It’s ironic because it all started at a be-in or a love-in, one of those hippy-dippy-paint-your-face-with-flowers events that were so widespread in 1969. This one, on Boston Common, a rare spring day when the sky was painfully blue and everyone was happy or pretending to be, three or four hundred college kids assembled for more than the usual peace and love, a free Tim Hardin concert, blankets on the lawn, jug wine, radios thrumming Mamas & Papas, Beatles, Donovan, Starship, Joan Baez, a folk-rock olio riding the wave of a pot cloud so potent the squirrels were stoned.
My girlfriend had painted flowers on my cheeks and I did the same on hers, petals and stems and leaves, all perfectly delineated and suitable for framing, a competition as we were both art students. My roommate and best friend, Johnny, had rolled a half-dozen joints, something Tim Hardin would appreciate being a junkie and all, though we didn’t know that until he OD’d a decade later, my mind a little vague on some details though not others. Tim’s first album, mostly melancholy love songs perfect for pseudo-sad college kids, “Don’t Make Promises,” “It’ll Never Happen Again,” “How Can We Hang On to a Dream,” were filled with palpable despair and words I still know by heart, so it’s not true that marijuana will rot your brain as I was smoking it every day at the time.
Tim was an hour and a half late and more than a little fuzzy, forgetting words and once or twice nodding off in mid-song, though we cheered him on the same way I’d cheered on a stumbling-drunk Janis Joplin at Madison Square Garden earlier that year while she lamented her failed love life in between songs and shots of Southern Comfort.
It was later, as we were leaving the concert, all three or four hundred of us pressed together in a throng of impatience that tested our all-you-need-is-love sensibility, when we met the Harvard boys and the older guy, a friend of a friend of a friend, though I never found out whose friend. He was at least thirty, tall and skinny in ratty bellbottoms and a Harry Nilsson T-shirt, and before we made it off the Common he’d asked us (actually he asked my girlfriend) if we wanted to go to a party in Cambridge and she said yes—nobody said no to a party back then.
Cambridge was smarter and savvier than Boston. Boston University students were always a little insecure with the Harvard/ Radcliff gang, though as art students we were exempt from academic competition because we didn’t take any academics and being art students made us cool by default with our paint-splattered jeans and turpentine cologne. I wore my cool like a Jackson Pollock Halloween costume though deep down I was still a suburban kid who’d let his hair grow and wore John Lennon glasses, twenty years old and about to graduate thinking I knew everything. Oh, if you had seen me with my parents, screaming about capitalism and the war and how money didn’t matter and how I was never going to be like them.
The Boston day was slipping toward darkness when we strolled back to BU for my car, a pink Studebaker I’d inherited from my grandfather, mellow on Tim Hardin and grass and cheap wine, face makeup streaked across our cheeks like war paint, me and my girlfriend and Johnny sharing a joint, puffing away in public like we owned Boston, like we owned the world, and we did in the way all twenty-year-olds do with their youth and beauty and audacity.
The Cambridge pad was like so many others, a railroad flat of endless rooms all reeking of weed and sweat, couples dancing slow to fast music, others dancing alone, a few grinding away, the sexual revolution in full swing.
We’d only been there a few minutes when the older guy offered up some hash. Got it from a dude who grows it up near Woodstock, powerful stuff, he said, and after a couple of tokes I knew he was right, cotton batting taking up residence in the crevices of my mind. I was already stoned when he said he had something even better, unwrapping a handkerchief to display what looked like translucent pebbles. DMT, he called it. Like acid, but short and sweet, you only trip for, like, five or ten minutes.
I was game. So was Johnny, who asked if it was anything like banana peels. The older guy said, You kidding? Much better than that, laughed, and dropped a pebble into a hookah and put a match to it, all of us rapt as it flared like a tiny comet.
Johnny took the first inhalation, eyes tearing as he held the smoke in his lungs. Then I took a hit. It smelled like burning metal singeing my nose and throat and then wham! my heart was beating like mad, everything starting and stopping, coming and going, the room there and not there, people zooming in and out of focus, George Harrison whine-singing “Within You Without You” deep inside my head, faces around me morphing and melting, apartment walls dissolving into fast-moving clouds like I had been transported into a Magritte painting, and it didn’t feel like a few minutes; it felt like forever and a little scary, everything at warp speed.
Then it was over and I was back in the dingy Cambridge apartment, sweating like I had a fever and the older guy was leaning into my girlfriend, the two of them on a mattress covered with a torn Indian blanket, other people on it too but all I could see was them, as if they were in the middle of a fish-eye lens. The older guy placed a joint between her soft lips and looked over at me with a sort of leering smile, then dropped another one of those pebbles into the pipe, and Johnny and I took turns again like trained junkie monkeys and the ceiling exploded and lightning lit up an emerald-green sky and I could feel my heart squishing and squashing, sending blood through my body and I guess I was talking, could hear a kind of slow-motion echo emanating from my mouth but had no idea what I was saying though now the older guy was slapping me on the back and saying, Thanks, man, thanks, and the next thing I knew the four of us—me and my girlfriend, Johnny, and the older guy—were piling into my pink Studebaker, windows down, air on my face like a wind tunnel, lightning and comets above us as I drove through Harvard Square, all of us laughing.
At some point I had agreed to help the older guy clean out his apartment though I could not remember when; then my girlfriend said she didn’t feel well (an excuse, I was sure) and wanted to go back to the dorm, so we dropped her off but kept going until we were in the suburbs, the whole time the older guy rolling more joints and Johnny and I smoking them, radio blasting Sly and the Family Stone, “Everyday People,” and singing along.
Slum-er-ville, the older guy said when we got there. What everyone calls Somerville, the only place I can afford, with my college loans and all, a dark street of single and attached houses, none of them nice and not at all like Boston or Cambridge, no streetlights, no charm. I was a Communications major but can’t get a good job so I work part-time for a record producer who fixes me up with cool singers like Grace Slick, who I fucked by the way, says the older guy, which I did not believe though he went into detail about how Grace smelled and how she talked during sex and how she was from a rich family and how she was kind of a spoiled brat, and then Johnny, always competitive, said, You wanna hear about the time I fucked Mama Cass? and he goes right into it.
It was in Monterey, you know, California, and she announces her hotel room from the stage, can you believe that? So I figure what the hell, I go after the show and sure enough there’s a bunch of guys hanging in front of her room and finally she comes out, good ol’ Mama Cass, I swear to God, all fat and cute in a flowered muumuu, and she crooks a finger at me and says, YOU, and next thing I know I’m in her room, in her bed, and we’re smoking dope and drinking champagne out of the bottle and I’m trying to find her clit, not so easy, heh-heh-heh, and she’s telling me what to do and saying what a big cock I have—and I do, man, I really do have a big cock—and I fuck her and she gets off practically screaming and when it’s over she asks me if I like her, can you dig it, Mama Cass asking me if I like her? I say, sure, sure, of course I like you, and ask if she’ll autograph my T-shirt, and she finds her panties and writes on them, To Johnny with love, from Mama Cass, and hands them over and I’m like, Holy shit, right, so I say, Hey, will you do me a favor and sing something for me? and she starts singing, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” but she’s changed the words to Dream a Little Dream of Johnny, and I swear to God I get goose bumps up and down my arms but I see she’s crying, so I ask what’s wrong and she says nothing but tells me to go because she’s got to get some sleep because they’re on the road in the morning, so I fight my way through the crowd of guys still outside her room waving her undies in the air, and they’re all hooting and laughing and smacking me on the back and making fat jokes and—