(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5441929&forum_id=2Reputation#47038548)

That line about Calabasas was a thread once iirc

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5441929&forum_id=2Reputation#47038555)

```

As time went by, things got more settled and ordered into a nice routine that made me feel centered, which I felt was all I could expect at that point—the grace of habit. I got attached to the simple habits of my days: I still lived in the back of the bookstore, and I had started doing yoga in the morning to calm down. After yoga I’d eat a simple healthy breakfast, and then reread my little bible, Psychotherapy, East and West, underlining certain passages in red. Nothing all that mind-shattering happened. My life just went by without much passion, emotion, or despair. I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t elated; I just was. It was like the life of an old rabbi studying his Talmud. The only person who disturbed my peace was Joe. He didn’t think I was in the best of mental health, and he wanted to shake my habituation by converting me to Christ. I didn’t realize that Joe had become a born-again until I saw him reading the Bible a lot. Joe, I soon found out, was a born-again Christian who took LSD as the Holy Eucharist. At last, after much effort, Joe talked me into taking LSD with him, alone. I discussed the idea with Meg. She didn’t really seem to think it was a bad idea as long as I was aware that at some point on the trip Joe would probably want to read to me from the Bible and try to convert me to Christ. She warned me not to get too paranoid when it happened. It was a beautiful, clear Saturday afternoon in late summer. Joe wanted to drop the acid at his house and take it all real slow and quiet—just mellow out as it fell into place. I was extremely nervous and couldn’t stop falling asleep. I felt as if I were going to die or something, like the dread before you take off on a roller coaster.

Then all of a sudden we just did it. Joe took out a whole sheet of blue blotter Holy Eucharist LSD and cut off two small dots that seemed to glow in the nervous focus of my eye. With a trembling hand I did what Joe did: I put the dot on my tongue and washed it down with a big gulp of Dr Pepper. Then we just sat there smiling at each other like two cats that had just swallowed two mice. But soon Joe got up to fetch his Bible and began to thumb through it. It was then that I asked him if we could please go up into the mountains.

I wanted to be outdoors for the trip and I thought I knew a beautiful place to go: it was the stream on top of a mountain that flowed down to a waterfall that cascaded into a deep pool where everyone swam naked on hot days. If we could just get to the beginning of that stream, I thought, everything would be fine. I also thought if I didn’t get near some water real quick I’d go mad. But I didn’t tell Joe that. I kept wondering what madness would be for me. What would my crazy activity be if I really let go? Then I suddenly knew that madness was only a smoke screen to keep us from looking all the way down into the pure bottomless pit of death.

What came to me then was the full and complete realization that we were all going to die and beyond our personal death there was only one thing larger, the end of all human history, when at last the sun would go out. But I didn’t tell any of these thoughts to Joe because I thought they would provoke him into reading to me from the Bible. I was sure I didn’t want that. At the same time I was happy to know what I did want, and that was water. We went to the water. Joe drove, telling me that the acid would probably just be coming on strong by the time we got up there. We reached the edge of the woods in about twenty minutes. Neither of us had watches, so time was just a sort of conditioned feeling by then.

Not seeing any real path into the stream, we bushwhacked for a while. Then we found a path and came to a little clearing by that rushing stream. We stood there for a minute and then separated without a word. I followed the descent of the stream which led to the waterfall. It wasn’t long after that I felt the acid coming on quite strong. Since I was a virgin to it all, I didn’t know what to expect, but I felt like my whole mind and body was on this roller coaster just as it was starting up its first giant rise. I just stood there and watched that clear stream flow and break around some small rocks that sat out in the center. The clear water made silver rings around the rocks, which shimmered to blue as the water reflected the late-afternoon light. Then I hopped out and landed, with what felt like perfect balance, on one of the flat rocks in the center of the rushing stream. I felt the whole stream as one big snaking, ever-changing body all around me. Out of some need to define myself against that stream, or perhaps out of some feeling of being born again for the first time, I just opened my arms and cried out, “I am!” My voice seemed small and low against the sound of the rushing water.

I stood there waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. So I tried it again, a little louder this time. “I am!” I called to the sky and trees. Still no answer; nothing happened. The water continued to flow on, and the sun sank a little lower into the lush green all around me. Once more, I thought, and this time I really shouted until I could feel it down to the base of my balls: “I am!” It was only then that I suddenly got self-conscious and wondered if in fact I might be disturbing some of the campers in the area. This new feeling of self-consciousness, coupled with a touch of loneliness and curiosity about what Joe was up to, sent me back to where I had left him. Joe was standing tall, beautiful, and glowing by the stream.

