LSD & SEX & SORROW

Stephen Policoff

Mickey wandered into my dorm room, eyes wide with chemical enhancement. In that dislocated December of 1967, Mickey was always tripping, and I was not far behind hm.

“Ummm SimonGold,” he murmured, “Allen Ginsberg is up at Vassar.”

He always called me SimonGold, as if that were the only reasonable way to say my name. “Big reading, Dahlia says. That’s where she is this year. Let’s go up there. Yes?”

Of course I agreed. The rattletrap of a Corvair my father had given me was always available for crazy rides.

We took something, I can’t recall what. Mickey’s psychedelic resources were vast, his equanimity while high mythic. We drove from Wesleyan to Vassar, listening to a Procul Harum concert on the radio, saying little. I have no idea how we got there, really, and the ninety-minute drive seemed both instantaneous and endless.

We screeched into the visitor’s parking lot and Mickey’s longtime love, Dahlia, was there and leaped into Mickey’s arms the moment we emerged.

She squeezed my hand. “So glad you two showed up. Nobody cares where you park, by the way.” She laughed, her light, musical laugh. “They’re too busy fretting about boys sneaking into dorms.”

She led us to the chapel, where the reading was about to begin. The dark wooden pews on one side were mostly filled with girls in far nicer clothes than warranted by the reading, and pensive dons in blue suits. On the other side of the chapel, was an assortment of folks in flowing Indian garments, flowery shirts. Dahlia pulled us over to a pew near the back. As we settled in, a small group of even-more-stoned-than-we-were men and women reeled in the side door and sat peremptorily on the floor right below the stage. They swayed, they chanted.

“Hey, SimonGold,” Mickey said, “Groovy, yes? Timothy Leary and the Millbrook crew.”

I knew of Millbrook, of course, the Hitchcock estate nearby, wreathed in LSD research and Flower Power inquiry. I wondered if the invidious Nate Balin was still a denizen of that fervent scene.

Nate Balin was five years older, grew up across the street from me in Albany. When I was fourteen, I used to babysit for his little brother, Ned, and Nate, a proto-counter-culture delinquent, would glower, making strange, rageful imprecations to no one. Notorious for his messianic eyes, his convoluted sermons on “reality,” at eighteen he ran away to Mexico to cavort with Dr. Leary, then, according to Albany rumors, followed the acid trail to Cambridge, India, and Millbrook.

I scanned the stage area with my drug-wide eyes. I did not see Nate Balin, but I did see someone else I knew, a woman with auburn curls sticking out of a paisley kerchief, a woman who looked not much older than a child, in a long white gown, a woman who was my life-long crush, Annie Healy.

My mouth fell open. “I know someone there,” I murmured. “I was in love with someone there.” I pointed a shaky finger toward Annie; Dahlia almost jumped out of the pew.

“You know Annie Healy? She has made quite the stir here this semester. She brought in some bloody awful guru to run a workshop last month on how dreams are all that is true. Tremendously weird stuff.”

I was about to run toward this strange assemblage, to fling myself at Annie, but just then Ginsberg wandered onstage, with his vast beard and billowing orange shirt. He was carrying a little harmonium, and began to sing like an ancient cantor, then began reciting his great anti-war poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which I loved but could barely listen to as I sat staring at Annie across the room.

When the reading was done—and Mickey told me it was a splendid reading—I looked at Dahlia, and she just laughed, gave me a little push, and I skidded across the room, and then I was standing in front of Annie, who nudged the scarf away from her forehead, gave me a look of mild astonishment, as if I had materialized from another lifetime, which I guess I had.

“Simon. Wow. Amazing,” she said.

She looked the same, except for an almost golden glow which suffused her lovely face; I had never seen her look quite so radiant before. But maybe it was just the drugs.

We stood there regarding each other, lopsided smiles. I was going to hug her but hesitated, and then she was hugging me, wrapping arms around my shoulders in the way I had always wished she would.

