The Drifters (59 page)

To take her trip required about seven hours, and during the latter half of that time the other five young people searched for her, and grew increasingly apprehensive when they could not find her. It was Cato who first thought of the English fellow at the bar, and sure enough, when he and Britta went there to make inquiries, the waiter said in broken English, ‘She come here. Now his room I think.’ When Cato flashed a jealous anger, the waiter laughed. ‘Not pom-pom. Sssttt!’ he said, and he shot an imaginary hypodermic into his arm.

For five escudos the waiter showed them where Churchill lived; it was on the third floor of a very old house
overlooking the ocean, and as they reached the door to his room they could hear Monica moaning and laughing inside, with Churchill’s whining voice assuring her, ‘It’s going splendidly. Everything is all right.’ When Cato pushed the door open, Britta entered first, and saw Monica lying mostly undressed on an unmade bed, her head rolling backward off a pomade-stained pillow, her eyes much dilated and apparently crowded with abnormal visions.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Cato shouted, to which Churchill merely said, ‘Ssssssh. Mustn’t waken her abruptly, must we?’

‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ Cato shouted, lunging at the reedy Englishman, who quietly stepped aside. ‘Don’t be an utter ass,’ he said. ‘She’s coming out of her trip and needs quiet.’

So Cato and Britta sat on the floor and watched as Monica slowly returned to near-normal reactions. ‘It was so spacious,’ she moaned repeatedly. She offered no other description of her trip; it was merely spacious in a majestic sort of way.

‘You’d better tell the others we’ve found her,’ Cato suggested to Britta. After she left, he started dressing Monica, who oscillated between a normal control of her senses and a reversion to her trip. When she finally realized where she was and with whom, she gave Churchill a kiss, crying, ‘You dear, dear boy! Ten times better than you said.’ And her first words to Cato set the pattern to which she would stubbornly return during the rest of her stay in Portugal: ‘Cato, you’ve got to try it! The colors … the sensations … God, to have sex at the height of a trip … Cato, we must!’

When they got her into the pop-top and back in Alte, where the air was fresher, her head cleared and she said rationally, ‘It isolates and expands the senses. Of course, you still have only five, but each one seems twice as important as the others. I remember looking at the uneven plaster on the wall. Slight bumps became mountains. One broken area became the Alps, each speck of plaster a peak by itself. I heard Churchill saying, “It’s going beautifully.” I heard the words. I understood them. And I was aware that I understood them. You know, you’re aware the whole time. You’re aware of everything.’ She paused, remembering the effect of Churchill’s words, then said,
‘Only three words! But they formed the noblest oration I ever heard. It was as if he were the real Churchill, with Hitler and Mussolini thrown in … a fantastic orator. It took him about fifteen minutes to say “It’s going beautifully,” but all the time the multitudes were cheering. God, how they cheered.’

She returned to her intense proselytizing. ‘Kids, you’ve just got to try it. Really, that first time in Torremolinos with the dike … that was nothing. But to take it seriously … with Churchill there to steer you … a real spot with a place to lie down sensibly. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had. I’ll tell you, it was twenty times better than good sex.’

She insisted that Britta and Gretchen accompany her on her next trip, but they begged off. Yigal also declined, and Joe said, ‘You must be nuts.’ She did, however, persuade Cato to join her, so three days later they walked and hitch-hiked into town, with the understanding that we’d pick them up about ten hours later.

When Britta took us to Churchill’s grimy room, we found Monica and Cato naked in bed, with Churchill leering over them. ‘This is one trip they’ll never forget,’ he assured us, and when they returned to Alte their report substantiated his prediction: ‘Have you ever wondered what sex would be like, strung out for twenty-four hours at peak perfection?’ Monica asked, and Cato replied, ‘It ain’t bad.’

So the pressure of the proselytizing continued, with Britta under fire one day, Yigal the next. When Monica insisted one morning that Britta try LSD, because it would expand her mind, the Norwegian girl replied, ‘My mind expands every morning when I get up and see that sun. You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never been in Tromsø through the winter.’

Yigal was more harsh. ‘I’m having trouble with calculus. I sure as hell don’t want to muddle up what little brains I’ve got,’ and Monica cried, ‘You’re just being chicken, chicken, chicken,’ and Yigal stared at her, but Joe said, ‘I don’t think you have the right word, Monica. Not for this little bantam rooster.’

