promptly got a bladder infection which I carry to this day from the stress of being separated from my two daughters.  I can’t be flippant about that tearing-apart.)

But I had jumped on a train that was by now too fast to jump off.  After about a year of relative bliss, while I felt my role as mentor beginning to slip, my faithless lustful heart began its stealthy undermining of this second marriage, only this time I couldn’t share the blame.   Ready to start first grade, my oldest daughter came to live with us in our basement apartment near Emory University where my new wife had found a secretary job in the Anatomy Department.  With the help of my filmmaking partner now out of the military I was learning the technical end of professional film production.   I was also discovering I had brought my old self along.   The "art" films I was doing on the side were getting more explicitly pornographic.   (It was more than simple whimsy that caused me to disguise my copies of these movies by labeling them "Church.") Concurrently I was thinking I could probably seduce our married landlady who lived upstairs, with husband and two children.   (Thank God when I actually broached the subject she found the suggestion merely comical.)  I grew a mustache and goatee that once caused a pair of neighborhood children to recoil backwards from me while I was jogging – before scattering pell-mell screaming, "The Devil!"

My young wife was struggling hard to be a good surrogate mother to my bright young daughter, never failing to read her bedtime stories and make sure she was breakfasted and ready for school.    After work we’d get stoned and jive with the cat or watch Star Trek.  Weekends with the latest Stevie Wonder hit Very Superstitious blaring on the car radio, we’d add a few more bright swirls of hippie-nation paint to our black VW beetle, making it an ever-more tempting target for angry semis, somehow undeterred by the magic word "LOVE" emblazoned in fiery letters between the headlights.  We also had some horrendous fights, once bringing the police pounding the door to check us out. It’s hard to recall what these fights were about, though jealousy of my first wife was a common, albeit understandable, ingredient.   Inwardly I felt I always only got what I deserved, even when my 6-year old daughter joined in against me by upending a flowerpot in my lap.   At night we’d light a giant four-foot-tall red candle beside our mattress on the floor and listen to Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf on FM.   People who know me now might find it hard to believe, but I am sure the unbiased reader will agree I was a royal ass in those days.

Nevertheless in our search for a better way we continued to experiment on holidays with psychedelics like mescaline and LSD.  I remember one snowy day with the Atlanta streets covered in ice, "tripping" on mescaline and feeling like a timberwolf in his element, careening on motorcycle boots for skis down our driveway.  I now suspect that the powerful "self" that had "surfaced" in my body to sniff the gray wintry air of our planet was indeed more alien than I could have guessed at the time.   When a former student and his wife from Alabama days moved into the area, our weekends got more interesting.  As leader of a rock band in 1966 he had been the first kid in north Alabama to smoke pot and grow shoulder-length hair; now we had the dope-guru’s pleasure of turning them on to more exotic highs.   It was the era of the Beatles’ White Album and the Yellow Submarine movie.   Before long the four of us dropped acid and got "righteously" naked together, but I was never quite able to push things to the "wife-swapping" point.   It’s not easy to admit what a reprobate I had become, but the worst is yet to tell.

While valuable as experience, filming classroom scenes, recording interviews with minor bureaucrats, even making occasional promos for the Georgia Highway Patrol was not the sort of moviemaking I had in mind.   To bring in the future I would have to move where the future was already happening: California.  My talented film cohort and his music-composer wife were homesick for the Bay Area and equally eager to advance their film-industry careers.  They showed us incredible color footage they had shot on a recent visit – of a place we’d never heard of called Haight-Asbury. So without any prospect of work, my daughter having returned to Florida to be with her mother for second grade, we quit our jobs at Georgia ETV, rented the biggest U-Haul truck we could find, loaded all our worldly goods including the BMW R69S flat twin with Earls forks I had just traded my Norton Scrambler for, and – after a brief stop at my parents’ home in Nashville – struck west on I-40 as a mini-caravan chugging confidently toward the golden hills of what we were sure would be our El Dorado.

At night we would find an empty field where we stretched a tarp between the truck cab and our inflammatory VW bug, happy adventurers all. At some junk-strewn stopping place between Oklahoma City and Albuquerque my tender-hearted wife adopted a couple of abandoned kittens, immediately naming them Benjamin and Anthea, making three with Pooty-Tutu.

My filmmaker friend’s wife Shirley, a supremely gifted pianist and composer, had been a Rogers before marriage.   When we arrived in the Bay Area in 1969, the Rogers clan took us into their home in Pleasant Hill (now best known as the community where Tom Hanks spent his adolescence).  Cherry and I were truly welcomed as family members by these generous people, who provided a base from which to ease into an unfamiliar polyglot culture where distinctions in social status were, to put it mildly, not so sharply defined as in the South.   The very garbage men in northern California were articulate, even literate.

The downside of this unaccustomed glut of qualified people was that for the first time in my short working career, landing a job was suddenly a huge challenge.   Film and TV proved to be absolutely closed, while junior colleges essentially laughed at my credentials.   After six weeks of fruitless applications during which I was stunned by the chaotic atmosphere in many of the schools I visited, I was finally accepted to teach 10^th grade English at what amounted to a ghetto holding-tank in the East Bay community of Richmond, point-of-origin for the Black Panthers. I was beginning to see the "big frog" advantages of north Alabama.

My Florida-born wife and I rented an upstairs apartment a stone’s throw from the new high school, which was built as a fortress without windows around a large roofed commons that could be closed off with giant steel barriers that descended from the ceiling over the main entryhalls.   Rheem Avenue below our window, looking across to the Whataburger, was often the scene of blowing newspapers and swooping seagulls, noisy with vehicular traffic during the day and wailing sirens at night.   Perfect.   El Dorado.

The entire Bay Area was seething, so much farther into the future than po-dunk Gainesville ever thought of being. Ken Kesey’s electric kool-aid acid tests were ancient history here.  The radicals were genuinely heavy people like nobody we’d ever seen in person, dangerous people.   They beat Latin/African drums in the parks, they clapped explosively in total abandon when they danced.   Half of them had given up wearing shoes, for crying out loud.   The Tate murders happened the week of our arrival. Haight-Asbury and Telegraph Avenue had already become war zones adrift in tear gas.   My still innocent vision of pot-peace-love & rock’n’roll was shocked to find the Berkeley Barb pushing an image of doe-eyed hippie girls with ammunition bandoleers spanning braless bosoms.  Homosexual sex was happening boisterously in the stalls of the men’s room at the Student Center of the University of California at high noon.   The smell of weed and patchouli oil was everywhere.  The Steppenwolf Bar in Berkeley was where up-scale hippie white women went to be picked up by equally high-flying black dudes in bizarre feminist inversion of George Wallace’s Alabama. We were taken there by a friend of my wife’s only days after our arrival, high on acid, to have any racist programming deleted from our hard-drives.   I mainly remember one huge black man yelling in my face, "The Bank of America is sucking your blood!"  I loudly agreed.   The Family Dog night spot down on the eerily foggy coast of The City itself – parking area stocked with items like a lavender Microbus labeled "The Purple People-Eater" – was the scene of experimental film nights never imagined in any previous avant-garde circles.   (I never realized ‘til many years later the wry occult significance of "family dogs" as easily obtained subjects of ritual sacrifice – though I’ll never forget one Sunday dawn riding my BMW north on the Oakland Freeway seeing the neatly headless body of a large brown short-hair dumped in the middle of the slow lane. Three Dog Night was a rock band, remember, with a name popularly thought to refer only to an arctically-frigid necessity.   Makes one wonder.)

Shortly after arriving Cherry and I rode our motorcycle into San Francisco to see "the Haight" for ourselves. We figured the nearby police station would be a safe place to leave the bike, but a friendly black officer burst into the fenced parking lot and told us "no way," as their station had been pipe-bombed again within the week and we unfortunately fit a profile, Georgia crackers or not.   All this was about the time Rosemary’s Baby hit the screens, along with the documentary Woodstock.  Our surfboard had obviously caught the Mother Wave, and we were loving it.

Well, "fools rush in," and this proved triply true when I began my job at Richmond High. To tell it like it was, Richmond was about equally divided among three ethnic groups: the desperately trapped ghetto blacks, the somewhat more hopeful Chicanos, and the barely better-off white residue of the "Okie" dust-bowl exodus.   This combo made for some interesting alchemy in a high school population.  But my personal discovery was that it was not a chemistry that mixed well with the authoritarian style of teaching I had successfully practiced in the South.

