Leary in Limbo

I carried my bag through the airport waiting room, gazing into faces, trying to look dignified, trying to transmit the message that I was the one. I was in disguise. That is, I was wearing a black suit and a black tie and my hair was slick and shiny with Dippity-do, combed back into a sweeping pompadour. A chauffeur spoke to me politely in French, but he had been sent to fetch some Spanish businessman he didn't know. A tall, thin woman wearing a dark-red midiskirt, long sleeves, a belt, boots and beads passed me by. I looked at her boldly, questioning, telegraphing. But she didn't respond. Then I saw a tall, thin man at the gate, speaking French with a very bad accent. He wore a turtleneck sweater and a brown-leather cap, the kind worn by Russian workmen. The woman in the red midi was with him. It was Timothy and Rosemary.

This was early last fall, right after the escape. Three months later, there was to be a question of what was going on over there in Algeria between Leary and Eldridge Cleaver. But right then Leary was a fugitive. My job was to find him. And the deal was that I couldn't snitch. Even if I had to do time.

There was some legal precedent for a writer's being able to keep his sources of information confidential. But the courts had ruled on it both ways. Contempt of court could get me six months. Aiding and abetting an escaped felon could get me five years. And since I was already an ex-convict, I would just have to pucker up and curl my toes, ready for that fabulous five. But suddenly the glowing bright blue of melodrama fell apart. The FBI knew where Leary was as soon as he made his first contact with the United States. And in three more days, he was going to hold a full-scale press conference: cameras, microphones, television and all.

They had a small rented car outside and, after going through some complicated money-changing maneuvers at the bank window, we drove off to Algiers, laughing, talking loudly, trying not to interrupt each other. I described some of the problems I had had in finding them, the ludicrous misinformation, the embarrassments, the discouragements. I described some of the screwball things a guy gets into while playing this free-lance-journalism game--the insults, the boredom, the bullshit, the one and only pistol ever pulled on me. My last job was a profile on a country-music freak and I spent two weeks with the hicks of Middle America, bouncing from one country fair to another. But I can be pretty cool when I have to be. Because I always know that in the end, I will have the last word.

Rosemary looked at Timothy and said, "Gulp." Timothy smiled at her. Then I realized that I had done it again. The best I can ever say for myself is that I am not very diplomatic. So I said so.

Timothy answered, "At least you're honest. You pull your gun out and lay it right on the table."

They were enthusiastic about Algeria, a truly revolutionary country, a member of the Third World, equally opposed to both capitalist and Communist imperialism. Timothy said it is the kids who are running the country and their eagerness and joy are a true inspiration. They had already found a house in the unspoiled, natural fishing village where they were staying and intended to lease it, fix it up and establish a center for revolutionaries in exile.

We had lunch at the St. George, a deluxe hotel high in the hills overlooking Algiers. We had some Cinzano and drank a toast: to freedom.

One thing was quickly settled. Leary's recent letter, a statement of allegiance to the Weathermen and violent revolution that had appeared in the underground press, was genuine. Completely sincere. Laughing happily, he said the John Birchers were the only ones who had really understood him all these years. They always said he was a subversive and a drug fiend and a revolutionary and a traitor and a criminal. And they were right on.

Leary moves very quickly but with a certain awkwardness. He is tense and vibrant, talks rapidly, laughs very often and punctuates every sentence with a broad smile and a fond glance at Rosemary.

After lunch, we zoomed down the hills, the little Renault bucking and swerving. Timothy parked downtown to tend to some errands. We got out and passed a beautiful building, part Moorish and part contemporary. A dome covered with tiles surmounted the entire vision, but it was a modernistic dome, something like a giant spool, unlike anything I had ever seen. To describe it properly, one would have to resort to the vocabulary of solid geometry. I expressed my admiration for the building to Rosemary, admitting that I respond to good architecture, especially the new stuff.

"It's the Catholic church."

Only then did I notice the very small golden cross on top of the dome. But Rosemary was very quiet. I had said something wrong, though I'm still not sure what.

We had a drink of Pernod in a little bar, Timothy very effusive and familiar with the bartender, who didn't quite respond. Timothy's French is just about as bad as mine. What little I know I picked up in the streets and cells of France and I haven't used it at all in many years. Timothy took a sweater into a dry cleaner's, then joined us in the car, saying he sometimes has trouble with the idiom and had used ça marche instead of ça va. The proprietor had marched around the room in a laughing parody of a wooden soldier. I tried to explain the difference when suddenly, Leary snapped with great impatience, "You're explaining to me my own joke."

I was too stunned to apologize. Oh, I have been snarled at. Lots. But, wow. Never by a prince of peace.

We drove out to the village of El Djamila, about 15 miles along the coast. No rooms were available at the Learys' hotel, because a Czech soccer team was in town, so I took a room nearby, with a window overlooking the beach. The room was very damp. There was no heat and no hot water and the bed sagged unbelievably. The rate was five dollars at both hotels and both were owned by the government. I was warned to drink only bottled water.

I spent a total of five days with Timothy and Rosemary. We talked in the village brasserie over coffee. We had dinner in the local restaurants. We walked. We went for brief excursions in the car. The conversation always rambled. Timothy seemed distracted by Rosemary's presence; he kept smiling at her and they held hands and spoke with each other of personal things with an intimacy that excluded everyone else.

