Memories of Drop City

The First 1960s Hippie Commune
and the Summer of Love


a memoir by John Curl



iUniverse, Inc.
New York Lincoln Shanghai

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Copyright © 2007 by John D. Curl
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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-42343-9 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-0-595-86681-6 (ebk)
ISBN-10: 0-595-42343-4 (pbk)
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN-10: 0-595-86681-6 (ebk)




Contents
Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 1 Curly’s Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 2 The Draft Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Chapter 3 The Night Before . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Chapter 4 The Road to Drop City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Chapter 5 Two Weeks in Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Chapter 6 The Being Bag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Chapter 7 The Summer Before Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Chapter 8 Back to Drop City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Chapter 9 A Home in This World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 83
Chapter 10 Rabbit’s Gun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Chapter 11 The Trinidad War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Chapter 12 Getting the Word Out. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 105
Chapter 13 The Ultimate Painting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . 121
Chapter 14 The Last Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Chapter 15 The Dropper Band . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Chapter 16 A Visit from the Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 150
Chapter 17 The Joy Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Chapter 18 Living the Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Chapter 19 The Autumn of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Chapter 20 Back to the Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Chapter 21 A Difficult Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Chapter 22 Incidents at a Sundance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Chapter 23 Dream Walking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Chapter 24 Turning Corners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 216
Chapter 25 The Counterculture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 222
Chapter 26 Forever Free and Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
A Drop City Album. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 235
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255




Prologue


Drop City was a legend and, at the same time, a real place.

I lived at Drop City for three years, participating in its precipitous rise and the events that followed. Many years later, I decided that it was time to tell the true story, but what did I really remember of events so long ago, of the world beyond the frames of the old snapshots and fading newspaper articles, beyond the moments of passion? I couldn’t decide whether the story could best be told as history or fiction. The truth seemed to keep crossing the line between the two. As they say, fiction writers tell lies in order to tell truths that can’t be told any other way.  Back in the Sixties, sometimes it felt that the daily events we were living were also happening on another, almost mythical, level. Still, reality is messy and sprawling, while fiction transforms it into neat plots. Drop City involved a lot of people, so there wasn’t just one, but many stories. Memories can be deceptive, and we constantly rewrite our life stories. I didn’t want to hurt the people I loved and still love, or hurt myself, by writing the truth, but truth is the bottom line, and that is what I had to write, whether I wrote it as a novel or a memoir.

Begun in remote southern Colorado in 1965 by three young artists as a social experiment and art colony, it quickly became the first “hippie” commune, a crucible of the time, a hotspot of creative ferment and radical ideas, a countercultural crossroads stop for numerous seekers traversing America on their way to some better future. Drop City provided some of the earliest form and image to some of the ideas bubbling out of the ferment of related movements for social change of the Sixties. Drop City won R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Award for 1966. The media portrayed it as a center of the drug culture, but Drop City is where I and a lot of others stopped taking drugs. Because something important happened there, the name Drop City still rings in our deep cultural memory over forty years later.

To understand America today you’ve got to look back at the Sixties, the watershed of forces that changed the second half of the twentieth century, and to comprehend the Sixties you have to look at the counterculture. I don’t mean the rock bands, but the culture of the communes, collectives, and cooperatives, which sprang up in an infinite variety everywhere young people gathered. That was what the term “counterculture” meant: not a musical style, but the collective culture that groups of young people were creating all over the country. The rock groups of course were an important part of that, but just one niche of something much bigger. Those were years in which millions of young people, and some older people too, really believed in what we called the Revolution. Large numbers of young people were rejecting the status quo of American society and turning to each other; in so doing we were seizing the power to recreate our world. That was the energy at the heart of the counterculture, and of Drop City.

