Chapter 40
THREE YEARS LATER

I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.

One day, while I was painting the walls and varnishing the paneling in my office, Tim, bearing a jug of wine, walked in and sat down. The weather was fine, and I had opened all the doors and windows to air the place out. Tim was amused by the mouse traps, boxes of rat poison and spray cans of insecticides which I had collected, out of harm's way, on the mantelpiece.

``I've always felt I could judge a person by the way he decorates his mantelpiece, Arthur,'' Tim laughed.``

Could be,'' I replied, setting out a couple glasses on my writing table. I applied a touch of gold paint to one of the decorative nail heads in the paneling.

``Have you visited the Ashram recently?'' I asked.

``No,'' Tim said, pouring. ``I have given up trying to talk to that crazy son of a bitch. He's really out of his mind.''

I mentioned Haines' latest move: getting rid of the pretty girls and moving in the monstrous behemoths.

``I just don't trust broads who let themselves go like that,'' I said, sipping. ``They must be filled with grievances as well as fat globules. We can't afford to have people like that around. We're not geared for it.''

``Yeah, I talked to one of them. Karen something. Pretty bad.''

Sure enough, this particular lardass, a graduate student at SUNY New Palz where she was preparing to become a psychologist, later volunteered to testify against us in the conspiracy case just for the glory of it all, or something. Girth appeared to have become Haines' main test for the admission of camp followers to his family circle.

We talked awhile about the usual stuff, and then Tim abruptly changed the subject.

``Did I ever tell you what happened to my first wife, Arthur?'' Tim asked. It was a grim story. He had come home one afternoon from work at the Kaiser Psychological Clinic in San Francisco, where he was director of research, and found the corpse of his wife lying on the floor with a note next to it reading, ``I cannot live without your love.''

I was shocked. It was the first time I had heard Tim volunteer anything about his personal life that wasn't self-congratulatory and exemplary.

``Jesus, Tim,'' I said. ``That's one of the most terrible things I've heard in a long time. Well, at least things like that never seem to happen around here, whatever other problems we may have.''

``I think I understand your motivation in all this a little better, Tim,'' I said at one point in our conversation, making the assumptions most psychologists would make.

In order to expiate guilt, Tim had to act as if he loved everyone, and try to make everyone love him. The LSD experience had to be interpreted in a manner consistent with these requirements. From which, in standard psychoanalytic twists, followed much of Tim's history, including the return of the repressed, the cyclical build-ups and let-downs of his supposed loved ones and much else, if you want to push it. Yeah, sure, and so what? It didn't mean Tim was right or wrong in anything he said or did.

We chatted a while and then Tim went out to fish off the bridge and I went back to my interior decoration. A few minutes later, Billy Hitchcock walked in.

``Kleps, I just heard one of the most incredible things I have ever heard on this property and I have heard some pretty incredible things. I can't believe it.''

Billy almost always built up his stories in advance. A true salesman.

``What, what?'' I asked.

``Well, Tim's outside fishing off the bridge. When I stopped the car to say hello, he turned around and lifted his finger like this (Billy demonstrated) and said, `Art Kleps is the only sane person on this property!' Come on. Let me in on it. What the hell did you say to him?''

Nothing special that I could remember. I was just as surprised as Billy, who had driven over to invite us to the Bungalow for dinner. Aurora, who was spending more and more time in New York because of Billy's increasingly non-domestic habits, was back. Sam and Martica were in attendance. He also wanted me to meet a business associate, Seymour Lazar. I called Wendy from upstairs and we took off in Billy's car. As we crossed the bridge, I saw Tim paddling out towards the center of the lake in the small boat I kept tied underneath the bridge. Tim and Susan were invited also, Billy said. It would be quite a mob.

``I still don't believe it,'' Billy kept muttering as he plowed his big Cadillac through the narrow, leafy tunnel of the shortest gravel-road route between the Gatehouse and the Bungalow, flushing small game and one or two deer (there were two herds on the property, whitetails and a small, red German variety) right and left as he went.

``Oh, come on, Billy,'' I said. ``If it suits his purposes he'll say I'm hopelessly insane tomorrow. You know Tim.''

``Besides,'' Wendy added, ``saying someone is sane around here may be a left-handed compliment.''

True. I think it was just a matter of Tim taking a break from the occultist nonsense and amateur psychologizing he had to listen to back in the hills. Every now and then, he had to get a loaded, relax, and say what he thought, whether it supported his political agenda of the moment or not. On the other hand, maybe he just wanted to get me drunk before dinner.

Later, I found out I had won a ``sanity contest.'' The kids had put up a list of candidates in the Big House kitchen and I had won, hands down. Tim had neglected to mention this.

As promised, we had a full table that evening, including a straight and snotty cousin of Billy's who made comments like ``sure, we know, Tim'' whenever Tim made a cryptic or quasi-paradoxical remark. The cousin had the look of a man who has just discovered shit on his shoes.

This character was a genuine Mellon of Pennsylvania and/or Virginia, as distinguished from these semi-civilized Hitchcock half-breeds who tolerated the likes of us.

Everyone except the legitimate Mellon was stoned and half smashed on grass and wine and brandy, and merrily yakking away in consequence. The unadulterated Mellon's waspish asides acted as a sort of contrast or counterpoint or punctuation to the rest of the talk. I was sufficiently spaced so I could actually appreciate this, in a way. Added depth or resonance or something, sort of.

Tim finally took notice of the authentic, true, pure, holy and fully documented Mellon's hostile commentary. ``Well, I'm perfectly willing to admit I'm a charlatan,'' Tim said, grinning and opening his arms in acceptance. ``We're all charlatans aren't we? Don't you agree, Susan?'' He swung around to face his daughter, who was seated at the foot of the table.

Susan had her head down. She shook it abruptly and negatively and ran out of the room, clutching her napkin. Tears glistened. It had been a mistake to invite Susan to the dinner. Tim got up and followed, to explain what he meant, I guess.

Did he say it was all a game and we had assigned ourselves different roles to play? Maybe. But why call that charlatanry? Did Tim mean, Snazzm, that one can do nothing but delude oneself, that is, ``have'' a dream? I doubt it. That isn't charlatanry either.

Charlatanry, which is deception, requires the appearance of a world of particulars about which one can tell the truth or lie, and this is true in any Zmm. Dream figures may lie to one another, and mythic beings tend to lie like crazy, with some specializing in the profession. There are truth tellers and liars in dreams, just as there are good guys and bad guys in dreams.

One good way to define veracity is to say it is what telling lies isn't. Truth is a characteristic of some sentences, that's all. One tells the truth about one's impressions and ideas to the extent that one gives an accurate report of them and does not intentionally mislead. Fictions are neither true nor false, per se. Fictions and errors remain fictions and errors even if, as sometimes happens, they turn out, in whole or in part, to be factually correct about something or other.

Ipse dixit.

These distinctions, so important to beady-eyed philosophers, Tim brushed aside. Words were to be used to soothe or stun, and to paralyze reason, and above all else, to prevent Tim from being fingered for anything. All usages had to be made vague and safe instead of sharp and dangerous in order to provide a cloud-shrouded coastline where he and other pirates could not be distinguished from honest fishermen.

Explicit, systematic rationales for intellectual charlatanry are hard to find, although the sentimental glorification of professional and pathological liars and crooks is certainly a major theme of what might be called the cumulative Hollywood House-Tree-Person test. This neurosis has also played an important part in American literature, good and bad, for a long time and has now (1994) reached a blatantly psychotic level in the mass media. Serial killers are glorified. The rest of the world should erect every barrier possible against this shit and ``quarantine'' the United States if necessary.

I would explain this madness mostly in Marxist terms but the classic Freudian mechanisms are clearly at work also.

The philosophic justification, such as it is and as best as I can make out, seems to go something like this:

If, as it seems, it is all an illusion, then it's all a fraud which means that you are a fraud and I am a fraud so let us all freely lie to one another, each in his own charlatanic fashion, and may the best pretender prevail. The underlying premise is the supposed equivalence between ``illusion'' and ``fraud.''

But there is a great difference, obvious to most 9-year-olds, between an illusion or a fiction or a dream on one hand and a lie on the other, a distinction neither Tim nor his hero Aleister Crowley nor a lot of other con artists seem able to grasp. Appearances are appearances for naive realists and solipsists and dreamers and the awake and the enlightened and the unenlightened alike. They are all one has. Superior theories, those that get us anywhere, about how particular things work ``save'' (explain) all or most of the appearances they deal with, while inferior theories leave the same appearances out in the cold, where they frighten the penguins.

