The Stoned Apocalypse (2 page)

The fantasy machine went into overdrive, and I saw myself as an editor on the Reader’s Digest. The salary was to be twelve thousand a year, and I would be expected to live in Pleasantville, and I would receive Blue Cross and paid vacations and bonuses and wholesome meals in the company cafeteria. It was interesting that I could simultaneously see such a step as one more nail in the coffin of my personal stultification, and as a step up in some vaguely defined social hierarchy. My soul would die, but my mother would be pleased.

When I arrived at Mrs. R.’s I suffered a further disillusionment. She lived in one of the ugliest, stuffiest buildings in the Seventies on the West Side. It was one of those apartment houses that seem as though they would much rather be hotels, and was guarded by a lackey at the door, bowing obsequiously to well-dressed visitors and residents, and glaring suspiciously at any odd types who wandered in, such as delivery men, freaks, and anybody with dark skin. “How can a guru live in a place like this?” I thought.

I gave the doorman my name, and he buzzed the information upstairs. A voice rasped back over the speaker: “Tell him to wait.” I sat in the lobby, doubly mortified. I consoled myself with the fact that this is the way Zen masters are reputed to treat those who come seeking assistance. I reasoned that she wouldn’t know that I was hip to the game, and this gave me an advantage in the coming encounter. I smiled as I imagined how I would wrestle the guru down and force her to admit my superiority. Then, having shown my strength, I would humbly ask her for guidance.

Almost three quarters of an hour later, she had me sent upstairs. I went to the door, and stood there a moment, marshaling my forces. I rang the bell and almost stumbled backward when a plain, pleasant, middle-class woman, with friendly eyes and a dowdy dress opened the door to greet me. I stepped into an ersatz Victorian living room, calling to mind the line that Marilyn, my Bennington star, had delivered in relation to Gurdjieff. “Somehow,” she had said, “that entire scene reminds me of overstaffed furniture with thick cloth slipcovers.” The woman stepped back and motioned me inside. “Take off your coat,” she said. “And sit down.”

I dropped my coat on a chair and walked into the next room. She turned off down a hallway and disappeared. I waited for another half hour. I passed the time by casing the joint. There was a well-chosen collection of books, a ring of Third Avenue antique store furniture, and several original Modiglianis and Renoirs. I began to smell the contours of wealth, and a subtle dimension braced my perceptions.

She came back in bustling, and arranged herself tidily on the couch. For a moment we sat in silence, she smiling, and me “sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come.”

“Well,” she said, “tell me about yourself.”

I hesitated, but couldn’t find anything to hang the hesitation on. I took a breath and proceeded to give her about two hours of my best rap. Shortly, I went into a kind of hypnotic state, lulled by the sound of my own voice, and presently was no longer aware of what I was saying. I must have appeared like some mechanical doll which had been wound up and was letting out a mindless spiel. At one point, I noticed that I had stopped talking, and snapped to. I became aware again that I was in the room, with this woman watching me, blandly, openly. I sat back and waited for her reaction.

Without changing the expression of pleasant attention she had worn for the entire time, she said, “I think you are such an utter fool that if you have acquired, by the age of forty, the courage to kill yourself, it will be the one significant act of which you are capable.”

I stared at her in disbelief. I waited for some indication that she was joking, or offering the line as some sort of gambit. But she looked at me levelly, without malice or judgment. She had simply been making an observation and seemed not to have the slightest interest in how I received it. Very slowly a feeling of horror crept over my body. I began to feel worthless and somehow vile. I felt as though I had committed some kind of nameless sin, and was now being called to task for it. Except that the sin was the sum total of how I had lived my life up to that point. She remained pleasant.

For a long time I waited for something to say, and then collapsed inwardly. I was a punctured balloon, and could do nothing but bow my head to receive whatever punishment she wished to mete out. She stirred. “Nonetheless,” she said, “there are some barely salvageable features about you; you are not an entirely broken machine.” She appraised me with a long look. “Perhaps something can be done,” she added.

I squirmed with pleasure. A wave of gratitude washed over me. Involuntarily, I smiled. She was playing me like a mannequin.

