The Stoned Apocalypse (11 page)
I don’t know how the affair would have gone if I hadn’t begun hallucinating. Perhaps it would have slid into a friendly orgy, with some gentle and harmless fucking, the teacher taking the ripest plums for his private preserve, and letting the others fend for themselves. But I was struck by a reincarnation flash. Suddenly, I realized that I had done something like this before. I closed my eyes and saw myself as an Aztec priest. Thousands of screaming worshippers were massed at the base of the pyramid; the jungle sun beat down from an open sky. I wore a plumed helmet and a great cape; and in my hand I held an obsidian blade.
The inaccuracy of detail paled before the romance of history. It is another aspect of acid culture that the most illiterate young people can have racial flashes, coming clear from the archetypal consciousness, which teach them more about the smell and feel of an era than the thousand dusty tomes pored over by the PhD candidates in their molelike effort to understand an era by amassing detail. If the young acid head would study history, or if the historians would drop acid, we might have some true scholarship taking place, but none of that is likely to happen in America.
I stood there amidst the bare bodies gleaming dully in the Haight-Ashbury night. I spoke. “Everyone, very slowly, begin to feel where the center of movement is in your body. Find that spot which calls itself to your attention and begin to move from there. Let the stretch be slow, total, and complete. And when that stretch is finished, rest . . . until you find another center to move from. Do this until you are moving freely, rolling and stretching, coming to your knees or feet. It you roll over or touch someone else, let that be part of the experience. Accept everything that happens to your body as you come to a sitting position.”
And for ten minutes they did just that, going through all the predictable changes, the awakening of sensuality, the surprised delight that simple movement could be so rich, the flashes of rich sexuality, and the flow which comes from just being in a room with naked, beautiful, relaxed people. When they had all come to, I sat down among them. “I need a virgin,” I said.
There was a quick shuttling of glances. Clearly, it was an absurd request.
“Well, are there any Virgos in the room?” I said. One girl lifted her hand. It was Adrienne, a student who seemed to hold me in some form of blind reverence. “Lie down here,” I said, indicating the floor in front of me.
She lay down on her belly, her arms at her sides, her eyes closed in complete trust. Her face was full, her breathing relaxed, and her buttocks loomed like cotton candy cones. My throat became dry.
I looked at the others. “We are going to reenact an ancient sacrifice,” I said. “Just relax, and get the sense of a very hot sun burning into your shoulders. See if you can feel the sweat trickling down your arms, and the way the light makes your eyes hurt. You are staring up at a very high altar where the priest of the tribe is going to sacrifice a young virgin for the health and prosperity of the people.
“Picture the girl, much like Adrienne here. She is lovely, heavy-limbed. She has never known the touch of a man’s lips, the ecstasy of a caress. She has never had the moment of sheer bliss when two human beings interpenetrate and become one body, one consciousness. She has never known love.
“She is frightened and excited. She is going to experience brutal, painful, swift death, before she has even begun to taste the juices of life. Never will she have her center penetrated by the firmness of a man’s passion. Never will she have a child sucking at her nipple. Soon, her wondering eyes will be closed forever as the black blade pierces her tender belly. And, as her soul flies to the gods above, the priest will tear out her heart and eat it, still beating and bleeding, before the hoarse cries of the multitude.”
As I spoke, Adrienne’s breathing became heavier. The others in the room came closer. There was not a one of them whose blood lust had not been touched. All the savage instincts, bubbling so close to the surface, had been given permission to burst loose, and they leapt about in a joyous dance. I had flashes of burning witches and Nazi storm troopers, I saw the sacking of libraries and the ravages of looting horsemen, I saw every viciousness and evil that man has ever committed in his blind rage. All the violence of the species burned in the room that night, and it was directed at the most innocent one among us, the virgin who had done no harm, and had no cause to experience this brutality.
Slowly, I turned her over so that her vulnerable front lay exposed. Her full breasts lay to each side of her torso, her chest rose and fell as her breath quickened. Her legs lay partially opened and her cunt lips twinkled from under the pubic hair. The tension had reached sublime heights.
I looked up into the imaginary Peruvian skies which had become so real. I said a silent prayer to the deities who hovered overhead, waiting for the soul of the girl, and then, with great theatrical slowness, I raised my right arm. I could feel, I had a sense-memory, of a heavy stone knife in my hand. The eyes of the others went half to the girl, half to my hand. I gritted my teeth, and with a savage cry, plunged the dagger deep into her bowels.
Cascading freakiness ensued.
Three of the women in the room cried out; one fainted. The men came halfway to their feet. Adrienne screamed, a long, piercing wail that curled the hairs on the back of my head. She folded in half, and for a split giddy moment of terror, I wondered if the power of suggestion from the entire group had somehow materialized a knife, and whether she now lay with a mortal wound in her belly.
