467 - Investigating Life

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Peter Gorman
Today’s podcast features an interview of Peter Groman by Tom Huckabee. The interview took place at Peter’s home in August 2015. In this, the first part of Peter’s story, we learn that Peter was one of the first American’s to take ayahuasca. At the time, Burroughs’ “Yage Letters” hadn’t yet made it around to him. He wrote a freelance story about the experience, which became a front page story in High Times Magazine. Many twists and turns later, Peter became the Editor in Chief of High Times and was instramental in entering the discussion of medical marijuana into the mainstream media. This is the first part of this interview, and it ends with Peter and his wife deep in the Amazon and being acosted by river pirates.

Peter Gorman’s Website
Contact Peter Gorman
http://pgorman.com/product/new-book-sapo-in-my-soul-the-matses-frog-medicine/
Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine
Other talks featuring Peter Gorman
Podcast 280 – “Albert Hofmann is Interviewed by Peter Gorman”
Podcast 279 – “Peter Gorman Interviews the Elders”
Podcast 278 – “Oscar Janiger Interviewed by Peter Gorman”
Podcast 277 – “Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna” Part 2
Podcast 276 – “Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna” Part 1

Dr. Timothy Leary’s Cooper Union Speech
Podcast 127 – Leary: “The Cooper Union Speech”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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Well, the other day I decided to re-listen to Dr. Timothy Leary’s influential Cooper Union speech from 1964.

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And as you may recall, this was most likely the first time that LSD was discussed in a mainstream and very influential public forum. That speech had a major effect on many lives,

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and some have called it actually the opening act of what we now call the 60s.

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In my introduction to that talk, I spoke about the importance of understanding the history of

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our tribe if we are to move our understanding of consciousness exploration into the mainstream.

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And in the way of an introduction to today’s interview,

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I want to make a brief comment about what we think of as history.

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For many of us who have been forced to go to schools in the U.S.,

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our view of history is largely about people whom our politicians think have stories that are, well, worth telling.

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But these people didn’t create history on their

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own. While a famous general or admiral may get credit for winning a particular battle,

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well, they aren’t actually the people who did the winning. It was all of the common people,

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us average working stiffs, who do the heavy lifting in the making of history.

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And our stories don’t seem to hold the attention of people who are mandating

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which books are to be treated as official history in our schools.

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Now circling back to the concept of the history of our community, or tribe as some of us like

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to call it, just who is it that is creating our history?

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Well, over the week just passed, thousands of them converged on the Black Rock Desert

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and created another chapter of Burning Man history.

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That’s a big and very noticeable story.

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But again, it’s not even close to the big picture of the history

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that you and I and our friends are creating each and every day.

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But here’s the thing.

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We seldom know at the time that what we are doing would ever qualify as

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a topic of a history book. So how do you and I, us average people in the psychedelic community,

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go about doing things that could be remembered and learned from in the future?

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Well, don’t look to me for the answer to that question, because I have no idea about things like that.

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What I do know, though, is that I deeply enjoy learning about the paths that others have taken,

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and who have elevated their lives out of the mundane dullness of cubicle or assembly line hell,

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and turned their lives into great adventures.

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Well, at least looking back, they seem like adventures, but at the time, they may have been seriously unsettling experiences.

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In a few minutes, we’re going to hear some stories from a man whose life, well, from my perspective, has been a truly wonderful adventure.

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From the jungles of the Amazon to the jungle of New York City, and with some interesting stops in between. Now, about a month ago, one of our fellow salonners posted a comment

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to one of the talks that Peter Gorman had sent to me to podcast here in the salon.

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And the comment was a request for an interview with Peter himself.

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Well, an excellent idea, I thought.

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But the truth is that I don’t think of myself as a very good interviewer,

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and so I kind of pushed that thought to the back of my mind, a tactic that I suspect many of us make when we want to

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avoid something that we know we should do but don’t feel quite up to doing it just then.

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However, a few weeks ago, quite out of the blue, I got a phone call from a fellow salonner

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named Hector. Hector and I had connected here several years ago when he was in the area,

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and this time he was in Texas,

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and had just returned from the jungle on an ayahuasca retreat

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led by none other than Peter Gorman.

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What’s more, he was, at the time, staying in Peter’s house.

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So he put Peter on the phone,

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and I asked him if he’d be willing to do an interview for the salon.

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He agreed, and I immediately got in touch with my friend Tom Huckabee, who not only lived

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near Peter, but Tom was also the person who introduced me to Peter in the first place.

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And as for being a good interviewer, Tom is the person who interviewed me for the Confessions

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of an Ecstasy Advocate video that I’ve mentioned here in the salon more times than you probably care to hear about.

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Now, Peter Gorman was one of the first Americans to ever try ayahuasca.

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He was quite young then, as young, in fact, as many of our fellow salonners are right now.

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So, he has this amazing experience with ayahuasca and wants to tell the world about it.

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And if you think back to your own first powerful psychedelic experience, well, you probably

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know exactly how he must have felt.

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So Peter wrote an essay about his experience and sent it off to be published.

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And the story was rejected several times, but he kept trying to get it published.

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Then, as you will hear once I quit talking, High Times eventually decided to

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make it a cover story, and as they say, the rest is history, as eventually, after many twists and

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turns, Peter became the editor-in-chief of High Times. Now, at long last, I’m going to turn it

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over to Tom Huckabee’s interview of Peter Gorman.

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But as you listen, please keep in mind the fact that in the beginning and along the way,

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Peter was mainly doing things that you either have done already or are planning to do.

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And just like he couldn’t have predicted the twists and turns that would lead him to where he is today,

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you and I actually have very little understanding of where we’re going to be in just a few years from now.

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But hopefully, between now and then, we’ll all have a few more great adventures ourselves.

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And now, finally, here’s our interview.

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My name’s Peter Gorham.

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I’m an Irish kid from Queens, New York.

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I was born in 51.

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My father was a Broadway

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actor. My mother was a Broadway actress and a radio actress. I was sick as a kid, and

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sick kids who can’t move around much tend to have a feeling of, I’m trapped in here.

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I don’t want to be trapped. There were maps in the basement of our house that showed pictures

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of Africa and the tribes that lived there, and South America and the tribes that lived there. And I just grew up wanting to go to those places.

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At the same time, I wanted to be a detective like the early TV shows. And I ended up growing

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up to become an investigative reporter, not a detective. But I got to do investigations.

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I ended up spending an awful lot of time in places like India, Northern Africa, and particularly down in Peru,

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where I got to meet some of the wildest tribes that were available,

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where I got to collect plants for people and herbarium specimens,

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where I got to just live the absolute dream life that I wanted.

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And I’ve had a rollicking good time doing it.

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And I’ve also incidentally raised some good kids.

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Just the best life you could have had.

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Great.

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How did you become editor of High Times?

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During my first trip to Peru,

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I traveled with two friends,

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and we wound up drinking ayahuasca.

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None of us had heard about this.

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It was 1984.

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There was no internet.

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And, well, Burroughs and Ginsberg had written a book called The Yahé Letters, earlier, you know, two decades earlier,

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it really didn’t get passed around a lot compared to Burroughs’ better works, better known works,

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and Ginsberg’s better known works. So we had, none of us had heard of ayahuasca. We wound up doing it.

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And I wound up writing a story about it,

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and the only place it seemed to me that might carry that story was High Times Magazine.

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And so I sent it in. It was rejected.

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I sent it in. It was rejected.

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I sent it in again with a, how can you reject this?

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There’s never been a national story on this damned medicine.

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And the third time around, they had changed editors between the second and third submission,

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and the editor, Stephen Hager, said, this is fantastic.

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This is a cover story for June.

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We are going with this.

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And that was how my association with High Times Magazine began.

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Now, that association ended up with me being editor-in-chief some 14 years later, 13 years later.

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In between times,

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I’d written a couple more stories about South America,

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about a substance called Nunu,

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and about frog sweat,

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and about magical plants,

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and a mystical fellow who had a wild museum,

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the psychedelic plant doctor in Lima.

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And then I got a call one day,

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and this was, this is long and bear

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with me because this is very important to my life and development I got called

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in by Steve Hager and John Howell the publisher and they said sit down you’ve

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written three or four stories for us now we’re going to give you an assignment

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said written those freelance I I said, okay,

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what’s the assignment? I’ve never been given an assignment before by anybody. Prior to

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that, I’d written plays and books. I mean, short stories and poetry. And they’d been

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published, but they were never assignments. And so they said, do you know Earth First?

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I said, the environmental group? Sure, I’m aware of them. They said, well, Dave Foreman

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is on the FBI’s most wanted list.

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And he’s hiding.

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We need

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you to find him and get an

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interview with Dave Foreman.

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And I said, how?

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He’s hiding from the FBI. He’s on their

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10 most wanted list.

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And they are putting tons

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of manpower, money, and effort into finding

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him, and they can’t. How will I find

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him? They said, I don’t know. That’s

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your job. You want it or not. You’ll

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pay $300. I

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said, well, hell, $300. I’ve got to try

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this. And for two weeks at home,

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I couldn’t think of anything

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that would connect me.

