Tune in. it's Sunday afternoon, St. Patrick's Day, and traditional Celtic music is wafting through the air outside a Benedict Canyon ranch home high above Beverly Hills. Inside, musicians are serenading an Irish philosopher as he lies dying in bed among linens that depict cartoon rocket ships zooming over planets. Throughout the afternoon and well into the night, visitors come to pay their respects: a grandchild, Rastas, filmmaker Oliver Stone, slackers, alternative rocker Perry Farrell, Webheads. "I run a salon," says Timothy Leary. "Throughout human history, the salon has always been a fermenting place where creative people meet."
Indeed, Leary's recent guest list is both eclectic and electric: Yoko Ono, goddaughter Winona Ryder, former Mama Michelle Phillips, dolphin researcher John Lilly, onetime Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro, the widow of Aldous Huxley, the members of the industrial-metal group Ministry, and Ram Dass, who used to be Leary's old Harvard bud Richard Alpert. Oh, yes, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins just dropped by and dropped off a tape of Dead Man Walking. "It's a little hectic up here," says Leary's personal assistant, a young woman with magenta-streaked hair, Technicolorfully tattooed legs and the too-good-to-be-fact name of Trudy Truelove. "Sometimes the weekend party situation is like an open house."
While the concept of a salon may be traditional, this particular one can only be described as "late century cyberpunk frat." Over by the patio is a slate-gray pool table perched on construction girders, and out on the lawn is a sensory-deprivation chamber. The garage is less a garage than a World Wide Web command post. Hiding among the overstuffed sofas and comic- book art in the living room are a video-game power glove, the latest issue of Rolling Stone and a Yoda mask. The dining room is dominated by a psychedelic poster from an old Don Knotts movie. But the master bedroom, which Leary refers to as his "de-animation room," is the strangest place of all. Amid the clutter of bills, floral bouquets, newspaper clippings, medical journals and stash boxes is Leary's deathbed, and on either side of it are a huge tank of laughing gas and an Apple computer. Bathing the Mac in red light is that hippie relic, the lava lamp.
Turn on. In this instance, one of Leary's friends adjusts the valve of the nitrous-oxide tank, and a balloon inflates. Leary takes a hit off the balloon, and his eyes roll back into his skull. The laughing gas eases the intense pain he feels in his hip. "All my life, I've hated the legal drugs and loved illegal ones," he says when he comes back to earth. "The doctors don't like to hear me say that. But this is safe. It's just like air." Of course, laughing gas isn't the only remedy at his disposal. There are injections of Dilaudid, doses of hallucinogens, various vials of white powder, a pack of Benson & Hedges and a daily highball. "I'm an Irishman," he declares. "I can handle my liquor! Whaddaya got?"