It will be seen that among the objects with which we are acquainted are not included physical objects (as opposed to sense data), nor other people's minds. (Bertrand Russell)

The central liar in Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe is a lot like Tim in a lot of ways. Here are some quotes, run together from different places in this minor masterpiece:

And at bottom he did murkily consider all attainment, idealism and so forth, to be a sort of speciousness; the upper world, for him, was divided into admitted frauds, hypocritical frauds, unconscious frauds: this fraudulence, in fact, to his glazed-pottery-blue eye, constituted the human, and below it was the only animal activity, which was of no interest or amusement to the observer. Every relationship, therefore, propelled itself for him toward confession and mutual self-exposure; the slurrings and elisions of his voice conspired toward this end; even in his ingratiating mood, his talk had a sidelong motion, suggestive of complicity ... One begins by persuading oneself, and this germ of persuasion is infectious. He has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It's a rare asset; it would be useful to him in politics or religion ... He's capable of commanding great loyalty, because he's unswervingly loyal to himself. I'm not being sarcastic. Very few of us have that. It's a species of self-alienation. He's loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause. In the world today, there's a great deal of free-floating, circumambulate loyalty that fixes itself on such people, who seem to offer, by their own example, the possibility of a separation from the self that will lead to a higher union with the self objectified in an idea. It's his fortune or his fate to have achieved this union within his own personality; he's foregone his subjectivity and hypostatized himself as an object ... The criteria of truth and falsity, as we know them, don't exist for him. He doesn't examine his statements from the point of view of the speaker but from the point of view of the listener. He listens to himself as you or I might listen to him and asks himself, `Is it credible?' Even in private soliloquy, credibility is the standard he applies; that is, he looks at truth with the eyes of a literary critic and measures a statement by its persuasiveness. If he himself can be persuaded he accepts the moot statement as established. This is real alienation. In the critical part of his mind, he's extraordinarily cold with himself, cold and dedicated. Hence his incessant anxiety, like the anxiety of a military commander or an author or a stage director; he's busy with problems of reception, stage effects, cues, orchestration; his inner life is a busy rehearsal and testing for activity on the larger stage of tomorrow, where the audience, as usual, will miss the finer points. Immersed in all these difficulties, hung up on the snags of production, he's impatient, understandably, with outside interrogation. `Is it true?' you want to know, but the question's irrelevant and footless. Do you ask an amber spot whether it's true? Or an aria? At the bottom, he doesn't give a damn ... what you or I think, any more than a general cares about democratic opinion. We're not his critics or even primarily, his audience; we're amateurs whom, unfortunately, he must use in his production, since the great Commander we will act under saw fit to send him no better.

Jeezums!

The day after the Great Pretender vs. the Magnum Mellon dinner, Wendy and I went to Millbrook, town of, where I got a haircut and a marriage license from the same person. Wendy then took a bus to New York. She would return on the appointed day with her parents, sister and brother-in-law.

I walked back to the Gatehouse from the barbershop, past the supermarket, and then uphill past an old-fashioned drug store, several modest but well-tended houses and the Episcopal Church. It was a short journey I always enjoyed unless the weather was bad. Once I was over the brow of the hill, an uncluttered prospect of fields and woods opened up with "my" charming Gatehouse, looking like a toy construction in the middle distance, occupying center stage.

I recommend this stroll to pilgrims to the shrine. The only changes I have noticed, passing by, perhaps disguised as Phil Ptolemy and his All-Geek Orchestra, is that the Gatehouse was re-roofed at some point with cheap sheets of fake, petro-plastic ``tiles,'' and aluminum ``combination'' windows were installed. The horrors of it all.

(Recently, I have been told, some improvements have been made, but by all means go see for yourself. Don't forget to check out the barns, which Dieterich originally intended as mere outbuildings of a castle one would expect to see only in the Land of Oz.)

On my next visit to the Bungalow during my vacation from the marital condition, I walked in to find a political harangue, of all things, in progress. Since every Psychedelian I knew on the estate disbelieved and/or despised the official line on almost every subject, there usually wasn't all that much about politics to talk about. This seemed to be as true at the Bungalow as it was at the Ashram. Maybe it was different back in the hills but I doubt it.

Billy owned a Spanish-language newspaper in New York called Il Tiempo, which had a wide distribution not only in the city but in several Latin American countries, particularly the Dominican Republic. His editor, who was holding the floor in front of the bar, had apparently come up to Millbrook to give Billy and anyone else in earshot the benefit of his views on the latest political crisis in that country.

Billy, Tommy, Sam and Seymour Lazar, who had impressed me as quite a pain in the ass the night before (a ``feisty'' little prick with lots of ``chutzpah,'' I suppose one might call him), were sprawled around the living room looking bored and sullen while the editor shook his fist and delivered a rapid-fire series of pronouncements. The women and the children, I could see, were outside by the pool. The editor had his coat on and seemed about to leave. Judging by the number of empty glasses and cigarette butts in view, it looked like the editor had been holding forth for some time.

His speech was straight, hard-line anticommunist ranting of the old school. ``They'' could do no right and ``we'' could do no wrong. The monstrous American genocide then under way in Vietnam was too restrained, we could kill twice as many of the godless commies if we really tried and so forth and so on. When the editor uttered the name of Fidel Castro, a tremor passed over his swarthy features and his eyes popped out a little. He didn't just disapprove of Castro, he hated his guts. It was the only time I heard anything like it at Millbrook.

Billy responded with a series of half-hearted uh-huhs, yeahs and mmms and sank lower and lower into the couch and Sam and Seymour behaved pretty much the same way. I could hardly believe my ears. On the few occasions when Billy and I had talked about South American politics, usually in reference to Marco, he had expressed the usual liberal wisdom on the subject. Sure, he participated in the big rip-off in various ways, as did anyone with 50 cents in the bank although few knew it, but he didn't deny for a moment that it was a rip-off.

``Come on, it's obvious isn't it? Have you ever seen how those people live down there? Anyone who thinks things are going to go on forever as they are is kidding himself,'' Billy had said. ``Of course they're going to go communist or socialist or whatever you want to call it sooner or later. I've taken that for granted for a long time.''

Billy, like most of us in those days, tended to underestimate the power of oligarchs to control moronocracies by controlling television. (At the time, it appeared to many of us that TV was a powerful force to counter government propaganda with truth.) And Billy, like most people, overestimated the intelligence of the average voter, here and abroad. On hearing the Tories had won an election in England, where the Mellon family had many connections in ruling-class circles, Billy had slapped his hand on his forehead, and laughed explosively. ``What? Those fucking thieves got in again? I can't believe it! Where's the phone?''

So why all the uh-huhs, yeahs and mmms?

When the editor left, Billy went up to the bar and poured himself a stiff one.

``Schmuck!'' he said.

``Yeah, I hate to listen to that shit,'' Sam added.

``Well, what the hell, Billy,'' I asked. ``If you didn't like what he was saying, why didn't you tell him he was full of crap? You have a controlling interest in the paper, don't you?''

``Yeah.''

``So this creep is your employee, right?''

``Sometimes I wonder.''

``Does he write editorials like that?''

``Worse.''

``Well, why don't you fire him and hire someone who represents your views? Why not be social-democratic and libertarian?''

``You don't understand business, Kleps,'' Billy said.

How true, but as time went on I learned a few things. Although the paper consistently lost money, that had nothing to do with it, and may even have been a plus. As a matter of fact, Seymour tried to get control away from Billy a year later. It was worth having because of its political influence in the Dominican Republic and in other Spanish-speaking American ``client states,'' and for no other reason, except possibly that it was the best kind of "write off," that is, an asset that appeared to lose money while actually making a lot of it. If the paper told stories agreeable to those who owned and managed the client states, and did not tell stories disagreeable to them, the owners of the paper would be rewarded in various ways.

When Billy visited the Dominican Republic, he didn't stay at a hotel, he stayed at the Presidential Palace. If, for example, the concession to rent seat cushions at soccer matches was to be sold off to make a fast buck, President Baleguer, or whoever, would not tell Billy to go stand in a corner with his face to the wall, but instead would allow him to make a bid on an equal footing with any other capitalistic parasite who happened to be hanging around. Such privileges were worth big money to those parasites who had wormed their way into the core.

No newspaper representing Billy's actual views would be worth anything, because it couldn't have been sold in the Dominican Republic or anywhere else in the region. The newspaper represented the system in virtually the same way Federal Reserve Notes represented the system. Billy could no more alter the political orientation of the paper, in which resided its true value, than Hugh Hefner could print a picture of a syphilitic sex organ on the cover of Playboy.

In the summer of '70, when I was living on the property as a private guest, after doing time in the Northampton, Massachusetts jail for possession of the sacraments and lewd and lascivious cohabitation, I got another lesson on this subject. Billy and I were flying down the Hudson in the helicopter right after the Kent State murders. Even Bennett College in Millbrook, a junior college for girls, which had been given its library by Billy's mother, as he informed a stunned librarian who had asked us what connection we had with the college one day, was in an uproar. I happened to know one of the leading firebrands, Susie Werneke, very well. Billy was angry also. The Kent State murders and Kissinger's insane bombing of Cambodia had succeeded in arousing his normally torpid sense of civic responsibility. ``Listen, Art,'' Billy said, after making his usual detour to view Pocatino Hills, shake his fist and yell some expletives down at the Rockefellers below (the Governor was apparently entertaining some nuns at a garden luncheon), ``why don't you write an editorial right now, and if I like it I'll print it in Il Tiempo. I mean, what the fuck, what? If a bunch of Bennett girls can get out and do something, I feel I can too, and the way things are going now, what do I have to lose?''

