The Stoned Apocalypse (8 page)
He looked straight at me. “Jesus said, ‘Cast out doubt.’ “
I looked up, a slow smile forming on my lips. “Of course,” I said. The logic was unassailable. “How do you cast out doubt?” I asked.
“That’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Paul. “Just believe.”
“Believe?” I said. “Believe in what?”
And with a voice like thunder he laid it on me. “BELIEVE IN JESUS AND YOU SHALL BE SAVED!”
It was as though lightning struck my brain. I saw how, in a single gesture, I could solve all the problems of my entire life, simply by putting all of my confusions in the hands of Jesus. It made no difference what my intellect thought of the matter, my emotion reigned supreme. I jumped up from my chair, grace pouring down on me from Heaven.
“I believe!” I shouted.
“Say, ‘I believe in Jesus,’ “ said Paul.
I lifted my hand in the air, very giddy by now, and sang out, “I BELIEVE IN JESUS!”
“HALLELUJAH!” shouted Paul.
“PRAISE BE!” Cheryl said.
And all three of us stood there jiggling and beaming, oozing energy out of our pores and into the rocketing space of their small living room. I fell back down into the chair, elated and stunned.
A vibrating white glow seemed to light on all the objects in the room, and I became aware of the sheer presence of everything. “God is here,” said Paul, so simply, so matter-of-factly, that I bowed my head before the reality of that.
“I’ll have to give up my sophistication,” I thought. “Your sophistication isn’t worth anything anyway,” Cheryl said, and I looked up at her, amazed.
“Perhaps I’ll be the first saint of the Aquarian Age,” I thought as my fantasy machine began leeching off all the liberated energy in my system. I realized that I was playing with potentially dangerous, very powerful psychic dynamics. I had seen these two people undergo radical changes overnight. The scene had me very high.
But, of course, Satan was waiting in the wings. I developed a crush on Laura, Cheryl’s friend. Her fiancé, Walter, was an ex-con, ex-Marine, ex-speed freak, who was willing to kill for Jesus. His main rap was fire and brimstone and war on atheistic communism. And he was very suspicious of me, although he was willing to accept my conversion at face value.
One afternoon, I went to Paul’s and found Laura there alone. She gave me some coffee, and for a while we made some holy small talk and laced our sentences with “Praise be,” and then just once, in the midst of the scene, looked straight into one another’s eyes. And that did it. Pure lust smoldered. Instant flashes of fornication exploded all around us. All the hidden excitement of forbidden sex inflamed our limbs. I had grown so blasé in the air of sexual permissiveness which I breathed in the circles I traveled, that I had forgotten how delicious it could be to break a commandment. It also gave me an insight into the words a veteran Christian had once told me: “You don’t know what fucking is until you and your wife fuck in Jesus’ name.” I experienced the truth of it a while later when Leah also stumbled into Paul and Cheryl’s one afternoon and also converted for a day. That night, while coming, she spread her arms wide and shouted, “Oh fuck me, Jesus!” And with Jesus backing me up, so to speak, I sailed into an orgasm that I had never attained on the purely material plane.
Laura and I stared at one another; we were trembling. She reached out and took my hands. “Let us pray,” she said, and sank to her knees. I knelt down with her. We came close, our hands holding, our chests almost touching. Sublimation had never scaled higher peaks. “O Lord . . . “ she began, and our mouths moved ever so slightly toward each other when, suddenly, loud footsteps clunked on the wooden stairs outside.
She turned sheet-white. “It’s Walter,” she said.
Now, theoretically, we weren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, her fiancé should have been pleased to find his old lady leading a recent convert in prayer. But sex hung heavy enough in the air to be smelled by anyone who walked in. She jumped up. I jumped up. We stood there in confusion (the Devil again!) and looked classically guilty as he came in the door. He took one look, and he KNEW.
