Updated 1 year ago
When I was in college in the late 80s at the University of Texas at Austin, I became friends with a gang of skinheads. As I had bleached my hair blonde and called myself Han, they saw me as Nordic. Not that it really mattered. Though they were all White Power, in practice they didn’t really give a shit. One of them, Elbow, was Mexican, and the leader, a human bowling ball named Mark Dagger, was known to spare Jews if he ran into a one he liked:
They weren’t terribly organized or even overtly political. Back then they were just a subset of the counterculture. I myself wasn’t a Nazi, but as I couldn’t really escape them in the Austin scene – there were about 50 of them and they were everywhere – I decided to co-opt them in case I ever needed muscle. Forget for a moment why a college student would need “muscle,” but I had plans.
I hitched a ride with a few up to Dallas, where I would buy speed and sell acid then do the reverse in Austin. Although they apparently beat up random people with their steel-toe Doc Martins in Deep Ellum, I wasn’t around for any of that, I was in the fabled Starck Club moving drugs, doing things like write my number on a sheet of acid for a pretty girl… But in retrospect, it makes me sick to my stomach thinking I was associating with these people. and I have never “looked the other way” since.
All the while, I was thinking, “keep your friends close, and enemies closer.” I had fed them so much acid they couldn’t fight, and on the drive back I heard one of them was tripping so hard he kicked his friend instead of the black guy the friend was holding down. So I felt I did my little part.
(Note: Many years later, in 2003, I learned that the Hammerskins came from Dallas around this time, and that one of them shot up the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin after running into me at a random outdoor party.)
Back in Austin, I even designed a Nazi flyer, in jest:
This alliance with the skins sometimes came in handy.
For example, one time, some friends were having a birthday party for Eunice, who was black and a good friend of mine.
Some of her friend’s fraternity boyfriends were there, with her friends. Chugging beer.
Meanwhile, a lot of us gothy 80s clubby kids were there.
And finally, about ten skinheads. I told them to be nice to Eunice. So they behaved and just milled around and did the usual, looking for free drinks, hazing their young recruits by hanging them out the window by their Docs and yelling, DO YOU REALLY WANNA BE A SKINHEAD!?!?! and asking where the ska and punk music was at.
So inevitably one of the frat guys starts going around to the gothy kids, Robert Smith lookalikes, calling them faggot.
Then he came up to me and said “Hey faggot!” I started yelling at him threatening him, calling him a frat bitch. He was like “Chill bro, just testing you” and was about to give me a friendly fist bump.
Then Mark Dagger, the leader of the skins, sees me arguing with him. So Mark comes up and punches the guy through a plate-glass window.
Then everyone leaves, Eunice is furious, Mark and all the skins hug her and say they were sorry.
I call out the guy who was hit, who was ready to have another go at it, “Chill, dude. Mark Dagger was just testing you.”
That felt good.
In 1987 I lived in a clothing-optional hippie compound at the time called the Ark. It had a swimming pool in the middle. My room was one big bed – I lived next to where Farrah Fawcett Majors had lived. Everyone had sex with everyone else, to the point where when someone had gotten chlamydia, a huge portion of the Ark was in line at the UT health center.
I remember getting high and having sex with Kelly Nichols, a sweet dark haired Jewish beauty who later on became Alex Jones’ ex-wife. It was heaven. There was a Loud Hall, where I lived, a Gay Ghetto, the Meat Hall, and a Quiet Hall.
I invited the skinheads over on occasion. I didn’t have any Skrewdriver, which was their favorite band, so I played the Sex Pistols and the Clash. It was funny seeing all the gays, blacks, Jews, Asians, Mexicans, lesbians, and the skins all in one place. This was painted on my door:
The Ark was full of drug dealing, and, seeing an easy way for a poor student to make a buck, I joined in, buying pounds of weed and selling ounces. I even bought a triple beam scale from a pawn shop. I eventually graduated to selling LSD, as it was a lot less fuss. I’d buy the sheet of 100 tabs for about a hundred dollars, and sell it for about 250.
Little did I realize at the same time, my skinhead friends were going to high schools in adjacent, ultraconservative Williamson County, and selling drugs to kids.
You can pretty much tell what’s about to happen here.