I wrote out an editorial as we flew along. There was nothing in it which would have caused the slightest lifting of eyebrows at, say, The New York Times or even The Poughkeepsie Journal. My emphasis was on the danger of antagonizing an entire generation by such mindless measures, and so forth. The usual stuff. I can't usually write the usual stuff, but I guess I was angry enough to do it then. Billy thought it was wonderful.

The apoplectic, anti-Castro editor had been replaced by a more businesslike type who didn't write the editorials, but who followed the same general policy as his predecessor. While we were having beer and sausages at "21," Billy handed his new boy my editorial, saying, ``By the way, I would really like to see this printed.''

The editor put my paper in his pocket and went back to explaining how insiders could make a fast buck in collectors' issues of South American postage stamps. The editorial identifying Nixon and Kissinger as war criminals was never printed. When I asked how the editor had justified this insubordination, Billy shrugged.

``He said it wasn't right for our audience,'' Billy said. ``I guess he has a point.''

And that was the end of that one.

Back to 1967:

Wendy and I both had doubts about tying the knot, but there was no doubt at all that an infant was aimed straight at us, head first, we hoped. Another factor was the difficulty prosecutors faced in trying to force spouses to testify against each other. Considering everything, holy wedlock seemed like the thing to do.

We went every day to the post office in Millbrook, where, with a couple exceptions when $100 bills brightened the day, causing the birds in the trees to sing more melodiously, there would be $10 or $15 at most; enough to buy cigarettes, wine and groceries and, perhaps, to mail out Divine Toad Sweats to those who had asked for them and do the laundry. Usually there was nothing, causing those very same birds to mutter seditiously.

Nobody paid regular dues and very few of our members, most of whom were students who spent every spare nickel they had on the lesser sacrament, had stable addresses or stable incomes. I might have been able to come up with another book or a magazine but there was no way to produce either without capital. The irony of our prime patron owning a foreign-language newspaper during this period, when we were entirely at the mercy of a media intent on twisting us into various contemptible configurations, seemed pretty routine by that time.

I still hadn't met Wendy's parents, but she assured me they would cover the expenses of her having a child, if nothing else. They did, demonstrating the feature of Jewish ethnic culture in the United States for which I have the most admiration and which contrasts very favorably with ``Christian'' cultural norms: a genuine concern and willingness to shell out for the welfare of children and grandchildren of any age. Tim was enthusiastic about the marriage, and readily agreed to perform the ceremony, which would be held outdoors in front of the Big House.

``It's one of the most sensible moves you have ever made, Arthur,'' Tim assured me. Well, maybe.

As for Tim's own domestic moves, it was pretty clear that the tent in the hills was not going over any better with Rosemary than the mud hut in Nepal had gone over with Nina. Tim ejected Susan Schoenfeld on a charge of turning Rosemary on to some junk, which always finds a market among those leading the simple life involuntarily. It was the first time I had heard of any heroin being around and, although no one appeared to be deeply hooked on the stuff, Tim's reaction, if founded on fact, certainly made sense. If any of us had been busted for narcotics possession, it would have done more political harm than a thousand pot or acid busts.

Opiates are not nearly as dangerous as the official propaganda maintains. For most people, it's much safer to smoke opium than to down a few martinis. It's all a genetic roulette-wheel trip, and some predispositions are demonized while others are tolerated or even subsidized for reasons which have nothing to do with factuality and everything to do with furthering the interests of the owning and ruling classes. Is drug X easier or harder to control than drug Y? Is drug X more profitable than drug Y? These are the only questions that really matter, and it is because of this that NORML is futl. What is good is bad and what is bad is good.

You say that drug X stimulates the imagination, encourages critical thought and provides ordinary people with a cheap source of home entertainment?

While under the influence of drug X, they seem content to talk to each other, screw each other, bake cookies, listen to music and stuff like that?

They feel no guilt?

Some of them grow their own?

Well, if such be the case, no profits are being made and no taxes are being paid. The sky is falling and the end of the world is at hand. Call out the troops.

To understand American drug laws, read the Communist Manifesto. It explains everything.

Unlike psychedelics, however, it is true that opiates and coca are highly addictive in the incredibly concentrated forms in which prohibition forces producers to deliver these drugs to their markets.

Neither substance, in any concentration except an extreme overdose, does any direct physical harm. Many addicts, including thousands of physicians, function better on the stuff than off it. W.C. Fields, speaking of booze, had it right: ``In my experience, it is most often the absence, rather than the presence, of the substance in question that causes all the problems.''

The property crime and general physical debility associated with opiate use in the United States is entirely the result of the high price which most addicts must pay to obtain their daily ration, and the highly refined form it comes in, and both the price and the potency are direct consequences of prohibition.

As has been clearly demonstrated by the humane and rational European ways of dealing with the problem, an addict who is allowed to obtain what he needs at little or no cost will often eat three meals a day and trudge off to work in the morning just like everyone else. If anything, he is less likely to commit crimes than his non-addicted contemporaries because, once he has his fix, and no worries about getting the next one, he is generally content with a quiet, modest existence and not about to go roaring off into the night in search of cheap thrills the way boozers do. Addiction, per se, is not all that serious a problem. The problem is addiction in a context of high prices and criminal sanctions against use.

It's an American problem, deliberately created by the stone-hearted American capitalist oligarchy to crush working-class people under as many capricious and arbitrary burdens as possible, to turn them against each other and terrorize them and prevent them from thinking straight about anything.

My wife, my daughter and I lived in ``Nieuw Amsterdam,'' a huge housing development southeast of Amsterdam, from the spring of 1988 until January of 1991, when we were forced to return to the United States because of crimes committed against us by a DEA agent named D. O'Neill and his hirelings in the Dutch police, who stole our mail, burned our money and attempted to macrowave our gall bladders, with some kind of weird sub-sonic vibration machine.

Most of this happened after the Dutch Ministry of Justice, fully informed by me of my criminal record in the United States, had granted us residence. The American mind police intervened, and had the decision reversed, asserting, along with other lies, that the Neo-American Church (about one third of the members of which were racially semitic) had a ``Nazi basis.'' We didn't find out about any of this until it was too late to do anything about it. (See Kleps v. The Netherlands, ECHR 19551/92.)

``Love it or leave it?'' Not any more, all you house and field and swamp niggers out there. You will stay on the plantation you were born on, unless drafted to put down insurrections on other plantations, and grin from ear to ear when massa passes by.

Putting aside the guardians of law and order, who are in a line of work which attracts rotten, corrupt bastards the world over, Holland in general compared to the United States as fresh air from the North Sea compares to industrial pollutants blowing up into Texas from Mexico. Our spacious, high-ceilinged, three-bedroom apartment, which overlooked a small lake with lots of fish, ducks and swans in and on it, cost us about $200 a month. Hashish, available from over 250 coffee houses around the city, cost $7.50 a gram. We were surrounded by Third World immigrants, many of whom were on the dole and many of whom were "illegals," supported by those on the dole and by individual initiatives of various kinds. The guaranteed annual income for all legal residents included a vacation allowance sufficient for a month in Spain every year. The powers that were had decided that people who don't have jobs need vacations as much as those who do. I agree. We do.

Addicts were common, but there were also services for them. The community was peaceful, pretty and well-tended. We merrily bicycled about, in the genuine parklands between the buildings, even in the late evening, without apprehension. The atmosphere, both physical and social, reminded me of Westchester during the '30s and '40s. What more can I say?

Long live the Queen.

The Wendy-Arthur wedding went off pretty smoothly, although for a while it looked like Tim would refuse to preside and we would have to ask Haines to do it.

The problem was Susan Shoenfeld. While I was up at the Bungalow early in the morning getting dressed in some of Billy's finery and having a couple Bloody Marys, Susan, our most recent outcast, walked in.

Billy, who, like Otto, ranked Susan in the highly attractive category, and did not know about her recent expulsion from the League, immediately asked if she was staying for the wedding. ``Sure, why don't you, Susan,'' I added. I had nothing against Susan, and appreciated her style. Although, like Peggy, she was too boyish for my tastes, her voodoo nonsense amused me greatly.

Heretofore, oddly enough, most of my conversations with Susan had been about self-defense. She claimed to have burned Doc Duvalier's Chief of Police in Haiti a year or so earlier in an acid deal (it was typical of Susan not to bother making the usual excuses for this conduct) and feared the Ton Ton Macoute might find her and carve her heart out, or something. When she asked me for advice, I suggested she might buy a .22 semi-automatic rifle in town and keep it under her bed.

If any crazed zombies covered with blood and chicken feathers tried to break her door down in the middle of the night, she could fill them full of holes, which might slow the ungrateful dead down long enough so she could jump out the window or take some other evasive action.

