The Stoned Apocalypse (13 page)

The pioneers of that soon-to-be psychedelic Grossinger’s stumbled onto a seeming truth, that if one lays emphasis on health, on growth, on joy, it is a more effective means of dealing with mankind’s ills than by delving into the pathological aspects of the personality. And if it had remained merely a corrective to the older forms of psychiatry, it would have been a reasonably healthy manifestation. But, as with all things, it was organized, ritualized, jargonized, and finally turned into a religion. It went rapidly from Bill Schutz’s workshops called JOY, to Stu Miller’s workshops called MORE JOY and stopped just short of SON OF JOY. The fact that a human emotion was sold the way the detergent of the same name sells its washing power did not seem odd to any of Esalen’s founding fathers.

Also, the community remained silent on the fact that going into a room full of naked strangers, being led in a massive group grope, and running out among the breathtaking grandeur of Big Sur will turn anyone on, and has nothing to do with the supposedly theoretical underpinnings of any psychological approach. Esalen’s major crime came in refusing to cop to the fact that all they were doing, essentially, was providing tired and uptight middle-class America with mild orgies and a vain hope for a fuller life. They have never spoken about what happens when the Esalenized person steps back into his web of conditionings, into the fall of his civilization, with its wars and corruption and poisoning of the water and air, and its ethic of violence and greed. As with so much of the California scene, no one there seemed to have the historical perspective to see themselves not as a cure for society’s ills, but merely one of its more vulgar products.

On they went, charging higher and higher fees, with Bernie Gunther helping people to discover that feeling the bodies of young girls would make you come more alive, with Betty Fuller leading giant workshops, with some five hundred people at a time processed through a four-hour pastiche of “growth techniques.” The initial sense of family had disappeared, and big business took its place. Esalen became a groovy-factory manufacturing jollies. It even formed a “Flying Circus” to go around the country, “to introduce the Esalen techniques,” as though intimacy and true sensitivity and flexible intelligence could be taught through “techniques.” It held a weekend bash in New York City where some six thousand people paid almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to see the Esalen heavies put in a two-hour appearance apiece. Therapy transmuted to show business. And always, in the background, the sound of cash registers clanging.

Concurrently, hundreds of growth centers, spurred on by the Esalen success story, sprang up like warts around the country, and anyone who had spent a few hours with an Esalen teacher, or had been processed by an Esalen teacher, called himself a group leader, and the encounter madness began. Esalen made matters worse by setting up a “leadership program,” whereby one might spend a month getting stoned at Big Sur and then go forth as an “Esalen-trained leader.”

Esalen’s chief general hit the benefit trail, and by the end of the decade had insinuated the Esalen mystique into almost every organization having even vaguely to do with personality change. Their latest conquest was a visit to England where they spoke of the growing success of “the movement.”

Sadly, although none of them is any better or worse a human being than anyone else, they have given birth to yet another ism, another form of regimentation whereby people can hypnotize themselves. They have become the American-born version of the Tibetan hierarchy, for while they seemingly transcend politics, they are most influential in guiding much of the tone of the nation, much of its texture. Whatever the political outcome, Esalen will be on top. If the money is right, one can picture them just as easily leading sensitivity groups for the Weathermen as giving massages to Air Force generals.

At the club, Harold was visited by Esalen’s San Francisco agent, who had been tipped off to Harold’s scene, and had joined the line of those who wanted to clip him for some bread. But they had good bait. Harold and one of Esalen’s big guns, it turned out, had been fraternity brothers, and Harold was flattered that the great Esalen chief remembered him. Esalen was trying to get him to buy them a house for their city headquarters, and were promising him lifelong admittance to all workshops, prestige, and orgies at the baths. It was the first time I saw Harold lose the calculating look in his eyes.

As Esalen moved in, I realized it was time for me to move out. One night, when most of the others had gone, Ellen and I dropped acid and stayed in Harold’s bedroom to ball. We were deep into fucking, when there was a heavy pounding at the door. It was Margit. She had come upstairs and found the door locked. She screamed to be let in. Her worst nightmare was coming true. The man she hated and feared was fucking the woman she dug, and she was on the outside. Half out of malice, and half out of exuberance, the fucking got wilder and louder. We began making animal noises, and making the big bed squeak with our thrashings. Margit went to a back entrance and came in through the bathroom window, but not carrying a silver spoon. She burst into the bedroom and stood there, glaring. We ignored her. We fucked until we finished, with her watching us hatefully. And then, slowly and deliberately, we sat up and stayed in one another’s realm of attention, pointedly leaving her out.

Finally, she came forward and sat at the edge of the bed. I turned and looked at her, full in the eyes and with no reservations. For a minute she held my gaze and then said, “All right, you win.”

