1968: Timothy Leary threatens to ``go over to Tommy's side'' if he doesn't get Maynard Ferguson's furniture back from the Buddha of the Future.
1963: The Age of the Assassins begins in America. William and Thomas Mellon Hitchcock finance and promote Psychedelianism on their 2,500-acre estate at Millbrook, New York. Teenage queens fail to behave in a manner to which the author has become accustomed.
1960: Patchogue, Long Island. The author, in his fifth year as a school and clinical psychologist, takes half a gram of mescaline sulfate, with the usual consequences.
1963: First visit to the Mellon Hitchcock estate. IFIF. The Castalia Foundation. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Drs. Leary, Metzner and Alpert and the supporting cast of the early days. A professor of art from Cornell loses track of which side is which.
1964: Cambridge. IFIF. Lisa Bieberman. The Psychedelic Review. A eulogy for Aldous Huxley. The author gets stoned and loaded with Alan Watts.
Easter vacation at Millbrook. Lost in an isolation closet.
Solipsism and synchronicity. Enlightenment is a gas. Ideas of reference are where it's at.
Dick Alpert's photos of co-educational shit-ins. A trip with Tim aborted by Susans who think I'm bananas. Did Herman Hesse smoke edelweiss or what?
A candle explodes, threatening universal urination. The Zmms; Snazzm, Fazzm and McPozzm are introduced and defined. William Mellon Hitchcock hopes to use LSD ``to make more money on the stock exchange.'' Tim says the author is having a bad trip.
Fired by a Person person. The hidden hand at work. A visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A refusal to love shit, despite Tim's recommendation.
Morning Glory Lodge on Cranberry Lake. The Neo-American Church, foundation and former and present doctrines and practices of. Peyote to the people.
Millbrook. Tim's in Nepal with a Swedish model of aristocratic lineage. The author finds it hard to believe that, in Iroquois, ``Poughkeepsie'' means ``Place of Overflowing Shitholes.'' Hollingshead twirls. Ralph pulls out joints. The author reads a sermon on digestion to paying visitors in bed sheets. A Psychedelian PTA meeting.
Millbrook. Bombed with 1,000 mics. The Kundalini experience.
1965-66: Summer at Cranberry Lake. Winter in Miami. Back to the lake. Visitors, including Jack Kerouac, appear for sugar cubes and conversation. In Texas, a Sado-Judeo-Paulinian (these people are not ``Christians'') punishment freak sentences Tim to 30 years in prison because hemp was discovered in his daughter's pants.
Fun and games in the palaces of the ruling Sado-Judeo-Paulinian serial killers and mass murderers of Washington, D.C. A territorial dispute with a hireling of the American Medical Association, who has a point, sort of.
Meat Hook Baird, M.D. tells the Senate of the United States that acid heads are skinny, bespectacled, hedonistic runts with covert and overt homosexual conflicts, pugnacious noses, receding chins and marked ``gratification complexes.'' The author, front page news, causes Bobby Kennedy to foam at the mouth.
Stabbed in the back on the home front.
Marijuana goddesses galore. Bill Haines and the Sri Ram Ashrama are introduced to Timothy Leary and the League for Spiritual Discovery. Hired by a funny farm in New Jersey, but there are blackbirds on the left.
Really stabbed in the back on the home front. Billy Hitchcock tries to help, but Tim would just as soon not have another drunk around.
The author, a cockeyed optimist, finds something good to say about delirium tremens.
How not to live over a white-lightning run. Jail. Back to Millbrook. You're as good a man as I am, Bali Ram.
January, 1967: Tim's in California. Haines is in charge of the Big House. All present are accounted for. The author recovers.
Under the benign tyranny of William Haines, a.k.a. ``Sri Sankara,'' a fun time is had in the Big House by Leaguers and Ashramites alike.
Bob Ross, goat lover vs. the author and Otto H. Baron von Albenesius, sheep herders.
A crazed dentist disgraces the Neo-American Church on the West Coast, but the author excommunicates the rotten bastard. A sociable trip in the Meditation House.
Tim decides to return, despite a deal he made with the despots of the Place of Overflowing Shitholes to never do so. He demands that we evict Rudy and Jackie first.
They are driven forth and the author gets their room. The Bombardment and Annihilation of the Planet Saturn and Divine Toad Sweat, Bloated House Organ of the Church. The Mysterium Tremendum on $5 a day.
``The view from that room was lovely when snow was falling, a hushed surround both brilliant and subdued, which, for all its detail, gave little hint of what century or country we were in.''
Barefoot Michael Green, Bill Haines and the author are invited to the Bungalow for drinks. Then Bali Ram (shod in gold slippers), Bill Haines and the author are invited to the Bungalow for a trip.
Suzanne and Aurora are fixing the drinks?
``The needle leaked. Tee hee.'' Oh well, in for a dime, in for a dollar.
Holy shit!
``What do you think this is, Sham? The Calcutta bazaar?'' Wendy's offer to strip is accepted, on a trial basis.
Tim returns, but too late. Things have changed. Is ``Victory Over Horseshit!'' a ``gentle love message''? Does Tim have enough clout with the Hitchcocks to evict the Ashram? No, to both questions.
Peggy Hitchcock throws a ``Psychedelic Seder'' at her town house in New York, for which Bill Haines and author prepare the punch. An Episcopal priest sees the light. The Neo-American Church gets the Gatehouse.
The Kriya Press of the Sri Ram Ashrama prints 2,000 copies of The Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook. Tim's ``review'' thereof. Moonlight madness and the Mellon millions.
Billy Hitchcock and the author, now boon companions, do not entirely succeed in resisting the artful wiles of ruthless adventuresses who seek to enmesh our souls in the toils of carnality.
Egalitarian primitivists are all over the place. Tord moves in. The author appears on the ``Allan Burke Show.'' It becomes clear Tim would rather rule in Hell than share Heaven with the likes of us.
The great Fourth of July party of 1967. Champagne Charlie Rumsey, Joe Gross, M.D., Huntington Hartford and daughter, Cathy, dedicated missionary bee hee.
A fast forward to a contrasting, occultist kind of party in California in '68. Back to 1967. Tim evicts an East Village, freeloading, female freak from the Bungalow.
The author is the sanest person on the property? According to Tim and a public poll, yes. Tim pronounces himself a charlatan. Susan is upset, but a Monster Virginian Mellon of Pennsylvania, or vice versa, is delighted to hear it. Capitalism in action.
Wendy and author tie the noose. So do Howie and Betsy, with Pat O'Neill dancing naked on the Big House roof at the reception. The repetition compulsion is bad news.
The Sado-Judeo Paulinian Voodoo-Catholic Republicrat Racketeer-influenced Corrupt Organization of Slime Mold Slugs from the Place of Overflowing Shitholes orders its minions to assault us, women and children first. Tommy deeds territory to all three persecuted sects.
Little Billy takes Orange Sunshine. Suzanne is accused of indecent exposure. The author barfs on a limo, and other mopping-up operations.
The author claims to have loved every minute of it, even when he was barfing on the limo.