“Begin by getting rid of that foolish grin,” she ordered. “I haven’t decided to take you on as yet. There are some things you will have to understand first. You cannot fool me. Anytime you try to fool me, I shall know about it. You are to speak to no one about what goes on here. And you shall have to obey me utterly. Can you do that?”

I was eager to please. “Yes,” I said, “I think so.”

“Nonsense,” she barked. “You can do nothing.”

“That’s right,” I said, “I can do nothing.”

“Stop parroting me, you idiot,” she yelled.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

“Very well. Now, sit up straight in your chair. You might at least act as though you had some pride in yourself.”

With that she showed me a simple exercise for centering the self and gathering a fine grade of psychic energy. I was to do it every morning, simply sitting quietly, letting my body awareness move from my feet, up through my legs, through my torso and arms, and into my head. Nothing fancy. Simple body awareness. She put me through the paces a few times, and it was one of the most astounding experiences of my life. I wasn’t feeling my body; my body was aware of itself, and the “I” which I usually identified with became a kind of shadowy presence. “Try that for a few weeks, every morning, and then call me again,” she said.

When I left, I was having acid flashes, although I hadn’t yet dropped acid and didn’t recognize the experience. It was as though everything I saw was washed clean, as though the entire world had just been formed that day and I was seeing it with newborn eyes. I was filled with hope, exuberance, and a roaring sentimentality. Much like the early Christians who bore the Eucharist through the streets among hostile Romans, I clutched my experience to my breast and walked warily to the subway. I resolved that I would change totally, that I would obey all of Mrs. R.’s directives, that I would do my morning exercise without fail. To paraphrase Orwell, I loved Big Sister.

For the following several months, I was treated to a similar routine. Every three weeks I called the guru and went to her apartment, where she politely asked me about my progress. I dutifully reported my activities, describing the results of my morning awareness exercise. It was an odd period, for I received neither encouragement nor blame from the lady. It was like treading water, and I found myself becoming slightly bored. It seemed to me that I should be learning all sorts of esoterica and being initiated into mind-boggling rites.

During that time, I quit my job at Americana. I had reached a point of near suffocation, and three weeks before Christmas, I handed in my resignation. With their usual lack of grace, they promptly rescinded the Christmas bonus I was to receive in the next paycheck. Infuriated, I wrote a four-page diatribe and left it on the president’s desk, and then went back to my office and gathered up all the correspondence and every back issue of the magazine, leaving nothing for any future editor to work with in continuing to put the book out. I waited until seven o’clock, and then piled everything into four cardboard boxes, took a cab to my pad, and threw the entire lot down the incinerator. I would have preferred dynamiting the building’s foundations but I didn’t have the means to match my fantasy.

My next job was as managing editor for Avant Publications, hearty publishers of Escapade, Caper, and a small library of sex-cartoon books. The editor quit shortly after I got there, and willy-nilly I found myself running a suite of offices and six employees. Suddenly I had a huge office on Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, with two phones on my desk, a receptionist, a secretary, and a salary in five figures.

The work consisted mostly of finding more or less palatable material to fill up the sixty-six pages of each eighty-page issue that weren’t covered with shots of naked women — nipples and buttocks exposed, pubic hair forbidden. During the five months I worked there, I looked at over five thousand sets of photographs of women without clothes.

One afternoon, up to my elbows in editorial confusion, I received a phone call from Joan, whom I hadn’t seen since leaving Americana. She and her husband, Douglas, wanted me over for dinner. This surprised me since Mrs. R. allowed no unauthorized fraternization among her students. But I was glad at a chance to pick up information.

They lived in a perfectly decorated apartment in the West Fifties. Douglas was an industrial designer, almost forty, and wore a great bushy moustache à la Gurdjieff. In keeping with the fact that Gurdjieff loved to drink and Ouspensky was down on drugs, they packed away a lot of booze during the evening and spoke disparagingly about marijuana. “I used to smoke charge,” Douglas said, using a term that hadn’t been current for fifteen years.

