Ego Death

Back in the late 1970s, after I left San Francisco and moved to Washington, I started writing down my stories from my time in the Haight.  I moved to San Francisco from LA in March of 1966, right after the last Acid Test at the Cathay Studios in downtown LA.  I had one address, 408 Ashbury.  I lived in the Haight from March of '66 to the end of January '68.

When I had written all that I remembered, I thought I would turn the stories into a memoir, but it didn't turn out that way.  I ended up with a novel about a young woman and through her eyes, tried to capture what it was like for me to leave home at 18 and live not only in that short bright intense period of time that was the Haight Ashbury, but what it was like to live in San Francisco, to this day one of my favorite cities.  I loved it, I hated it, it was really really hard sometimes.  It was confusing and scary and it is a miracle that I came through it all as unscathed as I did.  But it was my Greenwich Village, my Paris of the 20s, my Lost Generation, my last chance to touch the end of the Beatnik era, and I knew it.  I knew times like that come rarely, and so I stayed when it was really awful, and I stored the memories.

Most of these postings are pieces I chose not to include in the novel because they don't fit the narrative.  What is in the novel is not always exactly what happened, because I wanted to make a better story.  I'll be posting the alternate ending and some tales that are just a little rough.  This is the place for the orphans...

Ego Death

The houses in San Anselmo hung from the hillsides, hidden in the woods.  It was a treat to leave the City and spend time in the quiet, bucolic countryside just a few miles across the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was peaceful, hot and dry after days of foggy gloom.  The house was one of those secrets, passed from friend to friend and never listed openly for rent, one of those magical special places.  Long windows on the top and bottom floor of the split level looked out into the trees and let in the southern light.  It was a house party. We were all going to take acid and be in the country. 

I was amazed to see Denny when we arrived.  He was so out of place in this setting, all rustic and natural.  I never thought about him in the woods.  Him on the houseboat in Sausalito was a stretch, but forest and sun and nature?  Not Denny, but he greeted me as if I had walked into his streamlined flat back in the City.

“Hey, Sally!  What’s happening?”

“Hi, Denny.  What are you doing here?”

“You can’t have an acid party without the acid, can you?”

I sat down on one of the couches with a can of beer.  Denny passed around some little white tabs of acid and we all dropped and waited to get high.  Jeffrey decided to make a beer run into town with two other guys I’d never met who were there when we arrived.  Since I was paranoid about being high on acid out in public, I stayed behind. 

After they left, I sat in the sun with Denny.  He kept rolling joints and stacking them at one end of the shoe box top that served as a dope tray.  A new Lamberts, Hendricks and Ross album played on the phonograph.  As the acid came on, the jazz took on a special meaning.  I listened closely to see if there were any coded messages.

My breath came harder, and a tightness in my chest frightened me.  Was I having a heart attack?  The record came to the end of side one and the needle automatically lifted and sat back down at the beginning of the last song, “Twisted.”  It did this about 4 times.  There it was, the message.  It was in this song.  The words filled my head. When I looked at Denny, he didn’t  seem to hear it at all.  Perhaps I was the only one who noticed that the same song kept playing over and over, and that the song was about being crazy, being twisted.  I felt panic pushing all other thoughts from my mind.  I turned to Denny,  “I think I'm going to freak out.” 

Denny looked up, a cigarette hung from his lip, his myopic eyes bulged in a question mark.  “Here, smoke this.” 

His hand jabbed toward me with a joint in his fingers.  Without a moment’s hesitation, I took it and began puffing away, as if it was exactly what I needed.  Suddenly I stopped and looked down at the joint in my hand.  This is ridiculous.  I don’t want to get higher, I want to come down!

The perspective of the room swiveled and from a distance, I looked down at a young girl screaming and crying. Denny held her feet, talking quietly and steadily.  I strained to hear what he said, but from my position in the rafters, I heard nothing.  I shook my head.  Poor girl.  I think she’s freaking out. 

Jeffrey and his friends returned, and people from the house filed by the couch like mourners at a funeral:

“Too high.”

“Ego death.”

“Tsk-tsk, what a fuss.”

 I agreed with them.  All they needed was a flower to drop on my chest to complete the ceremony, or perhaps a clump of damp earth.  I was gone.

As my breathing settled and I realized Jeffrey was sitting by me, explaining something with his hands and fingers, puzzle pieces falling into place, it made absolute perfect sense.  Denny, who held my head in his lap, apologized and offered me another joint.  This time I knew what I was supposed to do with it, it felt right.  I felt bad for Denny.  He looked so concerned.   He had done his level best to try and head off my freak out but there was nothing he could have done. These things happened. 

These group acid parties usually left me exhausted and confused. While others seemed to glide through the experience with nothing more than laughter and wonder, I agonized every trip, often with tears and panic.  Was my mind too analytical?  In my eagerness to sort out what was real from what was not, did I overlook the point of these journeys?  Ego death is no easy path, and it seemed to me that many people I knew never made it back in one piece.  We talked about taking acid constantly, but the experience was completely subjective.  I was never sure when I tried to describe what happened to me that anyone else really understood.  Did they see melting faces?  Did they see the true nature of a person’s soul?  Could they see evil?  Did the secret of the universe reveal itself to them?  Was it important or were we supposed to just entertain these visions like some color-saturated movie marching across our mind and let them go?  Was any one thing more important than any other?

I made my way upstairs to one of the beds laid out like a dormitory.  I tossed and turned, recalling the breathing techniques I learned from my few brushes with meditation, and worked to quiet my mind, to fall asleep.  I woke up, to the sound of the new “Fresh Cream” album blasting from the stereo downstairs.  Last night’s acid trip was a thousand miles away.  No more jazz, no more secret messages.  A long table downstairs in front of the windows held breakfast; fruit, juice, toast, pastries, cereal and pots of coffee and tea.  It tasted like the first breakfast I had ever eaten.  It was the last time I saw Denny, though the bond I felt with him from that singular experience has stayed with me forever.