Susan, who hadn't known it was legal and easy to procure a firearm in the land of the free and the home of the brave, immediately bought a Ruger, with a little clip and lots of ammunition, at the Millbrook hardware store. She didn't hunt with her rifle, but enjoyed shooting at targets in the woods, which was enough to alarm and offend Haines, who eventually seized the weapon and threw it in the smaller lake behind the Gatehouse. Just as he was pitching it in, he told me, a carload of Bungalow visitors passed over the bridge where he was standing (in his robes, as it happened), with his arms upraised and the rifle in his hands, thereby creating an intriguing subject for dinner table conversation, no doubt.

Leaving Susan at the Bungalow, I drove down to the Big House to check on the arrangements. Banners and streamers and shrine areas were all over the place. The black tanka hung from a line strung over the stone steps to the Big House front lawn where the ceremony would be held. I didn't have the heart to take it down. No matter what the intentions of whoever put it up, it was, Snazzm, a black cat case. Perhaps I should have called off the wedding, but removing the warning sign wouldn't have accomplished anything.

Tim was not ready to preside. I found him on a tractor cutting grass at the west side of the house, dressed in a pair of old shorts. I drove the Cadillac up to him. What in hell was going on?

``Art, did you invite Susan Schoenfeld to the wedding?'' he asked, after shutting off the engine. His face was set in stern lines.

Jesus Christ! News traveled fast at Millbrook.

``Well, yeah, Tim,'' I said. ``Billy and I did. We didn't invite her back to live here, just to stay for the ceremony.''

``Unless you have her off the property in half an hour I won't perform the wedding,'' Tim said, not betraying the slightest hint of amusement. He was dead serious. Tim had decided Susan was a ``downer'' and Tim had no mercy on ``downers.''

``OK. I don't care much either way,'' I said. ``You had better get cleaned up, though. I'll be back in 15 minutes.''

``Just get her out of here,'' Tim said, his face relaxing. ``I don't want that girl anywhere near me. She's pure poison.''

``I just don't worship him anymore,'' Susan said, when, back at the Bungalow, I asked her what the trouble was.

``I'll take care of it,'' Billy volunteered. ``Tell Tim I took her to the bus station.''

Who performed the ceremony didn't matter much to me, but when I called Wendy about it, she was insistent that I persuade Tim to do it, as he had promised. The invocation of the name of William Haines (who?) would not have improved her status among the Jewish princesses of New York nearly as much as the invocation of the name of Timothy (no shit?) Leary.

I drove back. All was well. Tim was in his office on the third floor having flowers stuck in his hair by Rosemary. I gave Bhavani, who was standing by, a box of ladyfingers and a small bottle of Sandoz acid in solution from the large reserve of crystal Tommy held in a safety deposit box in Barclay's Bank in London. When Tim saw the bottle, his mood altered abruptly from mild resignation to eager anticipation.

Haines appeared, caught the mood instantly and, after a few coarse remarks concerning the consummation of my forthcoming union, fell with relish to assisting Bhavani in the preparation of the sacraments. Since some straight visitors were already on hand, and more were expected, including Wendy's family, we agreed that only 25 micrograms per ladyfinger would be a good idea.

Having screaming, freaked-out novices tied to trees all around the perimeter of the lawn would not have set the right tone.

Michael Green, wearing only a pair of shorts and a lei, walked in. Wendy and her family had arrived, he reported. Her mother was crying, and her father looked ``sort of stunned.'' I drove back to the Bungalow and returned with the Hitchcocks, the Clapps, and several cases of champagne, which Jack and Jimmy put down on the porch by a table with the traditional cake. All was in readiness. Tim and Tambimutto were standing under the tanka. About 50 people, many of whom I didn't recognize, were sitting on the lawn.

To the sound of bongo drums and flutes, Billy, my best man, and I walked to the summer house where I had my first sight of my parents-in-law-to-be. Classic bourgeois Jew Yorkers in appearance, they looked as stunned as Michael had described them, but most of our visitors looked stunned when they first arrived, even if they were not there to see their daughters wed to an alien from ``inner space.''

Wendy's sister, Jill, smiling brightly in the sunshine, looked like one of Joe's Scandinavian blondes. Billy muttered an appreciative comment before we got within hearing range. Her husband, Wally, who operated a company that handed out annual awards for the best TV commercials of the year, looked like the classic Madavexec he was. Their 4-year-old daughter, beaming like her mother, clutched a bouquet.

We all walked back, appropriately paired and tripled, to the steps under the black tanka. Tim uttered some typical Timisms, Tambimutto read from the Vedas, cymbals clashed and pipes played. Ladyfingers were passed, and I noted that Tim's identification of them as ``the sacrament of our religion'' had not made much of an impression on the straight segment of our audience. Mrs. Williams was eating one and so was the little flower girl.

As soon as the ceremony was over, and everyone was up on the porch sloshing down the bubbly, as Otto put it, and eating cake, Wendy steered me over into the far corner of the porch and anxiously asked, ``Arthur, how much did you put in those ladyfingers?'' She was relieved when I told her it wasn't much. Jill's daughter played happily with the resident kids, who were enjoying the opportunity to have a small dose in an outdoor party setting. Mr. Williams and Wally, both mildly stoned, joined enthusiastically in a baseball game Tim organized.

Mrs. Williams, however, tossed her cookies and then passed out, but regained consciousness quickly. She wasn't able to describe her symptoms and seemed relieved when we told her she was on a very minor LSD trip and would return to normal consciousness in a few hours. I suspect she had two, maybe three. We put her to bed in the Gatehouse. Later, Wendy said she thought this little trip may have loosened her mother up somewhat.

Well, legally staked out once again. At least this time, I thought, nobody could accuse me of leading an innocent maiden into perdition. I had found her there, and the term ``innocent maiden,'' in any sense, did not apply.

Surprisingly often during the 1967 ``Summer of Love,'' considering how many visitors we had and how threatening the political situation had become, not much would happen on any given day. It was possible to relax and converse, drink, putter around, read, go fishing or swimming, drink, or whatever.

I retain in my memory an unusually detailed recollection of one low-key scene of this kind, probably because it has such a mild, mellow P.G. Wodehouse flavor.

Billy and Tommy and I were drinking beer and discussing the foibles of mutual acquaintances, on lawn chairs in ``Swami's corner,'' an alcove in the stone wall that traced the perimeter of the Gatehouse-bridge region. Swami was present only in blithe spirit, but plenty of his more colorful and tuneful relatives were around, chirping it up.

There were no women, rivals, children, servants or courtiers present, just the four of us birds, one ectoplasmic. I'm pretty sure it was a Sunday afternoon. If not, it felt like it.

Things had become so relaxed that, despite the character flaw to which I have already alluded, I was about to bring up the financial condition of the religious institution for which, in one way or another, we were all responsible, present balance zero, when there was a soprano ``hello'' from the gate.

``Naturally,'' I moodily muttered to myself, as I ambled over, glass in hand, feeling more relieved than disappointed, if the truth be told. It was fate. Did I harbor an unconscious dread of the almighty dollar? Should I wear a T-shirt with ``Born to be Broke'' on it? Could be.

It was the mother of a kid from town who was a schoolmate and close friend of Jackie Leary. The boy had recently been busted for growing a couple pot plants in a window box in his bedroom. The connection with Jackie had not gone unremarked in the press and it was not now going unremarked by the lad's mother, who had obviously had a few, and who can blame her?

``Well, come on over, have a beer and tell us all about it,'' I said, ushering her through the pedestrian gate. What else could I do? And it would be a good idea if Billy and Tommy got this kind of story from a primary source, for a change.

I introduced her, and Tommy gave up his chair, moving to a concrete bench built into the wall. I didn't introduce Billy and Tommy, thinking our guest already knew them, such was the seeming familiarity of the friendly greetings exchanged.

She was a pleasant sort and, although justifiably pissed off about the situation in general, not really hostile to the community.

I was OK, Haines was OK, but Timothy Leary was a different story altogether. She went on in this vein, one not entirely unwelcome to my ears, for some time. I noticed Billy and Tommy were both grinning, and that Billy was egging her on. Suddenly it dawned on me: she hadn't recognized the twins. For all she knew, they might have been Bertie Wooster and Bingo Little.

``Well,'' I said, when the flow slackened for a moment, ``what about the people who brought Tim Leary here in the first place? Don't you think they have some responsibility for what goes on around here?''

``That's a good point,'' said Billy.

``There's no question about it,'' Tommy added. ``After all, it isn't Tim Leary who owns this place.''

Chronic worrier though he was, this situation was just too fraught with comedy for Tommy to resist. Like Billy, he was bursting with suppressed merriment. The junior pot farmer's mother was pretty merry also, oddly enough. The mood was infectious, I guess.

``You mean that Billy Hitchcock?'' she asked. It was evident it took some effort, but if her congenial hosts at this impromptu gathering were inclined to dump on Billy Hitchcock she would certainly add her two cents' worth.

``Why, that Billy Hitchcock is probably the worst of them all,'' she declared with great emphasis. I poured her another glass of beer. Billy vehemently agreed with her generalization about his location on the moral totem pole, and pressed her for more details about her son's case, and for anything and everything she might have to say about anything and everything on the place. It went on for quite a while. Rarely, I think, has any woman been given a better opportunity to bitch to a more receptive audience. When the flow threatened to end, I put in a word about how ``rich people think they can get away with anything'' which restarted the conversation as if I had administered benzedrine to all present.