Laura ran out of the room. Walter dropped the groceries he was carrying and advanced on me with clenched fists. Mutilation was close when, with a brilliant inspiration, I snatched up a Bible, brandished it before me, and yelled, “In Jesus’ name, I ask you to consider.”
The conflicting emotions of murderous rage and ideological commitment stormed inside him. But that stopped him long enough for me to regain my balance, and I said, very quickly and forcibly, “We were praying, Brother Walter. You startled us.” He gave me a wary glance and went into the other room. In a few moments I heard shouting and thumping and a woman’s crying. After a while, he came back in. He was sober and deadly.
“Laura told me what happened,” he said, and from the way he said it I knew the game was up. “In a Christian marriage,” he continued, “the woman is beholding to the man, and the man is beholding to God. I can’t allow anyone to come in the way. So you leave, and never come back, and pray to Jesus to save your rotten soul.”
It was with this baggage that I entered my fourth class at the Gallery Lounge. I gave a stem lecture to the now more than two hundred eager faces waiting for bigger and better orgies. I spoke to them of the need for sobriety, and warned that, from now on, there would be no such shenanigans as took place the week before. I canceled the class for the night and told them that only those who were serious about using the body as a vehicle to reach the Holy Spirit should come back.
There was much shuffling, but I ended the talk by standing up and walking out. Several people stopped me. Among them was a young sophomore who assured me that I was the holiest man he had ever known. While another young man, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and who was very hip in the ways of being stoned, just looked at me a long while, and then shook his head and said, “Far out.”
During the following week, I woke up from the spell, and relegated my conversion to the long list of experiences which make up the mosaic of life. I was at a loss as to what to do for my next class, but never had to make that decision, for the students called for a general strike against the college.
Reagan, having become hip to the influence of student groups on campus, was maneuvering for a cutback of funds from all left-wing student organizations. The political crazies panicked, and at a meeting of the EC the next day, I was informed of the decision to strike. The Experimental College had come to an internal decision to vote against the strike, arguing that to strike would be to call in the police, and to call in the police would be to squash all freedom on campus.
But the prevailing opinion of the other groups was against them, so they went along with the majority. And so, the strike that was to enter history began.
At a general meeting of all the student organizations, the Panthers dropped by. Since they had no immediate involvement at the school, they decided not to intervene, but were explicit about their advice, which was addressed mainly to Progressive Labor. “If anybody starts any violence, they gonna answer to us, and we gonna kick ass.” PL got surly, but in the face of overpowering brawn, they acquiesced, and the strike was peaceful for a while, until the momentum of events swept everyone away.
I remembered when I first came into contact with Progressive Labor. Milt Rosen had just been expelled from the Party and was starting his Maoist wing. The people he gathered around him were all young pros, capable of creating a disturbance and hypnotizing a meeting. But there was something seedy about the lot of them. As Alan Krebs once observed, “Marginal institutions attract marginal people.” I sat in on a few of the early meetings Milt had, and found them even more tedious and regimented than those of the Party. There was an incredibly fanatic need to translate every facet of human experience into the collected works of Mao Tse-tung. Possibly no greater tunnel vision has existed since the days of the Inquisition.
One day, on campus, I had passed one of the many tables that different groups placed in front of the student cafeteria. I saw the PL banner, and a twinge of nostalgia gripped me. There was the usual stringy girl behind the table, with the same expression of beady intensity that marks a PL-er more clearly than any membership form. I smiled at her, and she greeted me with disdain, since I was quite stoned and dressed in an Indian robe. Nothing daunted, I started a conversation.
“PL,” I said, “I remember when Milt Rosen started PL.”
Her eyes lit up. “You know Milt Rosen?” she gasped.
“Knew him,” I said. “I’m not in touch anymore.”
Her attitude softened. “Yes,” I said, “I was there when he was expelled from the Party.”
“He quit!” she shot back.
I answered with a wave of my hand. “What are you people into now?” I asked.