The police got wind of drug activity, got some narcs involved, and pretty soon I was in jail for selling LSD to minors. As they were rounding us up, the cop told me if I didn’t tell them of any other drug dealers, he was going to put me “in a cell with a nigger who would butt fuck me.” I shook my head, I wasn’t going to squeal. Yet at the moment they led me into jail, I heard one deep voice come out from the cell, “I want that blonde.”
Thankfully, my rectum stayed untouched over the weekend.
Long story short, I received probation. I went through about a year trying to justify my previous actions. My ego needed some sort of way to not have to admit I did anything wrong by selling LSD to kids.
So I embraced anarchism, holding rallies and psychedelic festivals on campus.
I wrote for the student paper, The Daily Texan, as “the anarchist columnist.” The famous Mike Godwin, who created Godwin’s Law, was the Editor in Chief. I also wrote for the Polemist, the local radical paper.
Once after chugging too many beers with Scott Henson, a fellow columnist at The Daily Texan and also the Polemicist, I vandalized the Jefferson Davis statue on campus. He was the President of the Confederacy. A couple of lesbian cops came to my apartment and noticed that the same red paint
was also the same paint and handwriting used to deface a sorority next door to where I lived, where I had written “we Want Whites Only” on the sidewalk. They also asked if i was related to Kathy Whitmire, the lesbian mayor of Houston. I said, “Sadly, no.” I was even called in for questioning, and the detective told me that he had interrogated all the other radicals, including the Steve Biko Committee, who were about as cooperative as “that chair…” The chairman of the local Steve Biko Committee later thanked me for doing this vandalism, which meant a lot to me.
The police knew I did it but could not charge me. After placing a hydrochloric-aluminum bomb near a UT building, and calling it in, and not having it reported, I gave up on political violence.
Moving my revolution to a personal level, I then started squatting up on the top roof floor of the building I lived, growing weed plants, with the tacit approval of the super, until the owner switched supers and threatened to evict me. I finally got out.
I had gone from being paranoid about “that knock on the door” that every drug dealer faces, to being paranoid about “FBI files” that every anarchist activist faces. All the pressure eventually got the better of me. I decided to actually try to just do things the right way. I took Ayn Rand and a more right-wing libertarian outlook seriously, celebrating our invasion of Iraq in between Riccoloa commercials on CNN. My life immediately turned around, I got in the Dean’s List consistently, graduated with honors, and made it to NYC.
I still held a place in my heart for the psychedelic drugs. It was my personal religion. That is one source of beauty from which you can never forget, and the memory just compounds in time. My eyes were still dilated from strong MDA the day I drove off in the moving truck.
Having decided to plumb the straight and narrow, I blossomed in New York. I spent 5 years of working in advertising, and in one glorious weekend back in Austin got all my legal records expunged. I was making good money, living an affluent and exciting lifestyle, going to the Harvard Club, eating at the best steakhouses in midtown, shopping at Barney’s and Brooks Brothers, golfing with the heads of the Wall Street Journal, attending the 1996 Olympics, and generally feeling like “I had arrived.”
When my parents came up I took them to Bouley, the best restaurant in town. Once I took my mom to a huge party in Imelda Marcos’ old apartment at Dag Hammarskold Plaza, with huge closets for all her shoes, and as we were heading out I noticed girls were taking off their clothes and jumping in the pool. I went out every night to the hottest party on any given evening, for years.
Once near my house in Chelsea, which was all painted silver, the mafia had set up a casino. I put on a suit, went in, with some coke, weed and my grandfather’s pipe, and started to scan the scene for available nonworking girls. A pound at the door. Cops came in. Made everyone walk a gauntlet to get out. I ditched my pipe with the drugs under a table.
I distinctly remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where Christopher Walken carried his dad’s pipe in his ass for years as a POW, and realized with dismay the dishonor I was bringing to my grandfather.
All through the 90s, when New York nightlife was the best it had ever been, or arguably, will ever be, almost every night I was out, scanning time Out New York for special events and parties, and a big phone network of party hounds. Usually, Mondays was when I caught up on sleep.
Once the tabloid show American Journal contacted me to be on a show for Heroin. They gave me heroin in the penthouse at the Marriot Marquis, filmed me snorting it, and followed me as I walked down to Peter Gatien’s Club USA, where I parted the crowds like Moses. Inside, with neon signs that said DRUGS, wearing Gaultier sunglasses, and a film crew in tow, I met a nice young actress from Idaho and we dated for several years.
