I was able to stay with a family I knew well, whose two daughters were among my close friends. To my relief and my parents’ surprise, they generously allowed me to live with them from August through December of 1976. During that time I was introduced to two new areas that would open my eyes in unexpected ways. Faye, the mother in the family with whom I stayed, was the first person to teach me about consciousness—how our mind determines to a great extent our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world; and how so much of our subjective experience is a function of our perception. For the first time, I began to get a sense of the spiritual as distinct from the religious, as well as understand drug-induced states of consciousness as part of a much larger continuum.
The physical separation from my parents gave us all room to breathe. The distance allowed us the space for a gradual rapprochement, and after about a month I started to have dinner with my family once a week. At my parents’ urging, we also began family therapy. I didn’t want to participate in family therapy and I was convinced that it would be a waste of time, but I also didn’t want to bear the weight of responsibility for not being willing to try since so many of the family’s problems seemed to track back to me. Moreover, I really did want to have a relationship with my family and had no idea how to get there from where we were.
Family therapy was both challenging and fascinating. Our therapist was an experienced and savvy MSW who used an explicitly family systems approach. Even though—as is so often the case with the Scapegoat—it was my acting out that brought the family into therapy, to my amazement I was not blamed. As much focus was placed on my parents and on my siblings as on me. As uncomfortable as I know it was for my parents, particularly for my father, to not be in charge, they were open and receptive. Family therapy changed how we related to one another, and for a time, communication within our family, and between my parents and me, improved dramatically.
All through this period, I continued to develop my capacity to live a double life, negotiating very different worlds—precariously balancing a “B”+ average with the roles of druggie, varsity athlete, pot dealer, and student council vice president. My group of close friends dubbed me “Citizen Dan” for my ability to shift gears and strap on a diplomatic persona whenever it served my purposes.
I moved back home in early January 1977, and having accumulated enough credits to graduate early, completed high school later that month. I graduated somewhere toward the bottom of the top 15 percent of my class. Some family context: my brother would become valedictorian, graduating first in his high school class; one of my sisters was salutatorian, graduating second in her class; and my other sister graduated somewhere between the top 5 and 10 percent of her class. When I said good-bye to high school, I was well versed in the three “R”s (well, not so much ’rithmetic—math and I never got along well) and intimately familiar with the four “S”s—smoking, swallowing, snorting, and shooting.
Two weeks later, at the age of seventeen, I left New York and most everything that was familiar to me 3,000 miles behind. I had spent a month during the previous summer hitchhiking around California with a friend, and decided then to attend college there. With a one-way plane ticket and $200.00 in my pocket, I moved to Los Angeles by myself, forsaking the glory days of my senior year of high school to work full-time and get a head start on establishing state residency prior to beginning school at the University of California at Santa Cruz that fall.
At the time, I knew one person in LA, an uncle who had had a nasty divorce from my aunt ten years earlier, whom I had visited briefly during the previous summer. I lived at his home in Downey for the first month, which also coincided with my first job as an independent adult—selling encyclopedias door-to-door. As bad as that gig was, from it came an unexpected benefit. I became friends with a coworker who had a friend with a small house in Temple City who needed a roommate. For the following eight months I shacked up with Perry, who despite being legally blind rode a motorcycle and somehow had a legitimate California state motorcycle license. I got a job at a glass manufacturing company in East LA, which required taking two different buses, over an hour each way, to get to and from work. Although I used daily, my LA experience gave me important opportunities to grow up and provided a less-than-appetizing taste of what the adult world of work can mean, reinforcing my appreciation for higher education.
The University of California at Santa Cruz is a singular place—2,000 acres of redwood-covered forest, interspersed with wide meadows overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the city of Santa Cruz with its stunning beaches, stretches of sand extending between cliffs perched on the northern tip of Monterey Bay. Established by the University of California as an “alternative” campus in 1965, it was unique in combining the resources and prestige of a major university with the intimate feel of a small, liberal arts college and a rigorous academic environment. After exerting so little effort in school, I was finally ready to invest myself academically.
Even still, throughout my tenure at UC Santa Cruz, I walked a tightrope between working hard and performing well academically and pursuing pleasure pharmacologically. I lived on campus my freshman year and my dorm was located next to some administrative offices. On one occasion, an office assistant followed the pungent aroma of pot to my room and politely requested that I find a way to keep the smoke from infiltrating their building. It was as matter-of-fact as if she were asking me to turn down the live Grateful Dead that I routinely played at loud volume.
Wacky names for college intramural sports teams are not unusual, but during my sophomore year our intramural flag football team likely broke new ground. “The U-40s” was the brainchild of a small group of like-minded friends who shared an affinity for both sports and intravenous drug use, and may be the only intramural team ever named after a specific model of syringe.
I graduated in the spring of 1981 with a double major in Psychology and Environmental Studies/Planning and Public Policy, and an asterisk. The asterisk was that while I received my BA in Psychology with Honors, I had completed all of the requirements for my degree in Planning and Public Policy except one—an extensive senior thesis. Environmental Studies, and the degree I didn’t quite yet have, was my real interest. The program at Santa Cruz was state-of-the-art; the coursework was challenging and thought-provoking, and the professors were awe-inspiring yet approachable. My psychology major was also excellent and growth-enhancing, but I added it basically as a throw-in to achieve the distinction of a double major. I had fully planned to finish my senior thesis the year following my graduation.
[IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA,] SAY HELLO
“Sometimes the light’s all shining on me
Other times I can barely see.”
ROBERT HUNTER, TRUCKIN’, GRATEFUL DEAD
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In October of 1981, a few months after completing one of my two degrees and going through the graduation ceremony at UC Santa Cruz, I went backpacking in Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe with Mick, then one of my closest friends. Mick had graduated the year before me and was working construction at the time, even though he was a genius in science and math. He had an innate ability to understand how the world works on those levels—areas that have always been a mystery to me. Mick was also one of my hardest-core partying partners. There were frighteningly few mind- and mood-altering rocks that we hadn’t turned over together to explore in-depth what was underneath.
The very first time we met, perhaps not surprisingly, revolved around drugs. I was on the prowl for pot during my first week at UCSC, looking to find, not just a place to score now, but a reliable ongoing source. A friend of a new friend directed me to the dorm next to mine, to a room at the end of the top floor, and there