For one thing, many of the students came to school geared down on "reds," supersonic on "crank," bemused on weed, or somehow maintaining on acid. On top of this I quickly found that about half of my 10^th graders read and wrote at a second grade level even when they were "straight."  They also spoke in an unknown tongue.  I thought at first the black kids were saying "Ride on!"   After a while I discovered that to be "Right on!" There was considerable reference to "pimps an’ hoes," more self-explanatory.   I was the "dude" they called "Kentucky Fried Chicken."

When I started out trying to impose the sort of order that had worked in the South, a tiny sliver of hell broke loose.   It is no exaggeration to say that on one memorable occasion I was faced with two students at the front creating an obscene imperative in three-foot-high letters on the green-board (one outlining, the other filling-in), two others at the rear of the room removing the grille from our air-conditioning unit, a cluster in the opposite back corner shooting craps on the floor, and a fight in progress in the middle of the room in which a desk was being hurled over the heads of the few still-seated students.   We had an intercom near the door that connected to the front office.  As I tried to intervene with the desk-thrower, the intercom was being seriously manned by a sympathetic black fellow sending the alarm: "Kentucky Fried Chicken need you in Room 10 quick!"

About those retractable steel barriers.   This was a school where I had to carry an un- conscious white girl to the office who had passed out on drugs, where I had a hunting knife drawn on me by one reluctant learner, and where the hulking dean of students had to defend himself with a garbage lid from a student tripping on acid who had shaved his head Iroquois-style and swiped a bow and arrow from the girls' archery class.   Richmond High in 1970 was already in the 21^st Century.

I did change my classroom approach. Finding out how much they were into music, I struck a deal.   Collecting all the paperback novels to which they could possibly relate, I turned my desk into a one-hour lending library with a record player on the side. They brought all their favorite albums to class.   I played disc jockey and promised each an "A" for the hour if he or she kept seated and even "pretended" to read for the duration. In the beginning they doubted such good fortune, but after the first report card showing good English grades for the first time ever, the interest in actually trying to read gradually became genuine.  Kentucky Fried Chicken’s classes were "pretty cool" now.

Meanwhile Cool-Man was pushing the envelope of a sinner’s freedom again – the one labeled "slavery" in invisible ink.    Before my first year at Richmond was out I was bringing a couple of the "hipper" kids home with me for lunch and we were "turning on" before going back to class.  With my hair and beard now looking like General Custer in granny glasses, I was fast becoming the local Pied Piper of higher consciousness.   In my one class of more advanced students, the rock opera Tommy became our main literary focus.   In bell-bottoms and boots I was quickly popular among all the students, constantly getting high-fives and hippie-nation-hand-clasps in the halls.  The kids knew they could safely share their real lives with me.   ("You know, Mr. Haun, snapping is when you can hear the brain cells exploding in your head.")   The administration seemed a bit ambivalent about this turn, but pleased enough to offer a contract for a second year.

I bought an acoustic/electric guitar at a pawnshop for thirty dollars.   In the late afternoons I’d take it to the windy crown of one of the undulating golden hills overlooking Richmond and the north Bay toward the setting sun, smoke a fat number, and beat that 6-string half to death.   Maybe that destiny I was being prepared for is rock star – that’s a place of influence.

Now and then my wife and I would take half-hits of acid and ride the bike down to Berkeley or over the Oakland Bridge into The City.  We were present for the immortal (free) Youngbloods’ concert in Provo Park when they recorded, "Come on people, now, smile on your brother – everybody get together and love one another right now…"    In the brilliant sun the tall fir trees were loaded with grinning hippies while thousands of coffee-lid Frisbees bounced off the foreheads and instruments of the band as they played.    (Faithless bastard that I was, I danced most of that number with a beautiful girl standing behind me while Cherry was looking for a bathroom; strange to say, our wedding ring got stolen at that very moment.)   As half-naked pagans, we did the Alameda flea market, cooking on mescaline under an intense blue sky, astonishing ourselves over the beauty of 10-cent ashtrays.   I also remember a "love-in" at Golden Gate Park where an obviously demonized wildman in loincloth cast rapid-fire curse-gestures, face contorting in hatred, at a small boy who had inadvertently bumped his divine frenzy to Gaia.   I didn’t believe in demons yet exactly, but sometimes you know anyway.

Cherry must have gotten pregnant about the time my first school year in Richmond began, because our daughter was born in May before school let out.   Our Alabama couple from Atlanta had just shown up towing a motorcycle trailer behind their homemade camper.   The morning after we brought our new daughter home from Kaiser Hospital,  I called in sick to spend the day celebrating with these welcome friends, but lost points when the vice-principal saw me in front of the high school hauling ass on my buddy’s BSA.   (Hey, dude, my wife just had a beautiful baby girl, not in the least deformed by LSD – thanks be to God!)

The fact is, I’ve been throwing in a lot of unnecessary detail because I’m ashamed to tell the rest of the story.   My sexual greediness continued to push the bounds.  My wife was beginning to seriously question the shape of utopia as I saw it.   Her "I just want to tag along" days of early infatuation with my high-sounding ideas were definitely over.   I had to practically drag her to several gatherings of a group I had read about in Playboy years before, the Sexual Freedom League.  This turned out to be, on the surface, not much more than an uppermiddleclass wife-and girlfriend-swapping club, though I have no doubt for some it became a trapdoor into far "heavier" trips. Regardless, I was eager to explore the lusty possibilities, while Cherry felt trapped in unpleasant circumstances.  She was anything but the "foolish woman" in Proverbs who "says to him who lacks understanding, ‘Stolen water is sweet; and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’ But he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol."   I’ll tell you later how this saying was fulfilled in a most bizarre way.  This group harped on the need to "get beyond jealousy," but my brief experience with them proved they were pursuing a delusion.

It was with this group that I experienced the most extreme drug trip of my entire life – forever my definition of "bummer."  We had joined about fifty of these heterosexually liberated ones for a weekend at someone’s vacation home in the high Sierras.   Our Japanese compact was the least reputable vehicle present.  A wide array of drugs was in evidence.   I inquired around if anyone had any mescaline, since I had always had "good experiences" with the large white capsules that had been so-called in the past.    I was offered a tiny beige capsule about one-third the familiar size.   I thought, "This can’t amount to much, small as it is."   About an hour later I was literally turning green, straining every muscle in a futile attempt to shed energy, ripping off my clothes in the middle of the main living area where perhaps 30 strangers were milling about.   While Santana’s "Black Magic Woman" pulsed on the stereo, I knew I simply must NOT go where this drug was taking me.   Fortunately someone had some Thorazine – horse tranquilizer – which had an initial effect like an orbiting missile striking a water-filled blimp.   For the next many hours I wafted slowly back to earth fighting the paranoid certainty that we had been tricked here in order to become human sacrifices, almost simultaneously doing mental warfare with other looming "truths" as, for example, that I was Jesus and my Dad was actually God in disguise.  Through it all there was somehow a nodding familiarity with a language not of this world.   At least this episode saved me from committing another infidelity.

Not that I didn’t keep trying. I made passes at two women teachers at the high school, but they were too wise to get involved with a married man.  I even flirted half-heartedly with one of the students, herself already an acidhead at 16, but ironically that wasn’t what finally got me busted at Richmond High.

My second year at Richmond began hopefully enough.   Cherry and I had moved to a house 25 miles east, beyond the coastal hills in the tiny collection of aging dwellings known as Clyde, facing across a mile of flat desolation toward a row of flaming oil refineries along the lower Sacramento River.  Happily, our new home was next door to a 6-foot-three muscular Californian with an Italian surname married to the eldest of the Rogers girls.  Ronnie in his broad-brimmed leather hat was a jack-of-all-trades who got wired early and plastered swimming pools in 100-degree heat for a living.  Evenings he taught me as much as I could absorb about playing electric blues guitar.  I immediately bought a Fender solid-body, and we made quantities of rafter-writhing rhythm in my attic, which I attempted to baffle with about nine hundred egg cartons.

