How LSD-25 Got Me Into Medical School
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Alligators Consume UCLA Drew School of Medicine
My roommate’s broken Honda limped most of the way to my interview at UCLA Medical School before dying somewhere around Tarzana. I found a place to stash it and got a ride with the tow truck driver the rest of the way to UCLA.
Soon, I was sitting in a small office providing a resident physician with insincere answers as to why I wanted to be a physician. The honest answer was that I had no idea what I was doing in that office, but for whatever reason, I worked very hard for 4 years to get there. After listening but not listening, he asked to see my schedule for the rest of the day. These formalities didn’t matter much. It was one of the best medical schools in the country, and it was my first interview on my journey to becoming a physician.
“Oh shit dude,” he said, “Howard Goldberg.” I could see the look in his eyes. I was fucked. His face said: “This guy is going to fuck you hard and you are not going to get into UCLA Medical School. Have a nice day and see you in the next life.”
But at 21, I was a punk. I had a long tuft a blue hair with a peace sign woven into it. I didn’t care whether Howard Goldberg was a hardass or not. I had written as honestly about my life in my medical school essay as I am writing now. If I didn’t get into medical school, I would become a neuroscientist, which would be a perfectly fine way to live my life as long as I didn’t have to hurt any mice along the way.
Howard Goldberg was round and grey, with a kippah laying clipless over his sunspots. He didn’t look at me. He merely calmly made an observation: “You are late.”
I was staring at his coffee cup, which smelled stale and had concentric rings of dried coffee going to the top. At the bottom, a thin film was developing over a milky swamp.
After a few minutes of typing, he turned to me and asked, “Son, have you ever done drugs?”
“Yes.”
“Pot.”
“Yes.”
“LSD-25?”
“Yes.”
“Peyote, mescaline?”
“Yes.”
I could not find the “no” on the Ouija board. I imagined the molecules of water trying to make it past the film that had developed on top of the coffee. Was the mug aging more slowly as the coffee turned to powder?
“Son, I’m going to ask you to relax now,” he said, “because the next few questions are going to be a little stressful.”
I smirked. I had given up on UCLA Drew School of Medicine as soon as the resident fixed my tie, tucked my sunglasses into the inside pocket of my suit, and looked sadly at my blue hair.
Goldberg turned to me and stared me in the eye. “Who wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘72?”
“Um…Hunter S. Thompson?” Southern California institutions require each sentence to end in a question.
“Who wrote Electric Kool Aid Acid Test?… Who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?”
My encyclopedic knowledge of 60s Americana ended somewhere around a question about to person who taught Bob Dylan how to play a harmonica.
It turns out Howard Goldberg was a communist in his youth. He marched with MLK from Selma to Montgomery, two places I knew nothing about, and, with my self-righteous elitism, soil that I never intended to set my own feet on.
He was much bigger than I in every way. The real deal. The Truth.
I was a fraud playing a role just like all the others. My honest answers to his questions masked the deep desire for identity hiding under my blue hair.
Respect, Howard Goldberg.
I received my acceptance letter one week later. LSD-25 had gotten me into UCLA Medical School, issuing yet another fraud an opportunity to enter through the portal to high society.
Nursery School Dropout
By the time I tuned in, I long since dropped out.
When I was 4, my dad took a corporate job as an architect in Denver, Colorado, where we lived as a nuclear family. My grandmother followed us to Colorado and lived nearby. My parents enrolled me in a pre-K program in Denver. But after I chewed the vinyl lining on her car door with my canines, my grandmother stopped taking me. I much preferred staying at home and watching Sesame Street and Zoom. It was probably PBS that taught me how to read and write, but I can’t say for sure.
My dad took to his corporate architecture job in Denver the way a schizotypal takes to a mental hospital. The white overhead lights. The linoleum floors. The client meetings. His job turned him from a functional Draugluin to a full-blown lunatic. After a few months of that, he smashed as many cars as he could with our VW Squareback and they took him to the moon palace.
He was out of the loony bin as soon as he was in. But my mom dragged him to Big Sur, where he underwent proper therapy in a throw-pillow and candle environment far from Herman Miller chairs and fluorescent lights. It was a humble institution at the time, with worn floors and stale chamomile tea. But if hovered majestically over the Pacific.
Most people at Esalen Institute—the staff, the clients, and the regular workers—consumed ganja a few times a day and tripped on hallucinogens a few times a week. One of my few childhood friends was the son of the primary drug dealer at Esalen.
My parents soon split up, and my dad took the savings he had to make a downpayment on a piece of land. He put up a tent and started to grow marijuana. In those days, Big Sur agriculture was lucrative, and he was easily able to pay off the loan while also taking on the occasional eccentric client.
There was no school to speak of near Esalen. There was a kind of day care center far to the south that we sometimes attended. It was appropriately named Pacific Valley. There, we smoked pot and watched James Bond films (an absolutely fantastic combination at any age).
When we skipped Pacific Valley, which was nearly every day, we broke into the stash at my friend’s house. There was a literal wall of pills, each sorted into little plastic boxes. We couldn’t understand the names of any of the drugs, but we knew acid came on blotter paper, and that was all the information we needed to find what we wanted.
