Peyote: A True Account of the Search for the Magic Cactus - Paperback

by Brian K. Crawford (Author)

Brian Crawford was a twenty-year-old hippie, hitch-hiking around the country from the East Village to Haight-Ashbury and various hippie communes and centers in between, sampling every psychedelic experience he could find. One day in Boulder, Colorado, he met a mysterious stranger with something new - peyote, the magic cactus.With his girlfriend Elissa, the bizarre and paranoid Mike just returned from Vietnam, Sara the seductress, and fellow travelers Sean and Chris, he set off in a red 1947 Cadillac ambulance in an odyssey through the southwest in search of the places where peyote was rumored to grow. They found what they were looking for, and more.Busted by Immigration, he and Mike spent a week in a small town jail and met and educated some of the local kids who had only read about the hippie phenomenon. After his release, he joined a hippie commune in Fort Worth. In the process, he learned as much about himself as the strange world of the psychedelic cactus.

Author Biography

Brian Crawford is a computer programmer living in Marin County, California. In addition to short fiction and memoirs, he has written a historical novel Toki about the South Pacific kingdom of Tonga, and several collections of memoirs and short stories. His stories have been published in the print magazines Bust-Out Stories and Paradox Historical Fiction, and the online journals Slow Trains, e-clips, Clean Sheets, Sedona's Attic, and Oysters and Chocolate, where his story The Heat won a $500 Grand Prize. His short-short story Heart to Heart won Honorable Mention in the Whim's Place 2006 Flash Fiction contest, and The Find won Second Prize in their 2007 contest.