DR. TIM'S LAST TRIP

By Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

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?"

It's a little too easy to dismiss the gaunt and frail-looking 75-year-old suffering from prostate cancer as just another artifact from the psychedelic era. There was a time, after all, when "tune in, turn on, drop out" was the mantra of a generation. People have forgotten how influential his International Foundation for Internal Freedom (pronounced If, If) was and how dangerous the government considered him. LEARY IS GOD was almost as popular a button on campus as peyote was in the mid-'60s. It wasn't just the kids who fell under the spell of Leary and LSD, but Establishment figures as well: Cary Grant, Steve Allen and musician Maynard Ferguson, not to mention TIME magazine founder Henry Luce and his wife, playwright and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce.

The beginning of the end, though, came in 1966 when a Dutchess County (New York) assistant D.A. named G. Gordon Liddy raided Leary's Millbrook mansion, which the doctor used courtesy of an Andrew Mellon heir. Two minor-possession arrests eventually landed Leary in a San Luis Obispo, California, prison in 1970, but he escaped with the help of the radical Weather Underground, then materialized among the Black Panthers in Algeria. Betrayed and recaptured in 1973, Leary spent most of the next three years in prison. When he was released, he turned his attentions to SMILE (Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension) and then to vaudeville--a debate circuit with Watergate figure and old nemesis Liddy. His last few years have been spent migrating in cyberspace, trading on our nostalgia for lava lamps and dealing with cancer doctors.

Though his days are severely numbered, Leary still has plans. He's writing another autobiography, following Flashbacks and Confessions of a Hope Fiend, as well as a sort of how-to book on death. According to Leary, he also wants "to die on the World Wide Web" and to leave behind a Website tour of his home. "The key to dying well is for you to decide where, when, how and whom to invite to the last party," says Leary. He fondly recalls the 1963 deathbed vigil for Aldous Huxley: Leary brought him a new translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as the LSD that the author of Brave New World took just before he shuffled off this mortal coil. "He was so cheerful and funny," says Leary. "So sarcastic and all that." When Laura Huxley visited recently, she returned the favor not with illicit drugs but rather with a white magnifying glass that Leary uses for reading.

When Leary feels his time is up, he says he will take a "suicide cocktail." But even at that, he's hedging his bets--he wants his body frozen by the Cryocare cryogenics lab for future resurrection. If he had to live his life all over again, would Leary have done anything differently? "Sure," he says, inebriated by the gas and, for some reason, baseball. "I've led the league as a human being over the last 30 years, but I've only batted one out of three. The other two times, I went up there, and probably shouldn't have swung at that outside pitch. But look around--I'm still leading the league, I think." With that, Leary takes another deep draw on his balloon so that he can, for the moment, drop out.