Timothy Leary 1920-1996 by Mikal Gilmore Rolling Stone July 11-25, 1996 It was a late afternoon toward the end of spring. I am seated with several other people on the floor of a bedroom in a ranch house high up in the hills of Los Angeles' Benedict Canyon. Through the plate-glass doors on one side of the room, you can see the day's light starting to fade, and a breeze soughs through the trees and bushes in the house's back yard. On the bed before us lies a gaunt, agd man covered in a red blanket, sleeping a restive sleep. We have all gathered into this room for the same purpose: We are here to watch this man as he takes sleep's journey to death. It is not the sort of thing that many of us have done before. The man who is dying is Dr. Timothy Leary - one of the more controversial and influential psychologists of the last 41 years and a guiding iconic figure of the countercultural tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. It was Leary who, as a promising young clinical researcher, helped develop the theory of transactional analysis - effectively changing the doctor-patient relationship in modern psychology - and it was Leary who, only a few years later, conducted a provocative series of psychedelic experiments at Harvard University that helped pave the way for an era of cultural and psychosocial upheaval. But nothing he has done in the years since has inspired as much reaction as how he has been preparing for his death. A year and a half ago, Leary learned that he had fatal prostate cancer - and he promptly did the one thing almost nobody does in such a situation: He celebrated the news. He announced to family, friends and media that he intended to explore the consciousness of dying the same way he once explored the alternative realities afforded by drugs: with daring and with humor. As time went along, though, Leary's proclamations became more audacious. At one point he suggested that when the effort of maintaining his life no longer seemed worth it, he might take one last psychedelic, drink a suicide cocktail and have the whole affair broadcast on his World Wide Web site. Then, following his death, a crew of cryonics technicians would come in and freeze his body, later removing and preserving his brain. Needless to say, these sort of hints have attracted a fair amount of media interest and have also stirred disdain and criticism from various quarters even from a few right to die advocates who felt Leary wasn't taking dying somberly enough. "They'd have me suffer in silence," he once told me, "so I can save them the pain." But when all is said and done, Leary is not dying outrageously. Rather, he is dying quietly and bravely, surrounded by people he loves and who love him. Even as he is dying though, he is still Timothy Leary, and he still has something to say. Around 6:30 in the evening he wakes, blinks, wincing momentarily in pain. He looks around him, seeing familiar people, including his Stepson Zachary Leary, and his former wife Rosemary, who once helped him to escape from a California state prison and flee the United States. He winks at Rosemary, then looks around him and says, "Why?" He smiles, tilts his head, then says, "Why not?" A couple of people in the room laugh and repeat the phrase back to him. It goes on like that for a few minutes, Leary saying, "Why not?" over and over, in different inflections, sometimes funny, sometimes sad. At one point he says, "Esperando" - Spanish for "Waiting." A few moments later, after another litany of "why nots," he will say "Where's the proof?" And still later "Go now." He looks back to Rosemary and mouths, "I love you," and she mouths the same back to him. Finally, barely above a whisper, he says, "Why?" twice more, then drifts back into his heavy sleep. I FIRST MET TIMOTHY LEARY ONLY A FEW WEEKS before his death I approached him nervously. Like many of the people I knew who came of age in the 1960s, I had been influenced by Leary's spirit and by his teachings. As a result, I had taken psychedelics mainly mescaline and LSD - with the idea that I might see visions that would change my life, and once or twice, I guess that's what happened. I remember one night I went looking for God (a required acid activity at some point or another) and came back realizing that God was indeed dead - or that at least if God was a divine power who might judge and condemn us for our frailties and desires and madnesses, then he was dead in my own heart and conscience. Exit God. Hasn't been seen since. Another time, I took acid not long after a brother of mine had died following surgery (I know: not such a good idea), and I plunged into what was called (appropriately, I decided) a bad trip. That night I saw the death of my lineage - the deaths of my ancestors, the deaths of my parents and brothers, the deaths of the children I had not yet had (and still have not had) and, of course, the death of myself. I sat in a dark-red oversize chair that night and watched death move before me and in and out of my being, and I gripped tight to the arms of that chair until the morning came. It was the only sunrise I have ever been happy to see. I was not the same for days after. Maybe I was not ever the same again. That was 1971 and it was the last time I took acid. It wasn't that I didn't like the psychedelic experience - I loved it and had much wonderful fun with it over the years. It's just that I didn't fancy the idea of running into death any more than necessary. And so when I went to see Leary the first time, I wasn't sure what I was getting into. I was fascinated by his history and had things I wanted to ask him, but there was this problem: The man was dying, and that meant getting close to death. You could say I was unprepared for what I found. Death had already been welcomed into Timothy Leary's house, and it was being teased relentlessly, even joyfully. The place, in fact, was full of life. About a dozen staff members and friends - most of them in their 20s - were in and out of the house constantly. Some of them - a crew called Retina Logic - were busy working in the garage on Leary's Web site. It was a cause that was close to Leary's heart: He planned to have all his writings and various memoirs stored on it in perpetuity. Other house regulars, such as Trudy Truelove and Vickie Marshall, were busy making Leary's schedule for him, slating him for a steady stream of interviews, visits with friends, dinner parties and rock & roll concerts. Clearly, death did not hold the upper hand in this house - at least not yet. As I waited for Leary in his front room full of brightly colored art pieces - I noticed a contraption in the corner alongside his large glass patio doors. It was the cryonics coffin he was supposed to be placed in at the hour of his death. His blood would later be drained and replaced with antifreeze compounds, and his body frozen in liquid nitrogen so that his brain might be preserved. It might have been a creepy thing to stumble across, except it was actually sort of comical. Somebody had draped it with Christmas lights and plastic toys, and a Yoda mask had been placed on the pillow. Leary entered the room seated in his motorized wheelchair. He was pretty adept with the thing, able to make sharp, quick turns and wiggle his way in and out of tight spots, though sometimes he would collide headon with his big, beautiful golden retriever, Bo, who's as blind as a bat. Bo wandered Leary's house and yard constantly, bumping into tables, doors, people, trees - a sweet, majestic, Zen-style guard dog. I learned quickly that it was almost impossible to conduct a linear interview with Leary. It had nothing to do with his temperament. I found him always cheerful and eager to talk. But he was easily distracted. He'd break off suddenly to focus on whatever was happening around him or to gaze appreciatively at the short skirts that one or two of the women around him wore. "I'm senile," he told me on that first visit, "and I make it work for me." Some of the distraction, I