Blood Spore: of Murder and Mushrooms
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F O L IO BLOOD SPORE Of murder and mushrooms By Hamilton Morris n July 2011, on the hottest from another source: “This dayI of the year, I received a information should be treated fragile-looking Maxell com- with due caution. Some of pact cassette from a retired these cops, if still living, could psychology professor and be very dangerous.” gerbil-aggression researcher The warning was delivered named Gary Davis. I had been by Paul Stamets, who had told the cassette contained a told me about the tape but recording of two police ofcers never actually heard it. Once discussing their involvement a friend of Pollock’s, Stamets in the robbery and murder of has in recent decades become one Steven Pollock, a physi- recognized as the foremost cian and pioneering mycologist who—despite in- authority on medicinal mushrooms: a taxono- valuable contributions to the eld, including an mist, author, cultivator extraordinaire, and gen- improved technique for growing psychedelic eral fungal hype-man, Stamets travels the coun- mushrooms on Purina Dog Chow—remains large- try giving lectures on the different ways ly unknown. Carefully labeled mushrooms can save both the planet and the //, the cassette had for thirty years been stored human race. It was at one of these lectures, titled in a toolbox under two dozen inoperative WWII- “How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World,” era Geiger counters in Davis’s mother’s house. I that I first had the opportunity to question had offered to pay for the tape but Davis refused, Stamets in person about the story of the tape. In insisting he just wanted it to be heard by as many a sold-out room with theatrically dimmed lights, people as possible, then backtracking and suggest- Stamets begins by opening a specially designed ing he wouldn’t mind terribly if I sent him twenty carrying case and removing a large, concentri- dollars for beer. I was worried about the tape’s cally banded cylindrical fungus, which he then integrity and had been reading anxiously about hoists above his head. “This is agarikon,” he the myriad problems that befall aging magnetic declares with Mosaic solemnity, “and it will prove media—binder embrittlement, remanence reduc- to be as important for the survival of the human tion, even fungal contamination—and the trans- race as the discovery of re.” In agarikon, which action was further charged by a stern warning really looks very much like an unfrosted layer Hamilton Morris’s last article for Harper’s Magazine, “I Walked with a Zombie,” appeared in the November 2011 issue. Page borders by Roderick Mills. Photography credits on page 56. FOLIO 41 Morris Folio CX 2.indd_0521 41 5/21/13 4:53 PM cake, Stamets has detected potent antimicrobial be a police officer from Castle Hills, Texas, compounds that he predicts will protect us from named Wayne Merchant, the other a self- intercontinental viral storms destined to sweep described “burglar” whose name is unclear. Of- the globe. He tells the audience of how he cured cer Merchant joins The Burglar in a diner where himself of a stammer with Psilocybe, treated his cheerful muzak unwinds on the radio, dishes mother’s breast cancer with Trametes, saved his clatter, and a cash register rings and the drawer aunt’s home from carpenter-ant infestation with shoots open. Unbeknownst to Ofcer Merchant, Metarhizium, and how mycelium—the lamen- he is being recorded. The Burglar is distressed tous network that absorbs nutrients into the because he has been “fingered” for the “bull fungus—is both earth’s brain and the Internet’s moose job” and “shooting up a guy.” He is facing natural progenitor. He does all this wearing a hat serious “federal time.” It can be inferred that The made of mushrooms. Burglar knows much of the Castle Hills PD per- Listening to Stamets speak about fungi I think sonally and is acting as an informant in the this must be what it was like to listen to Thomas pursuit of a reduced sentence. The two discuss Edison talk about incandes- their involvement in an array of crimes, both cence, the research so deliri- petty and violent, before the conversation turns ously ambitious and diverse that to the unsolved murder of Pollock. it seems to teeter on the brink of insanity but, perhaps by : Ahrite, there’s one more thing virtue of its grounding in clini- that I don’t know how it got brought up, imma tell you what I heard. I heard on the cal studies and scientic publi- street that you did it. cations, doesn’t leave one feel- : I did what? ing to be in the presence of : Pollock’s death. a mountebank—somehow : Whose death? quite the opposite—and when : Pollock—that mushroom