His smile was the most open, completely relaxed smile I had ever seen on any face anywhere. He was even more beautiful than the drugstore picture of Christ Mom kept as a bookmark in her Bible. The sun set behind his head, creating a sort of red halo that fired up the edges of his beard. I couldn’t get enough of all this in my eyes. I chanted over and over again to Joe, “This is too much. This is too much to stand. I can hardly stand this beauty anymore.” I saw a wild and crazy bat flying over Joe’s head. I saw two bats with long peacock feathers coming out of their tails and I saw that the whole sky above Joe’s head was filled with glorious, ornate, spectacular, almost suffocatingly baroque waves of peacock feathers, which I now tried to negate with Mom’s old familiar pattern of escape. I couldn’t stop assaulting Joe with what-ifs. “Joe, this is really great here, tripping in the woods,” I said. “But what if we were at the ocean? What about tripping at the ocean? What if we were down on Seventh Street now? What would it be like to be tripping on acid with all those Seventh Street hippies?” No sooner had I asked Joe that than out of the woods came this band of East Village hippies. I swear.

I could immediately tell by the way they were dressed and the way they moved and talked that they were genuine East Village hippies come up to the country for an acid weekend. I thought Joe had set it all up. I thought that he had rehearsed the whole thing and had brought them up to hide in the trees until I gave them their cue so they could come out and play their Seventh Street hippie antics on me. Then I thought maybe I had conjured them. I thought that this was all a big theater and I had conjured these spirits to teach me a lesson. I felt some higher forces were speaking to me, telling me that I had the power to get exactly what I asked for, so be careful. I felt that I had the power to create my own reality. At the same time I tried to realize that these hippies who surrounded us in the dark were not phantoms but real human beings. I could only see them as a group of actors playing out some scenario that had been put together in some place I could not yet comprehend.

I had the dark feeling of being completely and absolutely lost, stupid and blind and lost, and I knew that my only connection to meaning would be to tell Joe this. So I did. I said, on the verge of tears, “Joe, I feel lost.” It was so dark now that I could hardly see his face. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to him or one of the phantom hippies. Then I heard him laugh back at me his easy, comforting laugh and say, as if his words were smiling, “Yes, that’s because we are lost. I didn’t bring a flashlight and there’s no moon tonight.” I was amazed at how quickly the sun had gone down. We were indeed lost. We were lost in the dark. If there was a path back to the road we had no idea where it was. Then Joe, who seemed more in control, asked these crazy hippies if they knew the way out of the woods.

They seemed ready for a great adventure and cried out, “Follow us.” They had a couple of kerosene camping lamps that they held high over their pale-blue demonlike faces as they led us into the thick of it. Every so often one would take a little hatchet and stoop and begin to hack at a tree root and scream, “Die! Die! There, it’s dead! That’s the fifth poisonous snake I’ve killed tonight!” But I only saw the snakes they hacked as tree roots and was never sure what they were seeing or if they were just trying to scare us. The funny thing was that in spite of all their mad antics I trusted them completely to lead us out onto the road. As we walked, Joe kept whispering to me in my ear, “Let the little children lead you. Let the little children lead you.” At times the woods turned into a gigantic jungle tangle and at other times it seemed like we were on some sort of path, until at last we were miraculously on the edge of the highway somewhere near where we had left Joe’s truck. As soon as we got onto the road, the hippies left us as they laughed and sang, “We are the happy wanderers …” and they staggered on down the road swinging their lanterns like a band of happy gypsies, all disappearing into the night as magically as they had come out of it. Relieved to be on the solid asphalt, I walked into the middle of the road and looked up and gazed upon that gigantic night sky. I was seeing the night sky for the first time in my life. I just plain saw it, just saw it directly without any mediation of thought or comment. I saw the stars for the first time and they were just stars.