suspect, was the byproduct of the steady stream of painkillers and euphorics that he availed himself of including morphine patches, marijuana biscuits, Dilaudid tablets glasses of wine and balloons of nitrous oxide, his seeming favorite. Despite all the calmatives, he was often doubled over in pain. Other days, I found him completely lucid and focused. One afternoon we were talking about, well, death. I had been telling him about my last acid trip. He winked at me and laughed. "But of course," he said. "Everybody says it's a dying, death experience. If you don't die, you didn't get your money's worth from your dealer. Dying was built right into it. Why do you think we were using the Tibetan Book of the Dead as our guiding text?" I understood then that I was talking with a man who had already died many times over. It's like he said: That was one of acid's core truths. It could take you into all kinds of deaths - deaths of ego, deaths of misconceptions - and you could then walk back alive. More or less. I asked him what he thought real death would be like. He reached over to his nitrous tank, filled a large black balloon and sat quietly for a few moments. "I don't think of it," he said, looking a little surprised at his own reply. "I mean, yes, every now and then I go, 'Shit!' You know, every now and then. The other night I was looking around and I thought, 'Good God, my friends here - their lives have been changed by this. The enormity of it.' But I just take it as the natural thing to do." He took a sip from his balloon and seemed to be looking off into his own thoughts. "It's true that I've been looking forward to it for a long time," he said. "The two minutes between body death and brain death, the two to 13 minutes there while your brain is still alive - thats the territory. That's the unexplored area that fascinates me. So I'm kind of looking forward to that." Leary stopped talking for a moment, clenching at his stomach, his face crumpled in pain. After several seconds, he gained his breath and returned to his balloon. "The worst that can happen," he said, his voice husky from the nitrous, "is that nothing happens, and at least that's, um, interesting. I'll just go, 'Oh, shit! Back to the Tibetan score card!' But, yes, it's an experiment that I've been looking forward to for a long, long time. After all, it's the ultimate mystery." TIMOTHY LEARY WAS FOND OF POINIING OUT that the probable date of his conception was Jan. 17,1920, the day after the start of Prohibition, the official beginning of America's troubled attempts to regulate intoxicants and mind-altering substances in this century. Born in Springfield, Mass., on Oct. 22,1920, Leary was the only child of his Irish-American parents. His father, Timothy-also known as Tote-had been an officer at West Point and later became a fairly successful dentist who spent most of his earnings on alcohol. In 1934, when Timothy was 13, Tote got severely drunk one night and abandoned his family. Timothy would not see him again for 23 years. In the most recent (and best) of his autobiographies, Flashbacks, Leary wrote: "I have always felt warmth and respect for this distant male-man who special-delivered me. During the 13 years we lived together, he never stunted me with expectations." But Timothy's father also served as a "model of the loner," and for all his charming and gregarious ways, Timothy would have trouble in his life maintaining intimate relations with family members - a problem that would not disappear until his last several years. By contrast, Timothy's mother, Abigail, was a beautiful but dour woman who was often disappointed by what she saw as her son's laxity and recklessness. In her own way, though, she also served as a model. In Flashbacks, Leary wrote: "I determined to seek women who were exactly the opposite to Abigail in temperament. Since then, I have always sought the wildest, funniest, most high fashion, big-city girl in town." For years, Timothy seemed prone to the wayward life that his mother feared so much. He studied at Holy Cross college, West Point and the University of Alabama, and had serious problems at each institution (in fact, he was more or less driven out of West Point for his role in a drunken spree), though he finally received a bachelor's degree during his Army service in World War II. Then his life seemed to take a turn. In 1944, while training as a clinical psychologist in Butler, Pa., Leary fell in love with and married a woman named Marianne. After the war the couple moved to California's Bay Area and had two children, Susan and Jack. It was at this point that Timothy's career began to show promise. In 1950 he earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, and during the next several years, along with a psychologist, Frank Barron, Leary conducted some research that yielded a remarkable discovery. By testing a wide range of subjects over an extensive period, they learned that one-third of the patients who received psychotherapy got better, one-third got worse and one-third stayed the same. In essence, Leary and Barron proved that psychotherapy - at least in its conventional applications couldn't really be proven to work. Leary wanted to discover what would work - what methods might provide people with a genuine healing moment or growth experience. He began exploring group therapy as a possible solution, and he also started developing a theory of existential-transactional analysis that was later popularized in psychiatrist Eric Berne's Games People Play. By the mid-1950s, Leary was teaching at Berkeley and had been appointed director of psychological research at the Kaiser Foundation, in Oakland, Calif. He had also produced a book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which would enjoy wide-ranging praise and influence. But behind all the outward success, Leary's life was headed for a cataclysm. After the birth of Susan, in 1947, Timothy's wife, Marianne, went through a bad bout of postpartum depression and became increasingly withdrawn from the world and, according to Timothy, from her husband and family. As time went along, both Marianne and Timothy began drinking heavily and fighting regularly. The source of their arguments was often the same: For two years Timothy had been conducting an affair with a friend's wife at a rented apartment on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. The affair, combined with the drinking, the quarreling and Marianne's depression, became increasingly painful to her. On a Saturday morning in October 1955 - on Timothy Leary's 35th birthday - he awoke to find himself alone in bed. He stumbled around the house, groggy from a hangover, calling Marianne's name. A few minutes later he found her inside the family's car, in a closed garage, with the motor running and exhaust clouding around her. She was already cold to the touch. Leary called to his startled children, who were standing in the driveway, to run to the nearby firehouse for help, but it was too late. Marianne had withdrawn for the last time. Leary's hair turned gray within a short time. "He took a lot of the blame on himself," says Barron. "After that, Tim was looking for things that would be more transformative, that would go deeper than therapy. He was looking, more or less, for answers." By the end of the 1950s, Leary had quit his posts at Berkeley and the Kaiser Foundation, and moved with his two children to the southern coast of Spain. He was, by his own description, in a "black depression" and felt at a loss about both his past and his future. In January 1959 in Torremolinos, he later wrote, he went through his first thorough breakdown and breakthrough. One afternoon he fell into a strange, feverish illness. His face grew SQ swollen that his eyes were forced shut; his eyelids were encrusted with dried pus. During the next few days, the disease got worse: His hands became paralyzed, and he couldn't walk. One night as he sat awake for hours in the darkness of his hotel room, he began