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I looked at pictures of Dave Foreman that had

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been published. I read stuff about him that had been published years earlier, and then one day it connect me. I looked at pictures of Dave Foreman that had been published.

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I read stuff about him that had been published years earlier.

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And then one day it hit me.

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My goodness.

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He is a bear of a man.

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He was born

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North Dakota, South Dakota.

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Went to school, Wyoming,

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North Dakota, South Dakota.

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Wait a minute.

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He must have played high school football.

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If he plays high school football, if he played high school football, he probably goes to a bar,

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drinks beer, and watches college and pro football. I don’t know why that seemed to make sense to me.

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And then it made sense to me that, okay, I’m going to have to call every bar in both

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South Dakota and Wyoming and ask for Dave Foreman. It was Hellasius’

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task. At the time, you could get three phone numbers for 50 cents from the rectory, and

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it was still rotating the old type of phones. And so I started with Wyoming. I thought there’s

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less people even in Wyoming than there are in South Dakota. Let me start with Wyoming. I thought there’s less people even in Wyoming than there are in South

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Dakota. Let me start with Wyoming. And so I went to the operator, give me the first three bars

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in Wyoming. Next operator, give me the next three bars with their phone up, give me the next three.

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And I got through the whole state. And I forget, I want to say, and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I want

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to say there was 200 something odd bars in that state. And then once I had every bar,

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I began calling them. Hello, this is Peter Gorman. I’m looking for Dave Foreman, who’s

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on the FBI’s most wanted list. I know if he’s there, you’re not going to give him to me.

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But will you please take my number? And if he shows up, have him call me. And I did that over and over and over. And after about two weeks of that, maybe eight

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calls a day, 10 calls, somewhere in like the 125th bar, halfway through the first date. I mean,

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this is like grace looking down on me. When I said I’ve had the greatest life, I am not fooling.

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About the 125th, 130th call, I get a call one afternoon.

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Hello, Peter Gorman? Yes. Click.

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There was no call waiting.

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There was no numbers showing up on the old rotary dial phones, of course,

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so you couldn’t find out who that was.

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The next day, hello, Peter Gorman? Yes. Click.

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That went on for about a week.

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And at the end of the week, or six days, whatever it was, hello, Peter Gorman?

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Yes, this is Dave Foreman. What the hell is this about? And I got my interview with Dave Foreman.

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And it was the feature interview for High Times. And at that minute, I thought, I’m supposed to be

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an investigative reporter. I’m not supposed to be writing poetry. I’m not supposed to be writing short stories.

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I figured out how to

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find him, and the FBI can’t.

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Of course, two days after

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the story got published,

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the interview got published,

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hello, Peter Gorman, this is the

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FBI. They wanted to

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know, where was Dave Foreman?

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And I was able to look him in the eye and say,

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I have no idea.

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Why don’t you call every bar in Wyoming and South Dakota and ask if Dave Foreman called from there?

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And they said, what? I said, well, that’s what I did. I don’t know what state. For all I know,

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he was in Florida. And one of the bartenders was a cousin’s cousin. I have no idea where he was.

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one of the bartenders was a cousin’s cousin.

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I have no idea where he was.

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And they looked at me with blue suits on,

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and they were,

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we don’t like you at all.

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But that’s how I became an investigative reporter,

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and that’s how High Times took me on as a senior editor.

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And then I began, I was given the assignment of,

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can you make medical marijuana a national issue?

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Because by 86, it was no longer national.

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Who is Dave Foreman?

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Dave Foreman was the leader of a radical environmental group called Earth First.

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Earth First was going into the northwest coast to the trees that were being cut,

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the old redwoods that were being cut.

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And they were putting nails in the trees and they were setting traps for the loggers.

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And when the loggers would try to cut the trees with their chainsaws,

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the nails would snap, you know, not the blades, but the chains.

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And at the time, that was considered very radical.

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They were not actually hurting people.

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They had signs posted, these trees

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have been nailed. Do not try to cut, you might get hurt. The loggers didn’t care. They would go in

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and they would find a huge bulldozer that was about to just knock down hundreds of trees in

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the afternoon, and they’d just pour sugar in the gas tank. And the whole engine was dead within a

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day. It was that kind of organization.

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And it was a loose organization.

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Judy Barry and a few other people, and Judy

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Barry eventually, you know, she

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the FBI probably, probably

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no proof, planted

00:15:17 ►

a car bomb to make them look like

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they were actually going to car bomb people.

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And the bomb went off, and Judy Barry,

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and I’m going to forget the other fellow’s name, were terribly injured, and I could be wrong.

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I want to say that at least one of them died.

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This is a long time ago, so I apologize for not having on the tip of my fingers.

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And that was the point at which the entire leadership of Earth First was put on

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the FBI’s most wanted list.

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Tobacco, caffeine, tell us the history of your use of drugs.

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I’ve used drugs for a long time. I’m smoking a cigarette now. The first drug I ever used was cigarettes. When I finished being sick as a child,

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I was put into the second grade.

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I’d missed the first grade.

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And I was caught probably in the first few days

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having taken a package of my father’s Pell Mells,

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and I was caught smoking Pell Mells outside school.

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And I said, well, I always smoke. What’s the problem?

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You can’t smoke at this Catholic school?

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I thought that was really an unusual,

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like my father smokes wherever he wants to.

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Why can’t I?

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So I thought this was a very unusual take on things.

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I quit smoking until I was 14 or 15.

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At 14 or 15, I did, you know, I began to smoke again.

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And like any decent, wise guy, kid from Queens at the time,

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not wise guy as in a genuine wise guy, but anybody who was playing on the edge of things, a smart ass,

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my friends and I would buy a quart of orange juice and a quart of vodka,

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and we’d mix them up, and we’d sit at a bench and get drunk before we’d go into a school dance.

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And then we’d go into a school dance. And then we’d go into a school dance and, you know, we were in the mood. And we didn’t get very drunk. We just got drunk enough

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to get thrown out of the dances. But we thought that made us look cool. And I went to Woodstock.

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I ran into Hashish and I smoked my first hash. The night before Woodstock, about three quarters

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of the way up to the event,

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we stopped and someone said, well, we need a pipe of some sort. We don’t have a pipe,

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we have hash. And I thought, let me invent something here. So I took out a pack of my

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cigarettes and I took out the silver foil on the inside, put it over a glass, stuck a straw

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through while I took a pin and made a bunch of holes. So I made a little water pipe. And that

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was my first hash experience. And I don’t know why I knew how to make a water pipe.

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I don’t know why or how I knew, but I knew and it worked. Everybody thought I was

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so cool. And I act like I do this all the time. Meanwhile, I never smoked hash. And I was looking

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out at the woods and the woods was looking back at me. I said oh this is what people are talking about

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with marijuana I like this this is cool and so I started to smoke pot when it was available

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and later I was on a farm in West Virginia I was working with a friend and he said Peter I have

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some orange sunshine LSD in one of those, you know, the cool house.

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They had a house where they kept the vegetables during the summer so they’d stay cool where they canned them.

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And he said, Ellen and I and you, we should do some LSD today.

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Go get it.

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I was working for him, so I ran to get it.

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On the way back, I opened the jar and I saw these little tabs and so I ate three of them and I came back and said well here’s the

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jar and David looked at me he said um Ellen and I decided not to do LSD we’re

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going to go for a walk in the park and make love and so we’re gonna drive to

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town and go on some trail and make love. So I had 115 acres to myself with 1,050 micrograms of orange sunshine.

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And by chance, by chance, Ram Dass’ book, Be Here Now, was in the house.

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And so after the trees started dancing, after the rain came,

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after I threw the knife up in the air and caught it with my palm as often as I could,

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which left huge, gaping wounds in my palm,

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I found Be Here Now,

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and it was the most magical experience in the world.

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I opened this tiny little book of hundreds of pages,

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200 pages, I don’t know, 300 pages,

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and some of them you had to read the page.

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You know, there will be peace on earth when men come around to it.

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And you’re turning it over, and you’re under this huge dose of LSD, you’ve never done it

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before.

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And you’re like, whoa, that page was talking to me.

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And while I never became a big drug user, I did my share of, you know, marijuana, and

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I, you know, you were in college in New York City.

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And the way you supplied your own marijuana was you’d buy a quarter pound, a half pound.

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You sell six ounces, you keep two ounces.

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You know, you were not a drug dealer.

00:20:14 ►

You were just buying it for your friends and you get to keep it.

00:20:18 ►

Whatever you kept, you gave to your friends anyway, right?

00:20:21 ►

It wasn’t like you were hoarding.

00:20:22 ►

It wasn’t like trying to sell it for money.

00:20:24 ►

And the same with LSD.

00:20:25 ►

When it was around, it was beautiful.

00:20:30 ►

I suppose I tried

00:20:32 ►

every drug

00:20:34 ►

available at the time. I went through a bad

00:20:36 ►

stint with cocaine.

00:20:38 ►

I went through

00:20:38 ►

where I just kind of got caught up

00:20:42 ►

in it. I had a neighbor who was losing weight

00:20:44 ►

and she gave me Christmas trees.

00:20:47 ►

They were an amphetamine with a little miltown in them,

00:20:53 ►

and I’m forgetting the name of it.

