The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (50 page)

By the spring of 1975, we weren’t the only ones who were interested in developing this piece of psychedelic technology. A fellow student I’ll call Mark had access to the agronomy department’s tissue culture lab, and he became an enthusiastic collaborator. We managed to get some spores germinated and were growing mycelial cultures on potato dextrose agar in the lab; that was the easy part. We still hadn’t gotten them to fruit—that is, to form mushrooms. Then I stumbled on a paper in the journal
Mycologia
that described a simple method for growing fruiting bodies of the common edible mushroom
Agaricus bisporus
in canning jars, on a substrate of sterilized rye grain (San Antonio 1971). Though not a practical method for large-scale cultivation, it was presented as a way to grow a few fruiting bodies for use in genetic studies. We could have cared less about that; it looked like it just might work for
Psilocybe cubensis.

We lost no time in sterilizing a batch of canning jars. The mycelium grew rapidly and permeated the substrate within a few days. After that, we removed the lids and “cased” the jars with a layer of sterilized peat moss and vermiculite. I then took the jars back home so I could spray them every day and look after them. Ten days passed. Nothing happened. The mycelium appeared to be growing through the casing soil and spreading on the top of it. Not good. I added more soil and kept watching. Five more days: nothing. I was disappointed to say the least. One night I came home and took a look at the jars as I had been doing every day, and still saw nothing.

It was my friend in the building who noticed first: along the side of the jar, squashed between the mycelial block and the glass, was a little penis-shaped structure, an elongated white stem topped with a rounded, dark brown tip. A mushroom primordium! Excitedly, we checked the other jars, and they all had them. Over the next few days, they broke through the surface and expanded into beautiful, golden-capped mushrooms. They were also quite adequately strong, as we soon learned. By this time, even the uncased mycelial blocks that Mark had kept in the lab were producing fruits, as I discovered the next day when I found him there bent over in uncontrollable laughter. There was every reason to be happy, even without the assistance of psilocybin. This changed everything.

Those familiar with Terence’s talents as a raconteur won’t be shocked to learn he could be an unreliable narrator at times. And with respect to his account of how we perfected our mushroom-growing method, as noted in
True Hallucinations
among other places, I have some debunking to do. According to Terence, he’d been conducting his trials in the shed at the lower end of his garden in Berkeley. He’d tried growing the mycelium on beds of sterilized rye and manure-compost mixes without success. Finally, in frustration, he closed up the shed and went away for a couple of weeks. Upon his return, he threw open the shed door and found the beds were covered with large, beautiful clusters of mushrooms.

Great story, but our discovery occurred as I’ve explained it above. Here’s the abstract: Working in the tissue culture lab over several weeks, Mark and I succeeded in establishing mycelial cultures. Then we stumbled across the paper from
Mycologia
. We applied the method described there, and it worked.

I immediately shared the method with Terence, who also had success. The technique was tricky at first, but once we knew its quirks, growing mushrooms in mason jars on blocks of sterilized rye grain was quite easy. In
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
, we described our method as about as complex as a seventh-grade science fair project. It would be almost another year before we tried growing mushrooms on composted beds, in a manner akin to what Terence described, but even then we had little luck, as I’ll relate.

Nevertheless, the jar method was a major breakthrough. We considered it further validation of the gnosis that had been given to us at La Chorrera, now that we were in full symbiotic allegiance with the mushroom. The Teacher had intimated that we’d be given the knowledge of a technology that violated no physical laws, but which we’d understand to have verified its teachings. Clearly, this simple methodology was what the Teacher meant. And we used our book to convey that knowledge to thousands of others around the globe. After
Psilocybin
was published, anyone could produce a pure, natural, potent psychedelic using materials largely available at the grocery store. Any college student with a spare closet could now produce magic mushrooms in modest quantities and give them to friends. It really was another psychedelic revolution, of a quieter kind.

We published
Psilocybin
under pseudonyms; only years later was it widely known that O.T. Oss and O. N. Oeric were Terence and Dennis McKenna, respectively. In many respects, I regard that book as our most significant accomplishment. It continues to have a positive cultural impact, that is, if you believe the mushrooms and their influence are good, as I do. More than our wild ideas and theories, which may well be flawed and destined to be forgotten, we can claim a modest credit for the role we played in implementing a global symbiosis with the mushrooms. Even in the years after Wasson’s article in
Life
on the mushroom cults of Mexico, the experience remained the secret knowledge of a few. Now millions have experienced the mushrooms and the dimensions they open to exploration.

