Nicholas Noecker wrote a short story about meeting Timothy Leary that he shared with me. It’s excellent, and he’s kind enough to allow me to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
— Russell Little
While rummaging in the attic, I found a tattered old book. I held it and stared…38 years ago I had an unlikely encounter with the man who wrote it. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. When I shared the story with my author-friend, all he said was, “Write-it-out.” Well of course! Sometimes, I think writers just want someone else to experience their pain.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
It was 1979, and Timothy Leary had revived his campus lecture tours of the ‘60s having spent most of the ‘70s in prison or on the lam. Leary was a ‘60s cult-hero who’d advocated using psychoactive drugs to expand consciousness. He was also a Doctor of Psychology, a celebrity, and an author. And he was at our campus to talk about his book, EXO-PSYCHOLOGY. Leary’s own description of it can hardly be improved: A manual on the use of the human nervous system according to the
instructions of the manufacturers. Not a word wasted.
EXO is a blueprint for the evolution of human consciousness situated outside-looking-in – a
radical shift in perspective. The design proceeds from the core of Leary’s claims: that we are in fact programmed to evolve beyond the physical, that we are destined to become “transhuman,” and that we will move into Space. It seemed outrageous at the time…and for good reason.
In the ‘70s, people were focused inward…on “Me!” The zeitgeist was quite comical and derided widely, to no avail. The “Me” thing was evoked hilariously in Disco dancing’s “How do I look? How am I doing?” moves, and with serial faux pas in movies like Saturday Night Fever. Tom Wolfe christened it, The “Me” Decade in an essay for New York Magazine. Then seemingly out of nowhere, Tim Leary returns to assert that our destiny lay outside ourselves. Outside Me?!
When Leary finished his lecture, Disco music began playing on the sound system – a theater of the absurd that could only have happened in the “Me” decade. The audience made for the exits with not one question for the aging shaman of cosmic consciousness. In minutes, teacher and students were worlds apart. It was Saturday night.
FISHIN’ with TIM
The auditorium was empty…except for Leary, me, and a stack of unsigned books. Leary was still at the podium in his t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes…and that signature grin. I walked down to the stage thinking, how could a man who’d spent his life peering through the doors of perception not see that the world had passed him by? Ten years earlier students crowded the stage when he finished talking. Tonight, he may as well have been lecturing on Third World debt. He walked over, sat down, and shook my hand. We had the stage to ourselves dangling our legs off the edge like kids fishin’ on a dock.
“I’m Tim,” he said. “What’s your story?”
A WALK in the DESERT
In the Summer of ’71, a friend and I journeyed to the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. We’d just finished high school and wanted to experience the mysterious Yaqui Indian culture before college made it invisible. Soon after arriving, our interest began to grow. We wanted to see the desert the way the Yaqui did. Our guides were two Yaqui elders – Juan and Genaro. We experienced a desert that few know exist. And we saw things you wouldn’t believe. When our journey was over, our guides left us at a deserted bus station with a different perspective.
“Now go…learn to see on your own,” they said, then turned and disappeared into the desert. We caught the next bus and began making our way home, our lives different somehow. Then Leary told me how it all started for him.
DAYS of FUTURE PAST
Leary’s journey to the desert began improbably as a Cadet at West Point. One day, he violated the honor code by refusing to report on fellow cadets for infractions he witnessed on his watch. At his court martial, he was astonishingly acquitted of all charges.
“Nick, it was the only fair trial I ever received,” he said utterly deadpan. “And then I was honorably discharged.”
Leary told me he enrolled immediately at University of Alabama for no particular reason, joined ROTC, studied psychology, became an honor student, then got expelled for staying overnight in the girls’ dorm. It was 1943, war-time. Leary was drafted immediately and ironically at the same moment a Swiss chemist named Hoffman was discovering for the first time the psychoactive properties of LSD. The future-past was unfolding at last. But still, Leary had yet to have a psychoactive experience other than his court martial acquittal and that night in the girls’ dormitory. Long-story-short, Tim claimed that after he got drafted, he was inexplicably promoted to Corporal and assigned for the remainder of the war to of all things, the position of Staff Psychometrician, in the Deaf Rehabilitation Clinic at Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Hey, that’s right down the road from where I grew-up!” I half-shouted.
“I was honorably discharged in 1946, and left Butler for good,” replied Tim with a twinkle in his eye. Booyah.
The 1950s could be called America’s ‘great leap forward’ and Leary’s career reflected that: PhD from Berkeley, founder of Kaiser Hospitals’ Psychology Dept, Director of Psychiatric Research at the Kaiser Family Foundation and publication of the widely-hailed book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality.
