The Stoned Apocalypse (12 page)
And it was with no little self-conscious suavity that I stood before the bed of the millionaire and said, “My name is Yen.”
He looked at me with coolly appraising eyes which, because of the booze in his blood at the time, had trouble focusing. But I saw his posture immediately. This was a man who for all of his life had people approach him hat-in-hand. Although he was superficiality itself, he had learned that in social interaction he need do nothing but lean back and let others perform. As an endless stream of people did, in fact, do. He had the place, he had the bread, he had the power, and had to do nothing but be there, like a magnetic spider.
In all fairness, I must note that there was no malice to the man. He was merely spiritually corpulent, inane, and mentally fuzzy. Yet he did know how to appraise the motives of others in relation to himself. I decided that my tactic ought to be to confront him harshly, for I calculated that he was basically a passive homosexual and wanted nothing more than to be controlled by another man. But my functioning tripped up my reasoning, and I ended by flirting with him instead. This was as successful for the short run, because I knew how to handle him, and he knew that I knew the game we were playing. His eyes flashed and he said, “You are a very shrewd person. Yen,” and I flashed back, “Like yourself, Harold.”
But shrewd I wasn’t, for he never gave me his money, only his funny paper. We talked about my role at the place, and it was decided that I was to serve as a psychic host for the weekend gatherings. Since the people who came were largely guilty, games had to be provided to warm them up. The women working for the club had the function of walking around in see-through gowns, serving drinks, and acting as models for body painting which, it was hoped, would spread to the wives present.
I was later offered the same job by the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League, at the Ashbury Street headquarters. But the scene there was even more deadly than at Vantage. It was the large basement room of a private house, and each Wednesday, dozens of couples would come for a sexual cocktail party, sipping martinis and making small talk. One portion of the room was sealed off by hanging blankets and partitioned into cubicles behind that. The bit was, you flashed on someone you wanted to fuck, and if there was mutual agreement, you went behind the wall and did it. It was as ribald as a group of preteen-agers playing spin-the-bottle.
At least the decor at the club showed more imagination. Harold did all the decorating himself. The entire third floor was a large room, some forty by fifteen feet. He blacked out all the windows and then hung, laid, and suspended about a thousand dollars worth of ersatz Middle Eastern junk. There were gaudy overstuffed throw pillows, pseudo-Persian rugs, hideous little wooden sculptures, and fake bronze gongs. Indescribable posters lurked in the shadows. To the side of the main room was the master’s bedroom, equipped with madras cloths hanging from the ceiling, blinking lights, and a Playboy bed. Beyond that was the kitchen and dining area, which held a jukebox, a bar, and a set of weights. Aikido classes were given there on Saturday mornings.
My workshop series ended in disaster the first night when Evelyn’s schizophrenia was precipitated by the relaxation exercise, and she began freaking out by screaming and running wildly through the halls. After that I quickly joined the mood of the others who worked there, a kind of depressed lassitude. I began making it with Ellen and she stopped crashing at the club and moved in with me to a room in the Haight in an apartment we shared with two Kerista rejects. He was a New York Jew trying to be a West Coast Gentile, and his old lady was right out of Olympia Press. At the time, he was using her as a model for beaver flies. In the same pad were two homosexuals, one a cheerful chipmunk who stayed stoned, worked in the post office, and spent most of his spare time at the baths. The other was a serious interior decorator from Ontario, and he had built a complete environment in one of the rooms, out of tinfoil, strobes, mirrors, and Christmas tree lights. It was a pleasure to take mescaline in there, listen to his Laura Huxley recordings, and pass around an inhalator of amyl nitrate.
