The Stoned Apocalypse (9 page)
Now, at Harbinger, they could move in a company of peers, for along with Confers there were gathered some of the finest acid minds of the day. The thing with LSD — which Confers himself never took, oddly enough — is that it illumines all the natural propensities and conditioning of the individual. The problem is that it has been taken mostly by people with little sense of culture or education, and has thereby bred an entire generation of idiots savants. One meets them constantly in California, smiling, wise, somber men whose eyes reflect the profundity of the sages, and yet who can barely string together two sentences in any kind of articulate discourse. At Frontiers, there were people who had a high degree of native intelligence, who were well educated, and who had mastered the vicissitudes of acid. In addition, there was the countryside, hundreds of luscious and often nude women, healthy babies, and pulse-pounding music.
Within a short while, Frontiers had become the psychedelic country club of the nation’s hip intelligentsia. If it had continued to succeed, it might have turned on an army of men who live at the heart of machine-America, inside the veins and arteries of its computers. But the government could not allow such diabolic rites in the woods to exist for long. At first, the local cops began harassment. They found health violations, and when these were taken care of, they began “looking for runaways.” One memorable night, six stalwarts from the local constabulary, pudgy and apple-cheeked innocents from the boondocks of northern California, pulled a surprise raid. Except it was they who suffered the greater surprise. They found six or seven hundred naked freaks, dancing and swilling acid punch, setting up a soaring cry which set the leaves on the trees to spinning. They rushed into the dining hall where the bulk of the party was going on, and froze to the spot. To a man, they blushed. They stated their official business, which was looking for underage runaways, and then quickly left, but not before four of them had been approached by a number of people and asked to come back when they were off-duty. The next step was to humanize the police.
Yet, from that day on, the group’s days were numbered. For in addition to outside pressure, they suffered from internal disunion. Less and less emphasis was put on work; more and more the place became a great sloppy crash pad in the woods. Money ran out, and hidden jealousies and suspicions sprang to the fore. Every two weeks saw a new regimen posted on one of the bulletin boards, and as any veteran of communes knows, once the rules have to be promulgated in print, the organization has become as rigid as the society which had been fled from.
My finest memory of Frontiers comes, however, from one of the way stations that had begun to spring up around the organization. Since the Springs could accommodate only so many people, those who were quasi members had begun to set up a series of houses going from Vancouver to Big Sur. They had no official status, but once one cracked the Frontiers circuit, it was possible to live for months without money, simply traveling from house to house in the company of hundreds of other members of this subculture of a subculture. Again, to become part of the family involved learning a set of extremely subtle responses and mannerisms, none of which could be described by anything short of a kinesicist and video camera. Since I am a chameleon on the level of personality, it took no great trouble to blend in with the mix, and one weekend I found myself with almost eighty others in a haunted chalet at Clear Lake, near Ukiah (which, as someone pointed out, is “haiku” spelled backwards).
The people there were mostly between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, and were typical of the young acid graduates who lack the critical intelligence to view themselves as products of history as well as of eternity. These are the kids who speak with a vague optimism about the Aquarian Age, and in the face of the most mammoth evils maintain a faith in the salvageability of man that is simultaneously inspiring and appalling. They remind one of the ancient Chinese maxim which runs, “When the people begin to use auguries and superstitions to solve the problems of daily living, one may know that the state is in decay.”
Any attempt at perspective was taken by them as bad vibes, or paranoia. They had not yet reached the stage of understanding that the existence of real enemies is one of the ground rules of life, for all species. They were still at that vulgar level of misunderstanding which equates the Buddhist Nirvana with the Christian notion of Paradise.
The three days there were typical. Dozens of people came and went. Sacks of grain appeared mysteriously. No one had any money, no one had any plans, no one knew who lived there or how the rent was paid. Somehow, the house existed as an energy center and served as a focal point for a continual grouping and regrouping of these mangy ministers of some obscure god. They were as lovable as they were infuriating.