“I thought of you the other day,” she said, not letting go. “Nate Balin and I were talking about Albany. You know him, right?”

We released each other; I could not stop peering into her gleaming eyes, could not stop my hands from shaking.

“Why…why do you know him?”

“I’m dropping out of school. I’ve been mostly hanging out in Millbrook, anyway, such a wondrous scene, so many wise men and women, wow, you would love it, maybe you’ll come?”

“I tried to find you. I kept driving over to your house but your brother chased me away and you weren’t there and now there’s no one there. What happened to your family?”

She shook her head, shook it twice. “Let’s not talk about downers like that,” she said. “I am on a different trip now, and I am not looking back. Come on, let’s go out, I need to know, I need to know all about you, Simon.”

She tugged me out of the chapel, onto the cold campus, and the December wind whistled through the trees around the commons, and all the brown leaves clattered and crumpled across the desolate lawn. We sat on the library steps despite the wind. Annie was shivering, but I did not feel cold, did not feel much of anything except the yearning I had felt since losing touch with Annie a year and a half ago.

“Do you really want to know all the stupid things I’ve been doing?” I asked. I did not think I could recount anything then, even the fervent rush of music and drugs which had washed over me that year.

“No,” she said, “Let’s just start over,” and she kissed me, touched my face with icy fingers, and we sat there on the damp stone steps for quite a while, kissing. Then she jumped up.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’m getting a ride back to Millbrook with Nate.”

“Don’t go,” I whispered. “That’s a terrible idea! “

I grabbed her hand. I kissed her hand. “Come back with me, come back to Wesleyan with me, or…somewhere. With me. Not with Nate. What are you doing with Nate?”

“He knows lots of things.”

“Not everything is worth knowing,” I said. And she laughed at that.

“It’s just part of my journey, that’s all,” she said. “I need to go places and he knows some of those places.”

And just as she said that, the Millbrook crowd wandered out of the chapel, chattering, a cacophony of voices, and Ginsberg was with them, quietly chanting OM, and walking behind them was Nate Balin, with his mane of hair and wild eyes. He headed straight for Annie, took her arm, yanked her toward him. She resisted for a moment, then didn’t.

“Can that be you, young Simon?” he said. “We were speaking of you not long ago, were we not, Annie? Perhaps, we even saw you in a dream, did we not, Annie?”

Annie nodded. I think it was a nod. She pulled away from Nate, hugged me again. She took my hand. She kissed my hand. “Come to Millbrook,” she whispered. “You will, won’t you?” and then she turned away, rejoined the group.

“I will!” I whispered.

I was still so high that in that shining moment I saw myself as a knight on a golden stallion, Sir Lancelot, with swooping sword, ready to ride to Annie’s rescue.

If only she had wanted to be rescued.

That was the coldest December, in every possible way. Sleet caused branches to topple all up and down High Street. The pipes froze under the Lawn Avenue dorms, and a jet of water spurted and instantly froze across the quadrangle, causing an icy pond to form, on which we skidded for days.

I flailed through the end of classes; it was like the familiar student’s nightmare, where you are late for a test and haven’t done the reading, only it was true. I began to feel the edge of a fear that I could fail out of college—it was notoriously difficult to fail out of Wesleyan, but for a few weeks it seemed entirely plausible. I vowed to do better, though I still could see little but Annie’s glow, off in the distance, summoning me.

In the absence of interests other than taking acid and playing the guitar, I began to meet up more often for aimless jam sessions with Mickey. When he wanted to, he could wail up a storm, sound almost like a sitar player on his electric violin, but he only sometimes wanted to.

One afternoon, after I barely made it through a music theory presentation, Mickey and I played around with a song I had been trying to write for Annie.

I had written these lines:

Once upon a time I wore a frown
Till I saw you glitter in your gown…

“Umm, Simongold,” he said, “is this about that girl at Vassar?”

