During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce—no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.
When a friend and colleague of my parents’—Augusta Bonnard, a psychoanalyst—came to Los Angeles for a year’s sabbatical in 1964, it was natural that we should meet. I invited her to my little house in Topanga Canyon, and we had a genial dinner together. Over coffee and cigarettes (Augusta was a chain-smoker; I wondered if she smoked even during analytic sessions), her tone changed, and she said, in her gruff, smoke-thickened voice, “You need help, Oliver. You’re in trouble.”
“Nonsense,” I replied. “I enjoy life. I have no complaints; all is well in work and love.” Augusta let out a skeptical grunt, but she did not push the matter further.
I had started taking LSD at this point, and if that was not available, I would take morning glory seeds instead (this was before morning glory seeds were treated with pesticides, as they are now, to prevent drug abuse). Sunday mornings were usually my drug time, and it must have been two or three months after meeting Augusta that I took a hefty dose of Heavenly
Blue morning glory seeds. The seeds were jet black and of agate-like hardness, so I pulverized them with a pestle and mortar and then mixed them with vanilla ice cream. About twenty minutes after
eating this, I felt intense nausea, but when it subsided, I found myself in a realm of paradisiacal stillness and beauty, a realm outside time, which was rudely broken into by a taxi grinding and
backfiring its way up the steep trail to my house. An elderly woman got out of the taxi, and, galvanized into action, I ran towards her, shouting, “I know who you are—you are a
We had plenty to talk about the next time we met. My failure to recognize her, my seeing her as a “replica,” she thought, was a complex form of defense, a dissociation which could only be called psychotic. I disagreed and maintained that my seeing her as a duplicate or impostor was neurological in origin, a disconnection between perception and feelings. The ability to identify (which was intact) had not been accompanied by the appropriate feeling of warmth and familiarity, and it was this contradiction which had led to the logical though absurd conclusion that she was a “duplicate.” (This syndrome, which can occur in schizophrenia, but also with dementia or delirium, is known as Capgras syndrome.) Augusta said that whichever view was correct, taking mind-altering drugs every weekend, alone, and in high doses, surely testified to some intense inner needs or conflicts, and that I should explore these with a therapist. (In retrospect, I am sure she was right, and I began seeing an analyst a year later.)
The summer of 1965 was a sort of in-between time: I had completed my residency at UCLA and had left California, but I had three months ahead of me before taking up a research fellowship in New York. This should have been a time of delicious freedom, a wonderful and needed holiday after the sixty- and sometimes eighty-hour workweeks I had had at UCLA. But I did not feel free; I get unmoored, have a sense of emptiness and structurelessness, when I am not working—it was weekends which were the danger times, the drug times, when I lived in California—and now an entire summer in my hometown, London, stretched before me like a three-month-long weekend.
It was during this idle, mischievous time that I descended deeper into drug taking, no longer confining it to weekends. I tried intravenous injection, which I had never done before. My parents, both physicians, were away, and, having the house to myself, I decided to explore the drug cabinet in their surgery on the ground floor for something special to celebrate my thirty-second birthday. I had never taken morphine or any opiates before. I used a large syringe—why bother with piddling doses? And after settling myself comfortably in bed, I drew up the contents of several vials, plunged the needle into a vein, and injected the morphine very slowly.
