The Stoned Apocalypse (19 page)

And so, I walked in one afternoon and tendered my resignation. It was met with regret by the men whom I had come to know as co-workers and friends and lovers. I had made enough money to tide me over for a while, and wanted to take a week or so to plan my next move. The letters from Georgia were getting frantic, and I knew that I had to find some way to bring her to the city, or else go back to Arizona, or else tell her to have an abortion and call the whole thing off.

That night, I dropped by to visit Leah and found her in bed with a dropout psychiatrist named Steve. I sat down and the three of us got stoned for a few hours and Steve began talking about some friends of his who were setting up a new psychiatric ward on the Peninsula. It was to be a blowout center, based on the type that R. D. Laing had set up at Kingsley Hall in England. I became interested at once. I had read Laing two years earlier, and had been much turned on by his words. He had dropped acid and come to see how rotten psychiatry is at its core, and set about doing something to change it. During the course of it, he flipped out a few times, and met with such resistance from his fellow doctors that his work remained limited to what he himself was able to accomplish.

Now a radical — radical, of course, only within the context of the Neolithic psychiatric community — wing was being opened, and the people running it were looking for staff members. They wanted people who had taken acid, or who were into an Esalen bag, or who had establishment credentials and wanted to do more than the establishment allowed. Steve told me a bit about it, and I felt the call. It sounded like just what I needed. It would pay about a hundred dollars a week, and give me a chance to get back into my relaxation work as well as use my knowledge of drugs. Also, it would allow me to come to terms with my own insanity.

“Give Al Feldman a call,” said Steve. “He lived with me in Ukiah, and he’ll be the ward psychiatrist there.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

The next day I called Al and with that began a trip which almost destroyed my mind.

Al is a gentle Scorpio. Like many doctors who get bored with the routine of general medicine, he went into psychiatry. The way that scene is set up in this country, an MD has to know very little by way of formal psychological training, and needs absolutely no qualifications by way of sensitivity, warmth, humanity, or perceptiveness to start playing with people’s minds. About the only formal requirement is an internship in a mental hospital, but this is usually spent filling out forms and walking through the wards at a rapid pace. A doctor, to be a psychiatrist, only has to hang out a shingle proclaiming himself one. And the one advantage these inept witch doctors have over their lay therapist cousins is that they can prescribe pills.

But like a number of other psychiatrists, Al had dropped acid, and got a flash on what a con game the whole business is. The professional posture, the mask of objectivity, the jargon, the rituals, the high fees. And he became concerned enough to want to actually help his suffering fellow human beings. Of course, the acid insights took him to a realm of compassion which his level of self-knowledge could not make effective. He saw more than he could handle.

He was living with Larry, another dropout shrink who sported long sideburns, a cowboy hat and boots, and a general air of insouciance. Harish was also there, an enlightened Pakistani who looks like Meher Baba; Carol, Harish’s wife; and a constant stream of friends, crashers, well-wishers, and family. It was one of the warmest, most-together households I had ever seen.

I made an appointment to meet Al at the hospital. I arrived in the early afternoon and was charmed by the physical layout of the place. The weather was ideal, in the middle seventies, dry, with a slight breeze. The buildings were new and the grounds were immaculate. Almost everyone walking around was a patient or a staff member, the former practically all on Thorazine, and drifting about in a peaceful haze. At one point, a few weeks later, I saw two patients get into a fist fight, but they were so drugged on that horse tranquilizer that they fought in dreamy slow motion, making the whole scene unreal in the hot afternoon. If it weren’t so pathetic, it would have been funny.

My interview was with Al, Harish, and Teresa, who was a research psychologist. I was somewhat apprehensive because I felt that this was the perfect place for me to be, and I didn’t want to blow the chance. We chatted a bit, and then Al said, “What is your fantasy about working here?”

I thought a bit about it and answered very slowly. “I’ve been crazy a few times,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been in a place where I was trapped in what felt like eternal suffering, where no other person could ever reach me, and which I couldn’t communicate to anyone. And when I took acid, I realized that it was possible for me to go over that edge and never come back, I mean, to be in such anguish that my behavior would seem mad to everyone around me, and they would put me away. And then I read Laing, and he made sense. When he said, ‘If a person has one human being to talk to, then he’s no longer crazy,’ I realized that he had put his finger right on the issue, without any bullshit. Because I’m convinced that insanity has no objective definition. In the East they say, ‘The only difference between a schizophrenic and a holy man is that the schizophrenic doesn’t realize that he’s holy.’

