On a clear, cool night early in the spring of 1967, I lay on
a stone wall fronting Long Island Sound, waiting for the acid to come on. I was
in the back yard of a mansion in Stamford, Connecticut, staring into the
star-filled sky, listening to the small waves gurgling against the shoreline.
My mind was serene, but I was nervous, as always when I took acid or some other
psychedelic substance. The unpredictability of the drug both thrilled me and
made me anxious. Where will I go? What will I see? What will
happen? Will I survive? If I lose myself on this
plane of existence, what will come next?
My
expectation and anxiety were more intense than usual this night. I had dropped
what I had been told was two-hundred-fifty micrograms of pure Sandoz LSD-25,
the Holy Grail of psychedelics. Or something very much like it.
I
had no idea who obtained this rare specimen of a heralded
consciousness-altering substance or who manufactured it, but it showed up at
the house where my band, NGC 4594, had camped to rehearse. The sprawling home
was a prime example of a southern Connecticut Gold Coast mansion; it belonged
to the family of our flute and mouth-harp player.
The
tablet I had swallowed, about the size and color of an adult dose of aspirin,
purportedly had the purity and power of LSD-25, the legendary psychedelic
accidentally discovered at Sandoz Laboratories, in Basel, Switzerland, by a chemist named
Albert Hoffman, in 1938. Dr. Hoffman’s cosmic experience was decades in the
past, but this dose was supposed to be light-years beyond any acid I had
previously taken.
The
pitch that accompanied this acid could have been lifted from a used-car
salesman’s book, but if the claim was correct, I was in for a journey to the
center of consciousness, where “clear light” waited to bathe me in its
cleansing glow. I had taken other “clean” acid trips, uncut with amphetamines
to make the trip come on faster, and free of other additives favored by the
street “acid men” to stretch their product for maximum profits.
As
the acid slowly insinuated itself into my nervous system (one test of purity is
the length of time it takes for uncut LSD to start working, about forty-five
minutes to an hour), I felt the heightened combination of exhilaration and
anxiety that signals the acid beginning to work its magic.
A
gentle nudging began to assert itself at the edges of my consciousness. I gave
myself over to the Sandoz simulacrum and let it take me where it would.
Over
the course of what seemed like millennia, the acid took me far away, into the
vast field of stars above me, and into the water, where I imprinted my image on
the surface over and over, until I became an armada of insubstantial clones
breaking on the shore. In a quick burst of rational thought, I thought, so, this is what the shouting is all about over Sandoz. Well ...
let it come down!
Inside
the house, NGC was playing to a group of local day trippers who showed up every
Friday night to get high and listen to us. We had moved into the mansion from Storrs, Connecticut a couple of months
before and had become the latest attraction for the local sensation seekers.
As
I lay wrapped in ecstasy in Stamford, my brother, Melvyn
Starger, lay on his small bed in his small cell of a room on the opposite side
of the state, at Norwich State Hospital. He too had taken
drugs, ones very different from what I had consumed by choice. He was not given
a choice in the matter; his drugs were prescribed and mandatory. His meds
probably were benzodiazepines, psychoactive medications that produced sedative,
hypnotic, anti-convulsive, and muscle relaxant effects. In other words, they
were used to control patients’ behaviors, which could be explosive and
unpredictable.
Someone
meeting Melvyn for the first time would wonder why it was necessary to give him
medicine designed to pacify him. He seemed so calm and diffident to most
people. But he had a temper that could get way out of hand, and it could
explode in seconds. He was too thin and under-muscled to do any physical damage
to people, but he could be scary. He could yell at the top of his range for a
long time.
I
can’t presume to know where Melvyn’s mind went when he was on his meds. His
inner workings had been a mystery to me and my parents for many years. I did my
best to hold off thoughts of him as I peaked on the acid. Had I thought of him
in this blissful state, I thought I would freak out (as we used to say). That would
have been a shame, because this trip was one of a kind. Nothing should be
allowed to ruin it. Not that I hadn’t thought of my brother over the years
since we were kids, but there were times when it just wouldn’t have been fair
to let reality intrude on my experience.
My
efforts to keep my brother at bay have never worked. He was always there, ready
and waiting—my constant Virgil on our travels together. He had appeared to me
many times over the years, a stoop-shouldered wraith shambling through my thoughts,
not so subtly reminding me that our bond would never be broken, least of all by
changing locations and doing drugs.
Even
in the middle of my cosmic dance on Long Island Sound, I occasionally felt the
sorrow generated by my brother’s presence creep in, slowly and inexorably. This
time, my altered perceptions absorbed Melvyn and his aura with barely a
whimper. I didn’t panic; no ambulances had to be called. I simply rode the
whirlwind to its conclusion: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
By
then I had learned enough about how to guide myself through a psychedelic
experience to understand that walking the Via Dolorosa (“the way of grief”) can
be an important part of the experience. After all, the language we used to
describe an acid trip or some other mind-altering experience employed such
phrases as “ego death,” states of being one must travel through to reach the
true center of consciousness, where the pain and suffering brought on by human
folly melts into divine nothingness.
