The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (61 page)

Terence and others encouraged me to pay this Texas fellow a visit, which I did. He was a smooth talker with big plans, but the cult-like atmosphere of the operation put me off. It seemed to be a kind of commune where MDMA was consumed more or less constantly. There was something a little strange about the whole thing; and although MDMA was not yet scheduled there were already rumblings that it soon would be. Outside a secret plan for world dominion, I wasn’t sure that producing several kilos of MDMA every week in semi-automated laboratories was such a good idea. For one thing, it was bound to attract the attention of the authorities sooner or later, and I wanted to make my living legally. But after enduring relative poverty for years, I was certainly tempted. About that time, in May 1984, I was invited to a conference on psychedelics at Esalen, on the topic of “Technologies of the Sacred,” along with Terence, Sasha, Stan Grof, and other psychedelic celebrities. It was a marvelous, stimulating event. Having just completed my work on ayahuasca and
oo-koo-hé
, I had something to contribute to this community, but I wasn’t sure how to turn my knowledge into a legitimate career.

The situation temporarily resolved itself when I got a call from Dr. Charles Thomas, director of Helicon, a small, private, nonprofit foundation in San Diego dedicated to investigating the relationship between nutrition and cancer. Somehow, Thomas had gotten one of the many resumes I’d mailed out before leaving Canada. He had funding for a project to investigate the relationship between dietary selenium and cancer. There was epidemiological and demographic evidence that a diet rich in selenium could prevent cancer, and he had a theory that selenium prevented mutations. He was investigating this by using mutation-prone strains of yeast, and needed a postdoc quickly, and invited me down for an interview. My qualifications were nil, except that I knew sterile inoculation techniques from all my previous work on mushrooms, so I figured I could do as well with yeast. It was a gig, and a way to get back to the States, so I accepted his offer.

I returned to Vancouver, packed up the Merc, and drove the battleship south for the last time; I barely made it to San Diego and traded in the car as soon as I did. I quickly found a small house fronting a back alley in a San Diego neighborhood known as Normal Heights. (We used to joke: Is it a place, or a state of mind?) Sheila had stayed on in Vancouver to work over the summer and joined me in the fall.

I settled in at Helicon Foundation, which was located in a large warehouse in an industrial district of San Diego. Thomas was an eminent Harvard-trained molecular biologist and virologist. His father had been chairman of the board at Monsanto, so he had some family wealth. Helicon was Charlie’s plaything. He didn’t need the money or any outside funding; the foundation was a platform for him to conduct any research that caught his fancy. Some of the work was quite solid, and some of it was less so. Thomas belonged to a small coterie of scientists who believed that the virus known as HIV was not the cause of AIDS. In this, he’s had some pretty good company, including Berkeley cell biologist Peter Duesberg and Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, a key developer of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methods that revolutionized molecular biology. I’m not qualified to say whether there is any validity to such ideas. Most mainstream scientists consider AIDS “denialism” to be a crackpot conspiracy theory; then again, when it comes to questioning accepted dogma, mainstream science can be as hidebound and close-minded as the most fundamentalist religion, as anyone who has worked in the field of psychedelics will know. The fact that Charlie was among this group of heretics tells you a lot about the guy. He was a pain in the butt of orthodoxy. We liked each other on that basis alone. That may have surprised us both, considering how much he offended my liberal sensitivities, and how I surely must have rankled the conservative in him. We maintained a productive, if edgy, relationship. He was not without a sense of humor, and I think he was at least a competent scientist even if he did have funny ideas about AIDS.

A proud father and his two sons on Dennis’s wedding day, 1984.

Soon after, Sheila joined me in San Diego. The time had arrived for us to formalize our relationship and get married, in part so she could apply for a green card and find a job. Both Sheila and I were recovering Catholics who wanted nothing to do with Roman Catholicism. Instead, we made plans to get married in a local Gnostic church with a laid-back, sandal-wearing pastor. It was a perfect fit for us. The Gnostic faith seemed more genuine and less revisionist to us than our childhood religion. The Gnostics, after all, were the real deal, and perhaps even mushroom cultists in the distant past. This little church specialized in weddings; that’s how they supported themselves. They’d perform the simple ceremony and sign the certificate, no muss, no fuss, and they wouldn’t be coming after us to attend services or otherwise take part in their community.

We had a very sweet, and very small, wedding in October. Dad and his wife Lois were there, along with Terence, Kat, and their kids, our friends Mike and Ellen from our UBC graduate student days, and Iris Pugh, who together with her late husband Truman had taken Terence in for his senior year in high school in Lancaster. We had the reception in our backyard. We stayed overnight at a local bed and breakfast—our honeymoon—and the next day the entire family went to the San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park. It was about as low-key (and cheap) a wedding as one could hope for.

And with that our lives resumed. Sheila found a job in a long-term care facility, which wasn’t the most desirable position, but there were no jobs available in acute-care hospitals. As for me, the Helicon gig was just that, a gig. I had no particular interest in the work; I was an ethnobotanist, after all, and saw my career path as lying more in that direction. I started plotting my next move almost as soon as I got to San Diego.

It was only after we had moved to San Diego that I started to benefit, indirectly, from Terence’s growing fame. When Roy Tuckman learned that I lived in San Diego, he invited me on
Something’s Happening
a couple of times, so that afforded me my first modest entry into the public arena. Later, in 1986, with the help of Terence and one of his Hollywood friends, we organized a conference in Santa Monica called “Hallucinogens in Ethnomedicine.” Terence was a featured guest, along with Luis Eduardo Luna and Douglas Sharon, the director of the San Diego Museum of Man. Sharon had become a minor figure in the psychedelic pantheon thanks to his book,
Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shaman’s Story
, published 1978. That turned out be a nice little gathering, though far less influential than the earlier Santa Barbara event.