``I've noticed that,'' said Tommy.

There are few subjects upon which people with ordinary incomes are more eager to animadvert, particularly when they are in their cups, unless someone rich is present, in which case not a word is ever said about it.

It was good for another 15 minutes at least. An atmosphere of uninhibited frankness prevailed. If it hadn't, Milwaukee would not be what it is today.

``Um, if you don't mind my asking,'' the townswoman asked, ``who are you two guys? I know Mr. Kleps here, but ...''

``Call me Art,'' I interjected.

``I'm Billy Hitchcock,'' said Billy, with the exact degree of mirth appropriate.

``What? You're kidding me!'' Her startled eyes swiveled to Tommy, who also confessed.

She took it very well, considering everything. There was only one, faint-hearted recrimination, and she couldn't even manage a frown for that:

``You've all been teasing me.''

``No, no,'' Billy said. ``Honestly, we wanted to hear what you had to say.''

Tommy and I chimed in along the same lines. It had been too good a chance to pass up. Yes, it had been pretty funny, but also most informative and interesting. Billy and Tommy were eager to help her solve her problem in any way they could. No lawyer? What about Noel Tepper?

Amidst mutual expressions of esteem and calls for a replay sometime, our little party broke up. Our visitor departed, with a great story to tell back home.

Dinner at the Bungalow tonight? Sure thing. ``Now, that was fun,'' Tommy said, before he and Billy took off in Tommy's Chevy. I think the kid got a year suspended or something like that. If so, it may have been enough to keep him out of Vietnam. Getting busted saved quite a few kids from getting mangled or killed in those days.

I can't remember exactly when the startling event took place, but sometime in the summer of 1967, Mummy made what amounted to an inspection tour of the property. When the news of her presence at the Bungalow came in, I happened to be at the Ashram, and on good terms with Bill, so I guess it was around the time that the Catechism was being printed. Maybe the Catechism had been printed, and she had seen a copy, which would help to explain what happened and did not happen.

Bill, who may have been on a light dose at the time, was electrified by the news. He seemed to interpret her visit in an entirely positive light, although nobody else did, and rushed to get cleaned up, don his robes, commandeer a car and driver, and dash off for the Bungalow, although no invitation had been extended.

It was clear that visions of sugarplums were dancing in his head.

He was back in 10 minutes, looking about as shell-shocked as I have ever seen him look. ``You had better get down to the Gatehouse, Kleps,'' Haines muttered in an aside to me as he swept past. ``She is only here to look the place over and you are definitely on her hit list.''

Questions were asked but none were answered. Bill vanished into his room, and I took off for the Gatehouse.

``Mummy is coming!'' I announced to Wendy, who looked properly electrocuted by the news. We both rushed around like maniacs, trying to make the dump look semi-inhabitable. I mopped the stairs and dusted as much of the surrounding wood as I could reach, while Wendy concentrated on our barren quarters themselves. Sure enough, about an hour later, while we were both still frantically attempting to make a sows's ear look like a silk purse, a Rolls pulled up in the parking lot and a woman attired entirely in black, accompanied by a man attired in similarly funereal garb, alighted.

I swung open a window.

``Hi,'' I said. ``Mrs. Hitchcock?''

``Yes.''

``I'm Art Kleps. Please come up. The door's open.''

Mummy never cracked a smile, and declined to sit. She stood on the second-floor landing in the doorway, while her companion hung back a little, and shot questions at me and Wendy in drill-sergeant tones. She was obviously a woman accustomed to command, and I must confess to being somewhat jolted by the experience.

Who were we? What were we doing here? Who invited us? Isn't that illegal? Goodbye.

``Holy shit,'' I said to Wendy, as the Rolls rolled over the bridge.

Had we played it wrong? Probably. Would it have made any difference if we had played it right? I doubt it, unless suddenly lunging at the woman and stabbing her in the ass with a hypodermic full of acid would be considered ``playing it right.'' That would have made a difference, but what kind of difference is a whole other question.

And that was the end of that one. I don't remember ever saying a word to Mummy's sons or daughters-in-law about her visit or hearing a word about it from them. We didn't even talk about it among ourselves. It was like one of those minor earthquakes in California. The day it happens, nobody talks about anything else. The day after, people are strangely uncommunicative. The day after that, it's as if it never happened.

Mummy, according to Billy, did not exactly revel in her status as a prime specimen of the Mellon zillions on the hoof. ``Oh, I don't know boys,'' she would often say as they rolled past Levittown or some other '50s development of modest new houses, ``sometimes I think I should give all the money away and we should go live in a house like one of those over there,'' causing little Billy and little Tommy to laugh so hard they fell off their jump seats.

Nor did she approve of Billy's undisguised greed for more, more and yet more. ``Why, you're nothing but a fast-buck artist!'' she told him one time.

Well, we all have our crosses to bear, I guess, as my mother often remarked.

Speaking of mothers, the Arthur-Wendy wedding seemed to stimulate Betsy Ross, who had been opportuned by Howie Druck for some time to make their liaison legal, to make his dreams come true. Their marriage was celebrated a couple weeks later, but this time at the Bowling Alley with Bill Haines doing the honors instead of Tim. Haines had just the right voice for this office; deep, resonant, assured.

It was a pleasure to listen to Haines recite, but it did seem strange to hear Max Muller's translation of the Prajna-Paramita at a wedding ceremony, which, after all, is addition portending multiplication, rather than subtraction.

But, then again, why not? What better time to remind people of the illusory nature of the world?

I have it on tape:

By the power invested in me as a priest, I pronounce you husband and wife.

Everything passes, things appearing, things disappearing.

But when it is all over, everything having appeared and having disappeared, being and extinction both transcended, still the basic emptiness and silence abides, and that is blissful peace.

Thus, oh Saraputra, all things having the nature of emptiness, have no beginning and have no ending. They are neither faultless nor not faultless. They are neither perfect nor imperfect. In emptiness there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no discrimination, no consciousness, there is no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no sensitiveness to contact, no mind. There is no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no mental process, no object, no knowledge, no cessation of ignorance, there is no noble Fourfold Truth, no pain, no cause of pain, no cessation of pain, there is no decay and no death. There is no knowledge of Nirvana, there is no obtaining of Nirvana.

Why is there no obtaining of Nirvana? Because Nirvana is in the realm of no thingness. If the ego, soul or personality was an enduring entity it could not obtain Nirvana. So long as man is seeking highest wisdom he is still abiding in the realm of consciousness. In highest Samadhi, having transcended consciousness, he has passed beyond discrimination and knowledge, beyond the reach of change or fear, he is already enjoying Nirvana.

The perfect understanding of this and the patient acceptance of it is the highest perfect wisdom, that is, the Prajna-Paramita. All the buddhas of the past, present and future, having attained highest samadhi awake to find themselves realizing Prajna-Paramita.

Therefore, oh Saraputra, everyone should seek self realization of Prajna-Paramita, the transcendent truth, the unsurpassable truth, the truth that ends all truth, the truth that ends all pain, the truth that is forever true. Oh Prajna-Paramita, oh transcendent truth that spans the troubled ocean of life and death, safely carry all seekers to the other shore of Enlightenment.

Listen to the mantra, the great mysterious mantra: Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhisvha! Gone, gone, gone to that other shore, safely passed to that other shore. Prajna-Paramita. So may it be. Wisdom, hail!

May you love and never hate one another. May peace and peace and peace be in you and everywhere. Om shanti, shanti, shanti. You may kiss each other.

Ladyfingers were also distributed at the Betsy-Howie wedding, but they had much more of a kick to them than ours had had, and Haines made sure that everyone knew about it.

As a result, most of the straight guests present didn't take any, although quite a few put one or two away for a rainy day. All, however, were treated to a demonstration of what is meant by the expression ``freaking freely'' which will probably remain indelibly engraved on their memories for life. During the reception, someone shouted, ``Hey, who's that up on the roof?'' and all eyes turned skyward.

Pat McNeill, naked as a jaybird, was prancing around on the porch roof in front of Tim's room. Beatles music floated down to us, as well as Pat's voice.

She was shouting, ``Yoo hoo, Timothy Leary, come on up here. I want to get fucked!'' and other requests of a similar nature, interspersed with snatches of song and girlish giggles. Someone stepped out of a window and pulled her in. Conversation at the party, which had been somewhat strained, became highly animated.

Tim told me later that getting clothes on Pat had been quite a struggle. Finally, she agreed to put on a pair of Tim's pants, but nothing else. Two boo hoos from Philadelphia who happened to be visiting that day told me that they had been quietly ``meditating'' (watching goldfish) in the music room that evening when Pat had appeared and sat down next to them, bummed a cigarette, made some idle conversation, and then asked, in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, ``Hey, would you guys care to fuck?'' They didn't, perhaps because they were not attracted to women in general.

``Let's fuck'' trips are pretty common, although Pat's was certainly more dramatic than most. Her ideation, if any, probably went something like this:

Now that I'm stoned, what do I want to do?