Slowly, the spasm passed, and I saw with great relief that her skin was intact. A general sigh of nervousness ran through the room, and then Adrienne rolled over, to lie once more on her stomach. My palms were wet and my context was blown. All I knew was that there was a delicious naked woman in front of me, so flipped-out she was ready to relive being a human sacrifice just to be able to dig on the passing scene. So I did what an acid-laden Aztec priest and Zen monk would have done. I lifted my robe, lowered myself on her quivering form, and fucked her with rapid, mounting pleasure.
This was the signal for the festivities to begin, and within minutes there was yet another tangle of bodies on yet another floor, and my career as orgymaster was beginning to assume a distinct direction.
After that night, the scene at the commune fell rapidly apart. And I didn’t want to hang around to see the death throes. Half of the original core group had left, and I didn’t have the energy to keep the vortex spinning, to integrate the new people coming through. Crashers appeared at an even greater rate.
Three days later, I lay in the hammock, watching the fog roll in off the Panhandle, and leafing through the Barb. One of the sex ads caught my eye: “Swingers Club — an exclusive meeting place for swinging couples,” followed by an address and phone number. Without any conscious intent, I began making plans to move in the direction of North Beach, where the decadence had a more refined shape. That afternoon, after getting stoned with Tommy and reading The Pit and the Pendulum together, laughing uproariously at that tale of mounting horror, I left Waller Street and went to the freeway entrance to hitch downtown.
Tommy came with me, looking for a ride to Palo Alto. He was dressed in his usual Sherlock Holmes outfit, complete with checkered cape and hat. His general air of unreality, and the fact that he had no thumb on his right hand, made him a most peculiar hitchhiker indeed. “Tommy,” I said, “you don’t have any thumb on your hand; how can the people tell what direction you want to go in?” He thought a moment, and said, “It doesn’t matter. Every direction leads someplace.”
I left him standing there as I got a ride heading north, and had no knowledge that the gods of mirth were waiting in the wings and already snickering as I made my way to Broadway and the commercial wing of the sexual revolution.
The club consisted of the two top floors of a three-story building. On the ground floor was a belly-dance bar, with girls imported from Eighth Avenue in New York, and deriving ultimately from Brooklyn. North Beach was, of course, the publicized home of the beatnik era, and the City Lights Bookshop still hung in as a relic from the old days, with Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti or Snyder occasionally showing their faces, looking like refugees from a psychedelic Mount Rushmore.
The area is now mostly topless-and-bottomless, interlaced with pornie movie theaters and topped with the transvestite revue at Finocchio’s, where the tourists gawk in derision and hidden envy at their fellow human beings. The commercial-entertainment strip is surrounded by three utterly distinct areas. There is Chinatown, which provides, for all its bustling, an odd note of busy quietness as its members continue in their steadfast refusal to be assimilated. Thousands of newly arrived immigrants cough their lungs out in squalid rooms, while their more prosperous brothers operate the lacquered stores along the narrow streets. The young Chinese hoods, reacting against the hundred years during which their people have been the niggers of the West Coast, are letting their hair grow, and travel in small packs at night, snarling at the fat white faces along the strip. Next door lies the Italian section, with its usual complement of pizza places, espresso joints, and funeral parlors. And overshadowing all is the new Bank of America building, San Francisco’s first true skyscraper, defying the San Andreas fault, and announcing the power of American imperialism to Asia.
The swingers’ club was the mongoloid brain child of an ex-used car salesman, ex-masseur, ex-bouncer named Jim, who summed up within himself all that was wrong with the business mind of Western man. As usual, when meeting such people, my admiration for his ability to manifest all the ills of civilization within a single distorted personality far outweighed the trauma of spending time with him. Jim had a mind which was incapable of perceiving anything except in terms of its possible income. He spoke with clenched jaws, and with a fervor ordinarily found only in maniacal gospel preachers and politicians on the make. The one thing which saved him from being a total monster was his mammoth ineptitude, a pervasive inability to bring any project to a successful conclusion. Like other anal retentives, the energy he used to conceive his ideas obscured any grasp of larger issues, and he spent untold hours with pencil and paper, figuring out the smallest details of complicated schemes whose salient feature was their total unrelatedness to reality.
The idea took shape — coagulated, actually — when Jim met Harold, a fifty-five-year-old millionaire who sustained himself on the twin pillars of lechery and alcoholism. Harold was the son of wealthy and crusty old landowners before whom he lived in mortal terror. For his personal fortune of some three million dollars was tied up in lame-brained business ventures which threatened continually to fail, and if his parents learned of his life-style, they would cut him off without a penny in their will. He was without ready cash most of the time.