Our
perceptions of the power of psychedelic drugs came from our readings of
Buddhist philosophy and certain practices found in the Tibetan Book of the
Dead, which had been appropriated by the Harvard psychedelic guru Timothy Leary
for his own usages. In terms of getting high on psychedelics, it probably
amounted to nonsense, but if that got us through bad experiences, what was the
harm? In fact, the truest thing I had learned about acid, peyote, mescaline,
magic mushrooms, and even things like lowly marijuana was how strong these substances
were. One could believe anything behind their power to distort the senses and
disrupt the orderly flow of one’s mind.
In
my brother’s case, he walked the Via Dolorosa his entire life.
In
some societies, my brother might have been revered as a holy man, treated with
respect and deference. In our world, he was crazy. A looney-tune. A moron. No
one in polite society called him those terrible names, of course, at least not
in public. I called him those names, in private and in public.
Divorced
from the rest of “normal” society by his multiplicity of psychiatric
afflictions, my brother grew up inside his own life. It was not a life that
anyone would have chosen, but it was his, thrust on him by nature. His world
was rigidly self-contained. He was the only permanent resident. He could relate
to the “outside” when he chose to, but those were rare moments. My parents and
I had to do the work required to enter his world. It was a hard, frustrating
task, but there were occasional payoffs, if one worked hard enough. Small
flickers of light would dance in his eyes on those rare moments when he was
able or willing to enter the world of the others—our world.
This
brief description of my perception of Melvyn’s affect and demeanor may remind
some of the classic symptoms of autism, or as the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) terms it, “Autistic Disorder.” The DSM’s
list of symptoms includes: Marked lack of awareness of the existence or
feelings of others; no or abnormal seeking of comfort at times of distress; no
or impaired imitation (e.g., does not wave bye-bye, does not copy mother’s
domestic activities, mechanical imitation of others’ actions out of context);
no or abnormal social play; and gross impairment in ability to make peer
friendships.
Melvyn
did display some or all of these manifestations at various times throughout his
life, sometimes all of them at once. The diagnosis of autism was not generally
heard during the time of Melvyn’s development, and even if it had been, the
tagging of Melvyn as autistic, or “on the spectrum,” may not have made a
difference in my parents’ comprehension of their son’s many aberrant behaviors.
In retrospect, the gap that existed between Melvyn and the rest of the world
would surely have remained—in fact, did remain—for his entire life.
But
Melvyn did not live in a vacuum, despite all of the obstacles that separated
us. Melvyn—the fact of Melvyn—exerted a profound influence on everyone who came
into his world. My parents struggled for their entire marriage under the weight
of Melvyn’s conditions.
Some
families, when faced with crippling mental disabilities in a family member,
bond together and face their futures in some kind of harmony. Other families
fall apart, unable to face the fact of a terrible intruder in their midst. My
family went the latter route.
When
Melvyn’s strangeness could no longer be ignored or explained away, my parents’
reactions took very different forms. Over the long term, my father grew more
distant and depressed, and he began to blame my mother more and more for
Melvyn’s problems. My mother adopted the pose of a martyr, taking verbal abuse
from my father that increased with passing years. My mother became
“Long-Suffering Elsie” in the eyes of friends and family. The perception wasn’t
entirely fair. She could still laugh and socialize and have fun playing the
piano, but there was no doubt that something deep and sad had possessed her.
One can argue that we all affect each other simply by being in each other’s
lives, but living so closely with someone of Melvyn’s uniqueness takes that
rather obvious observation to a very different place.
As
Melvyn’s wrongness became more and more pronounced, my parents turned their
gazes on him and never looked away. My developing antisocial behavior and rock-bottom
self-image took a backseat to Melvyn’s much bigger problems. My parents missed
the danger signs in my young life early on. Their concentration on Melvyn bored
like drilling tools into Melvyn’s being, as if my parents could mine
information from him about his strangeness. They watched in mounting horror as
he transformed from a seemingly normal child into an alien creature lurching
toward entropy. They reacted to the early years of Melvyn’s thwarted
development with shock, disbelief, denial, increasing pain, depression, and
cruelty.
The
fact that it took years for Melvyn’s first symptoms of psychiatric disorder to
appear—holding out hope for my parents where none really existed—exacerbated a
situation that eventually flowered into a force that destroyed the fabric of my
family.
This
may sound like melodrama, but I watched it happen. My mother, refusing to
believe the evidence of her eyes, would swear at times that Melvyn was reading
full sentences when he was 2 years old, which proved to her that what was
clearly happening to him was beyond her comprehension. She was indulging in
magical thinking to save her own sanity.
