The Stoned Age

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In June, the news broke that Carlos Castaneda had died two months earlier of liver cancer in Los Angeles, proving that the famed author and cosmic trickster was as gifted an illusionist in death as he had been in life. Here his ex-wife recalls a pivotal point in Castaneda's career: the day he met two other counterculture icons, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (who later became known as Ram Dass).

It was 1964, down in the East Village, smack in the center of the hippest community on earth, that Carlos ran into the great Tim Leary. Carlos, in town to visit some friends, had become quite interested in Leary by this time. Word of Leary's Harvard experiments, his forced departure to Mexico, and the subsequent retreat to a spacious estate in Millbrook, New York, had been a big topic of conversation among the students at UCLA, where Carlos was a graduate student in anthropology. You couldn't go a day at Haines Hall without hearing about him.

But the thing was, Leary's experiments had the vague look of legitimate scientific inquiry. At least in Carlos' mind they did, and so he paid particular attention. Leary was rising on the East Coast as the hottest thing in psychedelia—a visionary whose time had come; Carlos kept close watch from the West Coast. He read about Leary in Time, Newsweek, and Life, in specialized publications and journals, and he talked about Leary with friends. Carlos had been thinking a lot about Leary, even when he did his own psychedelic research with the Yaqui Indians near the Arizona border; and so it was a real surprise to run into the real thing one night at a party in the East Village.

Carlos had the preconceived notion that he and Leary were somehow on the same wavelength, both scientists probing social unknowns. Carlos was wrong. For one thing, Leary and Richard Alpert were stars at the party, and Carlos was a nobody. Ego was the game here, not science, and everybody huddled around Leary, who was slouched down in a peach wingback chair with that brilliant toothy grin of his. They were talking about mushrooms and acid, so when Carlos interjected something about his experiences with the Indians, nobody paid much attention. It was as if his words disrupted the flow of things.

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