Confessions of a Gasoline Huffer
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Confessions of a Gasoline Huffer as originally printed. Illustration: Paul Hoppe<br>" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.thestranger.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/img_9100.jpg-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C585&ssl=1" /> Confessions of a Gasoline Huffer as originally printed. Illustration: Paul Hoppe
Fran Handford was a retired schoolteacher who sat in a rocking chair, smoking long white cigarettes with shaky hands and listening to public radio. She and her husband Dana lived in the woods on Bainbridge Island, just down the road from my parents. Dana was tall and thin and drank a glass of buttermilk every day at lunch to keep his weight up. He saved his pee in a bucket by the back door to pour onto his compost pile. He was a psychiatrist and had been associated, in the 1950s, with the first American psychiatrists to study psychedelics. The Handfords had an impressionist landscape over the fireplace, by a friend of theirs. Fran once pointed at it and said, in her quavering old-lady voice, "I think he painted that after he had taken El-Es-Dee."<br>I was their primary gardener and houseboy that summer. I got $8 an hour and a pair of surrogate grandparents. They sometimes hired additional help: an ex-con named Tony who lived in a halfway house, a 25-year-old stoner named Eric who still lived with his parents. As a teenager, I liked being around ex-cons and stoners and always fell for the racy girls who took drugs and skipped class. (At the time, I was dating a girl who lived in Seattle—even racier. Sex was still a pleasant mystery, but getting closer every day.) They made me feel tougher by association. On Saturdays, I came over to weed, prune, fix, paint, sweep, and mow. Burn days were the best, when I’d stand around all afternoon with a rake, watching a fire twice as tall as I was incinerate the detritus from the previous year’s windstorms and yard projects.
The Handfords’ house had peeling red paint and an old wisteria vine strangling the front porch. Inside, it was like a library where people happened to live. Books covered and sometimes tumbled off of shelves in every room—the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallways. There were books on the floor. They were good books, books Fran encouraged me to read: Slaughterhouse-Five, Mrs. Dalloway, Catch-22; nonfiction by Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Winston Churchill; poetry by Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot. I read on the job, stealing time from them—time I was supposed to be weeding, pruning, and fixing. They knew: They were saints that way. They thought that any time I spent with a book would be good for me.<br>I took more books from their house than anyone can remember, and dutifully returned them—with one exception. I was too embarrassed to ask to borrow it. The book: Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings, a 575-page collection of essays, written by psychologists and psychiatrists, published in 1969. It has a stained white dust jacket with a line drawing of a bald man meditating and some EKG scribbles in black, red, and green.
I crouched in the Handfords’ basement, next to the box where I found it, flipping through its pages. Some passages were hypnotically opaque, about "autogenic training" and "psychophysiology" and other jargon I didn’t understand. Some were druggy but erudite, like where William James explains how getting high on nitrous oxide helped him "understand better than ever before both the strength and weakness of Hegel’s philosophy." Some were just druggy (I imagined this spoken in a soft man’s voice, like something you’d hear from a groovy 1960s British movie): "Shortly after swallowing the pill, I began to feel the effects. I was looking at the green grass and green hills of the countryside. Slowly the green changed into a lavender… My body was deep purple. It was an extremely pleasant sensation. It...