Timothy seemed to understand the problems of the "new journalist," the need to expose one's self to exotic experience, to be able to groove on someone else's trip. He understood the challenge, the fatigue and the despair, the elusive myth of objectivity. He also understood the challenge to the interviewee, who has to get his point across to the writer.

With a laugh of easy confidence, he said: "What you are really going to write about is not me. It will be about yourself." However, he was upset that his people had let me come to Algiers.

For four days, I had submitted to a personal check-out. I was asked about my politics. They asked me if I was a head. They wanted to know where I lived, my religion, my education, my writing credits. They wanted to know if my marriage was a good one and if I had a close relationship with my wife and my three kids.

I was gently informed that I look exactly like a pig.

I used to be apolitical. But now I find myself one step to the left of dead center, and that step is gradually getting longer.

I submitted copies of several magazine articles I had written. I gave them details of my novel, "Cool Hand Luke," and explained just how the material had evolved from personal experience while building two years on a chain gang.

No, not parking meters. Safecracking.

After giving several references, both underground and overground, my vibe pattern was calculated and I was eventually accepted.

I flew all night but couldn't sleep, thinking of all those essays and books and interviews and articles that I had read.

Saint Timothy. Interviewed and written up forty-eleven times. Essayist. Lecturer. Psychologist. Drug cultist. Denounced by politicians, the police and the boohoos of every church. Scientist. Martyr. Founder of a new religion. Architect of a new culture. Psychedelic-showbiz personality. Jailbird. Guru. Candidate for governor of California. Saint Tim. Messiah of LSD.

I thought about the possibility that I might fail on this assignment. And I thought about my need to change planes in Madrid instead of the natural connection, Paris. Because I, too, am a fugitive. Twenty-three years ago, I escaped from a jail on the French Riviera. I didn't (continued on page 160)Leary in Limbo(continued from page 126) have to worry about being recognized; I am too small a fish to really worry about being sent back from the States. And yet, still....

... still.

Leary, too, asked questions about my family, and was impressed by the fact that my wife and I are very close. I asked him why everyone was so concerned with my family life. He said it was a matter of tantric tradition, the Hindu belief that a single man is only half a man, one of the reasons everyone has so much trouble with J. Edgar Hoover. He is a 76-year-old bachelor and is thus a unicripple.

So I was not entirely without redemption. At least I was an ex-convict. And I had a good marriage. I am also a Libra, like Leary. And we both knew Dennis Hopper, who played one of the convicts in Cool Hand Luke and was one of the few friends I made while out in Hollywood shooting the movie.

Timothy sympathized with my bad experiences out there. He himself had endured the same rape, the insult, the degradation. He admitted that Hollywood was the one institution he could never overcome. And he was impressed that I had dropped out of high school. Rosemary had also quit after two years. Timothy has a Ph.D., but all his close friends are dropouts.

Yet there is still a lot of the schoolmaster in him. I was constantly provoking his displeasure by not listening properly or by being obdurate. "I have tried to tell you something four times, but you keep interrupting." Again, while he was expounding some involved theory, I got lost. And then--bam! "What's the matter? Haven't you been listening?"

He told me some things about his escape but wouldn't give all the details. There was a key to its success that might prove useful to others, he said. Besides, he was already writing a book about it.

The planning took three months and was engineered by Bernardine Dohrn, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, tribal leaders of Weatherman and the SDS and all of them fugitives. Timothy was very proud of this and wanted to have their names published, so they could get proper credit.

There were 40 people involved. A fund of $30,000 was raised through contributions from dope dealers all around the country. The final nine-member escape group was commanded by a 19-year-old kid assisted by a ten-year-old. Four cars were used, all equipped with two-way radios.

The news media indicated that the escape was a mere walkaway. It was a "country club" joint, with minimum security, reserved for old-timers, good risks, assorted rats, finks and snitches, political cons of all kinds. But Timothy had to climb a 12-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire; and outside, five trucks with armed guards in the cabs patrolled in the darkness.

Suspicious of possible roadblocks, the four escape cars leapfrogged ahead of one another, radioing back when everything was clear. One car was given the job of leaving Leary's prison clothes in a gas-station rest room eight miles in the wrong direction.

He was joined by Rosemary, who had also been given a ten-year sentence but had been free under an appeal bond. Together, they were shuttled across the country, hiding out in a string of safe houses provided by the Weatherman underground. To board a plane for Paris 13 days after the escape--using false passports--Rosemary changed her appearance with glasses, make-up and a wig. Timothy cut his hair short. The center of his head was shaved to simulate baldness and the rest of his hair was dyed red. He removed his false teeth and his hearing aid, wore heavy-rimmed glasses and assumed a vacant facial expression with popped eyes. He was wearing a business suit and tie.

Meanwhile, O'Hare airport was in a security crisis due to an epidemic of skyjackings. New equipment had just been installed. New regulations were in effect. All hand luggage was thoroughly examined before boarding. Every passenger stepped between two shiny metal poles, a plainclothes security guard intently watching a dial that would detect large metal objects. It was the gateway to their freedom. They were about to be reborn, passing through this square, electronic vagina.

Timothy was told to stop, to back up, to walk through slowly. The guard watched the instruments, nervous, undertrained and inexperienced, paying no attention whatever to this funny-looking guy with the silly expression. Behind him stood Rosemary, unable to smile, unable to talk, unable to swallow because of the large ball of hashish she held in her mouth.

