He Will Be Our Guide Even To The End

By Dale Sullivan

In He Will Be Our Guide, Dale & Sheryl Sullivan take the reader on a tour of 1970s highs, from a few years drugging to a lifetime adventure with Jesus. If you need encouragement that Jesus is alive and real, you need to read their book. Steve Simms, Author of Beyond Church and Off the RACE Track.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644717479

Book preview

Preface

I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.

I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds.

—Psalm 77:11, 12

Along every path we take we encounter junctures, places where we make decisions. Are we going this way or that way? How do we know which is best? Can we put the alternatives on a scale and weigh them, choosing the most rational course to a desired destination? Even if we could, do we know we have taken all the variables into account? Do we even know what the destination is; or, if we think we do, how do we know that it is the best destination?

Sheryl and I have come to believe that the way to walk on our pilgrimage in this life is to listen. The prophet Isaiah channeled God’s voice: Your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it’ (30:21). Listening requires quietness and patience; it requires laying aside your own understanding; it requires faith that the path you take is a path that leads to your true destination, even when you don’t know what that destiny may be.

When we began to reminisce about God’s faithfulness over the years, we realized that the years just before and after our marriage in 1971 were a time when we made decisions that put us on the path we have been following ever since. We began to collect memories and to string them together. Sheryl and I would talk about what happened, and if we couldn’t remember details, we contacted friends from those years asking for help. I wrote, but it is important to recognize that I am not the sole author. Sheryl is my coauthor: we often talked about our memories, and she helped read and edit the volume more than once.

This memoir is based on real people and real events, and we have had to ask people we knew thirty or forty years ago to share with us their memories. Even with their help, we have encountered many gaps in the narrative. It’s like a series of stepping-stones. One stone will be very clear in our memory and then another and another, but how these events transitioned into each other is not always clear. As I have tried to build a coherent story, I have sometimes composed transitions and details—and in at least one instance an event—that seem likely even if I didn’t have a memory of them or evidence from Sheryl or our friends to support them. In some cases, my guesses have been confirmed by readers who say they remember it just that way. The stepping-stones are vivid enough that they trace out a path, a journey, which is surprisingly coherent in retrospect. As Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon observe, By telling these stories, we come to see the significance and coherence of our lives as a gift, as something not of our own heroic creation (Resident Aliens. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989, p. 55).

When I wrote the first draft of this memoir, I used people’s real names, and I used real locations to keep the details straight in my mind, but in later drafts I changed most of the names to protect the innocent, as the opening lines of the Dragnet TV series put it. Some people will recognize themselves in this story. We hope they do not think we have misrepresented them, even though we see ourselves and our friends through subjective lenses and even though our memories of details are selective. We have tried not to impute motives unless a person has told us what their motives were. Not everyone comes off as a saint in this book, even though the book is mostly about people in Christian communities. We Christians are works in progress, and we have many failings.

This memoir does not follow all the rules of the genre. You will find journal entries that break up the story line from time to time. I wrote these entries after completing the first draft, and they are indented, like extended block quotes. Some of them give background information that helps set the context for the story. Others muse about theological or philosophical issues. You can skip them if you find them tedious.

We should add that most of the scripture passages in this book are taken from the King James Version of the Bible, because that is the translation we used then, not because we think it is the best translation. There are a few places where we have used our own paraphrases of scripture instead of using direct quotations.

There are several people we would like to thank. We contacted the following people to ask if they would tell us what they remembered about the summers of 1971 and ’72, and about the spring of 1973: Steve Allmand, Russ and Suzanne Stratton, Mike Jones, Marvin Withers, Mike and Sherry Mills, Randy Lemmon, Jim Goings, Kaylon Hubbard, Marlee Riveria, Janelle Wheeler Olivarez, and Shirley McClintock. Their recollections helped us to piece the story together, even if we didn’t use their stories. In a few cases, we did use their stories, but we revised them to make them fit in with the style of this memoir. We also want to thank Russ and Suzy Stratton, Ember Sullivan, and Philip Sullivan for reading a draft of the book and offering their responses. Finally, I want to thank Rebecca West, one of my graduate students at North Dakota State University, who encouraged me to write this memoir shortly after I retired.

