HOW I MET TIMOTHY LEARY

by Howard Hallis

I met Dr. Timothy Leary in 1992 when the rave promoters Savage House were throwing their Shiva's Erotic Banquet party. Tim was to give a lecture there and he invited a bunch of us up to his house beforehand so we could get interviewed along with him for the nightly news as they did piece on "Tim Leary Joins The Rave Scene". The TV journalist started slamming Tim for being an acid guru in the 60s and wondered if he was still advocating drugs by supporting these warehouse parties where ecstasy use is rampant. Tim smiled and told her that the new drug wasn't ecstasy... it was the computer.

After the rave, which was great (one of the last good ones I went to before the cops and gangs made them suck), my pals who promoted it told me they had taken a loss of tens of thousands of dollars (because of the giant guest list) and couldn't pay Tim's lecture fee. I offered to cover it for them and they were so grateful that they let me in on their next project: A giant week long event to take place in recently democracized Prague called "Let The Sun Shine In". Tim would be involved, and they wanted me to go back up to his place.

Once there, I showed Tim some of my art and he said "This stuff looks like what Bill Burroughs did back in the fifties. We should do a book together, Howard."

Needless to say, I said "Hell yeah."

Tim's books were a great source of reference for me and my friends in high school and college. I liked how he told people that setting, state of mind, and the people you are with greatly determine the outcome of good or bad trips. How he re-wrote the Tibetan Book of The Dead with Richard (Ram Dass) Alpert and Robert Metzner. How he hung out with Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. His life story "Flashbacks" tells of how he escaped from jail, went into exile with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers, and was finally brought back to the states and spent the night in a cell right next to Charles Manson. His theories on consciousness and his studies with LSD were also of interest since... well, hey... I WAS at art college.

But before the book could start, I tried to get the Prague festival going and got Robert Anton Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge involved. They were going to have a lecture with Tim out there and show trippy videos and talk to people about consciousness expansion. Sounded great, but the guy behind it all had no capital... or any plane tickets, places to stay or ANYTHING other than a promo video of Czech girls singing songs from Hair around giant factories. By the end, I had invested months of work and a few thousand dollars. (Good thing I had that scholarship!)

I was so embarrassed that the event was a bust that I didn't go to Tim's place for a while, even though we had become friends during the time I was trying to make things in Prague happen.

Years later, I went to one of Tim's lectures at EZTV, a digital art space on Santa Monica Blvd. He was working with video artists Retinalogic and had some hypnotic videos playing behind him in what was basically a live performance of his video tape "How To Operate Your Brain". Tim somehow saw me in the crowd and said hello after the show. He invited me and my girlfriend up to his house.

He asked me what I was working on, and I said I wanted to start a multi-media factory where people could make and edit movies, music and art. He shook his head and said "Why do you want to invest in REAL ESTATE? Solid buildings you have to pay rent on every month? Why open a place that has a party and studio YOU have to be responsible for when people will soon be able to do all that at home. You can't have a good party in one place every night... the interzone has to keep moving. The energy needs to move around to stay vital and interesting.

Maybe so, but "the interzone" seemed to always be present at his house. While I worked for him, many of the famous people around in the mid-90s made their way by: Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp, Lily Tomlin, Dennis Hopper, Perry Farrell, Genesis and Alura P-Orridge, Al Jourgenson, Ozric Tentacles, David J from Love and Rockets, artist Robert Williams, Robert Anton Wilson, Gary Busey, Robin Tunney, Parker Posie, Tony Curtis, John Lily, Babes in Toyland, Anthony Keidis, Adam Sandler, Eldridge Cleaver, Tool, Dan Ackroyd... and so many more. He had computer artists, celebrities and pot heads mixing with political writers and documentary film makers. But that's getting ahead of myself.

Tim asked me about doing a book project again. This time the wheels were set in motion.

