The Stoned Apocalypse (17 page)

I looked around and saw that the family had also left. Of course, for them, this was just a wild night out. None of them would have taken the intense metaphysical journey which had wrung me dry. A great crashing took place, but I remained high in spite of it. The resultant state was dread. I left the campus and walked toward the bookstore. Everything had become alien. All the people were strange. There was no one there who even knew my name, who cared what I was feeling, who could comprehend what I had just experienced. I was free, and I was frightened.

There were people at the Mandalia and they were preparing to drive home. Half a dozen of the family were there, plus some others who were acquaintances. I got in the car and rode back in silence. I felt bitter and superior. I needed the people around me and yet I despised them. Worse, there was no way to make contact with them, for we inhabitated different universes. A dozen times I wanted to speak, and realized the inadequacy of words.

And then the idea hit me. I would not speak. I would not speak again. I thought of the boy in prison for five years. I would not speak for five years. I would write him a note telling him that I had taken a vow of silence for the duration of his imprisonment, and that by this vow he would know that he wasn’t forgotten. Once again I stepped out of despair by the expedient of adorning myself with a myth of impossible proportions. Yet, it served the purpose, as would have any less baroque and grandiose neurotic defense. In these, as in most other matters, it is the style of the gesture which separates the artist from the run-of-the-mill psychopath.

The scene at the house was turgid. John and Ginny, Don and his old lady, and Connie, the tiny grain-fanatic, sat on one side of the room drinking tea and smoking grass. The other group of about five people sat on the other side, talking almost secretly among themselves. I went into the bedroom and wrote the note to the man in jail, and put it away for mailing in the morning. I felt elated once more, but didn’t have the presence of mind to realize that I was simply following the waves of the drug and the environment, as helpless as a cork on a stream.

I sat midway between the two groups, and got heavy. I sank deep into my resolve and absorbed from it all the benefit which would have accrued had I actually carried out my plan. I got high on my self-delusion. It took perhaps some ten minutes for some of the people to notice that I was sitting there, very loudly being silent. Don called over to me and asked if I wanted a joint. I waved my hand. “What’s the matter, man?” he asked. “Ain’t you talking?” I shook my head. Again I got up and went into the next room and wrote a note which I pinned to my chest. It read, “I do not speak, but I can hear everything you say, and will do my best to help you.” And returned to my post.

The reaction that the note caused ranged from the feeling that I was stoned and on some kind of strange trip, to the kind of revulsion people often feel in the face of massively irrational behavior. But I did not flinch. Once again, I was forgotten by the others, and then a strange thing began to happen.

I could hear, not only every individual conversation in each group, but the thoughts and intents of all the people there. In effect, I was doing no more than paying attention to the total ensemble of relationships and communications in the room. This is no more than what a person ought to do all the time anyway, but it took that massive amount of peyote and the wild trip of the night to bring me to that point which the mass of mankind does not attain, and views with a suspicion of witchcraft. So low has our species sunk that we cannot stay tuned to all the levels of intercourse which take place, and we laughingly call the blind shouting we do at one another human speech. From my vantage point, I could literally see the shapes of energy as they shifted with the changes in focus and emphasis.

Don, who was generally thought to be inarticulate, turned out to be a brilliant talker. All that was required was to be silent and let him come to the end of his rap. He talked the way a musician plays, and to listen to him for content was as silly as trying to understand what a musical phrase “means.” I was able not only to sit in my own silence, but to pervade the room with silence, so that the words each person spoke stood out sharp and clear and it was possible to actually hear what that person was saying, stripped of all punctuation marks and projections and social-theatrical roles. It was a chilling experience to listen to the naked human voice in that way, and to realize that we are all always so exposed, all the time, in our voices and eyes and gestures and body postures and intentions. It is only necessary to pay attention and stop one’s inner clatter, to silence the thought machine in the brain.

Then, although the two groups weren’t talking to each other, I saw the subtle signals which passed back and forth. The people from the family were blind to that, but the other group gradually fell silent and began watching me listening to the other group talk, amplifying my perceptions with minute facial expressions. In short, they began tuning in on my wavelength. At one point, Don’s rap filled up like a balloon over a cartoon character’s head, and began floating across the room. I looked up and watched it sail overhead. One of the people in the second group saw me looking at it, and then saw it. He grabbed the person next to him and said, referring to me, “Do you see what he’s doing!”

