The Gumby Papers

A Friday night search for ice cream in Hades…

On a warm Friday afternoon in late May 1974, Terrence and I decided to take “the Raiz Diabolicum,” the diabolical or devil's root, the conquering Spanish Catholics’ name for Datura plants in use by indigenous people, i.e., “the Indios.” The Catholic clergy mistook the symptoms of Datura intoxication for demonic possession. Certainly people on it look “strange, crazy or possessed.” Datura intoxication is not a state of sanity, but one of delirium. I've never seen any of the beautiful patterns one might see on, say, LSD (or any other “classic” psychedelic). Instead, Datura/jimson weed opens a door to a bizarre “Gumby-like world,” not visions per se, but actual hallucinations (some “fun,” some not). Included are various bouts of amnesia or simply unconsciousness (which can lead to death).

That Friday Terrence and I ate perhaps a two-inch piece of Datura Meteloides (aka Datura Innoxia, a member of the nightshade family) root each, a yellow white, bitter, parsnip-like root, but tougher and stinkier. We grimaced as we swallowed the slimy bitter pulp.

“This better work, Shultz! I don't want to see Don Juan!” (Carlos Castaneda's shamanic muse).

I assured Terrence we would see “something.” Perhaps 20 minutes after chewing down these nasty tasting roots we started to feel sleepy and very thirsty. Our pupils dilated into large, vacant black holes, while random disconnected thoughts drifted through our heads like wispy clouds.

“This isn't much fun, Shultz! I'm tired and thirsty! Let's go to Baskin Robbins and get some ice cream!”

I groggily agreed to get something cold and wet to cut through this bleeping atrocious cottonmouth! Our tongues were dried like tough leather and stuff was moving around right at the corners of the eye range.

We headed to Imperial Highway eastbound toward the Safeway market on an unsteady pilgrimage for cooling confectionery treats. We were like two drunken monks. The sidewalk rose up and down like a cooked piece of bacon. We stepped carefully to avoid tripping over the tops of the ripples. The sidewalk was like a cement escalator going in reverse.

Terrence asked me, “Where is the ice cream?”

I answered, “It's up the hill!”

What?

Terrence said, “What's up the hill?”

“The ice cream!”

Terrence then said to me, “I never asked you that!”

I could not tell if I was hearing my own thoughts or Terrence’s spoken words, or if Terrence was so whacked out by the Devil's thorn apple that he could not remember what he was saying.

This was just part of the general confusion of the Datura/jimson weed experience, and there is just no way to control its effects. Brain spasms, chaotic and absolutely real-looking actual hallucinations, solid-state realities and/or ultra-vivid walking dreams occur. It is as if some center in the brain shuts down that is usually awake, or at least partially conscious and then subconscious materials such as dreams ooze out uncontrolled.

We walked along, our faces flushed bright red, eyes glassy and vacant, our brains gone slack, our fuzzy mouths were full of laundry lint, spitting flecks of cottony foam.

“Gee, this is a lot of fun!” I thought I heard Terrence say. I started to hear the constant refrain in my head, “Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear, fuzzy-wuzzy had no hair!” – over and over, a repetitive fuzzy mantra repeated ceaselessly and pointlessly.

At times I hallucinated that we were both wearing our pajamas and ready for bed.

“But first let's have some ice cream!”

“But there are miles to go before I sleep.”

It seemed like we were moving forward but we were not. It also seemed much steeper than I ever imagined! At one point Imperial Highway turned into a river full of rushing green water with lots of trees on the opposite bank waving at us. They were very friendly trees! The river was full of people swimming around and yelling at us to come into the river and join them! They seemed to be having a great time!

Actually it was 5 o'clock in the afternoon during rush-hour traffic. I was very thirsty and hot, and I was very tempted to jump in and swim about with the friendly people, but I held out for the ice cream first. Then the swim. A few people climbed out of the river to join us. I recognized them as familiar friends of mine – Linda E. and Yvonne W. and Donnie “The Duck” Beck, and surf buddy Timbee. We had a wonderful time talking about school and parties, jobs and drugs, etc., but they kept vanishing.

“Did you see that, Terrence?”

“No! What?”

We passed a chain-link fence. There was a dog-like creature sitting behind the fence. It was a big round animal with a humanoid face. It greatly resembles Timbee! It looked at me and said in plain English: “What the fuck are you looking at?”

The Timbee Dog had this huge bulbous red nose like a clown nose, which made me hysterical with laughter.

“Hey, check this out!” I yelled.

“What?,” he mumbled, his eyes ringed like a raccoon’s. He was trying to piss on a fence. He didn't seem to be having any success at this. (Alkaloids in the Datura plant temporarily paralyze your bladder muscles.)

We fuzzily marched on – the pajama boy parade. It was hot. I took off my “pajama top” (t-shirt) and dropped it, forgotten on the sidewalk. Lots of people from La Mirada High School, friendly and casual acquaintances, were walking up Imperial Highway to talk to us! It was like Imperial was one big block party!

Terrence asked me, “Can you smell it? A rubber factory is burning!”