I was also on the Discovery Channel discussing Ketamine, MTV discussing MDMA, and CBS 48 Hours had a special about MDMA that was filmed in my apartment.
Yet even with all this craziness, and connection with thousands of people in my Rolodex, I felt empty, like a replaceable cog in a huge machine. It was a truism I had learned about New York – in a city with thousands of people, you can feel completely alone. Maybe I was just spoiled. But as I wasn’t particularly religious or spiritual outside of my LSD experiences in Austin, I wanted to explore my unique potential in the world. I started hearing about the rave scene being resurgent, and psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna, and I was intrigued. So I swung back into psychedelics, hard.
After seeing my first rave in San Francisco in 1995, I bought a set of “brain machines” (blinking light glasses) and started setting them up with lawn chairs at raves and clubs. I went to Twilo every Friday with them, but after once in 1998 Sasha & Digweed’s manager stopped me because of a seizure hazard, I angrily went to the “dirtier” side of trance, goa trance.
Goa trance had picked up from the rave scene, which had pretty much died due to a huge gang of thieves and thugs called the BTS (Brooklyn Terror Squad).
This was a potential problem for the outlaw scene, where we had free all-night parties out in distant dark ghettoes. The hippy music sort of repelled stupid people, but the stuff to steal surely didn’t.
Remembering my times with the Austin skinheads, I attempted to co-opt them, but soon found they were too disorganized and didn’t really have a hierarchy. So I ended up befriending some of the smarter ones, such as 666’s mastermind, Punk, who led a cabal of sorcerors…
..and I ostracized the rest.
This was all mostly me. Although I certainly had backup when in large numbers, most of the trancers were completely useless – and I didn’t do it for them anyway. I did it for my crazy monomaniacal plans.
Once at a bridge four local toughs were going around robbing ravers. I eventually approached them, told them they had to stop or I was going to “fucking shut down this party right fucking now,” and then offered a peace offering with four sugar cubes of LSD. 800 mics each.
It worked, they meandered off and were never seen again.
Once Israelis had promoted a massive bridge party, handing out flyers with the location even to all the record stores so everyone came. There, Jacob and an Israeli got seriously assaulted. I visite the Israeli, Edi whose face had been mangled. He played for me Roger Waters’ Amused to Death. Six years later, I found the perpetrator and he explained he on was PCP and had reformed. I let it go.
I made a shitlist on this website, detailing all manner of thuggery. I included a guy who beat up his girlfriend and then ran off to Germany to rape a girl and a druggy friend who was a borderline child molester. One long negotiation with his godfather later, I removed it from the site and he became completely reformed.
There were even some Russian thugs that had to be dealt with. There were two of them that tried to rob me, holding my finger as if to break it, I started yelling, people came, they dispersed. I eventually just gave them a lot of LSD.
That was the third time I’ve fixed thugs with acid, I realized. And they became trancers, even my henchmen, even helping me clear out some BTS, who vandalized their car in retaliation.
So we succeeded in keeping out the worse elements. I even lost some teeth over it while harassing a huge Jamaican thief named Troll over a microphone while DJing. I was saved by Pam, who stopped him from stomping my face while I was out cold. I later pointed him out to police, and he went to jail. An Israeli friend with a history of violence (he was a stabber) offered to kill him, and even though we could have gotten away with it – to the police, it would have been just another black thug dead – but I decided against it.
Killing people to me seemed to cross a line. Like, it’s permanent, and did I really want that hanging over me for life? Of course not.
I generally was never the aggressor, though I did throw someone down a flight of stairs once. He deserved it.
But I would ask myself, I am a college graduate with a career in advertising. What have I become?
Still, I stood firm. They would have to kill me to stop me.
The stage was set to make some money, and expand some minds.
While back in Houston I ran into an old friend that sold me a gram of pure purple crystal LSD for $13,0000. This was the same famous LSD made by the infamous Harvard chemist William Leonard Pickard, in a missile silo in Kansas. This was enough for 10,000 strong doses. He also sold me a quarter-pound of weed, which I put in my parachute pants and stunk up first class on the flight back. Ah, the pre-9/11 days.