“After that, I became bored,” he sighed.
Tim was a sitting duck for a walk in the desert when he traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1960. Which is exactly what happened…
“I learned more about human consciousness after 6 hours in the desert than six years back in the lab,” he said, staring blankly into the empty seats. I could sense him reminiscing.
This is where it gets really interesting.
Upon his return, he and Harvard associate Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) started The Harvard Psilocybin Project. That’s not a misprint. They began their research on prisoners, switched to Seminarians, then ended where a lot of inappropriate things begin – with their students. With that, Leary’s far out ideas on human consciousness had taken him too far. Less than three years after his first psychoactive experience and still more than three before psilocybin became illegal, Leary told me he was fired from Harvard and never worked in academia again. I asked him if he regretted losing The Psilocybin Project. His answer shocked me.
“Nick, in this decade alone, I’ve been tried, convicted, and sent to prison, then broken-out of jail by the Weather Underground, kidnapped by The Black Panthers, then held captive in Europe by an international arms dealer, rescued by the Swiss government, then sent back home to serve out my time…and immediately released by a Governor whose nickname was Moonbeam. Who needs psilocybin?”
LEARY’S LAMENT
Tim told me he feared that The University, once a reflection of an ideal place where young people could explore, experiment, and learn – the last sandbox for matriculating minds – was in decline. For the rest of the evening all he could talk about was leaving Earth, moving out into Space, leaving it all behind, and becoming transhuman. It was he who’d passed the world by. Young people sneaking craft beer into their dorms today might find Timothy Leary to be an old stoner who lost it. And they might be right…but maybe not.
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN
Leary may well have been losing it. Transhumanism sure sounded crazy in 1979. Yet, what is happening today, right before our eyes? Gene therapy technology is on the verge of delivering life extension through reprogramming of proteins, genes, and DNA. The more we learn about the human genome, the more it looks like software. It is software. Human-machine interfaces are giving the handicapped, functioning limbs controlled by thoughts. Google has already invested billions in transhuman technologies. Eyes are turning toward space and seeing opportunity. Humans will move into space and we are becoming transhuman…just like Leary predicted long ago when Disco left him on the stage…with me.
Later that night, helping Tim carry all those books to his car, I couldn’t help thinking about the things we talked about: walking in the desert, life on the lam, transhumanism. I even wondered if Tim hadn’t gone to West Point, or spent that night in the girls’ dorm at Alabama, or gone to Cuernavaca, whether we’d have ever met. Or how it is that humans are about to journey into space while leaving human consciousness largely unexplored. 38 years later, I’m not sure we’ve progressed all that much in our understanding of a lot of things Tim took for granted. I’ll never forget his final words when he left me in that deserted parking lot.
“Nick, remember – turn on, tune in, drop out is just a temporal solution to permanent
problems…and it’s an impossible way to live.”
As he drove away, he tossed me a book and waved, grinning. I caught it and just shook my head. I couldn’t remember him signing it…but there it was. I hope I will always remember my encounter with Tim and that not so much time will pass before I think of it again.
NOTES:
My encounter with Timothy Leary really happened…I learned things about him that evening few people ever knew…I wrote the story the way I remember it…all the things he told me pretty much checkout from what I’ve been able to find…I didn’t know where Tim was going when he drove away that night – he wasn’t dressed for Disco-dancing – but recently I ran into a friend who was at the lecture, left, and ran into Leary later that night at The Texas Opry House, a music dive that specialized in Lonestar Beer in longneck bottles, and a place for which Tim was appropriately attired…after all these years, my friend and I finally wrapped the Leary and Me story in a most satisfactory way
The journey to the Sonoran Desert is fictionalized…somewhat…from time-to-time my friend and I talk about going back but we never do…it became invisible to us long ago
Not long after our encounter, Tim hooked-up with another ex-con, G. Gordon Liddy, one of the infamous “Plumbers” who went to prison for breaking into The Watergate office of the Democratic National Committee which led to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974…the two old Army Vets toured college campuses debating each other on higher consciousness, the military, the decline of the University, and the state of the culture…it wouldn’t happen today
Timothy Francis Leary “de-animated” on May 31st 1996…a year later his ashes were put into small bottles and sent into space on a rocket with Gene Roddenberry and 22 fellow voyagers…for all his faults, Tim remained a fearless explorer of unknown realms right to the end…RIP
Noecker, August 2017