Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride
Travels with Cactus Man, Buttoned-Up Trip master Extraordinaire
Justin Panson
Travels with Cactus Man, Buttoned-Up Trip master Extraordinaire
Justin Panson
The memorial service for Randall W. was held last year at Mulvaney's Building & Loan, a restaurant in midtown Sacramento where his daughter works. She texted us the news a few weeks earlier, which came as a surprise as he was a bodybuilder focused on nutrition and in good shape—although he did have a decade on me and was closing in on 70.
I got to the restaurant thinking we have reached the years where you begin going to friends’ funerals, and that mortality is lurking around every corner. In the large banquet room I got to meet his people who had come out from Ohio, maybe twenty strong. As cliche as it may seem, they really were good solid midwesterners, nice folks, and also many people from here in town. You could feel a genuine love and affection in that room, and you heard so many allusions to just how unique and intelligent the dude was.
Before the memorial started I had a reunion with Randy’s three kids, now in their early to late twenties. Despite the somewhat crazy times of their upbringing, Alexis, Brent and Christopher were all living well and it was so nice to reconnect with them. I told them I was going to say a few words of eulogy and joked that I would not be telling the real stories. We all laughed, knowing the more interesting aspects of their dad’s backstory. I did get up there and talk about our families being on the block together with young kids, and the neighborly camaraderie of dads drinking beer in our garages. I mentioned how interesting and brilliant Randy was, how he learned deeply into disciplines, and the sort of calm rational way in which he broke down a wide range of complex topics. I saw a lot of heads nodding when I said that.
After the eulogies, they played Ripple by the Grateful Dead, which was a solemn poignant moment. This was one of Randy’s favorites, and mine too going back to my college days. It’s a studio track off the early American Beauty album, a simple beautiful acoustic meditation on the cycles of life:
I got to the restaurant thinking we have reached the years where you begin going to friends’ funerals, and that mortality is lurking around every corner. In the large banquet room I got to meet his people who had come out from Ohio, maybe twenty strong. As cliche as it may seem, they really were good solid midwesterners, nice folks, and also many people from here in town. You could feel a genuine love and affection in that room, and you heard so many allusions to just how unique and intelligent the dude was.
Before the memorial started I had a reunion with Randy’s three kids, now in their early to late twenties. Despite the somewhat crazy times of their upbringing, Alexis, Brent and Christopher were all living well and it was so nice to reconnect with them. I told them I was going to say a few words of eulogy and joked that I would not be telling the real stories. We all laughed, knowing the more interesting aspects of their dad’s backstory. I did get up there and talk about our families being on the block together with young kids, and the neighborly camaraderie of dads drinking beer in our garages. I mentioned how interesting and brilliant Randy was, how he learned deeply into disciplines, and the sort of calm rational way in which he broke down a wide range of complex topics. I saw a lot of heads nodding when I said that.
After the eulogies, they played Ripple by the Grateful Dead, which was a solemn poignant moment. This was one of Randy’s favorites, and mine too going back to my college days. It’s a studio track off the early American Beauty album, a simple beautiful acoustic meditation on the cycles of life:
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If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung Would you hear my voice come through the music? Would you hold it near as it were your own? It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken Perhaps they're better left unsung I don't know, don't really care Let there be songs to fill the air.... |
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I first got to know Randy at a block party on our street in about 2004. He was our neighbor down the street for a few years but we had never really connected. He and I were having a good time knocking back beers. He was this preppy, square-jawed, well-built fellow who looked like he just walked out of the J. Crew catalog with his chinos, loafers, button down Oxford shirts and V-neck sweaters. As we were chit chatting, down the street a group of moms were talking near a jump house where a swarm of kids were running amok. He was sharing his professional details, that he was a VP for a large national construction company, and that he was currently in charge of building a high rise office building downtown—structural steel, maybe 20 stories, glass facade, a major project.