There was no word for them in my mind. I saw it all not as hallucination but so clearly and powerfully and directly that it brought me to my hands and knees right there in the middle of the road. I could feel the warm asphalt still radiating the heat of the day, like it was a warm body under me. I lay down and clung to it with all my might. When I rolled over and looked at the sky again I was amazed not to be looking up; I now had the sensation of looking out. I could feel the complete roundness of the earth and I knew I was looking out into the universe. This view of the stars as “out” lasted for some time, and was always on the edge of being unbearable. It was awful, in the sense of inspiring awe. There was no longer any room for fear. It was all just one big AWE. When I stood up I saw that Joe too was looking at the stars, and I went over and hugged him and his whole body felt like a great warm loving bear as I wondered how I would ever live my life after this trip into the mountains. “Shall we head down?” Joe asked. “Oh my God, whatever. Let’s go get a beer or whatever, I don’t care.” I felt no need for anything. My body was in total harmonious motion as we sauntered to Joe’s pickup truck and got in. It never occurred to me that Joe might not be able to drive. All things seemed possible. Why, we could even fly down to town if we chose. Joe made a U-turn and we started toward town. Not far down the road we came to a spectacular turnout, one of those scenic overlooks, and he pulled in to let me out while he sat in the truck and waited. I walked to the edge of the lookout and there below me the whole Hudson Valley was stretched out with its scattered streetlights and farmhouses, and New Paltz sparkled like a gem in the distance. Looking down on it all, I could see that it was breathing—the entire Hudson Valley was breathing, and not only the entire valley, the entire earth, and my breath was in union with it, or its breath was in union with mine, I couldn’t tell. The waving swell of my diaphragm was also the swell of the valley below. There was suddenly no me, or I should say no complication of me. There was no Brewster with a history anymore.

My body was filled with a colored liquid, like the mercury in a thermometer, and then it all went down until it drained out my feet and left only an empty outline, like a Matisse drawing. Now I was the landscape, which was all liquid and flowing through my outlines. I don’t know how long this lasted or what it meant. I only know that I never experienced anything like it before or ever after. At some point I turned to see Joe glowing behind the wheel of the pickup. I climbed in beside him and everything in that cabin was as liquid and interesting as the valley below. As we drove down the winding mountain road toward New Paltz I began again with the what-ifs. But this time it wasn’t Seventh Street. “What if we were in Vietnam tripping right now, Joe? What if we were in the middle of that war? What if we couldn’t get our fingers off the triggers of our machine guns?” Joe didn’t answer. He just smiled and drove. As the what-ifs spun by in my mind, I knew I could stop the Ferris wheel at any point and take the thought out and examine it. Or I could let the Ferris wheel keep spinning. Then the Ferris wheel turned into a stream just like the one I’d been standing by and its seats were now wooden boxes floating down the stream and every box, I knew, contained a thought. I could drag it out and open it up. Or I could let the boxes go—and I did. I watched them flow by. That night I pledged myself to Meg. “I think we should try to make a life together,” I said to her at the diner over a BLT. “For better or worse, let’s try to make a life together.” Meg seemed a little surprised and then took my hand while I turned to her and said, “I like you, Meg, because things matter to you.” MEG AND I had made love once or twice, but I didn’t like that out-of-control animal feeling. I liked that all-over spiritual feeling I got from the LSD better, and I began to feel that my little room in the back of the bookstore was meant to be a monk’s cell, not a sex pad, and I wanted to keep it that way. I had had the sex pad with Melissa; now I wanted something else with Meg. One day I found a way to re-enter that joyously transcendental state without using drugs.

Actually, Meg found it. Meg came up with the idea that I should try modeling for her life drawing class to make some extra money. They were looking for a model, so I took the job. I had never modeled before but I knew I’d be right for it. I was in good shape and had an almost classic body. I had no objection to being naked in front of an art class, although a jock strap was required. I hated jock straps and had never owned one. I bought one at the college athletic store and then, repulsed by the horrid white clinical aspect of it, I decided to dye it red. On Monday at nine in the morning I showed up at Meg’s life drawing class with an old bathrobe I had bought at a thrift shop and my new scarlet-red jock strap. I think the drawing teacher and the whole class were impressed and thought of me as a real professional. It all happened on that first day. I made the wonderful discovery within an hour. I found that I could empty out and turn into an outline again. I could disappear without fear because I knew that the whole class was keeping me in that room with their eyes. The more people looked at me, the more I was present, and I was also free to come and go from that presence. If there were ten students looking at me, times two eyes, then I’d feel twenty times larger than I usually felt.

It was their constant gaze that kept my body in that room, while my imagination flew to Bali, then out into the cosmos, getting ever closer to a state of nothingness. It was a way of constantly dying and being brought back from the dead, resurrected once again by the voice of the art instructor, which was like the voice of God bringing me back into the world of the living when he’d say, “Let’s take a break,” and whoosh, I’d be back in my body and putting on my robe and talking with Meg about all the places I’d been in my imagination. They paid me very little, only $3.50 an hour, but that was fine, because I was getting paid for just standing still, or sometimes sitting,

