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By Root 1136 0

to the West Coast, Bob Wilson and I got together a few times alone. He was a tall, handsome Texan who dressed in formal, dark clothes. He was my age, just a little younger, but his demeanor, that of an Eastern European diplomat, was ageless. Paul Schmidt, a poet and Russian scholar, had lived with Wilson for one year right after Wilson got out of the Waco high school and Schmidt finished serving in the army. Schmidt claimed that Wilson spent the whole time arranging their few sticks of furniture down to the last millimeter—and indeed Wilson’s striking stage tableaux depend on precise and innovative lighting and sets and even props.

Keith and I worshipped everything being done by Bob Wilson, including his 1976 staging of Einstein on the Beach with music by Philip Glass. It was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House and to us felt like the premiere of an opera by Wagner—something awesomely new and revolutionary, a new chapter in the story of the human spirit. It wasn’t the music so much that impressed us but the ingenuity and grandeur of the stage pictures. I wrote an article about the event for Christopher Street in which I praised the opera at the top of my lungs. I’ve never felt foolish afterward about my enthusiasm; I’m just happy that I had the wit to recognize at the time the advent of one of the great artistic moments of my generation, though I was far from alone in my praise. The opera was five hours long and people were free to come and go as they liked; I recall there was a sound booth from which one could watch and hear the performance while chatting to friends. Many people (stoned, to be sure) stood in the aisles weeping. Yet the whole event was cool—a train, a trial, a rocket launch. In many of the sections the chorus merely sang numbers over and over (“one, two, thirteen…”)—not a bad liturgy for Einstein. The rumor was that the cost of mounting the production burdened Wilson with an enormous debt for the next decade.

LSD was an occasional part of our lives in the 1970s. I would never have dreamed of dropping acid every weekend or even every month or even every half year. For me it was too big an event, a quasi-religious ceremony, and far too dangerous. Acid was much stronger in those years, lasting for twenty-four hours and sometimes driving people we knew around the bend. I remember one weekend at a house out on Fire Island when our host discovered that he’d invited too many guests and didn’t have enough beds for everyone. His solution was to mix LSD into the drinks, unbeknownst to the guests. Then he pulled a few mattresses and pillows into one room, which he declared the kiddies’ room, and herded us all in there gabbling and sobbing and laughing for the next twenty-four hours. We went on a stroll around the community, which at least had no cars so we couldn’t get tangled up in traffic and damaged, though I suppose we could have gone swimming at midnight and drowned. We visited one house where the house pet was an Irish wolfhound the size of a pony. Though the dog was so sweet he was called Baby, his demonic owner decided to terrorize us by showing us his enormous claws, as big as a pterodactyl’s, and saying, “He could tear you apart with these—just rip out your throat.” We were so infantilized by hallucinogens, we sobbed at the thought and our teeth chattered with fear.

Everyone, I suppose, has different notions about how much drug use constitutes abuse. In the early 1990s a French psychiatrist interviewed me and wrote an article about me as a typical drug addict of the 1970s. I thought she was overreacting, though I humored her since she was so keen on her article. In the 1970s I almost never bought marijuana but I’d smoke a joint if someone offered it, usually about once a week (not often by human standards though excessive for a presidential candidate, it seems). Over the decade I probably went on twenty acid trips maximum, none of them good but all of them memorable and life-changing. I didn’t know people rich enough to afford cocaine, though occasionally a well-heeled trick would get me high. Most