What I really want to do is get screwed by Timothy Leary, my guru.

Why not ask for it? It's perfectly natural, and nothing to be ashamed of.

After all, should I be secretive, sneaky and hypocritical about this or come right out with it?

Nobody has the right to criticize me for expressing a natural wish.

Dishonesty is one of the greatest curses of mankind.

Why shouldn't women say they want to screw just like the men do?

Come to think of it, why shouldn't I take my clothes off and dance on the roof? Men like to look at naked women, don't they? If I want Tim to fuck me, I should show him what he's getting.

What about Rosemary?

To hell with Rosemary. All's fair in love and war.

What about embarrassing my husband and children and Howie and Betsy and so forth? I'm setting a good example. They should all take off their clothes too, and announce whom they want to fuck. Everybody wants to fuck. Why don't they take their clothes off and go to it?

If this was, indeed, the way Pat thought, it would have been difficult to refute her at any point.

She wasn't waving a gun around. She was waving her ass around. Was Pat's ass injuring anyone?

If Pat had behaved this way in Macy's Basement instead of on the Big House roof, it would have been a different matter altogether. ``Location is everything,'' as they say, or, as Blake put it, ``One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.''

Shortly after the Howie-Betsy wedding, Haines kicked Sarasvati out into the cruel, Sado-Judeo-Paulinian world once again. Perhaps the burlesque show on the Big House roof had reminded him of what his most ardent female admirer really wanted: to be hosed down with his precious bodily fluids. Immediately after getting the heave-ho, Sarasvati appeared at the Gatehouse, sobbing and simpering and asking for my advice.

Since Haines and I were, once again, not on speaking terms, I suggested she borrow some of my camping equipment and hide out in the woods on the hill overlooking the Ashram, so she could spy on the object of her affections from a safe place. She did, and it drove Haines into a frenzy, as I had expected.

Reports came back to me of Haines blundering through the brush brandishing his cane and vowing to suspend his vows of ``ahimsa'' (non-violence) if he caught her. Eventually, much to everyone's astonishment, Sarasvati, instead of creeping quietly back into the outer circle during a trip, as was her usual tactic, left the property, and wasn't heard from for about two weeks. When she returned, beautifully dressed and carrying expensive new luggage bulging with presents for the kids, Haines was too flabbergasted, and probably too happy to see her again, to offer any objections. I happened to be present at the Ashram at the time, my latest difference of opinion with Bill, whatever it was, having been resolved or, more likely, totally forgotten.

Her story was incredible even by Millbrookian standards. She had pried $100 out of Susan Schoenfeld's ribs before she left, and had taken this sum to the nearest race track where she placed the entire amount on the nose of a 100-to-1 shot named Swami, which won. With the proceeds, she flew down to British Guiana where Dr. Mishra, the Ashram's original guru, was living, his visa to the United States having expired shortly after the Ananda breakup. Mishra treated her with the greatest civility and invited her to stay as his house guest for a few days.

When she left, Mishra gave her a present to take to Bill: a bottle of Scotch whiskey. ``What the hell did he give me this for?'' Bill asked, turning it around in his hands and then passing it to me. ``He knows I almost never drink.''

The rest of us, however, did, and it wasn't long before Sarasvati was back in her usual rags, rolling around on the floor, giggling and muttering to herself while Bill gave her an occasional friendly poke with his cane.

Probably because the chicken coops, where kid visitors often spent the night, were located there, the worst freak-outs seemed to occur in the ruined gardens below the farm manager's house, where stern Clum and his brood might hear them, or, if they were really lucky, see them. In one instance, when I happened to be nearby and was called upon to help, the Clum family, if they were watching, were treated to a the sight of a Chinese boy screaming and writhing around on the ground as if entangled with an invisible boa constrictor, while a baby-faced, teenage American girl slowly removed her clothes in front of him, as if performing some kind of weird sex-cult ritual. That's the way it looked when I arrived.

Diana, 18, a frequent visitor who had shared some LSD with the Chinese boy and a couple other kids up on Ecstasy Hill a few hours earlier, solemnly explained that she thought the Chinese boy was screaming for her pussy, since that was what he had wanted earlier, but I managed to convince her that this was an unlikely motive for flailing the ground with one's arms and legs while howling like an animal.

``Come on, Diana,'' I said, as I yanked her jeans up, ``You're cute, but you're not that cute.''

Using the usual soothing syrup, I talked the Chinese boy down. When he came out of it, he didn't remember his freak-out at all, or anything leading up to it, only the happy parts of the trip up in the hills earlier, looking down on the misty vistas of the Hudson Valley and talking to the other kids about the inner meaning of it all. But he had caused distress in the household of a benefactor, and the way he had been brought up, that was a cause for great shame. No problem, Chinese boy. It's all part of the game. Try it again some time.

Diana later became a full-time Ashramite in Arizona, where she and Betsy and a living doll named Jane did a lot to help relieve the aridity of it all. The Chinese boy, too embarrassed to return, wrote us a nice note apologizing for his conduct and saying he had benefited greatly from the experience. It sure as hell didn't look like it at the time, but this is often the case.

Otto punctuated the final months with two bursts of gunfire, neither one of which hurt anyone or was intended to. The first burst burst when Sam and Martica Clapp, Billy, Aurora, Wendy and I accompanied him to the small town near Woodstock where, sure enough, he showed us his submachine gun factory under the maple trees in a quiet residential neighborhood. He introduced us to the boss, who praised him as one of their most trusted advisors on difficult technical problems. As a fitting climax to our tour of the premises, Otto, while twitching, sweating and muttering as usual, loaded a few rounds into the drum magazine of a freshly fabricated 1921 model Thompson and fired a fusillade from a back door into a mud puddle in the parking lot. None of the assembly-line workers even bothered to look up from their work.

The second burst burst after Otto appeared one evening at the Gatehouse with a brand-new North Vietnamese army rifle and an equally pristine wooden box of Chinese ammo, and asked to sleep on the floor of my office that night because he had had a premonition we would need protection. How, in the midst of America's maniacal invasion and brutalization of Vietnam, had Otto acquired these samples of the ordnance with which these brave people defended their homeland against the demonic power of the Pope and the Pentagon? I didn't bother to ask.

Sure enough, some drunks (we all presumed) showered the place with firecrackers about 3 a.m. and Otto scared them off by firing two sharp, socialist shots into the earth near the wall. When the State Police arrived, the noise, no doubt, having been reported, Otto boldly presented himself, explained his conduct, and showed them his weapon. They left without even writing anything down, perhaps because they didn't feel up to an exercise in calligraphy at that hour of the night, or because they had heard as much of Otto's surreal and detail-filled monologue as they wanted to hear, and didn't feel like getting all of that down on paper either.

The parties went on.

Aluminum Dreams, a rock group in which Billy had taken an interest, probably because of the female vocalist, who would soon move on to greener pastures, took over the second floor of the Big House. They never made it, and didn't deserve to. Tim, Bill and I did our best to ignore them, which wasn't easy if you happened to be within earshot. Billy wrote off thousands of dollars which he had put into equipment and expenses, and almost lost his servants also, because of the imperious demands the three male musicians made when they were at the Bungalow.

Tord found a girl, appropriately Amazonian in appearance, who had come to the property in search of a lost horse. She never seemed to say anything, at least not when I was around, and Tord became increasingly incommunicative himself. They lived together on the third floor for a while and eventually married, off the property.

The ``Third World'' egalitarian-primitivist group erected a ``Teepee Town'' back in the woods. Another group, loosely associated with them, came in to make a movie. They had professional equipment but little capital. The general idea was to represent heads as noble Indians and narcs as depraved sheriffs and drunken lawmen of the Old West but I don't think there was a plot, as the term is normally understood. There certainly was no script. There was a pink horse, ha ha, but after you've seen one pink horse, you've seen them all.

Tim, naturally, did his best to convert these extremely amorphous cinematographic concepts into The Life and Times of Timothy Leary. As the producer said to me just before he left, broke and with almost no usable film, ``Well, I've discovered one thing. You either go on Tim's trip around here or you don't go on any trip at all,'' which I thought summed up the general situation very well.

If he had simply recorded, without serious interference, snippets of everyday life on the property it might have made a good flick.

A visitor with a shortwave radio set, which he kept in the trunk of his car, showed up one day. Since a small island in the Caribbean was at that time threatening to declare its independence of the U.K. and casting about for support, we all thought it would be a good idea if Billy had a chat with the island's Prime Minister by radio, to see how he would react to the idea of naturalizing a community of acid heads, some of whom, presumably, would be filthy rich.

Since Billy, greatly amused, said he thought it was worth a shot, the radio was set up in the Bungalow's library, and a mildly stoned and jovial group gathered to watch the visitor twirl his knobs and tweak his toggles; a complete waste of time, as it turned out.

All the ham could get over his device were hilariously synchronistic snatches of this, that and the other thing from the Caribbean region, none of which had any practical utility for any of us: communistic denunciations of the rich, homilies on ``communication problems,'' news of drug busts, etc. The island was unreachable, possibly because the CIA or MI-6 had jammed the local frequencies.