There was trouble with the town. The people there, like most people in small towns, were willing to be tolerant of anyone who didn’t blatantly upset the social ecology. If fifty freaks had moved into the old chalet, and held obscene orgies and cabalistic rites, no one would have objected so long as, during the daytime, they dressed and acted in a conventional fashion. One could understand their viewpoint; they were living way out of the city in order to escape the insanity of the city, and while they were closed to a good many things, and steeped in ignorance and prejudice, they could be friendly if one didn’t invade their homes with frightening displays of weirdness. But the young people had no sense of propriety. As far as they were concerned, the earth was theirs, totally, and they would allow others to live on it, as long as they didn’t interfere with their own sprawling, chaotic ways. They insisted on wearing the wildest of hippie-type costumes, and driving through the streets in psychedelically painted trucks. They flaunted their beards and bra-less chicks and smoked dope outrageously. Of course, they were merely flaunting their deep insecurity, but the effect was to give the insecurity a basis in reality. The townspeople began the usual harassment, beginning with edicts from the health inspector.
They were to be evicted some two months after the weekend I spent there, but that weekend ought to have been enough to rip the minds of any one of the good burghers if they had seen the goings-on. A good six hours after dinner was spent with serious turning-on. Several pounds of grass were smoked. Slowly, those who weren’t already coupled began to drift toward mates, and near midnight, we started moving toward the bedroom.
The bedroom was a single room, some sixty by sixty feet, totally covered with mattresses which had a single sheet over them. Some industrious chick had taken dozens of sheets, sewn them together, and made a covering for the state’s largest single bed.
Now, everyone there had to some degree or another dipped his hand into some form of pseudo-meditation, group chanting, massage, and relaxation. So, almost like saying prayers before bedtime, we began a round of head and body games, under the rubric of some eclectic Oriental structure. Within a short time, hands were kneading backs, nostrils blew in and out with alternate breathing, headstands were performed, and a low level sighing permeated the air. The scene lasted for half an hour or so, and then the lights were snapped out, as some forty couples lay down to sleep.
We formed a circle with all our feet toward the center, so that our bodies stretched out like spokes on a wheel. Within seconds, the sense of sexuality grew very heavy. Forty cocks lay to the ready; forty cunts yearned in secret anticipation. All the dope and gymnastics had worked everyone up into a fine sweat, and most of the people here were sexual strangers to one another, adding an edge of anticipatory excitement to the brew. All of that, coupled with the insane sense of religious fervor which sparked our every rustle, made the place as combustible as a Freedom March through Georgia.
Total silence ensued. Everyone was awake. Everyone knew everyone was awake. And everyone knew that everyone knew. And was waiting. A very long five minutes passed, and suddenly, from a segment of the wheel on the rim opposite from me, a sleeping bag rustled! Our ears strained to the sound. Another rustle. Silence. And then, the unmistakable slithering of a hand against fabric. And shortly after, a clear female sigh.
The room collectively relaxed.
The rest was fairly standard, except for the time intervals. Everything happened more slowly as the couple worked their way upstream through the consciousness of everyone else in the place. As for the rest of us, we had to navigate the waters of their fucking through sound alone.
Finally, we heard him mount, and the moaning explosion of breath as he entered, and then the joyous crying out as he moved inside her. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Ohhhh,” he said. “Ohhhh,” we all thought.
Of course, the domino effect took place. A few seconds later, a new moaning began. And then a third. And within five minutes, every single person in that room had thrown back his sleeping bag and was balling in full gusto. Cries rang out, and the air filled with the perfume of dozens of young snatches. It was the single most happy sexual time I had ever experienced, and more taboos came ringing down in an hour than Ellis was able to catalogue in a lifetime.
