Night Beat (67 page)

Some people close to Leary believe that Susan had never been the same since the Laredo arrest and trial—that she held herself to blame for her father’s subsequent troubles, and that, like her mother, she had grown depressed and withdrawn over the years. Others claim that Susan had always loved her father powerfully, and that all the years and events that kept him from her—the arrests, the flights, all the many girlfriends and wives—ate away at her. Regardless of the causes, Susan’s suicide hit Leary hard—a blow that many of those close to him feel he never really recovered from. “I don’t think he could push that one away so easily,” says Ram Dass. “I remember speaking with him on the phone and feeling a surprising vulnerability in Tim that I wasn’t used to hearing.”

The news of Susan’s death also came as a terrible blow to Rosemary, who had been living on the East Coast under an assumed name, still a fugitive. “I’d been angry with him for a long time,” she says, “but I’d been having dreams about them prior to her death, about Susan and Tim and myself in some bucolic setting with streams running and the three of us very happy. Which wasn’t the case when the three of us were together. I was the wicked stepmother for most of our married life. So I knew I was being taught something, or told something, about Tim and Susan, and about my heart. And then, when she died, it was so
hard.
And I knew how hard it would be for him.”

Rosemary, who hadn’t spoken with Timothy or anybody close to him since 1972, called Ram Dass, who put her in touch with Tim. “We met in Golden Gate Park,” she says. “It was a great romantic meeting. When I left him in Switzerland, we were quarreling, so to meet him and find that our love was still there—the love that we had for one another—was just incredible. It validated so much for me to know that about him and about myself, and to have given up the anger and the hurt that I had felt. The emotion involved in all that just opened the way for me to love Tim again.”

Leary put Rosemary in touch with a lawyer and helped her resolve her fugitive status. “It was extremely easy,” she says. “I had lived such a remarkable and paranoid life for so long, never sure who to trust or what to say. It was liberating to be free of all that. I just got my California driver’s license with my name on it.”

Rosemary began to see Tim often. She was impressed, she said, by how open his heart now seemed. But she also saw other changes. “I could tell he wasn’t feeling wonderful. He’d always had an amazing constitution; I’d never known him to be ill, even with a cold.” And then, around Christmas 1994, after a strenuous lecture tour, Leary was felled by a bout of pneumonia. “It was his first taste of mortality in terms of his body,” says Rosemary, “and I think it was devastating for him to find himself so ill, and then not bounce back from it.”

It turned out to be more than pneumonia. The doctors had determined that Leary had contracted prostate cancer, and it was inoperable. With the right treatment, they might be able to keep him alive for a year or two. Leary later told reporters he was “exhilarated” by the news. This would be the start of his greatest adventure—a conscious and loving journey into death. He called his friends—Rosemary, Ram Dass, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and many others—and shared with them his excitement. “That’s just the epitome of his personality,” says his stepson Zach. “I guess it made perfect sense that he would feel that way about it. But when he was first disclosing it, I was much sadder than he was. I said, “God, how could you
feel
like that?’ But to him it was just another card in the hand—the death card. And now I have to say I’ve learned so much from him in these last few months.”

Indeed, it seems the knowledge of his death brought out a gentle and transcendent quality in Timothy Leary. “He’s more emotionally available now,” says Ram Dass, “which is remarkable, because he’s never handled his emotions at all. I mean, he’s always been a very friendly person—fun and vibrant and stimulating, and all that—but deep emotions have been delicate to play with historically with Timothy. He’s lived more on the surface of events and things rather than the slower, deeper rhythms of emotions. The last few times I saw him he was very much there, and that thrilled me. When we would look into each other’s eyes, he was looking at me about death. We never said words about it, we never acknowledged it other than doing it, but it gave me the conviction that he isn’t afraid of death. He knows he’s going after one of the darkest secrets of the society, and it’s humbled him in an interesting way.”

There’s also something about Leary’s awareness of death’s imminence that heightened his sense of play. In the last few months, there was nonstop activity around his home, and much of it was geared to fun stuff—dinners, outings to midnight rock & roll shows, around the clock visits by well-wishers and friends. “Silly silliness is being performed as a high art here,” he told me one afternoon, with utter joy.

A good example of Leary’s latter-day high art silliness is an event that became known as “Wheelchair Day.” One day Leary decided to round up as many wheelchairs as possible, load his staff and friends into them, and hold wheelchair races on Sunset Strip, then wheel into the House of Blues, for a luncheon, designed on the model of DaVinci’s
The Last Supper.
After the event, Leary was riding back to his house in the rented convertible of his friend, Internet rights activist and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, with two of the young women from his staff, Trudy Truelove and Camella Grace, in the back seat. The radio was blasting as they headed west on Sunset, and Trudy and Camella were sitting on the car’s trunk, goofing and making dancing gestures. Leary looked at Barlow, smiled, and shouted: “Life is good!” That was when Barlow glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw the flashing red and yellow lights of a Beverly Hills police car—and realized that the car he was driving was perhaps not entirely free of illegal substances. Shit, he thought to himself, Tim Leary’s last bust.

