INCIDENT AT MARVISTA

The visible world is no longer a reality. And the unseen world is no longer a dream.” ----- William Butler Yeats

My close encounter in October of 1999 began with a phone call from an acquaintance I’d met at a seminar by psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He invited me to a party at a house in Mar Vista near the beach in Los Angeles on the following Saturday night being thrown by, as he described them, “veterans of Burning Man.”

My friend informed me that this wingding would be “electric” via the ingestion of psilocybin mushroom fudge. Chocolate, I’m told, potentiates the effects of magic mushrooms, as well as making them easier to digest. I was pretty damn excited. As a psychedelic vet of five decades, I’d been desperately in need of some paradigm-shattering travel. The consensual reality where most of us dwell has been getting grayer, duller, more predictable. More ridden with hype, duplicity, lies. And I’ve never understood this need by people to excitedly go stand in line for the latest bazillion dollar Hollywood blockbuster when we can be off living our own movies. I had a gut feeling that this ‘90s variant on the Acid Tests would be an epic and I was right.

After thoroughly cannabinoiding myself and downing a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s to quell my nerves, I took a cab to prevent interaction with the Los Angeles Porcine Department. When I arrived, I walked through the house and exited into a large backyard filled with 300 PoMo bohos. But it was clear that this wasn’t merely another Hollywood wrap bash for some glib yuppie sitcom. Naked people hopping in and out of a hot tub is not that uncommon a sight at a show biz social gathering but there was a genuine vibe of tribe versus the usual bunch of acquaintances who get thrown together because of a mutual pursuit of a paycheck.

For reasons having to do with the asininity of the drug laws in this country, I’ll refrain from being overly descriptive of the physical layout of the backyard. But it was magical ground over which hovered a huge tree. Multicolored lights accentuated the surreal atmosphere. Some kind of recorded trance music was being transmitted, but I don’t remember whether it was of the electronic or traditional variety or the latest combination. Hell, my reportorial skills were severely hindered by the grass, sour mash and all-consuming awe at the sheer amount of freaks in one spot.

There was, of course, the young girl with long, straight hair down to her ass who seemed to be following me around and staring into my soul, all the while sensuously tooting a recorder affixed to her slightly parted, full-bodied lips like some musical phallus. She reminded me of Crazy Alice Schmidlap, who’d sit barefoot in trees blowing a flute for hours with lysergicized faraway eyes when she wasn’t blowing me or any of my male hippie brothers back in 1973. I mean, you can’t have a legitimate communal grilled psychedelic reality sandwich without some space cadetette deep-throating a wind instrument. Otherwise the partygoers seemed to be of that unique ‘90s beat/hippie/punk/hip-hop/grunge/goth/raver/modern primitive crossbreed. Hairstyles ranged from shaven to longlonglong, dyed or not, maybe partly shaved and partly dyed. Lots of tattoos and body piercings. Some “costumes” I guess, but what differentiates a costume from a lifestyle? People came as any damn variation on any damn thing they wanted and that’s the way it should be.

After asking around for my friend for about twenty minutes (and getting a lot of half-answers from people who’d gotten past that boring language hang-up), I found him and he procured me a thin wedge of the heralded fudge. While chocolate may potentiate shrooms, evidently so does reefer and whiskey because I got off quickly. I passed the lift-off stage where giddy giggling and irrational fear coexist, inanimate objects became anthropomorphized; their molecules clearly in flux, motivated by an intelligence.