In 1985, Luis Eduardo Luna invited me to present a paper on my work on ayahuasca at the forty-fifth International Congress of the Americanists, to be held at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia that July. He had organized a satellite symposium on ayahuasca and invited me, along with a number of established anthropologists, including Michael Taussig from Columbia University. I was the only botanist or phytochemist to be invited. Luis Eduardo had been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Peru every summer with his mentor, Don Emilio, and teaching during the winters in Helsinki. Together we presented a paper combining the ethnographic data we’d collected, mainly from Don Emilio but also from other informants, on the “plant teachers,” or
plantas que enseñan
, with the phytochemical and pharmacological data I had collected, mainly through extensive literature reviews.

In the
vegetalismo
tradition, ayahuasca is at the center of a vast pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants that are used either as admixtures to the brew or by themselves. Like ayahuasca and its most commonly used DMT-containing admixtures, all these plants are regarded as intelligent, and the apprentice shaman must learn their properties by keeping a strict diet and consuming the plants, either alone or as part of ayahuasca. In this way, the plants will “teach” the apprentice their properties and uses in curing. Some of the plants in this traditional pharmacopoeia are among the most toxic and biologically active plants known from the Amazon, so it is not surprising that they possess a complex chemistry and pharmacology, even apart from their spiritual qualities.

Eduardo and I had collaborated on this paper before I’d left UBC, and we presented it at the conference. We submitted it for publication in the symposium proceedings, and it was published in Spanish in the prestigious journal
America Indigena.
Later, an English version was published in a book co-edited by Schultes entitled
Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline
(1995).

I also presented another paper on my chemical and pharmacological investigations of ayahuasca and some of my work on
oo-koo-hé
. Both of my papers had been recently published in the
Journal of Ethnopharmacology
, and I was quite proud of the recognition my work had gotten. My pride quickly withered, however, when Michael Taussig launched into a thirty-minute polemic, in Spanish, that was basically a criticism of reductionist science and the absurdity of my presumption that studying the chemistry or pharmacology of these plants could ever explain anything of significance about them or their true role in ethnomedicine, that all this work was bullshit and I was a fool and charlatan (not to mention a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry) for having the temerity even to show up at this symposium, and that I should be publicly flogged, if not executed, on the spot for being the contemptible piece of shit that I was. Or something like that. I understood very little Spanish at the time and could not really defend myself against this tirade, which was probably merciful or I would have been even more mortified. It was a useful lesson in the viciousness of academic discourse, and probably in my need for humility. Many years later, one of Taussig’s students was in an ethnobotany course I taught in Ecuador, and he suggested that I should not have felt singled out for persecution. Taussig treated pretty much everyone that way, he said; it was just his style of discourse.

It didn’t really matter. I had come back to South Americ a for bigger things than simply going to the conference. I had managed to raise enough funds to support six weeks of collecting in Peru following the conference. Eduardo had invited me to visit his ancestral home in Florencia, and I spent some time there after the conference. I then headed south to Iquitos, where I met up with two Iranian guys who had seen my talks in San Diego and were interested in learning about ayahuasca and mushrooms. They had agreed to pay part of my travel expenses if I’d act as their guide for a couple of weeks and show them the ropes. This went quite smoothly. By then Nicole was living in Iquitos, in a small casita inside a walled pension owned by the Schapers, an old Iquitos family, and we were able to stay there as well. Mushrooms were easy enough to find in the pastures out along the highway, and we connected with a good
ayahuasquero
for several satisfying trips. The Iranians left happy.

Eduard and I had arranged to meet in Pucallpa after I had finished in Iquitos, and I flew there and checked into the beloved El Pescador out near Lago Yarinacocha. If corporate had sent down a memo to upgrade the place, it had gotten lost in the mail. The hotel was as basic and shabby as it had been on my visit four years earlier. They’d added another porcelain toilet, which was perpetually clogged, and a small cantina with
cervezas
that were more or less chilled, so I guess that qualified as improvement.

The purpose of my trip was to reconnect with Francisco Montes Shuña, the cousin of Pablo Amaringo whom Terence and I had originally met during our search for the elusive
chagropanga
in Tarapoto. Francisco had moved back to Pucallpa, and over the intervening years had collected live specimens of many medicinal plants, including a good selection of the “teacher plants” that Eduardo had been documenting. I planned to purchase these specimens from him and import them to the States, clear them through the USDA facility in Los Angeles, and then ship them on to Hawaii. The plan was for Luis Eduardo to join me in San Diego at the conclusion of our trip, pick up the collections in L.A. and transport them on to Hawaii. All of this involved a lot less red tape than it would today. Terence and Kat were temporarily living in the house they’d recently built on the Big Island and were eager to receive the specimens.

A secondary goal of our work in Pucallpa was to introduce Luis Eduardo to Don Fidel, the
ayahuasquero
with whom both Terence and I had met earlier. Luis Eduardo had been spending time with Don Emilio and other
ayahuasqueros
in his fieldwork around Iquitos but had yet to visit Pucallpa. The visit was a chance to renew contact with Don Fidel and benefit from his remarkable insights and skills.

The most significant event of our stay in Pucallpa was unanticipated. I had taken Luis Eduardo to meet Francisco and his family and look at the plants he had for us, ready to ship. Afterward, I suggested we stop by Pablo Amaringo’s house, and we were lucky enough to catch him. Thanks to Luis Eduardo, I learned a number of things about Pablo I hadn’t gathered during our previous conversations. The big surprise was that Pablo had been a powerful
ayahuasquero
years earlier, but had given up that practice after getting into fights with other shamans,
brujos
, on the astral plane.