By J. F. Burke
Most of my life it’s been boo, booze and blow. I didn’t get into trips until I was 42, in 1957, when a friend of mine in Santa Fe introduced me to peyote. A Taos Indian had given a dozen peyote buttons to each of several persons in Santa Fe’s art colony. One of them a serigrapher who did realistic still lifes of mushrooms had been waiting for me to arrive and trip with him.
I knew very little about peyote at that time, but I did know enough to be aware of the problem of getting it past our palates, so I pulverized the dried buttons in a Waring blender and tamped the powder into gelatin capsules. Otherwise our soft palates might have reflexively ejected the peyote, which I’d been told was incredibly bitter. We washed the caps down with cold mountain well water.
My friend’s trip must have been very strange, for he spent the first eight hours wrapped in a Navaho blanket, curled up like a chrysalis in a cocoon and chanting in a language that sounded Indian to me. After eight hours he emerged from his cocoon smiling, looking beatific and saying nothing. Very mysterious.
Afterwards, when I asked him what language he’d been chanting, he said English. I objected that it didn’t sound remotely like English but very much like some Indian tongue. He said that was just my own mental confusion, a peyote hallucination. When I asked him what he’d been chanting about, he said he’d been chanting “in praise of everything,” as he put it. Just what an Indian shaman might do, I commented. He ridiculed the thought. But if he really believed he’d been chanting English, he was out of …
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Author: High Times / High Times
