How
Drew and I Bonded, and
How A Night With Teresa brought back this Memory
[an unpublished section of a book that Nyerges has been working on about his childhood]
In 2008, I was sitting on the wide
open field of the Passionist Monastery in the foothills of Sierra Madre. My friend Teresa and I were sitting there in
the darkness of the new moon, considering some key decisions before us. We sat there on a large blanket which we had
to move and arrange until we found a spot free of the ubiquitous gopher holes.
It was dark and quiet, and we spoke little, but looked southward at the vast
expanse of lights that made up the Los Angeles County sprawling urban expanse.
I didn’t perceive that I was in a
state of crisis, though by the true definition of the word – a fork in the road
where a decision must be made – my current state was indeed a crisis.
A decision needed to be made. But why Teresa and I were there that night,
and the decision I needed to make, is not what this story about.
Being there on the broad open field
of the monastery brought back a flood of memories from approximately 1974, when
I found myself facing another personal crisis of sorts.
Back then, my friend Drew Devereux told
me how he researched where he was likely to find peyote in the wild. He then hitchhiked down to Texas, along the
Rio Grande, nearly to the Gulf of Mexico.
He carried just a little canvas pack. I admired Drew’s apparent lack of
fear, and his ability to go where no man has gone before – well, at least to go
where he hadn’t gone before, and certainly where I had never gone before.
He told me that in a little U.S.
rural town which seemed far more Mexican than U.S., he got dropped off by his ride and then he hiked into the nearby
fields. Drew described the type of trees
that were out there, and how they grew in gullies in the slightly undulating
landscape. In some cases, lichens hung
from the lower branches of the trees, indicating that the area is often in the
shade, or that it was sometimes underwater.
Drew wrote to me, “I remember the
trip to Texas, of course. But I almost
gave up because I didn't find any cactus. But I met some people who told me
that it grew everywhere, and they actually took me up a hillside and showed me
where they grew.”
So Drew made his camp there for the
night, comfortably out of view of what made up the small town. At dusk, he ate some of the raw peyote
cactus.
He wrote extensively about his
experience, and I was full of awe at what seemed a magical plant.
“Once I set up camp, I ate one or
two and then the buttons took on a bluish glow in the growing dusk, making them
really easy to see,” wrote Drew. He
explained that he noticed multiple blue lights glowing in the field in front of
where he camped. The lights didn’t appear to be hallucinations, so Drew walked
to one of them, and the light was emanating from a peyote plant. He walked to another blue light, and it was
also coming from a peyote plant. Each
blue light in the field was from a peyote plant which led Drew to conclude that
there was something special about the plant that could not be explained by
botany or biology alone. He felt that
there was an actual entity or presence that resided within or through each
small little cactus button of peyote.
As Drew was leaving on his
hitchhike trip to go back home, he said that some cops kicked him out of
town. “As they were questioning me, one
of them kicked my backpack and said I probably had drugs in there. I said ‘of
course I don’t -- go ahead and look.’ Thanks goodness they didn't or I would
probably still be there in prison.”
Months later, I’d driven all the
way to Texas to find Drew’s patch. I
didn’t find his, but found another patch nearby, and brought a bag home. Some time after that, Drew and I got together
at my friend Larry’s cabin in Sierra Madre to eat peyote. I was living with my parents at the time, and
probably told them I was going to be camping out.
We sat and began to eat the
nauseating cacti, and I eventually found myself staring at things. I think it affected me more than Drew, but
there’s no way to know such a thing. I
became very introvert about my life and the things I was doing or not-doing,
and I didn’t talk much.
Drew asked me, with what I
perceived to be a tinge of irritation, “Why are you staring at me?” to which I
had no answer. But in fact, when I
stared, things were revealed to me, and each thing I looked at, including Drew,
became a dynamic scene in motion which told me its past history and a complete
story. Drew’s face changed from one
persona to another, to a monster, to a god, back to Drew. It was best that I didn’t stare.
Later, past midnight, we walked a
block away to the old Pinney house, which locals called a haunted house. At the time, it was divided into numerous
apartment rentals, and Rolf, a friend of mine from Pasadena City College, lived
in one of the apartments. Drew and I
went in, walked up the stairs to his door, and let ourselves in. He didn’t lock his door. I went over to him where he was sleeping and
touched his shoulder to wake him up. He
didn’t move. I pushed him a bit and all of a sudden he began to violently shake
and shake and mumble, and he finally sat up, saying that we’d scared the hell
out of him. I said I was sorry. He said
he wasn’t mad, but it took him a few minutes to compose himself and to calm
down to where he could talk with us.
I told him we’d eaten peyote and we
just sat there on his carpet for awhile, talking in the dark, and after awhile,
Rolf lit a candle and made tea for all of us.