She grew chatty. “Well, we’re mostly in the factories now, working with the consciousness of the workers.” Now, if there is any group more stolidly reactionary than the American working class, it must be the young Turks of PL. I was amused.
She looked at me suspiciously. “What are you doing now?” she said.
“Oh, I’m teaching relaxation,” I said.
She leapt up from the chair and almost spat at me. “Relaxation,” she said scornfully. “What’s that going to do for the working class?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Relax them, I guess. Make them less unimaginative.”
If she had had a gun she would have shot me, but that was not to be. The revenge of Progressive Labor was to come in adding poisoned fuel to the flames of the strike. SDS, of course, added its strident voice, calling for lists of nonnego-tiable demands. And the Black Student Union, with their Urban League mentality, got all liquored up at the prospect of being real militants. Great secret caucuses were held. Guns were strapped on. Plans were made to enlist the aid of all the student bodies of California, to close down the entire so-called educational system. I stepped out of my guru role for a minute, put on my political glasses, and offered an opinion that one should not call for violent revolution unless one were militarily stronger than the opponent, or unless one had the support of large masses of the people. But my voice was lost in the din.
It was laughable, in a tragic way, for the American ruling class, that odd amalgam of bankers, generals, top politicos, industrialists, oil barons, and heads of advertising agencies, has grown as stupid as dinosaurs in the ways of the world. They understand the fact of power, but have grown so lazy in their wealth that they have forgotten about the bases of power, and the ways in which they can be changed and lost. In short, they can’t recognize an enemy until the enemy hoists a great big sign on itself saying, “I am the enemy.”
Which is precisely what the strike accomplished.
It was the day before my thirty-first birthday, with Scorpio at the height of its influence, that the demonic forces were unleashed.
Overnight, the campus became a tense, ugly place. The radicals chanted, held mass rallies, presented demands, broke windows, and in general acted like a second-rate news-reel. There was the predictable litany of pompous speeches, much venting of justified rage, and the arrival of the police.
At the end of the first day, the spectacle had reached the point where the local SDS firebrand was shouting invectives at the administration building, while the college president, flanked by gray-faced attendants, stared at the students in stunned, stupid confusion. The twentieth century had just burst upon the poor man’s consciousness, and he was at a total loss as to how to relate to it.
The next day, I bought five hundred tabs of acid and flew back to New York, where I spent a paranoid ten days unsuccessfully trying to sell it to a city that was reeling from rumors of the Mafia’s putting strychnine in the LSD. “But this is pure,” I pleaded. “Right from the Coast.” The entire time was cold and bone-chilling, the telephone system suffering the first of its later-to-be-chronic breakdowns, the garbage men going out on strike, and the airlines grounding flights left and right. I finally got back, eight hundred dollars poorer, with a traveling lady of three days acquaintance who was drifting around the world at the time. But, by then, Hayakawa had arrived.
I caught his act a few times, and got bored. It saddened me that the hero of my youth, the man who first turned me on to language as a phenomenon, had become such an addled old romantic that he could, with clear conscience, make himself entirely misunderstood by the student body. After so many years as a popularizer of other people’s thinking, he was finding his moment of original glory. It was a poor show for a semanticist.
The college finally returned to placidity, after most of the hip teachers and radical students had left or been fired. And the Experimental College became a memory in the hearts of those who, for one brief moment, saw a possible way out of the nutcracker which is crushing the skull of America. The tragedy is not that one or another political force had won, but that something beautiful and life-affirming was squashed in the nation’s forced march toward chaos and brutality.
Yet, in retrospect, I realize that the EC was only a dream. The sins of this nation have gone too long unpunished. And since we are the strongest military power in the world, retribution cannot come from outside. We are condemned by destiny to be our own torturers, judges, and executioners. We are doomed, like so many civilizations before us, to commit a ghastly suicide. And the only pity is that we may take the rest of life on earth with us.
But none of these considerations was active at the time, for I had begun to hear the siren call of Haight-Ashbury. I still had more than four hundred hits of acid left. I sold my car. And visited the Lexington and Concord of the Psychedelic Revolution.