1

My mom was forty-five years old when I was born. I had five brothers, the youngest one being ten years older than I, and he moved out when he was only sixteen, so for most of my childhood I was the only child at home. Mom and Dad were old enough to be my grandparents—indeed, I already had two nephews and two nieces the day I was born. Mom sent me to live with my brother Clydell in Orange, California, for the summer of 1967. Dad had passed away three years earlier when we lived in Golden, Colorado, and Mom and I moved back to Holdrege, Nebraska, to be near family. I think Mom thought I needed a father figure, and Clydell—or Clyde as he now calls himself—was fourteen years older than I was. He had gone to Grace Bible Institute in Omaha for a couple years and had been a devoted Christian until he ended up in a bad marriage to a pastor’s daughter (Clyde is now a devoted Christian again and has been for several years.) After the divorce, he moved from Nebraska to Southern California and remarried. I believe Mom hoped Clydell would find me a summer job and lead me to deeper commitment to Christ. My enthusiasm for Christ was waning while my girlfriend and I were getting a little too serious for kids our age. Mom might have hoped that after a summer apart, our romance would end.

I spent the summer working at the Denny’s restaurant located across the from the main gate of Disneyland. Clyde and his new wife, Beverly, both worked there, and they helped me get a job as a busboy on the graveyard shift. Clyde and Beverly were a combined family: Clyde had three sons, and Beverly had three daughters (a Brady bunch before the TV show started airing). The first couple weeks of my stay, we talked about visiting a church in the area, but somehow we never got around to going, probably because of work schedules.

There was excitement in the air, both in the restaurant and in California generally. My shift began at 11:00 p.m. I tried to arrive early most nights to see the nightly fireworks launched across the street in Disneyland. At 2:00 a.m., the bars closed, and we had a rush, the restaurant filling up with people looking for a place to carry on with their partying and get something to eat at the same time. Almost nightly a different group of sailors on leave would come in, and the rest of the place would begin singing military songs, encouraging the sailors to march around the aisles. At 4:00 a.m., I began cleaning—the restrooms could be a real challenge. I got off at seven.

The Denny’s near Disneyland was not the only exciting place in California. Hippies began to bloom like blossoms on a cherry tree. During the Summer of Love, as it was called, thousands of young people found their way to the Haight-Asbury district in San Francisco and to the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. The Strip was close enough so that one Sunday afternoon, Clyde and Beverly loaded the kids (my nephews and nieces) into the car and invited me along for a sightseeing trip to the Strip, keeping our doors locked, looking for hippies. We caught glimpses of guys with long hair and of young women in granny dresses, but I don’t recall that the tour made a lasting impression on me.

Most days, after getting off work at 7:00 a.m., I would head to Clyde and Beverly’s place and catch a few hours of sleep. Then I would climb in the 1961 Ford that Clyde had lent me for the summer and head to Huntington Beach, where I would do a little bodysurfing, lie in the sun, and listen to Wolfman Jack on my transistor radio. He reported stories about the Flower Children in San Francisco and played the song San Francisco at least once every hour:

If you’re going to San Francisco,

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

If you’re going to San Francisco,

You’re gonna meet some gentle people there.

The song beckoned me north, and I head-tripped about hitching to San Francisco to check out the scene before flying back to Nebraska for my junior year in high school. I didn’t go to San Francisco. Instead, I flew standby out of LAX to Denver and caught the Denver Zephyr to Holdrege. When Mom and I had moved from the Denver area to Holdrege three years earlier, it felt we were moving from a place where things were happening to a backward little town surrounded by cornfields. Now that feeling returned, I felt the world closing in around me.

