The obituary was accompanied by a very odd photograph taken at the University of Texas in 1951. The picture, however, didn’t show a kid in his mid-20s. It looked like a Hollywood publicity photo of a character actor who specializes in playing stout bankers. He might have played one of Lionel Barrymore’s clerks in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Time’s obituary of what it called, in its mighty wisdom, an “enigmatic personality who was either an unfairly vilified anthropologist or a wildly inventive novelist,” was accompanied by a picture of a face covered by a hand, with only intense eyes and a few strands of black hair showing. This is the only photograph, according to Time, to which Castaneda would consent. For a cover story!

I hadn’t thought about Castaneda in years. As a matter of fact, the last time I thought about Carlos Castaneda, after the previous years I hadn’t thought about him, was at a party in Mill Valley, Calif., in the early ’80s. Midnight or so, a short, long-haired Latino man walked through the door. He had a huge mustache and a grin that ate half his face. On either side of him, two women, gorgeous in a Playboy/hippie kind of way (honey-blond, vacant, faded blue jeans, halter tops, you know), sashayed through the door. They seemed like a dream sequence from a Cheech and Chong movie.

After a while, somebody came up to me and shouted over the music (the ’80s equivalent of whispering) that this guy was Carlos Castaneda. I went over to the cluster of people surrounding him in the corner of the garage, out of the way of the dancers. He had his wallet open, beaming, showing everybody his driver’s license. The two women were moving their bodies idly to the music, looking away, scanning the crowd. I elbowed to his side. Like a stoned pope offering his ring, he held his license up for my view. Sure enough, it said, “Carlos Castaneda.”

And that was that. I didn’t talk with him. I danced until 3 and drove home erratically.

Was he the One True Castaneda? I doubt it. He was too young and pleased to be recognized. On the other hand, he did have two fabulous babes following him around, always a sure-fire fame indicator. Maybe he was a con man who’d convinced them that he was the real Castaneda. Maybe he was the genuine Castaneda, acting like a con man to teach us a lesson, and the two women were spiritual guides from a separate reality. I just don’t know.

After reading the obituary, feeling both nostalgic and mildly alarmed that I couldn’t remember what the deal was with Carlos Castaneda, I rushed out and tracked down a copy of “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.” I found one for $2 in a used bookstore in Santa Rosa, from a woman who seemed excited that I was buying it. I guess the news of Castaneda’s demise hadn’t precipitated a rush for his output.

The book was pretty much as I’d remembered it — an earnest seeker hooks up with a cranky old magician and learns what fear is. That was the appeal of the book (and series) when I was a kid, and probably remains so today.

There are all kinds of echoes in the relationship between Carlos and Don Juan — Plato and Socrates, Boswell and Johnson, Watson and Holmes, Luke and Yoda, Scully and Mulder. The book is very well written, in an old-fashioned meticulous style that only contributes to the — what? Verisimilitude, I guess. I liked it as much as I had the first time I read it, which was quite a lot.

But I also remembered why I stopped reading the series. “Journey to Ixtlan” was the last one I read, I think, if that’s the one that ended with Carlos leaping into the Nagual. Anyway, I didn’t leap with him. I lost interest, that’s all. I was as fond of amazing dope tales as the next guy, but I wasn’t about to pack my troubles in an old kit bag, hitchhike to Sonora and stalk old Apaches in the hope of finding luminous beings, magical gestures or even the secret of life. My parents would have killed me.

I’m a Tonal, not a Nagual, kind of guy, in other words. I had a life, such as it was.

What Castaneda’s life was, though, remains a mystery. He seems to be one of those peculiar Americans (despite his origins), like Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Walt Disney or Hugh Hefner, who had a dream of combining mission with marketing. He was more subtle than most, and therefore less successful (though successful enough to remain in print, and on required reading lists, for 30 years). Cruising the Internet, however, I’ve noted that he has bickering female “disciples,” roaming the land, promoting his (Don Juan’s?) concept of “tensegrity” through workshops and seminars. Tensegrity is a tool that allows us to cross the bridges of space, time and awareness. Nothing wrong with that, but where’s the theme park? The church? The drugs?

Ah well, if it isn’t dead, Castanedaniasm is young. As are we all. Forever young, forever stupid.

As the ever-wise Don Juan put it in “The Teachings,” re. the abuse of magical power:

“I killed a man with a single blow of my arm … Once I jumped so high I chopped the top leaves off the highest trees. But it was all for nothing! … For what? To frighten the Indians?”

Really. What’s the point of that? That’s the true lesson of the ’60s, isn’t it? On the magic bus, we’re all Indians. What’s the point of that?