I need to back up, though, because that was the vacation I wound up handcuffed naked to a chair on the Mexican border, facing a mandatory five-year federal sentence.   Having landed in Clyde with a whole summer to play with, my thirst for adventure was again keeping me awake nights.  I suppose the rationalizing started with the fact that neither of my options for impacting the world "for God" – film and music – could begin to be financed on a teacher’s salary.  But in Gainesville we knew of a familiar figure in the local counterculture who reputedly had made $5000 smuggling one backpack of marijuana across the Rio Grande border near El Paso.   If I could pull off a stunt like that I’d be an overnight hero in Clyde, California (not to mention hastening the dawning of the Age of Aquarius in my immediate environment).   Plus I’d be opening a door of financial provision for whatever big doings God had up His sleeve for us.  Was I dumb, or what?   (Of course the "or what" was: I was being inspired by the wrong god.)

I honestly don’t remember if my precise plan was hatched before or after seeing Easy Rider at the Concord Drive-In that summer, but I was so tuned in to the spirit of the times I doubt it matters.   No backpack smuggling for this culture-warrior: I would transport my illegal smoking leaf into the vulnerable underbelly of Babylon inside the headlight cowl of my trusty Bavarian Motor Steed.

Bidding the obligatory fond adieu to wife, baby, and neighbors, I was so pumped I rode way into the night all the way to Bakersfield, where I rested a few hours before barreling east across the Arizona badlands.  In the pink glow of dawn I took advantage of the calm chill to practice steering with knees alone, arms crossed over chest at 80 miles an hour on straight desert interstate with little traffic; but by noon I was suffering through such incredible heat my air-cooled machine would only do 30 miles an hour. After dark,  passing Phoenix the temperature dropped down around 100, so I could again cruise at 80, which was plenty fast enough on the couple of occasions I caught a June bug between the eyes.   In the principle of an armor-piercing shell, that particular sensation is quite electric, exactly like minor fragments of the creature manage to penetrate clear through one’s brain to impact the rear wall of the skull.   But no hippie biker worth his Zen detachment would think of riding with a windshield.  Eyes watering behind wire-rimmed glasses was The Way.

After renting a modest hotel room in downtown El Paso, I found a barber who sheared my freedom flag to military respectability.   Then leaving my traveling baggage at the hotel, I rode across the surprisingly dinky bridge at the international border into Juarez. There I rented another room in a small Mexican motel stuccoed the color of ox blood. Leaving my bike locked inconspicuously beside the thick wall near the motel entrance, I scouted some quieter residential areas on foot, a bit taken aback that even modest homes were surrounded by walls topped with jagged shards of broken glass embedded in cement.  I slept that night with my Dad’s 22-magnum six-shot derringer under my pillow.

The next day I located the bustling "sin strip," where I got a guardedly affirmative response from the first taxi-driver I asked, "You know a donde puedo comprar marijuana?"   (At last a chance to use two seemingly wasted years of high school Spanish.)  This shady-looking individual with a large shock of straight black hair sized me up a moment, doubtless put off by my policeman’s haircut, then motioned to hop in his taxi.   We sped away to a barn-like Mexican "lounge" that must have doubled as a whorehouse, considering the graphic propositions I received at the bar from a plain-faced senorita.  (When she asked if I "likee candybar" I figured this wasn’t an appeal to my sweet tooth.)  But not only was I holding on to my $150 bargaining money, I was way too nervous to do more than order a stupid soft drink, wondering meanwhile if I might actually have to try to bluff someone with the noisemaker in my right jeans pocket.   My erstwhile pacifism had flown with the territory.

Pretty soon the taxi guy came back with a middle-aged, no doubt family man in rumpled pants and old sports shirt, who carried a shopping bag.  Their English was barely better than my Spanish, so I finally understood they wanted to haggle this deal  in the cab.  The "cabby" drove us up into a dusty barrio set on a hillside where adobe houses were ominously rotting from neglect and the glass shards atop the walls noticeably taller and sharper.  None of this was remotely what I expected.  The pirate behind the wheel just kept changing direction until I was totally disoriented.  Out of his bag the well-fed older character hauled a couple of compressed bricks of stemmy-looking grass tightly wrapped in red cellophane.   He also pulled a bright yellow "joint" from his shirt pocket and lit it so I could sample his product.  It was very harsh weed and the heat in the closed car was making me half-nauseous.  We drove some more through menacing ghettoes while they asked how I liked the smoke.  I couldn’t tell if I was getting high on the bitter-tasting joint or just totally stressed by being at their (probably nonexistent) mercy.  Hell, I just wanna get this part over with. As I recall I ended up giving them my whole wad of dope-money, $150 for the two bricks, each about the size of a loaf of bread.  Still, it was way more weed than I’d ever seen at one time, and I knew it would take many trips back and forth to get it all across the bridge.

That’s another thing I haven’t explained.  I had been testing the customs checkpoint in both directions on my bike and had always been waved through with the other traffic, in spite of my California plate – even one trip when I had all my traveling gear and bedroll strapped on going south into Juarez.   So after the "deal went down" and I was safely back at the ox-blood inn, I started breaking my bricks into smaller baggies that could be stashed behind the headlamp and in nooks under the sidecovers.   I was super-tense on the first northbound crossing, but just like before, I was waved through by U.S. Customs and thought, "This smuggling gig is too easy!"   But what a tedious drag it became on the American side taking my headlight cowl apart in the parking garage of a big hotel just to retrieve a fat sandwich-bag of grass.   I was getting impatient to start back and receive the accolades of less hardy souls in Clyde.

This impatience nearly put a radical dogleg in the entire course of my life, but for my long-suffering Lord’s sovereign mercy.   I must have made four or five round trips across the border and was getting pretty handy at popping the chrome retainer ring  off my headlight cowl.  Then one more time back at the Ox-Blood, I crammed all of the remaining dope as tightly as I could in my usual hiding places and still had one solitary baggie left over.  It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Mexico felt vaguely threatening.  I hated the thought of another round trip just for one bag – but Frugal Freddie wasn’t about to leave even one behind, having paid for it with honest sweat for the Contra Costa County Unified School District.   I hadn’t been stopped one time, even once driving down packing all my gear.  So hey, I’ll just unroll my sleeping bag and put that puppy in the farthest inside corner, re-roll it tight, encircle with plenty of rope, neatly knotted off, and it ought to be good all the way home.

Enter life lesson number six hundred and four.   It never dawned on my intricately strategizing brain that a fully loaded motorcycle heading south was not at all the same animal as a fully loaded motorcycle returning Stateside, from who knows where.   You get the picture.   I arrive at the usual northbound checkpoint and the uniformed U.S. Customs agent, a grandfatherly gentleman in his fifties, motions me to pull over and stop.   Whoa now!   Heart-pounding time – you bet.   He has a long counter beside the parking lane I had never noticed before.  He asks me to unstrap my pack and sleeping bag and throw them on the counter.  Done.  He then proceeds to go through every item in my backpack.  No problem.   See, I’m a good boy.   But of course he also does the hideously dreaded thing, untying my rope around the bedroll and methodically unrolling the bag.  I’m still praying he won’t notice the little bulge at the far end – but of course he does.  With a look of mixed surprise and delight like I just made his day, he snaps up the baggie and escorts me sternly by the arm across the traffic lane and through the door of the yellow brick customs office.

They’ve caught a live one and the place is suddenly energized. The older agent pats me down for weapons while another behind the counter phones his boss and grabs a form to record my vital statistics.  I knew I’d already blown it big time so I quickly decided a gesture of good will couldn’t hurt.  The half-hearted frisk job had somehow missed the derringer in my right pocket.   I reached in with thumb and forefinger gingerly on the butt of the toy-sized gun and dangled it aloft, barrel down, before their suddenly larger eyes.   It is snatched away but the gesture has been duly noted.

Having gotten my ID data, they escorted me into another smaller room, empty except for a table and chair, told me to remove every stitch of clothing, including socks, and then – after one of them peeked at a place where the sun doesn’t shine – handcuffed me by one wrist to the arm of the wooden chair.   Then they left the room.   Rush hour was happening outside on the bridge.   If I stood, I could see the tops of bumper to bumper cars moving slowly in the bland afternoon light coming through the single wire-reinforced window.  That chair felt mighty cold on my bare butt, a working class hero no more.