He came off as a nice guy, smart and well spoken. We continued powering down the macro beers from the keg and talking about a whole range of topics, including how he had jacked up his craftsman house, repoured the foundation and restored it completely himself. And then he mentioned that he had an extra ticket for an upcoming Grateful Dead show down at Shoreline Amphitheater, near San Jose. (**For you exacting Deadheads, in 2004 this band was an incarnation of the original members ten years after the death of Jerry Garcia). Anyway, when he busted out that offer it was a total non-sequitur that this preppy guy would be going to a Dead show. I agreed to join him because I wanted to see the Dead after so many years, and because I was pretty intrigued by this guy.
He came off as a nice guy, smart and well spoken. We continued powering down the macro beers from the keg and talking about a whole range of topics, including how he had jacked up his craftsman house, repoured the foundation and restored it completely himself. And then he mentioned that he had an extra ticket for an upcoming Grateful Dead show down at Shoreline Amphitheater, near San Jose. (**For you exacting Deadheads, in 2004 this band was an incarnation of the original members ten years after the death of Jerry Garcia). Anyway, when he busted out that offer it was a total non-sequitur that this preppy guy would be going to a Dead show. I agreed to join him because I wanted to see the Dead after so many years, and because I was pretty intrigued by this guy.
In the run-up to the show I continued to be perplexed, telling Megan that I wasn’t going to curtail smoking weed at a Dead show just because I was going with a total prepster. The day came and I agreed to drive. We were going to meet his brother and brother-in-law and a few other guys, all staying at a hotel down in walking distance to the venue. We hadn’t even gotten to the freeway yet when I looked over and he was sliding the metallic watch off his wrist. He looked at me with a wry smile and tossed it right out the window on Alhambra Boulevard. What the what? And he said something like we won’t need this today. Seriously? I remembered the scene from Easy Rider when Peter Fonda does the same thing out in the desert, but this guy wasn’t doing some obscure film reference here, and he seemed like a guy not given to showy metaphoric gestures. Hell, he’s just ditched a nice timepiece. Then right after that he pulled out a wine bottle of dark murky liquid and took a big pull off it. To my perplexed inquiry he disclosed that this is the juice of the San Pedro cactus, in the mescaline family of psychoactives.
Ok, now this preppy Deadhead anomaly is starting to come into focus. I agreed to try the cactus juice once we got to the hotel. At this point in my life, at 40 years old, I hadn’t done psychedelics since my mid 20s. Even back then I was an infrequent user, just a carry over from the college years when a lot of people would enjoy “shrooms” and a few other party drugs. Since then, Meg and I were busy raising kids and I was just in a different place, living in a nice East Sac neighborhood in a conventional mode, with kids in the local catholic grade school—parent, husband and career guy.
Along the two hour drive from Sacramento he shared the ins and outs of preparing the San Pedro mixture with an authoritative, scientific delivery: cutting footlong sections, trimming off the outer skin, distilling and blending it up with pineapple juice. He took me through a horticultural and historical premier, “This is the Echinopsis Pachanoi, formerly classified as Trichocereus pachanoi, in the Cactaceae family.”
He was highly knowledgeable on botany and horticulture, and had a professorial manner as he discoursed through the knowledge base of psychoactive substances. He mentioned wryly that he picked up his San Pedro plants at Target, “The plants themselves are not illegal, and most people don’t know about the alternate uses of this and other plants, uses that have been sacred in South American indigenous cultures for centuries.” As we closed in on Mountain View, near San Jose, he was showing subtle signs of being in an altered state, but still maintaining the conversation quite well. And then he navigated the front desk check-in flawlessly.