00:20:54 ►

But she gave me 500 of them.

00:20:56 ►

So I ate 500 of them in the next six months,

00:20:58 ►

and I just walked around the block lots and lots and lots of times

00:21:02 ►

and didn’t get a whole lot accomplished.

00:21:03 ►

What was the strength again?

00:21:05 ►

This was speed.

00:21:06 ►

But it was a pill speed.

00:21:07 ►

It wasn’t shooting up speed.

00:21:09 ►

The neighbor said,

00:21:10 ►

these make me crazy.

00:21:12 ►

And I ate one.

00:21:13 ►

I was so focused.

00:21:15 ►

It was like,

00:21:17 ►

we used to call them Christmas trees.

00:21:18 ►

They were green and white

00:21:19 ►

and they were fantastic.

00:21:23 ►

So if one was good,

00:21:24 ►

six was much better. Twelve over the course of the day was fantastic. So if one was good, six was much better.

00:21:26 ►

Twelve over the course of the day was fantastic.

00:21:28 ►

I mean, just until you run out.

00:21:30 ►

And when you run out, you realize, oh, my God, I’m about to go insane.

00:21:33 ►

I need some more.

00:21:35 ►

Phillip, my roommate at the time, we had an apartment in Upper East Side.

00:21:38 ►

I went to Hunter College, and he said,

00:21:40 ►

Phillip, just lock me in this room. Don’t let me out.

00:21:42 ►

He locked me in a room, didn’t let me out.

00:21:44 ►

Two days passed. I said, you can let me out now, I’m fine.

00:21:47 ►

And that was over that addiction.

00:21:48 ►

I’ve never done speed since.

00:21:52 ►

During that period, did you meet any of the luminaries in the drug world?

00:21:58 ►

You read Be Here Now, did you ever meet Ron At that time, at the time I was probably really wrecking myself with cocaine

00:22:10 ►

or the six months I wrecked myself with the amphetamine.

00:22:14 ►

I met a couple of the largest cocaine dealers in the city.

00:22:20 ►

I met some of the largest heroin dealers in the city,

00:22:22 ►

although I was not a heroin user.

00:22:24 ►

But if there was no cocaine around and you really needed to get high, you could snort some heroin.

00:22:29 ►

It seemed to work all right, although I’m not recommending it to anybody, please.

00:22:33 ►

I was so elastic.

00:22:35 ►

I thought that, and I wrote stories about what I did.

00:22:38 ►

I’d write short stories about these drugs.

00:22:41 ►

And the tone of the stories was always that I’m elastic enough to do these crazy amounts.

00:22:46 ►

You’re not.

00:22:47 ►

So just read my damn story

00:22:49 ►

and be happy with that,

00:22:51 ►

and you don’t have to do any of these things.

00:22:53 ►

Now, or 20 years ago,

00:22:55 ►

I realized I’m not as elastic as I was.

00:22:57 ►

So I hardly do anything.

00:22:59 ►

I drink some red wine.

00:23:01 ►

Otherwise, I’m pretty clean.

00:23:04 ►

But… Were you reading the drug literature at the time? of red wine. Otherwise, I’m pretty clean.

00:23:08 ►

Were you reading the drug literature at the time? Did you read Leary’s

00:23:11 ►

first book, Psychedelic Experience? You read Yahé letters, right?

00:23:16 ►

I read Yahé letters.

00:23:17 ►

At the time, I was in love with Baudelaire.

00:23:24 ►

I was in love with some of the Hemingway material.

00:23:27 ►

I was in love with Bukowski.

00:23:31 ►

I was very much in love with the early work of Carlos Castaneda,

00:23:36 ►

which really blew my mind.

00:23:37 ►

And I don’t care if people like him or don’t like him

00:23:40 ►

or say he was totally phony.

00:23:41 ►

At the time, he still opened a million, millions of us,

00:23:47 ►

opened our eyes to the idea that shamanism, cordon d’etre-ism, people who can heal, people

00:23:53 ►

who connect to other realities are not dead. So whether or not he was fake or real, I don’t care.

00:24:01 ►

It was an invaluable lesson for an 18, 19-year-old kid to get, to say, my

00:24:06 ►

God, I can do that. I don’t want the drugs. What I wanted was to connect with the other

00:24:11 ►

realities. What I wanted was what LSD promised, but then couldn’t quite deliver on because

00:24:18 ►

she had a ceiling. And so after he’d done it, I don’t know, 10, 20, 75, 100 times,

00:24:28 ►

it seemed like I ended up going back to the same space.

00:24:33 ►

My later work in South America or in the States with Peyote and some real good Southern Ute teachers

00:24:37 ►

and with Ayahuasca with some real good teachers

00:24:41 ►

and with San Pedro, the same,

00:24:44 ►

showed me that there is no ceiling if the right corner data was there to encourage you.

00:24:50 ►

In terms of meeting people who were in the drug world,

00:24:56 ►

later on in life, I wanted to meet the people like Albert Hoffman.

00:25:01 ►

But when I was a kid, I wanted to learn about the scene.

00:25:06 ►

I was dying to learn about how does this happen?

00:25:09 ►

How do these drugs get here?

00:25:10 ►

How come these people don’t go to jail?

00:25:12 ►

Who’s moving the marijuana?

00:25:13 ►

Who’s moving this cocaine?

00:25:15 ►

How come I can go to XYZ’s house,

00:25:17 ►

and he’s always got a kilo of cocaine,

00:25:19 ►

or two, or three in his safe?

00:25:21 ►

And at the time, we didn’t know how rotten it was,

00:25:24 ►

and we didn’t realize people were getting caught in the crossfire in South America.

00:25:27 ►

This is still pretty early on.

00:25:30 ►

Talking about early 70s.

00:25:32 ►

And Richard Pryor hadn’t even set his hair on fire yet.

00:25:35 ►

So this is, you know, early on.

00:25:37 ►

And I got a chance to meet the fellow who brought in tie sticks.

00:25:42 ►

The first fellow who brought tie sticks in commercially to the United States.

00:25:46 ►

I later got to meet Dennis Perrone,

00:25:49 ►

who, the father of California drug law change,

00:25:55 ►

and the fellow I knew was just using a little bit of one of the boats

00:26:01 ►

that Perrone used to bring in.

00:26:02 ►

Perrone was bringing in millions of

00:26:05 ►

dollars worth of pot every week on boats. And with it, he was funding the gay movement,

00:26:11 ►

the women’s rights movement. He was funding the rainbow people. I can’t swear, but I’ll bet the

00:26:18 ►

first five or 10 rainbow convocations were due to the fact that he was dropping $25, 000,$ 50,000 a week on them

00:26:26 ►

to be able to have a place to meet, to pay park permits, and to be able to get buses to get people

00:26:32 ►

up there and to clean up afterwards. He was just a wonderful guy and just a pot dealer, and he was

00:26:38 ►

great. The names of the people I dealt with, the fellow with cocaine, he was eventually busted.

00:26:46 ►

In a typical fashion,

00:26:49 ►

someone, he was at the time,

00:26:52 ►

worth two kilos at a time,

00:26:55 ►

maybe $50,000 to the mob,

00:26:58 ►

whichever mob it was.

00:27:00 ►

And so they would front him $50,000 worth,

00:27:02 ►

and then one day he called me excitedly and said,

00:27:05 ►

10 kilos were coming in that night.

00:27:07 ►

And I said, don’t take it.

00:27:09 ►

Nobody, nobody, I knew enough about that by then, nobody gets jumped from 2 to 10, period.

00:27:16 ►

You know, that means 500,000 they trust you with now?

00:27:19 ►

Who are they?

00:27:20 ►

They’re not your best friends.

00:27:21 ►

They’re people you do business with.

00:27:23 ►

And, of course, the FBI walked in with the cocaine that night.

00:27:26 ►

It was one of those, like, I told you not to do it.

00:27:31 ►

I was doing cocaine all the time, but, you know, during college,

00:27:34 ►

you know, when I went to college,

00:27:35 ►

I almost immediately found a rent-controlled apartment.

00:27:38 ►

I went to Hunter College,

00:27:39 ►

so the rent-controlled apartment was seven blocks away.

00:27:41 ►

And it became a hub with my friend Phil

00:27:44 ►

of the coolest

00:27:46 ►

people in that university that we knew everybody wanted to come over and we’d all throw in a buck

00:27:51 ►

in the pot and i’d cook dinner or sometimes phil would cook dinner but we had just a fantastic

00:27:56 ►

array of bright young people at the house and we were young and it was just it was smart

00:28:02 ►

conversation going on all the time maybe there was some joints being smoked but, and it was just smart conversation going on all the time. Maybe there were some joints being smoked,

00:28:06 ►

but pretty much it was just a wonderful blend of people coming over to the house

00:28:11 ►

where we kind of had soirees without meaning to.

00:28:15 ►

And during that time, I got very lucky,

00:28:19 ►

and I worked with a gallery called Multiples Art Gallery.

00:28:22 ►

worked with a gallery called Multiples Art Gallery.

00:28:34 ►

And what they were doing was commissioning serigraphs or color prints of some very famous work from people like Warhol, Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg.

00:28:43 ►

You know, we just had wonderful artists that worked with us.