I shrugged. I could rarely admit even to myself what I was doing.

“How about this then,” he said, and he played some lissome notes on the violin:

After several puffs of something, the two of us came up with a verse:

Once upon a time I wore a frown
Till I saw you glitter in your gown
But then you danced away
And shadows filled my day
Then I and you and all of us
Fell down

I liked that song, and one night, near the end of classes, Mickey called Dahlia up and we played her the song over the telephone.

“Ohh, lovely,” Dahlia sighed. “Will you keep at it?”

Would we? Would I keep at anything, really? This has been a recurring question in my life. Yet the more compelling question for me through all the last bitter days of 1967 was when should I, how should I continue my quest to Millbrook, to Annie?

On a whim, I typed up the lyrics, sent her the song.

She sent me back a strangely unfocussed photo of herself in a long white nightgown, reposing on a bright blue couch, arms flung back, looking like a somewhat ravaged Alice in Wonderland. Accompanying it was a note in perfect schoolgirl cursive: Come to Millbrook for New Year’s Eve. It will be amazing!

I spent as little time as I could in Albany over Christmas. I sequestered myself in my room, played the guitar, listened to records—After Bathing at Baxter’s, Disraeli Gears—sneaking a few puffs of pot and exhaling out the window of my boyhood home. I mostly avoided my parents, who seemed both eager to avoid engaging and clearly worried about me.

“Si, your mother and I are…we are just a little concerned,” my father said, finally cornering me in the kitchen on the day after Christmas, which I had spent almost entirely in bed. “You seem like you have gone a little off the rails.”

“No, I’ve gone all the way off,” I said.

I disliked being called Si. I disliked being worried about, even if the worrying was justified. I made up some story about great music opportunities waiting for me back at school. Then, for whatever self-thwarting reason, I blurted out, “And do you remember Annie? I am going to see her on New Year’s Eve.”

My father blanched. He hemmed and hawed. “Well, Si. I suppose that’s a nice thing for you? But we…your mother and I…never approved of that family. We always thought they were trouble.”

I smiled a false smile. “Not me,” I lied.

For the whole last week of the year, I timed my few hours of consciousness so as to limit interactions with my parents; it appeared they had given up on me as well. My mother did not even bother to harass me about joining them for dinner; she merely left a plate of food for me on the counter, as if I were a mysterious guest whose presence could not be assured.

I drove down one night to my high school hangout, the dingy bar called Mike’s Log Cabin. I couldn’t stay in my room any longer, and in the frenzy of 1967, I’d fallen out of touch with most of my high school friends. I drank whiskey sours, listened to the jukebox. Someone was playing the Beatles “Hello Goodbye” on repeat for at least an hour, and it seemed both to sum up my life, and to be hanging down, like a dense cloud, over my head.

A few vaguely familiar faces stared at me, smiled, seemed poised to address me but my only intention was to get sullenly drunk by myself, and after a while, I was, and rose, unsteadily. I noticed Robbie Rosen from my class at a corner table laughing it up with a group of tipsy younger kids. Robbie and I were never friends, but this did not stop him from staggering over to me, throwing an unwelcome arm around my shoulder.

“Word is you’re still hung up on that Irish Princess Healy? Guess you like ‘em crazy!”

I shuddered, mumbled, “Sure, I like ‘em crazy,” and slipped away so quickly that his arm dangled uselessly in the air for a moment.

That everyone in Albany knew everyone else’s business was hardly a surprise; I had just forgotten. But I didn’t like being gossiped about, even if the gossip was mostly true. I retreated to my room and barely stirred for days.

Two days before New Year’s, a snowstorm blew in, one of the epic storms Albany often experienced, depositing drifts almost as high as our living room window, leaving cars buried in driveways all up and down Ormond Street. When I dragged myself out to rescue the Corvair, I noticed Ned Balin, across the street, helping his mother shovel a path to their door.