doctor. Stamets utters his concluding : I don’t even know the son of bitch, remarks he is reward- I don’t even know where he lived. ed by a rabid stand- : They got—they claim—that I did it, ing ovation. The au- that I went in and killed him, robbed him dience wastes no and killed him for two hundred thousand cash, and killed him. time in swarming the : Hmmmmm. stage in hopes that Stamets will be able to help them find fungal succor for their n August 1977 Gary Lincoff had not yet au- human woes, and I thoredI the National Audubon Society Field am, of course, no dif- Guide to North American Mushrooms, nor was ferent. A man begins, he yet the president of the North American in a somewhat accu- Mycological Association or the chair of their satory tone, to inquire prestigious Mycophagy Committee. His first as to why his black- book, Toxic and Hallucinogenic Mushroom Poi- morel kit did not bear soning, was going to press that winter and, de- fruit, to which Stamets reminds him there are no spite a lack of formal mycological training (he guarantees of fruition, offers a diplomatic hand- held only a BA in philosophy), he was on his shake, and turns to the next person in line, which way to becoming a world-class authority on is me. I am hesitant to bring up the subject of Pol- bioactive mushrooms. He appeared profession- lock in public, but the press of mycophiles on either al, wore a suit, and publicly discussed the hallu- side of me leaves me no choice. I tell Stamets I have cinogenic varieties primarily in regard to modes obtained the Pollock tape and I think I can solve of treatment for those who had consumed the murder, in response to which his face changes. them. Yet he was part of a burgeoning group of “You know, Steve was assassinated by the police,” mycologists whose interest in “toxic” mush- he says, suddenly unaware of his surroundings. The rooms, particularly those of the genus Psilocybe, dissatised morel-kit customer takes a extended to their possible therapeutic applica- step backward toward the door. tions. It was in that summer of 1977 that Lin- coff attended the Second International Myco- he tape, heavy with hiss and wow and utter, logical Congress in Tampa, Florida. wasT as Davis described, a forty-ve-minute con- Lincoff was particularly interested in a talk versation between two men: one who appears to titled “The Hallucinogenic Species of the Ge- 42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2013 Morris Folio CX 2.indd_0521 42 5/21/13 4:53 PM nus Psilocybe in the World” being given by the whose greatest danger had once been the mis- leading Psilocybe taxonomist Gastón Guzmán. identication of toadstools, a frightening new There was another IMC2 attendee who shared dynamic had emerged. Lincoff’s fascination with Guzmán, but unlike Both Pollock and Lincoff were bearded. One Lincoff he wasn’t waiting in the air-conditioned might even go so far as to say extremely bearded, convention center; instead he’d chosen to stand certainly bearded enough that they could regis- outside, conspicuously sorting mushrooms in ter “the stock-reaction ‘hippie.’” (Pollock’s hair front of a hand-painted Winnebago Chieftain was so voluminous that it often that he had converted into a rolling mycologi- extended beyond the borders of cal laboratory. This was Steven Pollock. Young, photographs, his autopsy report hirsute, and wearing a Day-Glo T-shirt, Pollock correctly, if with understate- xedly examined mushroom specimens in the ment, observing that his hair parking lot, totally oblivious to the withering was “full in amount with no al- glances of academic passersby. Intrigued, Lin- opecia.”) And so, not wishing coff approached Pollock to ask what species to be shot, Lincoff and Pollock he’d been collecting, and Pollock brought him fastidiously ashed their IMC2 inside the Winnebago to have a look. Pollock badges and politely asked farm- had outtted the interior with an autoclave, pe- ers for permission. While tri dishes, desiccators, and everything else nec- searching a secluded field on essary to culture and preserve mushrooms on their hands and knees, Pollock the road, plus stacks of his first book, Magic and Lincoff looked up to nd Mushroom Cultivation (1977). Lincoff immediate- themselves surrounded by a ly realized that he had met IMC2’s most interest- herd of milk cows. Pollock had ing attendee, and so he didn’t hesitate to forgo written extensively about the history of Brah- the rest of the afternoon’s presentations when man cattle and how their dung and domestica- Pollock invited him to go hunting for a species tion inuenced global mushroom distribution, of bluing Panaeolus rumored to and he assured Lincoff they weren’t at risk of be- grow on the outskirts of Tampa.