Me and Victor would order the green peyote buttons, several dozen at a time, from Lawson’s Texas Cactus Gardens. They came with planting instructions, but we never planted any of them. This was 1965 in Iowa City, Iowa. The buttons cost a quarter apiece. When a shipment came in, we would put out the word to our friends who would come over to “the mission” for a peyote party. The mission was what we called the crash pad where I and a bunch of other people were living on communal pots of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners.

We knew nothing about peyote. Victor had read something somewhere about it and found out you could order it through the mail. So we did. Somewhere we learned that you should first clean out the white fuzz that supposedly contained small amounts of strychnine.

Everyone would sit around with sour expressions on their face, munching on fresh, green peyote buttons. The only record we had at the mission to play on our cheap portable record player, was Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. I must have heard that record at least a hundred times, in all states of consciousness.

These peyote parties became a fixture in Iowa City for a couple of years. It was never a large crowd. Everybody knew everybody very well, as well as it is possible for people as young as we were, still blank slates, to know each other.

I married Susan that year and soon after we had a son, Jason. I was working at Component Homes on a pre-fab housing assembly line. It was brutal work for a 6’2″” 145 lb weakling. Ten hour days, and a half hour for lunch. I would go to a nearby bar and order a boilermaker, a bottle of beer and a shot of bourbon, and that would be lunch. After work I would buy a quart of beer to drink when I got home. I loved Jason. I would hold him in my arms and carry him around our apartment, pointing out its features and explaining the world to him.

After a little while, we moved to Ames so that I could finish my degree at Iowa State. I needed to make up two flunked PE courses, a beginning accounting course, and a sophomore literature course. I worked at the Student Union, washing dishes and setting up chairs, and Susan’s folks helped us out. After I graduated, I got a job as a programmer trainee at the Iowa State Highway Commission, which was not far from the house we were renting. And I got it because of peyote.

One of the regulars at the Iowa City parties was a guy who had a girl friend in Ames who used to come over to Iowa City for the parties. She was beautiful and smart and sweet. Everyone loved her. And she worked as a computer programmer at the Iowa State Highway Commission. She hipped me to, and recommended me for, the job. I took a programmer’s aptitude test and scored 100% in half the allotted time, and my career in software development was launched.

Peyote got me another job, many years later. Sometime in 1995, when we were living in San Francisco, in a little row house in the Sunset district, I got involved in the Native American Church, attending all-night peyote ceremonies in a tipi. I invited my old friend, John, from The Farm communal days to one of these meetings. At that time he was the manager of the San Francisco Chronicle’s newborn, experimental website, The Gate.

Before the meeting we talked about it. The Gate was John’s only topic of conversation in those days. He was having trouble finding a tech guy who was competent and communicative and trustworthy. I gave him a detailed run-down on just exactly what kind of person he needed. Coincidentally it was a perfect description of myself. In the morning when we emerged from the tipi, all peyotied up, having undergone an intense bonding experience, he offered me the job of Technical Director. I was there for five years and built the first major newspaper website’s technical underpinnings, almost single-handedly, from the ground up. It was a major milestone in my checkered career.

It was 1966 in Iowa City. Susan and I had just gotten married and our first child was on the way. We were flat broke. Victor said he knew where I could get a job. He had worked there before, at the Heinz plant in Muscatine. It was tomato season, and anybody could get a job there. Victor and I worked there for two weeks, which made us some of their most reliable employees. Most guys didn’t last that long.

We worked 14 hour days on the assembly line, stacking boxes of ketchup onto palettes. The pay was $1.65 an hour, no extra for overtime. We slept in the barracks and ate in the company cafeteria. A charge for room and board was deducted from our pay. Ketchup and mustard were free though.

The barracks had a communal shower and a big room with bunk beds. The migrant workers in those days weren’t Mexicans. They were middle-aged white guys who followed the ripening of fruits and vegetables around the country, from Oregon to Iowa, what we used to call hobos. It was hard to get much sleep for the constant sound of coughing all night.