In irritation Monica turned to me and asked, ‘You worked in Asia, Uncle George, where they know about expanding the mind. What do you think?’

‘I can’t understand why anyone would take such risks
with an unproved drug,’ I said, but again Joe cut in: ‘Because she’s a damned fool.’ This occasioned much discussion, with Monica claiming, ‘It’s a new development of the human race. Hell, Uncle George, you couldn’t be expected to understand. It wasn’t even discovered till 1938. Nobody tried it till 1943.’

‘How do you know?’ Joe asked.

‘Churchill told me. He makes it for the whole Algarve. Gets his chemicals from Switzerland. But the point is, it’s a new experience and you can’t dismiss it until you’ve tried it.’

To my surprise, this reasoning took root in the one mind that I would have judged least likely to be receptive. One morning Gretchen came to me as I was talking with Joe near the stone poet, and said, ‘Uncle George, I seek a favor. You’re to watch over me while I try LSD.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’ Joe asked.

‘No, but I want to be. I suspect Monica’s right. This is a vision of the future. It could be a whole new pattern of life.’ She looked down at her hands and said, ‘God knows I don’t approve of the pattern I have.’

‘You think LSD offers a solution?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think anything. But I’d like to see for myself.’ Again she looked down at her hands. ‘What I need is a vision of the world—a consistent vision in which things fall into place. I can’t devise it by myself.’ She fought to choke back a catch in her throat. ‘By myself, I simply can’t do it.’

‘LSD won’t do it either,’ Joe warned.

‘But it might.’

She was so insistent that I finally consented to drive her into Albufeira, where we found Churchill, gray and pasty as ever, his thin hair plastered down on either side of his forehead. Gretchen said, ‘Monica sent me. She said you’d supervise …’

‘This morning I’m busy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Gretchen said, and her disappointment was so obvious that Churchill took my arm and said, ‘But, if he’s willing to stay with you, no problem.’

‘I know nothing about LSD,’ I protested.

‘You don’t need to know anything. Just sit with the subject and reassure her from time to time. You see, the imagery becomes quite involuted, and a point of reference is required.’

He convinced Gretchen of this theory, clinching it when he said, ‘Anyway, you’ll be taking only half a spot, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He led us to his third-floor room, and as I stared out at the ocean he took from his wallet one of his spots, held it against the light to see how much LSD it probably contained, tore it neatly in half and handed one portion to Gretchen, with the command, ‘Allow the rice paper to dissolve in your mouth, then swallow it.’ And he was gone.

As Gretchen held the fragile paper in her hand, I tried one last time to dissuade her from tampering with her mind. ‘You don’t need it,’ I assured her, but she repeated the refrain that people my age were hearing throughout the world: ‘How can I tell until I’ve tried it for myself?’ I grew impatient with such reasoning from a girl of her ability, and growled, ‘Doesn’t education teach you that some things are to be taken on the wisdom of the race? Suppose you were pregnant and wanted to use thalidomide to relax your tensions, and I told you, “From the horrible consequences we’ve seen in Germany we know that thalidomide ought not to be used by pregnant women.” Would you, in spite of the evidence, feel that you had to prove the facts again for yourself?’

Like the intelligent person she was, she paused, looked at the paper, and analyzed what I had said. From the way her eyes narrowed, I judged that she was agreeing with my argument, and I expected her to tear the paper up. Instead she shivered and said quietly, ‘You can’t even guess how miserable I am. If LSD holds even a remote possibility of providing an answer …’ Defiantly she popped the paper into her mouth.

She kept it there for about a minute, during which she told me, ‘At least it doesn’t taste bad.’ I saw her swallow and expected some kind of quick reaction, but none came. She remained totally normal, and for nearly an hour we talked about the camping trip from Torremolinos to Portugal.

Then, suddenly, she was asleep. For about an hour she lay inert, and I could not help seeing what a lovely, well-proportioned girl she was. She lacked the conspicuous signs of beauty but possessed such a harmony of appearance and liveliness and personality, you knew that in her late forties she would be more beautiful than any of the young lovelies now surrounding her, for she would mature with
all components of her being commensurate with one another. She was one of those young women to whom good things ought to happen.