The most pungent memory of those days was Olompali, a sprawling estate in Novato, northeast of San Francisco. It had a main house, and several cottages and stables, horses, dogs, and some forty families living there. The rent was paid by the son of a business magnate who had left over a million dollars for the supposed continuance of the family empire. But the son took the bread, dropped out, and began the support of a small portion of the Coast’s indigent people. Before long, Rancho Olompali had joined Morningstar and Frontiers of Science as one of the quasi-permanent scenes of the time.
At this time, my experience with communes was limited to the one that I had visited in Oregon. That was a forty-acre farm which had a dropout mathematician as its head. He did free-lance computer programming to support the place, and ran the farm on pure communist principles. Everything was held in common, including clothing and sexual partners. It was a sort of intellectual Tobacco Road, since most of the people there were from the cities and had fairly good educational backgrounds but had decided to drop all the civilization games. Their major activities were farming, cooking, and fucking. Everyone had his or her own room, or nest, and there was a large common bedroom for group sex in the main house. They were people totally without ambition and lived for no other reason except the living. After two years, they had transmogrified into a large, amorphous family. Interestingly, most of them were from Minnesota, and were in contact with the great Minnesota dope circle that operated up and down the Coast. At the commune, grass came in kilos and acid came in numbers.
Olompali was quite different, since it was close to San Francisco and was plugged in to the urban scene very heavily. The mise-en-scène the day Leah and I visited was extraordinary; they were having a party. Hundreds of acres of rolling hills, horses cantering by, a huge, sparkling swimming pool, and almost five hundred men, women, and children. The dress ranged from nudity to Renaissance gear. The entire mood was one of freedom. Here were a horde of strangers, suddenly thrown into an intimate and random situation, with the result being a peaceful and loving communion. Some years later, Woodstock was to attain national prominence for the same scene, only over three days and with half a million people. But the seeds had been planted long before in places like Olompali up and down the West Coast.
There was some desultory music-making and dancing, until, around two o’clock, a middle-aged man with a shaved head walked out to the table near the pool and plunked down two plastic bags. It was four pounds of pure THC. He looked around at the assemblage and with a small smile said, “Cocktails.”
By two and threes we worked our way to the source. I had never had the stuff before, so I didn’t know how to judge amount. As usual, I was ready to err in the direction of too much. I took four hits, two in each nostril, and then waited for some fifteen minutes. I felt a slow rise, and had four more hits. I was chatting with a bearded blond boy who suddenly began to look like an ancient Greek, when my body dissolved into a mass of watery pinpricks. I got hung up on the fear flash which often accompanies such sudden changes in the state of the sensorium, and immediately walked off by myself to wait until the mood passed. I walked halfway to the large house when I turned, saw Leah, now also quite stoned, looking at me with knowing affection, and then, without warning, we were both racing for the pool, only to dive wildly in, laughing and quite prepared to drown.
We didn’t leave the water for four hours. During that time all the possible sea changes took place. We became fish, we became seals, became coral reefs. At one point, Leah did a bit of womb therapy on me, allowing me to float in her arms in the water until every last bit of tension had washed out of my body and I had regressed to the consciousness of an embryo.
Midway through the madness, a naked young man with a Roman helmet on surfaced near me. He blew the water away from his face, turned to me and shouted, “To all good things of the earth you are invited; the price of admission is sin.” And then dove under the water and swam away, helmet and all.
Our paths kept crossing, as well as those of several others. Leah and I found ourselves part of a group. Before we fully realized it, we had become a troupe, doing psychedelic guerrilla theater in an arena which was already in the upper realms of living theater. With the heat and the dope and fantastic vibrations and naked bodies and period costumes, all sense of the twentieth century had disappeared. We were in a timeless state. And while this is common enough when one gets stoned, it rarely happens with so many people in such perfect communion.