After a ritual where I some weirdos come over as I added high-proof grapeseed extract with the powder, I eventually added most of the crystal LSD to mint breath freshener, and about a quarter I put on Pez candy.
I would put one drop of acid on each pez candy, and kept them in containers that held ten. It was ideal short term storage.
When I made the Pez, I had to drop from a breath freshener bottle onto each Pez. As a table I used a glassed print of Dali, the Persistence of Memory.
Although there was a minty-Pezzy-LSD residue all over the glass, I left it there, so that occasionally some people could lick it and trip. Which was funny, because some DID start licking my walls after coming over, and they didn’t even know about the Dali. They were just trying to deliver a compliment using a Willy Wonka reference.
But the synchronicity didn’t end there. Salvador Dali’s nephew Jeffrey, who I knew from the uptown society scene, came to my house while two Bulgarian friends were laying down the Pez. He was with a blonde woman 20 years younger and a foot and a half taller and said “Jeff, I hear you have the best acid in NYC. Lets trade” and he pulled out a tall jar of coke. He liked to mix it with Ketamine. I showed him our little Dali project. He laughed so hard.
I was living on 51st street in midtown at the time. My late night schedule was getting the better of me – often I would come home and put one foot in bed, then the alarm would go off to wake up. I got served an eviction notice for noise. I paid my lawyer friend by letting him grab the most weed he could out of my bag with one hand. I moved in with James on West 47th. James’s place served as a hotel for psychedelic pioneers such as Stanislav Grof and Christian Ratsch, and Talamasca. He didn’t let me store all my Pez in the freezer, because there was a big MDMA bust going around, so I kept it in my room, which has a huge space heater blowing hot air around everything. Remember this little fact as we progress into this story.
Over the summer, James was going to travel, and he didn’t trust me there with his thousands of dollars of music production equipment and computers, so I had to find a place to live for the summer.
So I decided to move down into a squat in Tribeca on 146 Duane Street.
The whole building was slated for demolition, except for Wylie And Pete, who were the last holdouts, and were fighting eviction. The place across the hall from them was open. It was then I recognized the building. I had visited the room above this one – 3D – ten years prior, when I visited friends while in college.
Taking this as a good sign, I moved in all my party supplies and clothes into 2D. It had high ceilings – at least 15′. Pretty soon it became party central. I had a couple of Mackie self-amplified loudspeakers, Pioneer CDJs with an FX box, enough for a long sustained party. I was running the Trip Out New York trance event email list.
A DJ from San Francisco moved in, Aaron oCeLoT, and started cavorting with various women of ill repute.
“I first met the Machine Elf in 2001 when he invited me to stay with him in a squat in Tribeca. I repaid him by boring a hole in the wall into the next unit, which, although vacant, contained a mannequin, a harpoon (decorative I’m sure), and a bunch of sweaters. Wiley actually created the hole initially, with a plastic head. I just sorta squared it out into a doorway approximately two feet wide and 6 feet tall. When the Machine Elf awoke from his slumber he was not pleased. I patched this breach into the next unit with some wallboard, spackle, and paint. You could hardly tell there was ever a hole because, in addition to my Trance Music Production Skills, I’m a damn good sheetrock/ spackler.” We also found a whole designer’s apartment full of clothes. And then a dungeon with bondage stuff with Planet of the Apes memorabilia and cages. It was like a real-life dungeon crawler video game.
I continued to inject Ketamine into my arm, which caused my consciousness to travel to an intergalactic astral plane where I could the din of billions of alien intelligences, with me as their point man. An abscess was starting to develop on my left bicep from all the shooting. I could buy needles legally at pharmacies but this one girl at the counter gave me a lot of shit over it so often I re-used the needles.
Back on this plane of existence, my right-hand man Stefan told me that this whole setup was either gonna end up massive or completely reamed by the cops.
The summer of 2001 was banging. There were always a dozen or so people there, sometimes many more. At some point, one of my friends, a fire twirler named Charity had gone down to Palenque, Mexico for a psychedelic ethobotanical conference, the kind of place where elderly German psychedelic gurus loaded on coke and K swapped wives. As she swung back to New York, she brought her new acquaintance, Daniel Pinchbeck, in tow.