to smell his own decay. In his book High Priest, he described it as his first death: "I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My identity. The guilts. The wants. "With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social self were gone. I was high, completely free." The next morning, the illness had abated. Timothy Leary was about to be reborn. IN THE SPRING OF I959, Leary was living with his children in Florence, Italy, when Barron paid a visit. Barron brought with him two bits of information. First, during a recent research trip to Mexico, he had located some of the rare "sacred mushrooms" that had been alleged to provide hallucinations and visions to ancient Aztec priests and the holy men of various Indian tribes in Latin America. Back at his home in Berkeley, Barron had eaten the mushrooms - and had a fullblown, William Blake-quality mystical experience. Barron thought that these mushrooms might be the elusive means to psychological metamorphosis that he and Leary had been seeking for years. Leary was put off by his friend's story, and, as Leary later wrote, "warned him against the possibility of losing his scientific credibility if he babbled this way among our colleagues." Barron's other news was more mundane but of greater appeal to Leary. The director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, Professor David McClelland, was on sabbatical in Florence and would probably be willing to interview Leary for a teaching post. Leary visited McClelland the next day and explained his emerging theories of existential transaction. McClelland listened and read Leary's manuscript on the subject, then said: "What you're suggesting . . . is a drastic change in the role of the scientist, teacher and therapist. Instead of processing patients by uniform and recognized standards, we should take an egalitarian or information-exchange approach Is that it?" Leary said, yes, that's what he had in mind. McClelland hired him on the spot. "There's no question," McClelland said, "that what you're advocating is going to be the future of American psychology. You're spelling out front-line tactics. You're just what we need to shake things up at Harvard." Leary began his career at the Harvard Center for Personality Research in early 1960. That summer he took his son on vacation to Cuernavaca Mexico. For the first time in several years, life felt rewarding. Things were good at Harvard. Leary was enjoying his research and teaching, and was also enjoying the esteem of his colleagues. One day an anthropologist friend stopped by Leary's villa The friend - like Barron - had been seeking the region's legendary sacred mushrooms and asked Leary if he would be willing to try some. Leary was reminded of Barron's statement that perhaps mushrooms could be the key to the sort of psychological transformation he and Leary had been searching for - and Leary's curiosity got the better of him. A week later, he found himself staring into a bowl of ugly, foul-smelling moldy black mushrooms. Reluctantly, he chewed on one, washed back its terrible taste with some beer and waited for the much-touted visions to come. They came, hard and beautiful - and in the next few hours, Leary's life changed powerfully and irrevocably. "I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries," he wrote in Flashbacks. "Mystics come back raving about higher levels of perception, where one sees realities a hundred times more beautiful and meaningful than the reassuringly familiar scripts of normal life.... we discover abruptly that everything we accept as reality is just social fabrication." Leary decided that mushrooms could indeed be the tool to reprogram the brain. If used under the right kind of supervision, he thought, they could free an individual from painful self-conceptions and stultifying social archetypes, and might prove the means to the transformation of human personality and behavior. It took some work, but Leary persuaded Harvard to allow him to order a supply of psilocybin - the synthesized equivalent of the active ingredient in the magic mushrooms - from the Swiss firm Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Leary also joined forces with Barron, who had been invited by McClellend to spend a year teaching at Harvard. Leary and Barron created what would become known as the Harvard Psychelic Drug Research Program. LEARY WAS NOT THE first psychologist or modern philosopher to explore the potential of psychedelics - which is the term that had been given to thought-altering hallucinogenic drugs. The respected British author Aldous Huxley had already written two volumes on the subject, The Doors of Percephon and Heaven and Hell, and others, including the philosopher Gerald Heard and psychiatrist Oscar Janiger (the latter's Los Angeles practice included such renowned patients as Cary Grant and Anais Nin), had been working toward various modes of psychedelic therapy and had achieved notable results in treating conditions such as neurosis and alcoholism. More notoriously, the CIA and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had conducted covert research using powerful hallucinogens with the aim of incapacitating foreign and domestic enemies or driving them insane. But three factors set Leary's work apart. One was the incorporation of his transactional-analysis theories into the overall experimental model: Therapists would not administer drugs to patients and then sit by and note their reactions but would, in fact, engage in the drug state along with the subjects. Another element was Leary's implementation of a concept known as "set and setting": If you prepared the drug taker with the proper mind-set and provided reassuring surroundings, then you increased the likelihood that the person might achieve healthy psychological reorganization. But the final component that set Leary apart from all other psychedelic researchers was simply Leary himself. He was a man set ablaze by his calling - and though that fieriness would sometimes lead him into a kind of living purgatory, it also emblazoned him as a real force in modern history. For the first two years, things went well with Leary's Harvard experiments. Along with Barron and other researchers Leary administered varying doses of psilocybin to several dozen subjects, including graduate students. He also gave the drug to prisoners and divinity students, with noteworthy results: The divinity students, for the first time in their lives, had what they described as true spiritual experiences. In addition, Leary made two important contacts outside the university: Huxley and the poet Allen Ginsberg (the latter had given the Beat literary movement its most exciting moment with his revolutionary poem "Howl"). With Huxley, Leary probed into the metaphysical fine points of the psilocybin mind state and debated whether psychedelics should remain the property of a small, select group of poets, artists, philosophers and doctors, who would take the insights they learned from the drug and use them for the benefit of humanity and psychology. With Ginsberg, though, Leary settled the debate. Like Huxley, Ginsberg was convinced that it was indeed a keen idea to share the drug with writers and artists - and arranged for Leary to do so with Robert Lowell, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk and Jack Kerouac, among others. But Ginsberg also believed in what became known as "the egalitarian ideal": If psychedelics had any real hope of enriching humankind, they should be shared with more than just an aristocracy of intellectuals and aesthetes. Leary came to agree - fervently. In particular he suspected that the people who could benefit most from the mind-changing possibility of psychedelics were the young. In the fall of 1961, Barron returned to his job at Berkeley, and Leary found a new ally: a good-humored and ambitious assistant professor named Richard Alpert who had a penchant for fine clothes and high living. From the beginning, Alpert and Leary shared a special