Back in Nebraska, I met Bradley, a guy three years older than I was. I don’t remember how we met, but I do remember that he introduced me to his spiritual quest and invited me to come along. He was taking classes at Kearney State College during the day and reading Timothy Leary and Carlos Castaneda at night, when he wasn’t tripping. Inspired by his reading, he had begun experimenting with LSD. Once we got to know each other, we spent long afternoons roaming pasture lands in the canyons south of Holdrege, tuning into expanded states of consciousness with the aid of psychedelics, identifying with Castaneda’s shamanistic ways rather than with Leary’s Tibetan monks. We were convinced that the doors of our perception were being opened.

It is undeniable that we began to see connections between ideas that we had never seen before. It seems to me now that there might be a materialistic explanation for these experiences. Perhaps the drugs made it possible for us to escape well-worn thought patterns, or accustomed synapse pathways, and to form new links to neighboring nodes, creating unexpected associations and what appeared to be novel insights. I am not, however, a materialist, so I won’t discount the possibility that there are spirits at work as well. We also began to attend to, to notice, things that we would have missed in normal circumstances. On an unusually warm day in January 1968, I drove my army-green ’47 Chrysler with a fluid drive transmission, a large six-cylinder flathead engine, suicide doors, a huge back seat, and wood-grain interior south to the canyons. Bradley was with me, directing me to an isolated spot where we could hike without running into anyone. After an hour of walking through the canyons, we stopped at the top of a canyon wall and sat on the edge to look down the gently descending canyon covered with dry prairie grass the color of straw.

As I gazed into the distance, Bradley, who sat next to me, said, Hey, look at this. He was pulling back the prairie grass to reveal a tiny wild yellow flower, nestled in a green base, sheltered by the tall dry grass. See, if you look the right way, you see life even in the dead of winter.

Journal entry, Thursday, December 28, 2017

I’ve decided to start keeping a journal again, mostly because I now realize how much easier it would have been to write the memoir if I had kept a journal faithfully. I’ve decided to use composition notebooks for the journal because I like the feel of pen in hand, because I can use it to take notes on my reading, and because I can take a notebook with me anywhere. I’ve been rereading the memoir I wrote the past nine months, editing for typos and filling in some details. The whole memoir comes from my memory and the memory of my wife and friends, memory unaided by written records. While writing it, I didn’t read any background material on the times or the movements that touched our lives. But about a month ago, I decided to do some background reading. I want to use this journal entry to summarize some of that reading, but, as I used to tell my students when I insisted that they keep a journal, I find a little free writing at the beginning of an entry gets my gumption going. What shall I write about? How ’bout this room?

The room I am sitting in, I call the office because it is where I read scholarly stuff and work on the computer; this is also the room I come to at 2:00 a.m. when I can’t sleep. I usually read something light, completely unrelated to my writing project—I’m presently reading Windigo Island by William Kent Krueger. In the last couple months I’ve read books by Kent Haruf, Marilynne Robinson, and William Keith Least-Moon in the middle of the night.

My haunt is a basement of a small 1950s ranch-style house in Spring Lake, a village located near Lake Michigan. When we bought this house six years ago, the basement had no improvements to speak of, but it was dry, the concrete block walls were straight and sturdy, and the open-floor joists of the main floor showed sturdy construction. Over the last few years, I have bought pine boards and screwed them to the floor joists and to furring strips along the walls, so now most of the basement has the look of a rustic cabin with pine-board walls and ceilings. I soon filled up the walls with bookshelves, but there was not enough room on these shelves for the books I have been collecting for nearly fifty years, most of that time spent as a professor of English. So I began building simple walls dividing the basement into rooms and hanging shelves on them. Finally, all my books are on shelves instead of in boxes.