Daniel tried to heal me from my Ketamine addiction. He said that when I injected it, my soul would get further and further separated from my body. He told me that while my consciousness was roaming around demons were selling my organs on the astral plane, and after that, every time I got high I would start to see a crowd of demons around me, and the biggest most articulate one would wear an Armani suit and push them all away and say, where do you want to go today? the Big Bang? The edge of the known universe? I’ll take you there heh hehe heh
…and that when I died, my soul would take hundreds of years to… progress? He took a strange head tickler wire object I had picked up in Amsterdam and tried to whisk away all the bad spirits in the warren of rooms, going WHOOOOOSHHHH WHOOOOOSHHHHHHH
Daniel later wrote about me in his book Breaking Open the Head:
“A few Burners never return to the mainstream. In New York, I met J., formerly the advertising director of a major business magazine. After he went to Burning Man, he aborted his career and morphed into a mad-eyed avatar of outdoor parties and trance music, living on the bohemian margin of New York — a thin margin these days. He christened himself “Machine Elf,” dressing as a sci-fi warlock with horns and cape at all-night outlaw parties he orchestrated under the city’s bridges.”
Little did i realize, that the carefree fin de siècle era was coming to a close. 9/11 was right around the corner, and the screws would start to tighten.
Eventually, the building supervisor, John Marshall, who had a mustache and a corvette, and worked for building owner Allen LeBoz, tried to change the locks on my door. I confronted him. “You’ve got balls,” he said, admiringly.
Calling his bluff, I called the police, and hurriedly put on my best Brooks Brothers casual summer outfit. About eight cops showed up – it must have been a slow day – and Marshall produced a lease agreement that showed HE was living there. I told the police I had been there a month and was about to move out.
The police told me I had to leave, and they were going to sit there and watch me pack up, so I better hurry up.
One of the cops walked around my apartment bemusedly. He saw my Viking helmet sitting on my bookcase, and put it on, singing “Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!” Everyone laughed.
Those words would be my downfall.
They stopped laughing.
Right where the helmet had been was a jar of white powder. Ketamine.
“Sit down, Mr. W_,” the ranking police officer said, as more police were called in, as they immediately started looking under the stack of books and belongings where the Viking helmet has been. They eventually found a tennis bag full of Pez dispensers, and each Pez had a curious indentation on it, like a liquid had been dropped on it and dried.
I was handcuffed, and while sitting in my Eams chair, I suddenly remembered that I had a wallet full of cash and Ecstasy. Thinking that MDMA may have been in a higher class of controlled substance than Ketamine, I thought fast. While the other cops were looking through other rooms, I noticed only one cop was in my area. I got his attention, and I pulled out my silver hologram wallet with hundreds sticking out of it, and said, “you may wanna take this.” I never saw it again.
They had the Pez, but I knew I had many bottles of liquid LSD, but I thankfully had cleverly hidden them inside my Mackie speakers, screwing them back in days before.
I was taken down to the precinct. A couple of narcs were called in and asked me what the hell I was doing. I told them I was encountering a lot of aliens and that I was working for them. A cop asked another “what the heck is Ketamine?” and the other replied it was what gay men did so they can butt fuck each other more easily. They laughed, and I resisted the urge to angrily say it was about the aliens.
They had also taken my Sony VAIO laptop. It was a marvelous feat of engineering, with a built-in camera with many special effects, and Windows Millenial Edition. It was able to fit inside the pocket of cargo pants and was connected to the citywide Ricochet network, offering broadband Internet access. It was basically a 2001 version of a modern smartphone, 10 years ahead of its time. Anyway, I had it rigged so that when its batteries went low, you would hear HAL from 2000 a Space Odyssey to say “My mind is going. I can feel it”
So it said that, right there, at the police station, and the police freaked out, thinking it was a bomb. This was in the early days of computers, and they weren’t used to such wizardry.
In the jail cell, I noticed the abscess on my left bicep had gotten to the point where it wasn’t going away and looked like it was getting infected.
After a day or two in the Tombs, I met with my court-appointed attorney, an ex-DA who was trying to make it in the private sector. We went in for my arraignment for a bail hearing. The DA said that I was running a drug lab, with strange powders and bags and scales and “nootropics” and beakers. The judge turned to my attorney, who said, “Your Honor, my client just got laid off from the Economist, and has been interviewing. Someone told him he could move in there temporarily, and it became party central with many people. Who knows who owned what.”
