Many times when I was in school, friends told me that while being around me
they had the urge to take drugs.  It was not that I actively encouraged them, but that the
effect of my presence was like a drug, and they hoped that mind-altering hallucinogens
would take them to where my creative imagination took me.  Try as I might to tell them it
was not drugs which kept me soaring through the ethers, they deduced otherwise from
observing my actions.  Though I took drugs often, I did not take them in the same doses
as did most everyone else.

 Where others would take one or two hits of acid, for me a half of a hit (or
sometimes only a quarter) sufficed.  My imagination was already so powerful that it did
not need much stimulation.  A couple tokes of marijuana were almost more than I could
handle, so I very rarely smoked the weed while in school and for a couple years
thereafter.  After turning eighteen (as this was the drinking age at that time) I
experimented more extensively with booze, though I was not fond of the effects of
alcohol.  It was also in my final year of high school that I began my experiments with
legal organic hallucinogens (yohimbe bark, rosewood seeds, morning-glory seeds) which
were to culminate during the following summer.

 Our school musical that year was Camelot, in which I won the role of Merlin.  In
studying for this part, I became so obsessed with the character Merlin that I  carried this
role around with me in daily life until after the play had closed.  I took to carrying a staff
of witch hazel into which I had burnt some runes, and my behavior became more
eccentric than ever.  My friends found me intolerable and increasingly domineering; they
were repulsed by my assumption of authority, and by my air of the occult and the arcane.
Much of what they took for occult influences were actually derived from my interest in
Native American shamanism, which I sometimes expressed quite openly in such actions
as offering tobacco to the six directions.  my portrayal of Merlin ended when the curtains
closed on the final performance of this musical; the influence of this character ebbed not
long thereafter, though I have always remained in touch with the archetype which the
legend of Merlin symbolizes.

 In this year, my father introduced me to the books of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  Avidly I
read everything he had written from Player Piano to Breakfast of Champions, and then
stumbled through a couple of his more recent books.  Though I enjoyed Vonnegut’s
pessimistic humor and dark satire, I detected that somehow all of his books (with the
possible exception of Breakfast of Champions) were failures.  What was wrong with
them?  I could not put my finger on it.  Though imaginative, they seemed to lack in
feeling.  The writing and the plots, while bright and sometimes brilliant, seemed stifled
and suffocated.  Perhaps his view of life was distorted and lacking of insight, yet his
writing possessed moments of clarity and intuition which bordered on the profound.
Could it be that Kurt Vonnegut wrote stories like general motors builds cars, simply cogs
in machinery and words on paper.  His books lacked life; for all his ingenuity, his
characters remain characters and never leave the page.  I could not understand this
problem at the time, suffering from it myself.  In most of my stories the characters
remained assemblages of lifeless words; only in poetry did my writing leave the page and
attain a reality of its own.  Though I did not understand what one had and the other
lacked, I could detect life in the writing of Tom Robbins and the lack of it in Kurt
Vonnegut.  It was more than a lack of involvement.  There is something which many
writers either will not allow themselves or cannot understand how to give to their
creations, something which separates a great writer from a good writer.  I was not to
discover this missing ingredient until I grew a little older and experienced more of life,
and my discovery of this unwritten principle was to coincide with reading Thomas
Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

 As the school year drew to a close, impending change made itself felt.  The end of
childhood--as allotted by our culture--was approaching, and I had to wonder whether I
was prepared for the life ahead of me.  Where, in looking at the road, I had used to see it
leading to my parents’ house--my home--now I saw it leading to other, uncountable
roads, all of which ran off in so many directions there was no telling where they would
lead me.  Lying in bed at night--instead of resting in the security of the walls around
me--I sensed a world beyond these walls, beyond that town and everything with which I
was familiar, a world unknown yet a part of me, where my future waited.

 I wanted to go out and see this world which was newly opened to me, and to taste
more fully this sweet and tangy freedom.  So long had I denied my wanderlust that now,
while others prepared for college, marriage, and work, I thought only of travel.  I would
escape for a time in transience, passing through space and time to make of all space and
time my home.  Where the darkness overtook me, there I would rest for the night.
Keeping my needs to a minimum, I would meet the world without solidity and thus pass
over it like the wind.  And I would find out, once and for all, if there was not someplace
out there where I could escape the demands of society and so save myself from becoming
nothing more than the motive force of a job, a car, and a prefab house.

 This was the world which school attempted to push me out into: becoming a
useful member of a psychotic society.  This was the monstrous toad which sought to
entrap me with its sticky tongue of consumer goods and artificial desires, as it puked up
indigestible drug addicts and half-digested mass murderers, and shat such foul wastes
that not even it could live in its own excrement.  The thought of this was so terrifying that
I fought against it tooth and nail as an attack upon my identity, my soul, my very being.
Knowing there was little room left for creativity and life in the safe, minimal existence
which led drearily to the grave, I cringed in the face of society and looked around for an
avenue of escape.  I felt the pain of the earth suffering the assault of industrial man, and I
cried for the earth as society offered a shovel for me to dig into her entrails and so take
part in the murder of the planet.  Refusing to take an active part in this suicidal,
homicidal insanity, I fled and hid for as long as I could--as long as I was permitted to do
so.

 Thus I stood on the eve of my graduation, facing the world with wonder and with
fear.  Graduation was either the beginning of life or the end, and I was not too sure I
wanted to find out which.