—"Dead Man. Walking, Nixon, Babe, some documentary," the purple-haired girl reads off the labels on the tapes.
—"Susan gave me those, you know," Leary says, referring to longtime friend Susan Sarandon, who has been smuggling him the special promotional tapes sent to Academy Members. "Take whatever you want. I've seen them all already."
—He stares at the writing on one of the cassettes, drifting into deep thought.
—"Oliver Stone's here," the assistant reminds him. "Out on the back porch."
—"I know that!" Tim says, as if he didn't care who it was. "So, let's go."
—His bandaged hand (bleeding cancer sores) nimbly manipulates the chair's joystick, sending Leary careening through a strobe-lit bedroom doorway into the powder-blue faux-fur-lined corridor that leads to the rest of Leary's rented Beverly Hills home. Paintings too numerous to display lay on the floor while plastic, mirrors, and fabric cover every other surface, even the windows. The house is a day-glo catacomb.
—Tim crashes into a signed Kenny Sharf, then stops short again.
—"Is Kenny coming this week? We have to make sure to put it up! Somewhere nice." Tim likes visiting artists to see themselves on the walls.
—He gets distracted again, and slowly reaches up towards a light switch. The movement makes him grimace, but he's committed to the task, and carefully flicks the switch on and off again, waiting around for a light to respond Nothing.
—"Go find a lightbulb."
—"We're out," the assistant answers, sheepishly fingering the small silver hoop in her navel. "We'll get some more tomorrow."
—"Oh well," Tim says, nearly running over the girl's foot with the tire of his chair as he barrels out towards the sunny living room.
— "Hi hi hi!" he shouts to the assembled guests. The movie director and two stars, some old Harvard pals, a rock musician and three newspaper journalists waiting for deathbed interviews all sit around the room making contacts drinking Leary's wine, smoking his pot, or holding onto something they want Leary to sign or otherwise legitimize. Everybody but Stone and a psychedelics expert from the Bay Area - who are deep into a conversation about a crack in the dashboard of Kennedy's limo - break off their activities and turn to Leary, crown jewel of a waning psychedelic empire.
—A stranger to the home is the first to greet Leary. The young man bends down and patronizingly spaces his syllables.
—"Hi Tim-o-thy," he says. "How are you?"
—"Dying," Leary responds without a pause. "How do you think I am?"
—Timothy Leary has been rehearsing his death for thirty years. As a longtime admirer and personal friend of Leary's for the past ten years, I was alternatively thrilled and disgusted by the circus attending him at his final departure For a man who invented the notion of 'set and setting' as the key prognosticated for the quality of a psychedelic session, Tim engineered an environment and mindset for this, his ultimate trip, that were at once inspiring and horrifying. —Leary always saw psychedelics as practice for the final process of de-animation that the rest of us call death One of his early books on LSD, The Psychedelic Experience is an adaptation of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead that Leary and his Harvard cohorts believed was a guide not only to the final exit into the post-life, but for the test-run of that journey experienced on LSD.
—Leary began his death act as a continuation of his lifelong stage show - a confirmation of his devil-may-care repudiation of obsolete social customs, from prosecution of drug-users to the persecution of smokers. On learning of his inoperable prostate cancer, he realized he was smack in the middle of another great taboo: dying. And once again, true to character, he wasn't about to surrender to the fear and shame we associate with death in modern times. No, this was going to be a party. A celebration. Our media-sawy cultural renegade was going to milk it for every second of airtime and column of newsprint it was worth. Timothy Leary, High Priest of LSD and Champion of Cyberspace was back.
—First, there was the "75th and Final Birthday Party', in October 95, at which Timothy and about 500 of his closest friends - ranging from Tony Curtis and Liza Minelli to Perry Farrel and Yoko Ono - consumed champagne, nitrous oxide, and a giant birthday cake meticulously designed from 1960's blotter-acid art into a mosaic of Leary's head. We praised him and then we ate him, all courtesy of a generous catering budget from film director Tony Scott. As the sun came up on the revelers the next morning, workmen on the bluff overhead bulldozed the last remains of the Sharon Tate house, where Charlie Manson's family had a party of a very different sort, giving Leary's vision of a psychedelic future for America a decidedly darker media spin.
—Then there was the Web site (www.leary.com) Tutankhamen in cyberspace. The thoughts, texts and images of Timothy's life uploaded into the datasphere for eternity. The next best thing to consciousness on a microchip, the web site was designed to live on long after his death, growing ever bigger as Leary's tremendous thousand-carton archive is scanned and digitized, and visitors contribute essays or converse in chat rooms. To promote the dying agenda, Leary listed his daily drug intake, both legal and illegal, as well as the status of his disease.
—A big book deal (which I packaged) soon followed. Design for Dying will be published by HarperCollins next Spring. In it, Leary argues for taking charge of one's own death process, from cryonic freezing of the brain to assisted suicide. A detailed appendix gives readers the chance to calculate their own 'Quality of Life Scorecards,' so that they may more accurately assess their desire to stay alive after losing various physical, mental, and social skills. David Prince a fast-rising music journalist and rave promoter from Chicago was enlisted to co-write the book based on Leary's extensive' outlines and long, late-night interviews.
—Most important, and most controversial, were Leary's decisions about how he was going enact his death-consciously, by suicide, and over the net for all to witness through live, CUSeeMe broadcast. He would 'do' death as he had done everything else: publicly, and in grand style No fear, and no apologies.
—The mainstream media was quick to seize on the spectacle. With Kervorkian still grabbing headlines in Michigan designer dying was a hot-button issue. Dozens of network news programs and national newspapers and magazines competed for morbid quotes from Leary. Remote video vans were parked in the driveway more often than not and journalists packed the living room to wait for their fifteen minutes of Qfi?A. Documentarians faxed contracts for exclusive film rights to the moment of death. Leary was ail-too happy to oblige. For a time.
—"This is just like it was at Millbrook," Rosemary Woodruff Tim’s fourth ex-wife, tells me as she peels potatoes in the kitchen. And she should know. A member of Leary’s upstate - New York LSD commune in the sixties, Woodruff went into exile with Tim after helping him escape from California Men s Colony, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for ten bucks worth of pot. Tim was recaptured in Kabul by U.S. DEA agents but later released during the pardoning Ford administration. Ironically, even after Tim was released for his own crimes, the warrant on Rosemary, who evaded sentencing, remained in effect, forcing her to hide underground for more than a decade
—Rosemary knew Tim at the height of his popularity and the depths of his infamy. Though she paid dearly for Tim's transgressions against the State, it sounds like the peace of infamy was preferable to the zoo of popularity. The couple never had a moment alone - even when they went out camping together in the woods near the Millbrook Estate, Tim’s followers would wander out of their tent to the middle of the night to rap with the Great One. Rosemary would collect wood for the fire and cook for the surprise guests.