The compound was surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with barbed wire that pointed inward. After our shift, Victor and I would crawl under the fence at a hole we had found, crawl over a culvert across the creek, and hike into town. We only had time for one beer, but it was worth it. Then back under the fence and into bed. If everyone else was more or less asleep, sometimes we would go into the shower room and smoke a joint. The sound of giggling in the shower room and two guys coming out sometimes got us a few funny looks.

We had three guys on our box-stacking crew, me, Victor, and another guy. Victor had worked there before, and he had a system. By working together and stacking the boxes in a certain pattern, it made it so much more efficient that we could do it with only two men. So we took turns wandering around the plant, stealing pickles, having a smoke.

Eventually the foreman noticed that we were doing the job with only two guys, so he came over and took our other guy away. Victor told me to just stop and let the boxes fall off the end of the line and smash on the floor. Pretty soon we had a pile of cardboard, ketchup, and broken glass at our feet. When the foreman came around again, Victor threw up his hands and said, “We just can’t handle it with only two guys.” We immediately got our third man returned to us, and life was good again.

For awhile I worked as an attendant on the day shift at Psych Hospital in Iowa City. It was 1965. I was 21. Psych Hospital was part of the University of Iowa. They only accepted patients who had some reasonable prognosis of being returnable to society, no hopeless schizos, no catatonics. I worked on the women’s ward. There were mostly manic-depressives and depressives, a few schizophrenics, and a few teenage girls and young women who were committed by concerned relatives for what were really moral transgressions. The depressives got shock treatments, after which they were somewhat confused, disoriented, and missing part of their memory, but were generally less depressed. The manics and the schizophrenics we just had to deal with, although they were of course thoroughly thorazined and lithiumed.

The primary therapy at Psych Hospital was to inform the patients who really wanted to get out, that there was a way they could make that happen. They were essentially trained in how to act normal so that no one would know that they were crazy. If, after a certain amount of time, they didn’t get “better”, they would be sent to the big house, the state mental institution at Clarinda. It was a very effective therapy. I witnessed many miraculous cures of mental illness.

One of the patients on the ward was a young woman, mid-20’s, sexy. She was in for f**king a priest. She liked to f**k, and had been committed by a concerned relative. You could do that in those days. I was forced to resign from my post on the day shift at Psych, partly because of her. I had applied to be transferred to the night shift, where I had several friends. After submitting my application, I was called into the office and told my services were no longer required. The two reasons given were that I had been having an affair with the afore-mentioned priest-f**ker, and also, that I had been distributing communist literature to the patients. I was entirely innocent of these disgusting crimes, but, it so happened, I knew the two guys who were actually, respectively, guilty. They were friends of mine. They worked on the night shift. What could I do? I didn’t much like the job anyway.

While I was still working there, a good friend of mine wound up as a patient on the men’s ward, across the lobby from where I worked in the women’s ward. Bob Costler (the name has been changed) was someone I had known from my years at Iowa State. I was an Economics major, but all of my friends and associates were writers and poets in the English department. Costler was the best of the poets. He was short, stocky, red-headed, freckled, from some little Iowa town, and he had a lyric gift. He wrote ornate,evocative poetry, kind of like Dylan Thomas.

He moved to Iowa City awhile after I did, and one night, after ingesting some peyote or mushrooms or something, he had a psychotic break. I wasn’t there when it happened, but later I went to visit him across the hall at Psych Hospital, where he had been committed. We were sitting on a couch in the visiting area, a big room, about twenty people. He leaned over and said, “You see that guy sitting there on the other side of the room?”. I said, “Yeah, I see him.” “Is that me?”, he whispered. He was quite serious.

Later, in the mid-70’s, after Bob got out for good, I saw him a couple of times in California. He had a job at the Shell oil refinery in Richmond and had married an extraordinarily square woman. The sense I got from him was that he was as crazy as ever, but had learned an elaborate discipline which allowed him to pass. There was no more poetry. He considered it part of his illness. I sensed a fierce determination in him to never ever fall back into whatever the dark, fearsome place was that he had worked his way out of.

I think that’s how it is, for most, if not all of us. We learn to mask our insanity. Some of us are better at it than others. It’s called civilization.