In the adjoining hotel rooms I meet Randy’s brother in law Mike and his brother Jerome, and another dude. (by the way, I reunited with Jerome at Randy’s memorial). We each swilled down a couple glasses of this thick nasty green liquid and then decided to take a mid-afternoon swim out at the hotel pool. It was a stellar blue sky June afternoon and as the drug kicked in I was really enjoying the sensations, the patterns and colors of the water and the whole scene out there with a bunch of other concert go-ers. Randy had considerably more than me and experienced a period of nausea, which is common. I did not exactly discern the differences between a mushroom (psilocybin) experience and this mescaline-based experience. For reference, Chat GPT breaks it down this way:
A mushroom trip is typically internal, surreal, and emotionally intense, with flowing, organic visuals and a sense of ego dissolution or deep introspection. The body may feel heavy, and time often distorts as sound and sight blend into a dreamlike experience. In contrast, mescaline feels clearer and more grounded, with bright, geometric visuals that seem overlaid on the world. It brings a heart-opening, empathic energy, often accompanied by a sense of spiritual clarity and connection, with a more energizing body feel and a longer, steadier duration.
I don’t recall the details of the trip other than to say the concert was fantastic, with all the magical, carnivalesque trappings of a Dead show. After that day, Randy and I were fast friends. And I began referring to him as Cactus Man, sharing the details of our adventure with some of my neighborhood pals.
This Dead show initiated a period of a few years where a small group of us would do various psychedelics, weekend warrior type stuff, with this buttoned-up, all-American construction executive as our magnanimous, botanist tripmaster. He would proudly show me the mushroom grow setup in his garage, saying, “It’s no easy thing growing this subtropical organism in an arid climate.” One day he brought over some Salvia Divinorum for me to try. He had ordered it off an early version of the dark web. This is a powerful, naturally occurring psychedelic plant in the mint family, traditionally used by the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico, for spiritual and healing purposes. The name translates to “Sage of the Diviners.” Its active compound, Salvinorin A, is one of the most potent known hallucinogens, producing intense, short-lived dissociative and visionary effects when smoked or chewed.
Randy told me the story of his recent Salvia experience, where he went through a trap door into a whole other world above our world of all encompassing visions. And that he was not able to find the trap door to get back out. Crazy. Then he loaded a chillum (an Asian ceramic pipe) with this 10x strength black powder and instructed me to take a massive hit. The sensation came on immediately and I had the most comprehensive drug experience I’ve ever had. The world and my whole perception seemed to fracture. I was really scared and tried to stand up off the couch. He pulled me back down. The effect faded within 30 seconds or so. It was discomforting but memorable.
One fall he met me and my crew out at Burning Man, pulling up in a rented U-Haul truck. He had been grafting slow-growing peyote onto fast-growing San Pedro cactus to speed up the growth cycle. We ate some of the peyote and had this absolutely magical night. I remember the vivid lights and carnivalesque scene, the group of us walking across the playa at dusk with fireworks overhead and all sorts of stimuli everywhere. Among a whole night of so many things to look at, I remember one point where we were transfixed by a hot young girl dressed in pink fur and ass-less chaps, wearing old aviator googles and firing a flame gun like a straight up badass. The bikes, the art cars, the wild, cool, generous people we met—it was like some kind of strange and beautiful movie, probably the most epic, mind-blowing event I have ever been to.
Another time went to a Dead show out in Wheatland north of Sacramento and he bought a little pouch of black tar opium from some random dude in the tailgates. We smoked it mixed with green bud. Sort of a different, more heavy, dopey marajuana buzz.
During this time we became pretty close, and it was also when I began to understand that Randy was quite right-of-center politically. We talked politics, but always managed to keep the discussions intellectual and not confrontational. To this day I can’t reconcile his political views with the rest of the lifestyle. There’s a beauty in something that so defies convention.
Another interesting part of the story is that he was day trading during this period. He explained his methodology, not value-based (how profitable the company is) but rather based on mechanicals, tracking the arithmetic patterns in stock prices to anticipate future movements. To round out this portrait of a renaissance man, during this time Randy also got his pilot's license. His fearlessness and abilities were always fascinating to me.
