LEGEND OF A MIND

     After Reality was the Greatest, Rootboy ran home to Mama, with
no job and no place to live--the inception of a disability which
lingers yet today.  I took my welfare check, cashed it, and bought
a ticket on the Nova Express back to Invisible City, a small town
in North Dakota, one hundred miles north of Fargo near the Canadian
border, and on Dawn's Highway next to the River of Endless Seas. 
The Suf Sea and Lower Suf Drag was in the past now, my world now
consisted of Ma's big house upon the hill, bought when her family
grew too large for the Other House.

     In typical 21st Century Schizoid Man fashion (I have loco
brains); after years of being a brilliant intellectual at the
University of the City of Night, I didn't look for a job, did
nothing but stay home and write; my illness was getting the best
of me.   Union Maid could see it, even as, constantly getting
higher and higher on endogenous speed, I proceeded to torment my
typewriter, writing a loony bin book (MINDSTORM) to the point of
writing 2,000 pages in a few months.

     Then, I crashed into a devastating depression, just before I
made the fateful decision:  I'd leave Invisible City for the
University of North Dakota in Enterzone.  Biggie the Blanket, my
younger brother, was still working on his degree there, no
dilettante, another time loco:  an Econ major with Socialist
leanings, paranoid of government conspiracies.  He drove us down
in the Batmobile, and I don't give a damn what the Marvelous Comix
thinks of their rights to the Batmobile, I drive the fucking
Batmobile, OK?  "Batmobile" is just a slang term for "used car,"
anyway.  And check out FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE BATMOBILE.

     So then there was Roachster, as soon as I got into Elwood
Blues.  He had a sign up on his door reading RESIDENT ASSISTANT,
so I asked him where I could go to get a brewski.  He pointed me
in the direction of Fab Five Freddy's grocery store.  That same
evening I met Dave Zabo, my next door neighbor, who had been a
music major at Julliard; he was playing some Subotnickal rhythms
on his cheap box, so I knocked on the door and requested Uncle
Mortie, and he suggested we restock our larder as far as ethanol
was concerned.

     And my first year was drunken dreams of the Furs of Hazzard,
while my grades languished abysmally; first quarter, I was on
academic probation and even managed to get a C in a creative
writing course--that, following being compared to Shakespeare and
Joyce by Bill Veeder.

     I was going thru a deep depression, but Big Ron Burnout, Dean
of Everything, not to mention Dean of Idiocy, wouldn't let me see
the psychiatrist at Student Health as it was a "pre-existing
condition," and wasn't covered by their insurance.  The City of
Night was something completely different:  they had so many flip-
outs, they had to have a Student Mental Health Center.  However,
I was able to see a psychologist, Helen Watkins and was finally,
I was put on antidepressants, but only after threatening suicide.

     Second year, however, my depression abated due to treatment
with Desyrel, an effective med with one major problem:  a painful
erection that won't go down; my doctor said, "If it lasts more than
an hour, put a cold-pak on it, and if that won't work, I'll have
to do surgery."

     As the meds worked, my grades went up and I was once again a
straight A student, until the wrath of Mary Sophia Prunikos,
Catholic girl, friend of Sister Mary Demon.  She went out with me;
heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper promises in the dark as she
shivered me timbers and blew me woody.  But all her love and tender
ministrations of her Soft Machine, malleable motor cruising the
erotic autobahn, was merely a ruse to get the answers to her take-
home final, then she turned around and dumped me.  And if anyone
had a heart, would you turn around and break it?

     Distraught at losing my timber-shiverer and woody-blower, I
threatened suicide and Big Ron Burnout took me before Kangaroo
Court and summarily rejected me from Enterzone on the testimony of
the dread Roachster.

     But not before I met Timothy Leary, twin brother of Really
Leary, and a neat-o guy, if you're a connoisseur of trance-forming
substances.  It was at a lecture he was giving.  I got there with
Biggie and Zabo, all of us thoroughly torpedoed, and myself also
on a nutmeg binge.

     There is nothing more vile and depraved than a gonzo in the
throes of a nutmeg binge.  (And just remember:  I know fear and
loathing.)

     So Tim started talking about evolution and losing the
audience, at one point, moves into a certain amount of brain-
crackle and pauses.  Someone shouts out, "Acid!"

     --I'm not talking about that tonight, but I can recommend a
book:  COSMIC TRIGGER by Robert Anton Wilson.

     I thought, I used to have that book.  Gave it to Lucy Ogden
cuz it looked like a nut book.

     --I'm talking about evolution, instead.

     Q&A time, I step to the mike, saying, "Tim, I noticed a lot
of teleology in your evolutionary theory.  Can you elucidate?

     --That's a GOOD question!

     Tim then, with the speed to carry on, went on to give an
elaborate answer:  first, he had to explain what "teleology" is to
an audience of stoned out granolas (teleology is a selection
process); then, he had to answer the question.  After about ten or
fifteen minutes babbling in vain, he moved on to other questions.

     So, after the Revenge of Mary Sophia Prunikos, that miserable,
rotten bitch-o, Rootboy again went home to Mama.

     For several years, I dwelt in the loose palace of exile living
off my disability money.  I stayed in my private Space Capsule,
the upstairs bedroom in my mother's house, poor Pop dying of
Alzheimer's; the tragedy of seeing a brilliant electronics engineer
slowly losing his mind.  At the end, a vegetable, with one lucid
moment:  two weeks before he died, putting him to bed, she leaned
over, and kissing him, said, "You're my good husband."

     --Not much good now.

     Back home once more, I'd routinely do nothing but torment my
typewriter, desperately trying to resurrect my academic success--if
an internationally known literary critic compared the first thing
you ever wrote to Shakespeare, wouldn't you spend all your time
with your fingers dancing across the keys?

