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So I knew he was somewhat cracked from the first night we met, and over the next couple years, his condition evolved into full-fledged insanity. I first noticed this one night when we were stoned on grass and discussing politics on the floor of a small, candle-lit bedroom with the ambience and half the size of a railroad boxcar. We were visiting Duffy, an old friend of mine from earliest Haight-Ashbury days. He and I had bumped into each other the week before at a demonstration against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the killing of demonstrators at Kent State by National Guardsmen . Duffy and I quickly resuscitated the outrage we felt at the demonstration. Bernie was unusually somber, quiet, and preoccupied. “And I’ll bet the guardsmen aren’t even tried,” Duffy said, handing me a joint. He was short and hunched and so malnourished that he got out of the draft without even trying. “Oh hell no!” I said and took my toke. Bernie turned down the joint so I returned it to Duffy. Holding–in the toke, I breathlessly whispered, “Those guardsmen did something millions of people, half the country, wanted somebody to do.” I gushed smoke. “Yeah, it was like this tribal ritual killing thing,” Duffy said. Bernie suddenly leapt to his feet and, facing a wall (and supposedly, hidden microphones), announced for the record, “I compweetwee dithagwee (completely disagree) with that. They-oh ith no evidenth yet that thith wath anything but an acthident, a mithtake… (There is no evidence yet that this was anything but an accident, a mistake…)” “O.k., o.k.,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m sure they heard you.” Embarrassed, I looked at Duffy, who didn’t know Bernie. Duffy’s beady eyes, between bushy eyebrows and a bushy mustache, were amazed, then delighted. “Bernie, goddamit!” I shouted later while driving. “They couldn’t have bugged that room! You’d never been there before and they couldn’t have known we were going there. Remember how we decided to go? We were driving down Guerrero and I said I owed a visit to a cat that lived over there and you said you didn’t mind stopping. We didn’t know ourselves that we were going there, so how could the government know?” He said nothing but turned and looked out the window. But there was even stronger evidence that his problem was psychological and not political. He let slip one evening in a coffeehouse, in the closest to a confessional moment I had ever known with him, that he had taken a lot of LSD the last year or so. Though he didn’t actually say that was a mistake, he knew he didn’t need to. He even admitted that many of the times he and I had been together he had been on acid while I knew nothing about it.
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