Randy told me the story of his recent Salvia experience, where he went through a trap door into a whole other world above our world of all encompassing visions. And that he was not able to find the trap door to get back out. Crazy. Then he loaded a chillum (an Asian ceramic pipe) with this 10x strength black powder and instructed me to take a massive hit. The sensation came on immediately and I had the most comprehensive drug experience I’ve ever had. The world and my whole perception seemed to fracture. I was really scared and tried to stand up off the couch. He pulled me back down. The effect faded within 30 seconds or so. It was discomforting but memorable.
One fall he met me and my crew out at Burning Man, pulling up in a rented U-Haul truck. He had been grafting slow-growing peyote onto fast-growing San Pedro cactus to speed up the growth cycle. We ate some of the peyote and had this absolutely magical night. I remember the vivid lights and carnivalesque scene, the group of us walking across the playa at dusk with fireworks overhead and all sorts of stimuli everywhere. Among a whole night of so many things to look at, I remember one point where we were transfixed by a hot young girl dressed in pink fur and ass-less chaps, wearing old aviator googles and firing a flame gun like a straight up badass. The bikes, the art cars, the wild, cool, generous people we met—it was like some kind of strange and beautiful movie, probably the most epic, mind-blowing event I have ever been to.
Another time went to a Dead show out in Wheatland north of Sacramento and he bought a little pouch of black tar opium from some random dude in the tailgates. We smoked it mixed with green bud. Sort of a different, more heavy, dopey marajuana buzz.
During this time we became pretty close, and it was also when I began to understand that Randy was quite right-of-center politically. We talked politics, but always managed to keep the discussions intellectual and not confrontational. To this day I can’t reconcile his political views with the rest of the lifestyle. There’s a beauty in something that so defies convention.
Another interesting part of the story is that he was day trading during this period. He explained his methodology, not value-based (how profitable the company is) but rather based on mechanicals, tracking the arithmetic patterns in stock prices to anticipate future movements. To round out this portrait of a renaissance man, during this time Randy also got his pilot's license. His fearlessness and abilities were always fascinating to me.
Somewhere around 2007 Randy put the hammer down on his life and things got a little weird. He took a VP position with Parsons, an international corporation specializing in defence contracting, signing on to a year-long stint in Iraq for major dollars. This was four years after the U.S. invasion, and it was very dangerous. The U.S. and other allies were spending billions to rebuild the country. He was put in charge of building six large projects simultaneously, hospitals and school campuses, large scale work. He would travel in a heavily armed convoy between projects guarded by a team of former British special forces guys contracted by Parsons. At that time it was a crap shoot if you would get killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) or in an ambush. There were lots of ways to die there. He only made it through half of his contract before bailing out, telling me it was way too dangerous.
During his visits home and after he bailed out of Iraq we would sometimes drink beers on the block with his brother-in-law Mike, a jar-head type special forces guy who had done four tours in Iraq and been through some very heavy stuff. Like a lot of special forces guys Mike was a little twitchy, some combo of PTSD and a chip on his shoulder. But he was a good dude in our beer drinking mode out in my garage.
At some point Cactus Man confided in me that he had been having an affair with Mike’s wife, a stylish woman from a prominent family in Chile. He told me that his wife discovered the affair and consequently Mike found out. For a few months Randy was sort of hiding out from Mike, worried that he was going to try to assassinate him. This was fuckin crazy for me to hear as I was working in the comparatively boring gig of graphic design, sitting in front of a computer all day trying to keep clients happy and win design awards. But knowing Mike, I knew Cactus Man had real reasons to be afraid.
Then one day he explained that the whole thing got resolved with a single phone call. Randy had mind-tricked Mike. Somehow he called him up and they talked through it and Cactus Man appealed to Mike's sense of honor, knowing exactly how to play the psychology. Randy ended up divorcing Laura and taking up with Mike’s wife. He was paying his ex-wife a sizable monthly alimony based on his high earnings. He didn’t want to keep paying her so he went in to the president of the California construction firm he was then working for and asked to be fired. The boss dude, familiar with some of Randy’s antics, just shook his head and fired him. Randy and the woman relocated down to a big rural spread in the Inland Empire outside of LA and that’s where I mostly lost touch with him.