Mr. Balin had died recently of lymphoma—one of the five Albany dads my parents knew who died of some kind of cancer between 1962 and 1967. It seemed to me there was a blight in Albany, one I yearned to escape.

When I used to babysit Ned, Mrs. Balin was always sweet to me, offering me chocolate chip cookies, hinting I could have a beer if I wanted one. I waved to her and made my way through the crunchy drifts toward the Balins’ house.

“Hey! Simon!” Ned said, bouncy as always. “I won the Second Form Science Prize this year, cool, huh?”

“Very cool! You’re still going to be a doctor?”

“Of course I am!” he shouted. “Right, Mom?”

She nodded, smiled tightly, wearily working at shoveling their driveway. I pitched in; I still had good impulses now and then.

“Hey, Ned,” I said, after we finally cleared a path, “I ran into your brother recently. Up at Vassar. A poetry reading. Strange, right?”

Ned turned away; Mrs. Balin shot me a bleak look.

“Thought he was in India or some place,” Ned murmured.

“We don’t hear from him, Si.” Mrs. Balin said, after a long moment. “Really I am not sure we wish to hear from him.”

We switched into talking about the weather, and then I backed away, shouting “Happy New Year” with the fake cheer at which I have always excelled.

On New Year’s Eve morning, I jammed the tiny trunk of the car with all my stuff—clothes I’d gotten for Christmas, records, books, my guitar, new leather boots. My unspoken plan was to stay with Annie as long as I could then head back to school. My unarticulated fantasy was that Annie would come with me and—what?—we would frolic together on the Wesleyan campus.

The Taconic Parkway was bordered that day by frozen snow boulders which occasionally rolled right into the road, causing cars to careen crazily around me. As I swerved into the little road off of 44-A leading to the Hitchcock Mansion, my heart was pounding, as if I were in danger. Which I sort of was, though my first glimpse of the place made me smile: a bizarre Victorian dream of a house with huge turrets and rectangular windows flung open to the freezing afternoon winds, and a giant face painted on the otherwise white wall. I felt like I had entered a movie set, especially when a parade of men and women dressed in colorful robes and heavy coats wove across the snowy field, chanting in the dimming daylight.

I pulled up behind a sleek silver Thunderbird and several motorcycles stacked up in the driveway as if they had been flung there. I sat for a moment in my crappy car, shivering, wondering what on earth I was doing, then thought of Annie and me, then Nate; I gritted my teeth, preparing for battle.

Indian musicians were practicing in a front parlor. Small groups of men and women were lolling about in other rooms, smoking hashish, pouring champagne, loudly discussing Buddhist philosophy. No one looked up at me; no one seemed to be in charge.

I wandered through several rooms downstairs, furnished with Persian rugs, deep couches, vast surreal murals and rich tapestries of Hindu gods, but also featuring orange beanbag chairs, battered desks and tables, as if all the furnishings had been assembled completely at random. In one of the rooms, a small man with a ring of frizzy hair and an owlish look sprang up from behind a roll-top desk.

“You. Are. New. Here,” he said, emphatically.

I gulped, nodded.

“Well, if you’re looking for Dr. Leary, he’s off attending to legal issues. Dick is in India, I think. I’m Art, by the way. What are you looking for? Or should I say seeking?”

“I’m…I’m looking for Annie? Annie Healy?” I stammered. “She invited me here. For New Year’s Eve?”

“Lots of people here,” he sighed. “Too many. They come for the party. Or transcendence. Or whatever. And then they don’t leave. Is she by chance a friend of the enigmatic Nate Balin?”

“Sort of,” I managed.

He laughed. “I try not to know anything about him.”

Then I saw Annie, racing down one of the three long staircases, bouncing toward me.

“Oh! You came!” she exclaimed. She hugged me. “This is Art, another wise soul in a house full of wise souls.”

He made an elaborate bow. “Ah. You’re Annie? I never learn anyone’s name here!”