Harold was surrounded by leeches and sycophants, people who understood that a fool and his money are soon parted. What it took them, and me, some time to learn was that this was such a fool that he was permanently parted from the bulk of his money, and had but the merest leavings to play with. He did nothing but promise futures, and this ought to have made me suspicious. But like the others, my venal vein began to throb, and critical intelligence became infatuated with this pigeon. Two in the bush got to seem mighty attractive.
This was the nature of the crew that populated the club. The essential idea around which the club was supposed to operate was a simple one, and in all fairness I must note that, were it anyone else but Jim running the place, it might actually have got off the ground. The Bay Area is peopled with thousands upon thousands of couples who, for one reason or another, have unsatisfactory sex lives and are ready to try drastic measures. They have seized upon the notion that more is better and, in one of the saddest marches since Napoleon approached Russia, have embarked upon a program of sexual expansion.
Now, there is a germ of validity in that approach. It is the same notion which fired Pan some fifteen years ago when he started Kerista. The difference lay in the fact that Pan had no fiscal motives involved in his scheme, although his mode of being warped had equally baroque ramifications. Pan is a great bear of a man, looking more and more, as the years go on, like an Old Testament patriarch. Since he has a brilliant mind, since he is thoroughly uneducated, since he is intolerably right-wing in his politics, and since he can chew LSD tabs like candy, he started a Utopian factory, spinning out the world’s most grandiose schemes since the days of the Socialist Utopians in the middle of the nineteenth century. His name should rank with Butler and Bentham.
I made my first contact with him and with Lad, the pied piper of the love movement, through an exchange of letters when they had bought land on Roatán Island off British Honduras and were setting up the headquarters of a worldwide commune and hip travel agency. The notion was that there were hundreds of thousands of communitarians all over the planet, and if they could identify with a single organization, it would be possible for any of them to travel over the entire globe, visiting their spiritual landsmen who were recognizable as members of the family.
Concurrently, the sexual mores of the old civilization would break down, and new possibilities of mating and matching would come into focus, creating a milieu of total sexual liberation.
There were two difficulties. First, the very nature of the hip civilization involves its total unwillingness to identify with anything, much less a fanatic travel agency. Second, Pan is one of those men who are quite lovable but who have trouble getting laid, so his sexual libertarianism was always laced with a kind of resentment and urgency.
At one point, through their sheer novelty and the force of Pan’s personality, Kerista was managing a hopping commune in the East Village, and staging orgies for various screen stars who found the whole trip amusing and pleasingly decadent. But they were busted for dope and indecency by the stalwarts of the New York vice squad, and Pan moved to the Coast.
I met Lad for the first time then, at four in the morning on Avenue B and Third Street, as I was walking with Susan Ashton, then head of New York’s Sexual Freedom League (although, alas, she couldn’t come). I heard the sound of bells, and turned to see Lad, with his eternal flute and drums and jingling knapsack, heading west. As always, he was handing out mimeographed sheets on which he, again, once and for all, explained Everything and gave detailed instructions as to How It Can All Be Straightened Out. He remembered the letters we had exchanged and we rapped a bit before he disappeared into the night, forever, as I thought.
But one afternoon, at the Experimental College, I met Pan, who also, to my amazement, remembered our correspondence. He was now married to a black girl, illiterate and right up from Georgia, whom he treated as a slave in the grand old tradition. She seemed to find the treatment tolerable, and was content to raise their two children and keep the house, worrying mostly that he didn’t spend the entire welfare check on dope or publishing the Kerista Tribe, the monthly movement newspaper.
Pan had aged. He had grown cranky. And he was having the most difficult time getting his sexual scene together, since his old lady was as physically unattractive as he was. But his mind had become a thing of wonder. Give him a few joints, a sympathetic ear, and he could spin out visions that would bring tears to your eyes. He would boggle the sensibilities by, in the middle of his fantasies, insisting that we “bomb Hanoi,” but I have long ago learned that people’s political prejudices are largely reflex actions and should either be ignored, or dealt with through immediate violence.
Kerista had transmogrified into an interesting organism, something that Pan could not recognize, since he still had hopes of an actual organization, with files and dues and obeisance to the Kerista Pope. But what had happened was that over the course of a decade and a half, some several hundred people had come to know one another slowly and well, through one or another project. There had been a continual cross-fertilization, a slow exchange of partners, a mutual assistance. And it had become a real family. And Pan was the unquestioned father of it. Like many fathers, he was roundly cursed and loved, ignored and listened to. Sadly, he still lived in the hope of his dreams, while he missed the stunning beauty of his actual accomplishment.