There were periodic emails he sent that were increasingly packed with dense, conspiratorial tracts and attempts to connect dots across massive swaths of history—from current day cabals of elites to financial system theories, and all the way back to ancient civilizations and astronomical concepts. I was always diplomatic amid these narratives that he believed in so earnestly. There would be the occasional mention of his latest horticultural project, and I would try to steer things toward these more tangible topics.
During his visits home and after he bailed out of Iraq we would sometimes drink beers on the block with his brother-in-law Mike, a jar-head type special forces guy who had done four tours in Iraq and been through some very heavy stuff. Like a lot of special forces guys Mike was a little twitchy, some combo of PTSD and a chip on his shoulder. But he was a good dude in our beer drinking mode out in my garage.
At some point Cactus Man confided in me that he had been having an affair with Mike’s wife, a stylish woman from a prominent family in Chile. He told me that his wife discovered the affair and consequently Mike found out. For a few months Randy was sort of hiding out from Mike, worried that he was going to try to assassinate him. This was fuckin crazy for me to hear as I was working in the comparatively boring gig of graphic design, sitting in front of a computer all day trying to keep clients happy and win design awards. But knowing Mike, I knew Cactus Man had real reasons to be afraid.
Then one day he explained that the whole thing got resolved with a single phone call. Randy had mind-tricked Mike. Somehow he called him up and they talked through it and Cactus Man appealed to Mike's sense of honor, knowing exactly how to play the psychology. Randy ended up divorcing Laura and taking up with Mike’s wife. He was paying his ex-wife a sizable monthly alimony based on his high earnings. He didn’t want to keep paying her so he went in to the president of the California construction firm he was then working for and asked to be fired. The boss dude, familiar with some of Randy’s antics, just shook his head and fired him. Randy and the woman relocated down to a big rural spread in the Inland Empire outside of LA and that’s where I mostly lost touch with him.
There were periodic emails he sent that were increasingly packed with dense, conspiratorial tracts and attempts to connect dots across massive swaths of history—from current day cabals of elites to financial system theories, and all the way back to ancient civilizations and astronomical concepts. I was always diplomatic amid these narratives that he believed in so earnestly. There would be the occasional mention of his latest horticultural project, and I would try to steer things toward these more tangible topics.
There is a further interesting part to the story that goes back to his early years in Ohio. He had won the Mr. Ohio bodybuilding contest in the 1980s and was a completely jacked dude at the time. He was running weed and got busted with a duffle bag of the stuff. He got sent to the Ohio State Reformatory, in Mansfield, Ohio. It’s the gothic stone prison where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed. There, presumably based on his strength and guts, he was the de facto leader of the white inmates. He told me that a knucklehead family friend was sentenced to that prison and he was bummed to have to be responsible for protecting this guy.
He told me the story of how at one point he had to face down the leaders of the Black and the Mexican gangs while he was in there—and that this showdown happened in a remote part of the prison. I didn’t get more of the details, but it’s something straight out of cinema, nearly unbelievable. I’ve never shared this part of the story, but now that he’s gone I hope this is OK to disclose.
The last time I saw him was a few years before his death. It was during a period when he was travelling to Sacramento every other week heading up a project to transform a historic downtown hotel into an 11-story Hyatt. He came over one evening and we had some mushrooms and sat in the yard talking for hours. We strolled down to the supermarket and bought dinner fixins. Just a couple of old dudes having a nice reunion.
About a year before his death Randy got back into extreme shape and won his age group in a national bodybuilding competition in Pittsburgh. He was so happy that his family rolled out for the event. The photo I found online is crazy, just how ripped a late sixties guy could be. It’s a testament to his precision and discipline in training and diet.
The last time I saw him was a few years before his death. It was during a period when he was travelling to Sacramento every other week heading up a project to transform a historic downtown hotel into an 11-story Hyatt. He came over one evening and we had some mushrooms and sat in the yard talking for hours. We strolled down to the supermarket and bought dinner fixins. Just a couple of old dudes having a nice reunion.