“Come on, Simon, there is so much to do!” Annie said, idly caressing my hand. “There is going to be such a party! Jazz musicians! Raga guys! Fireworks! Come on, we need to get started.”

She grabbed my hand, pulled me upstairs into a white room strewn with clothes, books, candles. A large framed photo of young girls draped all in red and gold leaned against a bureau.

“Those are the Kumari! The living goddesses of Nepal! I am learning all about them!”

“Maybe you’re one of them?”

She looked thoughtful at this observation, gnawed nervously on her lower lip, then kissed me, went on kissing me till my head—and the rest of me—felt almost ready to explode. She produced two little orange tablets, and without even a moment’s discussion, we both popped them in our mouths, and soon the distant sounds from the rehearsing musicians seemed to intermingle, to meld with kisses and caresses and bodies.

We were happy, we were high, and after a while we floated downstairs where now even more people were gathered, some dancing wordlessly to a thrilling jazz trumpet, some babbling, swaying, smoking, meditating.

I saw glamorous men and women in velvet gowns and Nehru jackets. I did not see Nate Balin. I did not wish to see him, certainly, but as he seemed to hover like a dark spirit over my thoughts, I could not shake the fear of him either.

But Annie was so attentive to me, I felt almost foolish. It appeared, at least in that moment that I had occupied her thoughts as much as she had occupied mine. Eventually, we found ourselves back in her room, naked and thrashing around on the pallet which stood in for a bed. We both fell asleep, and almost slept through New Year’s but yanked on our clothes, made our way down to the balcony overlooking the grand stairway into the crowded front room where people were already starting to count down to midnight.

We kissed at the top of the stairs, people shouted “Happy New Year!” and “OM!” and “Namaste!” We swayed to the odd mix of trumpet, sitar, flute.

I said, “This means something, don’t you think this means something?”

And then, I saw the skeptical Art in heated conversation downstairs with someone, with Nate Balin, who bounded up the stairs. “Are you getting ready for our journey?” he asked, looking right past me and into Annie’s wide eyes.

“What journey?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“We are off to Nepal on Monday, are we not, Annie? We both dreamed of the little goddesses there, and that is a sure sign we must go there. Together. Immerse ourselves in the living godhead suffusing that faraway place. I have been there. I have seen things. And I will show them to you, Annie, yes?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Do you know, young Simon, about the world-dream in which we are all mere players?”

He did not wait for my reply. He continued up the stairs but kept glancing back; once I was sure he winked at me.

I kneeled in front of Annie, a supplicant. “You can’t. You can’t go with him. You shouldn’t be with him. This is too important…just you and me together,” I stammered.

“I am not going with him. I mean, I’m going with him but not…with him. I am on a new path and I need to leave here, I need to leave every piece of my past behind.”

“But we just started over.”

I stood. I furiously paced the small balustrade, wanting to scream, unable to scream. “This isn’t past,” I said finally. “It means something…something important… and you feel it too, I know you feel it.”

She slowly rose, stretched, as if she had been sleeping for days. “Lots of things mean something. If it’s important…we’ll have to see if it’s important when I come back.”

“I don’t think going down a path with Nate is going to take you anywhere!” I shouted, so loudly that I surprised myself, though no one could hear me over the raucous party. No one but Nate, who slipped down the stairs as I was reaching for Annie’s arm, and gave me just a tiny shove, or maybe it was merely clumsiness, my balance compromised by LSD and sex and sorrow. I crumpled onto the carpeted stair, spiraled over myself and down a flight.

“Simon?” Annie said, her voice strangely strangled.

I smacked my right wrist against the bannister, and landed on a plush red carpet, where I stared up blankly into other blank faces. I looked up at the balustrade for Annie, but she was gone.

“Maybe he’s hurt?” someone said, after a long while.

My wrist was broken. It took weeks to heal.

But other things took longer.

Stephen Policoff

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