After about 45 minutes while I tried to quell involuntary trembling, a slender easy-going man in his mid thirties with a mustache comes in and explains that he is the chief customs agent in charge of the El Paso district. He also explains that I am in a whole lot of trouble for transporting across international borders – five years mandatory federal pen worth of trouble.   Then he offers a tiny ray of hope.   Since this is a first offense, there is one chance of getting a reduced sentence – if I will cooperate and lead them to the men who sold me the dope.  Ouch.   Now I have to become a rat to see my wife and child before five years are gone and I’ve become some felon’s sweetheart.   Chained naked to the only chair in a cold room, I quickly agree to become a rat.

But this won’t be as easy as I thought.     The next move, after my clothes are restored, is to turn me over to the Mexican "authorities" at the jail in Juarez.   That building, which I could guess around 1930 had been painted dark green below and cream yellow above, now looked more like the bomb-pocked hangars I had visited at Pearl Harbor – only way dirtier.   At least they didn’t throw me in the big inner "cage" with the really bad desperadoes standing around in their undershorts waiting for somebody to hose the floor down so they could find places to relax on it.

I was put with the upper-class detainees in a long narrow windowless room boasting a ratty old couch and chair and a light bulb in the ceiling. Prisoners here, including one or two almost elderly women, could send out for food if they had money.   The older people, all very friendly and animated, took turns on the couch while I slept on the concrete floor, using my Air Force issue boots as pillow.   Maybe I looked calm, but mentally I was freaking.

The next morning I got introduced to some genuine Mexican plainclothes cops, who I was glad to see had forgotten to bring their cattle prods.   These men were all about six-foot-four, very broad shouldered in natty lightweight tan suits unbuttoned in front  so you’d be sure to see the huge chrome-plated pearl-handled 45 automatics actually stuck in their belts.  I was hustled into the back seat of a big American car between two of the biggest narco-dudes and we roared over to "the strip" so I could have the pleasure of "fingering" my swarthy cab driver.

Sure enough he was there, and pretty soon they had him in the front seat looking at me with more than simple disappointment in his eyes.  Now what?  Well, lucky for me they threw the cabby into the inner dungeon with the really bad people, while I got put back in the "parlor" room with no word as to how long I might be there. The next big surprise was when they brought in the older fellow who had sold me the bricks and put him in the same "parlor" area I was in.   He too expressed more than simple disappointment with my having "fingered" him, an English term he seemed quite familiar with. My mind was fairly tripping without drugs for the first two days.  I knew it was a real Mexican jail when, visiting the single available toilet, a mouse skittered across the hand I had carelessly laid atop a low concrete-block wall.

They kept me there without explanation for three more days.  I got one visit from a minor officer of the American Consulate, who somehow thought I was an AWOL trooper.  It did become evident enough why they were keeping me when I was hauled into the Chief of Police’s office early in my stay and made to understand I could be returned to U.S. Customs at once for an appropriate donation of cash.

My true situation didn’t begin to dawn on me until the morning I was finally released from refried custody.  Someone excitedly brought into our parlor a front-page story in the local periodico, complete with a picture of me looking pretty damn serious as I was being brought into jail.   The Spanish text kept intermixing the word alfalfa in juxtaposition with marijuana.   Struggling to translate the article, I finally figured out what everyone else seemed to have known almost from the moment of my arrest on the bridge: I had been laboriously executing a masterful plot to smuggle generic cud-tempting alfalfa hay!   I was not a criminal!  They might want to but they can’t send you to prison for smuggling alfalfa!

There was one final ironic twist to this episode. Having decided I wasn’t going to be pressured into buying my way out of his clutches, the Chief assigned two of the giant plainclothes dudes to drive me back to the U.S. side. On the way, the one in the back seat produced an odd little conical package folded out of newspaper, the size of a Dixiecup.  In halting English he said they didn’t want me to leave their beautiful country with a bad impression, so he was offering this "tokenito" containing real marijuana!   I wanted to trust their motives – which likely were sincere – but after all I’d just been through, I graciously declined.

When I was safely back in El Paso, the friendly chief of customs, who seemed to have taken a liking to me, reiterated how fortunate I had been to have been swindled – and expressed hope I’d learned my lesson.   I said I already had because I was afraid to trust the offer of those plainclothesmen who drove me to the border!  He laughed and agreed he doubted they were testing me, but who knows?   He then returned my motorcycle and my Dad’s pistol.  The next morning I paid my bill at the hotel and said adios to west Texas and passionate thanks to God.    Don’t tell me He doesn’t have a sense of humor.

I rode so hard getting home I only remember stopping once around midnight to sleep in a field not far from the highway, lying right in the warm sand in my leather jacket, bone-weary but (what the world calls) a "free man" again.

Too soon my second year at the Richmond Zoo began.  A bouncing baby girl at home meant Cherry usually kept the car, now a brand new Datsun station wagon, while I enjoyed a splendid motorcycle ride to work through rounded hills past Martinez to Pinole, then south on the Eastshore Freeway.   Bay Area traffic even then was often bumper-to-bumper-80-miles-an-hour, but I felt semi-protected by a secret destiny that probably required all my limbs – certainly my mental faculties.  I was indeed permitted more than my share of free passes: like riding stoned on assorted substances and finally noticing all the one-way arrows had been pointing toward me for awhile.   I remember one unrepeatable get-off on a freeway exit-ramp when I was paying too much attention to a trio of bare midriffs and missed seeing a patch of oil.   I fell off the bike doing an automatic forward roll like I’d learned as a teenage judo novice in Japan. The Beemer continued, leaned over, scraping along on the bottom of the right-hand cylinder head, neatly around the ramp.  I rolled to my feet still in a run, caught the bike – actually righting and mounting it before forward motion had stopped.  Unfortunately there seemed to have been no witnesses to this feat, least of all the responsible trio.

Since I was now getting the big head to become a rock star, my dear wife sewed a pair of scarlet crushed-velvet bell-bottoms, which I wore to Christmas dinner at the Rogers’.   I thought things were going great.   I had no idea how my unfaithful attitude was shredding her young heart.   Now I was "tactfully" floating the possibility of our participating in some kind of mass orgy I had heard was being organized.  That’s when she finally found the courage to phone her parents for an airline ticket home.  Too late I realized Cherry had, seemingly overnight, packed for herself and the baby – and was gone!

Though obviously I should have expected it, I was seriously devastated.   I thought at first she might be coming back, but once again I couldn’t begin to absorb how cruel I had become in my blatant desire to "make" fifty thousand women.

One might think at this point I would have begun to repent and mend my ways.  Quite the contrary proved to be true.  My life went from a gentle gliding descent into a truly dangerous dive.   Not just inwardly, but outwardly.

One of the first things that happened was I lost my job.  And even though I was falsely accused, I have to admit there was a beautiful justice at work in that situation – as I’ll explain.   I was an inveterate, sometimes unmerciful, "kidder" with my students, particularly where I detected pretension or hypocrisy.   So there was this unusually shapely Anglo girl in one of my classes who came to school one day wearing a tight V-neck sweater with a zipper front – which zipper had a convenient gold pull-ring as big around as a water-glass attached by a short chain.  For once with no ulterior motive in play except to mock the blatancy of the tease, I reached out and (carefully) tapped the gold ring (once) and asked with a pseudo-scolding air, "What’s that for?"

I don’t recall her immediate response, if any, but a day or two later I was summoned before a roomful of very serious-faced administrators.  Apparently the girl had accused me of actually unzipping her blouse – in class.  Double whoa!  I knew this was so absurd (I wouldn’t experience "missing time" for several years yet) that I was probably way too relaxed for the circumstances, because when they point-blank  asked if I had "pulled at all" on the zipper, I just laughed and said, "I don’t think so."

Wrong answer.   Maybe they were just looking for any excuse to get rid of this overly radical teacher.  I was basically fired on the spot.  Only then did I acquire a lawyer who won my "right" (hah!) to a "clean record" (absolutely!) plus continuance of my pay through the end of the contract.  In other words, I would be paid my regular salary for about six months to simply never darken their door.   All in all, I thought I was "just maybe" getting better than I deserved.  (I am sure God prefers to be merciful, even in His chastisements. But I’m giving you present perspective; unfortunately at the time I was more inclined to take six months’ free salary as divine endorsement of my path  and a financial green light for greater exercise of "creativity.")