I smiled to myself. At last, I was being recognized. But just then, the balloon burst, and the room filled with confusion. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once and sharp-edged waves of paranoia filled the space. My mind, very vulnerable and sensitive, screamed in pain. I ran into the kitchen, found an iron pot, and returned with it on my head. The thing helped. Whatever the relationship between the metal in that pot and the vibrations in the room, it had the effect of blocking out all the jagged energy singing through the room. I added a signature to the note on my chest. It said, iron head. What a perfect name for a Zen master, I thought.

After a few minutes, things calmed down, and I heard Connie’s thin voice in a clear whisper to John: “Do you think he’s really crazy?” she said.

I saw the photograph of myself. Wild-eyed, red-robed, sitting in the middle of a house of crazies in Tucson, having made a vow of silence and now crowned with an iron pot on my head. The immense confidence I had just felt crashed, and emerged as its opposite. Suddenly, I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. Fear flooded my veins. But there was nothing for it and I continued to sit there, keeping up the front.

Several new people came in, and looked at me with raised eyebrows. One sat next to Ginny and asked, “What’s the note on his robe say?” She looked up at me and said, “Oh, nothing at all.” And everyone laughed.

Now the mockery began. The weakness I was feeling egged them on, and the room lit up with evil grins and condescending glances. I felt myself collapse, and lay down on the floor.

Then Don put on a recording of electronic sounds based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was an attempt to record the sounds of breath and blood and heartbeat and fading consciousness that are heard in the ears of a dying man. I entered fully into the experience, and in my state of high suggestibility, I slipped into the state of expiration. I sank below the molecular level of consciousness and existed as a mass of electrons. I understood the universe, not intellectually, but experientially, as an electric phenomenon, and in a flash, the entire world of appearances melted like a rubber mask and was seen for the shadow show that it is.

And in the midst of this, a loud metallic laugh crashed across the room, and I sat up with a sob. I leapt through giant levels of consciousness in an instant, and it freaked me. Suddenly, I was convinced that I was actually, physiologically dying. The usual thoughts went through my head. “I took too much peyote, I have strychnine poisoning,” and so forth.

I jumped up and ran into the back yard, to be among the stars and trees and grass. If I was to die, it would at least be in the bosom of nature. I knelt down under the fig tree, and for the first time in years, attempted to pray. There are no atheists on bad trips. I felt hypocritical, for I had long ago discarded any belief in a personal God who listens to the words we think when we think we’re praying. But I was desperate.

“Just let me make it through this time,” I said, “and I’ll never take dope again. I’ll never pretend I’m a Zen monk again.”

And as I prayed, a small thin voice in me said, “You liar. You know that if you make it through this one, you’ll be back at the same old stand tomorrow.”

The voice freaked me out. “Sshhh,” I said to it. “He’ll hear you.”

And with that, a great ten-foot bookcase which had been brought out of the house and was standing solidly and in total stability by the side of the house, for no known physical reason, toppled over and fell onto the hard ground with a great resounding crash.

My hair stood on end. “All right,” I said, “I lied. I’ll be smoking grass again tomorrow. But just get me out of this one.”

Then my spirit lightened, and the worst of it passed. I sat under the stars for over an hour, and then went back inside. The guests had left. I went past the alcove where John and Ginny were sleeping. John looked up. “Ginny can’t sleep,” he said. “Will you help me massage her?” It was clearly an invitation to a threesome. But Ginny was the one who had led the mockery of me earlier, and John had been no help at all. I was pissed off. I leaned over, drew their heads together with my hands, and leaned my forehead to touch the spot where their heads met. And then I took every bit of heaviness that was wracking my being, spewed it out of my third eye, and laid it right on them. They passed out immediately, and were depressed for three days afterward.

I walked into the kitchen. My vow of silence was growing unbearably oppressive. I got a flash on what it would be like to be locked inside my head for five years, never to let my voice out. I began to sweat, and went into the living room.

Don was still up. “Hey, man, want a joint?” he said. And in his eyes I saw actual concern, and remembered that he was the only one who hadn’t turned against me, was the one who tried to communicate with me earlier in the evening. “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” The words came out without thinking.