We talked about our experience, and what was on our minds for two hours
or so.
Later, Drew told me “Being in your
friend’s apartment, things became very supernatural for me. His cat assumed
huge proportions. Then I felt that I was traveling outside my body through his
window and looking at the street below. This view was physically impossible as
I was laying on his carpet. So I got a bit scared for the first time and was
then back in my body.”
Eventually, Drew and I could see
that Rolf was tired, so we left and walked back to Larry’s place on the empty
and dead-quiet streets of Sierra Madre.
Larry was asleep when we got there,
and since Drew and I could barely sleep, we each found a place in Larry’s
spacious yard and sat or laid down to rest and think.
I barely slept. Too much was going on in my mind, and
gradually I began to somewhat automatically review the current status of my
life’s activities: my school work with
no concrete goals, my part-time teaching through other organizations with no
clear agreements, my living with my parents but wanting something more for my
life, my feeling of panic that time is racing by, my desire to learn more about
many subjects coupled with an uncertainty if
I’d stick to it, and questions of how I’d finance those studies. My mind
drifted over my desire for travel, my seeming unorganized life, my desire for
spiritual awareness, my interest in writing as a profession but with no degree,
my seeming habit of starting many things but not always finishing them, despite
the fact that “finishing” is not always clear-cut.
I lay on the cement sidewalk, my
mind twisting and turning with what seemed like a forced life-review. If there was an entity in the cactus I ate,
it was relentless and wanted me to review and examine everything. Should I buy a car? What sort of job should I get to pay for that
car? Can I get such a job? Is that what my life should really be all about? Should I move back to a farm? Why don’t I have a girl friend? Should I have a companion? Should I go back to college full-time? Should I find and follow a guru? Have I
already found my guru and am too resistant to admit it? Should I return to Buddhism? Or Catholicism? And on and on and on it went, until dawn.
At first, there was an overcast
grey-streaked sky, and eventually a mildly foggy morning. I must have slept at least a little, and I
woke suddenly in a frantic panic, asking too many questions, and too uneasy to
answer any. In the cool of the quiet
morning, I picked a tiny scab on my arm and it bled. I felt a psychotic panic and imagined the
pain that would come if I were slashed to death by cutting. I went into a literal cold sweat as I was
experiencing both panic and incoherence.
It was very irrational.
I jumped up and splashed cold water
on my face from Larry’s hose. I walked
back towards the cabin and Drew was sitting there, awake.
“I was just waiting for you to get
up,” said Drew. I thought I was waiting
for him. So we both used the bathroom,
and then we went for a walk.
“Let’s go up to the monastery,” I
suggested, and we walked up the streets in silence, hearing only distant cars
and the sounds of our own shoes on the street.
We walked through Bailey Park and onto the grounds of the monastery’s
expansive “south lawn.”
It was dry with lots of dry
grasses. Just a few plants were green, such as mustard and turkey mullein. It was an other-worldly spiritual experience
to silently walk there, on what seemed at the time very much sacred ground. Drew got down on all fours and began to
examine a turkey mullein plant. He
explained to me the floral parts of the plant, how the male flower is situated
in such a way so that the pollen easily drops into the female flower. He pulled out his botanist’s magnifying glass
and had me look more closely. With the
10-times magnification, it was as if I had entered into a private, rarely-seen
world. Drew had been to this world
already and he guided me.
Then we walked on.
I shared some of my night’s
experience with Drew, who didn’t say much.
I told him about my many personal doubts. He was silent, and then he
reminded me about the time he’d invited me to go on a trip with him.
“When you say yes, that means
maybe, and when you say maybe, that means no,” Drew told me. “And if you write it down it does no good,
because you just lose the note” he explained in a matter-of-fact voice.
I was silent. He was right. His words were like silent arrows into my
heart. We left the field and went back
for a short walk down Carter, and Lima, over to Larry’s. We talked sparingly, mostly about the
night. But we were both tired and even
talking was tedious. We passed an early
Saturday morning yard sale and I began to examine some used archery bows for
sale. I’d long wanted to get involved in
archery but hadn’t done so yet. They had
several Bear bows (and others) for sale.
Some were reasonably priced, and others seemed high for a yard sale. I
held one of the bows for the longest
time looking at it, thinking about it.
Can I afford this? Would I use
it? Where would I use it? Can I get
something similar at a better price?
What about arrows? Was there
anything else that I’d need to buy?
Would I actually use this, or would it just sit around? Is there something more important that I should
use my money for? All these mental questions filled my mind. I liked bows and archery, I told myself, or
did I just like the idea of bows and
archery?
“Well, are you going to buy it?”
asked Drew.
I held it a bit and then began to
repeat to Drew some of my inner thoughts.
I sensed he was a bit impatient.