The Sixties were a time the likes of which we haven’t seen since. If I hadn’t lived through it as a young person, I might have difficulty now believing that such a time had ever existed. The America of the 1950s had hit a dead end at full speed, but out of that terrible crash appeared something new and totally unexpected. There was a sudden excitement in the air. Something new seemed suddenly possible, simply because so many young people were banding together to make it happen. At Drop City we took on “Dropper names,” sobriquets, new identities for the roles that we thought we were playing. It seemed that literally anything was possible, both in our personal lives and in changing the world. We really thought that a great leap in human consciousness was about to reshape the planet. The Revolution was inevitable, and we were being swept along on its cusp. All power to the imagination.

So these are my memories of Drop City.

 


Chapter 1



“Get off my case, will you?” Kugo complained to his wife Frinki, while their two baby girls laughed and jumped on the mattress on the floor of the chilly apartment.

A couple of wooden chairs and a small table were the only other furniture. I sat on the cold radiator by the window. The open oven door was radiating a little heat.

Frinki turned to me. “He always thinks everybody’s on his case. But he hasn’t even got a case. He traded it for a couple hits of windowpane.” Her deep green eyes were surrounded by a million freckles and a mop of frizzy red hair flying every which way. If she weren’t always so sarcastic, I thought, she would be beautiful. Windowpane was a kind of LSD.

This was the summer of 1965, a few weeks after the first photos came back from the moon and President LBJ began sending massive numbers of troops to Viet Nam. My friend Kugo and I were both living on the Lower East Side.

It was a strange summer. At first New York passed through a heat wave, the air so stagnant and humid you could hardly breathe. But now it was unseasonably cold.

“Don’t pay any attention to her.” Kugo began to roll a joint. He had been telling me about friends of his, Curly and Jo, who had just been in town and staying with them. “They do things different out there in Drop City. That’s what Curly says. Everything’s different there. At Drop City you don’t have to work. You can do anything you want. Fuck around all day, get stoned. Everybody’s an artist, whatever. They got interviewed by some poet who writes for the Other. He’s going to do an article.”

The Other  was an underground newspaper.

“How do they survive?”

“They just do. Go live there a while and see for yourself.”

“Anybody can just go live there?”

“Anybody. Drop City is Utopia.”

“Don’t believe it,” Frinki said.

“I don’t believe it. Nobody believes in Utopia any more. At least not in Colorado.”

“Okay, it isn’t Utopia,” Kugo said. “Utopia’s got rules. Drop City doesn’t have any rules.”

“Up is down and down is up. Isn’t that right, Kugo? And the tooth fairy leaves Thai sticks under everybody’s pillow.”

Their apartment was on the top floor of an old tenement on Second Street, a planned slum for poor immigrants when it was built a hundred years before. It was a tiny place, just one room with a stub wall about four feet high separating the bedroom from the kitchen. The bedroom side was only a little bigger than the bed, and the kitchen had a lion’s-paw bath tub squeezed into one corner. The toilet was down the hall, shared with the other tenants on the floor.

Kugo ran his fingers through his thick, pitch-black hair. “What’s with you, Frinki? On the rag?”

“Kugo, enough of this bullshit. Go out and get a fucking job.”

“Don’t start this in front of my friend, will you?” He turned to me. “I’m sorry, man.”

“I understand.”

“Curly could explain Drop City to you better. You’d really like each other. I’m sorry you missed them.”

“They were only here for a few days?”

“Just left this morning. Back to Drop City. I called you to come meet them, but your phone was turned off.”

“I got it turned back on.”

Frinki began to lace her boots.

“Where you going?” Kugo asked.

“Where do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“To the Welfare office, to try to get some fucking foodstamps to feed your daughters.”

I smelled a fight coming and stood. “Got to run. Catch you later.”

Kugo lit the joint. “Sit down.”

A voice came through the door. “The Fates have decreed our return.”

“It’s Jo and Curly!” Frinki exclaimed.

