I’ve a survivor’s resources; I’ve sharpened my senses. I can sniff the wind; I can feel when the storms are brewing in the house. When my mother’s on the rampage I can find a place to sleep, get myself fed, and better: find some good company, some ways to play, some people who want to read my poems or paint with me or just hang out in the park.

I have even discovered a method of achieving moments of tranquillity, courtesy of Dino. If he has not given up his elaborate hash pipe, he’s at least set it down long enough to pursue a new interest, Transcendental Meditation. He’s been initiated over the summer, while he’s been away somewhere, and returned with a zeal for conversion. I am the perfect subject for proselytizing; the technique promises expanded consciousness and creativity, and ultimately release from the karmic wheel of constant reincarnation, as well as a natural high. I don’t have the money to join up, but Dino intervenes with some family resources, and soon I’m waiting in his living room with the required devotional objects: a clean handkerchief, a flower, and a piece of fruit. I’m led into a darkened room where a visiting meditation teacher—a black-bearded professor on leave from UCLA—tells me my new mantra, a one-syllable Sanskrit word that sends me off promptly into gales of laughter that seem to come from nowhere. “You’re releasing stress,” I’m told, and indeed I love floating off on the mantra’s sonic pillow, an experience not unlike my out-of-the-body traveling: let go, let go further—a deeper and deeper trance that sometimes leads me to states of mind where I can see my thoughts billow up out of silence like balloons, or see the colors of the birdsong I’m hearing out the window: shades of surrealism.

Neither Dino or I are quite willing to give up getting stoned, so we alternate Dionysian weekends with weekdays of spiritual practice, except when we travel off to a meditation retreat in the mountains outside of town. There we meditate all day long, in adjacent rooms of the retreat house, getting driftier and driftier, and in the evening all the meditators gather to listen to the Maharishi lecturing on tape: “Consciousness,” he intones in an odd high voice, each syllable deliberate, chiming, a little pinched, “is a lake. Sink down into the lake, put down your roots like the lotus.” The guru’s metaphoric universe is exotic and highly limited: everything’s mountain, lotus, root.