I Have America Surrounded: A Biography of Timothy Leary

326 Pages·2006·5.27 MB·English

by  Leary

The Life of Timothy Leary

Foreword xi
i I'll Free You, My Love i
2 The Children Will Grow Up Wondering About Their Mother 11
3 But Don't You Think He's Just a Little Bit Square? 24
4 Then He Licked the Spoon 37
5 Jesus Christ, Do I Have to Fuck Every Girl Who Comes to This Place? 54
6 Thou Shalt Not Alter the Consciousness of Thy Fellow Man 64
7 Everyone, Compared to Him, Was Boring 73
8 I Want to Hit it Right Square in the Puss 83
9 WARNING: I Am Armed and Should Be Considered Dangerous 98
1o The Girl Began to Sing Arabic Love Songs 1o9
ii Just Say That on January the Ninth We Busted Leary 121
12 He Is Not Going to Die: They Will Have to Kill Him 129
13 Fortunately, Neuberg Had Been Armed With a Consecrated Magical Dagger 139
14 I Pledge That (1) I Shall at No Time Possess Any Illegal Drug 145
15 A Blizzard Descended on the Mountains 153
16 The Music of Paradise 16o
17 3o Gallons of Hash Oil, 2.5 Tons of Hashish, 1.5 Million LSD Tablets and Tens of
Thousands of Dollars in Cash 173

18 I Will Die Before I Go Back to America! 181
i9 I'm Not in the Twentieth Century 193
20 Naked Apart From a Pair of Long White Gloves and a Shotgun 205
21 Can I Shoot You? 215
22 Scum! Fucking Traitor! 231
23 On Houdini's Grave at Halloween 242
Acknowledgements 259
Selected Bibliography 261
Notes 265
-KAKUZO OKAKURA, The Book of Tea

by Winona Ryder
HREE MONTHS AFTER I was born, my dad, who was Tim's archivist, went
to see him in Switzerland, where Tim was living in exile after escaping prison and
being called "the most dangerous man in the world" by Nixon, who was furiously
trying to hunt him down.
My dad and Tim took acid and went skiing, and my dad pulled out a picture of me-
the first one ever taken (I was a day old)-and showed it to Tim and asked if he would
be my godfather. Tim said: "Sure."
We didn't meet until seven years later, after Tim was released from prison and
came to visit us on our commune in Mendocino County. We were walking along a
dusty road on a remote mountain ridge. It was sunset and we were holding hands. I
looked up at him and said: "They say you're a mad scientist."
Tim smiled and said: "I know." I think he liked the sound of that.
Around the time I became a teenager I wanted to be a writer. This, of course,
thrilled Tim and we constantly talked about books. My favorite literary character was
Holden Caulfield; his was Huck Finn. We talked about the similarities between the
two characters-especially their feelings of alienation from polite society. I wanted to
catch all the kids falling off the cliff and Tim wanted to light out for the territory. It
was a time when I was in my first throes of adolescence and experiencing that kind of
alienation. And talking to Tim was the light at the end of the tunnel.
He really understood my generation. He called us "free agents in the Age of
Information."
What I learned from Tim didn't have anything to do with drugs, but it had
everything to do with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was
not all about altering it, but about using it to its fullest. And he showed us that that
process-that journey-was our most important one. However we did it, as long as we
did it. "You are the owner and operator of your brain," he reminded us.
Tim was a huge influence on me-not just with his revolutionary ideas about human
potential, but as someone who read me stories, encouraged me, took me to baseball
games-you know, godfather stuff. He was the first person outside my family-who you
never tend to believe while growing up-to make me believe I could do anything. He
had an incredible way of making you feel special and completely supported.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his daughter in which he said that he hoped his
life had achieved some sort of "epic grandeur." Tim's life wasn't some sort of epic
grandeur. It was flat out epic grandeur.