“I heard about Laing’s blowout center in England, and I wanted to go there. From what I can gather, a person who is having a psychotic break is allowed and encouraged to see it through to the end, and the therapist does nothing but stay with him, giving him someone to talk to, like a guide on an acid trip. And I thought, if I could blow out like that, really go crazy once, just let it all hang out, look at it, feel it and taste it, then I would be free of the fear, and there would be no places left in my mind that were dark corners.

“My fantasy about this place is that there won’t be any difference between patient and staff, that we’ll all be just people trying to help each other out of our pain and confusion. And that the people who work here will be able to freak out and get in touch with their own craziness. That we won’t dull anyone’s head with Thorazine, but really put our guts on the line to help one another through our bad trips.

“My ultimate fantasy is of a place where everyone understands that on the highest level there is no crazy or sane, no good or bad, but just this fact of life.”

Harish eyed me thoughtfully. “Are you familiar with any esoteric work?” he said.

“I studied with the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York,” I said, encapsulating that entire complex experience into a single sentence.

“Ah,” he said, and closed his eyes. He said no more for the rest of the time that I was there.

“What do you expect you can do at the ward?” Teresa asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Mostly just be there, get into people’s heads, let myself hang out, find out whether I can work with relaxation and massage as a means to getting people out of their bad trips.”

There was a general nodding of heads, in proper interview style, and then we all rapped a bit more about the whole psychiatry trip and I told them something of what I had done and been doing. We talked about drugs and politics and in general got a sense of one another’s psychic space.

Then Al laid the trip on me. “The hospital has received a grant to do a study on the effectiveness of new modes of therapy, something in the area of a quarter of a million dollars. We’re setting up a wing in conjunction with Marvin Goldman, who’s doing a research study. The trip is to find out whether patients improve more quickly using our approach.”

“More quickly than what?” I asked.

Al looked a bit embarrassed. “Than if they are given Thorazine,” he said. “Half the patients on the ward will be on the drug, and half won’t.”

Several things struck me as being out of joint. First of all, Marvin Goldman was a research specialist for Esalen, and I had a deep mistrust of anyone from that organization. Secondly, he had the reputation of being a career hustler, and of being clinically paranoid. Third, the study was to last for five years, and I wondered whether there might not be more emphasis on it than on the actual condition of the people we would be working with.

But some of my fears were quieted when Al told me about the rest of the staff. A few would be straight nurse types from the hospital roster. About a third would be ward attendants who had had their fill of the way things were done at mental institutions, and had volunteered for this new program. And the rest would be acid heads, odd guru types, and assorted freaks. “I think we’d like to have you with us,” said Al. “But first I’d like to introduce you to Richard.”

He took me to meet Richard Kaprow, the project director. He was an extremely successful psychiatrist, working his way up into the higher echelons of California’s hierarchy of mental hospitals. He had just enough humanity left to want to see a program like the blowout center succeed, for he truly understood the horror of the current treatments. But he was a most fearful man, afraid at every moment that some catastrophe would split the foundations of his career. He spent a good deal of time piloting his private plane to and from Sacramento to have conferences with state officials. When he spoke, his eyes were always gazing a little above the tips of his shoes. And when he got excited, his voice took on an unmistakable whine.

The first thing he said to me was, “We don’t have the funds to pay you a salary yet. We’re expecting them to be cleared through Sacramento any day, but we can’t give you any salary until they come in.” Three months later, the funds still hadn’t arrived, but I was past the point of caring. I had other problems.

For now, it seemed that I had a job, something I would like, getting my head straight, and helping other people out of their own dark bags. I went back to San Francisco feeling high.

I moved into the Berkeley House a week later, and began going to the hospital regularly, to attend the many meetings which had to happen before the ward could open. I was on very good behavior, to the point of blinding myself to some obvious facts. The ward was to be in the very middle of the state hospital, with its window bars and police, its atmosphere of repression and debilitating drugs. The people I was meeting did not seem to be the types who would lay their hearts and minds on the line to help anyone out of a bad trip. And the project very early got mired in an immense bureaucratic tangle. But I didn’t want to see any of this.

