I Have America Surrounded

I Have America Surrounded

The Life of Timothy Leary

John Higgs

For Joanne, with love

‘In religion the future is behind us.’

Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

About the Publisher

Foreword

Three 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 President Richard 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 talked constantly about books. My favourite 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 learnt 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.

It’s easy sometimes to get lost in all the drug stuff that Tim’s famous for—all the ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’ stuff, especially in a society that loves a sound bite. But it wasn’t Tim’s only legacy. It was his vitality, enthusiasm, curiosity, humour and humanity that made Tim great—and those are the real ingredients of a mad scientist.

Winona Ryder Delivered at Timothy Leary’s memorial service 9 June 1996, Santa Monica, California

CHAPTER 1 I’ll Free You, My Love

The signal that the jailbreak could go ahead was a telegram. It arrived on the afternoon of Friday, 11 September 1970, while Dr Timothy Leary was exercising in the prison yard. He was called into the control office and handed a slip of yellow paper that read:

BELOVED—OPERATION TOMORROW

DOCTORS FEEL BEST NOT TO WAIT

TOTALLY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT SUCCESS

AND NEW LIFE DON’T WORRY I’LL BE

BRAVE WON’T BE DOWN TO VISIT

SUNDAY BUT WE’LL BE TOGETHER

SOON I AWAIT YOU I LOVE YOU

CONTACT ME AT THREE TREE

RECOVERY CENTER.

YOUR MATE

The sergeant who had handed him the telegram had done so with a look of sympathy. The message was from Tim’s wife Rosemary, and inmates always reacted badly to cancelled visits. Tim nodded and kept his face blank.

The telegram confirmed that arrangements for the necessary cars, drivers, safe houses and fake identity papers were complete, and that the ‘operation’ could go ahead the following night. The ‘three trees’ mentioned at the end of the telegram referred to the rendezvous. This was a group of trees, joined at the root, which stood a few hundred yards outside the penitentiary. If Tim could get himself outside the prison and reach the three trees, he would find a car waiting to take him to freedom. The symbolism was ideal, for Leary had Irish blood, and a group of three trees, always in fruit, was a symbol of unstoppable life in ancient Irish myths.

The stakes were high. If he did not reach the trees, there was little hope that he would ever be a free man. Leary had just been informed that he would be flown to Poughkeepsie in New York State the following week, where he would face further charges relating to the raid on his house in Millbrook nearly five years earlier. The likelihood of receiving more jail time was strong. This would destroy any hope that he had of escape, for this extra time would almost certainly trigger a transfer to a higher security prison. If he were to break out, it had to be Saturday or never. But that Friday the sky was a brilliant blue. His plan needed a foggy night in order to succeed. Without fog, there would be times during the escape that he would be silhouetted in the sights of the gun trucks and the armed guards. Without fog, only a miracle could prevent him from being shot.

He spent the following afternoon in the television room, watching the Stanford-Arkansas football game, and returned to his cell for the 4 p.m. head count. At 4.30 the whistle blew to signify the end of the count, and he waited for his cellmate to go to the food hall. Tim declined to join him, saying that he had eaten on the early line. The moment that his cellmate left, he got to work.1

He opened his locker. He removed the white laces from his sneakers and replaced them with dark ones. Then he sat down in front of the locker, a newspaper across his lap, and painted out the white stripes on his shoes and handball gloves with black dye. There was a sudden jangle of keys outside his cell door, and he quickly stuffed the shoes back in the locker. His heart was pounding as he sat motionless, listening to the guard move slowly away. By the time that it was safe to retrieve the shoes and return to work, he was sweating. He was rushing now, and his hands got covered in the dye. He wiped them on his handball gloves and shoved them back in the locker with the sneakers. Then he moved to the sink, where he began to scrub the black paint off his hands with a wire brush. He used his towel to mop the spilled paint off the floor in front of the locker. Finally, he hid the stained towel under his mattress.

There could be no going back now that his escape preparations were under way. He would not be able to explain why he had painted out the white on his gloves and shoes. He had crossed the line. He returned to his bunk and wrote what, at first glance, appears to have been an extraordinarily self-righteous farewell note to the guards. ‘In the name of the Father and the Mother and the Holy Ghost,’ it read, ‘Oh, Guards—I leave now for freedom. I pray that you will free yourselves. To hold man captive is a crime against humanity and a sin against God. Oh, Guards, you are criminals and sinners. Cut it loose. Be Free. Amen.’ Those who knew Leary well could recognize his sense of humour at work here, but everyone else could be forgiven for seeing only the arrogance and ego that so annoyed his enemies.