bond. "I had never met a mind like Tim's," says Alpert. "He was like a breath of fresh air, because he was raising questions from philosophical points of view. I was absolutely charmed by that. And there was a way in which our kind of symbiosis worked - our chemistry of the Jewish and the Irish, or the responsible, grounded, solid person and the wild creative spirit. I thought that I was at Harvard by shrewd politicking rather than by intellect; therefore I didn't expect anything creative to come out of me. and then I found that Timothy was freeing me from a whole set of values." But for others at Harvard, it seemed as though Leary might be freeing up just a few too many values. Some professors were beginning to find the whole thing too unsavory - the very idea of giving students drugs that apparently took them out of their rational minds, under the auspices of the university. At the insistence of several professors, Leary's supervisor McClelland scheduled a staff meeting in the spring of 1962 to debate the merits of continuing the drug project. The day beforee the event, McClellend called Alpert into his office. " 'Dick, we can't save Timothy,' " Alpert recalls McClellend saying. " 'He's too outrageous. But we can save you. So just shut up at tomorrow's meeting.' " Alpert gave McClelland's advice some thought. "Being a Harvard professor," Alpert says, "gives you a lot of keys to the kingdom - to play the way you want to play. Society is honoring you with that role." The meeting turned out to be more like a prosecution session than a discussion. Some of the professors tore into Leary with a vitriol that was rarely seen at Harvard meetings. They insisted that if he was to continue his ptoject, he would have to surrender the drugs to the university's control and administer them only under supervised conditions. To Leary it would mean retreating to the medical standard of the doctor as authority and the subject as lab rat - the same model that Leary had sworn to bring down. "Timothy was blown away by all the vehemence and vindictiveness," Alpert says. "He was, for once, speechless. At the end there was a silence in the room. And at that moment, I stood up and said, 'I would like to answer on behalf of our project.' I looked at Dave McClelland, and Dave just shrugged and that was the beginning of the process that would result in our end at Harvard" In 1963, in a move that made front-page news across the nation, Timothy Leary was "relieved" of his teaching duties, and Richard Alpert was dismissed for having shared psilocybin with an undergraduate. (At the time Alpert and Leary were reported to be the only professors fired from the university in this century.) "I remember being at that press conference," says Alpert, "surrounded by people who saw me as a loser, but in my heart, I felt like we'd won." Leary also wasn't distressed at the idea that his Harvard career was finished. He had, in fact, found a new passion. In the spring of 1962, a British philosophy student named Michael Hollingshead had paid a visit to Leary and brought with him an ominous gift. Hollingshead - who died a few years ago - is perhaps the shadiest, most mysterious figure in Leary's entire story. Alpert describes him as "a scoundrel - manipulative and immoral." But it was Hollingshead who first brought a jar of powdered sugar laced with LSD - an intensely hallucinogenic solution (in fact, the most potent one ever developed) whose psychoactive properties had been accidentally discovered in the 1940's by Swiss scientist, Dr. Albert Hofmann into Leary's home and taunted him by ridiculing psilocybin as just pretty colors" compared with the extraordinary power of LSD... Leary resisted the bait at first, as he had with the magic mushrooms, but one weekend he finally caved in. "It took about a half-hour to hit," he later wrote. "And it came suddenly and irresistibly. tumbling and spinning, down soft fibrous avenues of light that were emitted from some central point. Merged with its pulsing ray, I could look out and see the entire cosmic drama. Past and future.... My previous psychedelic sessions had opened up sensory awareness, pushed consciousness out to the membranes.... But LSD was something different. It was the most shattering experience of my life." Hollingshead would come and go in Leary's life, sometimes valued, often reviled. But Hollingshead's gift, the LSD . . . that was a gift that stayed. DESPITE THEIR FALL FROM HARVARD, Leary and Alpert intended to continue their research into psychedelics, now focused primarily on LSD. In the fall of 1963 a friend and benefactor, Peggy Hitchcock, helped to provide them with a 64 room mansion that sat on a sprawling estate two hours up the Hudson River from New York - a place called Millbrook. From 1963 to early 1967, Millbrook would serve as a philosophic-hedonistic retreat for the curious, the hip and the defiant. Jazz musicians lived there; poets, authors and painters visited; journalists scouted the halls; and actors and actresses flocked to the weekend parties. Some came for visions, some in hope of an orgy, some to illuminate the voids in their souls. All of them left with an experience they never forgot. This was a time of immense change in America's cultural and political terrain. It was, on one hand, an epoch of great dread and violence: The bloody civil rights battles, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the rising anger over the war in Vietnam made it plain that the United States had quickly become a place of high risks. At the same time, youth culture was beginning to create for itself a sense of identity and empowerment that was unprecedented. The new music coming from Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Motown and Southern soul artists, and San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane only deepened the idea that an emerging generation was trying to live by its own rules and was feeling increasingly cut off from the conventions and privileges of the dominant mainstream culture. More and more, drugs were becoming a means for young people to stake a consciousness apart from that of the "straight world," a way of participating in private, forbidden experiences. It was during this time of strange possibilities and the fear of strange possibilities that LSD became identified as a major threat to the nation's young, and therefore to America's future. Newspaper and television reports were full of sensationalistic accounts of kids trying to fly off buildings or ending up in emergency rooms, howling at the horrors of their own newly found psychoses. The level of hysteria drove Leary nuts. "Booze casualties were epidemic," he wrote in Flashbacks, "so the jaded press paid no attention to the misadventures of one drunk. Their attitude was different with psychedelic drugs. Only one out of every thousand LSD users reported a negative experience, yet the press dug up a thousand lucid stories of bark-eating Princeton grads." Nevertheless, for some in the psychiatric community, Leary had become part of the problem. By the nature of his flamboyance and his disdain for the medical model, they felt he had singlehandedly given psychedelics a bad name and was endangering the chance for further valid research. "It was easy," says Barron, "for Tim to say, 'There are people who are going to have psychoses under these circumstances- if they have that within them, they should let it out.' These are brave words, but Tim and I had plush training in psychology. We had personal analysis. We were well prepared. But if you have an adolescent in the middle of an identity crisis and you give him LSD, he can be really shaken. And I think that's where some of the more serious casualties occurred" Indeed Leary became indelibly identified with what Time magazine termed the LSD Epidemic, and he was under fire from several quarters. When he appeared before the 1966 Senate hearings on LSD, he was held up to sustained ridicule by Sen. Ted Kennedy. Leary realized that before