Barlow rolled down his window and said to the officer: “I know what we were doing was wrong. But you see, my friend here is dying, and we’re trying to show him a good time.” Barlow later told me he’d never forget the look that Tim gave the policeman: “Caught in the act of dying like he had his hand in the cookie jar.”

The officer smiled back at Leary, then turned to Trudy and Camella. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say that looks like fun,” he said, “but just because
he’s
dying doesn’t mean you should. Now get down in the seat and buckle up and I’ll let you go.”

When they pulled back into traffic, Leary turned to Barlow, laughed, and said: “What a fucking gift
that
was!”

NOT EVERYBODY, though, was enamored of the gallows humor of Leary and his troop.

On the night of the wheelchair-race caper, I arrived at Leary’s to find an ambulance outside his house, being loaded with his cryonics coffin. It turned out that a short time before, a team from CryoCare—the outfit that was to undertake the freezing and preservation of Leary’s brain upon his death—had come in to remove all their equipment.

For some time, a tension had been building up between the CryoCare representatives and Leary’s crew. CryoCare felt that Leary and his staff had shown disrespect for their equipment by decorating it with lights and toys, and also believed that some people at the house had been trying to keep CryoCare’s technicians away from Leary. More important, CryoCare’s Mike Darwin had grown alarmed about Leary’s pronouncements about his plan to commit suicide live (so to speak) on the World Wide Web. Darwin did not feel that his organization (whose brochure bears the motto, MANY ARE COLD, BUT FEW ARE FROZEN) could afford to be involved in what he termed a potential crime scene, or that they should leave their equipment in a house where illegal drugs may be present or used.

For their part, the Leary folks had become increasingly put off by what they regarded as CryoCare’s ghoulish interest in obtaining the head of Timothy Leary. The problem was only exacerbated when they learned that a CryoCare official who would be involved with the decapitation and freezing process, Charles Platt, had an assignment to write about the operation for
Wired
magazine. (Platt had also been sending serial e-mail to various parties, expressing his disdain for the Leary staff and his impatience with Leary for not dying as soon as had been expected. “What insane will to live,” he wrote in one letter.)

In any event, CryoCare’s actions left Leary with a decision to make: He could either sign on quickly with another cryonics outfit, or he could accept that his death would be final—that his brain would not be preserved for some indeterminate future attempt at reanimation. In the end, he decided against cryonics. “I have no real great desire to do it,” he told me. “I just felt it was my duty to futurism and the process of smart dying.”

Leary’s decision was not a small thing for him. He once told me that he did not believe that anything human survived beyond death, and that if we possess a soul, then the soul is our mind, and the brain is the soul’s home. By forgoing cryonics, Timothy Leary decided that even if he could, he would not return. His immortality, instead, would be his work and his legend, and it was his hope that those things would find an ongoing life on the World Wide Web site that had become his most prized dream in his final season.

IT IS NOT LONG after this that the end came. One afternoon I had to drop something by Tim’s place and we had a brief conversation. He was in the best spirits and most cogent form I’d seen him in. He told me touching stories about his relationship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (about how Lennon had written “Come Together” for Tim when Leary was thinking about running for Governor of California, but then thought twice about it and kept it for the Beatles) and about how he had tried to warn Yoko that New York’s Dakota was too risky a place—too exposed, too accessible—for a man like Lennon to live. “I wish I’d been wrong about that one,” he said, looking at the large photo above his bed of himself and Rosemary with Lennon and Ono during the recording of “Give Peace a Chance.” I left that day looking forward to visiting and talking with him some more.

A few days later I received a call from Zachary. “It looks like Tim is going today. You should come up soon if you want to say goodbye.”

Zach later told me: “Tim just decided he couldn’t live in that body any more and he wanted to get out. The key moment for him was when he went to take a shower last week and he stopped and looked at himself in the mirror, naked. That was all he needed to know. He was very clear and lucid and he looked at his body and saw it was pathetic and it was below his quality of life.” That night, Leary called Zach and the house staff around him at the table and said: “Can you go on without me?”

“It was like he was asking for our permission,” said Zach.

The morning that Zach called me, Tim had got out of bed and climbed into his motorized wheelchair and rode all over his ranch house. He stopped in the back yard where he sat drinking a cup of coffee, looking at the flowers that were coming to bloom in his garden. Then he said, “I’m tired. I’m going to take a nap,” and wheeled back into his bedroom. A short while later his nurse summoned Zach and told him he should notify anybody who might want to see him one last time.

I sat for about an hour with several other people that afternoon and watched Leary as he slept. Occasionally he woke, smiled, took sips on the ice that the nurse gave him, and once or twice tried to say something. At one point, he opened his eyes wide and said: “Flash!”

Later, around 9 P.M., I made another visit to his bedroom. The only illumination in the room was a string of Christmas lights, on the wall above Leary’s bed. Zach sat close, holding his stepfather’s hand. Tim opened his eyes briefly at one point, looked at Zach, smiled, and said softly, “Beautiful.”

It was the last thing Timothy Leary said.