In Algeria, Timothy was never without his leather cap to cover his embarrassment. The gray was just beginning to grow back through the red dye and his bald pate was barely sprouting new hair.

He wore that cap to dinner the first night I was there. We ate at the Riva Bella, one of the few restaurants that had not been nationalized. Eldridge Cleaver had nicknamed the place the Robber Baron. Timothy waved and smiled and shook hands with all the waiters and bartenders, employing his rather ingratiating American-tourist puppy-dog style. We were waited on by the proprietor himself, an artful evader of legal food prices. A high-pressure sales-resistance fun feud had been going on for some time between him and the Learys.

The meal was well-prepared French cuisine. Everyone was in good spirits, Rosemary happily describing the house they had found right on the beach. The rent would be only 150 dinar ($30) a month, but it would take $10,000 for rebuilding and repairs. They didn't say how they expected to get the money. It had been the house of a local administrator before the Algerian revolution. It had been bombed and heavily damaged and had been vacant ever since. The local police station was on one side, they said, and the village whorehouse on the other. I questioned that one, knowing that Algeria is much too straight to allow whorehouses. Timothy just smiled. "What's the difference whether it's true or not? Everybody makes his own reality, anyway."

From several people who knew him over the years, I had heard that Leary wasn't the same person anymore. The first time he turned on, he was almost 40. He was charming, graceful, witty and clever. He was an absolute square and a stone lush. And then one day down in Mexico, he ate seven of those magic mushrooms the Aztecs had called the flesh of God.

Six years later, he had already taken 311 trips on psilocybin and LSD. He has averaged one a week ever since. He has become gaunt. His hair is gray. His conversation has changed. Some people suggest he has suffered permanent brain damage. The only way to prove it would be to cut his head in half, flatten it out and take a look.

Ten years after the village witch brought those mushrooms to the Harvard instructor's vacation villa, he was in prison, doing one to ten years in the California Men's Colony. His crime was possession of marijuana. He also faced a ten-year sentence in Texas. He was also accused in New York on charges that could have brought the total to 28 years.

He had been denied bail while he appealed his sentence, on the grounds that his writings and his lectures made him a menace to society. The Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional. But California stalled and kept him in stir anyway. Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, was being held in the same joint in the maximum-security wing. They kited notes back and forth.

In prison, Leary was given a psychological-profile test. It was one that he himself had designed while working at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital.

We got to talking about revolution and I was surprised to hear the hard statements coming from these sweet, gentle, laughing people who spoke so often of love and peace, to feel the intensity of their emotions, to be witness to the shrill intransigence of their position:

"Every policeman is an armed, fascist, bully murderer. If he is not, he should take off his uniform and quit. No one can be friendly with a pig, any more than you could be friendly with a Nazi. It is war. It is our nation against the U. S. Government."

Timothy said he would not become a foot soldier because of his age and because he is a Libra. But philosophically, he said, he is even more radical than the Weathermen. And then the statements that seem so sad in the light of subsequent events: He is completely behind the Black Panthers, he said. He believes Huey Newton is the greatest American who has ever lived. The white race has created all the problems of this world, but the leadership of the future will be colored. America is lucky to have such men as Cleaver and Newton. They are generous and they are forgiving. Unlike some other black-nationalist groups, the Black Panthers are not racists. The Weathermen, by contrast, are "acid revolutionaries." They live in the tribal style and they represent activists rather than intellectuals. Their ages are between 18 and 22. Unlike the old-guard Jewish liberals, they are from the Midwest, they are middle class, in very good physical condition and very beautiful. One of the inside jokes is that your father must earn at least $30,000 a year for you to be a Weatherman.

I tried to raise certain questions. Even if violence is not the wrong tactic, is this the time for a full-scale revolution? The right wing is infinitely more powerful. They have the guns and the manpower, the money, the law, the church and the organization. They have also captured the American flag.

The response I got had nothing to do with strategy. It was raw emotion. Rosemary spoke about her own willingness to off a pig in order to defend her personal freedom. Timothy listened to her, smiling, his eyes sparkling, offering his open upraised palm in the "right on" position, Rosemary slapping it lightly, automatically, without interrupting her blazing attack directed at me, the representative of the establishment press, the square enemy.

"Wouldn't you fight to keep from going back to prison? To defend your wife and children from extermination?"

They accused me of having the old hang-ups. To think in terms of military posture, to pause to evaluate, to consider tactics and power and timing; all this in itself is part of the system.

"But do you really believe in violence?" I asked.

"Violence? Who's violent?"

"Blowing up police stations and banks?"

"You call that violent? The bombs are against property, not people. We want to trash the machinery of the establishment. It's the pigs who are violent. In the black ghettos, in North Korea and in North Vietnam. One person was killed in the bombing in Wisconsin, yes. But it was an accident. No one was supposed to be in the building that day. And the Weathermen apologized for that."

It is an unfair question to ask if they can really win or if they are beyond caring whether or not they can.

"All that stuff you're asking is politics. What we're talking about is war."

Timothy called himself a "loyal patriot of the future internation." He would possibly permit the robbery of his personal property. But he would kill to defend himself against any danger to his freedom. He admitted the Weathermen may eventually find that attacks on people will be necessary, especially if the pigs continue their present tactics as demonstrated at Kent State and at Jackson, Mississippi. They are now holding back deliberately to demonstrate their potential power.

