Timothy Leary (placeholder)

I met him at a bar in West Virginia in the late 80’s. I had heard he was some crazy hippy guy from the 60’s but he was so sweet and interesting. Then we dropped some acid.

I met Dr. Leary at a lecture he and Robert Anton Wilson gave in Cleveland, OH in the late 80s or early 90s. I saw him lecture again by himself at the University of Houston a few years later.

I used to work for a publisher and the assignment of driving Tim Leary to local media appearances for one of his books was given to me. For three days Tim and I drove over the river and through the woods to radio and tv stations. What an adventure that was.

Initially I was a little afraid of the man. It was just the two of us with a sometimes loose itinerary and who knew what to expect? The first place we went to wasn’t a major radio station, but an interview in someone’s house that looked just a little too much like the house in Psycho for Tim’s comfort. He refused to go inside. I was all of 18 at the time, wondering what on earth I was going to do with that situation.

It turned out we were near a town in Massachusetts where Tim had grown up, or at least had family, so we drove around for awhile looking at the sights while he talked about his mother. We joked about Norman and mothers and the Psycho house and he decided we might as well go back to the interview and see what happened. I waited in the car and he came out a little while later, beaming. He’d had a good interview and was feeling fine.

In retrospect, I feel like it’s a pity I didn’t know more about his work, given how much time I’d been assigned to spend with him. Essentially I was just winging it.

We went to a talk-back radio program on the second day of our short tour and by then I was starting to feel pretty fond of him. His enthusiasm was contageous. His outlook was uplifting and hopeful. When he talked about computers, people, the future, humanity and himself he could barely contain himself in his seat. His energy spread out in all directions. The immediacy of emotions was intense and engaging.

He seemed prepared for all the hateful calls he was getting on the call-in program. I wasn’t. I thought the Boston-Cambridge listeners would have a lot of questions or stories of their own psychedelic experiences to relate. Maybe even a colleague of his from the past might call. Instead, people yelled and blamed his influence for half the ills of their childrens’ tumultuous teen years, or their own.

Tim didn’t let it get him down. He was really patient with people and tried to communicate, dare I say educate, instead of getting into shouting matches that could easily spring from such heated situations.

Next we were off to a tv studio and along the way Tim chatted about being in jail with Charlie Manson. Later he gave small glimpses about his life in the Hollywood Hills. He talked about his high hopes for the future and about what a boon computers were for civilization. At one point his face beamed more than usual when he described how fantastic it is that people are getting smarter all the time. He saw the potential for humanity as near limitless. He talked about access and information. We, living in the here and now, have more access to information than anyone could have ever dreamt in past generations: all because of the information highway. He loved that.

When it came time to say goodbye, I dropped him off at a hotel where friends of his were waiting for his arrival. Their faces were radiant when they saw him and I knew why. What a marvelous mind, what great company and what a positive and affirming guy he was.

About a year later, a friend from that same publishing house got married and something came up that prevented me from going to her ceremony. When I heard Tim had been there, my heart sank that I’d missed an opportunity to see him. He really was THAT fabulous. I love him.