The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (70 page)

Terence was fifty when our Father died in 1997, and I was forty-six. Dad had long since retired to Mesa, Arizona, and lived there with Lois, his second wife. The rheumatic fever he’d had as a child had caused a heart valve defect that deteriorated over time. “Leaky valves” in old age are a common long-term outcome of this childhood disease, and the accepted treatment is a pig valve transplant. Our father had this procedure in the early eighties, and it fixed the problem for more than a decade. He wasn’t climbing mountains or hang-gliding, but he played golf and swam regularly and had few problems until the mid-1990s.

After that, the valve became less efficient, but a second transplant wasn’t indicated because of his age; what awaited him was advancing congestive heart failure. During this period we happened to be on a family vacation in Colorado at the same time Dad and Lois were. We were all staying at the Redstone Inn on the Crystal River, our old childhood family haunt. Dad became so short of breath sitting in the dining room I thought he was going to faint. He could barely make it upstairs to his room and appeared on the verge of a heart attack. Fortunately, the episode passed (it was probably triggered by high altitude) but he was definitely on the decline. He made a remark that day that has stuck with me: “You’re just living your life and everything is going along fine,” he said, “and the next thing you know, you look in the mirror and you see an old man looking back at you. You suddenly realize that you’re old. How did that happen?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. By then he could do little but sit in a chair. He was very uncomfortable and usually short of breath. It was wrenching to see this old man, my old man, suffering so much. It almost seemed as if death would be merciful even though he was “only” eighty at the time.

His doctors came up with the brilliant idea of implanting a defibrillator in his chest. Neither Terence nor I were consulted or even informed about this until the deed had been done. When I found out, I was furious. Dad did not have arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat; he had congestive heart failure. Though some would argue the devices reduce the risk of “sudden death,” a defibrillator struck me as an inappropriate treatment for a man of his age and condition. For me, convincing him to undergo the procedure amounted to malpractice. But Medicare would pay for it and reward his physicians well for doing so—another regrettable illustration of high-tech medicine out of control.

We had no idea just how regrettable until our father’s death—or rather, his many deaths. His ordeal began on April 27, 1997, a day when I had flown to Boston for a meeting with a company I was consulting for. Terence, as it happened, was also on the East Coast, giving a workshop in North Carolina. There was a message from Sheila awaiting me when I checked into the hotel. Lois had called to tell her my father had fallen in the shower after suffering an apparent heart attack or stroke. He’d been taken, unconscious, to the emergency room and died shortly thereafter. I went to my room and called Lois. After talking to her a few minutes, I hung up and sat there gathering my thoughts. The news wasn’t a surprise; we’d been expecting something like it for some time.

Then Lois called back with an odd and disturbing follow-up: it seemed that Dad had not died after all. He had not recovered consciousness, but his heart had started beating again due to the defibrillator, which kept kicking in when his heart stopped. The thing would literally resurrect him every time. Lois gave me the number at the hospital, and I called and talked to a nurse, explained the situation to him, and asked if they could just turn off the defibrillator. Clearly, Dad was not going to recover and yet was being denied a peaceful death.

The nurse’s answer shocked me. Actually, no, he said, they could not turn off the device, because it belonged to the corporation, and only a company technician could access the software codes that deactivated it. The request to do so had to be authorized by my father’s physician.

“Well, get the goddamn physician on the line and have him authorize it!” I demanded, by now screaming into the phone. But the physician was on a golf junket in Florida and couldn’t be reached, and no one was aware of a Plan B. The nurse, who shared my distress, said the only way to resolve the matter was for me to get there as soon as I could and get in someone’s face.

I hung up and called Terence at the conference center, and we both started making plans to get to Mesa. I left around ten p.m. and finally made it to Phoenix three stops and twelve hours later. Terence had been going through the same nightmare and reached the hospital an hour before me. Overnight, the staff had finally had gotten someone to turn off the device, but Dad had lingered on until Terence arrived and then stopped breathing twenty minutes later. I arrived shortly after that, but by then Terence, having no idea when I’d get there, had left, hoping to catch his connection for Hawaii out of L.A.

Being in the presence of someone who has just expired is a strange experience. The room was still crackling with the energy of our father’s departing spirit; I had a definite, eerie sense that it was still hanging around, as if reluctant to leave until I showed up. The sight of him was enough to tell me his death had not been peaceful; the device in his chest would not permit that. The signature of his suffering, his agony and exhaustion, was etched into his face, and I will never forget it.

Both of our parent’s deaths were fraught with drama. Our mother’s had been disrupted by our concern over Terence, at the time a fugitive, trying to sneak into the country to spend some final moments with her. That did not happen, and Mom died never getting the chance to forgive or speak with her eldest and favorite son. At least Dad got to see Terence before he died, though I don’t know if Dad was conscious when Terence was with him. I felt like the one who lost out; Dad had expired by the time I got there. Over the years, reflecting on these events, I’ve often berated myself for not taking legal action against the physicians who implanted the device. The death of a loved one is often a moment of great vulnerability. Lawyers and lawsuits are the last things a survivor wants to think about, and I didn’t, though I feel now I should have. It wouldn’t be the last time that a paralysis born of grief would cloud my judgment and keep me from making the right decision. I had no idea how to go about filing a suit, and I had doubts about whether we’d have the resources to sustain such a long and costly action if we did file. Life was pressing in, and I made the decision to move on.