     The problem is, I was outta pot.

     When you're outta pot, you're out alot, as Bozo Rebebo always
used to say.

     Bill Veeder had made the Shakespeare comparison about a piece
of writing that was done on dope.  After that, I did nothing but
get stoned and write; I wrote my entire Master's Thesis, the
novella-length version of A NEW CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY on dope, except
for the parts written in a mental hospital.  This went on until
finally I moved back to the Invisible landscape, and--well, Mama
didn't let Rootboy have his submarines.  But nonetheless, I
tormented my typewriter, regardless of whether what I was writing
was good or bad.

     And a lot of it really was bad.  Even Veeder had to admit
that.  When I was depressed and/or schizophrenic, my writing skills
would deteriorate.  My best work has been done while hypomanic,
state of bliss, but at least I'm NORML, even though there've been
repeated attempts to influence me.

     Then one fateful day of daze, I went ahead and wrote to
Timothy Leary; I mean, why shouldn't I?  After all, Muhammad Ali
had already sent me a note saying, "To my Brother Jim Bauer: 
Service to others is the rent we pay for a room in the hereafter,"
signed it, and drew a smile face.  So why wouldn't Tim write back?

     A week or two later, I got a response to the effect of, "Yes,
I remember you."  That was the beginning of a long friendship which
culminated in SURFING THE CONSCIOUS NETS, a graphic novel (a NORML
one), comprised of Tim's meanderings about the sex-life of one Huck
Getty Mellon von Schlebrugge (all kinda people influenced him), a
black, bisexual console cowboy with acute chronic manic-depression. 
According to Tim, "Most of Huch's craziness comes from you;"
another time, he called up and said, "You're the only person who
can match me for craziness, and I mean that in a good way."

     The other extant chapter of the SURFING series was published
in CHAOS AND CYBER-CULTURE, Tim's most important work since the
60s, and was remade/remodelled by yours truly as ANDY MORLOCK'S
DEAD.

     Tim was there for two of my eye surgeries.  (Glaucoma:  the
disease for which doctors recommend marijuana most.)  He was there
for my gall bladder surgery, when he told me to call him collect. 
He was there for me when I moved out of my Mother's house into
Mabel's dump, the worst slum building in town, and my life became
constant party-time wasting intercut with Surfing the Sexy She-
wannas at the Perky Pam Layout:  Judy Snooty, Kimothy O'leary,
Kolleen (my Kute Korean Kompanion), Jungle Jill, and me Bonnie.

     However, he totally missed my year-long common-law marriage
to Trish the Dish, a really good-looking girl who, unfortunately,
was incompatible with me, largely due to her violent temper, which
constantly had me walking on eggshells.  Our relationship, though,
has improved since she moved out; I think there was too much
togetherness in our relationship:  neither of us work, both of us
are on disability, and we'd also both spend all day Surfing the
Layout, that strange cyberspace dimension occupied by others who
are mentally ill.  Right now, I'm surfing the Sex Sea, with no
intention of getting serious again for a long time.

     Unfortunately, Tim left this world angry at me, in spite of
all the kind, thoughtful letters he'd written me, regardless of the
phone calls, regardless of the comix (does he not know I'm a
Rootboy covered with slime, not a bi hacker?):  shortly before his
death, he called about a letter I'd written, suggesting that
someone (it needn't have been Tim) collect some of my letters into
an epistolary novel.

     Tim had already attempted this with SURFING THE CONSCIOUS NETS
(a kinda keen cosmicomic, with lots of woody-blowing and other
NORML behavior, including a lot of influences).  I'd felt robbed,
cheated by that book, and in more terms than I didn't get enough
buckadingdongs off it; all he sent me was $650 in two installments,
and made no arrangements to keep the cash flowing in after his
death.  (If I wasn't riding the Purple Wage, I'd truly be a
"starving artist.")  No, I was also robbed by not being allowed a
large enough role in the creation of the document.  I'd been simply
a passive collaborator; he'd merely gone thru a lot of my old
letters and picked and chose what he wanted to use, rather than let
me do a complete remake/remodel from the top to the bottom.  I felt
it'd be much more hilarious if he would've.

     I toyed with the idea of sending some drugz to him thru the
mail, but before I could do that, he died.

     However, I don't think he was angry at me; his letters showed
so much concern that I doubt he'd do a complete turn-around right
before dying.  No, I don't think he was angry at me, I think he was
angry at death.  Anger, I know, is one of the stages of dying. 
Understandable, there's nothing one can do to prevent it, except
getting frozen.

     A nutty idea Tim entertained the same way he wanted to commit
suicide on the Net (conscious or otherwise) until shortly before
his death--a sign that he'd finally accepted death.

     After all, one of his major contributions to the literature
on psychedelic drugs was his use of the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
as a program for acid trips.  He shouldn't have known fear and
loathing of it, not to mention anger, he should've known from his
own experiences with LSD that the transition of death can be coped
with by the mystical visions he so avidly sought.

     And he still is outside, looking in:  he's no longer part of
the material world; his thought contained, like all the Adams also
contained there, in the Thought of God which is the evolution of
the Universe.  The False Creator is the one who claims to have
created the world in seven days and nights, denying the long, slow
processes of time.  

     This god needs death.

     Now, he's doing time in the Universal Mind.  And he will never
be forgotten by the Mind of the All, no matter the vagaries of
history which may recognize him as either a genius psychologist who
was ahead of his time or just a glorified drug-pusher.

     And I, like him, am a decade past my decade.  Yet Tim once
prophesied it would take a thousand years to resolve all the issues
raised by LSD.  Much more than a decade, Tim was a millennium
before his millennium.

     The Truth is out there.  Keep exploring psyber-space.  Maybe
you'll meet him on the astral plane.