This is a cozy place, especially in winter. Outside, the snow is at least a foot deep, so Sheryl and I plan to go snowshoeing in the woods north of Coast Guard Park this afternoon. Tonight, I plan to split a few logs and build a fire in the fireplace upstairs. But for now, the furnace behind me kicks on and off, blowing warm air my way from a vent just above my head. The coziness is enhanced because the walls are filled with books and the only lighting comes from naked bulbs in the ceiling. If I want light, I pull a string, and a pool of light falls in a circle surrounded by shadows around its perimeter. So here I sit in a pool of light, writing in a composition notebook. Okay—time to get down to business. I’ll focus on three books that fill in some details about psychedelic culture in the sixties.

I had never read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, nor Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, but I had certainly heard a lot about Leary back in the day. I ordered both from Amazon. I had read Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, but I no longer owned the book, so I bought it and read it again.

The counterculture movement was in full bloom in 1967, but the seeds from which it had sprung had been planted long before I knew anything about it. Strange to think about what I was doing in the early ’50s when this stuff began. As a child, I knew nothing about the world outside a twenty-mile radius of our home on the prairies of eastern Colorado, ten miles from the nearest town. We lived in this isolated high plains Eden until I was in third grade.

In 1953, while I was learning to ride a tricycle in our old farm house in Colorado, Aldous Huxley took a mescaline trip in California and then wrote about it in The Doors of Perception. In that book, he postulates that we humans have necessarily narrowed our channels of perception, protecting us from being overwhelmed with information, enabling us to focus on those things that we need to survive in the mundane world. There are, however, ways of getting beyond this constricted channel; they are openings into an expanded realm of consciousness. These openings are cleansed doors of perception, a phrase he derives from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where William Blake predicts, The cherub with his flaming sword is…commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas now it appears finite & corrupt. Blake continues two sentences later: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

Huxley muses that some people can pass through these cleansed doors of perception to enlightenment by practicing contemplation or meditation, but others need assistance. Mescaline, he believes, is a chemical means for opening such a door. A person who takes mescaline, accompanied by a benevolent guide, will experience reality fully, as it is given, rather than a narrow slice of it. He likens this process to the way Buddhist monks guide people, using the Tibetan Book of the Dead, through stages of death and rebirth. Ironically, Huxley, who, in Brave New World, seemed critical of those who escape reality by taking soma, now suggests that it would be a good thing if everyone was, urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience.

In 1964, the year my father passed away from a stroke in Colorado General Hospital, Timothy Leary published The Psychedelic Experience, a manual on how to navigate one’s way through an LSD trip to experience the enlightened states of mind that mirror those in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Acknowledging Huxley’s description and discussion of mescaline, Leary goes into detail about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, describing the three bardos. The three bardos—states of existence, normally thought of as stages between death and rebirth through reincarnation—are the period of ego loss, the period of hallucinations, and the period of reentry, descending from higher states of enlightenment into the everyday world of mundane experience. Relying on the teachings of Lama Anagarika Govinda, Leary rejects the traditional understanding of the three bardos and claims that these stages are not stages that follow death; rather, they are stages in a predeath experience, during which a person dies and is reborn through meditation, a process that prepares the person for physical death, when it comes, and the journey to reincarnation.

Leary suggests that there is a shortcut to enlightenment that does not require the time and discipline of meditation in the Buddhist tradition, namely the use of LSD. The guided LSD experience opens your mind to knowledge of your own existence, to the experience of all humanity, and even to the experience of the universe, all of which, in Jungian fashion, is buried deep in your subconscious. After describing, in the first part of the book, the experiences and visions you can expect in each bardo, Leary adds, in the second part, a manual consisting of practical suggestions about how to turn an LSD trip into a death-and-rebirth experience that maps onto the three bardos. Accompanied by a benevolent mentor, manual in hand, you can expect to experience ego loss (death), see visions of saints and demons, and reenter the world, now more enlightened, having been born again. He repeatedly reminds you that the visions are created by your own mind, so you should not think that they are external realities.