So much happened in the year after Cherry left me, I hardly know where to begin. From my present vantage I can see my idealistic side flailing desperately to keep nose above water, as if being alternately drawn-toward and pummeled-with the necessity for some kind of spiritual breakthrough.   Meanwhile my increasingly dominating lust seemed bent on drowning my gangly carcass.

By 1972 Haight-Asbury had already succumbed to a criminal element salivating to take advantage of hopelessly naïve flower children.   But Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley – in spite of voices calling for violent Maoist revolution (and discounting isolated "oases" in California, Colorado, and New Mexico) – was still the national mecca for seekers after enlightenment, higher consciousness, self-realization, and the elusive promise of a new golden age of blissed-out harmony among all two-leggeds.   The Hare Krishnas with their shaven heads and radical topknots (for "snatching away," believe it or not) were always whooping it up on Telegraph, drums slung over shoulders, chanting and dancing with tambourines.  Whenever they drew a good clot of seekers, their leader would launch some seductive streetcorner preaching.   I remember one compact wrestler-type fellow about 30 boasting 150 acid trips, none of which could compare to the drugless high he had found in Krishna consciousness through disciplined chanting and meditation.   The identical wide-eyed optimism was perfuming even the AM airwaves with George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord.   ("I really want to see You…Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.")  One evening I crowded in with about 200 of the counter-culture elite in an ordinary-sized living room – another 300 pressing against the windows outside – to rattle the ceiling joists with the "sacred Aum" for a good hour awaiting the grand entrance of the boy-god Mahara-ji, who finally stepped carefully through beaming disciples, hoisting the folds of his glistening robe, to take his seat on a flower-smothered dais against the longer wall.  He looked like a plump pampered kid; but, truly, what did I know – except that God was real.

The occult wasn’t "occult" in Berkeley – not only not hidden, but the self-evident cutting edge of psycho-spiritual evolution.  Wealthy college girls in loose paisley dresses were doing Tarot readings and astrological charts in tasteful hillside residences.    A Tennessee boy couldn’t help but be impressed.    The quiet incense-laden Shambala Bookstore on Telegraph was a potent seedbed for New Age awakening. When I wasn’t ogling classy nude dancers in other parts of the megalopolis, I was discovering Yogananda, Carlos Castaneda, and P.D. Ouspenski.   More and more on the street the watchword was that eastern paths of yoga and meditation were, not just cleaner, but in all ways superior ascents up the mountain to cosmic awareness than tawdry gambles with psychedelics.    Be Here Now – since I was too ignorant of the real thing to recognize the inversions – became pride’s Bible on my dashboard.

When I read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi (now advertised religiously in National Geographic) I was only too eager to believe the postscript’s details of how long his dead body resisted corruption.  I was so "inspired" by the seemingly harmless childlike spirit of that book that I took several of my remaining firearms, including at least one family heirloom, down to the canal near my house in Clyde and consigned those suckers to a watery grave.   (When circumstances later necessitated an honest confession of this act to my gun-prizing father, another high water mark in our mutual incomprehension was recorded.)

Meanwhile I was casting about to find a substitute way to generate income. The Rogers family had a tasty recipe from gold rush days for a flaky beef and potato turnover known in the West and elsewhere as a "pasty."   My always-understated neighbor Ronnie in some other context had used the phrase "Mom’s hair pie."  Wow.  A lightbulb flash from above!  What a knockout label to slap on a commercial pasty.   I right away began drawing plans for a ridiculously suggestive sign to mount on the roof of my Datsun, from which I would build a franchise pasty business. I knew northern California was ready to go bonkers over Mom’s Hair Pies. But somehow I never got the sign made and this stroke of genius went the way of others.

That inability to follow through was dogging my tracks that year.  My better nature was sincere in not wanting to waste my existence in pursuits unworthy of that now so faded heavenly vision.   What, after all, did He want out of my life?    When I was honest – probably not Mom’s Hair Pies.   But then I would get what I thought were brilliant film ideas, create detailed storyboard sketches – only to lay them aside with the haunting sense they wouldn’t do either. I gave considerable thought to creating an underground comic strip promoting the concept of the longhaired media super-shaman struggling in a snakepit of electronic cables, a prophetic superhero shaping the very mind of the planet.   I would call him Hopalong Moses Sperm!

Another unfinished project became the focus of a great deal of my energy during the year following my wife’s return to her family in Florida.   Recall that this was the era before "motor homes" became a mainstream lifestyle alternative.    Nevertheless in the early 70’s the Left Coast could boast ten thousand roll-your-own freak engineers.  Many of these self-propelled Hobbit-dwellings were lovingly crafted works of art.  My dream vehicle would combine living quarters with a rock-band stage setting.   You know, get the cockpit and nose section of an old DC-3, make the sides reminiscent of a Spanish Galleon (except replace the cannon with musical instruments), give it helicopter rotors topside and a submarine fin-and-propeller tail section.  Just make it a rolling compendium of all vehicles and christen your group Instantaneous Transports. Was I smoking some good stuff or what?

Using half of about $1000 I had shamelessly requested as a loan from my first father-in-law to start my pasty business, I bought a two-ton GMC flatbed truck that had been hauling scrap metal through Pacific salt spray for the past fourteen years.  The venerable blue cab was a lacework of rust all around the quarter panels, but she had a monster straight-six engine (that needed "a little work") and a four-in-the-floor transmission connected to a two-speed rear axle.  I cut the heavy twelve-foot steel flatbed loose with a rented welding torch, chained it to the fig tree in my Clyde back yard, and drove full bore out from under it.   Big noise and dust.

If such behavior seems too incredible for an English Teacher, allow me a brief aside.      I suppose in my solid neighbor Ronnie I had finally glimpsed the beauty and honor of basic honest work with one’s hands.    Moreover, I was discovering I also had been endowed with pretty good hands.   In comparison, the academic life – including public school teaching with its mechanically required lesson-plans – seemed insipid and wan. "Live with the sun," Ronnie said.  "Sleep at night.   Take care of your family."    Black grease streaking my forearms and the intense abstract colors of a crusty metal dashboard blazing in California daylight was awakening a deep part of me too long suppressed in pursuit of degrees and "career."   Ever so gradually like the swing of an ocean liner, I sensed my life making a course correction that was truly healthy.   I only knew for sure it was going to be forever away from the plastic phoniness of "professional people."

Later I would regret pulling that indestructible steel flatbed off the GMC, but remember I thought I was creating a rock’n’roll motor stage.   First, however, the engine had to be brought back to like-new dependability.  I hired a longhaired semi-homeless mechanic I found on the streets of Berkeley to direct our work on the motor in return for room, board, and pocket money.   This fellow turned out to be a needed lesson in the "falleness" of even "hippie human nature."  In four or five weeks he helped me rebuild and tune the old six-cylinder until it was functionally righteous.

In appreciation of his good work, I let him take my beloved BMW all day one Sunday to "visit some friends."   Considering what he did to me later, I should have been thankful he brought it back at all, riding in slowly on the drive that ran behind the houses on our block.  Pretty soon I saw the problem – a nasty dent in the front rim like it had been run hard over a sharp curb.

Oh well, roll with the karma.  No forgiveness for me if I give no forgiveness to you.  He was reasonably apologetic; I was reasonably grim.   I found a replacement wheel for $50 and we moved on.

Recall now that I was still smarting over the "Juarez bust" of the previous summer, looking for a chance to redeem my reputation as a consciousness-raising revolutionary. My engine doctor, no doubt realizing his usefulness to my project was about to close, said he had a fantastic connection for some super-potent weed in LA.  We could get it cheap if we bought at least $500 worth; then selling locally we could double our money and still have plenty to divide for personal use.   A new adventure.   I cashed my entire salary-check for the month, which netted six bills for dope-investment plus a little traveling money.  We headed for LA in his old car the very next day.  On the way I had minor misgivings when he proudly displayed a sawed-off rifle I had never known he kept stored under the driver’s seat.  He also had an unpleasant habit of referring to all former and future girlfriends as "bitches."  What had happened to the "noble hippie" so prevalent in Gainesville?   Jumping Jack Flash had given way to Sympathy for the Devil. Ah well, God works through mysterious means His wonders to perform.