We became friendly with Jocelyn, who worked as the accountant, and who hadn’t written down a single number in two months. She was making it with a Navy jet pilot, and they were vicariously interested in swinging. We got stoned at their place one night, in the middle of the Navy officer housing. His pad had a ghost and for a full half hour we watched it shimmering in the corner and making the room as bright as sunlight. We smoked some heady grass which a friend of his had just flown in from Vietnam, and he regaled us with tales of the military mind. His conversation was studded with jokes about “nukes,” or nuclear weapons, and he described how beautiful it was to get really high on hash and watch the colors of napalm bombs as they exploded on Vietnamese villages. He once and for all disillusioned me of the idea that to smoke grass makes one a better person; the weed simply makes monsters more monstrous. Oddly enough, however, he came across as a likable person, friendly and sophisticated, with no illusions about the nature of his work. He provided me with one of my strongest insights into the computer mind, that modern mutation in man which will devise the most efficiently horrible means of destroying life on the planet without a single concern for the suffering involved.
It was that night that Ellen got onto one of her junkie rides and took me along, wanting us to promise a suicide pact. She said that three of her friends had gone to a mountain top two months earlier, and did the final nod-out. For a moment, I didn’t know whether she was speaking metaphorically and then realized that they had indeed committed suicide through psychic agreement. One level of my consciousness saw it merely as another manifestation of the Dance of Shiva and nothing to get concerned about; but the rice-and-beans portion of my being was horrified. My feeling is that life is once around for each of us, and there is something amounting to a sacred trust for each of us to live it most intelligently, most lovingly, most honestly. I am given the creeps by people who think, somehow, that death isn’t real. It indicates that they think life isn’t real. And it is unfortunate that the spate of translations from the East has given them the jargon to justify their inability to wake up to the reality of living.
The fucking we did that night was grotesque. At one point we would be locked in ecstatic embrace, and then, as in a Gothic novel, some nauseating nameless Dread would seize us, and we would freeze in position, for as long as twenty minutes, staring at one another in reptilian loathing. The poppers we were using only intensified the experience, and none of it was helped by the presence of the ghost, or of the boy bomber in the next room. Yet, despite all the horror, it was one of the deepest experiences I can remember, for through all the twists and turns of that grisly ride, Ellen and I hung in there together, in a wide and moving communion.
As it became clearer that the club was not going to make it, Harold became even tighter with money, and most of the salaries were cut or done away with altogether. Some of the people split and the rest of us broke down into small subgroups. The club became more of a crash-pad and place for meeting. One night I took Ellen, Margit, and Madeleine to Tina’s house where we all dropped acid, strawberry barrels being the brand at the time. Tina was a sometime lover who was having a long thing with her therapist in Berkeley, a Jungian she went to see six mornings a week. She got up at five in order to get there for a seven a.m. appointment. It had been going on for almost two years, and there seemed to be no change except that he was some ten thousand dollars richer for it, and her parents, who were footing the bill, got a sense of helping their daughter.
By mid-evening, my clothes had come off, I had entered a barking contest with Tina’s dog, and was in an intense fight with Margit for the attention of the other women. She leaned her Aries dyke vibes into me and practically seared my eyeballs. Like any smart Scorpio, I laid back until she was off-balance, and then shot bolts of vibrant energy into her solar plexus. But she was unbelievably strong, and after an hour of struggle I said, “Look, I’ll split the chicks with you.” She refused to cop to what was going down and the fight simmered into a long night of silent antagonism.
Personal hostilities meshed with financial crisis, and the club came apart at the seams. I was in a state of growing and frazzled desperation. The constant worry about money was draining my inner resources. It was inconceivable that I should go to work; I simply wasn’t in any shape to go downtown and meet the Man. If I had gone into any office or employment bureau as I was, long-haired, wild-eyed, speaking what seemed to be gibberish a lot of the time, they would have freaked. And I had once and for all rebelled against the notion of putting on the “nice young man” act, pretending to be obedient and docile, selling my birthright for a mess of decaying culture.
The circumstances under which I was taking dope were making me crazy. One night I even stupidly dropped acid and went to the Carousel, a plastic rock palace, and had my sensibilities ripped off by the carrion vultures who swarm to such places to feed off the music and human vibrations.