“Do you have trouble making up your
mind?” he asked. It was a question whose
answer was painfully obvious. Was it me
or was it the drug? Or a
combination? I put the bow back on the
rack and said nothing more about it as we walked back.
We went to Larry’s and eventually
we each got rides home. I was very tired
that day and barely managed to do the bare essentials that were required of me.
Some time later, Drew and I talked
about our experience that night. Drew wrote,
“Our trip itself was the most
amazing ever as I didn't know what to expect. That we did it together was
important, and made it more powerful. I felt you were leading us around to
witness amazing things, and I would be lost otherwise, and I was very grateful
to you. I was at no time irritated or
impatient. My sense of time and
direction had practically evaporated. Everything was new and very beautiful.
“The rest of the night I just
enjoyed the wandering-about that we did, and how everything was so beautiful in
the moment. It caused me to pause and
realize that my life is quite amazing if I can stop and just simply take the
time to notice.
“I ate peyote a few times after,
but a kind of wall had been erected because of my fear of losing my body in
some kind of out-of-body experience. And because I was looking for and
comparing, things did not have the same power or newness that they did on the
trip that you and I took. Later I went
to Florida and got spores for Psilocbye cubensis and grew many flats of those
and ate them perhaps 10 times. I had
some interesting trips, but none quite compare. Finally, I just gave it all up,
but am very glad for doing it. As Alan Watts put it, when you get the message,
you can just hang up the phone. I could have simply hung up the phone after our
trip since I got the message. But making the call is something some people may
need to do, and for that reason I feel it is not helpful to simply advise
someone to don't do drugs. We have to find out things for ourselves sometimes.
“I was loving every second of our
experience that night in Sierra Madre, and every second was like an eternity,”
wrote Drew.
Later that night, and into the next
day, I wrote down lists of my “to dos”, all the unfinished and unresolved
things that plagued me. I wrote out some
action for most, regardless how simple.
The peyote cactus experience made
me deeply introspective, and it was not at all “pleasurable.” I saw my life as a near-meaningless series of
chaotic and unplanned activities, leading nowhere, fulfilling no purpose either
for the furtherance of my life’s goals, nor did it seem to fulfill anything in
the grand scheme of the universe.
In the next few days, I not only
made the lists, but I finished some tasks, settled agreements and contracts,
paid old debts, talked to people I’d always wanted or needed to talk to, sent
out Thank You notes, and generally tried to tie up the loose ends of my life. I
wanted to feel calm, at peace, and in a position to move forward with whatever
my life was about, or going to be about.
In that sense, Father Peyote was a
harsh task master who got me off my butt and into action.
I believe I ate peyote one more
time after that. Was I in need of more
punishment? It was not a pleasant
experience, with some very violent vomiting and I couldn’t wait for the effects
to wear off. I never tried it again,
though I always felt that I’d seriously consider doing it in the context of a
Native American Church tipi ceremony.
Years later, I was invited to such a ceremony but it was not an evening
when I wanted to be awake all night examining my life in slow-motion fine
detail, in the rain, in the mountains, so I declined. In fact, during that time in 2002, I didn’t
need the help of the Teacher Plant to get into my inner mind and higher Self,
to seek the answers to the diverse challenges then facing me. I needed acute clarity.
Anyway, I say: don’t do drugs! I know I must sound like a hypocrite. Still, there are other ways to learn the
needed lessons of life, ways that do not endanger your mind or your body or
your atmospheres. Did any of my drug use
damage my mind and body? Though I’ve
heard regular marijuana users say that there is no damage whatsoever from their
drug use, my honest reply is “How would I know?” I’m not specifically aware of “damage,”
though brave friends have occasionally pointed out my “quirks” and tendencies,
and my mostly life-long tendency to be late, and often forgetful. Did those result from drug use? Who can say?
I can’t say, since how can a potentially-damaged apparatus objectively
analyze itself? It cannot.
So this old memory flowed though my
mind as Teresa and I sat talking about future intentions. Memory and Intention, past and future, both
occupying the same part of the brain, and both intermingling as we sat on the
monastery’s vast field.
We sat in the dark for
awhile, both of us quiet, thinking, with no need to talk.
While we were sitting there
in the dark, we noticed a rapidly moving form passing in front of us, and then
doubling back. At first I thought it was a bobcat, but then perceived it to be
a coyote, probably examining a possible prey.
An hour later, there were two darting by, growling, and then one doubled
back, as if to surround us. Then a third
arrived, so I knew I should make them unwelcome. I stood, and though two had
instantly disappeared into the darkness, one remained.
I said to Teresa, “Watch”
and I boldly ran directly at it and it too disappeared. I was thankful that
they considered us too big for dinner.
Quickly thereafter, we folded up the blanket and departed. Though I
thought we had a good relationship, it did not last, and the reason for it not
lasting is an entirely different story.