We came to name our group, “the Verbals — a Mime Troupe,” and began with some of the usual games. We did a finger lift, laying Leah down and lifting her with our forefingers, just five of us using one finger apiece. We built a human monkey cage, and did parodies of every movie ever made (“You there, down in the life raft”). Terms like “reality” and “fantasy” became utterly meaningless, for we were in the realm of pure play.
When the sun began to go down, many of the people began to get worried. We all flashed the existential dilemma of our reliance on the sun, that source of all life which is so obvious we come, stupidly, to take it for granted and forget, each day, to reel in the wonder of its existence. “What if it doesn’t come up tomorrow?” someone asked. Our troupe went from person to person, trying to find a volunteer to take care of the sun’s rising in the morning. Finally, we found someone ready for the responsibility. We put him in our astral elevator and went up to the sixth dimension, and left him off, where he promised faithfully to insure that we would indeed have a dawn the following day.
And now a strange thing happened. The guests began to leave and each of the families came down by the pool, and stood in knots on the grass, watching us. The Verbals took stock. We were not only strangers to them, but we did not know one another. A moment of decision came down, and all at once, we began, raggedly at first, a long ululating howl, aimed directly at the moon, and in a moment, we were sending up the most beautiful wavering cries of passion and longing that had been heard in those hills since the wolves had been driven out. Soon, the other families joined in, and before long, the entire night sky resounded with the untrammeled vibrato of human voices in their full power and expression. I remember thinking that if any of the straight people from the outside world had come in at that moment, they would have thought us insane, and the next day would have filled the gray morning of millions of office slaves with the newspaper pictures of bearded and naked loonies howling at the stars. How far civilization has brought man down, to the status of a frightened cloth robot who cannot understand the joy of sheer exuberance.
The cries died down, the families began making for their rooms, and we knew that we were in. The man with the shaved head came up and invited us to his room. And then the trip began to get really strange. I had finished reading The Magus not too long before, and suddenly I saw our mysterious host as Conchis, and me as the fuddled Englishman. We entered the main house, and went up the baroque stairway. The scene became Fellini, and as we wound our way upstairs, we started to chant Gregorian hymns.
His room was done in rich rock style. Silk banners and grotesque posters and cunningly arranged lights. Half the room was a bed that stretched twenty by twenty feet. We settled down and our host began to roll hash joints as big as a ring finger. Opium appeared. Trays and tumblers of cocaine. Harry began doing imitations of hash peddlers in Morocco and then sang “Codeine.”
It is impossible to describe just how high we got. Our mysterious benefactor kept nodding and saying, “You people are fantastic. I would like to back you as a group.” And then smiling wickedly and adding, “What else can you do?”
Of course! I immediately flashed that he wanted us to perform an orgy for him. I went up to him, took him aside, and said, “Is it you, Mr. Conchis?” His eyes gleamed. “Don’t tell the others,” he said.
By this time I had relegated critical judgment to the level of obstruction. Everything was happening too high too fast for me even to begin to stop for questions. The only confusion came in, as always, when it became clear to me that the others were getting an entirely different reading from the scene. I realized that this reality, as all realities, was totally open-ended and could develop in any direction whatsoever. I thought I knew what the director had in mind, and even had his mysterious wink to use as evidence. But the others were drifting off into unknown realms. Paranoia set in.
I began to get nervous. I started opening and closing windows. I searched for clues to verify my existence. None was forthcoming. Each of us had consumed about half a pound of dope apiece, just in weight alone, not counting quality and kind. And the lines of communication had not been checked at each point along the way. Everything was going so well that I assumed that everyone was on the same trip. And now, as I felt forced to some kind of decision, there was no one to talk to. The formerly friendly faces of the others began to look sinister, and the random events of the day seemed, in retrospect, to be part of an enmeshing pattern. It reached a point of gibbering panic when, like an angel of mercy, Leah came up to me.