Billy and I and almost everyone else in the audience enjoyed the farce for what it was, but the best Tim could manage was a tight smile. Leaving the ham aside, he seemed to have been the only person present who had taken the project seriously.

Afterwards, because Tim asked to try out our new used car, I found myself in the back seat with the ham, a young guy with slicked-back, black hair and aquiline features, who looked like the model for a line drawing of a radio enthusiast I had seen many times in my youth, in advertisements in my favorite magazine then and now, Popular Science. Here he was, in the flesh.

Wendy sat next to Tim, who proceeded to take the worst and longest way back to the Big House over the most rutted and pot-holed roads, at an unsafe speed, while twisting his head around to carry on a conversation about radio with the guy next to me.

``For Christ's sake, Tim,'' I finally said, after the car had suffered its third or fourth wrenching shock, ``slow down. You're driving like a maniac.''

``You think I'm going too fast, Arthur?''``

I have complete faith in you, Tim,'' said the ham at my side, before I could answer.

``Well, I wish you would slow down a little,'' said Wendy.

Tim slowed down. To show all was forgiven, I made a comment about how much of the radio chatter we had heard had been synchronistic with the project or with life at Millbrook in general.

``Yes,'' Tim said. ``Amazing, isn't it? You know, there are times when I am convinced there is someone or something up there writing the script.''

``That's what I think,'' said the ham, who then proceeded to deliver a series of routine speculations about how LSD might enhance ``outer space communication,'' and allow us to contact ``higher powers'' and such, all of which all of us had heard before ad nauseam from other visitors intent, not on learning anything, but on securing our subscription to their favorite fantasies of deliverance from above. Tim, however, lapped it right up, dropping in a comment here and there demonstrating that he, too, could read Sunday supplements and science fiction magazines.

Later, because the car would be needed early the next morning to take someone at the Ashram to the dentist, Wendy and I walked back to the Gatehouse in the pale moonlight and dark tunnels made by the overhanging roadside trees.

I made what I thought was a most disillusioning suggestion.

``Wendy,'' I said, ``let's face it. Tim's a supernaturalist science-fictionalist or something like that. He thinks something up there (I pointed to a patch of stars in the roof of our leafy corridor) is doing it. He doesn't understand synchronicity!''

``I never thought he did,'' Wendy said.

If I had not deluded myself about Tim I might not have come to understand synchronicity myself. There was another strange aspect: it seemed to me that many of the ``troops,'' who rarely said anything philosophical, had a better general appreciation of the subject, just as Wendy did, than their supposed leader and teacher. At least, in the case of the kids, when they talked about ``God'' they usually meant something vague, abstract and Emersonian. At worst, they were Deists. Transcendentalists. Pantheists. What the hell. That's about the best one can expect from most people.

Tim, in contrast, believed a gigantic ``cosmic'' entity of some kind was ``doing it.'' This, to his way of thinking, was more scientific. In the land of the partially sighted, a man who was blind was king.

Otto Preminger visited the community, prior to making one of the least Psychedelian of the commercial ``psychedelic'' movies which appeared around that time. Tim and Bill brought Preminger down to the Gatehouse to meet me, but I was in town buying booze. In this instance my vice may have saved me from a fate worse than death, but in general, my drinking was getting to the problem stage.

Everything constructive I wanted to do cost money, and I didn't have any. All I had were promises and parties, sometimes two of the latter a week. As for developing the place into a self-supporting mecca for Psychedelian religionists, the flaming handwriting was on the wall, and the message was dire.

Tim's group became increasingly disorganized, disgruntled and diluted with transients. Haines, in self-defense, ceased to concern himself with anything other than the Ashram and its immediate surroundings, as did I in regard to the Gatehouse. It became clear the place was headed towards anarchy and there wasn't much Haines or I could do about it. If the influx continued, we would merely hold enclaves in what amounted to a public park.

This was dangerous in all kinds of ways but particularly threatening to the owners. ``Use easement'' and related legal concepts were not part of what might be called the ``conceptuaries'' of us peasants, but the Hitchcock Cattle Corporation and Mellon family lawyers were certainly aware of such things. The risks which the twins had already taken of torts and criminal defenses blaming everything on them were buffered by an intimate knowledge of what kind of people they were dealing with, that is, nice people, or at worst, harmless, to zillionaires, nuts.

Now, all of that was changing. For all they knew, some Uriah Heepish person they had never seen had already knitted himself a shack of twigs and spittle in their woods and was busily hand lettering page after page of perfectly drafted legalese which would make the surrounding acreage a legal leper colony or port of entry when filed with the county clerk, and tie them up in court for the next 400 years if they didn't pay him off through the nose.

Photographs? Tape recordings? There was a boundless scope for apprehensions of all kinds.

Every time Tim went to New York he would get drunk and invite everyone he met to come up to Millbrook. It was clear he was deliberately demolishing the tripartite organization of the place which, for a while, had seemed so natural and promising. Either Tommy, who now made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the swelling population statistics, would revolt or we would be raided again or both. A wide-open Psychedelian mob scene would not be tolerated for long in Dutchess County.

Given the enormous potential political clout of our patrons and assuming three relatively small and stable groups, a scene which could have been written off by the powers that were as just another whimsy of the rich might have survived much longer, but hordes of anonymous fake Indians from the gutters of New York represented a virtual guarantee of disaster in the near future.

We were up against long-entrenched local Republican ruling families of such reactionary and downright fascist dispositions that they had hated having Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ``the Squire of Hyde Park,'' living among them. Tim, to use Aldous Huxley's apt characterization of his much milder earlier conduct, was now ``snoot-cocking'' these mass murderers and serial killers (war-mongers and capital-punishment freaks) in a way they could not ignore.

Tim knew, in a general kind of way, what would happen. Since it would happen anyway, he wanted it to happen sooner rather than later and in a form that suited the wave of populist political rhetoric he was riding at the time. He wanted to milk it. ``It's all a matter of timing, Arthur,'' he earnestly informed me several times.

It became clear that the modest, domestic, essentially reclusive practice of Psychedelianism, which we had enjoyed for a while at Millbrook and which suited the Hitchcocks and Bill and me and almost everyone else around just fine, appeared of little account and eminently expendable to Tim, who cared little for the gods of the hearth, especially when those commonplace deities were contrasted with the newly risen and enormously powerful gods of television, the mass media and the popular culture in general, with whom, at the cost of considerable personal sacrifice and unremitting effort, he believed he had achieved an ``in.''

As Tim saw it, our values led nowhere, which was true because they were all ends in themselves, which we already were enjoying and merely wished to preserve, as one would wish to preserve for as long as possible the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The assumption that the whole scene would collapse in a few years, at most, was almost certainly correct if nothing changed radically for the better. I don't think Tim saw any future in the elitist, defensive, xenophobic enclave concept. Our community was not located where strange things were done under the midnight sun, or where an influx of a million a year or so would bedazzle the local peasantry with visions of down payments on mobile homes, but right smack in the middle of one of the most exclusive residential areas in the United States, which our most powerful and determined enemies considered their own private parkland, more or less by divine right. After all, they owned most of it, didn't they?

In contrast to the pointlessness of trying to hang on under such unfavorable circumstances, making a ``photo op'' out of it all and pandering to the kid culture by pretending to be the most communistic egalitarian primitivist around, would help bring Tim fame and fortune and perhaps support him in his old age. It would keep his show on the road by keeping his name in the papers and his face on the tube.

There was nothing unreasonable about this analysis, but the question that bothered me was: If Billy Hitchcock, Tim Leary, Bill Haines and I (and the core community in general, which had demonstrated many signs of life when given half a chance) with our various assets and complementary talents, couldn't maintain a stable Psychedelian community, who could?

Well, what reason was there to believe that, at that time and in the United States, anyone could? Even so, if Tim, Bill and I had ever approached Billy with a reasonable (xenophobic enclavish) plan, in which our roles were defined in terms of our demonstrable talents, it's not unimaginable that Billy (and maybe Peggy and maybe even Tommy) would have funded the community the way it needed to be funded. Maybe it would have been necessary to move the whole works somewhere else, maybe off shore, but was a total crack-up absolutely unavoidable?

Why, in an effort to straighten things out, didn't Tim, Bill, Billy and I ever take a trip together without having 50 or so other people around at the same time? If it hadn't done any good, at least we would have had the satisfaction of knowing we had tried. History is full of these almost unanswerable why didn'ts. The craziest aspects of human nature are often better illustrated by what isn't done than by what is.

The history of science and technology, which one might suppose to be relatively free of them, is in fact full of these seemingly inexplicable lapses. What kinds of beings are these who waste millions of man-hours by not inventing the cotton gin, for example? It's said that Whitney first got the idea by watching a cat trying to snatch a chicken by clawing through a fence. Is it really that much harder to imagine the cotton being pulled away from the seeds than to imagine the seeds being picked from the cotton? Why were all those seafarers allowed to perish of scurvy when the efficacy of citrus to revive almost-dead men was common knowledge among sailors for centuries?