00:28:45 ►

And I got to meet those people.

00:28:47 ►

They’d come in, and I worked the gallery.

00:28:49 ►

And so Miriam Goodman and a couple of the other women who ran it,

00:28:53 ►

they were well-to-do Upper East Siders, ran this gallery.

00:28:56 ►

And they would say, Peter, Philip, can you help set up this, you know, the show?

00:29:01 ►

We’re doing the Rauschenberg this week, and we’ve just commissioned five lithographs.

00:29:05 ►

He’s going to sign 300 of them. So let’s get these up on the wall. You know the show, we’re doing the Rauschenberg this week, and we’ve just commissioned five lithographs.

00:29:08 ►

He’s going to sign 300 of them, so let’s get these up on the wall.

00:29:14 ►

And both Philip and I had a pretty good sense of space and of art, and it carries over.

00:29:17 ►

It’s a little crowded in here, but it all sort of fits.

00:29:26 ►

And we ended up putting up these shows for these guys and women, and some of them loved it. From there, I got the chance to work behind the scenes with

00:29:28 ►

Dave Bassineau, who was making

00:29:30 ►

the Robert Rauschenberg sculptures.

00:29:33 ►

Robert Rauschenberg would make

00:29:34 ►

one, or Marisol would make one, a wood

00:29:36 ►

carving, and then they would

00:29:38 ►

bring it to

00:29:39 ►

the Impossible Man Studios.

00:29:43 ►

Oh, Dave

00:29:44 ►

Bassineau, and Dave Bassineau,

00:29:47 ►

and Dave Bassineau would say,

00:29:49 ►

I will make, he was very European,

00:29:53 ►

I will make the mold and the colors.

00:29:55 ►

They’ll be beautiful.

00:29:59 ►

And he had people like me on his team, and he would say,

00:30:00 ►

here’s a marisol, mix some colors and make ten copies,

00:30:07 ►

whichever one’s the best we use but he had five of us mixing colors

00:30:09 ►

to make her woodcut

00:30:11 ►

into a beautiful plastic sculpture

00:30:13 ►

he worked with plastics

00:30:14 ►

and so again I got the chance

00:30:17 ►

the lucky chance to work

00:30:18 ►

with these beautiful artists

00:30:20 ►

and the people who knew what they were doing

00:30:22 ►

everything I did

00:30:23 ►

I wasn’t much of a student in college,

00:30:25 ►

and I never did finish despite six years’ worth of trying,

00:30:29 ►

because I refused to take biology and chemistry.

00:30:32 ►

But I got the courses in living, because I lived in New York City,

00:30:36 ►

and I worked with this sort of people.

00:30:38 ►

And then I found, to really find the underbelly of town,

00:30:43 ►

I ended up driving a taxi.

00:30:45 ►

And I drove a taxi, and I loved driving a taxi.

00:30:47 ►

Probably, maybe I started in 71 or 72 as a junior in college.

00:30:53 ►

And I kept that license alive for about eight years.

00:30:56 ►

Used it pretty much just on the weekends

00:30:58 ►

for four of those eight years.

00:31:02 ►

But I quickly realized that if you wanted to make money as a taxi driver,

00:31:06 ►

you could drive people around.

00:31:09 ►

But if you wanted to make

00:31:10 ►

more money as a taxi driver,

00:31:12 ►

you knew where every

00:31:13 ►

vice was available.

00:31:16 ►

So people got in your car and said,

00:31:18 ►

I would like to know

00:31:20 ►

where there’s a card game.

00:31:22 ►

And you didn’t just say, I know

00:31:23 ►

where there’s a card game and I know the code word. You’d say, how much money do you want to spend on a card game. And you didn’t just say, I know where there’s a card game and I know the code word.

00:31:26 ►

You’d say,

00:31:26 ►

how much money do you want to spend

00:31:28 ►

on a card game?

00:31:29 ►

Because I know 20 of them.

00:31:32 ►

And I know the doorman.

00:31:33 ►

I know the passwords

00:31:35 ►

and it’s going to cost you X, Y, Z

00:31:37 ►

to get that info from me.

00:31:39 ►

I don’t know why it was important to me

00:31:41 ►

to know that stuff.

00:31:42 ►

Where were their brothels?

00:31:43 ►

Where were their gay clubs? Where were their gay clubs?

00:31:45 ►

Where were their people on the street who could do X, Y, Z?

00:31:49 ►

Where were the drugs?

00:31:51 ►

I don’t know why it was important at the time.

00:31:53 ►

I just had a voracious appetite to know who’s doing what, what’s available.

00:31:59 ►

I didn’t want to do it all, but I wanted to know about it.

00:32:03 ►

I wanted to see it. I got the chance to help build a strip

00:32:07 ►

club in New York City with a taxi driver. I knew Diamond Lills. What an amazing thing to be

00:32:13 ►

somebody who’s so regular at that club because you were building it and fixing it that the girls

00:32:20 ►

thought you were like their brother. I mean, I didn’t have to just be in the club, look at naked

00:32:24 ►

girls, but I got to see their attitude when people came in

00:32:28 ►

and tipped them or didn’t tip them. I got to see them, would you help me try this

00:32:32 ►

new costume on? I was behind the scenes. It was like being in a movie, except who

00:32:38 ►

wants to be an actor? I want to be the director’s assistant to see who’s doing

00:32:43 ►

what where to make that magic.

00:32:46 ►

Because to me it was all magic, whether it was art galleries,

00:32:49 ►

whether it was later writing and being an investigative reporter.

00:32:54 ►

I cooked for a long time and became a chef over the course of about 18 years in New York.

00:32:59 ►

Worked my way up in the days when there really were no cooking schools,

00:33:04 ►

so you simply were thrown into a

00:33:05 ►

position and then worked that for a year or two and then somebody quit you moved up and you went

00:33:11 ►

to another restaurant and that person quit suddenly one day after eight years so uh you’re

00:33:16 ►

the chef now what are you gonna start cooking what what i’m the chef well you better be good

00:33:23 ►

because i spent $400,000

00:33:25 ►

on this restaurant.

00:33:27 ►

But up till now, I’ve just been

00:33:29 ►

the guy making salads or

00:33:31 ►

the guy sautéing some fish,

00:33:33 ►

not the guy creating new menus.

00:33:36 ►

So,

00:33:37 ►

but I love being thrown into those.

00:33:39 ►

I loved figuring out how do you do

00:33:41 ►

this? What’s behind it?

00:33:43 ►

What makes this magic work?

00:33:45 ►

Whether it was cab driving, cooking, or just living life.

00:33:50 ►

What about casualties during that period, the heavy drug use and back in the…

00:33:58 ►

We’re talking about early 70s?

00:34:00 ►

And then early to middle 70s.

00:34:03 ►

Yeah, did you see it? And then early to middle 70s. I would say, in my experience,

00:34:07 ►

I wasn’t running around with a drug crowd.

00:34:10 ►

I was running around with a college crowd, an art crowd.

00:34:13 ►

Even if I was only on the periphery of the art crowd,

00:34:16 ►

I didn’t see those casualties.

00:34:19 ►

I’d hear about them.

00:34:21 ►

Or, you know, an Andy Warhol might die way too young.

00:34:24 ►

Or, you know, an Andy Warhol might die way too young or, you know, someone overdosed.

00:34:30 ►

Richard Pryor set his hair on fire.

00:34:32 ►

I didn’t know Richard Pryor, but that sort of thing.

00:34:34 ►

Sly and the Family Stone, what a fantastic group,

00:34:38 ►

but then their breakup happens because a little too much drug use

00:34:42 ►

creates a little too much jealousy, creates a little too much, which ended up being the great song, you know,

00:34:47 ►

It’s a Family Affair, where he just tells everybody,

00:34:50 ►

butt out of our family, butt out.

00:34:52 ►

We’re just people.

00:34:53 ►

So to me, at that time, yes, there were a lot of casualties,

00:34:59 ►

but no, they were not in my circle.

00:35:01 ►

They were not among my friends.

00:35:03 ►

Some 50 years of drug use and being around a lot of…

00:35:08 ►

Oh, no.

00:35:09 ►

If I’m asked about the first five years,

00:35:12 ►

with marijuana, hashish,

00:35:16 ►

even a little cocaine, which most people couldn’t afford,

00:35:19 ►

it was so expensive at the time,

00:35:21 ►

I didn’t see many casualties that I knew personally.

00:35:27 ►

If you move that up to the mid-’80s,

00:35:31 ►

when I worked at Wilson’s Restaurant,

00:35:34 ►

and I co-cheffed Wilson’s with Sarah Appel,

00:35:37 ►

and she was a marvelous chef, and I was a marvelous chef,

00:35:40 ►

and she’d do the weekdays, and I would come in and order Friday for the weekends,

00:35:44 ►

and I’d do brunch and dinner two days a week and help run that she’d run it during the week

00:35:49 ►

we began losing one waiter a week and it went on for a year and I’m exaggerating maybe it was one waiter a month, but everybody was dying of AIDS.

00:36:06 ►

And no one knew what they were dying of.

00:36:11 ►

A waiter would go in, he would not show up, and he’d say, where’s Josh?