At the beginning of the third hour she began to twitch slightly, and moaned, ‘It’s so magnificent,’ and a kind of kinesthetic movement took control of her body, as if great waves were passing through the room, affecting first her head, then her shoulders, then her torso, and finally her feet. Quite obviously she was in the grip of a force she could not control, and would not for the next four or five hours. Remembering my instructions, I assured her, ‘It’s going splendidly.’

Apparently, I was close to the truth, for she continued to mutter phrases like ‘magnificent,’ ‘so gentle,’ and ‘the colors, the colors,’ and these words lulled me into a kind of relaxed dozing. From what I could see so far, LSD was generally beneficent and I began to wonder if my presence was needed.

Accccchhhhh!’ came a scream from the bed. I leaped out of my chair to see Gretchen torn by some wrenching force that literally jerked her head in one direction, her torso in the opposite. She went into a wild convulsion, screaming only the horrible ‘Accccchhhhh!’

I tried to pin her shoulders to the mattress, and in this way we struggled for some time until the passion diminished, whereupon she went limp, sobbing quietly to herself and shivering in great contractions that tensed her body in reverse waves from her toes up to her head. During this time she said nothing. Even though I was terrified, I tried to reassure her, but she did not hear.

In this cycle, repeated three times, the next two hours passed and my apprehension grew, but as the fifth hour began, she subsided again into her benevolent sleep and entertained once more the visions which had given her so much pleasure before, and I judged that the crisis had passed and that she would remain quiescent for the remainder of the trip. I was glad that I had been there for the bad hours and wondered what she might have done in the grip of those great passions she had been alone.

The room was quiet. Suddenly she uttered a scream much more terrible than before, then went into convulsions that racked her body and against which I was powerless. It was hideous to see their effect upon her:
face distorted, shoulders jerking, arms and legs thrashing, and over all, the screams of a girl in torment.

It was now that I began to sweat—rivulets running from my armpits, ugly and sickening in their smell—as I wrestled with the sleeping girl. Try as I might, I could not hold her on the bed, for alternately her head or her feet would slide off to the floor, twitching and writhing as if they had separate lives of their own. Her clothes became torn, and at one frightful moment I began to laugh hysterically, I suppose because all I could think of was that she looked like one of the debauched Egyptian whores in the banquet scene of a Cecil B. DeMille movie.

Now for the first time she uttered the word
death.
She said it first in a low, croaking voice, then with increased terror, until the little room seemed filled with the presence of Death himself, come personally to take her. She pleaded, writhed to escape him, begged me for help, aware of my name and the fact that I was with her. Her face became ashen-gray, and for some moments she went into a catatonic trance which I interpreted as death, or its near approach.

‘Gretchen!’ I shouted, slapping her about the face to bring her back to life. I was now sweating all over; my hands were wet and slipped away as I grabbed at her shoulders to shake her.

‘Death!’ she cried repeatedly, adding a pathetic plea, ‘Uncle George, don’t let me die.’

Whatever I did was useless, and with anguish I watched her come close to dying; her breathing seemed to stop, her extremities grew rigid. I found a glass, filled it with cold water, and threw it in her face, but this had no effect except to make her hair look stringy and snakelike. Her mouth fell open and her tongue protruded, and she looked hideous.

Anguished, helpless, I went to the head of the stairs and started yelling for Churchill, cursing him, holding him to blame for this disaster, but of course he did not reply. He was selling his spots in Faro and other seaports along the coast.

When I returned to the bed, Gretchen had surrendered to a passive state which in some ways was more terrifying to me than the active, for now she moaned that she was beset by snakes crawling across her body, their cold heads twisting under her armpits and down her flanks. The
glorious motion that had seduced her so pleasantly at first had degenerated into snakes, whose writhings induced new cries of terror.

‘God, God, take them away!’ she pleaded. Her forehead was covered with perspiration that glowed in the darkened room and she continued to quiver as the snakes attacked her.

‘Kill them!’ she pleaded, and once when I went to the bed to try to quieten her, she clutched my hand and begged me to find a broom There would be one in the corner. I must use it to drive away the snakes.