There was no rubber factory in La Mirada.

“That's where they make the rubber bums! We have to put the fire out!”

“No!” I said. “Let's get our ice cream first!”

Between spasms of whacked-out hallucinosis there were small periods or islands of relative lucidity. None of the people we encountered on Imperial Avenue were real. The dog with the Timbee face was actually a large tumbleweed caught in the chain-link fence. We mumbled and bumbled our way in an eastward direction. It was a long journey, actually only half a mile, what with all of the fun people to talk to, lots of heart-warming conversations with friends!

We finally got across from Baskin Robbins. How we figured out the traffic lights and got safely to the other side of the highway escapes me. We shufflebummed our way into the brightly lit ice cream dispensing store like zombies from outer space, walking corpse-boys. We were the Night of the Living Dead looking for Rocky Road. We were doing good!

About 50% of the time we could act semi-normal and behave appropriately. The other 50% we don't remember. At this point our mouths were so dry we could barely talk and our speech center and brain kept disengaging. Baskin Robbins employees looked at us very warily – annoyed or alarmed? – at our scrumbling and babbling.

We might as well have walked in there with buckets on our heads naked! Somehow we obtained ice cream. It seemed like we were in there for days trying to find or choose a flavor and figuring out how much it cost, how to talk, find the counter. And why was there a pack of picture perfect pterodactyls preening in the parking lot? Why was Terrence talking enthusiastically to his ice cream cone while standing in the corner alone like some loser with a Mr. Microphone, a popular 1970s Popeil pocket product?

How we got out of there without the Baskin Robbins manager calling the Norwalk Sheriff's Department or the Whittier cops to help straighten out our attitudes remains a mystery to this day. Truthfully, being slapped around by the cops and thrown into a cell would have been a lot safer for us than being “the lost boys.”

We were vacant-eyed, stuporous, Wee Willie Winkies with our imaginary friends and acute cases of mumblemouth. We ate our ice cream dream with our raging cottonmouths temporarily soothed. It was like bringing water from the Colorado River to thirsty Los Angeles! We were enormously grateful for the temporary rehydration and thanks to Baskin Robbins we worked our way back home. Westward Ho!

We gobbled the ice cream in seconds, it seems, and we were eating or attempting to eat the waffle cone bottom that holds the ice cream. We had little success. The waffle cone crumbled to oven-dried sawdust that clogged our throats, making it hard for us to breathe. No saliva!

The cone formed into hard, pasty, dry clots producing asphyxiation and was potentially life-threatening. So that's what spit is for: to help swallow stuff! It was a moment of jimson weed enlightenment.

We gagged on our cones and spat them out before we suffocated. We might as well have crumbled them in our hands because our throats were too dry and constricted to swallow them.

At one point Terrence sprouted soft dense green fur all over his body like green velvet. I touched the fur.

Terrance yelled, “Stop it, fag! I knew you were gay!”

I couldn’t get over the fur.

“Is it permanent? What will happen when we go back to school on Monday?”

I touched the fur. It certainly looked and felt real, a tactile and visual hallucination. We ended up at the flood control abutment where the sidewalk crosses the flood control canal. We gazed blankly into the concrete-lined channel. Out of the narrow conduit tunnels emerged the ugliest kids I’ve ever seen. They looked like bat-faced babies and ultra-deformed dwarves who peeked out of the tunnels and waved at us and called us names as huge, frightening foot-long potato bug creatures swarmed along the flood control channel bottom.

“We have to go put out the fire at the rubber factory and save the latex bums!” my friend insisted. He pointed at the Shell Oil refinery flame, a big smokestack across town. Our legs wobbled like slinkies out from under us. Terrence pulled on my arm. I told him, “We'll go later! Let's go to my house and smoke some gold Colombian!”

He reluctantly agreed with me and we decided to hop the fence and take the flood control access road home two blocks or so. It took us quite a while to scale the six-foot chain-link fence. Hands, feet and brain didn't coordinate at all. I fell over the fence onto the concrete roadway followed by Terrence right on top of me. The deformed “kids” laughed and cheered at us. “You're in big trouble! You just wait and see!”

The houses along the access road twisted and warped as if made of play doh. Strange looking people violently yelled at us then vanished into thin air. Grotesque dogs with human faces barked at us! We were tired and very much wanted our bedroom slippers but we could not find them.

I realized I was missing my pajama top (t-shirt) and one shoe. Terrence looked like a cancer patient. His pants were soaked in front with some unidentified stain. We wandered cluelessly and aimlessly looking for my backyard fence among what looked like hundreds of identical backyards. At one point the sky filled with countless police helicopters with angry cops yelling at us, “You are under arrest! Lay down and put your hands in your pockets!”

We both did this several times until the copters left. This may have been a shared hallucination.

Days later Terrence said he also saw the copters and the ugly kids, but some other details were different.

We finally arrived at my house and climbed the ivy-covered chain-link fence. It seemed like a good time for a nice quiet nap! After all it was dusk, early summer and we had ice cream! We never smoked the bowl full of pot. We lost the lighter.

