As the years passed, so did other psychonauts whose friendship Leonard secured during his long, strange trip. Ram Dass died just before Christmas of 2019 and Leonard’s longtime Harvard mentor Mark Kleiman passed away the previous summer. The former Richard Alpert was 88; Kleiman was 68. In poor health since Leonard’s Kansas arrest, he died of complications following a kidney transplant. Pickard never faulted Kleiman for failing to step up in his defense during and after the trial. Like the Shulgins, Kleiman stayed in touch and tried to make prison life tolerable.
“My email and phone calls were taken care of for over a decade by Mark, who appeared at Lompoc and volunteered to help,” said Leonard. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have had mail.”
After self-publishing Lysergic, her first-person account of the Wamego acid bust, Krystle Cole became a minor Internet celebrity. She starred in Vice TV’s “Getting High on Krystle” episode of the popular psychonaut video series, “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia” registering more than 15 million views on YouTube. Her psychedelic advice website Neurosoup launched her second career as a psychedelic artist.
Todd’s other exes also flourished. Emily Ragan remarried and taught chemistry at the University of Tulsa, then Metropolitan State University in Denver. Kelly Rothe moved to North Carolina and became a well-respected osteopathic physician.
But the Skinner curse persisted.
On Feb. 6, 2019, his son Morgan Rothe-Skinner murdered his uncle at Katherine Magrini’s home in the New Orleans French Quarter. For no apparent reason, the 26-year-old Tulane design student stabbed Daniel Magrini to death, then held his 76-year-old grandmother at knifepoint.
“This has undone me,” said Katherine. “He told me he had just killed him. Things went downhill. He was just very manic.”
Her “agitated” grandson eventually rolled his uncle up in a rug, his feet poking out. That was how police found the corpse when the standoff ended and they arrested Morgan for second-degree murder. Katherine vouched for him the way she had once vouched for Todd: a good boy who wouldn’t even break the speed limit.
“I love my grandson very deeply, no matter what happens,” said Katherine.
In 2019, Morgan’s father remained in residence at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center. He has been moved at least 10 times according to one of his visitors, and bounced around his cell at least once, requiring extensive stitches. The balding loon known among fellow inmates as Dr. Lecter will be eligible for parole in 2044 when he’s 80.
At 5:45 a.m., Leonard walks the tier to shake off aches acquired from sleeping on a thin mattress over a steel cot. Next, he’s out on the track for an hour walk. He watches the sun rise past the guard tower while listening through his earbuds to classical music broadcast from the University of Arizona. The day begins, mostly spent reading, writing and corresponding, meditating, and helping others with legal advice.
“Old black man just walked up to me and said, ‘Thank you,’” Leonard wrote in an email. “Over seventy, no teeth, rail thin, polite, he’s done thirty years. Perfect record, not literate, a rarity. He didn’t know about the Compassionate Release program, so I approached him one day and wrote his petition. That’s flying well now, though we may have to go into federal court one day. He may go home. That made the morning, if not the week.”
Compassion and gratitude contrast sharply with the more typical resentment and anger that echo everywhere, always, throughout each day.
But if hope is the thing with feathers, Leonard Pickard keeps it well fed and watered.
Richard Shelton, Regents’ Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Arizona, directed the University’s creative writing program before he began his prison writing outreach in 1970. It started with Charles Schmid, “The Pied Piper of Tucson,”5 who wrote to ask for his feedback on his poetry. It was surprisingly good. With funding from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Shelton launched a lifelong commitment to help inmates express themselves.
“Their deprivation seemed to increase certain sensitivities,” he said.
When Shelton extended the program to include the federal prison on the outskirts of Tucson, Pickard bowled him over.
“I was stunned,” he said.
During the years that followed, Pickard’s prose became a staple of the annual Rain Shadow Review,6 a compilation of the best of Arizona’s prison writing. With his 2015 publication of The Rose of Paracelsus, Leonard graduated to the top rungs of Shelton’s students.
“It’s fascinating,” Shelton said. “Not for everybody, but fascinating. I told him he would reach a smaller audience, but he was fine with that.”
“The Rose was written, not for the public, but for the experienced,” said Leonard.
John le Carré bought a copy for his son Nick. Jeremy Irons’s secretary wrote that the actor would love to read The Rose, so Leonard sent him two. He began a sequel in 2017.
“I may call it ‘Songs of the Rose,’ for it concerns memories of the Six: their efforts across the earth to explore novel substances, and to contain addictive compounds.”
In 2018, he orchestrated a four-hour podcast (https://psyche-delicsalon.com/podcast-609-the-rose-garden-introduction/) with readers recruited from among psychonauts and admirers around the globe.
“This week I received photos of The Rose being read on board the Queen Elizabeth II,” he said. “Social circles are expanding.
“Writing is the perfect art for these elder days. It brings the greatest pleasure and a sort of tranquility. The Life Force will carry us ‘til pen drops from hand, yes?”
He worries about saying all he needs to before it’s too late. Sasha7 is gone now, along with Nick Sand, the Bear, Tim Leary, Petaluma Al8 and most of the first generation of psychonauts, but even at this late date, Leonard ponders the possibilities of higher education.
“Before dying in prison, I hope to contribute to society,” he said. “I’m seeking a faculty sponsor to oversee a dissertation in absentia on the topic of their choice, or on one of several issues: the future arc of the opioid crisis, potential outcomes of medicalization of psychedelics, or monitoring advances in biotech related to enhanced cognition.”
The thing with feathers