Darlene James is one of those 52 million. She lives in a cave alongside a freeway in San Francisco. A few weeks back, while U.N. leaders were planning their meeting, James was deciding she would not let her boyfriend inject “speed” into a vein in her neck.

“Methamphetamine’s making me crazy,” she says. “I need to stop.” But that same week James was rejected for treatment for the fourth time — this time because she did not have the appropriate paperwork.

James first walked into a drug rehab center more than six months ago and asked for help. But, although San Francisco has a policy of “treatment on demand” — within 48 hours of an addict’s decision to quit — she has yet to be accepted into a program.

Her story is not unusual. Most addicts seeking rehab wait weeks or months. Michael Pagsolingan overdosed on heroin after waiting eight weeks to get into a program. Cost of emergency treatment for an overdose — $1,450. Cost of one day in treatment — $55.

At the United Nations, President Clinton proclaimed that the United States would spend $17 billion to combat the drug scourge. Yet only 35 percent of those funds will be directed at “demand reduction” — i.e. treatment of addicts. The rest will go to attempting to control the flow of drugs.

These priorities seem wrongheaded, given the findings of a study sponsored by the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. The study shows that $1 spent on treatment decreases drug use as much as $7 spent on domestic law enforcement, $11 on confiscating drugs at the border and $23 to stop drugs at their country of origin.

Funding in San Francisco’s Treatment on Demand program is at 40 percent of needs. In Baltimore, there are 5,700 treatment slots for 60,000 addicts. In New York City, 60 percent of paroled drug abusers who don’t get into treatment are back in jail within months, but new treatment programs are still awaiting funding.

In the United States as a whole, an estimated 4 to 6 million addicts who need treatment are not receiving any.

“We are determined to build a drug-free America,” President Clinton told the U.N. special assembly. He spoke of a “virtual university” where anyone with access to a computer and modem could share knowledge and experience about substance abuse.

Darlene James, in her cave by the freeway, with no modem or computer, remains trapped in a chemical and bureaucratic nightmare. After being turned down four times, she beds down in her wet sleeping bag and says she is trying to keep from asking her boyfriend to inject her.

“These programs keep running me in littler and littler circles,” she says.

James did not think President Clinton’s fighting words or the U.N. conference marked the beginning of a new war against drugs.

On March 27, the FDA approved Viagra, a little blue pill that, according to its manufacturer, Pfizer Inc., has created a forest of wood in up to 80 percent of the 4,000 impotent men tested in their clinical trials. The sound of trees rising is beautiful music to stock analysts, no doubt thinking of the 30 million American men who are said to have erectile dysfunction. And as baby boomers age, that number will soar. Like teeth, penises weren’t designed to last 80 years.

Thus, predicts David Saks of Gruntal & Co., Viagra will be the most profitable drug ever — and early reports show he’s probably right. In the week ending April 10, nearly 40,000 prescriptions were written at a retail price of about $10 a pill. One Net-savvy physician, Michael Thomas of Milwaukee, was selling Viagra scrips on his Web page at $50 per “consultation,” until criticism forced him to require in-person office visits. Even without the Internet, Pfizer could gross $4 billion yearly from the drug. One thing is certain: Wall Street has placed its bet. In the past year Pfizer’s stock — now selling at an all-time high — has more than doubled. On Thursday, the company is expected to announce a two-for-one stock split.

The man behind that growth is Dr. Ian Osterloh, a diffident Englishman with narrow shoulders, a receding chin and a complexion the color of typing paper. When we met, not long before Pfizer submitted Viagra for approval, he was sipping tea and waiting to take the podium at a medical conference. The discovery of Viagra, he said, is a tale of the unexpected.

“We were experimenting at our research center in Sandwich [England] with treatments for hypertension and angina. We thought a phosphodiesterase inhibitor [which Viagra is] might be effective.” Viagra surprised Osterloh and his fellow researchers twice: It didn’t lower blood pressure but it did raise erections. A follow-up study caused even more excitement — first among the research subjects, then Pfizer, now investors.

Viagra is poised to dominate the impotence market much the way Prozac and similar pills have taken over the treatment of depression. But unlike Prozac, Viagra has a huge potential for black-market sales. At one testing site, a burglar stole a shipment of pills. Osterloh blames (guess who?) the media.

“This is not a ‘superstud drug,’” he said. “It is a serious medication for a serious disease. It is not intended for healthy, functioning men.” But sensational news coverage, he complained, has given the false impression that Viagra is for “regular guys” who want “a little extra performance.”

“That,” Osterloh said, “is what you get in your motorcar after it has been properly serviced.”