00:36:16 ►

Josh is late.

00:36:17 ►

Two hours later, no, Josh isn’t coming in.

00:36:20 ►

Where is Josh?

00:36:22 ►

Josh had to go to the hospital.

00:36:24 ►

He had a really bad cold. He can’t kick it.

00:36:26 ►

And three days later, Josh was dead.

00:36:30 ►

And you’re like, what happened?

00:36:32 ►

We were just learning about this new dreaded disease.

00:36:35 ►

Most of them were not needle users per se.

00:36:38 ►

An awful lot of them were…

00:36:41 ►

They were microbe collectors.

00:36:45 ►

They just overwhelmed their bodies with a combination of sex and drug use.

00:36:51 ►

Let’s get back to the Yahé letters, because I read it probably about the same time you

00:36:58 ►

did.

00:36:59 ►

You know, maybe I was 16, 17, and I remember going, that’s one thing I’m never going to do.

00:37:07 ►

But you read it and said,

00:37:08 ►

I want to do that.

00:37:10 ►

No.

00:37:11 ►

I read it after I had done Ayahuasca.

00:37:15 ►

So I had already done Ayahuasca.

00:37:17 ►

So when I read the Yahe letters,

00:37:19 ►

number one, I thought they were really badly written.

00:37:22 ►

And number two,

00:37:24 ►

what I wanted to do was meet Richard Evans Schultes.

00:37:28 ►

Because he was the one that Burroughs got in touch with to ask about where to do Yahé.

00:37:35 ►

And so he became a star on the horizon.

00:37:41 ►

And the more I learned about him, the father of modern ethnobotany.

00:37:42 ►

horizon. And the more I learned about him, the father of modern ethnobotany,

00:37:45 ►

Harvard,

00:37:46 ►

he had his own

00:37:47 ►

lecture hall, small lecture

00:37:50 ►

hall at Harvard, and he

00:37:52 ►

he had been a fellow who

00:37:56 ►

was

00:37:57 ►

working as an ethnobotanist

00:38:00 ►

on his PhD

00:38:00 ►

during World War II.

00:38:03 ►

The United States government called him in

00:38:05 ►

to the consulate or the embassy in Bogota,

00:38:09 ►

and he showed them Bogota, and they said,

00:38:11 ►

we have a problem.

00:38:14 ►

We need rubber to run this war,

00:38:17 ►

and the only rubber in the world is in Malaysia now,

00:38:21 ►

from seeds stolen, I mean, smuggled out of Brazil.

00:38:25 ►

We needed to find us other commercial rubber sources

00:38:28 ►

if the Malaysian rubber areas get taken over by the Japanese.

00:38:36 ►

And the reason that was important was because

00:38:39 ►

every airplane tire in the world has to be made of real rubber.

00:38:44 ►

Every sidewall on every car has to be made of real rubber even today.

00:38:50 ►

Every battleship has hundreds and some thousands of parts

00:38:55 ►

that only rubber can take the force of the retaliation,

00:39:01 ►

whatever the word is for it, when you shoot a big cannon off.

00:39:06 ►

Tanks use rubber.

00:39:08 ►

We would have without rubber

00:39:09 ►

no tanks, no air force, no navy.

00:39:13 ►

You don’t win a war that way.

00:39:14 ►

You don’t stop Hitler that way.

00:39:16 ►

So Schultes was sent down there

00:39:17 ►

and he found 8,000 species of rubber trees,

00:39:23 ►

dozens of which were commercially viable.

00:39:28 ►

And so he became somebody I wanted to meet.

00:39:32 ►

He also was the fellow who,

00:39:35 ►

when Wasson,

00:39:38 ►

who was the fellow credited with bringing magic mushrooms

00:39:41 ►

to the Western world,

00:39:43 ►

Wasson asked Schultes,

00:39:45 ►

Wasson was a banker, and may have been

00:39:47 ►

CIA, a little bit.

00:39:49 ►

But Wasson runs into Schultes

00:39:51 ►

and says,

00:39:52 ►

Have you been in Mexico? Have you heard of the

00:39:55 ►

cult of people who eat magic mushrooms?

00:39:58 ►

Mushrooms that

00:39:59 ►

get you high?

00:40:01 ►

And Schultes said, You mean

00:40:03 ►

like the statue I’ve got here?

00:40:06 ►

And the statue was a magic mushroom

00:40:09 ►

with a person under it.

00:40:12 ►

And Wasim went crazy.

00:40:15 ►

And Shilpa said,

00:40:16 ►

Yes, if I were you,

00:40:17 ►

I would head over to Maria Sabina in Oaxaca.

00:40:21 ►

She is a Mizitec Indian,

00:40:23 ►

and you might,

00:40:24 ►

and he talked a little bit like,

00:40:25 ►

you might,

00:40:26 ►

you might pay her a visit,

00:40:27 ►

and you might learn something.

00:40:29 ►

They became lifelong friends.

00:40:31 ►

But you’ve got to imagine,

00:40:33 ►

the person bringing ayahuasca out

00:40:35 ►

is Richard Schultes.

00:40:39 ►

He wears suits to bed.

00:40:42 ►

Charles Wasson is an international banker

00:40:44 ►

specializing in lending international monies. He wears suits to bed. Charles Wasson is an international banker specializing in lending international

00:40:46 ►

monies. He wears suits to bed. These are the fathers of the psychedelic movement. And the

00:40:54 ►

third father, Albert Hoffman, guaranteed his pajamas looked like a black tie. You know,

00:41:00 ►

he wore suits to bed. Can you imagine three straighter men in the world? No, but these three became the fathers.

00:41:06 ►

And by the time I was working at High Times and had done peyote with Southern Utes

00:41:11 ►

and had done ayahuasca and had done San Pedro up in the mountains of Peru,

00:41:16 ►

I was like, I have to meet these people.

00:41:19 ►

And my job in High Times allowed me to.

00:41:22 ►

I would, maybe I was a senior editor after the Dave Foreman,

00:41:27 ►

they made me a senior editor,

00:41:28 ►

and a couple of years later they made me an executive editor.

00:41:31 ►

An executive editor is a position where you get a credit card,

00:41:35 ►

you get a checkbook,

00:41:36 ►

and you assign yourself and other people to interesting stories to write.

00:41:42 ►

So I would assign myself, I have to go to Boston to meet Schultes.

00:41:47 ►

Hello, Richard Schultes, Peter Gorman, hi, Tom.

00:41:49 ►

I’d love to talk to you about your early days with ayahuasca

00:41:52 ►

and whether you’ve ever done it.

00:41:54 ►

Well, I haven’t done it in much time, young man,

00:41:56 ►

but I certainly, I can make a…

00:41:59 ►

I went up and I met Schultes and I spent the day with him

00:42:02 ►

and he bought me lunch and he brought me home to his wife

00:42:04 ►

and she made me dinner and I was ecstatices and I spent the day with him and he bought me lunch and he brought me home to his wife and she made me dinner and I was ecstatic except I blew the photo and we always had a big

00:42:09 ►

photo in high times and so I had to call him up and say I need another couple of hours with you

00:42:15 ►

and he said no no no I’ve given you all the time I intend to give you I was very generous. No. And I said, there must be a way. I had married a Peruvian

00:42:29 ►

and very indigenous, very beautiful, not full indigenous, but you know, from an indigenous

00:42:35 ►

line, very beautiful young Peruvian woman. And I thought, like I had thought with Dave

00:42:41 ►

Foreman, just a light bulb went off in my, and I said, if I show up unannounced at Richard Schulte’s office,

00:42:49 ►

but I have her stand in front of me,

00:42:51 ►

so when he opens the door to say,

00:42:53 ►

go away, I gave you the time,

00:42:56 ►

and sure enough, I said,

00:42:57 ►

Chapa, you’ve got to come.

00:42:58 ►

You’ve got to come.

00:42:59 ►

Yeah, I’d love to take a road trip up there.

00:43:01 ►

You didn’t take me the first time.

00:43:03 ►

I thought you were embarrassed of me.

00:43:04 ►

I said, no, I was just working.

00:43:06 ►

Now I’m working again, but this time you’ll work.

00:43:08 ►

You know, I mean, you don’t normally bring your wife and kids on interviews.

00:43:11 ►

This time I needed to.

00:43:13 ►

Sure enough, I knock on the door.

00:43:15 ►

He says, who is it from the other side?

00:43:16 ►

He’s looking for the people.

00:43:18 ►

I said, Peter Gorman.

00:43:19 ►

He said, I told you I have no time.

00:43:20 ►

I said, just open the door one second and tell him to my face.

00:43:23 ►

Here was my wife, right?

00:43:25 ►

He’ll go, oh, my oh my dear oh my dear he reminded her of colombian indigenous women that he’d known

00:43:35 ►

he says well this is different come in come in and he began to talk to her and ask her about

00:43:42 ►

where she was born in peru how she lived, did they still live on the river.

00:43:47 ►

And I had hours to go click, click, click, click, click, click.

00:43:51 ►

I got wonderful pictures and I learned wonderful stories

00:43:55 ►

that he never would have told me,

00:43:57 ►

that he only would have told an indigenous girl

00:44:00 ►

when he was remembering, don’t tell my wife.