"If ten teenage Jews and liberals had blown up a Nuremberg beer hall with Hitler and a thousand storm troopers inside, they would have been applauded. And this would have encouraged the Germans to rise up and do likewise. In the very same way and for the same reason, the Weathermen might blow up St. Patrick's Cathedral with five thousand pigs inside."

Timothy said, "I would not urge or tell anyone to off a pig. But I would support, defend and glorify such an act on the part of someone else."

After dinner, Rosemary felt tired and went up to their room. Timothy and I went for a walk. The rainy season had begun and the road to the fishing port was puddled and muddy, the air damp and cold. We walked out onto the breakwater, looking at the boats, smelling the fish nets, feeling the wind. He remarked that the place looked like Portofino 25 years ago, before the tourists hit it. This was considerably exaggerated, but I had learned not to contradict. Briefly, we played a landscaping game. On which cliff would Howard Johnson's go? What about the Holiday Inn? The billboards?

He described how he and Rosemary had lived in a tepee for two years on a mountaintop beyond Palm Springs, without electricity and without running water. They would get high and be able to look all around them and see nothing that was man-made. Sometimes they were raided by the fuzz, but they were always tipped off by an informer at police headquarters. Before they split, they carefully left love notes behind for the pigs.

Timothy is infatuated with playing fugitive, just as hip cons are in love with the game of cops and robbers. He especially likes put-ons. He once deliberately spread a rumor that he was dead, assassinated by the CIA.

Timothy said LSD is man's most important discovery since the invention of the wheel. We were back to that again. I didn't really give a shit about the dope question. Everyone knows as much or as little about the stuff as he cares to know. And as for mystical experiences, I have had all the visions I need.

As a merchant seaman in the Persian Gulf, India, North Africa and the Far East, I smoked various vegetations: hashish, kif, ganja and bhang. But I never liked the stuff and now I am off drugs completely. That means no alcohol, no nicotine, no caffeine. As for others, they can do whatever they like.

I am now 42. I am a nudist. I believe in the natural high of sun, sex, diet and exercise.

A wanderer by profession, I am on a long-distance wisdom trip.

We walked back to my hotel. I asked Timothy if we could discuss his earlier life. In most of those articles about him, there was virtually nothing about his formative period. If he didn't mind. I had no intention of doing a cheap Freudian analysis. But his personal background would be very interesting, what it was like when he was a kid.

Timothy was thoughtful. He said it might provide him with some new insight into himself. He has always been involved with women and with sex, but no writer has ever inquired about it. Sometime when we were alone, I said, somewhere quiet. Fine, he said. But we never did.

I went up to my room. A night club was in full swing right below, playing hick Algerian versions of hard rock. I crawled under the dirty quilt, shivering as I read the book Timothy had lent me. Cleaver's Soul on Ice. And then the lack of sleep caught up with me and I passed out.

But that was the end of my visit for Rosemary. From then on, it was a soft and gentle snub. Her eyes were always elsewhere, her preoccupation far away. Whereas Timothy would get testy and impatient, her hatred came out in beautiful, sweet control.

Later, Timothy admitted that they felt I had come to rape them. And I was too old. He found it difficult to communicate with anyone over 25. But the greatest obstacle of all was the veneration gap. I admitted that, yes, we did have that problem.

But beneath the cool, there was something else, a smell, a vibe of fear. And beneath my disappointment, I felt a painful swelling of sympathy. Because this was a heavy game. They were, after all, in exile, fugitives marooned in the exotic world of straight reality. And when Timothy spoke nonchalantly about being able to return to the United States by 1973 because things would be changed by then, I had to turn my eyes away.

Timothy took me to see their house. We walked over the heaps of rubble into the rear yard and then carefully inched our way up the ruined back stairs to the upper terrace, an immense hole gaping open to reveal the location of a bomb blast. I was appalled. They had spoken so eloquently of the quaintness of the place, the charm. But it was ugly, a total mess. And the beach was a mere strip of dirty-gray sand.

Timothy telephoned Elaine Klein about locating an architect. She is the patroness of the American exiles, Jewish but anti-Zionist. In Paris, she was very helpful to Algeria during the revolution and, after independence, she went over to accept a government position. She persuaded a high official to give sanctuary to Cleaver. He, in turn, offered protection to the Learys.

We had some wine back in their hotel room, using fancy new glasses that Rosemary had bought, along with some hand-woven blankets, for their new house. She spread some grass mats on the balcony and we sat outside, listening to a portable cassette player. The Jefferson Airplane quickly gained altitude as Rosemary crossed her legs in the lotus position, closed her eyes and moved her head and shoulders with the music. Timothy fooled around with some dumbbells that weighed only about ten pounds each. His body is very thin, his muscles stringy and undeveloped. Yet while in prison, he was the white handball champion.

Timothy showed me the beads and crucifix he had worn when he went over the fence. Grinning, he started to hang them up on the wall. Rosemary frowned and protested that the maids would see them, that the Catholics had fucked up Algeria enough as it was. I looked at some of the books in the room, most of them lent by Cleaver. There was a two-volume life of Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, a paperback of Revolution for the Hell of It, inscribed on the flyleaf, "To Tim and Rosemary and all the children of the planet. Happy Halloween--Abbie."

