Meascalito Visits Dan And The Clan

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Mescalito Visits Dan And The Clan - A short excerpt from my memoirs (all names bear no resemblance to the actual characters, OK?) It was 1972, South Berkeley up towards College St, and Frat Row. (And the Statute of Limitations has run out for all of us). " Dan And The Clan" had somehow managed a trip to the Southwest and come back with almost 20 pounds of Peyote. (Stolen from tribal land, traded for, gifted - we never knew). Then, there not being a huge market for the puke-inducing psychedelic cacti, the buttons sat in an upstairs closet of the Clan's two-story corner Victorian, and their 4 cats used the full boxes, buttons and sand, as their toilet.


To explain about 'Dan and the Clan'. They were a hippie dealer family, as were we all. Classic 'CounterIntelPro' structures obtained, ever since all of Col. George Hunter White's MKUltra Western Section "went native" in '72 after Bruce Roberts handed Scotty a copy of the Gemstone Files at an S.F. Marina District 'spook' bar. The 'Clan's core consisted of Dan, the triple Gemini patriarch, Rebecca, Suzy, and Don. About 50 of us all told made up the entirety of Berkeley's drug infrastructure. Separated into partnerships ('Hank & Frank', 'Doug & Mick', 'Black-Haired Jerry & Bailey', 'New York John & Patty') or larger groups ('Cal, Scotty & Gandalf' - my 'family': 6 to 7of us squatting in a 3 room railroad apt. across from "Vern's" Grocery about 51st and Telegraph at first, 'Rusty, Paul, Walter & Blonde John', and 'Dan and the Clan', etc.)


Our collective tribal turf ran from Albany to Oakland to the Berkeley Marina ( down by Walter and Hugh and the H Farm). We all had out of town distributors (ours became Gilroy/Morgan Hill) and in town we all knew each other and traded wares. Ergotamine tartrate from the N.I.H. would get delivered (3 lbs every other month or so) by ex-Rangers ('Gunner') to ex-Seals ('Wolfman') and we would get monthly semi-truck deliveries of "red-wraps", "white-wraps" and "blue-wraps"(pressed bricks of Mexican weed). That all stopped with Operation Intercept, closely followed by Operation Sunshine, but that's another story.


In any event, when the Clan discovered their choice peyote buttons had been irrevocably soiled, they freaked. They proceeded to put out a general distress help request over our grapevine, and it just so happened I knew what to do, and whom to get to do it.


There were many factions of folk in those daze, living in communal situations, some of whom even went on to become somewhat infamous as 'hippy-dippy weathermen', Yippie street performers, etc. I happened to know an affiliated chapter of a caucasian 'radical-fringe' guerilla theatre troup occupying two houses (across an Oakland St. from each other, with a tunnel dug between them for quick movement of contraband should the need arise) not far from the Clan, and one of their specialities was chemistry. So I hooked the two groups up.


Within 2 weeks, the smell of ether permeated the Clan's entire neighborhood. Clear plastic tubes ran from second-floor bathrooms to first-floor kitchens. Osterizers were bought and worn out masticating the peyote (after the white tufts of halitin were removed from the button's centers) into pulp. Huge pots were constantly on the stoves as the plant material was rendered for its vital alkaloids. Cases of coffee filters stacked next to Erlenmeyer flasks took up all available shelf space.


It took two weeks, everyone in town paranoid as hell, but in the end, truly sweet glossy bindle papers with the molecular schematic for mescaline printed on the exterior, filled with some of the most spectacular white needle-like crystals imaginable began to circulate around Berkeley, if you knew the right people. Mescalito blessed us with a short visit, and all the street-lights around Berkeley had halos for quite some time.