00:44:04 ►

But before I knew her, I had this beautiful

00:44:07 ►

girl. She kind of looked like, you know, and he would just go into things he would never have

00:44:12 ►

told me. So I had a great time with Schultes. And then once I met Schultes, it was, what else can I

00:44:18 ►

do to meet some of these guys? Wait a minute, 50th anniversary of LSD. Let’s do a special book on LSD.

00:44:26 ►

50th anniversary of LSD. Let’s do a special book on LSD. So I have to call Hoffman, and then I have to call Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg, and John Beresford, and all of these people

00:44:33 ►

who had become this huge rainbow of people I wanted to have impart information to me.

00:44:41 ►

So you are the beautiful woman that I brought to Richard Schulte’s office to say

00:44:46 ►

I need more pictures, I need time

00:44:48 ►

and he’d already told me he wouldn’t give me time

00:44:50 ►

and then he opened the door and I

00:44:51 ►

put you right in front of me and said

00:44:53 ►

Hi, this is my wife Chepa and he went

00:44:55 ►

sort of crazy. Remember the old man at Harvard?

00:44:58 ►

He pushed you aside.

00:44:59 ►

He pushed me aside, exactly.

00:45:01 ►

Did Peter tell you why he was taking you?

00:45:04 ►

Hmm, don’t really remember.

00:45:06 ►

He figured it out?

00:45:07 ►

No, I took you that trip so that he would let me in

00:45:11 ►

because he didn’t want to give me any more time.

00:45:13 ►

I don’t remember all those details.

00:45:14 ►

Tell us about meeting Peter the first time.

00:45:18 ►

How did you meet Peter?

00:45:21 ►

I was with my cousin.

00:45:23 ►

I was walking in the boulevard in Iquitos.

00:45:27 ►

I don’t remember who he was.

00:45:30 ►

Oh, with his friend…

00:45:33 ►

Steve.

00:45:33 ►

Steve.

00:45:35 ►

Oh, my cousin, she was dating Steve.

00:45:38 ►

That’s why when I met him.

00:45:40 ►

And is this what he looked like here?

00:45:42 ►

Che govora?

00:45:43 ►

Yeah, kind of.

00:45:45 ►

He’s much younger there.

00:45:50 ►

What was his first line?

00:45:52 ►

What did he say to get your interest?

00:45:55 ►

Did you know he was a famous writer from America?

00:46:00 ►

No, not really.

00:46:02 ►

He just told me that he knows the jungle and he made trips.

00:46:08 ►

And I thought, okay, he was an interesting guy because he was funny and…

00:46:14 ►

Charming.

00:46:16 ►

Charming and sometimes…

00:46:17 ►

I thought he was talking too much.

00:46:20 ►

But he was a big dancer.

00:46:22 ►

Oh, yeah?

00:46:23 ►

When I asked him, do you know how to dance?

00:46:26 ►

He was like, oh, yeah.

00:46:30 ►

And I grabbed her arm and I took her out on the dance floor in a place that had no dancing.

00:46:32 ►

And sure enough, she was like, I didn’t mean now.

00:46:36 ►

And I said, too late, right?

00:46:38 ►

And we danced a couple of times.

00:46:39 ►

That was kind of funny.

00:46:41 ►

Yeah.

00:46:41 ►

And it was kind of embarrassing because I never felt, you know,

00:46:43 ►

a gringo that actually dance, you know. We are famous for dancing a lot, but they don’t.

00:46:52 ►

Now, weren’t you there when the snake was brought in, the poisonous snake that the guy brought in and put on the bar that bit Peter? Weren’t you there during that story?

00:47:05 ►

Oh, at the bar?

00:47:08 ►

Yeah.

00:47:10 ►

Tell us that story.

00:47:13 ►

I don’t know,

00:47:13 ►

but I think I remember that the snake

00:47:15 ►

was in the bag

00:47:20 ►

and he was trying

00:47:21 ►

to put the snake back

00:47:23 ►

in the bag.

00:47:25 ►

A fellow had walked in and said he had a water snake.

00:47:28 ►

What’s his, your finger?

00:47:30 ►

And so I picked up, took the snake out of the bag.

00:47:33 ►

I was pretty good at handling snakes.

00:47:35 ►

And it opened its mouth and his fangs came back.

00:47:37 ►

I said, this is a Bushmaster.

00:47:39 ►

This is not a water snake.

00:47:41 ►

Put this back in the bag.

00:47:42 ►

You’re going to kill somebody here.

00:47:43 ►

So I put it back in the bag of water that he had

00:47:46 ►

and he closed it slowly

00:47:47 ►

and the snake leapt out

00:47:49 ►

onto the bar. We had a bar at the time,

00:47:51 ►

the Colbert Blues Bar, Cevicheria Maddalena,

00:47:54 ►

named for our daughter.

00:47:55 ►

And it slithered down the bar

00:47:57 ►

and I knew I had to catch this

00:48:00 ►

or my daughter Maddalena,

00:48:01 ►

three years old, is allowed to get bitten

00:48:03 ►

because it’s going to go off the bar, behind the bar.

00:48:07 ►

And I reached to grab it

00:48:08 ►

and I missed by a quarter of an inch.

00:48:11 ►

So I turned around and bit my finger

00:48:13 ►

and I snapped it on the floor and I killed it

00:48:15 ►

so I didn’t bite Madalena.

00:48:17 ►

And I think you had left just then,

00:48:20 ►

but somebody immediately went to find you

00:48:22 ►

and said Peter was just bitten by a Bushmaster.

00:48:24 ►

And she came racing back. Did you Peter was just bitten by a Bushmaster and she came racing back

00:48:25 ►

did you know what that was

00:48:28 ►

a Bushmaster

00:48:29 ►

Shishupe

00:48:31 ►

you knew Shishupe was bad

00:48:34 ►

you came back and she dragged me to a hospital

00:48:38 ►

and made me

00:48:40 ►

and I kept thinking I’m ok

00:48:41 ►

I’m just a little woozy

00:48:43 ►

I’m a little sick

00:48:44 ►

when they shot me up with all sorts of things.

00:48:49 ►

She took care of me.

00:48:50 ►

She made sure I got out of it okay.

00:48:53 ►

So you fell in love with everything about Amazon.

00:48:57 ►

Well, when I met Chepa,

00:49:00 ►

I had just convinced Chama Pharmaceutical.

00:49:04 ►

I had collected for the Museum of Natural History

00:49:06 ►

in New York, and that was a

00:49:08 ►

fluke. I had gotten some

00:49:10 ►

artifacts from a group called the

00:49:12 ►

Matzes, the Mayaruna,

00:49:14 ►

who wore

00:49:15 ►

splinters in their noses, had tattoos

00:49:18 ►

that made them, with the splinters

00:49:20 ►

and with some achote paint on their face,

00:49:22 ►

look like jaguars.

00:49:24 ►

And they did that so that they would hunt like jaguars in kind of an animistic way.

00:49:29 ►

I didn’t know if these were fake, like tourist Indians, or the real deal.

00:49:35 ►

And I had a wonderful teacher, a guide, who was teaching me how to survive in the jungle.

00:49:40 ►

And I thought, he charges me a lot of money every year, you know,

00:49:45 ►

to do 30 days with him.

00:49:47 ►

It’s thousands and thousands of dollars.

00:49:49 ►

What if he’s faking me out?

00:49:50 ►

So I got some artifacts, and the only way I could think to find out

00:49:54 ►

if they were worth anything for real, like from real indigenous people or fake,

00:49:59 ►

was to offer them to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

00:50:03 ►

And so I did, and it took me a while to get their ear.

00:50:06 ►

And I finally got their ear.

00:50:09 ►

And Ralph Carneiro

00:50:11 ►

was headed up

00:50:13 ►

the South American Ethnology

00:50:14 ►

area of the museum.

00:50:18 ►

And he had a woman working

00:50:19 ►

for him, Lila Williamson,

00:50:21 ►

who was with him putting together

00:50:23 ►

a permanent hall of South American

00:50:25 ►

peoples. So they agreed to meet me, because I used the word Mayaruna and Matzahs. And

00:50:33 ►

I brought some stuff in, a couple of bows and arrows, a ring used to climb trees, like

00:50:38 ►

just a vine that they put around their feet to be able to shimmy up trees. And instead

00:50:43 ►

of them laughing at me and saying that I was, you know, being duped,

00:50:47 ►

they were like, how did you get this stuff?

00:50:50 ►

Nobody gets into the Maya Runa Matsez and comes out alive.

00:50:54 ►

And so over several years, I collected for them, not getting paid or anything.

00:51:00 ►

They would just give me a letter that said, thank you.

00:51:02 ►

And then on the next trip, Peter Gorman is collecting for us

00:51:05 ►

if there’s a problem at immigration, please contact us.

00:51:09 ►

Don’t throw his stuff away.

00:51:12 ►

And so that would help me get through customs.

00:51:14 ►

Can you tell by looking at her or taking a guess?

00:51:17 ►

No, but I could tell a little bit by seeing what plants her mom would buy to ward off negativity.