He smiled. “Hey,” he said. “You’re talking again. You had me worried for a while.”

I sat and smoked with him a long while. The back of the nightmare was broken, and I felt waves of relief wash over me. Slowly, I returned to mundane perceptions. I took note of time and place. I made a resolve to telephone a friend in New York the next day.

Finally, Don lay down and fell asleep. I went into the bathroom, and curled up with my forehead against the cool tile floor.

“I’ll just stay here until the dawn comes,” I said to myself. For, no matter what else was insane in this universe, one thing was certain. The sun would rise. And with the sun, I would be all right again.

Within a short time, I heard the first bird sing. And then the sky grew light. And gratefully, I fell into a deep sleep.

A week later, I left Tucson.

“JoJo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass . . .”

And so it went. The Greyhound headed west, and I slept through the Mojave Desert. Breakfast in Los Angeles, sitting in a greasy spoon and watching Dada City come to life. Santa Barbara, and the first whiff of ocean, and then the long haul up the coast, watching the countryside change to green. Until, a long cycle of thoughts later, I put my feet down on the concrete sidewalks of San Francisco.

My money was almost gone. I was burned black. I had lost fifteen pounds. And I needed desperately to recuperate. I slung my knapsack on my back, holding everything I owned in the world, and moved on up to Bernal Heights. I found Fred and Melissa at home.

Their game of separation and return had reached a crucial point. I arrived and immediately relaxed in the atmosphere of food, dope, and good vibrations which generally characterized their place. “I’m falling apart,” I announced. “I need to stay here.”

“Perfect,” said Melissa. “We’re going to Chicago to get married.”

They had decided that since they would probably be living together for a long time, they might as well get married in grand style, make Melissa’s mother happy, and collect a couple of thousand dollars in wedding gifts. It was a form of polite robbery. Melissa’s mother, whose fixed judgment on Fred was “dot bum,” was less than overjoyed at her choice of marriage partner, but now at least had the chance to bully caterers, make countless arrangements, and crow before her relatives. I had met the woman once when she had visited Melissa some eight months earlier. She spent half an hour in the apartment, and when Melissa went to the store to buy some groceries, had come running into my place next door, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me into Melissa’s living room.

“Look at dis place,” she said in the accent she had steadfastly refused to surrender after fifty years in this country. “Look at all dis shit.” What she was referring to was the fact that Fred and Melissa had largely furnished their place with stuff they had picked up at the city dump. Most of it was the sort of furniture which, if refinished, would fetch nice prices as antiques. The style was funky. But Melissa’s mother was adamant. “Look at how dey live.” I was still sleepy, hadn’t even been introduced to the woman, and wanted to escape from the scene. “It could be worse,” I said politely. She drew herself up. “VOISE?” she said. “Vat could be voise dan to live like dis. DEAD could be voise.”

And now the two of them were flying to Chicago to confront the dragon and come away with booty. They would be gone two weeks and I could have their apartment. The timing was perfect.

I saw them off a few days later, and then set about trying to find work. I went through the want ads in the Chronicle, with an ever growing sense of despair. There was nothing that didn’t require some special dress or special skill. There seemed to be no need for retired Zen monks from Tucson.

But the next afternoon I went into the corner restaurant-bar, a kind of bohemian meeting place peopled by the entire spectrum of those living in the neighborhood, from hippies to Hell’s Angels, from homosexuals to old Italians, from office workers to junkies. It boasted a good jukebox, fair prices, and an owner who had made the change from traditional to transitional modes. George was an Italian of about sixty who had dropped mescaline and grown a beard, and was able to expand the parameters of his awareness to make his place a home base for such disparate groups. He needed a dishwasher. It paid $1.75 an hour, free meals, and was only a two-block walk from home. I took it without hesitation.

It turned out to be the best job I’d ever had in my life. Unlike any of the so-called respectable jobs I’d had, such as teaching school or editing or doing therapy or translating, this one asked nothing of me except the labor of my hands. No one cared how I looked, or what I thought, or what my moods were. I was the lowest man on the ship, and with that position came a healing and blessed anonymity. It didn’t take too long to learn the routine, and the actual mechanics of washing dishes involved a rhythm which soon became a kind of dance. I didn’t have to talk unless I wanted to, and for that reason, my silence was a joy.