Osterloh was annoyed when I asked if he’d taken the drug himself. “Certainly not,” he said. But the history of impotence research is filled with men who’ve experimented on themselves. An unforgettable example occurred at the 1983 meeting of the American Urological Association in Las Vegas. There, British physician Giles Brindley demonstrated beyond charts and graphs that a drug he’d been experimenting with was effective. He did this by stepping in front of the podium and dropping his trousers. Moments earlier, Brindley had injected himself. So there it was, standing proud before a room full of strangers: the, uh, “evidence.” Farther down the Strip, Siegfried and Roy were making a white Bengal tiger disappear, and two circus aerialists — one sitting on the other’s shoulders — were traversing a tightrope without a net. But even in Vegas they’d never seen a show like this.

Within weeks, doctors were prescribing injections, even though the medication was not FDA-approved for that purpose until two years later.

The mainstream press, especially the New York Times (which ran four
pieces on Viagra in the week after its approval) has been a consistent booster of this erection industry, gushing over every new treatment — and the new treatment emphasis. Once impotence was thought to be a psychological problem, the turf of sex therapists and shrinks. Now urologists, backed by the media, say the problem isn’t in your head — it’s in the vascular system inside your penis.

This shift has moved the focus from the couple (Masters and Johnson’s great insight) to the male organ. Treatment is based on an assumption of pathology. Many erectile-dysfunction specialists don’t even do a diagnostic work-up on the patient’s penis — nor did Osterloh recommend one when he spoke on March 27 at Pfizer’s press conference announcing Viagra’s approval by the FDA. Instead, most urologists give a general physical exam, take a sexual history, then offer the patient drugs.
Sure, these medications work, technically speaking, just as a doctor can prescribe a sedative to make an insomniac sleep. But does the fact that the drug works mean the problem is solved?

The answer to that, of course, depends on how you define the “problem.” The 1994 Massachusetts Male Aging Study, the survey urologists cite to prove their assertion that impotence is a problem (of varying severity) for half the male population between the ages of 40 and 70, didn’t merely ask respondents to rate their erections. It asked, “How satisfied are you with your sex life?” Surveyors created a “mild ED” category (ED = Erectile Dysfunction) for men who have erections, but worry that they’re not getting quite as hard, or lasting as long, as they used to.
(And how many men over 40, even those who have a regular sex partner, don’t worry about that?)

It’s only when you count these men that the
number of “impotent” men reaches 30 million. Dr. James Barada of Albany, N.Y., a member of the American Urological Association’s Treatment Guidelines Committee, is one of a small but growing number of urologists concerned about this “inflation” of the patient pool. “There’s a
difference between erectile dysfunction, which is a real disease,”
Barada said, “and erectile dysphoria, which is a vague sense of
dissatisfaction. I worry the line is getting blurred.”

Of course, the issue of sexual “satisfaction” is important, even if it is of questionable value in determining how many man really suffer from impotence. After all, only a dunderhead would deny that sex for humans — for better and worse — is at least as much a psychological process as it is biological. But these
truths are of little interest to most urologists. When Brindley
dropped his pants in Las Vegas, he did more than give new meaning to the term “scientific presentation.” He achieved the first major breakthrough in what Dr. Leonore Tiefer, professor of psychiatry at New York Medical Center, has called “the pursuit of the perfect penis.” This penis is impervious to Freudian insights, couples counseling and feminist criticism. It is a sexual tire that can be reinflated at will by drugs, no matter how many times it has gone flat in the past — or why. The
ultimate male fantasy has come true: a penis that’s hard on demand. And, best of all, you don’t have to talk to your wife, girlfriend or lover — or, even worse, a shrink — about your “relationship.” The only relationship that matters is the one between you and your dick.

Science has rewired that connection, but the price tag for this new
power tool is hidden. Men joke about being sex machines; the reality may not be so funny. When the penis becomes a mere engineering problem, the psychic vault of attitudes and anxieties that make up the “masculine mystique” is at risk of losing something important: its mystery, with consequences for eroticism, manhood and gender relations that the wood salesmen — and buyers of Pfizer stock — haven’t pondered at all.

With urologists, roughly 99 percent of whom are men, now
dominating the discourse on sexual functioning, an important group is rarely heard from — women. Sure, most women appreciate a firm,
hard erection. But a firm, hard erection attached to an inept,
insensitive lover is hardly the answer to anyone’s problem. Not
surprisingly, this is an issue you don’t hear addressed at urological conventions.

Even so, nothing is likely to stop the Viagra juggernaut. American men have been reeducated to see aging and the loss of youthful vigor not as a natural process, but as a disease. Sure, life is hard, doctors tell us — it’s supposed to be. And we have the drugs to keep it that way.