It seemed like a great idea to lay down on the garage floor like old Shanghai Chinese opium bums and gaze emptily at a water heater pilot flame. The fact that my grandfather was home, a person who greatly resembles Fred Mertz of the I Love Lucy Show, and my highly nervous pot-phobic mom, did not warrant even our slightest flicker of concern.

We layed on the floor like stunned tomato worms, slack bags of dusty dry delirious mummy dust. The pilot light flame was very blue and comforting and the garage floor was nice and cool. We mumbled and gumbled and giggled at each other, but we did not have the strength or the will to get up. I kept seeing this “pig person” peering through the back garage door or window. It waved at me and tapped on the glass then disappeared. Finally, after what seemed like hours of watching highly energetic fuzzy-wuzzy pieces of laundry lint frenetically fighting each other between bouts of total amnesia, the garage door opened.

It was about 7pm Friday evening, and there was grandpa wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and wingtip shoes like “My Three Sons” with Fred McMurray. He looked at us and shook his head, then he called us “hop heads.” That was his 1920s term for pothead. We were amazed and totally befuddled, defenseless and quite in awe of the wingtip shoes presented to us at eye level, set off nicely by white nylon kneelength support socks.

We layed there unmoving like curare victims with blowgun poison cooking in our veins. Was Gramps real or not? We tried to discuss this wingtip aberration but we couldn't remember each other’s responses. But gee, he certainly seemed real and he/it kept coming back calling us slanderous names.

But like all of the rest of the stuff we had seen that afternoon was he/it real? We couldn't be certain.

Slowly the world was losing its “Art Clokey” quality – the creator of the Gumby cartoons – and it was becoming more clear that the rather agitated and persistent grandpa in wingtips was in fact real and he was not very happy with our paralytic pilot light gazing. Hey, at least we were not out running around town getting into trouble!

We finally gained some control of our limbs. The walking dreams slowly faded, but not the horrendous cottonmouth. We croaked hollowly at one another. Muzzy dunce dumbler dudes sporting mouths full of laundry lint with a vague but growing sense that we might be in trouble. Didn’t the deformed kids and helicopter hordes tell us this? It was getting dark and we eventually became ambulatory.

Terrence still talked about putting out the fires at the rubber bum factory, and I was still seeing big odd bug creatoids out of the corners of my eyes. I shuffled off to bed and woke up at noon Saturday with fuzzy vision and that dumb fuzzy-wuzzy rhyme still dancing in my head.

Gramps was quite critical of Terrence and me and our non-activity, but he chalked it up to a marijuana overdose and said that Terrence was obviously a bad influence on me and made me a long list of household chores to do while calling me a hophead again.

Terrence somehow got home all the way across town and collapsed in bed, mercifully there were no parents around. He kept seeing a tall circus clown with a big knife surreptitiously following him through La Mirada Regional Park. Terrance was more affected by the alkaloids in the Datura root: scopolamine, hyoscamine, atropine – from the Greek atropos, the cutter of cord is shown as a gilded human skeleton with a pair of scissors cutting the cord, the connection to life, so the soul will enter the underworld.

I had some resistance to this potent cocktail of alkaloids but they really slammed Terrence. He was quite upset with me for days afterwards and even years later blamed me for “that bad trip – Shultz!”

Two weeks later I took more Datura with another friend at Terrence’s house where in our delirium we tore his room apart over and over for hours looking for a totally non-existent yet very magical skeleton key.

Back in the 70s there were quite a number of stories created by Datura derangement. Carlos Castaneda's book tempted quite a few people to readily gobble or drink the Devil’s thornapple often with frightening and/or disastrous results.

PS. Biofuels Billy and his famous recycling donkey “Jerry” will be traveling through the Albion Ridge area and other parts of Mendocino County. Biofuels Billy and Jerry are working on a new formula for filtered compost tea vehicle fuels. We call it “Donkey Juice.” These two helpers of humanity are on a travel mission through coastal western Mendocino County and we hope for an enthusiastic reception from other “like affiliated minds” in our county! We haven’t worked out all the bugs yet, so Biofuels Billy comes to your community for “shared wisdom.” We will work together to create a new fuel for mankind. Meanwhile we will clean our messy planet of unwanted materials. Jerry will eat peanut shells, laundry lint, old phone books, construction debris, old clothes, etc. These are broken down by Jerry The Recycling Donkey’s intensely adaptable (and sustainable) digestive system and formed into convenient and usable “patties,” which can be burnt as fuel after drying, or made into a rich compost tea with “diesel-fuel-like qualities” that might be used to power vehicles and appliances. Biofuels Billy is an Avatar, an Enlightened Being, a World Citizen with compassion for all! He asks that we come together – Bruce Anderson: you are included! – and work with Jerry The Recycling Donkey and Biofuels Billy to help make this world a shared utopian vision full of infinite possibilities for all!

PPS. Don’t denigrate the Power Of Dung. See you all in Mendo!

(Mr. Shultz lived in Willits at the time this was written.)