Although Huxley and Leary shared a similar perspective, they differed in significant ways. Huxley knew someone who was doing research on mescaline; that’s why he agreed to take it, and he did so as a subject in a scientific experiment. His clinical interest eclipsed his philosophical interests, so he made only passing comments about Native American peyote rites and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Leary, too, approached the study of psychedelics from a clinical perspective, but he linked his psychedelic journey exclusively with Buddhism and went into greater detail about those connections than Huxley. Both men considered psychedelics from a clinical perspective, and both, as we would expect of materialists, insisted that hallucinations and encounters with spirits are manifestations of the mind, not external realities.

And now, a summary of key ideas from the third book, The Teachings of Don Juan. Carlos Castaneda, an anthropology student, describes an extensive apprenticeship with Don Juan, a brujo, or Yaqui Indian sorcerer, who taught him how to grow, harvest, prepare, and use three plants (peyote; Jimson weed, or devil’s weed; and Psilocybe mexicana, or mushrooms) to practice sorcery. Don Juan used these three plants to enter states of nonordinary reality, but they were to be used to achieve different ends: peyoteis is used to gain wisdom; the other two are used to gain allies who give power.

Don Juan teaches that each of these substances is accompanied by a spiritual being, or power. Mescalito, the spirit who accompanies peyote, is male, and he is a protector and teacher. Once you get to know him and he accepts you, he is gentle and kind, and you can keep him with you at all times. Casteneda asks if he is a power within ourselves. Don Juan adamantly rejects the idea: No, he says. Mescalito has nothing to do with ourselves. He is outside us.

Castaneda has experiences with all three of these psychedelic substances. He meets Mescalito in the form of a dog, a squat man, and later as a beam of light. Using devil’s weed, he learns to fly and to practice divination. After experiencing flying, he asks Don Juan if his body flew or if it was all in his mind. Don Juan is reluctant to answer, suggesting that it doesn’t matter: You can soar through the air for hundreds of miles to see what is happening at any place you want, or to deliver a fatal blow to your enemies far away. Again, this experience is one that a spirit teaches. Don Juan says, As you become familiar with the devil’s weed, she will teach you how to do such things. When the topic of flying comes up again later, Castaneda concludes, Then I didn’t really fly… I flew in my imagination, in my mind alone. Where was my body? Don Juan answers, In the bushes, but he repeats his earlier claim: A brujo can move a thousand miles in one second to see what is going on. He can deliver a blow to his enemies long distances away. So does he or doesn’t he fly?

Academics like Huxley, Leary, and Castaneda, exploring psychedelic experiences analytically, planted the seeds that would later bloom as the psychedelic counterculture. But there were at least two other factors in play. Since I’m on a roll this morning, I will extend this journal entry and say more about this subject.

One of the factors in the rise of the counterculture was disillusionment. The hippies were children who grew up in the post–World War II version of the American dream—the baby boomers. Many were from middle-class or even wealthy families. Their parents had good jobs, a father-knows-best family, with two and a half well-educated and obedient children, a nice house in the suburbs, and at least one car with fins. Young people saw the emptiness of their parents’ lives, lives that had been spent seeking happiness in acquiring possessions. Realizing that it was all too easy to get caught up in the rat race and to take their places in the technological society, the establishment, they fled that life and turned to alternatives, seeking happiness in Epicurean revelries or spiritual enlightenment through drugs or non-Western religions.

