From The Thespian at the Oasis

I drove down to Los Angeles to stay with my parents for Spring Break. My friend John Dufford who I knew from Homer Lane picked me up at home and took me to a Hungarian restaurant where we met Fritz Perls for lunch. John was negotiating with Fritz to be allowed to tape record his Gestalt Therapy weekends at Esalen, starting with a first attempt in about a month.

John had invited me to this lunch meeting, and to the weekend at Esalen, with the express purpose of facilitating my first LSD session in an ideal setting. The topic over lunch was the logistics and arrangements for John to tape the workshops. I was 21 years old, very much in awe of Perls, and of John for having the chutzpah to pull this off. 

Here I was in the process of dropping out of Stanford, and committing to a path that would lead inexorably to a tectonic shift in my inner and outer life. I had read Fritz’s book Ego, Hunger, and Aggression, and was self-consciously chewing every mouthful very carefully, trying to blend into the background. When the meal was over Fritz blew my cover when he spoke to me for the first time and said,  ” Young man, I was afraid you’d never get through that meal alive!” Fritz exploded in laughter and I retreated farther back into my corner.

But we had set up the situation in which I would finally drop out in earnest.