Sex, Drugs & Magick: Bernadine Dohrn could take you all by herself in the shape you're in

 

When you use crack cocaine, you're disappointing Pee Wee.

Sex, Drugs & Magick: Up Against the Wall: The Story of Tyrone

This interlude has some pretty delightful writing in it; personally I adore the metaphors "I got feisty, broke into the conversation with a verbal crowbar..." and "[h]e used a verbal hatchet and cut his way back in..." Bon mots like that are paired with some genuinely hilarious reproduction of what late-Sixties-hippie-speed-talk might plausibly have sounded like. While Wilson possessed a tip-top memory, he didn't to my knowledge have an eidetic one, so I assume much of the details are his best attempts at a reconstruction of Tyrone's monologues. But what an attempt at recollection! Given the happy, if sinister in its larger implications, ending of this vignette, I would say this is one of the more enjoyable interludes in Sex, Drugs & Magick. 

At the risk of being gauche, I don't think that Tyrone is anything like we'd imagine someone of his description today. In our era, I'd imagine an individual who is widely known for being relentlessly sexually active at 17 and using speed would  conjure a bespectacled, ringlet-haired, aspiring writer, but that might just be my own prejudices. Today, speed is dirty. Or perhaps, speed is dirty depending on the brand and setting: there was a good reason for the reduction of sentences for crack-cocaine under Obama. One version of the drug was expensive, one was cheap and therefore worse and more punishable under the law. It is a small wonder I think, where crack cocaine and methamphetamine have been equated with the lowest rungs of society most of my life, that I immediately think of it with an aversion derived from a wish for foreignness. And like, mayhap because of, Wilson I have an aversion to uppers based on their danger and what I see as their relative worthlessness. 

I also think this is an odd anecdote-biography to follow the chapter on LSD/psychedelics. Most of the interludes involve people who are involved with the drug for the preceding chapter, here we have a brief mention that Tyrone used LSD when he was 14 and then move on to his speed usage. I would wager that this might be a message about the fleeting nature of LSD and that far from an end-all-be-all experience that some imagine it to be, it is simply something that happens followed by many other events. The discussion of the differences between talking to someone on acid and conversing with someone on uppers is humorous and illustrative. Aside from being able to mentally concentrate (somewhat), I have always felt more-or-less physically sound on psychedelics. I'd say drinking has a much more dire effect on my motor skills. 

Wilson again demonstrates his human decency by being forbearing with a young man who wants to court his daughter who he absolutely does not want around. Another way he was an exemplary human being, I shudder to think of that day. Wilson also guides the young man as best he can until Tyrone takes off and I believe that there is a personal sense of joy at the end of the chapter. But Wilson does cast a shadow over the end with the words of Ram Dass. 

It occurred to me while I was reading the chapter, how many people in life I've heard talk like Wilson has Tyrone talk. The conspiratorial fantasies and patently absurd theories I've heard spout from a few acquaintances at times were recalled to memory while reading this story. I wonder, since I have been trained to associate speed use with a certain stigmatic set of symptoms, if perhaps I was unaware that someone was using at the time. And more frighteningly, it does seem that Ram Dass was absolutely correct about the use of speed in the upper echelons of the government. At least according to that disgraced dick Madison Cawthorn and the late, sainted Carrie Fisher. (It pains me to put them in the same sentence.) 

Stray Thoughts

- I find it hilarious the girl who vandalized Tyrone's apartment had to find someone from the Weather Underground to secure a can of spray paint. 

- Regrettably, Tyrone and many other conspiratorial thinkers were nail-on-the-head correct about the dangers of Catholicism and its continued presence in civilization. 

- Was belladonna really that common in California during the 60s? 

- I'd like to know how Tyrone's life turned out. Like a few other figures in the interludes, I have a (what I hope isn't voyeuristic) interest to hear the rest of their stories. Wherever Tyrone may or may not be, I hope he got to ram a jazz guitar down someone's throat. 

-Turns out "every few days" means "next week." I don't know what to do with myself. 

I imagine a speed freak who was afraid of the draft and pollution,who also liked Lord of the Rings, listened to The Yardbirds.