The second factor was a cultural movement with origins in the Beats. It was as though the tiny subculture of the beat generation evolved (or morphed) into a rapidly growing counterculture, the hippie generation. A tenuous link existed between the Beats—people like Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassidy—and psychedelic culture. Many in the counterculture read Kerouac’s On the Road and were drawn to the bohemian lifestyle he describes. The Beats used heroine and alcohol in the early days, but they also began to experiment with psychedelics when they became more widely available. In 1964, when Ken Kesey and his Merry Gang of Pranksters took a road trip in the Magic Bus, round-trip from California to New York, dropping acid all the way, it was Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road) who drove the bus, chattering nonstop. In New York City, they attended a party to which Kerouac and Ginsberg came, but Kerouac seemed disengaged, even uninterested in the new scene. Leaving the city, Kesey and the Gang drove north to Leary’s retreat, where the long-anticipated meeting between the east and the west acid heads did not come off very well. Leary agreed to meet with Kesey alone upstairs in his house, but he refused to come down and meet the rest of the Pranksters. There are a lot more interesting stories about the rise of the hippie culture—like Kesey’s arrest, his idea for the Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the Grateful Dead joining in with the moving party.

It would take up too much space to summarize all of these. Besides, this is just a journal entry, not a history, and I’m running out of gas. So how can I sum this up? The sixties was a period of disenchantment and enchantment, people dropping out and turning on, people blowing their minds and seeking God.

So it was Bradley who turned me onto the psychedelic counterculture, a tiny island of purple haze in the farmland of Nebraska. But it was Lenore Senior, who taught English to juniors at Holdrege High School, who fired my literary desire and imagination. Miss Senior was much closer to our age than most teachers. She looked like a young college student—a slim woman with a narrow face and reddish hair falling just below her shoulders. Having entered and graduated from college a couple years earlier than normal, she was still enthusiastic about the world’s great literature, bringing the writings of the transcendentalists (especially Emerson and Thoreau) to life. Her father, Willoughby F. Senior, had spent several summers living with the Hopi in New Mexico (in fact, I have a copy of the book he wrote describing his time with the Hopi, Smoke upon the Winds). He had been a pastor back East but had left to move to Wyoming where Lenore and the rest of her family grew up secluded on a mountain. Lenore once told us in class that her father had a project, when he was in college, of trying to read all of the Greek and Roman classics as he walked between classes. She passed on to us her love of literature, the calm solitude of the Wyoming mountain, the deliberateness of Thoreau living at Walden Pond, and the peaceful ways of the Hopi.

Miss Senior invited students to meet with her to discuss ideas outside of class. I remember taking her up on the invitation and spending a few late afternoons and early evenings, talking as dusk fell. It seems like we met frequently, but I suspect it was only a few times and that I have exaggerated the number of meetings in my memory. We had extended discussions; they were not so much about literature as about alternatives to establishment lifestyles. She wanted us to break out of our taken-for-granted worldview; she wanted us to see life differently; she hoped we would grasp what really matters in life.

There were two other major influences in my life during these last two years of high school. Bud was my boss at Paige’s Bungalow, a small neighborhood grocery store just a half block from our house. My father having passed away, Bud became a father figure, representing the values of hard work and responsibility. He was a short man, who reminded me of a bulldog with his closely cropped flattop haircut. He looked like a drill sergeant, and indeed, he had served in the Marine Corps in his twenties. He always kept a pack of Lucky Strikes in the breast pocket of his white, short-sleeved shirt, which he wore under his white apron.

For four years, beginning in junior high, I would go to the store after school, wash my hands, and put on a white apron. There would be a couple tubs of bones to work on. I boned these leavings from Bud’s work for the day; that means I was to cut the meat off the bone structures so that we could use it for stew meat or hamburger. For instance, when he broke a hind quarter into the round and loin, there was always a triangular piece left with the hip socket in it. There was too much meat on the bones to throw away, so I trimmed them carefully. There were several such pieces, all of which I learned to trim with precision. When I finished boning the bones in the tub, I would open a box of boneless cow meat (dark-red beef from older cows), mix it with the meat I had cleaned off the bones, and grind hamburger. In my third year, Bud decided to take me on as an apprentice. He began teaching me how to break beef quarters, cut round steaks, sirloin steaks, T-bones, chuck roasts, and so on. I learned quickly, having had two years’ experience boning Bud’s leavings after school every day.