I’ve often regretted it. Dad was a good and ethical man. He was a good husband to our mother, and a good father to Terry and me despite the grief we caused him. He fought bravely in the war and paid a price for it. He enjoyed his friends, his fishing and hunting, his golf, his flying. He was an admirable person in many ways, someone to look up to and emulate. He was certainly not “an average guy” even though that’s how he wanted to think of himself. He was a good, practicing, believing Catholic to the very end. I hope he went to that heaven, if that’s the one he wanted, because he deserved to.

In January 1998, I took part in a twelve-day Ayahuasca workshop in Iquitos, Peru, at Francisco Montes’s retreat, Jardín Etnobotánico Sachamama, an hour outside Iquitos. Luis Eduardo Luna showed up, as did Francisco’s cousin, the painter Pablo Amaringo. The workshop had been touted as a splendid retreat in a beautiful setting, and that proved to be true. Luis Eduardo, Pablo, and I were there to provide entertainment in the form of our lectures. The group would be taking ayahuasca with Francisco, who had begun practicing
vegetalismo
, and with some other local practitioners. Luis Eduardo and Pablo had not been on good terms since their falling out over the art school in Pucallpa a few years earlier, but they both agreed to show up. We were hoping the reunion would bring some healing and reconciliation, which it did, although the truce was an uneasy one.

Among the interesting people there was a gentleman with some serious mental issues. For one, he believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and had come back to earth to overcome a coven of witches and warlocks who were bent on destroying the world. This evil cabal turned out to be us—the workshop participants. He became convinced we had lured him there to kill him. Muttering darkly under his breath, he let us now know he was on to us and, come nightfall, “the tables would turn.” He was quite serious about it and at one point tore off into the forest in a paranoid mania. Another group member, Bill, probably the sanest among us, found him hours later in a farmer’s yard, sitting in the lotus position and wearing only a towel, with a machete stuck into the ground beside him. After thirty or forty minutes of conversation, during which the guy didn’t open his eyes, Bill convinced him to find a hotel room in town and get some rest. The guy’s girlfriend, who had brought him to the workshop, later confided that he’d suffered these paranoid delusions for years and that she’d hoped the ayahuasca could help him.

Earlier, in a lucid moment, he told a fascinating story about how he had cured his severe dyslexia in adolescence using high doses of LSD. He’d always had difficulty reading, he said, because the letters just seemed to float off the page. Apparently, he’d taken LSD to play football in high school, believing that it improved his game. He was a good player, and his skill helped him gain social acceptance despite his learning disabilities; maybe LSD could help him tackle those as well. He described to me how, in a series of high-dose sessions, he was able to visualize the “wiring” in his brain, as he put it, and the “damaged filing cabinets” where his linguistic functions resided. In a shamanic act of psychic neurosurgery, he then identified a set of “alternate” cabinets and transferred his linguistic functions into them. After that, he never had any problems with dyslexia, he said. He read easily and enjoyed it.

I have no reason to doubt his story, though it obviously warrants skepticism in light of his mental health issues. It did lead me to speculate about the use of LSD as a potential treatment for dyslexia. We have a limited understanding of neuroplasticity, to say nothing of how psychedelics might affect it. That man’s anecdote hints at the curious link between psychedelics and language, as do the more prevalent accounts of synesthesia I’ve discussed earlier. Psychedelics have some fundamental relationship to the way our brains create meaning and understanding out of sounds and images. I’m convinced that further investigations into this phenomenon would yield new insights.

Another participant was Jill, Terence’s ex-girlfriend. The two had very recently split up, and one reason she attended the workshop was to look for some understanding and peace of mind. I’d gotten to know her somewhat on my visits to Hawaii while she and Terence were together; back then I’d mistaken her quiet self-possession and reserve for shyness. I knew their parting had hurt her, though I believe it had been her choice. I was still feeling a lot of turmoil over my own relationship with Terence and, fairly or otherwise, Jill’s experience may have heightened those emotions, which started surfacing for me in the Ayahuasca sessions. They were difficult sessions, very dark and disturbing. I kept seeing images of Terence with a black shadow in the center of his chest, a black, hard knot located over his heart. Given my feelings at the time, I interpreted this as an expression of his coldness and lack of compassion. Only later did I understand what the Ayahuasca was really showing me. It was a foreshadowing, literally, of a black tumor, the seeds of which even then were forming, though in my anger I had misplaced its location. I can’t vouch for the validity of this perception, of course. It was an Ayahuasca vision, after all. But in reflection, I have come to believe this is what I’d been shown—a premonition of the nightmare to come, still more than a year in the future.

Indeed, the rest of 1998 passed quietly. Terence went to the Palenque “entheobotany” event as usual, and in May he visited us briefly in Minnesota when he came out to speak at the Whole Life Expo in St. Paul. He informed me that he had a new girlfriend, Christy, whom he’d met in Palenque, a young woman from Ohio. I wouldn’t actually meet her for another year, but her age alone, twenty-five, had me privately conjuring up all sorts of presumptions about what she had to be like. Surely as impatient with me as I was with him, Terence wasn’t in the mood to care what I thought, so we really didn’t discuss it.

Chapter 49 - A Desperate Situation

Aunt Amelia, Terence, Christy, and Dennis, 1999.

By the spring of 1999, Terence was living with Christy in his recently completed house on the Big Island. He was busy dealing with various investors and others involved in organizing an event to be held on the island in September, the AllChemical Arts Conference. Billed as an exploration of the relationship between hallucinogens and the creative process, the event would feature Terence as the keynote speaker, followed by other well-known figures in the psychedelic and visionary arts community, including Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, Annie Sprinkle, Tom Robbins, Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer, and others. It was going to be quite an event.