A chubby face hidden behind wrap-around sunglasses and framed by a wild halo of kinky, black hair burst into the room, laughing, talking a mile a minute, followed by a pageboy blonde wrapped in a huge coat, with even features, smooth skin and a bit of a peasant build. Curly set a shopping bag on the table and began telling about a blown radiator. Frinki took their coats morosely and threw them in the closet. Curly’s manner had Kugo and me in stitches. Frinki stared at the shopping bag. Jo kept rolling her eyes and saying, “It didn’t happen like that,” but Curly just went on with the story. I could tell from their accents that Curly and Jo were from Brooklyn or thereabouts.

Finally Curly stopped talking long enough for Kugo to introduce us.

“How’s your morning sickness?” Frinki asked Jo.

“Not bad today. By the way, we brought dinner.”

Frinki immediately perked up, plunged into the shopping bag and began emptying its contents onto the table. Curly pulled out a plastic bag of sinsemilla and began rolling jays.

When our stomachs were warmed by the feast and our minds by the marijuana, Curly let out a loud belch.

“Don’t be gross,” Jo said.

He acted shocked. “Oh, excuse me, I forgot I was back in America. In really civilized places a good belch lets your hostess know you appreciated dinner.”

Frinki bared her teeth. “Thank you.”

“That just demonstrates my point.”

“Which point?” Kugo asked.

“This society likes to pretend it’s the apex of civilization, right? They’re so civilized they get grossed out if you belch. And at the same time, everybody acts like a mad dog.”

“Not everybody,” Jo put in.

“Okay, not everybody, at least not all the time. But on the whole this society is based on the principle of the dog fight.”

“We’ve all got the dog in us,” I said. “It’s human nature.”

“Right. You can’t change human nature. But we’re not just dogs. That’s only the lowest side of our nature. We’ve got better stuff in us too. The question is: how much is this society bringing out the dog in people? Is this a plague that has got everybody diseased? Can it be cured? Is it just that the people on top act like mad dogs, so everybody else has to as well? Does that gear this whole society to bringing out the dog in people, so if you don’t act like one, you get pushed to the bottom of the heap, which brings out the dog in you anyway, and you start biting and clawing your way up?”

“Dogs don’t have claws.” Jo corrected.

Curly ignored her. “Or is the dog so ingrained in us that people will always turn the world into a dog fight?”

“I don’t know. What’s your answer?” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know either. At least not yet.”

Kugo growled and lit another joint. “All I want is a full belly and some good reefer.”

“Because you’re a highly advanced soul. Not everybody is at your level yet. And won’t be if the people who run this society have their way. They see people like you as a threat.”

“To what?”

“This is the richest country in the world, there’d be plenty for everybody, if only they’d share it. But this society falsifies scarcity to get people like us to clean the toilets of the world for a few dimes. In order to perpetuate the dog fight. It glorifies the dog fight into a universal truth. It claims the best of all things come out of the dog fight. The dog fight is its pride and joy.”

“So what’s the alternative? Nobody’s going to go for socialism in America.” Kugo cut him short.

“I’m not talking about the government running everything. I’m talking about Drop City. That’s the great experiment of Drop City: Is there an alternative? Given decent circumstances, will people act decently? On their own, not if they’re forced to. That’s what we’re trying to do at Drop City. Start all over again from scratch. Everything fair and everybody equal. No rules or expectations. The only thing we have to agree about is that nobody has the right to exploit anybody else. Work when you want to; relax when you want to; find your own balance. Then we let Drop City grow, give it room to take its own shape, like a big extended family, like a living organism.”

Kugo laughed. “And you’re king, right?”

“In a place where everybody can take a good belch, everybody’s king.”

Curly went on to say there was only one other person living in Drop City so far, a painter named Clard, but other people came down on weekends to help with construction, and some of them were talking about moving there.

“You’re living in domes?” I asked. “Why domes?”

“Domes are advanced. All these rectangles make our heads into boxes. Living in a dome opens your fucking mind. No corners to hide in. Round like the sky. Living in a dome’s like always sleeping under the stars. Frees up your inner harmonies. You wake up every morning feeling like a new man. Helps you let go of your ego and attachments, all the junk that’s hanging you up and holding you back.”

