“I do recall being picked up for violation, but released in a few days and probation being cancelled by a federal judge,” he said. “It just went away, not even a court appearance.”
On the strength of his trust fund, he’d been floating around the country when he wasn’t working at his lab job at Berkeley or auditing one chemistry course or another. He passed through communes and college towns. Once, he ventured south of the border to check out the University of Guadalajara’s medical school.
“I loved visiting with the students. They used to call and say, ‘Come on down!’”
Another time, he crossed the same Canadian checkpoint where Nick Sand morphed into Ted Parody.
“I visited Victoria purely for affection and intrigue,” he said. “I never saw Nick.”
He once visited England, whetting his appetite for nineteenth century literature (“Loved the Age of Manners!”).
By 1974, Pickard quit wandering and settled in the future Silicon Valley.
“Stanford was transforming,” he said. “I found the density of talented people irresistible.”
He regarded education as smorgasbord, enrolling in classes at Foothill Junior College, as well as San Jose State University, the University of California Santa Cruz, and, of course, Stanford.
“Leonard was hanging out at Stanford with a lot of people who were in the know,” recalled Talitha Stills. “He was beyond university before he ever got to university. He had a real interest in medicine and the chemistry and pharmacology underlying the drug movement.”
With what was left of his dwindling trust fund, Pickard bounced between bon vivant and not knowing where his next meal was coming from. He became the eternal grad student. Calculus made him giddy; bio analytics, rhapsodic. In anatomy class, he empathized with the cadaver.
“Half her skull was sawn in a sagittal section, but her hair and eyelashes and one eye remained intact if you inverted the head,” he recalled. “I could not approach her without a prayer or a blessing. I think the professor felt the same way.”
He moved from class to class, choosing at whim which formula or technique he wanted to deconstruct. At some point, he decided to become a doctor. He collected pre-med credits the way Little Leaguers collect baseball cards.
“I had two hundred units from various places: about six years of undergrad science,” he said. “I never took history or philosophy or English lit or politics.”
On the social side, he needed no MDMA to fall in lust. A coed in halter top and short shorts did the trick, no chemicals required.
“Leonard had his little trust fund, so he could just dedicate himself to going out,” recalled Talitha. “He was all over the place. It was almost impossible to keep tabs on him. He was a pretty serious ladies’ man.”
One compadre recalled Pickard hiring part of the Stanford marching band to serenade an ingenue. Pickard denies that extravagance, but does remember hiring an opera tenor once to sing a few arias. “At San Jose State, there was a girl in whose eyes I saw far fields of starry light,” he waxed poetic. “We are still friends, and quite Platonic.”
And yet, perhaps in deference to the Six, Pickard is defensively fuzzy about most relationships, male or female, through the 1970s and well into the eighties. He explains his reluctance as protective. He’s wary about putting anyone else in the same jackpot where he wound up.
“In the years just after the sixties, we all shared and lived communally—though not in an actual commune per se,” he recalled. “Those who had, gave. Those who had not, bartered or offered services. There was little money, but all was managed somehow.
“That said, in the circles I shared, there were several estates near Stanford. We lived in their cottages. My personal delight was a stone gatehouse in Portola Valley that led to some vast estate hidden in the hills that I never even saw. Turreted, spiral stairs, massive stone fireplace, stained-glass windows. Don’t see those much in the States. Life was oddly cheap, with friends helping.
“Tai (Talitha Stills) found a huge place up on Mountain Home Road in Woodside. It had more horses than people. Places like that have now all been bought up by dot-com billionaires. Main house was gated; long oak-lined drive; several cottages, pool, meeting halls in upper floors. Owned by one of the last White Russian families that fled the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Tai would host parties, driveway packed—the works.
“That said, I also once lived in chicken coop with only the clothes on my back, at the edge of a winery in Monterey country with an heiress. Just for a few weeks, but great fun. Earthy.”
With Leary neutered, Owsley retired, Scully into biofeedback, and Nick Sand on the lam, underground sources for psychedelics appeared to dry up near the end of the Me Decade. Hippies became yuppies. Nihilism yielded to materialism. Pop historian Tom Wolfe wrote about EST, astronauts, and radical chic, but lost all interest in acid tests.
Even the CIA’s enthusiasm waned. Called before Congress, ranking officials of both Langley and the Pentagon reluctantly fessed up to two decades of MKULTRA. Yes, they had noodled with acid as a weapon and truth serum. Neither lawmakers nor the general public seemed especially surprised. The real lesson of Watergate and the sixties was that the government lies.
Washington’s duplicity didn’t lessen psychedelic condemnation. LSD had become inextricably meshed with Vietnam protest and dubious tales of people leaping from skyscrapers or staring at the sun until they went blind. Government propaganda that LSD could warp the DNA of the unborn was also proven to be patently false.
A general Baby Boom malaise settled over the submissive bent of the Silent Majority, but the latter still called the shots. With great fanfare and scant deliberation, the Congress that the