00:51:27 ►

Or in the bar, at our restaurant, when we would have no business for a few days,

00:51:32 ►

her mom would go to Belay, a huge market, and buy certain flowers and tell us,

00:51:37 ►

put them here, facing the door, so that everyone who passes sees that

00:51:41 ►

and will know there’s no negativity here.

00:51:44 ►

Because if somebody’s giving you a bad eye, evil ovo,

00:51:47 ►

to make sure no one comes in.

00:51:49 ►

So if you put these flowers and they see them,

00:51:52 ►

and the reason you could try to figure out,

00:51:54 ►

kind of figure out where people come from,

00:51:56 ►

was because her mom would use the same flowers her mom had used.

00:52:00 ►

And her mom had learned it from her mom.

00:52:02 ►

Do you have a man of flowers?

00:52:04 ►

Remember some flowers sometimes she would put there to ward off the evil eye?

00:52:08 ►

And that would indicate what river a person came from.

00:52:12 ►

Because different flowers grow in different rivers.

00:52:15 ►

One river grows great bananas, one river grows none.

00:52:19 ►

And just five miles away there’s another river that grows wonderful plantains.

00:52:24 ►

But your river can’t grow any you know

00:52:26 ►

so flowers the same way and so i would look at what her mom bought and realize okay those flowers

00:52:35 ►

grow on a river where the ocaño indians live so her mom probably back there even though her mom

00:52:42 ►

was not a full-blood indian but her mom’s mom’s mom was probably an Ocaño

00:52:47 ►

because that’s the river where those flowers grow.

00:52:51 ►

And only Ocaños would have used those flowers.

00:52:54 ►

So I can’t say with certainty if I were a real botanist

00:52:58 ►

and if I were a real anthropologist, both,

00:53:01 ►

I could probably really be certain.

00:53:03 ►

As an amateur in both, I’m pretty certain,

00:53:06 ►

but I can’t swear to it.

00:53:08 ►

Was her mom Catholic and spoke Spanish?

00:53:11 ►

Her mom spoke Spanish, and she was kind of a riverino, a person who knew how to live

00:53:16 ►

on the river, but lived in the city. Her mom was friends with more cordoneros, healers,

00:53:22 ►

than anyone I ever met. Her house was, every day, the guy worked,

00:53:26 ►

this person works with stones, this person works with smoke, this person works with eggs,

00:53:31 ►

this person works with ayahuasca, this, right? Yes or no? She was surrounded every day by

00:53:36 ►

wonderful healers. But lots of different plants. Ayahuasca was not, it’s become very popular.

00:53:49 ►

was not it’s become very popular but among the riverinos and not in not using that word in a derogatory sense just among the people who live on the river and depend on the river and the plants

00:53:54 ►

to live there are hundreds of plants for different ailments if a baby has diarrhea they would come to

00:54:01 ►

Julio and Julio would just send his daughter, Lottie, out,

00:54:06 ►

get me a little of this, a little of that. He might chew it, and then put it in the baby’s

00:54:09 ►

mouth. Well, you think it’s diarrhea. It’s going to go away in 12 hours. But in the jungle,

00:54:14 ►

right, diarrhea was going to kill a lot of those babies, because they’re going to get

00:54:17 ►

dehydrated and die. And there was no other medicines.

00:54:21 ►

So they didn’t have Imodium. They didn’t have 7-11. No, no, no.

00:54:26 ►

So everybody who lived on the river knew a great deal of plants.

00:54:30 ►

And so when we talk about cordoneros,

00:54:31 ►

I don’t mean her mom had 12 ayahuasqueros hanging in the house.

00:54:35 ►

She had stone healers, smoke healers, egg healers,

00:54:40 ►

people who worked with different sorts of insects.

00:54:44 ►

So when she said she had a restaurant, I thought, baloney.

00:54:49 ►

But I’ll show up, and it’s going to turn out I have to take her and her whole family to lunch.

00:54:54 ►

And instead, I walked in, and there’s 20 bankers eating ceviche at little tables.

00:55:00 ►

Like, that was the day the bank came and ate at her table.

00:55:03 ►

It was like, are you kidding?

00:55:10 ►

She had television. She had a great sound system. I thought, she’s not a fool.

00:55:16 ►

She’s connected. She is earning money. And she’s writing. And she’s smart. And she’s telling me I don’t need to pay. Like, that’s the biggest lie in Peru. Don’t need to pay.

00:55:20 ►

Instead, pay for my whole family. She was different. And everyone said she knew everything

00:55:25 ►

on the boat. And so I found a boat, I put it together. And I said, would you come? And, you

00:55:32 ►

know, just help me out because people say I need you. At the same time, I was frightened because

00:55:38 ►

she was beautiful. And we’re going so far out into the middle of nowhere. We were going from Iquitos to the border of Colombia and Brazil, Leticia.

00:55:50 ►

How many miles?

00:55:51 ►

300 miles maybe.

00:55:53 ►

And then 600 or 700 miles.

00:55:55 ►

The boat wasn’t that fast.

00:55:56 ►

600 or 700 miles up the Avarí, the border of Peru and Brazil,

00:56:00 ►

which is against the rules.

00:56:02 ►

You need special permission the whole way.

00:56:04 ►

And since you’re in international waters, you need against the rules. You need special permission the whole way. And since

00:56:05 ►

you’re in international waters, you need every outpost, you have to stop at the outpost

00:56:11 ►

and get a stamp to be permitted to continue on. We left Iquitos in the boat, and the first

00:56:20 ►

place we had to stop was a town called Pavis, where she was born. And she knew everybody there.

00:56:25 ►

It was fine, except when we first got there,

00:56:28 ►

she was in the back of the boat doing something.

00:56:32 ►

Now, the back of the boat had a larder where we had lots of potatoes and carrots,

00:56:37 ►

you know, basic foodstuffs that would last, we hoped, about a month without going bad,

00:56:42 ►

and some other things.

00:56:43 ►

And she had made me buy some rum

00:56:45 ►

and what do you call those Christmas cakes?

00:56:50 ►

Panettone’s.

00:56:50 ►

Oh, panettone’s.

00:56:51 ►

And I thought, I don’t even like panettone’s,

00:56:55 ►

and I don’t drink rum.

00:56:56 ►

I just have one bottle of gin or two bottles of gin for the whole trip,

00:57:00 ►

so I can have one drink at night, and that’s it.

00:57:02 ►

So I’m going to be sober.

00:57:06 ►

And the first place we come, a fellow marches onto the boat, military fellow, and he says, you need to have a red light

00:57:12 ►

and a green light to pass. And I said, well, I do. And he orders his man, break them. And just then,

00:57:20 ►

Chepa comes running out of the back of the boat, and she’s got a panettone in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other,

00:57:27 ►

I think, saying, Uncle Joe!

00:57:31 ►

Chepita! Chepita!

00:57:33 ►

I didn’t know it was you. Don’t break the lights.

00:57:35 ►

Don’t break the lights.

00:57:36 ►

And she saved the day.

00:57:39 ►

Then we went to his offices.

00:57:41 ►

We told him what we were going to do.

00:57:43 ►

We were going to collect some plants for Shama Pharmaceutical

00:57:45 ►

and

00:57:46 ►

he knew her and the only question

00:57:50 ►

was, well, this is

00:57:51 ►

great, but what else can you give us?

00:57:54 ►

And she had already told me

00:57:55 ►

buy 50 gallons of

00:57:58 ►

bidona drum

00:57:59 ►

of kerosene.

00:58:01 ►

And I thought, what do we need kerosene for?

00:58:04 ►

We use little lamps, but one tooth gallons will last a month. And I thought, what do we need kerosene for? We use little lamps, but one

00:58:05 ►

tooth gallons will last a month. And he, she finally says, well, you have no gas, you have

00:58:12 ►

no lights here in the whole military outpost. Maybe we could give you five gallons of kerosene.

00:58:19 ►

And she did. And the guy had lights and the whole place had a party that night. And I think she broke out

00:58:26 ►

a couple of more bottles, but we got our stamp.

00:58:28 ►

And at that point I realized

00:58:30 ►

no wonder they told me

00:58:32 ►

to use her. This is

00:58:33 ►

she’s the best.

00:58:36 ►

And I took her out in the river

00:58:38 ►

and

00:58:39 ►

maybe our sixth night or seventh

00:58:42 ►

night, we were in the Amarille

00:58:44 ►

going to a military base, Peloton,

00:58:48 ►

halfway up to where we were going to finally run into the Matzes.

00:58:54 ►

And before we got to Peloton, a light came around the corner behind us, around a bend,

00:58:59 ►

and it was moving too fast with too much intention

00:59:05 ►

and we instantly knew,

00:59:08 ►

oh my goodness, this is going to be pirates.

00:59:10 ►

We had heard, we had been told

00:59:12 ►

there were pirates on the river

00:59:13 ►

and sure enough, they came up alongside us,

00:59:17 ►

they caught up with us

00:59:18 ►

and there probably were 10 men

00:59:20 ►

but it looked to me like 30 or 50 or 100

00:59:24 ►

and my driver, the son of the owner of the boat of them were 10 men, but it looked to me like 30 or 50 or 100.

