And with that little money, she industriously sets to making herself a new life, finding an apartment out by the air base, moving out of my parents’ house. She finds a job in a cocktail lounge, where she meets an air force guy, a mechanic with a limp earned from a piece of shrapnel in Vietnam, a man she really likes.

Now I wish, sometimes, that I could see my mother’s addiction from the inside, that I could look down that long tornadic tunnel as she must have, feel that pull that she wasn’t ever strong enough to resist. I can’t; addiction is one of those facts which resists comparison. You can’t quite know it if you’ve never been there, since there’s no way to say what it’s like. In this way it most resembles sex and death, two experiences never—for differing reasons—adequately described. I want to ask her what she wants from it, what in those spirits so ultimately and entirely compels. But she couldn’t answer that, could she, even if she were here?

Back then, at fifteen, I didn’t want to know what my mother saw. I didn’t see any connection between what she was doing and my own “experiments” with drugs—which is what they were called, in the parlance of the day. I didn’t think my mother was experimenting; she knew what she got, when she swallowed her potion. If I thought about her booze I thought she wanted to close down the world, while my unpredictable powders and tablets opened it. I thought I was seeking something else in my spirits, too, some further understanding—entrance to the world above the world, or down beneath it? There is another reality, beyond this, isn’t there?

On my first acid trip, half a tab of Orange Sunshine, the atmosphere broke apart into cubist planes of light and color, sound crystallizing in that air too, the world all made of lovely geometrics as in Cézanne, and I wanted to stay there. I am my mother’s son.

A thread links the life of art and the life of intoxication. Both are acts of self-enchantment; both involve the sense that one is linking one’s life to a larger life. In my firebird dance—so many years before—I’d felt freed of the constraints of a body I already understood as a source of shame. I felt joined to the music, which had a quality of purpose and scale about it, a context larger than anything I knew. Its depths were open, available, glimmering. And when you gave yourself over to it—put yourself into Stravinsky’s hands, as it were—the circumstances of your life seemed to recede into the background: here, in the present, in the vascular pulse and hurry of the music, was everything that mattered.