One Christmas Eve in Dayton, Ohio, my first wife and I and a bastard I'll call Steve were looking for something to do. We wound up at a cheesy bar called the Southern Belle, the only open place we could find, and we were moping around all bored when up walks this Viking biker guy we sort of knew from the music scene. He was lonesome and wanted to sit with us. We rolled our eyes and said OK. Somehow the conversation made its way (as it often did, with me, in those days) to the subject of psychedelia, and our Viking friend told us he had once picked up Stephen Gaskin hitchhiking, and they'd had a long talk.
I was stunned, as I was at that time right in the middle of Gaskin's book, Haight-Ashbury Flashbacks. We talked about Gaskin awhile, and I guess Viking guy decided we were OK then, because he went out to his bike and came back with a paper lunchbag containing three psilocybin mushroom caps. Then he wished us a merry Christmas and left. We called him Santa Claus from then on.