IVIV (11) 178-9

[Doug Millison]

Japonica's hallucinations may seem contrived, as one friend put it,  
but having been in the presence of people who, sometimes under the  
influence of large doses of powerful entheogens, have presented even  
more extravagant glimpses into other worlds, or the Bible, UFO and  
Mind Control conspiracies, or & etc.… I think Pynchon captures a  
certain spirit of the '70s moment, when LSD was still distributed in  
good-sized doses, I hear that in more recent years the doses are  
smaller.

For my money, Pynchon does a good job in presenting the look-and-feel  
and general ambience and that certain je ne sais quoi of life on  
marijuana and acid, and I'd say he's probably had some detailed  
conversations on the subject with people who have had similar  
experiences, or, perhaps he has observed them up close and personal or  
maybe even  experienced something like that himself. Not that it  
matters to the appreciation of the novel, imo, but the stoner  
perspectives ring true enough to this survivor of 1970. It's not  
surprising that so many things happened the way they did in the late  
'60s, early 70s.  The straightworld folks were boozing it up -- this  
was the era of the 3-martini-lunch enjoyed by my sales executive  
father and many of his generational cohort -- and on prescription  
pills, tranquilizers, Sopors, Quaaludes, "Christmas Trees", "reds",  
and the hippie stoners were taking all that plus pot, acid, and  
amphetamines -- "white cross" and "Black Mollies" were favored in our  
dormitories and off-campus apartments in the Fort Wort-Dallas  
Metroplex in Fall 1970 and the following 2 years when I was there.

I have a friend from that era, a film major, who took a massive dose  
-- multiple hits of that Orange Sunshine that was around those days --  
of LSD first time he tripped and immediately went around turning all  
of his friends on to it, at the same time he was shooting a film about  
a guy who had taken a massive dose of LSD and was going around to all  
of his friends and turning them all on to acid because it was so  
groovy.  The same guy described to me, in convincing detail, the  
experience of driving across Fort Worth, from one apartment to another  
in the general vicinity of Texas Christian University, while tripping  
on acid ("Orange Sunshine") and carrying a kilo of Mexican marijuana  
beneath the seat of his car late one evening, and getting stopped by a  
policeman who had noticed a bit of erratic navigation through the  
previous intersection, and my friend somehow managed to maintain his  
composure and give a credible enough explanation, which he couldn't  
remember when babbling about this to the rest of us later that night,  
but the important thing is the policeman did not search the car and  
let him get back in and drive away.  He was quite taken with the way  
the flashing lights on the top of the police car had looked in the  
rear-view mirror at the onset of this episode, and with the peculiar  
noise and reverb effect that accompanied the sound of the siren.  The  
policeman's flashlight was pretty trippy, too, my friend said.  The  
whole thing interrupted an incredible fantasy that he was enjoying,  
tripping off some mundane R&B song on the radio.  Multiple universes/ 
dimensions couldn't really quite capture it, and my friend's movie  
came close but no cigar either.