Rosemary is a beautiful woman. She is 35, tall, slender, graceful. But she seemed fragile and showed signs of strain. Her kidneys were bothering her, unaccustomed to the wine, the heavy food and the strong coffee. She was looking forward to having their own house and their customary simple diet. In spite of herself, she sometimes broke into enthusiasm in quick, unexpected flashes. I even managed to get a right-on hand when I spoke of Hemingway's fake machismo. But then I ruined it. I asked Timothy what specific changes the revolution would bring. If the war were won tomorrow, what would American life and government be like?

"Oh, come on. Don't you know the answer to that? Don't you really? You sound just like the chamber of commerce. That's the first question the establishment always comes out with, 'Who's going to mind the store?' "

I tried to avoid his gaze of scorn, my eyes coming to rest on a little bottle of yellow pills on the night table, medicine, probably, but I didn't dare ask. He explained that there were plenty of people who could really groove on electronics or fixing car motors, just because it was their thing. It didn't mean that they had to become plastic, materialistic robots.

Privately, I wondered. Would it be that easy to find someone who really grooved on hauling garbage, sweating in a steel mill, going down into the mines? I knew for a personal fact it wasn't going to be that easy to get guys to go to sea.

Timothy mentioned using cocaine and heroin in jail. I didn't know they also favored the hard stuff and I was dumb enough to say so. They both stared at me in astonishment. The distortion of time is the most important characteristic of LSD, infinitely more life experience being absorbed in any period, which is ideal for happy occasions like honeymoons and celebrations. But the narcotics are advantageous for fast-time needs: operations, unhappiness, bad weather, jail. Man has learned how to program his own nervous system with his new ability to play a pharmaceutical organ on his own consciousness--up, down, fast, slow, sharp or dull. He can become passionate. He can make himself fertile or sterile. He can become spiritual. He can make himself sleepy, ecstatic or dead.

Timothy cheerfully admitted he is just getting into the women's lib thing. He, too, had his troubles with male-ego hang-ups, the symbols, the sexual identities. Nothing seemed to amuse him more than the awareness of his own growth, feeling his own life force struggling against the evil of complacency, decay and death.

Gradually, in bits and pieces, I was able to get him to make statements about the postrevolutionary future. There would be an immediate end to the Vietnam war. There would be total disarmament. The drug laws would be repealed. The CIA and all other forms of secret police would be eliminated. There would be no forced busing of school children. (To Leary, this is still another case of mechanical, slide-rule thinking, socialist bureaucracy run wild.) There would be no compulsory education. Formal schooling would be only for those who had a sincere desire to go into a professional field. The concept of materialism would be rejected and there would be a return to the natural man. Socialism would be swept aside in favor of a tribal system of society. The individuality of national, cultural and religious groups would be recognized. All industry would be put underground. The forest would return. New York City would be reserved for living purposes only, the streets returned to grass, each block a part of the new tribal division. The United States already has the technical resources to be able to simply give everyone adequate food, medical services and housing. All that is lacking is the willingness. The necessities assured, deliberate labor would be only for the luxuries. He also said, "Eventually, we'll do away with money."

The hedonist revolution would counteract the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The proper use of LSD would break the old cycles of the consumer-advertising-demand-slave machine. The postal service would be turned over to private enterprise. So would the administration of social security.

One thing was obvious; Leary believes in the basic goodness of man. His thought is like every other system of reform. Once the obstacles are removed and "society" is purged, once they knock off the squares, the pigs and the heavies, then man will ascend to his natural state of grace and everything will groove. There will be cooperation among men, instead of competition. There will be play instead of work. There will be chemical ecstasy instead of prayer.

Timothy laughed in that special way of his. "I told Eldridge Cleaver about the twenty-one-hundred-dollar interview fee I demanded from Playboy and offered to give half of it to the Black Panther Party. But Eldridge said, 'What do you mean, half? You're supposed to give all of it to the party.' And I said, 'Yeah. Right on.' " He laughed again. "What we'll do is, we'll take Playboy's money and buy dynamite."

Softly, Rosemary objected. "No. We'll buy breakfasts for the kids in the ghettos."

Cheerfully, Timothy agreed. I asked him which it was going to be, then, dynamite or milk.

"Oh. The Panthers never dynamite. Maybe we should build an atomic submarine in the Bay of Algiers."

Again, he laughed in that quick and disconnected way that could not be called a giggle but a nervous chuckle, perhaps.

It was always tricky to discuss anything for long. Trying to commit him to a quote, to argue, to reason or to question was like trying to deliver a right cross to a butterfly. Catch him in a contradiction and he would laugh at me for being so serious, and then--"Everything we do is a put-on."

I had been warned that he was a master at games. And there I was, trying to catch a multi-armed Vishnu octopus who jetted backward through psychic seas, leaving clouds of black ink hanging suspended in the currents, confounding all enemies as to his true shape, his ultimate size, his exact location. Oh, sure. I had plenty of notes, quotes and anecdotes. But it was all the official line of bullshit, one long string of hyphenated bumper-sticker slogans.

We went for a drive to the Club des Pins, a compound a few miles up the coast designed for foreign businessmen and diplomats. Timothy had to find some official concerning the leasing of the house. Rosemary and I waited for him in the car. Conversation was difficult. Her kidneys were still bothering her, but there was also that something else.