One of my excursions produced a meeting with Alistair Frazier, a prominent Jungian analyst with a list of books and papers to his credit. Alistair was a super-civilized man, thoroughly rational, with a dilettante’s love for the pathological. He had a rich appreciation of insanity, and could talk for hours on the symbolism of madness. In fact, he and Marvin Goldman had worked up a two-man act which fetched a stiff fee at Esalen weekends, dealing with such fluff as “the poetry of madness,” and “the science of madness.” Still, I liked him immensely, for he was warm and charming and highly intelligent. He was going to act as a visiting father confessor to the ward, dropping in once a week to lay some sheets of wisdom on us from his storehouse of clinical experience. He had never taken LSD, a fact I found curious in a man who was supposedly involved in understanding the intricacies of the human mind. Like they say, he talked a good game.

My money was running out again, and the ward was coming together. Finally, the day of the big meeting came, and some fifty of us met to discuss our future. In that first meeting, as is usually the case, the entire outcome of the scene was projected, had any one of those supposedly therapeutic hotshots had the perspicacity to see it. Most of the people there were sincere, but not one of us had the presence of mind to call attention to the essential dishonesties which began from the very first moment. I saw them, but had no way to articulate them.

For one thing, the meeting was boring. We spent a good deal of time talking at one another and not with one another. Much of the talk involved schedules, pay rates (“Do I get listed as an Assistant Seven or Nine for this project?”), and administration. It followed the pattern of all such meetings, with the usual waves of inattention, irascibility, and ego-tripping.

And then the big question was asked: What of our relations with the hospital at large? How would the administration feel about a revolutionary ward on their grounds, a ward where there would be no locks on the doors? A tremor of insurrection ran through the crowd, for everyone here had the sense that we were participating in some form of radical activity. A true revolutionary is someone who understands all the ramifications of the condition in which he finds himself, from the economic to the psychologic to the cosmic, and who has made the inner decision that he has nothing to lose, having come to the conclusion that the existing order has no redeeming value whatsoever and must be destroyed. Yet, for all their pretty ways, most of these people were protecting their salaries, their apartments, their status. And those who weren’t were worse, for they were the Kaprows, the Goldmans, the Fraziers, who were still climbing the ladder to greater power and prestige.

Now, however, everyone let out with great vocal complaints against the barbarity of the current treatment of the mentally ill, and on this issue the group found its cohesiveness. Within a few minutes, the place sounded like an angry PTA meeting. And then Marvin stepped in. “We are not at war with the hospital,” he said. “In fact, we depend on them for a good many services, for food, for garbage collection, for linen. We need their goodwill, and our task will be to educate them to what we’re doing.” All of this was true, but seemed to sidestep the basic question which was, how to run a free ward in the middle of a mental concentration camp?

Marvin swept the meeting with his eyes. “I want to hear no further talk of revolution,” he said. “The most important aspect of this project is the research, and nothing must stand in the way of that.” He stood up. “I want to hear no wild language,” he continued. “We must protect the research project, no matter what else happens.”

Al and Harish exchanged knowing glances, but no one said anything.

And then Marvin told us what the scene would be. Each of us would be assigned to several patients for observation. We would be given forms on which to check off patients’ behavior and attitude. We would have to write reports of what they did and how they seemed to be feeling.

“But that goes against the very nature of what the ward is about,” someone protested. “How can we relate to them as equals if we are making out reports on their supposed progress?”

“I admit that’s a problem,” said Marvin with that oily smile which can be so disarming. “But we’ll work on it. Just don’t anyone forget that the research is what pays our salaries, despite any utopian ideas you may have.”

In a flash I saw the dream of the blowout center go up in smoke. The place I had pictured, a secluded house in the woods where the poisons of civilization wouldn’t reach, disappeared, and suddenly I was in a dismal gray hospital room with a bunch of timid and confused people, listening to yet another petty dictator lay down the laws by which we would have to live. The vision was so horrid that I immediately squashed it and returned my attention to the mechanics of the meeting.

Which was degenerating into squabbles concerning the effectiveness of research done with paper and pencil techniques. But this was merely the mumbling of the troops; the essential point had been driven home. In a while, Richard smoothed things over with an appeal for us to all pull together and put this project over the top. “In three days,” he said, “we open the ward. Ward Sixteen. And I’ll see you all there.”

At this point, my fantasy life and my objective condition were coming together in a weird way. As I began to get involved with the intricacies of insanity, my social existence began to fall apart. Without a car in California, I was like a man without a canteen on the desert. I began to watch each penny I spent. I had no basis upon which to maintain friendships, since I could find no center inside myself.