“You ever hear of Bucky Fuller?” Kugo asked.

“Just vaguely.”

“The man who invented the triangle,” Curly said. “Domes are the simplest structure to build. The cheapest. A twenty-five-foot diameter dome costs less than two hundred smackeroos. Do more with less. You put little flaps along the sides and a skylight on top and, bingo, you got free, built-in air conditioning.”

“Kugo said Drop City was kind of like an artist colony. What about people who aren’t artists?”

“You don’t got to be an artist to live at Drop City. But at Drop City everybody’s an artist. When you don’t got to do all the shit that they force everybody to do,” Curly said, “what’s left but art? Painting, poetry, music. In the future—in the Drop City future—everybody’s going to be an artist.”

Deep into the night, while Jo, Frinki, and the kids were asleep on the mattress, Kugo, Curly, and I went on talking, laughing, and smoking.

Curly handed me a Drop City wallet card with a picture of a domelike structure and an address in Colorado. “Next time you’re tripping across country, stop by and take a load off your mind. Stay as long as you want.”



* * *



Drop City sounded like an escape hatch to a drowning man. I wasn’t making it in New York. I’d gone through a series of menial jobs and loathed them all. I was really at loose ends. I’d dropped out of college because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do with a degree. I just didn’t fit into this society, except as an outsider.

It was always like that. The neighborhood I grew up in was divided into separate Irish and Jewish enclaves. Ethnically my family was both, but we didn’t practice either religion, so we were not socially part of either group. My mom’s parents were Romanian Jews, and my dad’s were Irish Catholic and English Protestant. On top of that Grampa Sam called himself a “nature worshiper.”  Luckily I wasn’t the only outsider around.

I had a job sweeping a burlesque theater before the midnight show, four nights a week. Ernesto had gotten me the job, and we did it together until he quit. It was old-time burlesque, starring a once famous, fan-dancing stripper in her sixties. She looked pretty good actually, under the colored lights from a distance. They paid me in cash every night, a few quick dollars. I liked being around the menagerie, but they fired me for being late, unreliable, and incompetent.

I found another job at Pleasant Trucking Company, where I worked out on a dock routing packages onto a conveyor belt. It was hard, fast, dirty, freezing in winter, and very low paying. There was a tannery nearby, and the sickening stench of rotting horse flesh constantly blew into my face. As I worked I would turn away, take a deep gasp of the air behind me, which somehow I convinced myself was cleaner, and try to hold my breath as long as I could. Luckily they only let me work half-time, to keep me out of the union.

One night after work while I was hurrying past the tannery holding my breath, three guys jumped out of nowhere, backed me against a car, stuck a long blade in my face and demanded my wallet.

“I don’t carry a wallet.”

That made the guy with the knife awfully mad. I emptied my pockets and offered him a couple of dollars and a handful of change. He mumbled something about my mother and smashed me in the side of the head. As they stalked away, I felt the side of my head for squirting blood, but there was none.  He had turned the knife and hit me with the butt. My skull ached for days, but I was thankful to him.

Then there were the burglars. They always came in through the fire escape. Why even bother for my few worthless possessions? After a point I stopped nailing plywood over the window, and I didn’t replace my stuff. They must have taken that as a challenge, because they kept breaking in even when there was nothing to steal. Then I saw a young man walking across the street wearing my sweater. I just looked at him as he walked by. I didn’t even feel like killing him.

I grew up in The City, in a working class family. Dad was a postman, a letter carrier. Grandpa a garment worker, a shop steward for his union. I loved New York in a lot of ways, but as hard as I tried, there seemed to be no place for me there. I was either incapable or unwilling, or both, to do what was required for success.

My main resource in New York had been my group of friends, mostly people in the same boat. Besides sharing a deep alienation and anger, we also pooled many of our resources and helped each other survive.

