12, to go
Later Leary visits the locals, pacing among the fifty-odd guests, forever picking up things and intently examining them, zooming around a table heaped high with food, ducking between whizzing, whispered "there he is's. "
Finally he sighs, removes the heavy buckskin jacket and plops in a vacant corner, ravishing a pale plate of brown rice.
He looks up from his rice ravishing to discover he is being cornered for what is no doubt his umpteenth underground newspaper rap.   Yet, he remains quite civil, rather polite, and very direct.
200, and do not pass go
Leary that night lauded marijuana as "God's greatest gift. "
No false prophet he, the self-titled "High Priest" practices   what he preaches, practices very, very hard.
Very, very high priest.
Asking Leary questions is like shouting down a maze of dark corridors. He seems to call almost constant meetings of the various Timothy Leary's: public,  private, man, myth, man-child and father.   By Dr. Leary's own count, his various selves have held 500 extended get-togethers.
Eventually, the answers  thump and thunder out of Leary, the first words tiptoeing out like cautious elves who finally break into club-footed canters, only to fall under the weight of huge rumbling word waves.
At 49, Dr. Tim is well aware the generation gap is  definitely not a national park.   His ideas on bridging the chronological chasm^
"Every young person must turn on one or two grown-ups every year. " Amazingly quick mouthful of brown rice.    "Kim Agnew's got to turn on her father. "
Timothy Leary bogarts numbers. ( )
Leary burrows into a second plate-full of brown rice.   He seems to be rushing.   Dr. Feelgood is also running, the latter activity aimed at the gubernatorial mansion in California.
If elected Leary promises "to govern as little as possible. "
The prototype for Leary's California dreaming is "Woodstock, I mean huge groups of people just walking around grooooving on each other, stopping to work two to three months a year. "
This somewhat less than minor reshuffling of the state life style would produce "a coming together of the states of doing good and feeling good. We wouldn't base our actions on externally-determined rewards, but, instead, on what felt good. "
How did Leary bridge the feel good-do good gap?
"Well, " he begins, then cocks his head, scratches the gray hair wrapped
blue-tail fly
over an ear, registers perplexity, then amusement, hears the footsteps of approaching elves, beads those small dark eyes back up and chortles, "I just started getting high more and more often. "
33 1/3, on the second deuce
The Who's "Tommy" comes blasting through two gargantuan speakers in the front room.   The questioning becomes more difficult.   Leary leans forward to decipher our mumblings, as he is deaf in one ear.
The umpteenth underground interview experience is further complicated by Leary's bothersome right leg, which seems to stiffen with sitting.
Periodically Leary rises to stretch the gimpy leg, doubling his volume to enable his still-seated inquistioners to hear his answers.   Each time he relieves the stiffness in the leg his words are greeted by several feminine, restrained, very thin "ooh's. "
The bum leg, the deaf ear, all bring it home that this man, at 49, and Harvard-educated has been arrested eight times in four years for alleged violations of American drug laws. Between Leary, son Jack, 19, daughter Susan, 21, and wife Rosemary, the family has totaled twenty arrests, with Jack obviously a chip of the old sugar cube, matching his father's bust totals. It seems the family that holds together folds together.   Kids do the darndest things.
49 years,  8 arrests,  one bad leg and a bad ear.   He speaks more directly to youth than most of their peers, yet, as the proverbial saying goes, he's old enough to be their father.
Whichever side of the fence you're on, this is a remarkable thing.
5, at least
Leary feels that conservative guru William Buckley , may occassionally turn on."
"Of course, " he adds, "Bill's a real American (by Gawd? ).   I'm sure he goes outside the five-mile continental waters limit before lighting up. "
In 1966 Leary teamed with fellow Harvard psychologists Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert to write "The Psychedelic Experience, " a moving, probing description of the loss of human ego.
Alpert has since moved on to a non-drug meditation scene in India.
Leary says of Alpert  "Yes, Richard is a Hindu holy man now.   I hear he's got a rather good hash.   Of course, that's nothing like the acid experience. " His verbal view of his former colleague drips with sarcasm.
On the other hand, author Ken Kesey and Leary have been anything but bosom buddies.   In fact, if anyone rivals Leary as day-glow dada it is likely the charismatic, colorful Kesey.
Leary's early coolness toward Kes-ey's freaky tribe is well documented in Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. "
Since that early icy impasse, Kesey and Leary have made contact. The meeting was amicable, according to an observer, but "they spent a lot of
time feeling each other out, pacing around the room like dogs sniffing each other. "
Of Kesey, Leary says"Ken and I were always very close. We don't get to see each other very often.   I just admire him tremendously. "  His reply has a tape-recorded,mass-produced sound.
2, with grits
"Easy Rider" notwithstanding, there may yet be hope for good ole Southern boys.
Timothy Leary, alternate life-style leader-parking meter, spent two years of his academic vassalage at the University of Alabama, hardly the bastion of doctrinaire freakdom.
The deep South stint doesn't fit into Leary's media image as mystic guru and psychedelic denfather and he knows it.   The incongruity of the memory amuses him and he laughs almost continuously while recounting it.
"Man, I spent two years in a Jesuit College.   As if that wasn't enough, then I spent two years at West Point. I hadn't seen girls in four years and I wanted to go to a state school with co-education.   I went down the list alphabetically and Alabama was first." ,  "Everyone said,  'You don't want to go there,  its a damn country club. '" Leary throws open his arms in mock adoration, giggling "I said 'I , know,
I know,  LET ME IN THERE! "'
He throws his head back, eyes closed, howling at his own humanity.   It is a nice touch, the same relaxed feel you got when you found JFK ate breakfast in his underwear and at one time told the present Mrs. Onassis, "Jackie, you shouldn't be upset by the news coverage of your riding accident. After all, when the first lady falls and busts her ass, that's news. "
49
Leary rips into a second mug of hot tea, slurping loudly, savoring the flavor, feeling the warmth of the mug, caressing it like vintage Owsley.
Although the Leary myth empahsizes his spirituality, he seems more a hedonist, though not in the pejorative sense of Playboy plastic.
Rather, he seems to immensely enjoy little things like hot tea and brown rice, reveling in his own senses and feelings.
Perhaps this is, in the truest sense, spiritual.
30
Needless to say,  Leary's biological clocks, those little whazits that say "eat, " "sleep, " and "relieve yourself," are awry.
As if his 500 non-combat missions hadn't confused his system enough, Leary has further confounded his internal gyroscopes by criss-crossing time zones while jetting fromCalifornia to New York to Washington to Lexington.
The "sleep" whazit has the edge now and Leary rises twice to leave, gets involved in raps and leans back down, talking on until he is not exactly coherent.
continued on page \Z
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