About a year before his death Randy got back into extreme shape and won his age group in a national bodybuilding competition in Pittsburgh. He was so happy that his family rolled out for the event. The photo I found online is crazy, just how ripped a late sixties guy could be. It’s a testament to his precision and discipline in training and diet.
Twenty years down the line this all seems like a distant world, and a lot has changed since those times. Psychedelics are having a moment right now, enjoying a new legitimacy based on research showing the significant benefits as a treatment for depression and PTSD. Whereas it was once the purview of tripped out hippies, it’s now tripped out test subjects who carry the promise of enlightened and effective therapies… and of course a treasure chest of future pharmaceutical profits.
In decriminalized local jurisdictions like Oakland you can purchase psychedelic products like mushroom chocolate bars that have a factory-made look and packaging. These sales take place in a legal grey area based on good old American religious freedom. Thank you Puritans and Quakers!
The changes in societal attitudes have been buoyed by cultural thinkers like Michael Pollen, whose book How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, is a far-ranging inquiry combining medical research, historical context and first-person experimentation. In 400 pages he explains the powerful forces of expanded consciousness, and attempts to demystify these substances. Thanks to this darling of literary non-fiction the highbrow New Yorker magazine crowd finally has a window into the psychedelic world!
Tripping in a recreational context now regularly shows up in TV and movie plot lines, and in many other cultural references. It is not uncommon to hear of successful professionals and good upstanding citizens microdosing for pleasure and performance. And there is even a free-thinking NFL quarterback, Aaron Rogers, who is known to go on ayahuasca retreats, the powerful South American ritual vision quest.
Amid this new climate of acceptance, Cactus Man remains a conundrum—a preppy Republican who worked in a conservative industry and had a secret life of expertise in psychedelic cultivation and a deep connoisseurship of the mind-altering experience. He was fearless, fiercely independent, and crisscrossed standard archetypes and subcultural boundaries. On a personal level he was a good dude and a friend. His secret life reminds me of a key lesson: to look past appearances and not be too seduced by the window dressing.
Incidentally, I looked up the set list from that Shoreline Amphitheater concert that Randy and I went to. That night the Dead played 23 songs and for the encore to close the show they played Ripple. RIP Cactus Man!
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
April 10, 2025
In decriminalized local jurisdictions like Oakland you can purchase psychedelic products like mushroom chocolate bars that have a factory-made look and packaging. These sales take place in a legal grey area based on good old American religious freedom. Thank you Puritans and Quakers!
The changes in societal attitudes have been buoyed by cultural thinkers like Michael Pollen, whose book How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, is a far-ranging inquiry combining medical research, historical context and first-person experimentation. In 400 pages he explains the powerful forces of expanded consciousness, and attempts to demystify these substances. Thanks to this darling of literary non-fiction the highbrow New Yorker magazine crowd finally has a window into the psychedelic world!
Tripping in a recreational context now regularly shows up in TV and movie plot lines, and in many other cultural references. It is not uncommon to hear of successful professionals and good upstanding citizens microdosing for pleasure and performance. And there is even a free-thinking NFL quarterback, Aaron Rogers, who is known to go on ayahuasca retreats, the powerful South American ritual vision quest.
Amid this new climate of acceptance, Cactus Man remains a conundrum—a preppy Republican who worked in a conservative industry and had a secret life of expertise in psychedelic cultivation and a deep connoisseurship of the mind-altering experience. He was fearless, fiercely independent, and crisscrossed standard archetypes and subcultural boundaries. On a personal level he was a good dude and a friend. His secret life reminds me of a key lesson: to look past appearances and not be too seduced by the window dressing.
Incidentally, I looked up the set list from that Shoreline Amphitheater concert that Randy and I went to. That night the Dead played 23 songs and for the encore to close the show they played Ripple. RIP Cactus Man!
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
April 10, 2025
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