“I was never fighting you,” I said.

“I know that,” she said, “but I couldn’t help myself.”

The rest of the evening passed in normal acid waves. And at dawn, Ellen fell asleep while Margit and I went up on the roof to watch the city come to life. A little later, I went to Chinatown to buy groceries for breakfast. Walking through those silent streets, with the brisk solemn Chinese beginning their day taking down wooden shutters from the store windows, throwing buckets of water over the sidewalks, I felt a peace that rarely comes during a lifetime. When I returned, Margit put her arms around my neck and said, “Let’s be friends.”

“Sure,” I said. And we made a giant breakfast.

Soon after that, Ellen met some musician friends on their way to New Mexico, and split with them. I stayed for a while in the mad-tea-party house on Waller Street, and had nothing to do with the club until a few weeks later, after having dropped some acid, I climbed up the stairs to the top to find Harold, very drunk, wallowing in bed. He told me some stories about two young hippie girls who needed some money and had come to see him. “They were very nice to me,” he said in that oily way he had whenever he was referring to sex, “so I gave them ten dollars.” All the compacted degeneracy of the scene rose up in me like vomit, and with the energy I had from the LSD, I entered into a long seduction scene with him, at the end of which I got him to go down on me. I gave him some poppers while he was doing it so the experience would be burned into his psyche. And afterward, I demanded money from him.

“I don’t have much,” he said.

“Let me see,” I said, grabbing his wallet from his pants. He had only two hundred dollars, and I took that.

He looked up at me with fear and excitement. “That was very . . . nice,” he said. “I’ve never done that before.” He paused. “Can I see you again?” he asked.

“For that, you don’t need me, Harold,” I said.

“Do you know . . . someplace I can go?” he asked.

I looked down at him. “Sure,” I said. “Go find a urinal.”

As though following some predetermined curve, the next day I moved from the Haight pad to North Beach, and found a room in a place called, appropriately enough, the Circle Hotel. I paid the sixty dollars month’s rent in advance to a prototypic Irish landlady who was absolutely inured to the worst the species had to offer. Over the years she had come to view prostitution, drugs, murder, freak-outs, police raids, robbery, despair, and suicide with the calm of a Buddha sitting by a riverside chanting Om. She was an adept in the yoga of business, and had achieved her enlightened state through a thorough understanding of the dollar. One rented a room, one paid the specified price, and short of burning the hotel down, one was free to do whatever one liked. As far as I could see, she made no value judgments, cared not the least for anyone’s opinion of her, and treated mayor and criminal with the same scales of justice. I have met few people I have more fully trusted to be totally consistent within the parameters of social interaction. She had a husband, or boy friend, but his sole function seemed to be to check on rooms after people had left. The only times she spoke to him was to give orders, and I never heard a single word pass his lips.

The room was classic. Twelve feet by twelve feet, a rusted sink, a peeling dresser, and a squeaking bed complete with wrought-iron headboard. One entered from a long hallway that opened onto twenty similar rooms on each side of a complete square, making some eighty inhabitants to a floor. My room being on the inside, I could look out the window to a concrete courtyard, and the scores of other windows from which all the transient and already lost souls looked back.

When the landlady’s husband left after taking me to the room, and I locked the door behind him, I was totally without an identity. For one of the many times in my life, if I had died on the spot, there was not a single person around who would know what my name was, or how to contact next of kin. Of course, I signed in under a pseudonym, writing “Augustine Tocco,” with a flourish in the registration book.

I don’t think I had any thoughts at the time. Living with others had become intolerable. And I didn’t have enough money to take an apartment. And, most important, I hadn’t the slightest idea of where I wanted to go. All the guidelines which help an obsessive-compulsive over the hard spots were gone. Subjectively, I was one of the damned.

My possessions, by this time, fit into a knapsack and small suitcase. This was a long way down from the apartment full of clothes and appliances and furniture and books I had had in New York less than a year ago. But now I took out a half-dozen books, a few pants and sweaters, my hash pipe, and some of the cloths I had learned to carry with me. One of the women passing through the Waller Street commune had just returned from India and had taught me the poor man’s interior-decorating trick: three madras cloths, four holy pictures, an incense stand, and a small rug will turn any dingy room into a comfortable space.

I sat down to take stock. About four hundred dollars left from the stash I had come west with plus the two hundred I’d clipped from Harold. I had already sold my car. I was totally disillusioned with all the salvation scenes, and had had my fill of hippies. It was impossible to go back to the straight world, but I had lost my way among the dropouts. I continued to sit. I stared at the wall. Two hours passed. I began to feel as though I were getting as moldy as the woodwork. I wondered if I would just grow old here, become one of the thousand nameless drifters who slowly sink into social oblivion.