There is no shortage of current examples. Why, to cite one, doesn't every fire engine and emergency vehicle on earth carry a portable tank of dimethyl sulfoxide to spray on burns and wounds?

Few people can look back over their lives, after they have been around a while, without thinking of all kinds of simple, obvious things they could and should have done to solve their problems, but didn't do, for which there seems to be no explanation other than to say ``I was blind.''

I don't think the problems of which I speak can be eliminated, at least not directly, by reforms in the social order. They are manifestations of a universal mental disability caused by imprints and the repetition compulsion (or just plain ``habit,'' if you prefer) which knows no borders and is stronger than any ideology.

The power of imprints, which are simply one's original impressions of how things are related, to persist in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, is illustrated in my case by a ``belief'' I hold that the city of New York is NORTH of Westchester County. Notice the present tense. Knowing about a manifestation of this mechanism may weaken, but rarely eliminates the affliction.

I must have acquired this image at about the age of five, when my family moved from the city to Crestwood. I have been in and around and under and over the city and its environs off and on ever since, but to this day, unless I make an effort to see it otherwise, the island of Manhattan points north.

The East River is on the West Side and like the Hudson, which is on the East Side, flows north. I recall being vaguely concerned as a child, when the family car would turn left on the Bronx River Parkway for our annual trip to Vermont, that we were headed in the wrong direction. ``Well, Dad's probably going around the city somehow,'' I would say to myself, and return to elbowing my brothers for my fair share of space in the back seat. At some point, when the landscape became unfamiliar, the entire world would make a gigantic 180-degree turn, and both Crestwood and New York City would be behind us, firmly to the south but, in my mind's eye, with the city closer to us than the suburban county.

Why? It was my original impression, that's all. The city seemed cold, I guess, in every sense of the term, and Crestwood seemed warm in every sense of the word. Crestwood was therefore south of the city.

Returning from New York in the helicopter one clear and almost windless day, Billy decided to go straight up and hover for a while. The entire landscape of which I speak was spread out beneath us like a relief map. I could see the actual state of affairs in great detail. Billy and I had been talking about the contrasts and similarities of our boyhoods and we both tried to locate my old boarding school in Bronxville. No luck. I suggested we swoop down and follow the Bronx River but, on consulting the gas gauge, Billy decided we had better be on our way.

Did this experience correct or even diminish this ludicrous mental problem?

Not in the slightest. The Battery's up and the Bronx is down. I still have two maps of the area in my mind's eye, one correct and superficial, the other false and powerful.

It's an irritant when I'm reading fiction set in the area. I know my imagery is warped, and I struggle with it for a while, and then give up. How can I possibly enjoy a good story while twisting maps around in my mind at the same time? It can't be done. At least it's conscious. I can, if I must, as when driving in and out of the New York area, force myself to see things right side up, as it were.

Could I get rid of this troublesome imprint on a trip? Certainly, if I insisted on regression to my early childhood for that purpose, and found someone willing and able to assist me in this usually boring and frequently laborious process. It has never seemed worth the effort. If repeatedly jailed because of a compulsion to turn road signs in the area backwards, I probably would think it worth the effort.

It may all serve a useful purpose, in that I am reminded, whenever the terrain of my birthplace is brought to my attention, which is pretty frequently, of the power of imprints in general. Without these reminders, I might forget why it is so many people believe in so many crazy things. It encourages tolerance, of which combative people can always use an extra shot, and pity for lunatics, of which almost all of us need as much as we can get.

I'm not talking about indoctrination as it is ordinarily understood. If, during my childhood, the doctrine that New York City was north of us had been constantly propounded as what everyone ought to believe, the way supernaturalist "Christianity" was, in our home in Crestwood, and I had been obliged to bow my head and affirm that New York City was in a ``space warp zone,'' or something similar, and to listen to bizarre anecdotes and patently fallacious arguments denying the validity of magnetism and condemning Rand McNally as an agent of the Devil, I think I would have resisted.

Since the subject never came up, there was nothing to resist.

Catholicism is more powerful than Protestantism in this way. The Roman Catholic Church does not, except as almost emotionless mental exercises, trouble to make out any kind of rational argument to its captive audience of little kiddies. Instead, it simply hammers in the images as early as possible and reinforces the habits as often as possible.

The Sado-Judeo-Paulinian zombies who have criminalized Psychedelianism and destroyed the Bill of Rights in an effort to stamp it out were brought up on a vast array of lunatic imprints and are blind slaves to the repetition compulsion. Most of our persecutors are so crazy about so many important particular things that they might as well be called crazy in a general way. For people loaded with the classic American Sado-Judeo-Paulinian religious imprints, the whole world is turned upside down.

This mental derangement, involving, as it does, so many self-destructive compulsions, will eventually destroy the place if it goes uncorrected. Americans are not simply European transplants or the descendants thereof. They are a different breed altogether, and the rest of the world ought to keep its guard up.

Americans, in general and unless pushed too far, are willing to disregard what is staring them right in the face in favor of believing authoritative pronouncements or the standard cant or popular myths on any and all subjects. They are just plain gullible. They ``have faith,'' faith in anything they want to have faith in. There is no need to ``have faith'' in what seems obviously correct, or probable. The necessity for faith only arises when one wishes to believe in, or cannot help believing, things that are inherently fantastic or ``unbelievable.'' (At times, this credulity can take a cynical turn and become a kind of credulous disbelief: about half of the African-Americans I have known seem to firmly believe that the landing on the moon in 1969 was staged in Hollywood.)

In Vermont, in 1972, I got some plans for a plywood dinghy, and discovered what seemed to be a serious error in the drawings of the bow. I wrote to the company, one of the two largest in the nation, and asked about it. ``You're quite right,'' the reply came back, ``the line drawing on the bow is in the improper position. Over the past couple of years, more than 3,000 8-Balls have been made, but you are the first one to make a comment on this fact.''

Only a week or so later, I received a letter from the art director of Portal Publications, one of the biggest art print houses in the country. I had complained about the quality of a Maxfield Parrish I ordered; it looked murky to me.

I quote a few lines: ``At last! A real live opinion. I've had to contend with oceans of praise. We've sold hundreds of thousands ... no attempt was made to correct the color. I feel embarrassed and infuriated ... disgusted ...''.

People who build boats and order art prints are not, generally speaking, stupid. The various generals who repeatedly assaulted impregnable positions in the Civil War before Grant came along were not stupid. All those cotton planters who never once considered you could pull the cotton away from the seeds instead of the seeds away from the cotton were not stupid. All those sea captains who failed to include a couple barrels of dried lemons in their list of stores before sailing weren't stupid.

The builders of the great Near Eastern civilizations who invented astronomy, mathematics, writing, and law, but took 2,000 years to think of making wedge-shaped bricks for arches and vaults, were not stupid.

They were not sufficiently disenchanted. The psychedelic experience is not the spell, but the lifting of the spell, the transformation of the toad, the maiden's salvation; not the sword in the stone, but the sword out of the stone.

Was there any way we could have prevailed at Millbrook against the monstrous forces of evil arrayed against us? I don't know, but the first thing required would have been a ``united front.'' If Haines, Hitchcock and I had set a date for a trip and invited Tim to join us, it's hard to imagine him staying away. It would have been impolitic.

He almost certainly would have made difficulties about time, place and circumstances so as to give himself an edge, and these manipulations probably would have aroused Haines to a fury, but a meeting to discuss the proposed trip could have been arranged at which, perhaps, Billy and I could have bombed Tim and Bill and, at minimum, things would have lightened up a little.

My memory is hazy about it. It seems to me Haines and I discussed the possibility once or twice. I recall Haines flatly saying, ``He won't do it,'' and changing the subject, but I never talked to Billy about it, or did I? I'm sure I never suggested it to Tim. I let it slide. I never made a project out of it, never allowed the subject to fully engage my imagination.

By the time such a trip became a necessity if we were to survive as a community, I was dispirited and exhausted, ready to throw in the towel. The thought of trying to persuade Tim, Bill or Billy to do anything they didn't want to do made me shudder, quiver, vibrate, flinch, flutter and roll. I had been over that trench top too many times. I was groggy and shell-shocked. It is said victory in battle often goes to the side that makes one last effort when neither side has any heart left for fighting.

At Millbrook a last charge of the forces of right bows and bright dawns was never made.

So we lost the battle. The war goes on.

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The Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church may be contacted through His Eminence Sahib Kevin Sanford, Original Mahout, Order of the Toad with Morning Glory Clusters, Member of the Board of Toads of the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, Boo Hoo General of Texas, at NeoACT, Inc., Box 3473, Austin TX 78764, telephone (512) 443-8464. You can also contact His Eminence via email at KTSanford@aol.com and His Highness The Chief Boo Hoo at ArtKleps@aol.com.

Bound copies of Millbrook, ISBN 0-9600388-6-9, are available from NeoACT for $19.95; the 1971 Boo Hoo Bible, ISBN 0-9600388-1-7, is also available at the same price.