00:59:27 ►

And my driver,

00:59:29 ►

the son of the owner of the boat that I’d rented, and his

00:59:31 ►

timonel,

00:59:33 ►

the fellow who steered the boat,

00:59:35 ►

at night, I steered it during the day, he steered it

00:59:37 ►

at night,

00:59:38 ►

they both said, those guys

00:59:41 ►

are drunk and they’re going to kill you.

00:59:43 ►

So we’re going to join their boat and drink with them.

00:59:47 ►

And I looked and said, well, I’ve got Chepa and me.

00:59:50 ►

And I said, would you please?

00:59:53 ►

I’ve got a dog outside that’s digging a hole so he can get to cooler earth.

00:59:57 ►

So pardon the noise.

00:59:59 ►

And I said, Chepa, get below.

01:00:01 ►

Below was a space of maybe three, three and a half feet.

01:00:01 ►

I said, Chepa, get below.

01:00:04 ►

Below was a space of maybe three, three and a half feet.

01:00:08 ►

And I said, I don’t want these drunk guys to see you because then they’re going to come on the boat and kill you.

01:00:12 ►

So you get down below, and I’ll see what I can do.

01:00:16 ►

And in the course of seeing what I could do,

01:00:19 ►

I picked up a machete.

01:00:21 ►

I had a beautiful, beautiful knife.

01:00:24 ►

And I began to yell at them with force of ayahuasca.

01:00:27 ►

It was not my force.

01:00:29 ►

I suddenly opened my mouth, and kind of a raging torrent of New Yorkese came out,

01:00:36 ►

saying, who wants to be the first motherfucker on this boat?

01:00:40 ►

Who’s going to be number one?

01:00:41 ►

Because I’m going to take your goddamn hand off.

01:00:43 ►

And number two, I’m going to stab you. So what are you going to do? What are you going to be number one? Because I’m going to take your goddamn hand off. And number two, I’m going to stab you.

01:00:45 ►

So what are you going to do?

01:00:47 ►

What are you going to do?

01:00:48 ►

Knowing my death…

01:00:49 ►

This was preemptive because they hadn’t…

01:00:50 ►

I was going to die.

01:00:51 ►

They hadn’t threatened you.

01:00:52 ►

They had pulled up alongside and said,

01:00:54 ►

we’re taking your motor.

01:00:55 ►

We’re taking your motor and kill you.

01:00:57 ►

This is what’s going to happen.

01:00:58 ►

So this is what’s going to happen.

01:01:01 ►

And so I said, get below.

01:01:03 ►

My guys said they’re going to kill us.

01:01:04 ►

We’ll join them.

01:01:05 ►

And we look like them.

01:01:06 ►

We’re just part of the pirates now.

01:01:07 ►

See you later.

01:01:09 ►

Which left me and her.

01:01:10 ►

And I said, get below.

01:01:12 ►

Why were you tripping on ayahuasca?

01:01:14 ►

No, I had done ayahuasca a couple of days earlier.

01:01:16 ►

But I had the power of the juice in me.

01:01:19 ►

And so when I started, my fear combined with the spirit of ayahuasca

01:01:26 ►

made my voice come out very powerfully.

01:01:29 ►

It almost physically stopped them for a moment, I think.

01:01:34 ►

It’s true.

01:01:37 ►

And after two minutes of me knowing I’m lying…

01:01:41 ►

Because I always knew he had a charming, nice type of, but not that part where he laughed.

01:01:46 ►

So he was like the baddest mother?

01:01:49 ►

Yeah.

01:01:50 ►

Well, you know, he thought, you know,

01:01:51 ►

that’s our lives or them.

01:01:54 ►

Well, knight in shining armor?

01:01:56 ►

No.

01:01:57 ►

What happens was, she was the knight in shining armor.

01:02:00 ►

Suddenly, she’s standing next to me,

01:02:03 ►

this most beautiful girl in the world.

01:02:06 ►

I told her to get down,

01:02:08 ►

just lift up the hatch and

01:02:09 ►

climb down the three-step ladder

01:02:11 ►

to the hold, so even if they kill

01:02:14 ►

me, they won’t see you, so you’ll live.

01:02:17 ►

And suddenly, she’s…

01:02:20 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:02:24 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:02:29 ►

And then, and then, and then what happened is that I’ve been waiting ten years to get to a point in a talk

01:02:38 ►

where I could stop it at the turning point in a story and make us all wait another week to see how it comes out.

01:02:45 ►

And for what it’s worth, I’ve not yet listened to what is said next myself.

01:02:50 ►

Of course, since this is many years later and Peter and his wife are now telling the story,

01:02:55 ►

we at least know that they got out alive.

01:02:58 ►

And why, you ask, am I being such a jerk about this?

01:03:03 ►

Well, it goes back to my days as a young boy,

01:03:06 ►

back when every Saturday brought a new double feature to our small-town movie theater.

01:03:11 ►

And during the winter in northern Illinois back then,

01:03:14 ►

well, by 1 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon,

01:03:17 ►

almost everybody between the ages of 9 and 12 could be found in that theater.

01:03:22 ►

There’d be two main features with a bunch of cartoons before and in between,

01:03:27 ►

but the final movie of the day was always part of a much longer film,

01:03:31 ►

and so each afternoon ended with the great big

01:03:34 ►

to-be-continued message across the screen.

01:03:39 ►

And quite often that final film featured the adventures of Clyde Beatty,

01:03:43 ►

who was, well, basically a lion tamer from

01:03:46 ►

a circus. But he also starred in movies like The Lost Jungle and Darkest Africa and others of that

01:03:53 ►

genre. The one that I remember best had poor Clyde trying to save a damsel in distress who was on the

01:04:00 ►

other side of a narrow canyon that had a shallow river running through it.

01:04:09 ►

The river, of course, was filled with crocodiles whose mouths were gaping wide,

01:04:14 ►

just waiting for Clyde to attempt to jump over to the other side and save the girl,

01:04:18 ►

who was probably being attacked by a big snake or something.

01:04:24 ►

Now, keep in mind that in these movies, there was no such thing as computer-generated graphics or other special effects that we see today.

01:04:27 ►

No, this was just Clyde, the girl, and the crocs down below.

01:04:31 ►

So our brave adventurer looks around and sees a huge vine

01:04:35 ►

that he can use to swing across the canyon.

01:04:38 ►

And until this very moment,

01:04:41 ►

I’ve never actually wondered what that vine had to have been connected to up above.

01:04:46 ►

You know, the scene was just much too tense for questions like that to come to mind.

01:04:50 ►

But here was Clyde running to the edge of the canyon and grabbing the vine in an attempt to swing across.

01:04:56 ►

But just as he swung out over the river, the vine broke.

01:05:01 ►

And then the big to-be-continued sign appeared.

01:05:05 ►

And the audience collectively moaned.

01:05:08 ►

Actually, until the next Saturday, many of our schoolyard conversations

01:05:12 ►

were focused on how Clyde Beatty, king of the lion tamers,

01:05:16 ►

would get out of this week’s scrape.

01:05:18 ►

Now, ever since that vine-breaking moment over 60 years ago,

01:05:22 ►

I’ve been waiting to use that to-be-continued device somehow.

01:05:27 ►

And sorry for you,

01:05:29 ►

but this is the first time that I’ve been able to do it.

01:05:32 ►

However, never fear.

01:05:34 ►

Next week, we will learn how Peter and his wife

01:05:36 ►

got out of their encounter with the river pirates.

01:05:40 ►

And if I remember,

01:05:41 ►

I’ll even tell you what Clyde Beatty did

01:05:43 ►

when his vine broke.

01:05:46 ►

Now, before I go, I want to remind you once again,

01:05:49 ►

particularly our fellow slaughters who have just begun a new term at school,

01:05:53 ►

that life can actually be much more than just an old, gray, dusty road

01:05:58 ►

that leads to a cubicle once you’re out of school.

01:06:00 ►

When Terence McKenna was 22 or 23 years old,

01:06:04 ►

he talked his younger brother into taking

01:06:06 ►

an adventure in the Amazon to search for exotic drugs. Little did he know at the time, but that

01:06:12 ►

decision to throw caution to the wind and head to the jungle would be a decision that would provide

01:06:18 ►

the contours for the rest of his life. Without that little trip to La Torera, he may never have become the person that we now know as the Bard Terrence McKenna.

01:06:28 ►

And should you be in school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver this October 24th and 25th,

01:06:35 ►

you can put your toe in the waters of plant medicines and talk with some true experts in the field.

01:06:41 ►

That date and place is where you’ll find the 5th Annual Spirit Plants Medicine Conference. Thank you. you have fallen hopelessly behind in your work, well, maybe you should take the rest of the year off and head to the jungle.

01:07:07 ►

Who knows, that adventure may be when you finally figure out

01:07:11 ►

what it is that you actually want to do

01:07:13 ►

with the time that you have left here on this beautiful little planet.

01:07:18 ►

Just don’t wait too late in life for your chance to march in the parade.

01:07:23 ►

Of course, it would probably be a good thing

01:07:26 ►

if you didn’t tell your parents that I suggested this.

01:07:29 ►

And so for now, this is Lorenzo

01:07:31 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:07:34 ►

Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

467 - Investigating Life – Part 1

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Program Notes

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