We went shopping in some of the government stores. Rosemary looked at a black burnoose of heavy felt priced at $35. She decided to wait for a better color, perhaps blue. She bought some more mats, a Sterno-type stove and some beach towels made in Red China. Timothy laughed. "We'll sit on them and read the Thoughts of Chairman Mao." He was upset when I admitted I hadn't read the book.

We drove off to another village, going into a hardware store to find a teapot. And then from somewhere outside, we heard the long, slow, sacred wail of a muezzin calling for evening prayers, the lilting chant coming up from the very bottom of the Islamic soul, pleading its commitment to God, wafting inside above the groan and mutter of street traffic, the clatter of pots and pans.

On the way back, Timothy admired the color and the size of the rising moon. He spoke of being a member of the Red Sun Tribe, the Weatherman group from San Francisco. He and Rosemary have also been initiated into the Navaho nation and Crazy Horse's tribe, the Ogallala Sioux. They will eventually have someone bring in a supply of LSD from the States. Meanwhile, they have to be careful about getting drugs in Algeria, not wishing to upset the puritan attitudes of the orthodox government.

Back at the hotel, we had a drink of Pernod from the bottle I had bought. I was breaking my vow of abstinence. But by then, I really needed it. Timothy got out a guidebook to Algeria, showing me a description of Bou Saada (City of Happiness), about 150 miles to the south on the edge of the Sahara. There were open bazaars, folk dances, an oasis, mosques, craftsmen and ancient streets, all surrounded by mountain peaks and sand dunes.

Timothy and Rosemary discussed driving down for a few days to explore, to get high, to perhaps even buy a house there instead of the one at El Djamila. I asked if I could go with them, thinking that on an independent adventure, fresh from the beginning, we could have something uniquely ours. And if they insisted on turning me on, why not? What better place to have my nervous system illuminated than in the City of Happiness, the sacrament administered by the King and Queen of Space?

But the laughter and excitement over our ceremonial glasses lasted only a few moments. We had had a spontaneous flare-up of enthusiasm and warmth and then it was gone. Rosemary's kidney pain was back. Timothy and I went up the street to get her some milk and fruit. He repeated his standard performance with the kids running the grocery store, everyone in turn getting a handshake, a smile and a slapstick pantomime. Rosemary was in bed when we returned, looking wan but still very pretty, fragile yet very tough.

Timothy and I went down to the port to a smoky, simple, crude and smelly restaurant, sitting on a terrace overlooking the fishing boats. We had wine, tiny shrimps and a small local fish, rouget. With his cap and his turtleneck, he looked like some romantic international smuggler. It was a strange dinner. He was in an arrogant mood, all dignity and hardness, sitting very erect and dictating. He thought I made a mistake by not bringing a tape recorder, so that I could get down every word, scowling as I scribbled away with my pen.

All in one breath, he spoke of the zodiac, electricity, Christ, the location of energy, where the action is, the sporadic central role of the United States in world affairs. I suggested that perhaps this is a continuation of the original American Revolution, a second wave of idealism after a long lapse of principles. But Timothy said this was too chauvinistic. He did agree that the United States has taken materialism to an ultimate degree and has now created its own reaction. "Americans are the only people on earth who have two cars in the garage and two TV sets and can't get a hard-on. We are the only ones who know about the dangers."

Timothy said he has always been a psychologist trying to learn what man is all about in order to learn happiness. The discovery of LSD has altered the entire concept of man's nature and represents the single greatest contribution to its understanding. Just as Copernicus' discovery that the world is round helped lead the way to the Reformation, LSD has changed science, theology, culture and politics. It is now known, he said, that every man and every woman is God. But each individual must find his own inner reality. Originally, this was a Hindu idea, but they merely said it, whereas LSD actually does it. Thus, LSD has also become a religion, its followers making up the largest group of full-time true believers. The militant vanguard that is so important to the infidel world is only the tip of the iceberg, "the final Zen point."

We ate and we drank. Timothy smoked and I made notes. Whenever I tried to make a comment, he cut me off with a snappish "You said that already" or a disdainful "Don't lay your trip on me."

He said that he is generally considered to be a leader of youth, but that actually it is just the opposite. The kids have consistently taught the Learys.

He also told me, "I am probably the wisest man you will ever meet."

He described the ideal tribal unit, which would consist of 12 men and their families, although two men could be single, representing the homosexual element and the wanderers who transpollinate seed among the various tribes. This would also set up a certain challenge to family security. Man is always at his best when at the brink of danger and discovery. Boredom and security soon become death. Before marriage, sex experimentation would be encouraged. After marriage, sexual mores would depend upon the tribe's nature and desires. Ideally, all 12 men would have different zodiac signs to counterbalance each other's personalities.

Back at my room, I tossed and twisted on the cold, damp bed that sagged and buckled, listening to the hard thump of the night club below me.

And then came Friday. Timothy showed up at the brasserie three hours late. He doesn't have a watch and is always losing track of time. This is symptomatic of psychedelic drugs and is also part of the Taoist philosophy. Things can't be made to happen, they must be allowed to happen, naturally, when propitious circumstances have arranged themselves. He was wearing a bathing suit and his leather cap, quite cheerful about the progress of his book. We walked to the beach, where Rosemary joined us, her hair long and loose. She took off her flowing robe, unrolled a straw mat on the sand and sat in the lotus position, facing the sea, as she did a series of yoga stretches. We sat there for a while in the sun, swatting at the swarms of flies. Rosemary's back remained turned and Timothy was practicing his French with one of the local people, discussing the vagaries of the rainy season and the tourists who used to come to El Djamila.

