With each encounter, his colorful cabal delivers a new instruction or “mythopoeic” insight from yet another exotic locale. They are identified only as “nameless numbered files lost in the massive databases of the UN Precursor Control Program.”
In The Rose, Pickard questions each of the Six in much the same way David Carradine questioned Master Po in the seventies TV series Kung Fu:
Pickard: He mentioned experiencing the breadth of the human condition?
Magenta: So that he remains humble and focused, even with his consorts, and not distracted by the trappings of global mobility, the odd castle bedroom, and unabated sexuality. . . .
Pickard: And Indigo? We met in Salzburg and Vienna.
Magenta: Indigo considers ritual preparation of sacraments, the spiritual practices necessary to function while exposed to millions of doses.
The Rose opens in 1994 when Leonard, the forty-nine-year-old Buddhist trainee, trips through San Francisco at daybreak accompanied by the wise and enigmatic Crimson, just before Pickard is about to depart for his new life at Harvard’s Kennedy School. According to The Rose, by the time Pickard arrived in Kathmandu a year later, he had already chanced upon Indigo (during a break in a UN Drug Control conference in Vienna) and Vermillion (during a stopover in Berlin). His assignations among the Six usually happened abroad because none dared cook LSD in the US.
One close associate from that time said that Leonard later claimed a Nepalese drug lord threatened to hold him captive as his personal biochemist. Not so, countered Pickard.
“No problems in Nepal whatsoever,” he said. “I very much enjoyed Kathmandu and parts north. Many memories, some of which I described in The Rose.”
He did run into a British expatriate on that trip known only as Magenta. As with each of the other Six, Magenta whipped Pickard into an allusive froth that left many if not most Rose readers scratching their skulls and asking, “Huh?”
The inevitable contact high from one of the Six seemed amplified by the devotional resonance of Bodhinath. Magenta’s walking stick tapped unceasingly like some secret code. We circled the mesmerizing ancient clockwork, telegraphing peace throughout the ten directions and untold realms. We became trekkers on the sacred mountain Meru with its rubies and amethysts and harlots and sanctified streams holding up the skies. The spinning became a spiral of reveries until we soon nodded at the wailing wall of Jerusalem, prostrated ourselves before the golden crucifixes of Florence, and ceaselessly recited a thousand sutras in Dharamsala. We whirled with our arms out and faces upwards like dervishes, and cycled among unknown lovers in the holy orgies of the Epidaurians.
Pickard’s peculiar memoir drowns the reader in florid prose while making no reference to Deborah Harlow, their daughter Melissa3, or the daily routine of domestic existence in Cambridge. Neither does The Rose acknowledge his fast-evolving camaraderie with John Halpern and Alfred Savinelli.
Instead, the overstuffed roman a clef features four far younger Kennedy School companions—two women, two men—who idolize Leonard as “Captain Pickard,” their older, wiser classmate. He nicknames them Surf, Hagendas, Hulk, and Hammer, and spies on their respective sex lives, vamping like a coy ‘tween diarist who constantly fears that his elders are eavesdropping. All four students are as real as the Six chemists, Pickard maintained, but remain anonymous to spare them the stigma of having befriended a felon.
Naysayers may scoff, but The Rose of Paracelsus is absolutely true, according to Pickard. Like Leonard himself, his memoir tiptoes through minefields of fact and fantasy, trusting that some misstep won’t trigger ruin.
The question of money arose during the summer of ’95 and persisted over the remainder of the decade. Pickard’s adjusted gross income that year was less than $8,000. He didn’t bother to file a tax return. Nonetheless, he was able to trot the globe on a whim. He possessed a couple of Visa cards, managing minimum payments that totaled $1,042 by year’s end.
That he seemed to fly off regularly to Indiana, New Mexico, Moscow, or Kathmandu raised no eyebrows at the time because he was a student, after all, and travel was part of the curriculum. How he got around wasn’t important. How he could afford grand gestures of generosity was more problematic, though not so much to his recipients.
“Leonard was terrible managing money,” said Alfred Savinelli. “Just terrible.”
A California transplant first lured to Taos by the high desert romance of Easy Rider, Savinelli was a latter-day hippie in desperate need of cash himself when Pickard first showed up on his doorstep.
Savinelli opened Native Scents in October of 1989. He advertised himself as a “wildcrafter” who extracted “oils, essence, homeopathic and ceremonial plant products” that Native Scents marketed in twenty-three countries around the world. Savinelli maintained a lab on the premises to mine his oils and essences from local flora and fauna. He regularly ordered test tubes and flasks, compounds and catalysts to facilitate the extraction process.
By 1995, the business was floundering and Savinelli’s two original business partners balked. A bank loan to buy them out was unfeasible: no financial institution saw the upside of essential oils and scented candles.
No problem, said Pickard. When John Halpern needed cash, Pickard promised a cigar box containing $100,000. He could work similar magic for Savinelli.
It never occurred to either Halpern or Savinelli to question the source of the money. Pickard was older, wiser, and besides, he confided to Halpern that he lived a secondary secret life as a CIA operative. Halpern believed him. How else to explain his “sometimes bizarre and secretive behavior?”
With the wolf at his door, Savinelli ignored his instincts. Pickard ponied up an interest-free $300,000 loan. All Leonard asked in exchange was a few supplies now and again