And once again I could feel familiarity slipping from my grasp. The thing is that there is a way of perceiving existence that has no description in any symbology whatsoever. All the yogas, mantras, yantras, and religious cookbooks are nothing but a set of exercises which are supposed to put your head in that single place where the understanding takes place. The problem is, if you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it. And if you read about it, you can con yourself into believing that you do have it. Especially if you take a psychedelic. For a short time you sail into a self-induced Nirvana and think you really understand what the whole trip is about. But as Krishnamurti points out, “Reality is not an experience.”
At one point in my inner and outer travels, I emerged with the phrase “the mysterious familiar,” which is a personal literary tag to remind me of what I am always forgetting about the nature of things. It is to say that what is, is essentially mysterious. There is no one, there never has been anyone, nor can there ever be anyone, including the total Overmind of all Being, who has the foggiest notion why anything exists at all, and all speculation in that direction is as futile as it seems to be ineluctable. However, to live in that state of awareness all the time is a shortcut to madness, and while it may be a glorious insanity, it is not worth the agony, not to me at least. Nietzsche, obviously, thought otherwise; Artaud had no choice.
The alternative is to see what is as familiar. Being mortal and finite creatures, we seek refuge in the known. We cease contrasting that which is before our eyes against the backdrop of nothingness. We forget the void. The sky, the sun, the bird, the self . . . these are things we know from birth, we accept their existence unquestioningly. But in this state, we lapse into habit, our perceptions dull, and we enter a period of stagnation. In short, we fall asleep and join the rest of mankind in its round of walking coma.
Between the two extremes of sleepwalking and insanity, there is simple perception, a seeing in innocence. One can look at a tree, and see it always for the first time. To see without the symbol, without the associations, so finely, so purely, is probably the highest good. But to sustain such a state of perception requires enormous energy, of the type that I was wildly squandering in my metatheatrical madness.
Now I was sliding into an area where all context is stripped away, and there was no way to get a fix on my actions. Which is not to say that I was acting spontaneously; it was more like a drowning man thrashing about to find something to hold on to.
Evelyn and I began hatching schemes to blackmail Harold. She would seduce him and I would come in with a camera; or I would seduce him and she would come in with a camera. Or we would beat him up and steal his video setup and jewelry and car and threaten to kill him if he gave us any trouble.
Harold became restless. His taste for new bodies and faces was making itself felt and he was itchy for a new set of conquests. The people around him were beginning to openly despise him, and he needed to dangle his millions before a different set of eyes. At one point, he opened talks with one of the motorcycle gangs, the same people who had stabbed Stanley the Astrologer in front of the Donut Shop. He cut off all money from the club and we knew the end was near. It was simply a question of when the properly attractive hustle was dangled before his eyes. And it was then that Esalen made the scene.
Esalen is a quintessentially American phenomenon of the middle twentieth century. As a mixture of therapeutic effectiveness and shallow hucksterism, of sincere humanism and power mania, it finds no equal on the entire social scene. It began as the private home and grounds of one man, who started a conventionally wealthy-man’s trip of inviting his friends to his country estate. After a while, his friends invited friends, and within a few years, there was a very quiet groovy scene going on, against the glorious backdrop of Big Sur, and centered around a hot spring bath in a cave overlooking the Pacific surf.
However, through some mechanism or other, the people there got the idea to turn the place into a human growth center, and they began to attract a long list of defectors from the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities. The Freudian Empire was in shambles, and the new therapies weren’t filling the gap left by its downfall. So modestly at first, but with increasing momentum, Esalen began its series of workshops in sensory awareness, sensitivity, encounter, massage, “meditation,” bio-energetics, and that entire range of techniques which has come to be known as “the Esalen approach.”
But a strange change took place once the place stopped being a natural home for a group of friends, and became a business. Soon, Esalen began to sell sensitivity, to charge stiff fees for joy, and maintain waiting lists for awareness. They came at the proper historical moment. Therapy had sunk to such a level of pomposity and granite stupidity that no serious or hip person could take it seriously. And on its dead body, Esalen, like a great vulture, nourished itself.