Shortly after we had developed our new method, I finished my courses at CSU and moved, temporarily, to a small house in the Big Thompson River canyon just outside Loveland, Colorado. I had a great day job at a wheat genetics lab a few miles away, and plenty of spare time at home to set up and experiment with some jars. Back at CSU, I’d had a work-study job as an assistant to an art professor. During that time, many of the art students became my good friends. I remember the lovely experience we had when some of them visited Loveland and we all got quite loaded in a sunny glade in the aspen forest a few miles up the canyon.

My Loveland interlude was short-lived, and perhaps luckily so. I stayed in the house on the Big Thompson through the end of July. A year later, on July 31, 1976, torrential summer rains swept down the canyon and engulfed my former quarters during what proved to be one of the worst flood disasters in Colorado history. Among the 143 fatalities were my landlord (who lived up the road) and my next-door neighbor and her adult, mentally disabled son.

Earlier in my Loveland summer, I had gotten the final word on my application to study under Schultes at Harvard. Though I’d taken his advice on how to improve my chances by studying chemistry and taxonomy, I hadn’t been accepted. Fortunately, the refusal did not end my friendship with him, and I had opportunities to spend time with him in later years, and to earn his respect for my eventual achievements. To be honest, I wasn’t terribly disappointed by the rejection. With the new technology we now had at our disposal, I was actually leaning toward mycology and getting less interested in the taxonomy of higher plants.

After my Loveland interlude, I returned to California. I bought an old car for $100 and set out for the West Coast. I put my best mycelial cultures onto slants and stuffed them into a styrofoam box, which sat on the front seat beside me. My car wasn’t up to the freeways, so I mostly stayed on U.S. Route 50, billed as the “Loneliest Highway in the World.” The road lived up to its reputation, but at least I had the company of my fungal symbionts, quiet though they were.

I arrived in the Bay Area to a scene that had radically changed. Ev and Terence had broken up, spectacularly, after she’d started sleeping with a friend of Terence’s who had helped him with the timewave software. Terence had already moved to Oakland and had started a relationship with Kat, the woman he’d later marry. Kat had grown up in the town of Avalon on Santa Catalina Island off the coast southwest of Los Angeles. Like Terence, she had traveled widely in the late sixties; the two had apparently first met in Jerusalem and reconnected years later. Kat was smart, pretty, and fun to be around; she and my brother made a good match. Only half in jest, I tried to warn her that Terence could be difficult. For his part, he’d turned up the charm and ripped the knob off.

Our first project was to complete
Psilocybin
, which had been accepted by a small local publisher, And/Or Press. We finished the entire manuscript in under a month and saw it published early in 1976. I wrote the technical parts, and Terence provided the foreword, including the well-known set piece I excerpted earlier, “The Mushroom Speaks.”

Over those weeks, Kat and Terence had been planning a move to Hawaii, which they did in October. I first traveled to Hawaii in December 1975 to spend the holidays with them on the Big Island. Their rented house was small, but the land behind it looked ideal for a little experiment in outdoor mushroom cultivation. I arrived only a few days after they’d had a brush with the dark side of the mushroom experience, as described by Terence in
True Hallucinations
. Mushrooms are not always about giddiness and giggles; they can hint at, even starkly reveal, certain alien dimensions otherwise closed to the mind. Terence and Kat had been sobered by their encounter with that darker aspect and were in no hurry to repeat it.

Meanwhile, a journey was in the works. We had all been impressed by a book called
Wizard of the Upper Amazon
by F. Bruce Lamb, an account of the life of an
ayahuasquero
named Manuel Córdova-Rios. Rumor had it that Córdova-Rios was still alive and living in Iquitos, Peru. Enticed by his story, Terence and Kat had begun planning a trip to Iquitos to find him, and to investigate ayahuasca. I decide to stay in their place while Terence and Kat took off in search of legendary shamans and magic decoctions.