Jesus once commented that "the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light."   I prefer that perspective to the two-dimensional admission that I was still wearing a sandwich board emblazoned in tall Day-Glo letters "SUCKER."   I was probably in more real danger on that trip to LA than I ever was in Mexico.   The mechanic and I shared a motel room – dang, might as well admit it: we slept in the same freaking bed, but only to get the lower room rate I can assure you – in some unfamiliar part of that 100-mile-long City.  The next morning my business partner phoned his "connection" and, having explained that the deal would go much smoother if I wasn’t present, received my $600, which went folded into his left jeans pocket.  He dropped me off at a nearby park and said, "I’ll be back in about an hour."

Do I need to tell the rest of the story?    Didn’t think so.   I waited all day in the park, knowing I’d been royally had. With the sun about to set, I looked at the $3.00 remaining in my wallet and hiked back to Interstate 5 North and stuck out my thumb.   I was soon picked up by a young guy in an older model white Corvette who drove me all the way to Walnut Creek, within three-hour walking distance of my house, at which I arrived about 8:30 the next morning.   On the drive north I had been regaled with unsolicited stories of drug running laced with hints of criminal homicide.   One statement he made has always stuck with me because it truly exposed his mentality: "There are way too many people anyway."

Now one would think after this experiment I would have had enough "bad luck" in the marijuana trade to give it up.   But I hadn’t yet given up the idealistic notion that if society could just "loosen up" through the sane use of legalized mind-altering "brain-enhancers," then it would be able to lose its "hang-ups" – like penchants for hatred and war.   The race would truly move beyond materialistic preoccupations to discover the inner world of "spirit."  Combine my having bought into that propaganda with pre-existing stubbornness, throw in the additional fact that I could see my monetary prospects dwindling fast, and you shouldn’t be amazed at my next move.

At least I had had my fill of international drug smuggling.  This time my target would be Tucson, Arizona, a university town a short 60 miles from the border at Nogales. I would also play the game smarter, foregoing Easy Rider glory.   I acquired a cheap golf bag and clubs, mounted them on a two-wheel caddy like golfers of yesteryear used to pull. (I confess this latter item was "borrowed" from a driving range – though I did take it back later.)  Sticking these character witnesses in the back of my little stationwagon, I decorated the dashboard with a white golf cap and a few red and yellow tees, got another haircut, and was ready to cop some major dope.

I won’t bore you with details, but I made at least three trips to Tucson over a period of probably five months, each time bringing back real cannabis sativa, mediocre quality though it was.   What I eventually learned in Tucson about real dope dealers was sufficient to sour me on further involvement with this form of commerce, though I was later to take the "grow your own" route (as you will hear if you last ‘til I get to New Mexico).   There was the "fun part" of being shown how big old cars (preferably stationwagons) were bought for $100 for one-time usage, often using freshly stolen plates and always returning late on a busy (preferably rainy) Saturday night with the smell of spilled liquor masking the weed odor, driven by a cozy young couple willing to take the risk – interior panels stacked to the windows with bricks of pot. But I also learned that just about all these young entrepreneurs were killers, heavily armed in a cash business involving tens of thousands of dollars, admitting matter-of-factly that they would not hesitate to "off" someone if even ten grand was at stake.  I saw some very large and very sharp Bowie knives.   Once again, my peace-love-&-rock’n’roll dream was being adjusted.   The Beatles’ Let It Be was being answered by the Stones’ Let It Bleed.

I made some friends among the gentler counter-culture souls of Tucson on these trips. On my last visit down I brought my twin-reverb amplifier and guitar.  One night we got high on psylocibin mushrooms and went out among the giant cacti of Saguaro National Monument where everyone was duly impressed with the spooky sounds a wound guitar string will make under a fingernail.  (I can’t remember how we had an electrical outlet in the desert, but I’m pretty sure this was before I bought my two battery amps, powered with 40 D-cells each.)

I was "getting into" these marathon drives in my perky stationwagon, sometimes enhancing the broad western landscapes with judicious inputs of acid.  Needless to add, it was a mighty lonesome way to cover six or seven hundred miles a day.  On the open road I ran wide-open much of the time, which meant under 90, except downhill. Doing my own minor mechanical work, I began pampering the hard-working four-cylinder with frequent oil changes, tune-ups, even valve adjustments – one of the Rogers brothers having unveiled the latter procedure.  A lifelong metric tool collection was getting underway as I wriggled free of the English Teacher chrysalis.

There is one more narrow-escape story from these Tucson runs I have to tell.  I might have been looking like a golfer now, but I was still a true hippie at heart, God forgive me.    I couldn’t bear to pass up a "brother" on the road with his thumb out.    On this occasion I was headed back northwest toward the California border, my golf bag on its dolly fairly bulging with "the real thing."   The red-faced 15-year-old with shaggy blond shoulder-length hair and a backpack must have thought it a bit strange that a golf-nut in a shiny green Datsun was offering him a ride.  But he took the chance and turned out to be another polite kid, like the mythical Jojo, "headed for some California grass."   As the summer desert rushed past I discerned that here was another true believer who could be trusted as co-conspirator.   That was good, because it was 11:00 PM and I could just make out the faint horizontal line of lights ahead that was the California port-of-entry.  The State customs agents, formerly concerned to keep alien strains of agricultural pests and products out of the nation’s fruitbasket, were now trained to watch for illegal drug influx.   As an obviously model citizen in a late-model car I had never had to do more than slow down at the entry complex.  However, I explained our delicate situation to my passenger and asked if he wanted to get out now and hope for another ride, or take his chances with this secret agent of the Woodstock Nation.   He seriously debated the question a moment, seeming to break out in a nervous sweat while contemplating a tale to save for his grandchildren, but finally grinned and said, "I’m with you, man!" My own thinking must have been pretty fuzzy at the time, because what non-pervert golfer in the history of mankind had ever picked up such an obviously hard-core dope-head?

Sure enough, the security agent on duty, who looked like he might be next of kin to the one who stopped me at the Rio Grande, motioned for us to pull over, asked a couple of routine questions, and then – carumba! – asked me to please open the rear lift door on my car.   Déjà vu!   I thought I could begin to hear the freak’s teeth chattering while I stood aside to watch another customs agent look through my stuff.    Flashlight in one hand, he opened my traveling bag and rummaged around – he even looked inside my old Air Force lace-ups tossed in another corner!    All he had to do was lift one thin blue shop rag off the top of that golf bag ten inches from his nose and it would be all over – only this time no alfalfa excuses!

Two hippies agreed in silent prayer that night and God answered their request.  The agent seemed satisfied, slammed the rear lid, and waved us on our way.   After we smoked "a number" in celebration, I dropped my passenger off at a junction where our paths separated, and drove on north till dawn.   As I puttered steadily through the rounded hills of home-country in first light, I was overcome with such an upwelling of gratitude to God for my deliverance in the midnight that hot tears rolled down my cheeks as I drove.  Where in hell was my life going?  How had I gotten to such a place? About then Bob Dylan came to my rescue: his nasal whine whirling up out of my radio: "To live outside the law you must be honest."   Right on, Bob.  War is hell.

In case you’re wondering what was happening to all the societal leaven I was importing, much of it was being sold to friends and acquaintances.   Some of it was even being recklessly hawked to strangers on the streets of Berkeley.   I recall several sunny afternoons plying those teeming avenues in my Datsun, wearing my eye-searing scarlet bell-bottoms as a badge of freak authenticity, giving folks rides, offering assorted-size baggies of vegetable-matter – complete with plain or flavored rolling papers – from a black attaché case on the seat beside me.   Business must have been brisk at times, because more than once I discovered a $100 bill stuffed in the pocket of some pants I hadn’t worn in awhile, apparently too stoned at the time to remember putting it there.

Somewhere about this time I made a nearly non-stop solo run via Interstate 10-East and I-75-South to Miami, where I surprised my runaway wife, then staying with her sister. Cherry was polishing her fingernails when I walked in. I didn’t exactly get a welcoming hug.  Her eyes got a little wide, but she just kept polishing her nails: "Hi, Jim."   I stayed in a nearby motel.   It tore my heart to see our beautiful blond daughter, now able to climb up and down stairs outside their apartment.  But there was no way I was going to convince her mother they should come back to me.   I left some money and about four slender joints made with dark-chocolate colored papers of the most potent weed I had. I drove back to California as depressed as I had been "high" on the meteoric eastbound leg.