Perhaps I would become a bum. And with that thought, the first flash of my new insanity began. For somewhere in my private lexicon of folk heroes, the bum had always held a special place. Every now and then, while walking through the Bowery or one of its equivalents in other cities, I would meet a bum whose inner dignity burned through all the dirt of his rags. Perhaps a man with white hair and craggy features, with a fine intelligence in his eyes. A man who is aware that he is absolutely at the bottom of any social classification, despised by almost everyone who sees him. And yet, from the vantage point of sheer hopelessness, a fierce pride is born. The knowledge that he owes nothing to anyone, that he lives simply by what he can beg, and if he can beg nothing, then he starves. A man who sleeps on the streets in winter, knowing that he may freeze to death before morning. A man, in short, who has discarded all the pretenses of the world, and lives in the existential moment of breath. And of course, except for those very few bums who have the education and strength to transcend the judgment of everyone around them, these broken products of a sick culture come to see themselves as mere bums, and lose the single thing that a human being must maintain if he is to remain human: an unconditioned sense of inner dignity.

Yes, I thought, I would become a bum. I would drift through the streets in rags, silent, gentle, spit upon by all except those who could see through my disguise, those who would come to sit at my feet and learn from me the wisdom of poverty and self-renunciation. My eyes grew moist as the image took shape in my mind. I wanted to wax out on it, but heard my stomach growling, and decided to go to the MDR for a roast beef sandwich, and from there continue my plans.

But as I was leaving the building, I heard a familiar voice saying, “Far fucking out.” I turned, and it was Tommy Simon standing there, and a new phase in my life began.

Tommy was six feet tall, black, beautiful, and gay. I had met him in New York; I was an editor and he had worked as an art director. At the time I was not fully enough in touch with my own homosexuality to understand his scene.

Tommy and I were friends in the way that someone who is gay can be friendly with someone he digs, but who had not yet fully come out. I lent him money, he bought me dinners, we sometimes went to movies together. One day, bored and restless, I went to his cubicle to see him. He was out on a coffee break, and since he owed me ten dollars, I amused myself with a practical joke, leaving him a note which read PAY OR DIE with a black hand copied on it. There must have been some kind of psychic transfer which decided me on that particular joke because, at the time, he was some five hundred dollars in debt to a loan shark in the East Village, a man who was a minor Mafia lackey. I am told that when he saw the note he literally blanched. Of course, he learned that I had done it, quite innocently, and wreaked a peculiar kind of revenge. The next day, when I returned from lunch, I found that every single thing in my office had been Scotch-taped to everything else. Drawers, pens, typewriter, curtain, light switches, window handles, chairs . . . everything in a single web of sticky cellophane. I thought it quite funny, but the vice-president, a man who kept twitching his shoulders back as though he were a West Point student being criticized by an officer, looked at me suspiciously for weeks afterward.

Tommy had left for San Francisco shortly after that, and I thought I had lost touch with him forever. But here he was, with a new moustache, his hair dyed red, and looking absolutely ravishing in bell bottoms and cutaway shirt. “What are you doing here?” we said simultaneously.

So we went for a drink, told our respective stories, and found to our surprise that he lived at the Circle, too. At the time he was working in an art supply store by day, and at night working on a series of collages, shooting speed, and doing a lot of fucking.

After several hours at the bar he leaned over and said, “You have any plans for tonight?” I suddenly remembered that I was going to get a sandwich and contemplate my future as a bum. “I was going to get something to eat,” I said.

He smiled. “I’ll get you something to eat,” he said. “Come on.”

I followed him out and we went to the drugstore at the edge of Chinatown and bought a box of amyl nitrate. This was before the whistle was blown on the popper scene, causing prices to soar, and the things, ultimately, to become unobtainable without a prescription.

We left, and headed down Broadway. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“To the baths,” he said.

My memory of the baths are from the two cesspools of blind lust I frequented in New York. It wasn’t until I returned from the Coast and revisited them with a new perspective that I learned how to find sapphires in the mud, how it is possible to soar into the greatest ecstasy when one is at the depths of degeneracy. But at that moment, I recoiled. I was in no mood for urine-caked hallways and paint-peeling walls and dribbling old men. Tommy must have read my thoughts. “Wait until you see the baths here,” he said. “It’ll blow your mind.”

We went under the overpass of the expressway to the warehouse district and entered a discreet door with the one word on it. Inside, it was pure Hollywood. Richly carpeted floors, a color TV in the lounge, a clean, lively atmosphere, with all the attendants being pretty young boys. The rooms were impeccably fresh, and even the johns were spotless. And roaming up and down the halls, dressed only in towels around their waists, were the loveliest of San Francisco’s fairies.