I found myself with a girl I knew slightly and a bullish young man who had attached himself to us. The three of us went at it, he with greater fervor than I since it was his first time with the woman. By the time everyone else had finished, he and she were still at it, and he bucked all his young strength into her as she let out the first uncensored yells of the night. Whereas everyone else had maintained a certain vocal discretion, Judy just lay back and wailed. At the height of her orgasm, someone switched the lights back on, and everyone else sat up, blinking, to see who was making all the noise. The two of them sat up after a moment and received the applause and cheers of their brothers and sisters with innocent smiles of joy.
We all smoked some more dope, the lights went out again, and one by one we fell asleep, to the sounds of stray couples who were having a second go at it. The next day we woke to a breakfast of fresh fruit and groats, and headed back to San Francisco.
During that time, I lived mostly in a commune on Waller Street. It was supported by Gerard, a dropout landlord who, one day, had sold all his houses in Philadelphia and decided to be a hippie, and then diligently set about learning how. I had met him in one of my classes at the Experimental College, and one afternoon, as I was waiting for a bus to take me to North Beach, he called to me from the second story of one of those Victorian houses which people the Haight like so many great Japanese wrestlers.
I went up, and found a family in the making. Gerard was there, a kind of benignly confused paterfamilias, paying the rent and buying some of the food, and in general walking the thin line between financial commitment and just being one of the gang. Ernesto was there, one of the true legends of the Haight, a fifty-year-old Italian who had dropped out at the age of forty-seven and become an actual saint, white-haired, bearded, gentle, pained, going from commune to commune, teaching them how to put together compost heaps, how to love one another. For all the time I knew him, he never carried a penny in his pocket, nor owned anything but the clothes on his back, nor had a home of his own. But the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head, and so forth, and Ernesto was the closest thing to the reincarnation of Jesus that I had ever seen, but with a jovial Italian pessimism instead of poor Christ’s Jewish schmerz.
Martin was there too, Ernesto’s brother, a gentle dock-worker who got high from running the length of Golden Gate Park every day. He lived in almost total silence and in complete simplicity, a younger version of the man his brother had become. Shirley lived there, in red-haired confusion. And Lucy Sunshine, who couldn’t stop smiling, except to cry. Gypsy, who couldn’t make the break with his criminal past.
In all, some two hundred people must have passed through those rooms in the few months I lived there. When I moved in, a decision was being made to close the place off, to try to bring the people living there together into a family. But the same problem kept tearing us apart: how to strike a balance between the need for privacy and intimacy which keeps a family together, and the desire to allow any one of the family who needed to crash to come in for as long as he needed. In this case, the notion of “family” extended to the entire human race.
The day I went there, I had a pocketful of acid with me, and Gerard decided to have a party in honor of the occasion of our meeting one another again. There were over forty people at the house that day, and I immediately went into the kitchen, poured four large containers of orange juice into a bowl, and dropped fifty tabs into the mix. We sat around sipping the brew until, about an hour later, everyone lifted off.
What happened during the next twenty-four hours was both the best and worst of acid. People standing for hours with their arms around one another’s shoulders, forming human flowers, chanting, having psychic orgasms. People freaking out when they would suddenly pop to and find themselves under a pile of bodies or looking out a window to a totally unrecognizable street scene in an alien universe. Comic vignettes such as a sensitive young girl staring for over an hour at a tall black man sitting totally fogged in a corner. He was gazing with empty eyes at his lap. As she looked at him, tears came to her eyes. Probably she was hallucinating some hallowed figure onto the man and mistaking his stupor for satori. Finally, she crawled over, put her face in his lap, and gave him a long and exquisite blowjob. When she finished, she looked up into his face and said, “Thank you.” And crawled away. I watched him for another ten minutes, during which time some very slow, very heavy changes went on in his face. The major question he seemed to be trying to decide was where in his obvious stream of hallucinations the scene with the chick would fit. I have often wondered whether he ever realized that what had happened was actual.
By the middle of the next afternoon, most of the people had left, with Gerard, Martin, Ernesto, and myself remaining as the males of the household, and Shirley, Sunshine, and Marilyn as the females.