Wordlessly, Timothy and Rosemary went for a brief dip. I waited. But they didn't return; they walked up the beach, out of sight. Finally, I went up to my room. I chewed on a piece of bread. I drank some Pernod and looked down through the balcony railing. Timothy and Rosemary had returned, their feet black from the gobs of oil that had washed ashore from the passing tankers. They were kissing and smiling at each other.

The Czechs had left and a room in the Learys' hotel was now available. I moved and spent the rest of the afternoon reading and drinking. I was depressed. I was exhausted but couldn't sleep. I was constipated. Thoughts of revolution kept whirling through my head: social reforms, peace, the brotherhood of races.

I forced myself to knock on the Learys' door. But they were cleaning the oil off their feet with gasoline and Timothy wanted to work on his book. I went back to my room. Later, he knocked and announced that Cleaver was coming out for dinner in a couple of hours. He wanted to talk and was anxious to meet me.

But two hours after that, there was another knock. Eldridge would be along later and we should all go ahead and eat. Timothy and I had some Pernod and we talked awhile. He told me I had been granted a great honor to be allowed to see him. "Let's face it. You're the writer of the month." But he felt I was unprepared, too naïve about drugs, mysticism and politics. Using the new-speak of 1984 just as well as Agnew, he called me a Bolib, an old-line-bohemian-drunk-labor-union-liberal. He intended to raise hell with his friends who had let me come over. Perhaps I should telephone Playboy and admit that the assignment was too big for me. He chuckled. They could even run an ad in the underground press and get together a collection for my family as compensation for my trouble. Ready to take him up on it, I asked if that was what he really wanted. He hesitated a moment and went back to his room to ask Rosemary. He returned with her message: "Why doesn't he stop being such a whore for the establishment and go on welfare to feed his children?"

Timothy and Rosemary and I went to a restaurant called Dar-es-Salaam (House of Peace). It was dark and the prices were very high. There was a third-rate rock band, a strobe light going on and off every three minutes sharp. It was about as hip as Palm Beach during the hurricane season.

The Learys smiled and gazed into each other's eyes. They spoke to me whenever Timothy thought of another amusing title for my piece; like, "How the Learys Turned Me On in Spite of Myself." As for the message, "Our only regret is that we didn't take a thousand times more dope than we did." Sweetly, smiling, Rosemary reminded me that they could have put some LSD in my coffee. I smiled back and told her I had already thought of that. But then she hurriedly changed her mind and said, "No. We never do that."

Rosemary said she was from St. Louis. When she was young, a wild time consisted of going across the Mississippi River to East St. Louis. Her first husband was an accordion player. She said he was there in Algeria someplace. Leary and I both stared at her. Then she added, "Where else could an accordion player make it?"

Timothy had more writing suggestions. He said the timpani of my piece should be the moment they were buying the teapot while, outside, the muezzin was calling evening prayers, Instead of asking questions. I should invent a new form of creative journalism. I could write down a complete myth and then they could live it out. He went on with his scam saga, chuckling something about space molecules and earth gravity. He and Rosemary were time travelers. Their bodies were not really their own. They were going to join the Bedouins and live with the sun, the sand and the stars and travel back to the past instead of to the future.

I had come to Algeria as a journalist. It was supposed to be questions and answers. Opinions. Projections. Quotes and unquotes. But Timothy wouldn't play. Instead, he and Rosemary giggled, grooved on the menu, ordered wine and got up to dance, she moving slowly and gracefully, like a moon-goddess; he, jerky and nervous, all elbows and heels. In between, they stared into each other's eyes. They were playing honeymoon. My game was wallet carrier.

Timothy and Rosemary have been married five years. I was told by a close friend that she is his third wife. A second marriage lasted for seven months. His first wife committed suicide when he was 35. Jack, his son, is now 20. His daughter, Susan, is 22. Jack has been busted 14 times. Leary's mother is still alive. I had been refused permission to see her.

Leary is an only son. His father was a career Army officer. Leary studied at Holy Cross for two years, then quit. He was at West Point for 18 months. The Irish: politics, religion, sentimentality.

In his book "High Priest," he described his very first trip. He suddenly quit his psychological-research-director's job at Berkeley and went to Spain with his children, aged nine and seven. They wandered for the next four years in Italy, France, Denmark and Mexico. He. referred to this period as one of slow death. He didn't once mention the death of his wife.

Die and be reborn. Death and resurrection. Leary's works constantly clang with the repetition of the death motif. You die with LSD. But you are born again into a newer form. Karma. Avatar. More and more of the sacred satori. By dying just a little at a time but then resurrecting himself, he maintains control over that awful and final trip. He endures the little death. He flirts with it, casually, laughing.