A week later I went with Tim to the book fair downtown and showed publisher Ron Turner of Last Gasp publishing my art. That meeting resulted in the publication of 'Surfing The Conscious Nets", a strange book about a guy who looks like a cross between Michael Jackson and Diana Ross named Huck Getty Mellon Von Schlebrugge and his journey to find a way to keep his dick hard. This was written before Viagra, (which I think Tim would be advocating the same way he once did LSD. It's sad he didn't live to see it.) and reads like an early version of an e-mail correspondence over the web. It was based loosely on correspondence Tim had with a guy named Jim Bauer.

The web was pretty new to most of the world back in 1993 and 1994 when we worked on the story, but the advances came so quickly both in what you could do with digital art and with penis-hardening drugs that the book seems a bit dated now. Still, it was quite an honor and I do have the unpublished manuscript for the sequel that Tim left me. The sequel was much much better and involved Huck Getty uncovering a conspiracy to preserve famous people's brains and that somehow Andy Warhol was involved. We even started it before he died (about a dozen pages of the second graphic novel are done, including 2 cover variations).

Another project we collaborated on was some digital collages for the re-issue of Tim's classic book "High Priest" for Ronin Publishing.

Many people ask if I saw Tim Leary drop acid. I think that's the only thing I never saw him do. He always had a Benson and Hedges Menthol in one hand and a nitrous oxide balloon in the other. He liked to drink and smoke weed (or eat one of his famous 'Leary Biscuits'), but never LSD. He seemed to think he had taken that one as far as he could.

No, the emphasis was definitely computers for Timothy before he died. One of the first times we met, he asked me "Do you have a computer?" When I said no, he said "What the hell do you mean no? You need a computer! You need to get online!" Back in 1992, this was not a priority or a reality for most people, but boy am I glad I listened. It was learning how to design web sites at Tim Leary's that I have a job right now.

One of the most memorable anecdotes I can share about Dr. Leary is the time we were driving somewhere on the 101 freeway. I said "Tim, there was this one time when I did mushrooms with my girlfriend. We were in a hotel room and it was the middle of the night and she had fallen asleep. I looked at her and was peaking when a voice... a revelation... came to me. That this woman, lying here, was my soul mate. The great love of my life. The one I was destined to be with. Well, it turns out that it was one of the last times I ever saw this person and that she was so completely wrong for me I can't even tell you... But at the time we were tripping, it seemed like a revelation of absolute truth. So how can you tell the difference between something you experience on psychedelics that's a real, bona-fide mystical insight and what's just bullshit?

Tim laughed and said "It's all bullshit."

And I was enlightened.

Towards the end, as Tim got sicker, he kept working. His diagnosis of Prostrate Cancer came at a great time, since he had revealed to me in an interview for Ben Is Dead magazine he did months before he knew he was sick that he only wanted to live to see 75. Tim never showed any fear in relation to his own mortality. He welcomed it like a brand new mind-altering experience. He wrote extensively about designing your own death, preparing relatives and friends for it by listing the various components of your existence that define your quality of life. Mobility, intelligence, memory, physical beauty... As we witnessed each of these things deteriorate in Tim, we knew the end was coming.

On May 31, 1996 I got a call to come over to the house. That it was time. I drove back up the hills of Bel Air that I had driven up now for 5 years and went in Tim's master bedroom. He was cheerful to the end, greeting folks like Bob Guccione Jr. who came in to show their respects. By nightfall, he had grown quiet, with only his strained breathing permeating the absolutely silent room. Everything was lit by candles, and I swear as I looked at his face I saw it changing from a young man at West Point to a doctor at Harvard to a 60's guru to a fugitive on the run to a digital elder statesman of the new generation. The nurse then put her head on his chest and said "He's gone."

Tim had done it. He had died with dignity in his own bed, surrounded by friends and family. No hospital room with tubes sticking out of him. And he was coherent to the end. Everyone in the room stood up and gave him a standing ovation. Now he really was outside looking in.