Space Station number three

From Uni to the Arms Factory

You are asking, “What was the first tickle? The first pull?” I was not knowing it at the time, but I was apparently always a spiritual seeker. I never had much interest in a normal life – having a career, a wife and children – that never appealed to me at all. But I was in deep despair. I was a borderline alcoholic, getting drunk every night. I couldn’t hold down a job because I was too restless, uncentered and unfocused.

I was living in Buffalo, New York, my hometown. I had suffered through four years at university, basically to please my parents. I had thought that at uni, where I studied Psychology, I would find wise men with something to offer. But I realized that the professors had just book knowledge and were as fucked up as I was, and that they had a lot of problems in relationships, and with alcohol… so I was a bit disillusioned.

I managed to graduate – my parents were very pleased about that – and I got a job in the County Health Department, in an office in Buffalo City Hall. It looked as if I was doing something worthwhile and proper, but then I would just go to the office, drink coffee, read the newspaper and pace the floor… I couldn’t focus very well on anything fit for the job. So, after a few months, late one afternoon just before the end of the workday, my boss, Mr. Montgomery, called me into his office and said, “Bill, things aren’t right with you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, at the end of the month, from what you write you did during the month, I see there’s not much there,” he replied.

I asked again, “What do you mean? I’m doing just as much as the others in the office.”

“No, you’re not,” and he said I could either resign or he would have to fire me.

“Okay, then I resign.”

“What now? I’m so fucked up I can’t even hold down a job. What am I going to do? I don’t have money, and my parents aren’t rich, what am I going to do?” I asked myself.

So I did what I usually did; I contacted my drinking buddies, went to a bar and got drunk – and that was that.

After a while I got a job in a factory, inspecting jet engine parts. It was a horribly boring job, just putting metal parts in a gauge – they had to be either approved or rejected. The company had government contracts for fighter jets, and had contracts for foreign countries, so there was a security fence around the whole property. I was not so happy working there. I was on the second shift, which was from three in the afternoon to eleven at night. It fit me well because the bars in Buffalo were open till three in the morning. So, when I finished work, I could go to a bar and get drunk; I didn’t have to get up early to go to work.

That was my life for a while. I was also very outrageous and daring – really crazy. I met some interesting characters in the factory. And that’s when I discovered drugs; I started with marijuana and then discovered LSD. I was never a big fan of reality!

It was a revelation to come out of ‘just alcohol’ and getting stoned, and then to take LSD. I was taking LSD every weekend, but almost always also had my beer on the side. I bought myself a small motorcycle, a Harley Sprint. I would jump on it after taking LSD and go to bars. I must say I’m lucky to still be alive.

That’s what I was doing, and somehow I had to do. I needed to do crazy things because the job was so boring – eight hours a day with these metal parts and these gauges. It was decently paid, so could support my drinking habit and afford my marijuana and LSD.

I discovered a type of LSD called Space Station. These were white tablets, very pure, really strong. You could take just half of one, maybe even a quarter, and get off. I would usually take a whole one. And I earned some extra money by selling it. I would spend my whole paycheck on LSD. I would get 100 hits that I could then sell on for more. I was a bit of a businessman.

In the factory there were different inspection stations; I was at number three. I made a little sign and put it up:

Space Station number three, $3 a hit.

I knew that the foreman wouldn’t know what that meant; just people who were into drugs would know. I was advertising my LSD business in the middle of a normal factory!

I had a friend at the factory. Once they put us to work into another corner. It was full of parts that had been rejected. They had been marked with a red crayon which meant they were not okay. Because the factory was under pressure to fulfill a contract, we were asked to erase those red marks with some liquid, and let them be. Oh, my God!

My friend and I decided to phone the FBI and inform them what was happening. He phoned them when I wasn’t there; he got impatient. He later told me that they immediately ran a recording device while he informed them about the activity happening in this very established airplane factory.

Eventually the company had to let go of workers, and so I got laid off. This was great news for me because then I could get unemployment benefit. I was very happy about that; I would get money without having to work, especially doing such a stupid job! But after I applied for unemployment I had to wait and wait for the money to come through.

Meanwhile at my apartment: The landlord had a little print shop just below, making signs and silk screen jobs. My friends and I would have to sneak out the back door so he wouldn’t see us, because we didn’t have the money to pay the rent. But I think that he eventually got his money…

Moving to Seattle with Steve and my Girlfriend

My lovely girlfriend Annie, with whom I had been going out for a while, wanted to move to Seattle. This was in 1971. She had an aunt and uncle there and had already lived on the West Coast, in the Bay Area. I wanted to move there too, so we got a drive-away car. We had the idea of asking our university friend Steve, who was hanging out in the Bay Area, if he wanted to move with us to Seattle. He did, so we picked him up and drove up to Seattle where we found a nice apartment with two bedrooms a little bit outside the city, near a lake, and at a good price. We took our LSD on weekends, hung out together, getting stoned and drinking beer.

One evening the doorbell rang. Annie went downstairs to answer it. She thought it was her aunt and uncle coming to visit. I picked up our cat and held it tight so it wouldn’t run out the door. It took her a while to come back. And when she came back up the stairs, standing behind her were two black guys with a gun, her beautiful long black hair hanging over the barrel of the gun, which was pointed directly at me.