We left Dar-es-Salaam. Eldridge still hadn't come, so we decided to have a drink at El Djamila, an establishment even darker, even louder. I ordered rum, which is fighting liquor, the pirates' favorite. This joint was middle-class Algeria and I didn't like it. Timothy went off to dance with Rosemary. He kept on his leather cap but took off his shoes, moving barefooted in an old, creaky style, like a shipwrecked fisherman washed ashore at Woodstock. The locals were really with it. A woman danced with a man. Without her veil. A man danced with a man. Everybody looked at his own feet. And then three men danced together in a big triangle. I ordered more Cinzano for the Learys and rum for myself.

And then, suddenly, Timothy came up behind me and murmured that Eldridge was outside but didn't want to see me, probably because he was with another woman. And then he was gone. The muezzin and the teapot might prove to be the timpani of my piece, but this particular riff was being led by the kazoo section.

I paid the check and went back to the hotel. I paced the room, went out on the balcony, had some Pernod, cussed and swore. I began to feel a rising urge I hadn't known in years--the desire to trespass, to steal something in anger.

I opened the door carefully, sneaked across the hall, put the rim of a water glass against the Learys' door and my ear against the base. I could hear voices inside, very faintly. There was a deep, slow, rumbling baritone that had to be Eldridge. There was a woman's voice, clearly enunciated, educated, perhaps European. But I couldn't make out any of the words. I slipped away, glancing down the stair well as I tiptoed back to my room for a plastic glass with a larger diameter. But all I could hear was the precisely transmitted sound of a flushing toilet.

I went up the stairs to find the door to the roof, moving with that predatory silence that only a master prowler can know, my heart pounding with that ancient intoxication. I moved to the rear of the building, checking the windows in the neighboring houses, asking myself if perhaps I hadn't been playing cops and robbers too long, whether, during the rapture of the game of transgressor, I had not somehow become enslaved by my own rebellion. I had become a moral hybrid, half fuzz, half thief, dancing my creeper's dance from door to hallway to stairs to rooftop, trying to swipe words, boosting ideas, dipping information.

When I leaned over the edge of the roof, I could see lights reflected out on the balcony. I could hear voices. But the words were overwhelmed by the sounds of El Djamila across the street. Quickly, I went over the side, grabbing a water pipe with one hand, my foot on a molding, my other leg dangling, hanging there, drunk with wine, Pernod, rum Negrita, drunk with plot, with intrigue, drunk with Africa. But the script was all wrong. I couldn't hear a thing. A sudden shower began. The oxidized paint on the hotel wall was coming off all over my clothes and shoes. And then very loudly, inadvertently, I broke wind.

As if in answer to that pig dangling from the edge of the moon, El Djamila broke out with the camel-shit-kicker version of Lucy in the Shy with Diamonds. Simultaneously, a large billow of smoke came belching out of Leary's room, thick with the strong, sharp, unmistakable stink of burning pot, wafting out over the balcony and up to the rooftops, the stars and the zodiac, overwhelming the man from Playboy who struggled helplessly, caught in the intoxicating clouds of revolution.

And within those magic vapors, he finally achieved his ultimate vision, seeing Timothy and Rosemary illuminated in their quintessential identity, an intergalactic messiah in omnisexual form sent on a mission by the energy council to bring the supreme gift of time dust to the planet Earth. When our blue and our purple are finally turned electric, they will then embark on still another odyssey, wandering into the desert wilderness for their rendezvous with the vehicle that will transport them through time and through God, back to forever from the very beginning.

• • •

Things have changed. The fragile synthesis of mysticism and revolution has come apart. Since the time of this writing, Leary tried to contact Al Fatah as part of a Weatherman mission of solidarity with the Arab guerrillas. But he and Rosemary were denied entrance to Lebanon and also Jordan. Egypt would allow them to stay only long enough to get a plane back to Algeria. And then Timothy and Rosemary were put under house arrest--by Eldridge Cleaver, who published a statement in the underground press.

On January the ninth of 1971, I issued an order to Field Marshal D. C. who works in our Intercommunal Section here in Algeria to go to Leary's apartment and to take Leary and his wife, Rosemary, to another location and to confine them there until further notice.... Just say that on January the ninth we busted Leary. Leary is busted. And here you can see him busted, him and Rosemary.

What I'm saying here also applies to the Jerry Rubins, the Stew Alperts and the Abbie Hoffmans and the whole silly psychedelic-drug culture, quasi-political movement of which they are a part and of which we have been a part in the past, which we supported in the past, because it was our judgment that at that time this is what we had to work with from white America. But we are through, we are finished relating to this madness, we are through tolerating this madness; and we want everybody to know that the serious work of uprooting and destroying the empire of Babylon with its vicious fascism and imperialism, this has to be dealt with, in the only way that it can be dealt with, by sober, stone-cold revolutionaries motivated by revolutionary love--men and women who fit the description given by Comrade Ché Guevara: cold, calculating killing machines to be turned against the enemy.

They were released after five days. There has been no answer to Eldridge's charge that Timothy's "mind has been blown by acid."

Meanwhile, Cleaver and Huey Newton have read each other out of the Black Panther Party. The party newspaper--controlled by Newton--accused Cleaver of murdering his wife's lover, beating her and holding her prisoner. Cleaver has dismissed those charges as absurd.

Timothy Leary is once again in prison. After escaping from the cells and the bars of "Amerika," he finds himself in the larger confinement of Algiers, nervously pacing back and forth, surrounded by a puritan religion, an ascetic culture and hostile politics, denounced, ignored, his psychedelic dreams reduced to black and white.