Harold, unfortunately, had none of Pan’s humanitarian scope.
The people he appealed to were inverse Puritans, those who still found sex salacious but couldn’t admit that to themselves. They were still being cute or heavy about it, a variety of closet tramp. The more decadent ones, such as lived in Muir Woods and Palo Alto, had put together a fairly discreet scene, and were content with enlarging their sexual circles to six or eight people. They were the type who fucked by scenario. But most of the married equivalents to single bar-hoppers had a different problem: how to meet other “swingers.”
One way was to answer the sex ads in one or another of the specialized papers or magazines. But this entailed certain difficulties. What if one met a real sadist? Or what if one arranged to meet another couple, and found them unattractive? How to extricate oneself gracefully from the situation? Or worse, what if one met someone with a really vile perversion, and found oneself digging it? After all, one wanted to be wild, but not too wild. Middle-class morality is very pervasive.
There were a few bars that specialized in this sort of activity, but they were in the Los Angeles area. The swingers had not yet worked out as successful a subculture as the homosexuals, and couples-cruising was an unformed art. It was at this point that Jim had his Idea: why not a club for swingers?
He advertised in the trade journals and set it up as follows: a couple would come for an interview, and if accepted, pay a yearly registration fee. For this they would be able to come to two weekly parties, and have access to subsidiary services, such as party pads, etc. At the club, couples would be assured of meeting only other couples with similar interests, and the screening service would keep out the more dada types. Also, there would be a lightly suggestive ambience, so that one could look others over without pressure. On the face of it, it was an intelligent program, complete with socially redeeming value.
It ran aground on the shoals of reality. First there was the granite personality of Jim to contend with, his ability to discourage anyone with any degree of sensitivity from joining the club. Then there was the venality of the people who worked there. Also, the fact that Harold kept running out of cash at times when crucial investments were needed. And finally, the customers themselves.
For the concept of swinging is based on the supposition that a couple have got it so together, are so filled with love and respect for each other, have such a perfect sex life, that they spontaneously break the bonds of the twosome and reach out to include others. For the people who went to places like Vantage, nothing could be further from the truth. They were, almost to a person, characters out of Albee. Tight-mouthed, loose-assed, bickering, jealous deadheads who didn’t have enough energy to follow the simplest debauchery to its logical conclusion. Not one of them could have tied de Sade’s shoelaces or understood the depth of The Story of O.
As in every other human endeavor, the constitutionally strong, attractive, wealthy, and successful were off in some private corner, having their orgies, while the losers groped around the public places, searching to be found.
I sat across the desk from Jim and tried simultaneously to sell him a bill of goods and find out exactly what his scene was; I met the rest of the crew: Ellen, a delicious Taurus heavy into junk; Margit, a black Aries of twenty-six who worked hustling drinks in the jazz clubs, and must have been the world’s most unconscious dyke; Madeleine, Jim’s wife, a long-suffering woman of exquisite emotional sensibility and extreme social deprivation (I later took her on her first acid trip and had my mind blown as her Cancerian personality emerged and she kept saying, “I am the mother, I feed the bodies, the minds must grow.”); Ralph, a pimply would-be orgiast who got the job of putting out the monthly newsletter, with interesting tidbits for all the swingers; and Evelyn, who had a permanent crash-pad in the outpatient clinic at Marin General Hospital’s psychiatric wing; and the to-be-expected mélange of petty thieves, unsuccessful whores, declassé hippies, and strange floaters.
It was several days before I met the Man. It was going by the name of Yen at the time. I had dropped acid with Pan about a month earlier, and in a burst of affection, I told him I wanted to “join” Kerista. He was outrageously happy. I was his first convert in almost ten years. The first thing that had to be done was to get me a name, it being a Kerista rule, derived from an early vision of his, that everyone in Kerista must have a name with only three letters in it. We repaired to the Ouija Board, placed our fingers on the pointer, and Pan rolled up his eyes. “0 great ghost of Gurdjieff, guide us in finding a name for this new member of our Tribe,” he said. I smiled inwardly, thinking about what old Mrs. R. would say if she could see the scene. The Board did its usual magic, and the letters emerged . . . Y . . . E . . . and then a long hesitation. Was my name to be YES? It was a glorious vision, but the triangle scooted past the S and went to N. YEN. I was delighted. Yen, as the dictionary points out, means a desire, and the phrase which crystallizes the Scorpio nature is “I desire,” so that much of it checked out. Also, Yen is the standard Japanese currency, and I had been in Japan for two years and did much of my identification with that culture. Then, spelled backward it was NEY, pronounced “nay,” which was no. So the name became NO spelled backward. Finally, it had a devastatingly exotic ring to it.