The Stoned Apocalypse (4 page)
For a long time, before coming to myself, I was haunted by the visions I had while under her influence. The fact that almost every human being I meet is actually asleep, dead to himself or herself, walking in a world of illusion, created a loneliness that was almost crushing. And from time to time I still suffer night horrors, haunted by that insight into existential aloneness. I find that having a woman nearby, some cold beer in the refrigerator, and a copy of Ecclesiastes by the bed, however, go a long way to counteract the influence of Turkish fairy tales.
Shortly after dropping acid, I dropped out. I left the girlie book publishers. And I began to get even more restless. My journey to find myself started to take on a geographic bent, and in the classic manner of every American who seeks to know himself, I began to look west, toward the fabled land of California.
But before the final resolve to leave, one more event was to fill my paranoia quotient to the brim. With the wounds from my encounter with Mrs. R. still bleeding, one sunny afternoon, I walked into the Hotel Martinique, and into the arms of the Scientologists.
I have never had any luck with organizations. I began life between the Mafia and the Catholic Church, in the enclave of East Harlem in upper Manhattan. The neighborhood had the ambience of feudal Italy; it composed a fief with clearly marked boundaries. It was bounded by the East River on one side, a large park on another, with Park Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street marking the divisions between it and the stretches of black Harlem to the northwest. Just about everyone over thirty had been born in Italy, and I remember asking my mother at what age I would begin talking Italian, since it seemed that all the young people spoke English while the older ones reverted to the more ancient tongue. To say that we were sheltered is to miss the depth of isolation from twentieth-century America that blessed and blighted us. I didn’t meet a non-Catholic socially until I was seventeen; and at the age of fifteen, when one of the neighborhood girls dated a Protestant from the YMCA which stood in benign neglect at the fringes of the kingdom, we all swarmed around her after she returned, asking her what Protestants were like, how they looked, what they said. For all practical purposes, for the first decade and a half of my life, my picture of Protestants was a vicious lampoon of Martin Luther and legions of godless heretics. Jews were simply landlords and the people who had killed Christ, while Negroes stood in relation to us the way the Gallic tribes were viewed by Republican Rome. Our only natural enemies were Puerto Ricans, and by the time I was thirteen, more than twenty boys had been killed in a series of escalating gang wars.
Since I couldn’t make the ethical choice between the racketeer whose money came from heroin and prostitution, and the priest who gave him social standing by loudly accepting his money gifts, I became an introverted fanatic, that is to say, a mystic. While still very young I was having visions of statues weeping and wondering why baby kittens died such horrible deaths in the cellars which became our natural playground. At eight I read the life of Don Bosco, and decided I would mortify my flesh in his example. I didn’t know how to make a hair shirt, so one night I put five hundred marbles in my bed, thinking to spend the entire time in prayerful anguish. Of course, the marbles merely made a deliciously erotic hard-soft stimulus between the mattress and my body. I was rewarded for my intended sacrifice with a most memorable wet dream, and the next morning found my mother standing by the bed demanding to know what the marbles were for. “It’s a thing for school,” I said, and my parents, having neither the ability nor the desire to explore the complexities of their son’s mind, wrote it off as yet another aberration to be patiently endured.
The tale of my infatuation, disillusionment, hatred, return, and final renunciation of Catholicism is too stereotyped to warrant detailing. It ended with my making peace with the fact that, although I had discarded the entire content of Catholic thought, the structure of my mind was forever imprinted in a hierarchical fashion. In everything I perceive, I compensate for that, much like putting psychic english on my eyeballs.
Before coming to terms with my organizational conditioning, I joined everything from social fads to occult societies to utopian schemes, and finally, to that modern paradigm of Catholicism, the Communist Party.
When I left medieval Italy at nineteen I went into the Air Force — another joining — and after the training at Yale, found myself in Japan which, being feudal itself, seemed natural and comfortable to me. I quickly learned as much of the language as was necessary to do what I needed to do, which in those days was mostly to fuck, travel, and get stoned on the entire phenomenon of Japan. The total and thorough civilization of the place staggered me, as did the way in which the whole social structure was perfectly mirrored in the pyrotechnics of the language.