Tim then had to wait until after the next count, at 8.30, before he could make his move. Outside the sky was darkening and the weather was becoming cloudy. But there is a big difference between cloud and fog.

The thought of escape had been present when he was first imprisoned seven months earlier. During her very first visit, Rosemary had looked at Tim and made him a promise: ‘I’ll free you, my love.’

This was at Chino, a maximum security prison used as a holding centre for new prisoners. It was where convicts were evaluated and assigned to the most suitable prison to serve their time. It was here that Tim learnt about his potential future homes within the California prison system. Tehachapi, San Quentin and Folsom were all considered escape-proof. So was Vacaville, which was where the mentally disturbed were usually sent. It had a reputation for unpredictable maniacs and sudden violence, but it was not as feared as Soledad. Soledad was nicknamed ‘Gladiator School’, and was notorious for homosexual rape. The only options from which escape seemed possible were the forestry camps in the mountains, and the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. This was a minimum-to-medium security jail for professional and elite prisoners. But it seemed unlikely that he would be sent to either of these two facilities. These were options for quiet, uncontroversial prisoners, and, according to President Nixon, Timothy Leary was ‘the most dangerous man in America’.2

A factor in the choice of jail that he would be sent to was his status amongst the younger prisoners. The penitentiaries of California were notoriously brutal and violent. This was evident to Leary on his first night, when a burning mattress fell past his bars. It was accompanied by screams and shouts from convicts who were attempting to burn the jail to the ground while they were still locked inside.

New prisoners had to be quick to show allegiance to a particular clique or racial group, for a lone prisoner with no protection was seen as weak and vulnerable. When Leary arrived he was a hated figure in much of America. As one inmate told him, ‘If I had teenage kids and they were into drugs and I thought that you encouraged them, I’d have no hesitation in shooting you in cold blood.’ 3 This was a common attitude from the guards as well as many of the older cons. These were men who were on the wrong side of the generation gap, who often felt powerless to protect their children from the horrors of drugs and drug culture. And if there was one man who could be held responsible for the tsunami of drug use that swept the nation in the last years of the 1960s, it was Dr Timothy Leary.

Yet Leary was an untouchable figure in the prison system. This became apparent shortly after his arrival, when he intervened to stop the beating of a convict believed to be a snitch. Tim called for the guards, who rescued the man before he was seriously hurt. In doing so, he broke the cardinal rule of the jail—that of minding your own business. This should have earned him a beating, but the attack never came. Leary was protected by his status amongst the younger inmates. He was a living legend to prisoners in their early twenties and below, and especially to all those who had been involved in the drug culture. Drug use within the prison system was a long way removed from the idealistic, pacifist ideals of the flower children during the ‘Summer of Love’. Inmates would take whatever pills they could get, and those with a taste for amphetamines were unpredictable, violent and genuinely scary. It was immediately evident to the guards that, if he wished, Leary could wield his influence and cause a great deal of trouble, and a potential agitator is something that prison officers need to take very seriously.

So a move to the low-security penitentiary at San Luis Obispo, the California Men’s Colony West, did make some sense. The inmates here were older, white-collar prisoners, and the jail was regarded by many as a ‘country club’. The amount of time inmates were confined to their cells was kept to a minimum, and well-behaved prisoners were granted privileges such as contact with visitors or personal gardens. The convicts were aware that they had it good and that they had a lot to lose if they strayed from the conformist path, so they generally resigned themselves to doing their time peacefully. In case anyone was harbouring seditious plans, a semi-official ‘snitch’ system was in place involving certain prisoners reporting the inmates’ gossip to the officers in return for privileges. It was an ideal place to neutralise any potential Leary had for rocking the boat. And he was, after all, a 49-year-old academic and not some hardened street punk.

But was he an escape risk? San Luis Obispo was a low-security prison that did not usually take prisoners with long stretches to serve, as this placed them in a high-risk category. Tim had already been sentenced to a potential 20 years inside, and, for a man a few months short of his fiftieth birthday, this was a life sentence in all but name. It appeared that it would take something close to a miracle to put Tim in a low-security prison but, as Leary once explained, he was ‘in the miracle game’.