We each took a room, and I met Tommy in the lounge. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said, and taking me by the hand, led me upstairs.

Up we went, past the sun lamp room, past the weight-lifting room, down a long, dimly lit hallway, and turned a corner. At first, I thought we had gone into a pitch-black space. I stood there a long moment, peering into the darkness, and gradually, as my eyes accustomed, a scene out of Doré burned into my eyes.

There, under a lamp that gave off but a few photons of light, in a round room with a diameter of about twenty feet, were some thirty or forty men in a great writhing pile of bodies. From their center came the continual sound of heavy breathing, groaning, sighing, all punctuated by cries of passion and pain. Almost the entire room was a circular leather couch, perhaps two feet high, and around the couch was a narrow walkway. Men posing like characters in the stud magazines leaned against the wall, while their counterparts knelt in front of them, variously sucking and licking and biting. Here and there, a figure would tumble off the couch, lying half on, half off, doing something into the mass of bodies and being done to by one of the men in the ring outside.

Tommy turned to me and smiled. “Something else, isn’t it?” he said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

And we took a popper apiece, broke them, filled our nostrils with the heady fumes, and dived headfirst into the sea of bodies.

The next fifteen minutes had no description, simply because there were no discrete units of activity. It was all touch, all liquid, all sound, all excitement, all images. During that time, I went through every imaginable variation on the physical homosexual act imaginable. There was neither the chance nor the inclination to take any of them to their full conclusions. Rather, it was a sort of smorgasbord, with the joy coming in the many different flavors and sensations. It provided me with the single most glorious moment of total anonymity I had ever experienced in my life, and when I finally crawled out, I felt as though I had gone through a baptism of orgasm.

I went down to the lounge and had a Coke and a cigarette. Within a few minutes, Tommy joined me. We exchanged conspiratorial smiles. “Nothing like that in New York,” he said. “Amen,” I said.

He looked at me. “Let’s go to my room,” he said. My stomach dropped, and I lowered my eyes. I was still at the stage of pre-coming out where I was too embarrassed to make it with someone I knew. I could only do it with strangers. “I can’t,” I said.

“Can’t?” he asked.

“Won’t,” I said.

“Well I’ll be fucked,” he said.

“That’s the way it is right now,” I said.

He stood up and blew out a lungful of smoke. “Later, baby,” he said.

I stayed for a few more hours, used up the rest of the poppers, and had sex with perhaps a half dozen men, not one of whom I can remember. And at three in the morning, my head aching from the drug, my soul sick from excess, I made my way back to my room.

Perhaps, if I had just gone to bed, things would have been better. But I needed some comfort, and picked up one of my books, a thing I had found at Clear Lake called, pretentiously enough, This Is Reality. It was a handbook of meditation techniques based on the principles of Kriya Yoga. It was written, although I didn’t know it at the time, by a southern Baptist minister from Florida who had studied with Paramahansa Yogananda, one of that great stream of popularizers who have flooded our shores. Like so many of the self-proclaimed gurus who wend their way from India, Paramahansa was selling a superficial distillation of a very advanced practical psychology which had its roots in a totally different culture from ours, the practice of which assumed that the student had mastered a score of lesser yogas. It had taken root as a spiritual equivalent of the get-rich-quick mystique which feeds the American mentality, a promise of instant enlightenment. The great yogi’s death came, it is told, via a heart attack as he sat with a mouthful of roast chicken at a banquet given in his honor. His body still hasn’t decayed.

By the time the minister had watered down the already weak brew, his book emerged as a screaming parody on the whole idea of meditation. Of course, in my current state of mind, I took to it voraciously.

Basically, it was a system of self-hypnosis. One sat in a chair, regulated one’s breathing, and “felt” the energy going up the spine to the crown of the head. The book listed a series of recommended visions and sensations which were to accompany the exercise. It was supposed to be a kundalini yoga on the astral plane.

So, for the remainder of that night, and for the two weeks following, I alternated my time between freaking out at the baths, and spending hours practicing those venerable techniques. I should like to have a psychiatric description of my state of mind at the time. Certainly, it fit no categories I am familiar with. After a breakfast of bacon and eggs, and a quick trot through the pages of the Chronicle, I would return reverentially to my room, nodding hellos to my fellow debauchees at the hotel and then dutifully enter what I thought to be a meditative state. I can remember getting all sorts of flashes and buzzes and odd insights, and simultaneously wondering, Am I doing it right? Am I really getting enlightened? My critical faculty had been totally eroded, and I was completely at the mercy of blind whim.