Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,86

The famous Dr. Leary, father of this entire movement of tuning in and turning on, of dropping acid and exploring alternative realities.

The standard bearer of the deeper life.

Dracula didn’t realize at the time that Dr. Leary had just broken out of jail in San Luis Obispo, a town up the coast. He hadn’t known Dr. Leary in the first place. But word of his imminent arrival swept through the castle like the sharp wail of a wolf.

Tim Leary, Dr. Leary. The mortal’s name was a mantra among the hippie children. Despite his anxiety about the local authorities, Captain Blood found it within himself to chuckle at his own jealousy of their anticipation of the visit. He was used to being the princely topic of discussion. Perhaps a legend should never try to compete with an icon.

He only hoped that Dr. Leary would bring rain to the desert.

He waited like a schoolgirl for the visit, laying in food—the hippies were happy with brown rice and miso soup, but one noble must entertain another suitably. He went over his wardrobe—fringed jacket and tie-dyed shirt? Black turtleneck sweater and sports jacket? He presided over the castle preparations—rooms cleaned, linens washed and pressed—until one sunset, Alexsandru’s rap sounded on the door of Dracula’s inner sanctum and the lieutenant announced, “They’ve arrived!”

Dracula finally decided on a Nehru jacket and black trousers—he was not a hippie child, he was a grown man—and descended the staircase with an unhurried air although his unbeating heart contracted once or twice.

Leary came to him with both arms extended and took Dracula’s hands in his. Dracula looked into his large, deep eyes and knew that at last he had found his mortal counterpart: a man who had lived the depth and breadth of experience. Hopeful, Dracula embraced him.

“Ah,” said the mass of counterculture lounging in the great hall. The cavernous room thick with scented marijuana smoke, clove cigarettes, astringent red wine, and sweat. The yeast of sex.

“Welcome,” Dracula said.

Leary winked at him and presented his wife, Rosemary. Dracula gaped. She was astonishingly beautiful. His attraction to her was immediate and intense. To mask it, he ignored her.

“We’ll dine,” he added, sounding to himself old-fashioned and silly, a movie version of Dracula. Lugosi the Drug Addict, not Vlad the Impaler, in whose presence the fathers of daughters trembled and the daughters fainted. In those days, his favor was like a comet tail: either a beautiful radiance or a harbinger of disaster.

How he had fallen in the New World! Plummeted!

The servants prepared an exquisite table, which the hippie children devoured with no hesitation or delicacy whatsoever while Leary spoke of the movements toward universal truth and inner peace. He revealed to Dracula that many prominent psychiatrists in Los Angeles were using LSD in their practices. They were giving LSD to movie stars like Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Cary Grant had wanted to make a movie about LSD. So had Otto Preminger. He spoke of all the brilliant thinkers who had moved to Los Angeles, attracted by the climate of intellectual freedom: Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley. As he talked, his wife listened as if she had never heard any of this before. Excellent woman! Intriguing man! Dracula was overjoyed that they had come.

So were the flower children, who sprang up in the castle hothouse like so many celestial poppies. In microvans and magic buses, caravans and myriad groups of simpleton singletons. Across the Great Desert on the GBT, to sit at the feet of the great and mysterious Leary.

Who talked faster than a speeding bullet.

Who leaped through chasms in a single bound.

“If we charged admission, you’d be rich,” Leary told Dracula one night, as they kicked back with some Panama Red. Rosemary was nowhere to be found, but a few addled braless girls lounged about, perhaps angling to become Brides. Dracula contented himself with caressing them idly, if only to feel the heat of the pulses beneath their skin. It was a pleasant habit, like biting one’s nails.

He was more interested in discovering what pulsed inside Leary’s brain. The stories the man told! The adventures he had had, inspired by the drugs he had taken! Taking psilocybin in Tangier with William S. Burroughs! Discussing with Allen Ginsberg the politics of ecstasy. Arguing with Jack Kerouac, who disdained him. Leary’s life was one vast experimental, highly responsive moment in the now. Dracula came to look upon him as a counterculture Scheherazade, a mortal who could tempt him to stay up all night and look