In fact, in my time I've seen lawn chairs that appeared to have more going for them than some humans. The poly-hue of the lights, the sonic whirling dervish of the trance music, the snatches of random conversation, the carefree nudity--all began to meld into a free associating, primal energy force whose sum was mightier than its parts. BLUR. BLUE. GREEN. RED. BRIGHT, FIERY RED. IS THAT A TRUMPET? ITS TONE IS FIERY, THEN SLITHERING. FIERY RED. IT MATCHES THE RED LIGHT. THE RED LIGHT IS REFLECTED IN THE SHINY BRASS OF THE TRUMPET. THE RED LIGHT SOUNDS LOVELY! AS LOVELY AS THAT GIRL’S RED PUBIC HAIR! EACH STRAND OF HER PUBIC HAIR IS LIKE A LIVING, SLITHERING SNAKE, CURLICUING WET, WET LIKE THE PUDDLE OF BEER I’M STANDING IN…

At that point I had to sit down. My prosthetic hips and aging corpus couldn’t keep up with my born-again, astronautical mind. I found a seat - it was either a tree stump or a beer keg, I forget -- and stared upwards at the huge tree hovering over us and I swear it was a flying fucking saucer. Initially the Fudge People on the ground seemed like smallish, gentle creatures in comparison to the glowing, looming spaceship. They didn’t look like they could be Homo sapiens who commit drive-by shootings or fly-over bombings or even just emotionally piss on others. They were fudged and fragile flesh convened to welcome this flying fucking saucer to earth and they were all staring up at this clearly Identifiable Flying Object and then they became the Object and the Object became the Fudge People and any delineation was no longer recognizable. The Fudge People and the Object were breathing in unison in big oozing breaths and all the petty little shit of everyday consensual reality was for that moment in time nonexistent. “HERE’S THE PROOF, FOLKS!” I thought to myself. “THERE’S MORE TO REALITY THAN STARBUCKS!”

I realize that whatever I saw at Mar Vista that night can be taken literally or not. I’m not going to get into a how-does-one-define-reality dialectic. What I know I experienced was the emergence of a group mind with like-minded individuals on the same trip (250 fudge wedges were distributed). I haven’t even touched on the live music and dance, group massage and fire-breathing display that occurred because, quite frankly, I either missed ‘em or was too loaded to take more than a casual glance. While specific close-encounter imagery appeared to me, it’s not just my subjective analysis of my trip that led me to believe that a transcendent tribal phenomenon occurred. A large portion of the population of this Temporary Autonomous Zone, as writer Hakim Bey would reference this outpost of consciousness rebellion, stayed up all night and attended a ceremony by the Dalai Lama at the Universal Amphitheater the next day. Evidently, much of L.A.’s psychedelic community was buzzing dazzled about the incident at Mar Vista, even if they were so otherwise distracted by their pubic hair revelry as to miss the descent of the flying saucer entirely. Weeks later, I spoke with a musician who performed there and he confirmed citywide post-celebratory outbreaks of euphoria. A group mind can be a recipe for fascism, but he properly credited the success to the old Tim Leary concept of set-and-setting, pointing out that both the house and the participants brought their own magic to the event. “Normally when you’re surrounded by people and you’re on drugs, you’re forcing yourself to make sense to interact with people,” he mused. “In this case, we were allowing ourselves to open.”

And he didn’t even eat the freakin’ fudge that night! But he’s an experienced entheogenic voyager and communicated with the Fudge People through his guitar. One needn’t “eat the fudge” to understand much of this, but to paraphrase the late Terence McKenna, dying without having done psychedelics is like dying without having gotten laid. McKenna referred to the hyperdimensionality of the psilocybin trance: “All of these places that were thought to be discrete and separate are seen to be part of a single continuum.”

Which is just another way of saying God or the Infinite or the Whole Enchilada.

I missed out on the Dalai Lama, allowing myself to be kidnapped by some speed- freaked friends of mine and taking one really weird ride through L.A. And life has not been some blissful nirvana since. I take the demands of the squares personally and I spend much of my time suffering from acute melancholia. I read some LAPD “expert” on the drug MDMA (Ecstasy to you and me) discuss how one of the drawbacks of indulging is that that the raver can find ordinary life pleasureless and become easily depressed. Take that logic a few steps further. If you’d spent Saturday night kissing God, wouldn’t it be a bit of a downer to have to show up at the box factory Monday morning?