On his third day at Chino he was sent for the mandatory psychological assessment and presented with a set of tests. A significant part of these, he was shocked to realise, had been written by himself, 14 years earlier, when he had been one of America’s leading psychologists. They were known in psychological circles as ‘The Leary’. As he scanned the questions he knew exactly what personality traits they were assessing and measuring. He was able to answer each question in such a way that he would appear as close to a model prisoner as it is possible to get. The completed tests clearly showed, to the surprise of anyone who had read the newspapers during the previous decade, that Dr Timothy Leary was docile, conformist and meek. He was, the paperwork insisted, in no way an escape risk, and no one was prepared to argue with the paperwork. So the decision was made: Tim would be sent to San Luis Obispo.

The escape began at about ten to nine on the evening of Saturday, 12 September 1970. Tim put on his dark blue prison jacket and placed all his letters and treasured possessions in the pocket. He put on the blackened sneakers, left his farewell note in his locker and stepped out of his cell into the hallway.

Directly in front of him, at the end of the facing corridor, was the door to an internal prison yard. This was a square of grass enclosed on all sides by four cellblock corridors. It was also where a single tree grew, which seemed close enough to the corridor to enable getting onto the roof by climbing the tree and jumping across from its highest branches.

As he walked towards the door, a couple of convicts stood in the corridor and watched him pass. Tim had no choice but to walk past the prison yard door and round into another corridor, before turning back on himself and making another pass. The two cons were still watching. He walked past them again and headed into another cellblock. He was starting to act suspiciously now, he knew, but he had no option but to keep moving. He walked past them once again, and this time, once he had doubled back, they had gone.

He strode up to the door. As he was about to open it, he glanced into the adjacent cellblock where three more inmates were talking. One of them, a known snitch named Metcalf,4 looked up and glanced at him at the very moment he was about to reach for the door handle. Tim stopped himself and Metcalf seemed suspicious. Tim walked past and, after doubling back once more, found that when he reached the door again all three of the inmates were looking at him. There was no way that he was going to be able to get through that door unnoticed. He walked on.

There was another entrance to the yard, on the opposite side, but it was risky. He would have to walk across the floodlit square to reach the tree, and no one ever went in the yard after dark, not even the guards. But what choice did he have? He walked through this second door, into the light, and strode quickly and quietly across the yard, praying that no one glanced out of the windows of any of the four surrounding corridors. When he reached the tree he discovered that it was directly in front of the window facing Metcalf. There was no way he could climb up without being spotted. He ducked down and sat on the steps by the door, feeling very exposed, listening to the talk of the convicts a few feet away What was he to do? He knew that he couldn’t stay where he was for long. He would have to climb the tree and make a break for it. It would take Metcalf a few minutes to raise the alarm, so while climbing the tree offered only a small hope of success it was the only option that he had at that moment. He stood up, grabbed a branch and pulled himself up.

With impeccable timing, as Tim’s body appeared in front of the window, he saw Metcalf turn and face away from him. Tim shot up the tree and, within seconds, he had dropped down onto the slanted tiled roof of the cellblock. From here he could look down and see the guards lounging in the custody office. He removed his sneakers and padded barefoot along the corridor roof and across the cellblock, trying not to run into the television aerials that were nearly invisible in the dark. He could see into the neighbouring cellblocks and knew that their lights must be illuminating him up against the dark sky, but he was too elated to care. He reached the end of the cellblock and found his final obstacle: a telephone wire.

California Men’s Colony West was originally an old army base on the central Californian coast, just north of San Luis Obispo. It had been converted into a prison 16 years earlier, and consisted of rows of two-storey wooden barracks that had been connected by roofed-in walkways. It was, and is, considered a model prison, geared towards community work and rehabilitation, and at the time it did not suffer from the chronic overpopulation that has come to characterise the Californian prison system. There were flower beds and lawns, and uninterrupted views to the hills of the Pacific coast. There were no gun towers or walls, but gun trucks guarded the corners of the compound. Anyone attempting to climb the fence could be shot before they reached the top.

The jail offered regular, unmonitored contact visits, and Tim could spend hours with Rosemary every weekend. They could walk together through the gardens. This allowed Rosemary to pass LSD to her husband. It also allowed them to plan an escape.