By late winter 1976, I had moved to Hawaii and Terence was headed for Peru. There was something slapdash about their adventure, though as one who shared their wanderlust, especially for South America, I understood the allure. As it turned out, their travels would later help me in ways I could not have foreseen. Terence and Kat did contact Córdova-Rios, who, as Terence writes in
The Archaic Revival
, was by then in his early nineties, his eyes clouded by cataracts. He said the
ayahuasqueros
around Iquitos were mostly charlatans and suggested that Terence and Kat move their search to Pucallpa instead. Taking his advice, they met a practitioner there who would later assist me at the start of my professional life, in 1981.

I’d applied to the graduate program in the botany department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, on the island of Oahu, and had been accepted for the fall term in 1976. The idea of living on the Big Island for a few months seemed like an attractive prospect. I ended up enjoying the solitude, even if our dabbling in outdoor fungiculture never panned out. I left that place and flew to Honolulu in early June, loaded what little stuff I had in a rented beater, and raced around for a couple of days, looking for a place to live. I finally found a studio apartment just a few blocks from the University of Hawaii campus and moved in, along with my All-American canning pressure cooker, an essential tool for sterilizing cultures. My next-door neighbor introduced me to friends of his who lived in a communal student house nearby. They were nice hippies, fellow psychedelic enthusiasts who shared my appreciation for the abundance of the autumn harvest. Before long, I began to think of Hawaii as my home.

Chapter 39 - A Lab in Paradise

Shortly before classes started, I got a letter, forwarded from Colorado, from my former girlfriend Deborah. After years of living with the surfer in Florida, she’d married him, given birth to a daughter, and moved back to California. Fool that I was, the letter gave me a flicker of hope. She clearly wasn’t very happy; maybe we could see each other again.

But I was too busy with the start of graduate school even to dwell on past love. I had been offered a research assistantship by the botany department funded through the U.S. Forest Service. This was a break; it meant I could focus on research and did not have to work as a teaching assistant. My grantors didn’t care what I worked on, they said, as long as it was Hawaiian and as long as it was a tree!

I knew nothing about Hawaiian flora at the time except that
Acacia koa
and some of its close relatives were important trees on the islands. I knew that some of the African and Australian
Acacia
species had high levels of DMT and other tryptamines, also beta-carbolines, in the bark and leaves. It was perfect! I thought I could study the tryptamine chemistry of the indigenous Hawaiian
Acacia
species; I’d compare the alkaloid profiles among them and see if those compounds could be used as chemotaxonomic markers. The possibility that they might also yield significant quantities of DMT would be another, if unstated, research goal.

The only problem, I soon discovered, was that the Hawaiian
Acacia
species are all notable for their lack of alkaloids. Like many indigenous island plants, they had long since lost the need to produce protective secondary products like alkaloids, having few predators. Instead, I focused on the non-protein amino acids and phenolics, which were abundant in the Hawaiian
Acacias
. I ended up comparing these profiles among different island populations, and also with some of the closely related Australian
Acacia
species (which did contain tryptamines).

It didn’t really matter. It was a good, challenging project that enabled me to learn hands-on plant chemistry and how to conduct myself in the lab. Eventually, I got a master’s degree out of that work, though none of my findings were published in a journal, much to the disappointment of my original supervisor, who had secured the forestry grant that funded my research assistantship.

As it happened, I ended up working more closely with another professor, Sanford Siegel, Ph.D., who eventually became my research supervisor, mentor, and friend. Siegel was one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. He was truly a Renaissance man and a brilliant and creative scientist. I had seen in the literature that arrived with my acceptance notice that among the faculty was one Sanford Siegel, whose research interests, among many things, was exobiology, the study of extraterrestrial life. What? How could anyone study that, since there was none available to study, mushrooms notwithstanding? I had to meet this guy. A couple of weeks before the semester began, I visited the department just to nose around and see who was there. That was the mid-seventies, the era of the “energy crisis,” and the corridor lights were dimmed. I approached an odd-looking, rumpled character in the gloom, and asked if he knew where I could find Dr. Siegel. He peered at me myopically through thick glasses and quietly replied that he was Dr. Siegel. He looked like a gnome, short and quite round.