The best playground a kid on acid could ask for is an adult party. Purple bubbling drinks. Barely sipped glasses of fluorescent orange whisky--sitting ducks on low tables parented by self-conscious dancers feigning fluidity as if directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Drunk and tripping, it becomes clear that most adults are not the characters they want to be, and the more they try to be that person, the further away the target moves.
My father had little interest in the creatures his sperm produced. I was raised mostly by my mom. She worked as a shopkeeper, waitress, or bartender when she could. Between jobs, we simply lived on welfare and, regardless, stole food from the supermarket.
The books left over from their broken marriage (Henry Miller, Ken Keysey, Robert Pirsig, Carl Jung, Charles Bukowski…) were scattered about. Some in my dad’s tent (and later in his famous green house), some in the staff housing at Esalen. I read some of these books, but certainly not all of them. Mostly just the naughty ones. I must have read every book Bukowski wrote by the time I was 7. And comic books, if I could steal one or trade pot or jade for it.
My mom was a smart woman who knew how to survive, even if it was out of a VW van. Unlike most single moms on welfare, she managed to have a permanent PO Box as an address and a friend who had a serviceable telephone. She could navigate Medicaid and food stamps.
But she didn’t care much about navigating the many local school systems we passed through as we travelled around in our van or took housekeeping jobs. By the time I landed in a regular school, I was in 5th grade. Her best friend provided her with a steady job as a bartender in a small town in Northern California.
The dry years
The true beauty of the American education system is that no one learns much that requires skill or substance. Math was a struggle, but it still is (even though I do probabilistic modeling for a living), so I probably just don’t have the mind for it. Writing essays came more naturally. Whatever I learned from PBS, pre-K, and Henry Miller carried me fine to junior high school.
But life experience was another matter. If I possessed any social skills, I can’t recall what they were. By the time I entered school, the superpower of X-ray vision into the Self provided by LSD in my childhood had become severely myopic. Both the educator John Dewey and the economist Alan Kruger argue that the primary benefit of school is to develop social skills. Mine were mostly garnered listening to stony adult conversations. This did little to prepare me for the playground.
By the time I entered grade school, my social network was in such bad shape that I didn’t even have access to the broken kids who had drugs. I worked in the cafeteria to get my free school lunch, but the school kicked me out of the program for having long hair. Luckily, some bigger kids eventually got around to bullying me. I knew enough from after school television that the right thing to do was to punch the biggest one as hard as I could and aim for the face. After that, things were slightly better. But I remained a nerdy kid until I joined the track team in high school. From there, I slowly crawled out of my hole.
Gül Dölen, at the University of California-Berkeley, found that there are “critical periods” in the development of most mammals in which they learn how to survive in the world. The classic example of this is imprinting, the 48-hour period in which baby geese learn to follow a moving object in their environment. Professor Dölen found that these “critical periods” close rapidly and social learning is slow or difficult once the door is closed. But these doors can be re-opened with hallucinogenic drugs. If this is true, the biggest cruelty of adolescence is that only social kids have access to drugs.
The return of the alligators
I wouldn’t again place a blotter paper under my tongue until my sophomore year in college. When I was a young child who took hallucinogens, I could see people trying, and mostly failing, to play the (then desirable) role of social outcast—their hippie outfits looking more like they were pulled from a Hollywood closet than the local free box. As a teen on hallucinogens, the veneer of other’s identity was thinner still. The preppie, the hippie, the sorority girl. On LSD-25, you could hook the persona of most 19-year-olds under the nail and peel it off because the glue had not yet dried.
But there were the Genuine People mixed in with this crowd. They were like magnets. Compelling. Truth tellers. One such person was Steve Dave.
I had taken LSD with two friends very early in the evening so we could spend some time at the beach during sunset as the trip came on. Even before anything took hold, a dog understood our journey and followed us the rest of the night, radiating love in the pure way that dogs understand humans.
After the beach, the dog followed us from party to party. Eventually, we got hungry, got some slices of pizza and sat down in an empty lot to eat them, sharing them with the dog. Steve Dave came by and sat down with us.
“I know your name,” said Shawna. “It is Steve or Dave or one of THOSE names. I’m going to call you Steve Dave.”
“That’s right. I’m Steve Dave. You all are tripping. I’m here to guide you,” he said calmly.
To us, he was not only a Genuine Person, but he was also completely tuned into the universe. Like the dog that followed us around that night, he understood our journey.
We were unaware that our pupils were the size of grapes.
Michelle, Shawna, the dog, I spent the rest of the night following him, just as the dog had followed us. We were all in search of The Truth, and Steve Dave was our guide to that Truth.
He recommended a litany of old books from the 1950s and 1960s. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. I made a mental note of each. At the time, my memory was extremely sharp.
Eventually, we made it back to Shawna’s apartment, where we played Ouija.
Steve Dave: “Do you always channel through Parker Bradly Brother’s games?”
Ouija: “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.”
I woke up around 4PM the next day, headed to the bookstore, and bought every book Steve Dave recommended the night before. It took months to consume them. Most of them were familiar titles from on my parents’ bookshelves back when we were a nuclear family. I was on the journey to understanding my parents, and along the way understood a little bit about myself as well.