But compared to Berkeley, Miami seemed locked in a 19^th Century pursuit of affluence and leisure.   In contrast, being witness on Telegraph to the future in embryo had become a fascination I couldn’t abandon even to be near my youngest daughter.  These were the days when the environmental movement was little more than a hippie peace-symbol decal changing its American-flag background from red stripes to green on the back window of the van in front of you.   Or the bumpersticker on the clattering VW Bug convertible just cutting between you and the van, proclaiming "The First EARTH DAY: April 22, 1970"— already over a year gone.   No one I knew could have guessed these were the first shoots of a media-hyped "crisis" supposedly demanding global "governance."  Not that we would have cared – John Lennon’s Imagine captured our naïve globalist vision of pastoral harmony: People were basically good; change their external context, feed their heads with magic drugs, and world unity will inevitably happen.   Meanwhile the large round sunhat worn by the female passenger in the VW convertible suddenly blows into the back seat, causing her to stand and retrieve it. Cool.   Her sunhat proves to have been her only item of clothing.   That’s Berkeley – where the context was changing already.

Youthful nakedness.   The ultimate revolutionary statement of a rebel faith.   My drug-induced "inspirations" from the "shadow" were pushing the envelope of sanity. Perhaps the role "heaven" was calling me to was as a guru-catalyst of public nudity on a massive – soon to be worldwide – scale!   The Bay Area, so over-run with radically "free spirits," seemed ripe for a leader to declare the sacred glory of the human once and for all through mass demonstrations untrammeled by the falsehood, the absurd hypocrisy, of clothes!   What could the "enemy," the repressive government and ecclesiastical interests through their jack-booted "blue meanies" do to a parade of joyous nakedness ten thousand strong?  It would be like the hippies sticking flowers in those rifle barrels surrounding the Pentagon four years earlier, only carried to the Nth power.  "We have nothing to hide! Join us in the light!"  The millennium's true alchemy breaking into history at last…

There were other temptations, darker yet. Ever concerned since high school with keeping my body toned via running and calisthenics, my fantasies at times ran so far as to wonder whether I could become a male stripper in some mythical "play-girl" bar. Somehow even under the frequent influence of mind-altering drugs, there was enough conscience left in me to realize such a path could never be rationalized as "God’s way." Perhaps there were "less evolved" darker spirits, I reasoned, like heavier elements in the murk at the bottom of life’s rainbow stream, that tempted one to take such detours.

Having uncritically imbibed the New Age worldview, I had no belief whatsoever that there were actual rebel angels intelligently seeking to thwart the Good.   If God was indeed everything, "evil" must be an illusion, right?   Least of all could I swallow the old "myth" of Satan, some cartoonish prince of demons – in spite of puzzling album covers by The Rolling Stones: "His Satanic Majesty’s Request," "Goat’s Head Soup" – give me  a break!   All this was about to change.

About a year and a half earlier, while Cherry and I were still living in Richmond, I had had a single brief sexual encounter with a young woman I was acquainted with from the Sexual Freedom League.   (Lest you overestimate my involvement with that group, this was only my second – and last – such League "connection.") I had nonetheless become so morally lax that in this particular circumstance I was actually acting as much out of "politeness" as desire.     In other words, this experience proved disappointingly unmemorable – so much so that I probably had forgotten the woman’s name within a week.  Nevertheless, from what follows one must conclude that some kind of "soul-tie" had been established in the invisible realm.   At the very least, one can see the outworking of the spiritual principle: Where there is garbage, the "garbage man" has right-of-way.

I would not have brought up this shameful episode were it not that it bears such mysterious but direct connection to an event that happened well after my wife had fled to Florida.   I won’t pretend to sort out the precise "theological" implications of this event.   All I can do is attempt a faithful report.   You will note that it becomes all the more significant in that it was the first of a series of three such instances happening to me over the next five years, like explosive drum beats that finally woke me up to the true direness of my spiritual condition and course.

Words are again inadequate to the task, but here goes:

An evil personal being, a "spirit entity" of utter malevolence, a "demon," if you will, attacked me as I was falling off to sleep, in a literal attempt to "take possession" of my body.   In this first instance – not true of the other two – I had the strongest impression that it was somehow connected to (or even was) the spirit of that nameless young woman, who I also, in the midst of the attack, somehow "knew" had actually died – recently.

In other respects, all three of these attacks followed a similar pattern:  They always occurred when I was in that twilight state just preceding sleep, striking very suddenly and without warning.  This sucking darkness, somehow huge behind the human-sized "heavy void" pressing full-length on top of me, was clearly trying to force its way inside my body.   An instant life-and-death struggle was joined as in blind reaction I tried to regain waking consciousness.   My very breath seemed only marginally within my power to draw.    An instinctive fearsome knowledge during these seconds of mortal combat was that if "it" succeeded in its attempt I would be "gone" and my body would have become the "motor vehicle" for another, utterly inhuman personality, through which it could affect the "material plane."    I somehow knew I had to "wake up" to escape its power, but this simple goal of crossing back to "the daytime side of the mirror" was taking an inordinately mighty effort. The sheer metaphysical terror of these attacks cannot be communicated to one who has never experienced them. (I must note here what Whitley Strieber records in his Communion account, how his original intent had been to name that book detailing his encounters with "saucer aliens" Body Terror, until the big mama alien spoke "in a strange basso profundo voice" through Strieber’s sleeping wife to offer the alternate title, because "The book must not frighten people.")

One final note. I don’t credit myself as having had the seemingly superhuman strength needed to survive such a dreadfully powerful assault.    Whether I was somehow "sealed" because I had "gone forward" with sincere heart at age 10 at a Billy Graham crusade, or because of the fervent prayers of my forebears, or because of God’s inscrutable sovereign grace alone – I cannot say.   But I do not doubt that the mighty Lord Himself was overseeing these events that I might not succumb but begin to have my deluded eyes unclouded until that time when I would finally wish to turn from self-worship.  Satan himself and all his bloodthirsty devils with him are but creatures – vicious mad-dog rebels though they be – ever subject to the over-ruling leash of the Almighty Lord of Hosts.

(But for years yet I was still a sorcerer unawares.   It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered the Greek word in the New Testament translated "sorcery," pharmakeia, denoted drug use aimed at spirit contact.  To the New Ager steeped in the marvelous exploits of Castaneda's peyote adepts, a sorcerer was rather an advanced heroic model.)

What my first encounter with the demonic did accomplish, however, was to make me much more earnest in wishing to "rise above" sexual fixations by more serious pursuit of eastern transcendentalisms.   "Ah, Grasshopper – when the disciple is ready, the teacher will appear!" – or such would have been my thinking at the time.   Thus, in working through preliminary design ideas for my motorhome/stage, I met a sterling young carpenter in Berkeley who was truly on the upward trek.   No phony hippie, this fellow: more like a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia.   Short sandy hair, tall, clean, cosmopolitan – he had already moved beyond the outward trappings of freedom, having left psychedelics mostly behind and "graduated" into serious yoga and meditation.   "Now," he said, "when I do toke an occasional joint, I go right up to the Ocean of Bliss."   That sounded good to me.  Got to distance myself from these angry entities stirred up out of riverbottom mud.  This obvious representative of humanity’s "higher type" recommended a book entitled The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. More on that German-chocolate rat poison later.

Another blow that happened about this time was that I had to sell my beloved motorcycle. Even before Number Two bailed out, my first wife had moved from Florida to Berkeley with our two daughters and was living there in an upscale "commune" in a large house with two or three other families.   Their "alternative lifestyle" was even featured in Life magazine (April 28, 1972) and on French television. It was wonderful to be able to visit my little girls, though it hurt to see how sad my younger daughter looked.   They also got some regrettable closeups of what a loose-living doper their daddy had become.  Their mother was becoming involved with a younger man in the house whom she later married.   My kids were learning to make big purple candles at the Berkeley Free School – which by no means translated "tuition-free." Anyway, being rather totally in arrears in child-support, in a vulnerable moment I gave my black beauty away for $900 and turned the money over to La Primera, who was waiting for me and the buyer at his bank.   I even let him have my red metal-flake helmet with the wind-swept peace-symbol I had painted on both sides.