much longer - LSD would be declared illegal and its users would be criminalized. At the same time, things in his personal life were going through momentous change. In late 1964 he married Nena Von Schlebrugge. By the time the couple returned from their honeymoon a few months later, both the marriage and Millbrook were in trouble. Leary felt that Alpert had let the place get out of hand The two friends argued over various grievances including Leary's apparent discomfort with Alpert's homosexuality - and Alpert ended up cast out from Millbrook and, for a time, from Leary's life. (Alpert went on to change his name to Baba Ram Dass and became one of America's most respected teachers of Eastern disciplines. In time the rift between him and Leary healed, but they were never again the fast partners they'd once been.) Then in the summer of 1965, Leary became dose to a woman named Rosemary Woodruff, whom he eventually married in late 1967. The romance with Rosemary would prove to be perhaps the most meaningful of Leary's life, but also the one beset by the most difficulties. During the week following Christmas 1965, Timothy and Rosemary shut Millbrook down for the season and set out, along with his children, in a station wagon bound for a Mexico vacation. The couple had thoughts of changing their lives: Rosemary had hopes that perhaps they would have a child of their own, and Timothy entertained notions of returning to his studies and writings. At the Mexican border, however, they were denied entrance, and as they attempted to re-enter America near Laredo, Texas, they were ordered out of the car. They were searched and a matron found a silver box with marijuana in Susan Leary's possession; she was then 18. Leary didn't hesitate. "I'll take responsibility for the marijuana," he said. The consequences of that moment reverberated through Leary's life for years. He was arrested for violating the marijuana laws in one of the most conservative jurisdictions in the nation. When his lawyer advised him to repent before the judge, Leary said he didn't know what the word meant. Eventually he was given a 30-year sentence and a 630,000 fine - the longest sentence ever imposed for possession of marijuana. Susan got five years. In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction because Timothy had been tried under antiquated tax violation laws. The Laredo prosecutor simply retried Leary for illegal possession and sentenced him to 10 years. Timothy Leary quickly became a national symbol for both sides of the drug law dispute, and he did his best to rise to the occasion with wit and grace, but also with a certain recklessness. While free during his appeal of the Laredo conviction, he gave lectures and interviews around the country about drugs. He was invited as an honored guest to the Gathering of the Tribes festival, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and he and Rosemary sang and clapped along at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's recording session for "Give Peace a Chance." Leary also recorded his own album of chants, with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Stephen Stills and John Sebastian as sidemen. It all made for heady days and high nights, but it also made Leary the most obvious target for the country's rising mood of anger about drugs. President Richard Nixon told the American people that "Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man alive" and the directive couldn't be more plain: Both Leary and his philosophies should be brought down. And, more or less, that's what happened Back in New York, a local assistant district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy organized a raid on Millbrook. The charges were soon dismissed, but another raid followed - and those charges stuck. The raids had the desired effect of finishing Millbrook off for good Leary moved Rosemary and his family to Laguna Beach, Calif., but the day after Christmas 1968, he was again arrested for marijuana possession, this time along with Rosemary and his son, Jack. (Timothy always claimed that the joints had been planted by the arresting officer.) At the trial in January 1970, Rosemary and Jack were given probation, but Timothy was sentenced to 10 years. In an extraordinary move, the judge, declaring Timothy a menace to society and angrily waving a recent Playboy article written by the ex Harvard professor, ordered him to jail immediately, without an appeal bond. Leary was 49 years old, and his future appeared certain. He was going to spend the rest of his life in jail for the possession of a small amount of marijuana that - even in the furor of the 1960s - rarely netted most offenders more than a six-month sentence. Upon entering the California State Prison at Chino, Leary was administered an intelligence test to determine where he should be placed within the state's prison strata. The test happened to be based on psychological standards that Leary himself had largely authored during his groundbreaking work in the 1950s He knew how to make it work for him. He checked off all the answers that, in his own words, would make him seem "normal, nonimpulsive, docile, conforming." As a result he was transferred to California Men's Colony-West at San Luis Obispo - a minimum-security prison. On the evening of Sept.12, 1970, following a carefully mapped plan that depended on split-second timing, Leary methodically made his way from his cellblock along a complex maze of twists and turns and into a prison yard that was regularly swept by a spotlight. Dodging the light, he crossed the yard to a tree climbed it and then dropped down to a rooftop covering one of the prison's corridors. He crept along until he came to a cable that stretched to a telephone pole outside the walls of the jail. Wrapping his arms and legs around the cable, he began to shimmy its length until, only a third of the way across, he stopped, exhausted, gasping for breath, barely able to keep his grasp. A patrol car passed underneath him. "I wanted Errol Flynn and out came Harold Lloyd," he wrote in Flashbacks. "I felt very alone.... There was no fear only a nagging embarrassment. Such an undignified way to die, nailed like a sloth on a branch!" Then some hidden reserves of strength and desire kicked in, and Leary grappled his way to the outside pole and descended to freedom. A few weeks later, Timothy and Rose mary surfaced in Algiers, Algeria, where they had been offered asylum and protection by Eldridge Cleaver and other members of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver and the Panthers who were with him had fled the U.S. after a 1968 shootout with policemen in Oakland and had been recognized by the socialist-Islamic Algerians as the American government in exile. At first, Leary was excited by the idea of setting up a radical coalition abroad with Cleaver, but he soon lost favor with the Panthers. Writing in ROLLING STONE in the spring of 1971, Cleaver declared that it had been necessary for the Panthers to place Timothy and Rosemary Leary under house arrest in Algiers, claiming that Timothy had become a danger to himself and to his hosts with his uncurbed appetite for LSD. Such drug use, Cleaver stated was counterproductive to bringing about true revolutionary change - and what's more, he thought it had damaged Leary. To all those who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration or even leadership," Cleaver wrote, we want to say that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid." Looking back at the episode, Rosemary still feels a great sadness that the experiment between Timothy and the Panthers failed. "That's always haunted me," she says, "the idea that we had the possibility for some kinship. I think Eldridge and the others wanted us to recognize the experiences that had brought them there and how different they were from the experiences that they thought had brought us there. They recognized that we weren't going to be killed in any confrontation with the