I desperately wanted someplace that I could call home. It took me a long time to realize that I really didn’t have a home in New York any more.

A lot of friends went cross country and reported that living was easier on the West Coast, looser, that you didn’t have to squander all your energy barely surviving there. I’d been planning for a long time to go check it out, as soon as I scraped together some money, but that never seemed to happen. I had a few vague contacts in San Francisco. But I knew nobody between the coasts. Now I got the idea of stopping off in Drop City on my way west.

Although I grew up primarily in Washington Heights, my grandparents also had a little house in the country, across the Hudson river in New Jersey, where mom was raised. Grandpa Sam had arrived in Ellis island at the age of fourteen in 1903, from rural Romania, where Jews were kept in shtetls and forbidden to own land. His American dream was to become a landed peasant, or, in American lingo, a farmer. Forced into a sweatshop in the Manhattan garment district, he saved his pennies, and around 1920 he and grandma bought seven acres in New Jersey. But the farm failed in the Great Depression, and they were forced back into the city and he into the sweatshop. They kept the house, but it became a place where eventually they planned to retire. Anyway, we spent summers there, and I got to play with farm kids and know country living. I wondered if I could survive out there any better than Grampa. Since I was such a loser in New York, Drop City might let me see if I could make it any better in the country.

* * *



Drop City reminded me of an idea some friends and I had discussed a few years earlier, in the Fall of 1962, when the threat of imminent atomic war over missiles in Cuba had us all panicked. Most of us were students at New York City College.

We gathered at Otis’ apartment the night of the Cuban missile crisis: my buddy Ernesto, an aficionado of radical poetry and social revolution; our girlfriends Odessa and Mandy (this was before I met Patt); and Giovanni. We all knew each other from college, except for Giovanni, who was Otis’ offagain onagain lover. It was with this group that I first smoked marijuana. Pot made me paranoid the first few times, but soon it just affected me as a mood enhancer, a lot better than wine or beer.

Ernesto and the people he hung with were mostly Marxists. They’d always talk about how rotten capitalism was and “Come the revolution this, come the revolution that.” They called themselves communists, but they meant a communism in some distant future, which would liberate humanity, not communism as it was actually practiced anywhere. Present communism didn’t count because the revolution had been deformed, temporarily, by the never-ending struggle against capitalism.

To me it didn’t add up. Something had gone terribly wrong in their revolution. But it wasn’t just communism that failed. All systems had failed. Capitalism itself was once a radical ideology struggling against an aristocratic system, proposing a utopian vision of social justice. Either that promise failed too or it was a false promise. Betraying their ideals, both capitalism and communism wound up funneling the wealth of the world into the hands of small elites, just like the old aristocracy. The whole world seemed built on broken dreams, and the lives around me seemed crushed by false promises.

Still, the concept of the revolution was very compelling. It didn’t matter if everything in the past had failed. Humanity still needed to be liberated. People were oppressed by society, by each other, and, worst of all, by themselves. I too wanted and needed to liberate myself.

This was at the height of the Cold War, when the world seemed divided into two irreconcilable camps. I’d grown up during the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, when the United States was a pretty frightening place to a kid in a progressive political family. Almost all dissent was stifled. History as taught at school was mostly how the US, the fortress of freedom, had saved the world from fascism. Who could disagree? If you didn’t have an approved opinion, you kept it to yourself or got in trouble. My mom, a New Deal Democrat, warned me, “Don’t repeat anything outside that you hear at home.” Mom told me that because Dad could lose his job as a mailman and Grandpa could go to jail. Grandpa was a communist. That’s what he called himself. He wasn’t a Party member, as far as I know, just a “sympathizer” or “fellow traveler,” which are names they used for people like Grandpa in those days. He was a union man and thought that the government and bosses were in cahoots against the working man, and had used World War II as a cover to destroy the union movement. Mom was pretty left too, though her hero was Gandhi. One of my earliest memories was walking with Mom to one of her favorite stores, but finding pickets in front, she led me away, explaining why we couldn’t shop there and saying, “Never cross a picket line.” That’s what I grew up with.