But also at about this juncture I actually fell in love again.  I had been keeping in touch with one of my dope-smoking former students, a musically talented young Chicano named Carlos.  Carlos had a blond Anglo girlfriend who lived with her mother in one of the modest houses stacked in tight tiers on the lower hillsides immediately above Richmond.  Stopping there as I frequently did, I met a remarkable divorcee, a family friend formerly of the area, who was visiting from her new home in northern New Mexico.   This striking personage, whom I will call Noreen, had of all her siblings inherited the long black silken hair of a Choctaw grandmother two or three generations back.  When I first saw her over coffee she was rolling her own cigarette out of a blue Bugler tin using a simple red "rolling machine" – her deeply work-lined fingers contrasting with several artful silver rings.    She was a person of few words but tremendous presence.   Her parents had landed in Richmond from the dust-bowl exodus of the ‘30’s, where her industrious father had made a career as a transmission expert, after experience gained coaxing their truck from the Canadian River country near Anadarko, Oklahoma, by desperate substitutions of sawdust for unaffordable oil in the vehicle's differential.  Noreen had fled the craziness of the city with her preschool daughter -- after being raped by a black intruder at knife point -- to the silence and solitude of a two-room adobe hideaway without running water or electricity in the high desert about fifty miles east of Los Alamos.

Uniquely individualistic, fiercely independent, a natural feminist, she was supporting herself in her new environment as a jewelry-craftsman's assistant, as well as by caring for a neighbor’s goats and chickens.   The physically demanding lifestyle – using a silversmith’s hammer all day, carrying 5-gallon buckets of water, chopping her own stove-wood – had made her almost as wiry as those outrageous female body-builders that try to slap your TV surfing-remote out of your hand.   A Lincolnesque facial structure was made even more impressive by the first stages of that intricate sun-baked texture seen on the countenances of older Native Americans.   Preferring long simple dresses, tough boots, and dark shawls, she spurned makeup, refused to shave her legs – adorning herself rather with fine oils and silver bracelets.    Amazon and Athena, I had never seen anyone like her.

In Jungian terms, if you will permit an insight from that treacherous system, it was like meeting my anima, my own dark soul.  When we met, I was 31, she was 34.  We knew immediately we had important business together, becoming passionate lovers within twelve hours and destined to spend the next three years together in that 2-room crucible in a tiny Spanish village north of Santa Fe, only technically in the USA.   Once we had set up housekeeping together her personality morphed into a merciless Yoda who saw through all my "games" with decidedly supernatural clarity.   In some important sense I finally became a man over the course of this agonizingly stormy soul-surgery.

Discount it if you will, but I even had a prophetic dream – way back when I was living with my first wife in Alabama – that pre-encapsulated those valuable "smelting" years with Noreen.  In the dream a large gorilla-like animal with human eyes was chained on a platform similar to a boxing ring.   This pitiful creature was flailing in his bonds, a cry of confused desperation distorting his features.    Meanwhile a portentous musical overture arose in organ-like tones that could well have been some of my own future improvisations on the electric guitar.  Simultaneously, with an incredibly deep sense of release, this "abominable snowman" dissolved into a pair of lovers, male and female, in the act of ecstatic union.  At the same time a kind of overseer, in his thirties, who I knew in the dream was also me, was seen busying himself beside the platform, a brilliant transparent blue aura flaming around his head.   Let me hasten to add the caveat that the dream’s accurately prophetic elements do not insure that it was purely "of God." Still, it was not your typical pizza-induced sleep-movie, I can assure you, but one triple-underlined as being a kind of promise, from outside myself, of overdue blossoming.

I think this dream had an impact on the passion with which I pursued a spiritual breakthrough through intense yoga and single-minded study while I lived in the high desert with Noreen.   I confess I would often wander the blazing sand arroyos of the BLM wasteland behind our adobe shack trying to be mentally prepared for a "burning bush" encounter with the "Big Daddy" (or "Momma," – should it so prove).

I did make one eight hundred mile detour on my last golf-cart trip to Tucson in order to check out the New Mexican "scene" where Noreen had taken her stand.   To say the least, I was blown away by the "other country," almost "other world" quality of those mile- high valleys between the Jemez and the Sangre de Christo ranges, the latter rising over 14,000 feet.   Even more impressive was the quality of the hip Anglo immigrants who had recently settled there at $300 an acre among the native Spanish population, as refugees from the burgeoning madness on both coasts.   These people were seemingly without exception artists and thinkers who truly wanted to build a new kind of "civilization," even if it meant doing it with their own hands, one adobe brick or felled log at a time.   Moreover, Hindu "evangelists" were sowing ashrams all over northern New Mexico, which was rumored to be on a direct diameter through the earth’s core to Tibet.    This region was self-evidently one rung further up and into the future from what was happening in largely political Berkeley.   D.H. Lawrence, pioneer of free love, had come there before them; after I had established a niche in the local counterculture as the portable electric guitarist, a busload of us made a crazy winter pilgrimage to the novelist’s tomb, with its robust eagle-winged-and-headed earth-queen on her throne carved in stone over the entrance.   Ex-filmmakers and musicians, these people were the cream of freakdom, prepared to take a leak out the back door of a moving school bus any day of the week.

But I am racing too far ahead. There are important details to pick up as my time in California wound down.

For one thing, I didn’t simply pack up and boogie for the Land of Enchantment; moving elsewhere was not in my mind when I met Noreen.   It would take a major trauma to pry me loose from stratospheric fantasies by the Bay.    Allow me to sketch that nightmare now.

The day was probably Saturday.  I hadn’t done any acid in at least a month.  Our LSD came in a pinkish flat Alka-Seltzer-like sugar-tablet.   Rising early, I broke one in half, downed it with orange juice, grabbed my attaché traveling store, and headed to the University campus in Berkeley to start the day with a free yoga class.  It was taught in some kind of chapel area by a bearded cat in ragged shorts looking like Jesus Christ Superstar with an attitude.    In addition to a warm-up involving the usual stretching exercises known as hatha yoga, this group was advocating the so-called "breath of fire" technique, which involved rapid forced breathing to supercharge the lungs, not unlike what we used to do as pre-teens to make ourselves pass out. They also led us in a Hindu-vocabulary chanting sequence designed to vibrate portions of the skull while at the same time focusing all our energy on the "third eye center" in the forehead.   The ultimate object of this training was to awaken the kundalini, or "serpent power," said to reside at the base of the spine.    If this electrical shockwave were allowed to travel up the spinal column to the brain, the "thousand-petaled-lotus" of cosmic consciousness would be realized and we would remember we were God playing hide-and-seek from Itself. (I’ll relate my personal experience with "kundalini" that occurred about two years later in New Mexico, along with the bizarre results, when we reach that point in the chronicle.)

After the yoga session, I meandered toward the main campus’ arched entrance that let out onto Telegraph Avenue, "coming on" to the LSD with that always unexpected intensity that makes one question why he would once again subject himself to such a burden – this feeling of vulnerability to unseen threatening magnitudes: all the while hoping God might show up, but – so strangely – having to battle fear instead. Functioning in public during the first hour’s "launch-phase" of even one of these "low-orbit" acid-trips was way too stressful.  Maybe it was the pain of simply observing the sleepwalking personalities one inevitably encounters on the sidewalk, in the awful transparency of their blindness, as you blast through the overarching atmosphere of principalities.  I turned aside left into a mass of low trees and shrubbery bordering the campus, where I effectively disappeared a few feet off the ground, surrounded by comforting bark and intricately veined leaves.    I probably stayed there another hour as the morning temperature and sounds of nearby traffic rose together.  Then, feeling my head had stabilized at "cruise altitude," I climbed down onto the cushiony loam to resume my course off campus.

I was accosted just outside the gate by a chap in his 40’s with sailor-captain beard and a jauntily sloping brown leather cap.    Something seemed to have caused him to single me out.   I guess I do look fairly ripped.   Well, hey, the god in me greets the god in you, good Buddy.      After a few quiet