```

Spalding Gray. Impossible Vacation (Kindle Locations 650-771). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

But then it hit me that he is prob most like Dorothy Parker -- quote below is from her book of sketches on dudes:

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Freddie

“Oh, boy!” people say of Freddie. “You just ought to meet him some time! He’s a riot, that’s what he is—more fun than a goat.”

Other, and more imaginative souls play whimsically with the idea, and say that he is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Still others go at the thing from a different angle, and refer to him as being as funny as a crutch. But I always feel, myself, that they stole the line from Freddie. Satire—that is his dish.

And there you have, really, one of Freddie’s greatest crosses. People steal his stuff right and left. He will say something one day, and the next it will be as good as all over the city. Time after time I have gone to him and told him that I have heard lots of vaudeville acts using his comedy, but he just puts on the most killing expression, and says, “Oh, say not suchly!” in that way of his. And, of course, it gets me laughing so that I can’t say another word about it.

That is the way he always is, just laughing it off when he is told that people are using his best lines without even so much as word of acknowledgment. I never hear any one say “There is such a thing as being too good-natured” but that I think of Freddie.

You never knew any one like him on a party. Things will be dragging along, the way they do at the beginning of the evening, with the early arrivals sitting around asking one another have they been to anything good at the theatre lately, and is it any wonder there is so much sickness around with the weather so changeable. The party will be just about plucking at the coverlet when in will breeze Freddie, and from that moment on the evening is little short of a whirlwind. Often and often I have heard him called the life of the party, and I have always felt that there is not the least bit of exaggeration in the expression.

What I envy about Freddie is that poise of his. He can come right into a room full of strangers, and be just as much at home as if he had gone through grammar school with them. He smashes the ice all to nothing the moment he is introduced to the other guests by pretending to misunderstand their names, and calling them something entirely different, keeping a perfectly straight face all the time as if he never realized there was anything wrong. A great many people say he puts them in mind of Buster Keaton that way.

He is never at a loss for a screaming crack. If the hostess asks him to have a chair Freddie comes right back at her with “No, thanks; we have chairs at home.” If the host offers him a cigar he will say just like a flash, “What’s the matter with it?” If one of the men borrows a cigarette and a light from him Freddie will say in that dry voice of his, “Do you want the coupons too?” Of course his wit is pretty fairly caustic, but no one ever seems to take offense at it. I suppose there is everything in the way he says things.

And he is practically a whole vaudeville show in himself. He is never without a new story of what Pat said to Mike as they were walking down the street, or how Abie tried to cheat Ikie, or what old Aunt Jemima answered when she was asked why she had married for the fifth time. Freddie does them in dialect, and I have often thought it is a wonder that we don’t all split our sides. And never a selection that every member of the family couldn’t listen to, either—just healthy fun.

Then he has a repertory of song numbers, too. He gives them without accompaniment, and every song has a virtually unlimited number of verses, after each one of which Freddie goes conscientiously through the chorus. There is one awfully clever one, a big favourite of his, with the chorus rendered a different way each time—showing how they sang it when grandma was a girl, how they sing it in gay Paree and how a cabaret performer would do it. Then there are several along the general lines of Casey Jones, two or three about negroes who specialized on the banjo, and a few in which the lyric of the chorus consists of the syllables “ha, ha, ha.” The idea is that the audience will get laughing along with the singer.

If there is a piano in the house Freddie can tear things even wider open. There may be many more accomplished musicians, but nobody can touch him as far as being ready to oblige goes. There is never any of this hanging back waiting to be coaxed or protesting that he hasn’t touched a key in months. He just sits right down and does all his specialties for you. He is particularly good at doing “Dixie” with one hand and “Home, Sweet Home” with the other, and Josef Hofmann himself can’t tie Freddie when it comes to giving an imitation of a fife-and-drum corps approaching, passing, and fading away in the distance.

But it is when the refreshments are served that Freddie reaches the top of his form. He always insists on helping to pass plates and glasses, and when he gets a big armful of them he pretends to stumble. It is as good as a play to see the hostess’ face. Then he tucks his napkin into his collar, and sits there just as solemnly as if he thought that were the thing to do; or perhaps he will vary that one by folding the napkin into a little square and putting it carefully in his pocket, as if he thought it was a handkerchief. You just ought to see him making believe that he has swallowed an olive pit. And the remarks he makes about the food—I do wish I could remember how they go. He is funniest, though, it seems to me, when he is pretending that the lemonade is intoxicating, and that he feels its effects pretty strongly. When you have seen him do this it will be small surprise to you that Freddie is in such demand for social functions.

But Freddie is not one of those humourists who perform only when out in society. All day long he is bubbling over with fun. And the beauty of it is that he is not a mere theorist, as a joker; practical—that’s Freddie all over.

If he isn’t sending long telegrams, collect, to his friends, then he is sending them packages of useless groceries, C. O. D. A telephone is just so much meat to him. I don’t believe any one will ever know how much fun Freddie and his friends get out of Freddie’s calling them up and making them guess who he is. When he really wants to extend himself he calls up in the middle of the night, and says that he is the wire tester. He uses that one only on special occasions, though. It is pretty elaborate for everyday use.

But day in and day out, you can depend upon it that he is putting over some uproarious trick with a dribble glass or a loaded cigar or a pencil with a rubber point; and you can feel completely sure that no matter where he is or how unexpectedly you may come upon him, Freddie will be right there with a funny line or a comparatively new story for you. That is what people marvel over when they are talking about him—how he is always just the same.

It is right there, really, that they put their finger on the big trouble with him.

But you just ought to meet Freddie sometime. He’s a riot, that’s what he is—more fun than a circus.```

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5441929&forum_id=2Reputation#47038600)