By the time I was a teenager the witch hunts were over, but everybody still kept leftist opinions to themselves. At college in the early Sixties, people were once more broaching the ideas of revolution.

To my circle of college friends the Cuban Revolution represented the possibility of a breakthrough, a possibility beyond the Cold War, a small country struggling to find an independent way of life, a third way. It seemed like a peasant revolt searching for its own indigenous form of social justice.

Then I met Mandy. She held that the Revolution had failed because it had things backward: personal liberation had to come before social revolution, not vice versa. To achieve this and become fully alive, you needed to overcome your sexual hangups. The Sexual Revolution would replace the nuclear family with an extended or tribal family, which would free everybody from oppressive demands like fidelity. The key to human liberation was good orgasms.

I went around in circles about all this.

 Otis was the first black guy I ever became close with. Ernesto and I used to go down to his apartment, listen to music, get stoned and drunk with him and his friends. Otis was brassy and dynamic; his apartment had a continual party atmosphere. They lived in the same old tenement on Second Street near Avenue C. Otis lived in the basement apartment, Ernesto and Odessa lived on the top floor. I lived a few blocks away. Otis sang and played piano in a nightclub style; Giovanni was a wiry classical pianist with spidery fingers. Their common playing, though in antithetical styles, seemed to bind them together. I’d already become good friends with both of them when Otis told me he was gay. I had not even quite figured out what gay people do in bed. Pretty dumb, I guess. The attraction of gay sex was a mystery to me, but was the yearning for closeness and the desire to melt into another entity really different?

We were pretty depressed the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis and stayed up the whole night talking, preparing to die in a nuclear holocaust before dawn. If we were still alive in the morning, if the world was still here, we would go away to some isolated place and somehow live there quietly and peacefully. We all felt like giving up on this society. It was too violent and corrupt, too involved with domination and competition. We would pool our meager resources, find some land somewhere, share what we had and help each other survive. Otis, who was Creole, said he was thinking of moving back to his aunt’s land in rural Louisiana, and we could all join him. If there was a nuclear catastrophe and we were lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to be survivors, we would get the opportunity to rebuild the world, or what was left of it, on new foundations of cooperation and sharing instead of competition and greed. We talked about what we would bring, what writing, art, music, science of this civilization was worth preserving. I had my doubts that our little group, mixed both racially and in sexual orientation, could restart the world in the Louisiana bayous, but I kept my doubts to myself.

The morning of course dawned and we were still alive. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved. We could scarcely believe the world was still here and we had the rest of our lives to live. What a gift! How precious! We wouldn’t waste a minute. We walked the waking streets. How beautiful the world looked, how holy!

That night changed my life. After that I felt like I was living on borrowed time. I retained the notion that I would probably die young, so I resolved to live to the fullest. What more was there to fear after the near end of the world?

I spent the next few months staying up all night and sleeping during the day. I stopped going to school or work. Eventually I slid back into the old routines, just to survive, yet the idea of escaping continued to simmer in my mind. It was just a matter of how and when.

Even though Mandy and I were pals, the kind of soulmates who would stay up all night and talk about existentialism, we were never really good lovers. Maybe we were too much alike. Refusing to accept that as our fate, she decided we just needed to rev up our energy systems, and to do that she began sitting in an orgone box. I tried it a few times, but all I got was bored.

After Mandy and I broke up, I decided to join the Sexual Revolution, and ran around trying to have good orgasms with as many beautiful women as I could. It did rev up my energy system, but didn’t turn out to be a magic bullet. I started to worry that I was incapable of really feeling love.

Then along came psychedelics, and suddenly everybody was talking about a new revolution through a mass expansion in consciousness.



* * *