They were quite stern in refusing to answer any of my questions about Mrs. R. but spoke quite freely about themselves. “I first read Ouspensky ten years ago,” Douglas said, “and I knew I had to follow that path. So I came to New York and sought out the Foundation. I’ve been with them ever since.”

He was utterly committed, without a doubt concerning the rightness of his way of life. It was simultaneously admirable and infuriating. I noticed with them what has often been noted about people in the Work by those outside of it: that they never seemed totally at ease, they seemed always somehow to be watching, to be acting from some privileged platform. There was the unmistakable aroma of orthodoxy about them. Later, I was to understand that, as Brendan Behan notes about the Irish, the Gurdjieffites “are quite popular among themselves”; and their approach to life, despite its peculiarities, lends itself to a sanity and sobriety which contrasts sharply with the collective insanity of the species.

The evening may have been a screening of some sort, for the next day Mrs. R. told me that I could attend group meetings. “This doesn’t mean I have decided to take you on as a student,” she said, and continued with a lecture that made my back teeth ache. “You must be serious about the Work. It can chew you up. I will tolerate absolutely no nonsense from you. You can fool everyone in the world, but you can’t fool me. Also you’ll be asked to pay a fee.” The fee turned out to be twenty-five dollars a month, about which her comment was, “You’d have to pay twice as much for an hour with a mere psychiatrist and not begin to get what you’ll get here.”

The meetings were held in a renovated brownstone in midtown off Park Avenue. The ambience was that of a Los Angeles funeral parlor. Everyone walked around being terribly aware. Conversations were held in whispered tones. Seriousness seeped from the walls.

The major activity during each group was the reporting of observations each of us had made of ourselves during the week. In Gurdjieff’s regimen the student spent perhaps several years simply taking mental snapshots of basic behavior: posture, gesture, facial expression, movement, and tone of voice. This is considered necessary to rid the individual of all sorts of preconceptions, misconceptions, and fantasies he may have about himself.

About thirty of us sat in five or six rows of chairs facing the front of the room. Everyone maintained a totally still pose and a zombie-like silence. The point, I imagine, was to re-collect ourselves to be ready for the guru when she entered. But there was something about the enforced behavior which was oppressive; there was no ease or spontaneity, no joy of the moment. The mood was one of psychic constipation.

Usually she had us sit there for over an hour past the appointed time. And when she entered, it was with one or another form of put-down. “Well, what have you been doing while waiting for me? Dreaming? Dozing? What have you been doing this week? Who has some observation to report? Come on, come on. Speak!” And then, when someone would begin with, “As I was observing myself this week . . .” she would interrupt with, “You mean, as you were trying to observe yourself this week. You know as well as I do that you stumble around in sleep most of the time. How often did you remember yourself this week? Two times? Three times?” And the offending victim would bow his or her head and say, quite meekly, “Yes, Mrs. R.”

The first week I said nothing. I spent my time learning the protocol, for it became obvious that any breach of etiquette would be summarily squashed. At the second meeting, I was ready. During the week I had had a stunning experience. I had taken to doing my morning exercise sitting on the john in the office because I couldn’t get it together until I was up at least two hours, had drunk some coffee, and let the dregs of the night’s dreams settle. I was bringing my awareness, as instructed, up from my toes, to my legs and torso, and then to my head, when suddenly my brain felt itself as an organ. Up to that moment I had thought of what happened in my head as “mind,” due mostly to the aberrational training I received at the hands of the Jesuits when I was young. Now, at once, I understood the fact of “brain,” and the realization of its existence staggered me. I became aware that my thoughts were simply the way my brain felt when it exercised itself, in the same way that the sensation of stretching was how my muscles felt when they moved. And further, I realized that there was an awareness within me which transcended thought; that thought was a fairly low-level activity, and not to be at all confused with intelligence.

When she asked, “Does anyone have anything to report?,” I raised my hand and addressed her in the proper self-effacing format. “When I was trying to observe myself this week,” I said, “I experienced my brain as an organ, as a physical entity.” She looked at me through squinted eyes. “I didn’t expect you to report so soon,” she said. “But it appears you may be an adept. Continue.”