I dropped the cat on the floor, put my hands up in the air and stammered, “Don’t… shoot…”

They had us lie on the floor. Steve, who was in his bedroom, heard something strange happening and was ready to escape out the back door. But the guys had already opened the door to his room and put the gun on him. There we were: the three of us lying on the floor. They took whatever money we had, our watches and some jewelry. We didn’t have much, so they kept asking, “Where are the drugs? Where are the drugs and where are the guns?”

We said, “We don’t have any drugs. We don’t have any guns.”

They didn’t want to believe us. I got a little impatient, picked my head up and said, “We don’t have any drugs and guns!” Then one of them put his foot on my head and pushed my face into the carpet. My lip started bleeding and Annie started crying…

They couldn’t find any drugs or guns. We had some LSD well hidden in a toothpaste tube. We knew they wouldn’t find it. So they said, “Okay, we’re going to leave now. Don’t try to come after us or we’ll shoot at you up the stairs,” and left.

We went to see the guy who lived below us – we didn’t really know him. He said they had come to his door first and were also asking strange questions. He told us that the guys who had been living in our apartment before were big-time drug dealers and had drugs and guns. So we had moved into the wrong apartment, at the wrong time – and almost ended up getting killed.

While we were sitting around with this guy, smoking joints, another group of men came to the door. We said to him, “Don’t open the door. Just talk to them through the door.” Which he did, and they went away.

We decided we wouldn’t be staying one more night in that apartment. We drove to downtown Seattle, stayed in a very cheap hotel for the night, and thought, “Well, it’s time to move on.” We went back to our apartment in the daytime to gather our belongings and inform the landlord. I think we got our deposit back.

We then decided to take an all-night Greyhound bus to San Jose in California. You weren’t allowed to take animals on a bus, so we snuck the cat into a small duffel bag. We got on the bus but were afraid the cat might start making sounds, so started singing and humming. We sat way in the back. At some point in the night there was a stop where you could get off the bus and go to the toilet.

We stepped out the bus with the cat and took it out on a lawn. And when we were in line to get back on the bus – the driver standing at the door – all of a sudden, this black paw came out through a hole in the corner of the bag (which I hadn’t realized was there). The cat clawed into my leg and I almost screamed. I shoved the paw back in the bag and, sometime in the morning, we made it safely to San Jose. Still not knowing where to go with all our belongings – whatever little we had – and our black cat.

Then we saw a sign on a lamp-post:

If you need help with anything…

It was signed by a black minister going by the name Super Turtle. You could phone him and he would come and help you. He came and met us – he was nice and friendly. We didn’t have much money because I still hadn’t received my unemployment money. And Steve’s little stash of money, with which we were going to buy a stereo set, had unfortunately vanished during that incident in Seattle. And now he only had a few dollars left.

We said to Super Turtle, “We need a place to stay and we don’t have much money.”

He took us to some people he knew, where we could sleep on the floor under the kitchen table. As we thought we could manage something better, we took a cheap hotel and stayed a couple nights there. We found an apartment to rent, left the flop house, walked a few blocks, and then all of a sudden, Steve remembered that he had left his money stashed under the mattress in the hotel. We rushed back and, fortunately, the money was still there. We got ourselves a decent apartment where we hung out while I was waiting for my unemployment money to come through.

We just didn’t know what to do with our lives.

The Bear Tribe

One day we saw an article in the Berkeley Barb, a radical leftist alternative newspaper. There was an article about a Chippewa Indian medicine man from Minnesota, Sun Bear of the Bear Tribe. He had a vision that one day the white man would come to the Native Americans to learn to live more in harmony with Mother Earth, with nature, and to live a more sane way of life. This was at the beginning of the big Back to the Land movement in America – which eventually also spread to Europe. There were meetings in Sacramento every Monday evening. We decided to go and check it out.

The following Monday we hitchhiked up to Sacramento. The gathering was in an apartment belonging to a man whose Tribe name was Bear Marks, a big guy with a beard. He was a marijuana dealer, a really beautiful guy, very heart-full and friendly. Sun Bear gave a talk – there were about 20–30 people – all hippies who wanted to join the Bear Tribe. (They wouldn’t allow just anybody to join the Tribe.) There was only one other Native American there, besides Sun Bear.

After the talk we were asked, one by one, to go to a bedroom upstairs and have an interview with Sun Bear. It was up to him to decide if your head was in the right place, and that you weren’t a cuckoo or addicted to heroin or cocaine or something else. There were just three rules in the Bear Tribe: One was no alcohol, because that had led to the downfall of the American Indian culture. (Makes me sad… makes me sad.) No alcohol, which was good.

Then, no drugs, or at least, no synthetic, man-made drugs like cocaine or LSD. What was allowed was what was called ‘medicine weed’, marijuana, because it was seen as a medicine. It was smoked in a ritual, mixed with other herbs and maybe with a little tobacco, and ceremonially in a big peace pipe under the stars in a big circle. It was not like smoking a joint at a party. It was a holy affair… That was allowed. Also peyote was allowed, because it’s a natural substance.

