The Stoned Apocalypse (18 page)

That afternoon, she phoned in with a job that had nothing to do with typing skills, and at eight o’clock the following morning, I reported to the mail room of one of California’s largest businesses. The last time I had worked in a mail room was in New York at the age of twenty-four, when a similar dip in fortune sent me scurrying for the least complex form of employment. The man in charge here had the exact same personality as my previous boss, that of a sergeant who knew more about running the base than the commanding officer. The firm, he informed me with no little pride, received and sent more mail than any other organization in northern California. The mail room was the size of a football field, and had scores of machines for collating, wrapping, stamping, sorting, and shredding. Some fifty people worked there, mostly women who were Mexican or Puerto Rican, and some ten boys ranging in age from seventeen to forty. For most of them, this was a career opportunity, and the day I spent there was a complete education in the mores of the déclassé lower middle class.

To call what we did there “work” is misleading, for work implies some necessity for intelligence. There, the machines did the work, and we served the machines. It was the sheerest drudgery. Daily, hundreds of thousands of envelopes were processed through, and half as many small packages. I was again informed, with some élan, that the workers were given two fifteen-minute coffee breaks, a full forty-five minutes for lunch, and received free hospitalization. At the end of a year, one received two weeks paid vacation. The place drove home the reason why the term “wage slave” has been expunged from the American vocabulary, although conditions were clearly an improvement over their sweatshop equivalent in the garment district in New York. The long window against one wall provided a stunning view of downtown San Francisco. I imagined that if one were basically robotic, this was not a bad job, and brought us one step further in our frantic attempt to emulate the civilization of the ants.

But it wasn’t my scene. My call from the agency had indicated that this was to be a two-week stint, yet when I left that afternoon I knew there was no going back. I couldn’t face another day of the routine, the empty eyes of the people there, and the benign deadly efficiency of the mail room boss. It was as though everything in the place, every human feeling, every fleshy vibration, had been coated with a thin veneer of plastic, so that we smiled and spoke like people, but were in reality mannikins, programmed to a single task.

The next day I showed up at the agency and asked for another assignment. The chick fixed me with a stare which let me know that I should be grateful for the chance she gave me — two weeks of work (and I flashed the stories of the Depression my father had told me) — and that my leaving the job was a black mark against me. I let my eyes fill with silent pleading, and she decided to give me one more chance. “Here’s something perhaps more suitable for you,” she said. “It’s a computer programming company.”

The next day I appeared at the offices of Amalgamated Electronics, a squat seven-story building with almost no windows, resolved in my heart to do better. I would show the agency that I could succeed. While part of me was able to laugh at my situation, the other part felt sick with anxiety. Living with Pan was a chore, and if I couldn’t take it there, I really had no place else to crash, at least, no place where I would be received graciously, or which didn’t entail some emotional contract. And I couldn’t sustain another period of sleeping on the floor in the corner of some pad in the Haight. I had to make money!

The job I was given made the work in the mail room seem the soul of spontaneity. I was handed a pile of punch cards, and an equal pile of typewritten sheets. Each of the sheets had a more or less cryptic message written on it, and what I was to do was copy the messages onto the punch cards, printing in capital letters, putting one letter in each of the hundred squares on the cards. It was something such as might be given to a kindergarten student to have him practice the alphabet. I sat down, listened carefully to the instructions, feeling like one of the contestants on Beat the Clock. Later, I was to sense myself more like a chimpanzee in a bizarre psychological experiment. And still later, like a reject from a mental hospital doing the only form of work of which he was capable. I rolled up my sleeves, and began.

In a very short time, I realized that the work load was so planned as to keep me busy every second of the time. I didn’t have to rush, but neither could I slow down. I had to assume the untiring pace of a machine. Looking around, I saw my would-be peers, middle-class college graduates, each in his or her own cubicle, bored, wan, trapped. Their job was to write the messages which I was copying onto the cards. It was as though we were the middle components of some insane conveyer belt, transferring dada messages from an obscure source to an equally obscure end.

I went into a light trance and worked straight through, being interrupted by a tap on the shoulder for lunch and for each of the two fifteen-minute coffee breaks. At one point, the pile of messages disappeared, and I ground to an abrupt halt. I looked up and realized that I had finished. I walked up to the lady who had started me off in the morning. “Are there any more?” I asked. She looked up, puzzled. “No . . .” she said. And then, “Are you finished?” She looked up at the clock; it was twenty-five before five.

She gave me the kind of smile that teachers for the mentally retarded reserve for their most industrious students. “You finished ahead of time!” she cooed. “Why, that’s marvelous.”

To my intense surprise, I swelled with inane pride. It was the first word of praise for an accomplishment that I had received in months. And it was for an honest labor, however mindless. I almost kissed her hand. “Can I come back tomorrow?” I asked hopefully.

Her face fell. “No, I’m sorry. That’s all the work we’ll have for a while. Our regular girl is coming in tomorrow.” We stayed like that for a long moment. Then she added, “But if we need someone again, I’ll tell the agency to make sure to send you.” She looked up at the clock again, and as though she were handing me a star for my report card, said, “Why, you might as well leave early. After all, you’ve earned it.”

I walked out whistling in my private dark. I felt weighed down by the vision of millions upon millions of people working day in and out at these a-human tasks. At the same time, I had earned almost twenty-five dollars between the two jobs. My fortune was improving. I walked around downtown a bit, and feeling exceptionally flush, decided to go to the Stud Turkish Bath. I thought that a steam bath, and the possibility of some sex, would add a nice touch to the day.

