Shy Exhibitionist 3
Peter first read about LSD in The Readers Digest. This was in the late '50s, in an article that started off with a man hardly able to get his house key into a lock. Contriving mental change via such a drug appealed to Peter immediately, something which he believes will be of continuing fascination to him forever. Perhaps he already was formulating an attitude expressed by a quote attributed to him at the head of a High Times piece later on (which he doesn't recall having said): "There is no question about the direction of psychedelics -- eventually they have a positive effect on society."
Peter's next introduction to the potential of mind-induced arousing of the soul came by way of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. This milestone of psychedelic literature -- Aldous' 87-page report to Humphry Osmond about his mescaline sulfate experience on a May morning in 1952 -- reverberated even more after Peter got the chance to spend a few days with Aldous and his biologist brother Julian both in Berkeley and then around Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
These brothers hadn't seen each other for more than two years (Julian returning from India, Aldous from Mexico City). Aldous was to give a talk about "visionary experience" at Reed, and both wanted to visit a five-day-old elephant at the Portland zoo. Peter wrote about their interactions for the college weekly, and emphasized the challenge that mescaline, LSD-25 and psilocybin presented to "our conventional benchmarks of sanity" (sci-fi's Norman Spinrad's later evaluation).
Apart from Aldous' influential volume and R. Gordon Wasson's 1957 ten-page account in Life magazine of how he had been the first white in modern times "bemushroomed" (part of a "Great Adventures" series), the only other mind-changing literature Peter knew of appeared in Robert de Ropp's anthology Drugs & the Mind. At one point, Peter estimated that a third of the Reedies living in dorms had their own copy.
By the beginning of the '60s, Peter had looked up some of the reports about LSD appearing in psychoanalytic journals and even was given a seven-hour chance -- others wanted the opportunity as well! -- to read David Ebin's collection about The Drug Experience. Shortly after, he was allowed a two-hour glance at the seventh carbon (Xerox not being so popular in those days) of the Leary, Alpert, Metzner translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into The Psychedelic Experience (later published by University Books). Though this carbon copy could hardly be read, it was more or less the syllabus for their 1963 Zihuatanejo LSD expedition, which evoked more than 1,500 applicants at $250 each.
The word was slowly getting out. Even so, Peter was startled and delighted upon coming across Psychedelic Review #2 in a Berkeley bookstore that summer. He hadn't expected a journal devoted to the subject quite then.
Peter's first turn-on was a bit earlier, coming by way of two roommates in the Fall of '61: Colin Frank -- the son of Jerome, a famous psychoanalyst Peter had read much of, particularly in regard to nuclear dangers -- and David Padrewski -- more playful and even more fascinated by "drugs." About a month after the three had been living together, Colin divulged some possible apprehensions, admitting his puzzlement about Peter with,
"I realized upon seeing you that you were a manic-depressive . . . and I've been waiting for you to go into depressive stages." These two --and a photographer who joined the crew -- never, however, after that showed any concern about Peter's possibly precipitating a depression due to their turning him on.