The other major influence was my mother, who represents for me a life of devotion to Jesus Christ, a life lived in his presence daily. I won’t say more about Mom here, for her influence in our lives is documented in this memoir. Let me say this, however: Mom never stopped seeking God’s intervention in my life, pleading with him to bring me back to Jesus.

2

When I graduated from high school in May 1969, I had traded my ’47 Chrysler for a barebones ’62 blue-and-white Ford Galaxy sedan (one of the many mistakes I made trying to become cool). I still lived in the basement of Mom’s house, where I had a small apartment. I hadn’t been to church more than four or five times in the last three years; religion bored me. I thought I had become too smart to follow Jesus. The romance with my steady girlfriend, Connie, had survived our being apart in the summer of 1967, so we had been together for over three years. Now, however, we argued constantly. The romance had died, and we broke up later in the summer of 1969.

My group of high school friends and I were looking forward to a summer of partying. Miss Senior resigned at the end of the school year and moved on, writing a letter to the editor in which she explained her reasons for resigning. One line is still lodged in my memory: I cannot swim in stagnant water. Although I still hung out with Bradley from time to time, my attention turned to my own cohort, guys more interested in partying than in metaphysics and transcendental experiences. We never seemed to have trouble buying a couple cases of Schlitz or Budweiser, and we knew of many out-of-the-way places at the ends of fields or down in the canyons south of town where we could gather about 11:00 p.m., drink, smoke, and talk around a campfire through the night. During that summer, I began to experiment with drugs other than LSD. Normally, we expect marijuana to be a gateway drug that leads to more potent drugs. For me, it was the other way around. When I had taken LSD with Bradley, it had never failed to produce a pleasurable trip under his guidance, but I had never smoked marijuana. Early in the summer, I tried smoking marijuana a couple times without feeling any effects, but I finally got stoned in less-than-ideal circumstances.

Stan, one of our friends, ran the projectors at the local drive-in theater, where we often spent Friday or Saturday nights, sometimes sitting out on the patio in front of the concession stand and next to the projector room. I had scored a little weed the previous week. Three of us hung around the projector room with Stan, waiting for an opportunity to see if we could finally get stoned. There were two doors in the projector room, both opening to the outside. The one on the south side opened to a sidewalk that led to the men’s restroom; the one on the north led to the patio in front of the concession stand. Once Stan got the first reel running, four of us passed around a joint in the darkness of the projector room. I didn’t feel anything and decided that, having tried marijuana a few times without effect, it was not nearly as interesting as I had been led to believe. I left to go to the brightly lit restroom. As I washed my hands, the door opened, and in walked Officer Nesterman dressed in his Phelps County sheriff’s uniform. Suddenly I was stoned! Dylan’s lyrics began to ring in my head:

Well, they’ll stone you when you’re walking on the street

They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat

They’ll stone you when you’re walkin’ on the floor

They’ll stone you when you’re walkin’ to the door

But I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned.

Even though I knew these words might be about people menacing you, I believed Dylan was also singing about getting high. Suddenly both interpretations melded into one: when you’ve just realized that you’re stoned and a tall and rather heavy policeman walks into a brightly lit bathroom and stands at the sink next you, the words take on a double meaning.

I felt the plastic bag in my front pocket and quickly left the restroom, returning to the projector room where I told the others about my close encounter. They too had begun to feel the effects of the weed. Paranoia. I waited five minutes and went back to the restroom, which was now empty; dumped the rest of the weed in the toilet; and flushed it. After taking the empty bag to a trash can on the back side of the concession stand and tucking it down in the refuse, I returned to the projection room, which still smelled a little like an alfalfa processing plant, but now everyone except Stan had left, returning to the relative safety of their cars. After reporting my disposal of the evidence, I left by the north door and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs on the patio. As I marveled at the big screen in front