law. The Black Panthers, though had been killed. We were so naive, so stupid. At the same time, we were frightened Eldridge was very dictatorial. He kept me away from the women and the children, and then the Panthers threatened us and kept us in a dirty room in an ugly place for three days. So what were we to do?" The only thing they could do: flee. Next stop: Geneva, where they enjoyed a short respite until the Swiss arrested Leary after the U.S. government filed extradition papers. Leary was in the Lausanne prison for six weeks, until the Swiss, responding to the petitions of Allen Ginsberg and others, refused the Nixon administration's requests for deportation. By this time, though, all the years of harassment, fear, flight and incarceration-plus the lost oppurtunities for any stable and real family life of her own - had taken a toll on Rosemary, and she decided to part temporarily from Timothy. "I had always felt it was my job to protect Tim," she says. "That seemed to be the role that I played But Tim, he was Sisyphus. He was the mythic hero who was always going to be pushing that rock. He seemed to thrive on notoriety. He'd become a celebrity during those years, and that carries its own weight with it. I'd always wanted the quiet life, and with Tim, there simply wasn't the possibility for it. "Did I regret having chosen Tim to love? I don't think so. He was always the most interesting person. Everyone else seemed boring by comparison. Of course, by the time I wanted boredom, it was too late." By late 1972, Leary had become a man without a country, and without recourse. The U.S. was exerting sizable pressure on foreign governments not to harbor the former professor - indeed, an Orange County, Calif., district attorney announced he had indicted Leary on 19 counts of drug trafficking, branding him as the head of the largest drug smuggling enterprise in the world - and the Swiss would not extend him further asylum. Accompanied by his new girlfriend Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Leary fled to Afghanistan, but he was arrested at the Kabul airport by an American Embassy attache and turned over to U.S. drug enforcement agents. Leary was brought back to Orange County, tried for escape and sentenced to five years, in addition to his two previous 10-year sentences. He was also facing 11 counts from the second Millbrook bust and 19 conspiracy counts related to his indictment as the head of a drug-smuggling outfit. The U.S. government had succeeded in its campaign. LSD had been declared illegal, and its most influential researcher and proponent had been pursued across the world, arrested, brought home and put behind bars once again - bigger bars this time. The psychedelic movement had been shut down in a brutal way, and for decades after, Timothy Leary would be vilified for the inquiring and defiant spirit that he had helped set loose upon the 1960s. Looking back on the collapse of that experiment, the author Robert Anton Wilson, a longtime friend of Leary's and the author of The Illuminatus Trilogy says: "A lot of psychologists I have known over the years agreed with Leary - they acknowledged in private that LSD was an incredibly valuable tool. But these same psychologists backed off as the heat from the government increased, until they all became as silent as moonlight on a tombstone. And Tim was still out there with his angry Irish temper, denouncing the government and fighting on alone. "I don't want to discount that there are people whose lives have been destroyed by drugs," Wilson continues, "but are they the result of Timothy's research or or the result of government policies? Leary's research was dosed down, and the media stopped quoting him a long time ago. Most people don't even understand what Leary's opinions were or what it was he was trying to communicate. By contrast, the government's policies have been carried out for 30 years, and now we have a major drug disaster in this country. Nobody, of course, thinks it's the government's fault - they think it's Leary's for trying to prevent it, for trying to have scientific controls over the thing. He deserves a better legacy than that." IN 1975 SOME NASTY REPORTS BEGAN to circulate about Timothy Leary. According to stories that appeared in RoLLING STONE and other publications, Leary was talking to the FBI and was willing to give them information about radical activists and drug principals he had known in exchange for his freedom. The rumors were hard to confirm - Leary was being moved from prison to prison on a regular basis by the FBI and few friends saw or communicated with him for roughly a year - but even the idea had a chilling effect on many of Leary's former compatriots. Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, Jerry Rubin and Leary's own son, Jack held a press conference, at which they asserted that Leary's testimony wasn't credible and shouldn't be trusted by the courts. The full truth about this matter has never been easy to uncover. In Flashbacks Leary wrote that essentially he led the FBI on a wild-goose chase and that nobody was imprisoned because of his statements - though he admitted that he had made declarations about certain people to a grand jury. In any event, Leary was released from the California prison system in 1976, his reputation pretty much in tatters. Many of his old friends would no longer speak to him. "There was no question he was no longer the Tim I'd known before," says Frank Barron, who remained in touch with Leary during this period "Prison doesn't improve anybody very much, and he'd suffered for it. His sense of invulnerability was gone. But he was determined to come back into the public and to reassert his mission." Gradually, Leary rehabilitated his image. Shortly after his release, he separated from Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who some thought had been an unfortunate influence in the whole FBI matter. He settled into Los Angeles and became a regular at Hollywood parties. In 1978, he married his fourth wife, Barbara Chase, and took her young son, Zachary, as his own. Though Timothy and Barbara would divorce 15 years later, he would stay close to Zachary. It seemed that with Zachary, Timothy found the sort of relationship that he had not been able to achieve with his son, Jack - who stopped talking to him in 1975 and who only briefly saw him again two months before his death. "It was a time for him to do it over again," says Zachary, "and see if the whole domesticity of having a family was something really applicable to his life, and he found that it was. He was happy about that, because the sadness of his earlier family had been so great. So I think it was great for him, in his late 50s and 60s, to be a father again with a little kid, taking me to the ballparks and playing sports in the back yard. Young people - that's really what kept him going, that's what kept his theories alive. And I think the biggest moral ground that he covered for me was communication: 'Never try and shut anything down,' he told me. I'm only starting to realize now the mangnitude of the environment that I was lucky enough to grow up in. I really do consider Tim my father." Timothy went on to other interests. Primarily he became a champion of computer and communications technology, and was among the first to declare that these new developments - particularly the rapidly growing Internet - had the same sort of potential to empower creativity on a mass level and to threaten authority structures as psychedelics had once had in the 1960s. In time, the old friends came back. Ginsberg, Ram Dass and others made peace with the man with whom they had once shared such phenomenal adventures. "When people ask me why it is I treasure and respect Timothy," said Ram Dass, "I say it's because he taught me how to play with life rather than be played upon by life. That's the closest I've gotten to stating what it feels like. Timothy plays with life. People are offended by that because they think