From six to eight, there was the beer-drinking crowd, and I had little to do except sweep and bring supplies from the larder. From eight to twelve, dinner was served, and I worked fairly steadily, doing hard labor for about forty-five minutes out of each hour. And from twelve to closing, it was back to beer and coffee, and the neighborhood regulars would come in. Almost always, someone would be playing a guitar or singing. And a few times a week, the Chicanos came in and made the air spicy with Spanish. When I wasn’t working, I took long walks, or went to movies, or sat in the back yard and took the mild San Francisco sun. I got back into writing poetry again, and treated myself to a reading of the plays of Shakespeare in chronological order.

For the first time since I had left East Harlem, I felt part of a neighborhood. I got to know its gossip, its warmth and tragedy. Many of the young kids were deep into dropping downers and shooting speed, and I watched that entire generation waste away, for lack of knowing how to turn their energies into something that supported life, since nowhere in their society could they find a healthy channel for their youthful drives.

Also, during that time, I met Abraham Rubin, a self-proclaimed Sufi master who looks, acts, and talks like an old Jewish tailor. I learned little about the details of his life except that he had traveled around the world many times, had been taught by Sufi and Zen masters, and was an “accredited” master in at least three schools. He actually had diplomas on his wall attesting to the fact that he was enlightened. But Abe was a goof. He was the kind of person who could pierce through to the heart of any given situation and understand the humanity of it instantly, but he was garrulous and cranky. He had a Sufi school where he presumably led young people into the mysteries of that sublime Middle Eastern way of life. On Sunday afternoons, he led his students in so-called Sufi dancing in front of hippie hill. Everything he did was once removed from the source, a mild unintentional parody on the real thing.

Still, Abe had a good rap. I went to his place a few times, to listen to his tales of confrontations with Zen masters in Kyoto monasteries, his travels through China and North Vietnam. “One thing I can tell you,” he once said. “In any argument with a master from any school, a Sufi always wins.” It was impossible to take him seriously, impossible not to love him. He wasn’t what he claimed to be, but what he actually was, was so much more.

I got to know Paul better. Paul had taken so many drugs of so many varieties that he could hardly talk. His mannerism made him appear like an epileptic, and for a while I thought, as so many others did, that he was simply a ruined human being. But it took a while to see that as his body fell apart his mind and his heart got bigger. Paul’s rap was largely unintelligible until one got into the inside of it, found its logic. And then one found the wisdom and humor of the man. His one line which has since proved a talisman to me at moments when I didn’t know how to make it through was, “Stay with what you know.”

Fred and Melissa came back and moved to a small town north of Mendocino. They were going to try to return to nature, away from the distractions of the city. I stayed in their place for over a month, and was just feeling strong enough to make some new move, when Rita appeared once more in my life. She invited me to come stay with her in a small cabin in a redwood grove in San Rafael, north of the city. And on impulse, I quit my job and went.

It was an idyllic time, and the six weeks of it went a long way toward restoring my health and putting me in touch with my humanity once more. To wake up in the morning to the sound of birds, to step out into the majesty and empire of redwood trees, to have a substantial woman by one’s side . . . life knows fewer more gratifying modes.

And then the letter arrived. It was from Georgia in Tucson. She was pregnant, on the basis of the one time we had made it together. I borrowed a VW from a friend and made the long journey back to the desert again. Leah had just returned from a two-week odyssey that ended with her working at a truck stop in Needles, and she wanted to get into the desert again, so she came with me. On the way south, we stopped to see Doris at her parents’ in L.A. She had gone to Fred and Melissa’s wedding, contracted hepatitis, and gone home to recuperate. At her place we found, of all people, Melissa. She and Fred had freaked out in their farmhouse, had had no friends to help absorb the shock, and had split up. Fred took off for Portland and Melissa went to visit Doris.

We spent a surrealistic evening in that house, with its countless rooms and swimming pool overlooking a smoggy valley. Doris’ father was having a birthday party, and his guests were a dozen or so people who looked as though they had been sprayed with Krylon. The four of us stayed for a while, indulging ourselves in the fragmentary conversation, and then repaired to Doris’ room to get stoned. The next morning we left, and Melissa decided to join us, so the three of us waved good-bye to Doris and the caravan continued.