I got to see things very clearly from the Japanese viewpoint, and it took no time at all before I saw the role of the United States there. The Americans were using Japan as a base from which to headquarter their entire Far East operation, from keeping Korea divided in the north to keeping Vietnam divided in the south. Japan was also the Rest-and-Relaxation center for the brutalized Army men on the Korean peninsula, and, finally, the tip of the sword aimed at China, depending on whether the right-wing elements in the government could get Japan to become a nuclear power or not. In return for all this, the United States allowed Japan to use it as a vast market upon which to practice, and later to master, the entire field of electronics. At home, disgruntled businessmen were either being silenced, satisfied with the maintenance of a high European tariff, or being promised a piece of the pie somewhere else, notably the Middle East and South America.
With this vision, and the Gothic tale of horror which comprised the U.S. occupation of Korea, when I returned to this country I was ripe for revolution. Having had no real contact with America at large, and having been out of the States for three years, I had no idea where the real revolution was taking place, and with a burst of naïve fervor, attempted to join the Communist Party. Which was then, as it is now, the saddest single American organization outside of the DAR. I returned to Brooklyn College, there to pick my way through two and a half years of irrelevancies to earn a BA in psychology. Meanwhile, I discovered Greenwich Village, marijuana, and Marxism.
I fell in with a brilliant professor of economics who had just returned from Cuba and was aglow with tales of socialism triumphant. The pictures and stories of Fidel and his band rivaled anything America had to offer during the revolution of 1776, and contrasted with our line of folk heroes, which includes alcoholic Presidents, despoilers of forests and wildlife, vicious generals, and the legendary list of gunfighters, bandits, and armies of men who committed genocide upon the Indian nation.
After Japan, where culture is an art and not a wild hope, the United States could be clearly seen for the brutal, exploitive, shallow, vulgar, and bellicose nation that it was. In a flash I saw that our entire nation was solidly built on the twin pillars of greed and violence. And it seemed that nothing short of a mighty and total upheaval could cure it. This was, of course, before I came to understand that the problem is not with any given society, but in the nature of mankind.
At the height of this fervor, I met Roger, whose love of truth blended imperceptibly into a grotesque personal neurosis, and who was finding his rhetoric in Marx, Lenin, Engels, Trotsky, Plekhanov, and Eisenstein. I moved in with him and his wife, Verna, into a Hassidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. And while the long-robed and bearded Jews, with their sweeping fur-lined hats stood like eighteenth-century Poles in the evening fog under the lamplights, the band of us declared our home to be the first Williamsburg Soviet, and we spent all our time in marathon discussions and study groups, producing pamphlets and slogans, and in general doing the classic leftist scenario. Concurrently, I was having a tender love affair with a zaftig solipsist from Bensonhurt, although I was consistently criticized for having truck with such a decadent female.
It was a strange brew and reached a high spot during an all-night party which mixed impassioned denunciations of capitalism with nude dancing on the roof. The Hassidim passed by, refusing to even notice us since we were goyim and therefore hardly better than thinly cultured savages. Their attitude was freakily fixed in my mind one night when I went in to buy some bread at a local bakery. The man ahead of me was Jewish, but clearly of the Reformed, or Amorphous, wing. He was treated with contempt by the stone-faced Hassid behind the counter. But when the storekeeper turned his eyes toward me, I experienced that uncanny sensation of being completely seen through. In his eyes, I didn’t even exist.
Fairly soon, because of our constant involvement in marches, demonstrations, and courses at the Institute for Marxist Studies, we began to meet real Communists. Now, I had first gone to college during the days of McCarthy, and I knew of the concentration camp provisions of the Smith Act. Also, that was a time before the students had become the vanguard of the revolution, and HUAC was still droning through its Neanderthal hearings, counting each day a success if all the participants managed to keep awake during the entire proceedings. Also, through osmosis, I had been imbued with the rhetoric of the cold war, and despite myself, the notion of a Communist inspired images of cloven-footed demons. In all, to my straight-thinking mentality, joining the Party was a fateful and decisive step. So I flirted with the idea a very long time. Ironically, since my father was a house painter, to the Party this gave him a “guild mentality” instead of a “proletarian outlook.” And because I had been a Catholic (this was pre-Pope John) and, sin of all sins, a spy on the Chinese, they were equally hesitant to take me in.
