On the way up, I took one of these purple pills, which turned out to be psilocybin I think. They were just about right. I ended up taking two or three a day, for general research purposes. . . Steadman doesn't get at all into drugs usually -- He smokes a little now and then, but he's horrified of anything psychedelic. He had a kind of personal drug crisis up there in Newport. We spent the first two days just waiting for the weather to lift so the boats could go out. It was intolerably dull, and on the third day he said, “You seem to be having a wonderful time in this nightmare. I can't figure it out.” And I said, “Well, I rely on my medicine to keep totally twisted. Otherwise, I couldn't stand this bullshit.” And he said, “Well, maybe I'll try one.” At this point, I was up to about four a day. . . So he tried one -- I think he got it down about six o'clock at night in one of those bars in town, a yachting crowd bar on the pier. And by midnight he was completely berserk. He stayed that way for about ninety-six hours, during which time we had to leave, had to charter a plane and flee because the police were looking for us.

ED.: Why?

HST: Well, at some point the morning after we took that first pill -- or it might have been the next morning, I'm not sure -- Ralph was in an insane condition for three or four straight days -- but at one point I decided that, in order to get things moving a bit, we'd sneak over to the Australian yacht, the challenger Gretel, and paint “Fuck the Pope” on the side in huge letters, as big as we could make them. So that when Gretel boomed out of the harbor in the morning, this brutal graffiti would be painted in such a way that people on board, the crew members, couldn't see it because “Fuck the Pope” would be below the deck on the water line. . . whereas everybody else woutd see it immediately from the press and spectator boats.

But there was no way to get in there, to do the paint job. It was like trying to get into Fort Knox. The boats were guarded so well that the only way to get near them was to come in from the sea. Even that was sort of guarded, because it was all lit up, and no boat of any size or any reason to be out there at night could have made it in by sea.