The third rule was no possessions, which meant you were supposed to be willing to share whatever you owned with your brothers and sisters in the Tribe. You could not claim you owned anything. That included your partner; it was supposed to be a free sexual situation. But what would happen – I found this very interesting – people would split up with their partners and would then be with somebody else, immediately creating another monogamous relationship.

In my opinion it’s in our DNA, really deep in our genes, to be monogamous. There are these nice fantasies about free sex; I enjoyed that fantasy but I think it’s unrealistic. So that’s what happened – I lost my girlfriend. She ended up with somebody else, and I was alone.

So all three of us decided to join the Tribe.

There was one interesting thing that happened, in that first gathering: Steve and I had our little interview with Sun Bear. We came back down and were hanging out for a while; then Annie went up for her interview. It was taking much longer. We’re wondering what’s happening, and when she came down from her interview she was a bit shaken from it. We went outside and she told us that Sun Bear had tried to seduce her.

That’s when we had second thoughts about joining the Tribe. We slept overnight in the apartment; there were so many people that we slept on the kitchen floor. The next day we hitchhiked back down to San Jose. Still, we decided to join the Tribe.

This was a big turning point in my life because it got me out of my despair, drinking and drugs, and got me going into a more spiritual direction, which then eventually led to sannyas.

At first we stayed in Bear Marks’ Sacramento apartment, until we got the approval from Sun Bear or from another guy named Grey Wolf, the second in command. He was an American guy, a beautiful man, professor at the university in Davis, California, with wife and two kids. He got fired from the university because he didn’t believe in giving grades – everybody would get a passing grade from him… So he joined the Bear Tribe with his wife, Morning Star, and their two children.

Sun Bear went on a tour of the country, giving talks at colleges and universities about his vision and about the Bear Tribe. People from the East Coast and all over the country came to Sacramento, to Bear Mark’s apartment, in order to join the Bear Tribe. They were basically just hippies who were not interested in a normal life with a job, career, family and children. It was standing room only in the apartment, still somehow you would manage to find a place to lie down and sleep. Then slowly some people would get the approval to go to the Base Camp in the Sierra and left the apartment for the camp.

The three of us moved to the Base Camp in the foothills outside Nevada City and lived in teepees. There was just one house, like a lodge or cabin. We learned a bit about herbal medicine. We were also growing our own vegetables and doing these medicine ceremonies under the stars, the big peace pipe… We stayed a year and a half with the Bear Tribe.

It’s funny, I feel so emotional just thinking about those times.

At some point, I went with Bear Marks and Pine Tree Brother from Philadelphia, to do a fast higher up in the Sierra Mountains. After a couple of days, Bear Marks remembered some party he needed to attend in Sacramento, so he left. Then Pine Tree Brother also remembered something he wanted to do. But I decided, “No, I’m going to stick it out. I’m going to stay here.”

It was high enough in the mountains you could drink the water straight from the river. I was sleeping in the open, although I knew there were rattlesnakes around. I did the fast for seven days, then hitchhiked back down to Davis, near Sacramento, where we also had a Base. That’s where Grey Wolf had been a professor. He was able to use the house of a professor he knew, who was away on vacation, for a meeting with Sun Bear. On his tour of the States he had met people in Philadelphia who wanted to start a Base Camp on the East Coast, so Sun Bear chose me to go there to meet them.

In Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there was also a property, called the Free State, where people were allowed to live on someone’s property, for free. They could put up their teepees, tents, or whatever. I got a drive-away car and chose a few people to come with me. We drove across the country to Philadelphia, met with the people there, went to this property in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which was about 70 miles west of Washington D.C. There was a cabin where we could stay. I ended up staying there for six months. We did sweat lodge ceremonies – really mind-blowing.

When I felt it was time to move on, I first went to Buffalo and stayed with my brother. He was a teacher, a respectable person with a job and wife and son, living in the suburbs. I could stay with them for some time. I was supposed to paint the garages, but I was too spaced out and unfocused and wasn’t moving along very well, so that his wife wanted me out of their house. I left and went back to California to check out the Bear Tribe and see what was happening.

I stayed in Sacramento with Joanie, a close friend of Bear Marks, a very spiritually-oriented woman, interested in meditation. At this point I hadn’t heard anything about meditation yet. The only spirituality was this Mother Earth and that whole Bear Tribe phenomenon. I stayed with Joanie for a while, then found a place to stay in an alternative school outside Davis, a Waldorf school I think. They were open to me living there in exchange for helping with some chores. At least I had a place to sleep and got food. That led to spending a little time in San Francisco and Berkeley, and discovering the area.

My God, all these stories… They just show what an amazing, crazy, magical life I’ve had. And that’s why these days, with all that’s happened recently, I feel like it’s stupid to worry, because everything has always magically turned out beautifully in my life.

I’m now getting closer to the sannyas part…

To be continued…

Images: Dharmamurti and Tara; Sun Bear (Vincent LaDuke) and his father, Louie LaDuke. Source: Pearson, Susan. wikitree.com