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| Shy Exhibitionist 7 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Beresford's lecture was at an uptown hotel. Peter was impressed, and especially amazed at the reaction once the audience was invited to discuss their own LSD-prodded creativity (with ABC TV recording the event). Later, he went to a party to talk to Beresford, and mainly recalls being astonished at the double-jiggers Bonnie was downing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bonnie and Beresford were contracted to write the book that she and Peter wrote (LSD -- The Problem-Solving Psychedelic). Three days before the original deadline, Bonnie contacted Peter -- suggesting that maybe the two of them should do it together. She had collected some papers on the topic, but until then she and Beresford hadn't written a word. Bonnie, author of 20 books already, thought this project could be done within a month. It actually took three months. Bonnie then had just gotten out of Will Rogers Tuberculosis Center in upstate New York. When they began to write, her belongings were yet in storage. |
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| As a result, Bonnie sat looking toward the Hudson River on a stool with golden legs that was maybe six inches high, facing a typewriter supported by a board across two cardboard boxes. She typed using two fingers on one hand and one on the other -- a method she had used for all her other books. Peter sat ten feet back from the window, with relevant papers and books spread around the otherwise bare room. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bonnie's original notion was that she and Peter would each write various parts of this book, and then these pieces could be melded together. Probably the reason she afterwards didn't write anything again for more than five years was Peter's crossing out of her first three pages (which appeared to him as having just come off the top of her head) and other harshness. They soon realized they would have to collaborate on every sentence. Though several times they thought they could never conclude it, this book was finished by the end of '65. All the major studies had been published by then, so timing was just right. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Peter was soon after invited to discuss psychedelics with some writers from Life magazine. He remembers one lunch particularly, during which he repeatedly pointed out how Sidney Cohen, at that time considered "the expert" on LSD because of his book The Beyond Within, was misrepresenting experiments. Peter recalls Cohen remarking about LSD killing an elephant (something considered so revelatory by some that Jesse Stern in his The Seekers even devoted most of his first chapter to this). The elephant was probably killed by panic by the investigators, who pumped massive amounts of Thorazine into his ear. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| (Since then, Ron Siegel -- working under the original investigator, Jolyn West -- has given 300,000 mcg. of LSD to two smaller elephants than the one in the original 300,000 mcg. study. The result was that each was and is okay.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Peter was chosen over the white-haired doctor as consultant to Life magazine. In this role, he basically said "No!" to copy coming in from Life's stringers -- who had been asked to report about LSD use in their locales, and for the most part came up with "Police Gallery" responses. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Then Paul Krassner -- who had earlier told Peter he didn't "need" LSD, but later was to become one of its biggest gulpers -- recommended that Peter attend a psychedelic gathering in Toronto, Canada. When Peter arrived, he saw posters describing him as "Life Advisor on Psychedelics" and that the topic he was to debate -- surprise! -- was the right of everyone to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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