I climbed the velvet corridor, paid my four dollars, and entered that equally, but differently, bizarre world. I paid for a room, and as I turned to go upstairs, I saw a sign on the wall: help wanted. A number of things fell into place at once. I inquired about the job, and learned that it paid two dollars an hour to start, and involved scrubbing down the steam rooms, cleaning the johns, vacuuming the halls, and in general being available for odd assignments. I would be working under an old black cat who had been doing this for ten years. I filled out an application, was introduced to the manager, and, using the proper jargon, tone of voice, and seductive glances, got the job. I was to report in two days.

Now, visiting the baths is different from working in them, although I was to learn that the hard way. They are open twenty-four hours a day, and are the nearest thing we have in our times to the classic Roman model. Baths across the nation range from the utterly vile to the totally sophisticated, and the Stud fell somewhere in between. It stood near an S&M bar with whips and leather jocks hung over the liquor bottles. The Stud was considered kinkier than the other baths in the city, which appealed mostly to the straighter homosexuals.

One of the first things I noticed when I started working there was that there was no way to tell the time of day other than looking at a clock. The windows were painted black, and the lighting never changed. It had the ambience of Purgatorio. People walked up and down the hallways, peering into the open rooms, in a slow rhythm, as though bearing some great secret burden. Except for late weekend nights, when there were wild carryings-on in the mass public bedroom downstairs. There were three storys of hallway, and off each hallway were scores of doors, each opening to a little room, some six by ten feet, which had a cot, a closet, and a spittoon. Part of my job was washing down the rooms at specified intervals. The job level above mine involved changing the linen in the rooms after each client left; and the highest job was taking money at the door and assigning keys.

The work itself was bestial. We had two hours to scrub down three steam and shower rooms, using ammonia and a great, stiff-bristled brush. The man I worked with was muscled like a discus thrower, but by the second day I realized that the job was at the limit of my physical capacity. I had a flash on using the job as a weight lifter uses exercises, and might have stayed with the strain of it, but the psychic heaviness did me in. All day, up and down they walked. Lonely men, horny men, confused men, sexually charged men. Wearing red towels around their waists. Their feet made slapping sounds on the floor as they walked. Whoever gave the name “gay” to the homosexual world had a cruel sense of irony. For the gaiety was all superficial, all hysterical. Mostly, there was pain.

Previously, going to the baths, I had entered either to bathe or to fuck, and from my goal-oriented viewpoint, missed the larger sense of the place. Now I had a privileged position. It was house policy that none of the workers could have sex with the patrons, and it was strictly enforced. To get the job, I had to have mug shots taken for the police files, since the baths walked a thin line between respectability and illegality. The police knew what went on there, and were nervous about it, but since it was all discreet, and since everyone was “a consenting adult,” they pretty much left the place alone. Of course, that there were payoffs went without question.

So, the customers began to approach me, but not for sex; instead, they began to talk. And I learned many stories. The one thing which emerged most clearly is that there is no difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. They have the same range of problems, from impotence to promiscuity, struggles with fidelity, guilt. They have the same joys, the same fears. And they completely share the general sexual sickness of the nation.

In one thing there is a difference. The homosexual community, by and large, is much more upfront about its condition. Especially in a place like the baths, where one thing is admitted right out. Everyone is there for sex, pure and simple. It was not unusual to have a three- or four-hour intense, intimate, and totally satisfying sexual encounter with another person with whom one did not exchange a word. In many ways, there was a greater honesty here, for in its essence, sex is not between personalities, and it is not necessary to know the name of the person one is fucking.

Of course, fucking gives rise to feelings of tenderness and warmth, and in the meat rack, these feelings are suppressed and ignored. But this is no different from the cruising that is done in heterosexual bars, at parties, in the suburbs, and up and down every stratum of our culture.

For the first time, I entered the gay social community. Up to then, my encounters had been only sexual. Even when I went to gay bars, it was only to cruise. And my observations were private ones. For example, it is possible to see the entire anthropology of the American male by spending an evening in a gay bar. Of course, as Gurdjieff notes, one can’t understand another human being without agreeing with that human being. And that means, to know what it means to be homosexual, one has to be homosexual. Any psychologist attempting to deal with homosexuality who has not himself sucked a cock is a hypocritical liar, and ought to be arrested for malpractice.

My experience with Tommy that night in the Circle Hotel had been the first time I had cracked the barrier of mixing sex with friendship. Now, however, I began to get involved in the lives of my fellow workers. I began to enter into the affairs and marriages of these men. One of the men who worked at the Stud had been married for seven years, an unusual thing in the gay world, and when he spoke of his home, it was with all the love and fervor that any happily married heterosexual would show. I found myself going to private gay clubs, and discovering all the social roles which exist in a world of dancing, and loving, and living, and working, with one’s fellowman. And within a short time, my chameleon personality being what it is, I became gay. That is to say, I assumed the ambience of a homosexual. My clothes changed, my way of talking altered, I even walked differently. Not that I wanted to become swish, but that all the soft, undulating aspects of my psychophysical self came to the fore.

It was then that I had to make a decision. I knew that if I continued to work there, I would soon make my way up the hierarchy, first to room boy, then to desk clerk, and on into the bar, and higher echelons of the organization, which embraced stag movies, bookstores, and branched into design, art, and all aspects of the civilization. And I decided against it. Not because I had any prejudice against the gay life; it was in many ways more gentle and humane than that offered by the straight world. But I couldn’t accept having come so far, experienced so much, broken through so many barriers, to exchange the straight establishment for the gay establishment.

Already I could see that this world had its own mores, its own codes, its own taboos. The maverick in me was too strong. If I was to be homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual or orgiastic or celibate, it would have to be an ad hoc decision, based on the promptings of my instincts at any given time. I wanted to hang no social identification tags around my neck. Also, there was a horrible moment when, coming out of the S&M bar, I saw three young girls passing on the street, and my heart filled with dread at the idea that I would never have a woman again. To make a choice which sexually rules out half the human race seemed idiotic.