I was to be given several tests of my sincerity and effectiveness. They began with selling the Worker in Greenpoint, a brooding black and Puerto Rican project-housing slum in Brooklyn. I peddled the paper to old women who thought I was from Jehovah’s Witnesses, and housewives who were willing to pay fifteen cents just to get that white idiot away from the door, and once was met by a hulking dockworker who glowered at me from his doorjamb and said, “If you don’t get that fucking Commie paper out of this building, I’m gonna crush your head in.”
When I returned and told my co-workers of that last encounter, I was practically awarded the Socialist Medal of Labor. But while my almost-comrades were exulting over the number of papers sold, I was being privately appalled by the incredible seediness of the entire affair. They sang of raising the political consciousness of the masses, and their only contact with the masses took place with a newspaper or pamphlet or slogan keeping a suspicious distance between the people and the Party.
Still, “they” were pleased with my work, superiors whose names were whispered only among those who had already joined. I began to be invited to social gatherings, where I met the old-timers, the heroes of the struggles of the thirties. And then I received word that I was to be given a high-level assignment. I worried for a week, wondering whether I would prove worthy. And then the orders came. I was to infiltrate the Brooklyn Heights Methodist Discussion Club, and inject Marxist thinking into their talks. If possible, I was to be elected to some office in the organization, preferably that of secretary, and wield structural as well as informational influence.
Visions of Stalin danced in my head. The secretary! I too had heard tales of how Uncle Joe never slept, of how a light always burned in his monklike cell in the Kremlin, as he pondered and wept over the fate of his people. While I went about my task, gaining influence through giving lectures and fucking the young Protestant ladies, it never occurred to me that my position was the most ludicrous posture a revolutionary might take. As continents went up in political flames, and massive economic war machines geared for the final battle in the history of man, I was bustling about, quite seriously, seizing control of the most inane, innocuous, and effete clique in a neighborhood composed of closet queens, déclassé executives, sex-starved secretaries, and Norman Mailer.
It was a tribute to my diligence and narrow-mindedness that within four months, I had become president of the organization. Success beyond my wildest dreams! The very next day I was told the names of the other members of the club who were also Communists, and I realized why I had won the election so easily. More than half of the eleven members of that dessicated WASP company were members of the Communist Party! In a sense, I had to admire their feeling for camouflage; this was the very last place J. Edgar Hoover would think to look.
Within a week, I received the word; I was to be accepted into the Party. I now had only to write a formal application, in which I denounced my parents’ petit-bourgeois ways, my former Catholicism, my days working for the Air Force, and in general every anti-Marxist thought I had ever had in my life. Not having ever been in the Boy Scouts, I missed the irony of the gesture.
It was with moist eyes and heavily beating heart that I met the man who took my application, shook my hand, and uttered for the first time a word I had previously only aspired to. “Welcome, Comrade,” he said.
Three months later he was found with excessive funds in his bank account, a wardrobe filled with custom-made clothing, and suspicious notebooks written in code. He was exposed, denounced, and expelled. And I watched with horror as the man who took that sheet of paper into his hands confessed that he was indeed on the payroll of the FBI.
I fled Brooklyn. I stayed away from everyone to the left of Cardinal Spellman. I took refuge in corruption, and began paying attention to salary increases, decorating my pad, and seducing even more women. I was visited four times by FBI agents, and always there was a tall one and a short one, a heavy one and a reasonable one, and always with a barely hidden tape recorder. Our conversations were always congenial, and always ended with my refusing to give them names. In a sense, I felt a sense of shame in ratting on the gang. But also, since they obviously had agents in high places, it seemed stupid for them to ask information from me. I reasoned that they wanted my complicity more than my knowledge. The last I heard from them, the superintendent of one of my apartments let me know that the landlord had given the key to two thin, well-dressed men who entered my place and didn’t leave it for two hours.
Subsequently, when I suddenly saw the Mickey Mouse nature of the entire scene and discarded politics as either a useful metaphor or a successful pragmatic, I have seen no trace of them. Yet, I rest secure in the knowledge that somewhere, right now, all the pertinent facts of my life have been programmed and stored on a punch card in one of the computers which form the bowels of our Central Intelligence Agency.
Some lessons have to be repeated often before they are learned, and I had suppressed all wisdom concerning groups that promise individual or collective salvation, on the evening I walked into the Scientology headquarters. I was still reeling from my bout with Mrs. R. and my first three acid trips. I was living with Aster, an Aquarius lady from Detroit, in a fourth floor walk-up on Greenwich Avenue, and earning my living turning out free-lance editorial work.