I Channeled Timothy Leary for his 102 Birthday (Happy birthday Tim)
I was in no mood for small talk. Timmy had somehow gotten to me from the great beyond and I had to know right away which bardo he’d arrived at.
“BARDO?! Fuck that man. I’m in fucking hell! Can you believe that? After all I’ve done for humanity?! I gave them the only hopeful eschatology of the 20th Century. And what the fuck?! The afterlife is Christian? Really? What kind of tiresome Manichean authoritarian crap is this? After all those visions of infinite multidimensionalities, the afterlife isn’t even a multiple-choice question!”
“So what’s hell like, Timmy?”
“It’s not so much hot as boring. I mean, Lawrence Welk is in hell and Brian Jones is in heaven. Got that? It’s like one giant Church of the Subgenius prank just to mindfuck little Timmy. And all those French philosophers are in hell. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. Droning on and on. ‘Tim can I read you my essay about the post-dialectical dialectics of the isness of not being and gendered demonologies in hell?” Fuck no! Get out of here! I’d rather listen to Eldridge go on and on about how cool Kim il Sung is.”
“Yeah, so hell is not all it’s cracked up to be.” He grinned mischievously at his own joke. “But fuck that! I have a plan.”
“You always had a plan, Timmy. But first I have to ask, where did Nixon wind up?”
“Oh god. Nixon. We sometimes play pinochle. I mean, what else is there to do? We tried to set up a lecture tour of hell, like with that Gordon Liddy thing back on earth in the eighties. Satan nixed it though. He said, ‘It could be sort of interesting… and we can’t have that.’ You can’t score any good drugs there either. They’re all up in heaven… even crack! Burroughs is going nuts.”
“Timmy, I don’t see how you could have wound up in the boring place. You were always the most fun person to hang with.”
“Riiiight?! I know. So I wrote a letter to Satan and told him there was an error. I belonged in heaven with the groovy people like Brian Jones, Baudelaire, Colette, Janis, Hunter! For fuck sakes, I even wrote the first essay ever on hedonic psychology in the 1970s. And anyway, who knew you went to hell for being dull. Could it have been some of that pompous Hindu shit I rattled off in the mid-60s… trying to come on like some sort of holy man? I mean… gee, sorry not sorry. Besides, even then, I was funny. Even Lou Reed admitted I was funny. Anyway, this was clearly an error. But I never could get a fair trial, could I? ‘Oh Timmy just seems too slick,” they’d all say. What did that California judge say? ‘A pleasure seeking, irresponsible Madison Avenue advocate for the free use of LSD.’ Right! Well, as it turns out, those are qualifications for heaven. I mean, how many embodied youths did I rapture in the 60s? It’s confounding.”
“Incidentally, we get the news from earth in hell. Just 30 minutes a night … Cronkite. So we know what’s happening here… you poor bastards.”
Shying away from a discussion of our earthly apocalypse, I returned our focus to Tim’s afterlife.
“So what’s the escape plan, Timmy?”
“I’ve been campaigning all over hell for the notion that we now have the technology to build permanent space colonies in limbo, where people can escape the police state bureaucracies of both places … heaven, as well. You know, a place where we can think for ourselves and question authority. Roddenberry thinks it’ll work. My tech guy said it should be ready in ten years… or maybe it was a thousand years. I always did get that shit wrong, didn’t I?”
“Just in case that doesn’t work out, I’m trying to make a deal with the devil to get released. I told him I’d give him a lawyer. He told me, ‘All the lawyers are already here.’ (Uproarious laughter) He told me he wants Ginsberg! We laughed and laughed. Yeah. Ommmmmm my ass, Allen. I mean, that’s some boring shit right there, isn’t it?”
With his infamous trickster cackle, Dr. Leary suddenly disappeared in a puff of pot smoke. I smiled, but inwardly I was sad. I just couldn’t believe he was being returned to the boring place, he of all people.
