A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally

visited the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris, Trist was enthusiastic, stylish, and catalytic. Hunter would recall the thrill of absorbing “Howl” for the first time at Alan’s, thinking “someone was going to bust in and arrest me for reading it.” Enjoying a year off between prep school and Cambridge, Alan had time and a twenty-five-dollar weekly allowance that left him free to pursue whatever he chose, and that meant a daily circuit of Kepler’s Bookstore in the daytime, St. Mike’s in the evening, and a coffee shop called Stickney’s for the late hours.
    Kepler’s was a wonderful place. Probably the second paperback bookstore in America, it was a faithful reproduction of City Lights, and was founded in the mid-1950s by Roy Kepler, a onetime Fulbright scholar who had been a founder of the left-wing radio station KPFA and national secretary of the War Resister’s League. With his close friend and fellow pacifist Ira Sandperl, Roy ran a store that featured unlimited browsing, coffee, and hang-out rights, even for the bedraggled young beatniks like Garcia, who became, he said, “a fixture . . . a bum, virtually.” Instead of ejecting this bum, Roy felt he “could protect him.” Kepler was more political than most Beats, but the store welcomed the poets Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, and William Everson for readings. It was a lovely, nurturing institution, closely linked to Ira’s other occupation, which was running the Palo Alto Peace Center, home to one of the strangest and most interesting persons in the whole scene, Willy Legate. Garcia and company paid almost no attention to the politics of the Peace Center. Rather, it was, as Hunter said, “Willy’s gift to us.” “We were like the back door of the Peace Center,” said Garcia. “The front door was Joan Baez, Willy, and Ira.” Later, Garcia would reflect that “we all learned how to think a certain kind of way from Willy . . . things that come out of sequence—nonlinear, Zen, synchronistic thinking. How to think funny, the cosmic laugh.”
    Willy Legate was tall and stooped, with an enormous head, a bulging forehead, and thick glasses. Raised in Arkansas, he’d begun reading up on psychic research, the Rosicrucians, the theosophist Annie Besant, and yoga in high school, and while in college in 1959 he learned how to elicit vials of LSD from the manufacturer, Sandoz Pharmaceutical. He never, Hunter wrote around that time,
    said a great deal, or, if he did, it was mainly incomprehensible. He smoked many cigarettes and attempted to write books which were, if anything, as incomprehensible as Willy . . . When asked a question of greater or lesser import, he was prone to answer “Won’t tell ya,” but he could, on occasion, wax eloquent . . .
    “For Christ’s sake, must you always be so damned difficult?” [Hunter] asked, becoming irritated.
    “Difficult . . .” [Willy] muttered . . . “D-i-f-f-i-c-u-l-t. D as in diphthong, I as in ichthyology, F as in flagellation and again as in fornication, I as in infantile paralysis, C as in communist, U as in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, L as in lacerations of the head and kidneys, T as in Chinese Religion.”
    “Chinese Religion?”
    “Taoism, obviously.”
    “Oh; and what is this all supposed to be indicative of, other than an obvious crying need for psychiatric assistance?”
    “You’ll find it in Zechariah 2.6: ‘Ho ho, saith the Lord.’ ”
    . . . if Willy had a bed, everyone had a bed; if Willy had cigarettes, everyone had cigarettes . . . maybe even more of them than Willy took. Willy was the kind of person who somehow made you wonder just who you were and where you were going, and if maybe he didn’t have the right idea after all.
    It was a sweet time. Garcia and his circle were too poor to have much of anything, so they cherished what they found. The occasional taste of pot was memorable, leading to fabulous conversations and movable parties. They’d gather up a gang, perhaps a couple of the