it doesn't give life its due respect. But I think it's quite a liberating thing." . . IN 1990 THE NEWFOUND EQUANIMITY of Timothy Leary's life was shattered. His daughter, Susan Leary Martino, 42 had been arrested in Los Angeles for firing a bullet into her boyfriend's head as he slept. Twice she was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. Then one morning she was found dead in her jail cell. She had tied a shoelace around her neck and hanged herself. Some people close to Timothy believe that Susan had never been the same since the Laredo arrest and trial that she held herself to blame for her father's subsequent troubles, and that like her mother, she had grown depressed and withdrawn over the years. Others claim that Susan had always loved her father powerfully, and that all the years and events that kept him from her the arrests, the flights, all the many girlfriends and wives - ate away at her. Regardless of the causes, Susan's suicide hit Leary hard - a blow some feel he never really recovered from. "I don't think he could push that one away so easily," says Ram Dass. "I remember speaking with him on the phone and feeling a surprising vulnerability in Tim that I wasn't used to hearing." The news of Susan's death also came as a terrible blow to Rosemary, who had been living on the East Coast under an assumed name, still a fugitive. "I'd been angry with him for a long time," she says, "but I'd been having dreams about them prior to her death, about Susan and Tim and myself in some bucolic setting with streams running and the three of us very happy. Which wasn't the case when the three of us were together. So I knew I was being taught something or told something about Tim and Susan, and about my heart. And then when she died, it was so hard. And I knew how hard it would be for him." Rosemary, who hadn't spoken with Timothy or anybody close to him since 1972, called Ram Dass, who put her in touch with Timothy. "We met in Golden Gate Park," she says. "It was a great, romantic meeting. When I left him in Switzerland, we were quarreling, so to meet him and find that our love was still there . . . it validated so much for me to know that about him and about myself, and to have given up the anger and the hurt that I had felt. The emotion involved in all that just opened the way for me to love Tim again." Timothy put Rosemary in touch with a lawyer and helped her resolve her fugitive status. "I had lived such a remarkable life for so long, never sure who to trust or what to say," Rosemary says. "It was liberating to be free of all that. I just got my California driver's license with my name on it." Rosemary began to see Timothy often. She was impressed, she said, by how open his heart now seemed But she also saw other changes: "I could tell he wasn't feeling wonderful. He'd always had an amazing constitution; Id never known him to be ill, even with a cold." And then, around Christmas 1994, after a strenuous lecture tour, Timothy was felled by a bout with pneumonia. "It was his first taste of mortality in terms of his body in many years," says Rosemary, "and I think it was devastating for him to find himself so ill and then not bounce back from it." It turned out to be more than pneumonia. The doctors determined that Leary had contracted inoperable prostate cancer. He later told reporters he was "exhilarated" by the news. This would be the start of his greatest adventure - a conscious and loving journey into death. He called his friends and shared with them his excitement. "That's just the epitome of his personality," says his stepson, Zachary. "I guess it made perfect sense that he would feel that way about it. But when he was first disclosing it, I felt, 'God, how could you feel like that?' But to him it was just another card in the hand - the death card. And now, I've learned so much from him in these last few months." Indeed it seems that the knowledge of his death brought out a gentle and transcendent aspect in Timothy Leary. "He's more emotionally available now," said Ram Dass, "which is remarkable, because he's never handled his emotions at all. I mean, he's always been a very friendly person - fun and vibrant and stimulating, and all that - but deep emotions I have been delicate to play with historically with Timothy. He's lived more on the surface of events and things rather than the slower, deeper rhythms of emotions. The last few times I saw him, he was very much there, and that thrilled me. When we looked into each other's eyes, he was looking at me about death we never said words about it. It gave me the conviction that he isn't afraid of death. He knows he's going after one of the darkest secrets of the society, and it's humbled him in an interesting way." There's also something about Leary's awareness of death's imminence that heightened his sense of play. In the last few months, there was nonstop activity around his home, and much of it was geared toward fun stuff. "Silly silliness is being performed as a high art here," he told me one afternoon, laughing. A good example of Leary's latter-day high-art silliness is an event that became known as Wheelchair Day. One day, Leary decided to round up as many wheelchairs as possible and hold races with his friends on Sunset Strip, then wheel into the House of Blues for a luncheon designed on the model of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. After the event, Leary rode back to his home in the rented convertible of a friend, John Perry Barlow, formerly a Lyricist for the Grateful Dead and now an Internet-rights activist, with two of the young women from his staff, Trudy Truelove and Camelia Grace, in the back seat. The radio blasted as they headed west on Sunset, and Truelove and Grace were sitting on the car's trunk, making goofy dancing gestures. Leary looked at Barlow, smiled and shouted: "Life is good!" that was when Barlow glanced into his rearview mirror and saw the flashing red and yellow lights of a Beverly Hills police car- and realized that the car he was driving was perhaps not entirely free of illegal substances. "Shit," he thought to himself, "Tim Leary's last bust." Barlow said to the officer 'I know what we were doing was wrong. But you see, my friend here is dying, and we're trying to show him a good time." Barlow said he'd never forget the look that Leary gave the policeman: "Caught in the act of dying like he had his hand in the cookie jar." The officer smiled at Leary, then turned to Truelove and Grace. "I'd be lying if I didn't say that looks like fun," he said, "but just because he's dying doesn't mean you should. Now get down in the seat and buckle up and I'll let you go." When they pulled back into traffic, Leary turned to Barlow, laughed and said: "What a fucking gift that was!" NOT EVERYBODY, THOUGH, was enamored of the gallows humor of Leary and his troop. On the night of the wheelchairrace caper, I arrived at Leary's to find an ambulance outside his house, being loaded with his cryonics coffin. It turned out that a short time before, a team from the CryoCare Foundation the outfit that was to undertake the freezing and preservation of Leary's brain upon his death had come in to remove all its equipment. For some time tension had been building up between CryoCare and Leary's crew. CryoCare felt that Leary's folks had shown disrespect for the equipment by decorating it with lights and toys, and also believed that some people at the house had been trying to keep CryoCare's technicians away from Leary. More important, CryoCare's Mike Darwin had grown alarmed about Leary's pronouncements on his plan to commit suicide live (so to speak) on the World Wide Web. Darwin did not feel that his organization (whose brochure bears the motto, Many are cold, but few are frozen) could afford to be involved in what he termed a potential crime scene or that it should leave its equipment in a house where illegal drugs may be present or used. For their part, the Leary folks had become increasingly put off by what they