The scene with Georgia was out of a bad movie. She was twenty-one, a warm and attentive girl, but very schizzy. The sensible thing to do would have been to have an abortion. But after three days in the Arizona sun, and with the overflow of good feeling that comes from being surrounded by three women, and a distinct failure of reason, I decided that Georgia and I would get married and we would settle in San Francisco. We got quite stoned, and headed for Nogales, where we spent an hour with some obscure Mexican official, in a room with a slow-revolving fan overhead, and filled out a long series of forms.

We went back to Tucson, where Georgia was living at the guest house of some wealthy people who had hired her to look after their cats while they were gone, and for a week we played in the swimming pool, smoked hash, and fucked. I went around renewing acquaintances, and enjoyed the city through the eyes of one visiting, not tripping out.

And then I had to leave, to get the car back. Also, I had an unspoken contract with Rita still hanging. I was now into my second legal marriage, the first one having taken place in Japan some ten years earlier, and annulled a year later. Life was once more beginning to edge toward a level of complication past my ability to deal with it. I left Georgia with the idea that I would write, and as soon as I got it together in San Francisco, would call for her. Secretly, I wondered how it would all turn out, for I was genuinely fond of the girl, as I was of Rita and for that matter, of Leah, and of a hundred other women I had known.

When I returned to San Francisco, chaos reigned. We left Melissa at the Tucson airport, from whence she was flying to Seattle to meet Fred, who had called and wanted a reconciliation. Leah and I pushed on, saw Doris again in L.A., and then spent two transcendental days winding slowly up Highway One, getting high on the grandeur of Big Sur. We stopped once to look down on Esalen to see if we could spit on the guard shack from the road. The night we arrived, Leah and I made love for the first time in half a year, and I returned to San Rafael in a good frame of mind, only to find that everyone was being evicted from the grounds. Rita was moving to San Geronimo, and I decided I didn’t want to move with her. I crashed with Pan for a while until I could find work. I was ready to sacrifice anything to get a job, to put enough bread together to see whether Georgia and I might have a chance of bringing a child into the world.

I borrowed a suit from Charlie Winston whose wife and kid had shared my place for a month some time back. He was now teaching school, and making great efforts to look straight so they wouldn’t fire him. I took a few of my remaining dollars, bought some shoes and a pair of socks, got a white shirt from Paul and found a tie in the garage under Fred and Melissa’s old place, and was ready to step once more into the world of commerce.

I decided to try office temporaries. They are the most rapacious of the lot, but they always have work, and are not too scrupulous about the appearance of the people they hire. I typed up my résumé, rearranging the dates and leaving out half the jobs I had held so it would appear that I was a stable and serious person, and marched into the offices of Career Opportunities Unlimited on Market Street.

Doing the scene required no little acting skill or courage, for I was actually beginning to feel the bite of desperation. I believed the myth that one can’t starve to death in America, but there was nothing in the national propaganda which guaranteed that one couldn’t become a total wreck, barely subsisting, shunned by one’s former friends, and thrown into jail with some regularity. The important thing at the time was that I had lost the ability to pull myself together in any meaningful way. I could only manage a bare disguise, manipulating makeup and costume to make me seem normal in the eyes of my fellow citizens, whose criteria were not based on compassion but on profit. America had no space for failures. And it was the mark of my personal failure that I had descended to the level of judging myself by the same standards Americans used, that is, could I hold down a job?

I sat in front of the interviewer’s desk and played the role. She was a trim, tight chick of about twenty-three. Probably had a boy friend who didn’t fuck her right, and lived in a two-and-a-half on Potrero Hill. It was odd to sit there, doing psychological and sociological analysis of the women I had to grovel in front of in order to get some menial job. I realized that just a few months earlier, when I was flying high, I could have hypnotized her, done pretty much what I wanted with her, and left at my leisure. Now, I felt as though my cock had been cut off.

My job skills were amorphous. Given the right costume, I could have walked into an executive editorial spot with a high salary. But there was almost no editorial work in San Francisco, except for house organs and trade journals, and I would have starved before taking another job such as I had at Americana. Luckily, out of everything in my life which I had learned, the thing that I took as most inconsequential came to save me: I could type eighty words a minute. This, in the eyes of the office temporary mind, gave me status. “I’ll call you when we have something,” she said.