The judge turned to the DA, called him a butthead, and said that I was to be released on my own recognizance.
I wasn’t out of the hole yet. Due to Rockefeller Laws, drugs were to be weighted including whatever they were on. This means that I was to be charged for the weight of the LSD including the weight of the Pez candy.
I was sunk, the attorney told me. He said that I was facing 25 years, and that defending me was way above his pay grade.
So I cashed in my 401K and hired the president of the New York State Bar and took $10,000 from me as a retainer. It was all I had, and it was a gamble, because there was no money after that, and if the court wen to trial I would be in the red.
So. I waited for the test results of the Pez candy. And waited. And waited.
In the meantime, I played cat and mouse with the old building supervisor. The apartment had police tape all around it, and had cops and detectives going in and out for days. I wanted my stuff back. So he had me slip $300 in an envelope under his door, and he left it open one day.
While inside, I immediately noticed all my speakers and audio equipment were all gone. Everything that had a plug. To this day, I don’t know if it was the cops or the super who got them. But little did they realize there were bottles and bottles of LSD in the speakers. My friend Mark Lorenz helped me move everything out. I found some bottles of Ketamine that the cops didn’t take and immediately injected them. Back in business!!
I distinctly remember hitting the sides of the tunnel driving out to Brooklyn like I was playing bumper cars, and pieces of the moving truck falling off.
I still feel bad, because Wylie paid for the truck, and lost his deposit due to fender damage. I eventually secured most of my belongings at my friend Michel’s house, who had just done tons of acid and began dressing like a pirate for the upcoming Mermaid Parade, and had gotten fired for overloading the ad agency where he worked at’s printers to make flyers for it. Michel was nice, always offering me a Winston, even while some Russian girl who he had a crush on, Dasha, had a crush on me. Uncomfortable! I withdrew for a while, setting up my old desktop in his closet and played Warcraft 3 while I ruminated my next step.
Even though I was under a lot of stress, I still threw a party on a tugboat, with Frank Owen, a journalist from the Village Voice, who wrote about our little scene.
Just as all the acid that was hidden away in the speakers was probably stale, the actual evidence they had on me – the pounds of Pez – was apparently weak. Eventually, my case was dropped. The Pez, having been under a heater in my previous apartment, had lost all potency, and had apparently tested negative. Plus, I had the head of the New York Criminal Bar as my attorney. Plus 9/11 had just happened. All this amounted to me walking.
I decided to push my luck and began throwing parties in the same building on the rooftop penthouse, covered in fluoro blue in a white bathrobe. Wylie was kind enough to step forward and buy a Mackie sound system.
After scrubbing and alcohol, the abscess in my bicep slowly went down. The scar remains today of a troubled direction I had taken. A blind alley.
So it was like I never left. I thought things would go back to normal, but I didn’t realize at the time that the biggest tragedy in this story was not any of my legal hassles, but the aforementioned William Leonard Pickard, which you can watch here. He’s in prison for life. Thanks to him, I and many thousands of others had been riding a wave of very pure and powerful LSD, and the wave was gone. And with 9/11, our country entered a horrible new phase of death and destruction.
After two close calls with dealing LSD, and two evictions that could have gone horribly wrong, and dealing two different criminal gangs, I asked myself,
Why be so fucking extreme!?!
I didn’t have to be a corporate drone trading my life for my 401K, nor did I also have to be a drug swilling anarchist.
I had to break out of this destructive pattern! There had to be a different reality tunnel where I didn’t end up dead.
There was a middle ground, somewhere, through that forest, and I was determined to find it.
I decided that my thirst for rebellion was sated, and that I would never do these illegal things again, and that I could find ways to be creative and subversive that would not lead me to death or imprisonment.
I’ve been almost completely sober even from alcohol for a decade. I have no criminal record. I never went bankrupt. I didn’t end up in prison, like the skinhead at the beginning of this tale, Mark Dagger, did, for 25 years for murder. Or this guy:
Related: William Leonard Pickering to be Released from Prison
I’m going back to New York once Coronavirus is over, this time straight clean for good. There will be more stories, but no drugs, rebellion, or gangs. And I don’t care if it sucks. My people are there.