“Let’s split,” she said. “I can’t take these vibes any longer.” Gratefully, I led her out to the car.
The car! I realized that I had to drive over forty miles back to San Francisco, and I didn’t even know what my name was. Extreme circumstances make for heroes and fools, and a bit of both. I started back. One of the discoveries I made during that trip of two eternities was the probable reason why accidents happen so readily on highways. My body had been extremely sensitized by the drugs, and I got into the rhythm of the tires on the road. In that direction, it was all soft, all air and rubber, so much so that I forgot the steel and glass component of the car. At one point, I was dreaming along, anesthetized by the soft swaying of the machine, when I became suddenly aware that I was in an iron juggernaut, hurtling down a black ribbon of highway, with other monster machines whizzing by within inches of me. I freaked, but there was nothing to do except trust my instincts and keep going forward.
I found the perfect speed to be 371/2 miles an hour. Faster than that, and the road blurred; slower, and the wheel wavered. I came upon stoplights like a diver coming upon a sunken galleon, foggily, as from a great distance. Interestingly, although my mind was lost in some lotus land of indescribable fantasy, my physical reflexes remained perfect, and I brought the car to rest in front of my house with the delicacy of a ship landing on the moon.
For weeks afterward I floated on the high I received that day, digesting it, reliving it, weeping at the sheer beauty of it, tortured because I knew such a time could never be repeated, could never be accurately described. It was one of those moments that make one realize the poignancy of the haiku which goes, “‘How exquisite,’ I say, but with each thing I see, spring passes.”
Yet, that was not the heaviest of things which happened during the Haight sojourn. I had yet to come into contact with Frontiers of Science.
Since I was used to the New York brand of scene, with its rapid-fire punch and localized geography, it took some time before I could see the pattern of places and events which Rod Confers had put together. He was a physicist who claimed to have been taken up by a flying saucer one night and given a mission to turn on the world. It was part of the sublime naïveté of the man that when he told the story, it was impossible not to believe him. He held Wednesday and Thursday night gatherings, usually in the Grace Memorial Church and at the College of Marin. His basic trip was the formation of a kind of humanistic religion based on scientific principles, and he rented a huge run-down country club a few hundred miles north of San Francisco, where he began to put together one of the most outlandish communes on the Coast.
In the beginning, he attracted only true believers. These were people who fell into his scene the way I had dropped into Scientology. The essential difference was that Rod had no power trip going, nor any plans for world domination. Also, no money lined his pockets. In the beginning, one heard him talk, was moved, and simply turned over all one’s belongings to the Foundation. They took money, clothes, car, etc., and in return you were given a room, fed, and allowed to become one of the family.
The notion of “family” is a very important one on the Coast. One belongs or one doesn’t, and as in any family, there are no identification cards or passwords. You are known simply by your own face. This is why, when people went up to Harbinger Springs — the name of the place where Frontiers had its home — and asked if they could join, they were given a very elaborate runaround. If one felt he were part of the family, he just stayed, and then let the others decide on whether he could remain or not. As with so much else in California, a tacit agreement went a long way, and anyone who tried to be too explicit about things was vastly suspect.
The scene at Harbinger rapidly became one of dope and spirituality. The notion was that if a group of people could get it together and raise huge positive vibes, they would form a center from which salvation would flow. They did some dabbling in orgone meters, and were quite orthodox about diet. They also had some of the most beautiful hot spring baths in the area, and on any given afternoon there would be a small group of people sitting in the healing waters, gently stoned and smiling at one another.
Before long, they began to attract the attention of the straight world. They started to interest IBM executives and mathematicians and scientists from all parts of the country. The appeal was easy to understand. These were brilliant and sensitive men who had all their lives been channeled into the one arena society opened to them, and while they found its money and prestige and opportunity to use their brains attractive, they hated the regimentation, the deadly dullness of conformity and superficiality. Many of them also loathed the military meatheads who were turning their efforts into more vicious weapons of genocide.