regarded as CryoCare's ghoulish interest in obtaining the head of Timothy Leary. The problem was exacerbated when they learned that a CryoCare official who would be involved with the decapitation and freezing process, Charles Platt, had an assignment to write about the operation for Wired magazine. (Platt had also been sending serial e-mail to various parties, expressing his disdain for the Leary crew and his impatience with Leary for not dying as soon as had been expected. "What insane will to live," he wrote in one letter.) In any event, CryoCare's actions left Leary facing a decision: He could either sign on quickly with another cryonics outfit or accept that his death would be final - that his brain would not be preserved for some indeterminate future attempt at reanimation. In the end he decided against cryonics. "I have no real great desire to do it," he told me. "I just felt it was my duty to futurism and the process of smart dying." Leary's decision was not a small thing for him. He told me once that he did not believe that anything human survived beyond death, that if we possess a soul, then the soul is our mind, and the brain is the soul's home. By forgoing cryonics, Timothy Leary decided that even if he could, he would not return. His immortality, instead, would be his work and his legend, and it was his hope that those things would find an ongoing life on the World Wide Web site that had become his most prized dream in his final season. IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER THIS THAT the end came. One afternoon I dropped by Leary's house, and we had a brief conversation. He was alert and in good spirits, the best shape I'd seen him in. He told me touching stories about his relationship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono - about how Lennon had written "Come Together" for him but then thought twice about it and kept it for the Beatles - and about how Leary had tried to warn Ono that New York's Dakota apartment building was too exposed a place for a man like Lennon to live. "I wish I'd been wrong about that one," Leary said, looking at the large photo above his bed of himself and Rosemary with Lennon and Ono taken during the recording of "Give Peace a Chance." I left that day looking forward to visiting and talking with Leary some more. A few days later I received a call from Zachary. "It looks like Tim is going today," he said. "You should come up soon if you want to say goodbye." Zachary later told me: "Tim just decided he couldn't live in that body anymore and he wanted to get out. The key moment was when he went to take a shower in that last week and saw himself in the mirror, naked. It was all he needed to know. He was very clear and lucid, and he looked at his body and saw that it was pathetic and it was below his quality of life." That night Leary called Zachary and the house regulars around him and said, "Can you go on without me?" "It was like he was asking for our permission," said Zachary. The morning that Zachary called me, Leary had got out of bed, climbed into his motorized wheelchair and rode all over his ranch house. He stopped in the back yard, where he sat and drank a cup of coffee looking at the flowers coming to bloom in his garden. Then he said, I'm going to take a nap," and wheeled back into his bedroom. A short while later his nurse summoned Zachary and told him he should notify anybody who might want to see Timothy one last time. I sat for about an hour with several other people that afternoon and watched Leary as he slept. Occasionally he woke, smiled, took sips from the melting ice that the nurse gave him and once or twice tried to say something. At one point he opened his eyes wide and said, "Flash!" Later, around 9 p.m., I made another visit to his bedroom. The only illumination in the room came from Christmas lights on the wall above Leary's bed. Zachary sat close, holding his stepfather's hand. Timothy opened his eyes briefly at one point, looked at Zachary, smiled and said softly, "Beautiful." It was the last thing Timothy Leary said A FEW HOURS LATER, AROUND 2:30 A.M., I received another call, telling me that Leary had died at 12:45. I headed back to his house. The lights were still dim in his bedroom. On a nearby chair sat Trudy Truelove, staring at Leary. "I've decided to stay with him until they remove him," she said I've decided to be his guardian." Leary was laid on his back, dressed in white, the red blanket turned down. His mouth was agape, frozen in his last exhaled breath, as if he were calling out silently; Somebody had placed a large orange flower in his hand, its petals reaching up to his face. Soon the room filled with several people. We stood there for a long time in silence until we were told that it was time to say our goodbyes. The mortuary people had come to claim Leary's corpse. One by one, the people in the room approached Leary, some touching and kissing him, others whispering last words. When it was my turn, I went up to the bed and looked down at him. I hadn't been able to see before because of the darkness in the room, but his eyes were wideopen. When you looked into them, it was as if they were looking back into you. I bent over, gave him my kiss, then turned and left the room. ONE NIGHT NOT LONG BEFORE LEARY S death, I took LSD for the first time in 25 years. I guess I'd just grown curious after spending so much time around Leary, but I felt I also owed it to myself. I'd left psychedelics on bad terms, and that had never felt right. I wanted to see what might be revealed after so much time. I lay on my bed in the dark listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations, and once more, death came to visit. I saw what seemed to be thousands of faces. They were all in agony, and then they died and were swimming in straits of beauty and grace. Their suffering, I saw, was inevitable. So was their dying. And so was their release. Once more I saw death move around and through me, and this time I did not try to hide from it. I lay there and cried, and somehow I felt a great comfort in what I'd seen. I thought about this experience as I sat in Leary's bedroom at 3 in the morning and studied him in his death. As I said earlier, I'd always been terrified of death even to be near it. When I visited the funeral homes to see my father, my mother, my brother, lying in their coffins, I took short glances and got away quickly. I never touched my loved ones as they lay dead. I don't think I could have. Sitting with Leary, I realized something had changed - and maybe it had been a gift on his part. His greatest achievement, I believe, was to ask the people he knew to face the darkest part of themselves and then to be willing to be there with them to interact with them, to guide and help them - when they reached that place. I can't say whether he ever faced the darkest parts within himself in that same way. Maybe it never really happened until that last day and night. And if that was the time, I'm glad there were good people there for him. Being around Leary had taught me what nothing else had: that encountering death did not always have to be an experience of freezing horror. In those last hours, it turned out that Timothy Leary was still a good therapist. I looked at Leary lying there in his death, his eyes hollow, the skin on his face already sinking, and I was reminded of something Rosemary once told me. It was a story about one of the last times she saw Timothy before he fell ill. "I'd gone to New Mexico with him," she said. "He was lecturing there. He'd gone to the bar to pick up some drinks, and I was standing out of the light. And just the way the light hit him in the bar and illuminated the planes of his face - he was so beautiful. It was the old face. I mean, the one from years ago. I don't know why. It was just the way the lighting hit him. Beautiful bones." I sat there in the dark looking at Timothy, thinking of Rosemary's words. Beautiful bones, I thought. Even in death, beautiful bones.