The Stoned Apocalypse (24 page)

I should have thought that this would make a perfect Raindance tape, disseminating this news to the world. But, in that odd way people have, the scientists refused to have any of the tapes shown. In the face of their own findings that the world was coming to an end, they were afraid that such controversial material might damage their careers.

I couldn’t accept it. This was a betrayal on the scale of anything General Motors might be doing. But the others were of a different mind. We got a thousand dollars for doing the taping, and Francis and Barry got very high, rubbing shoulders with eminent men. The tapes were to be sealed and kept in the sociologist’s office, not even to be referred to.

When we had our next meeting, Francis and I clashed. I accused him of failing his own vision, of not being able to hold Raindance together, of not knowing how to use the equipment either to make a revolution or an honest dollar, and of being such a megalomaniac that he couldn’t see that his newfound peers were shitty cowards.

The five of us sat for four hours and exchanged unpleasantries. It all peaked when I challenged him to get off the level of general issues and discuss his own emotional immaturity.

At which point he stood up and declaimed, “If this is going to degenerate into an encounter group, I quit.”

And with that, he wrote out a letter of resignation, signed himself a severance check, and walked out, not to be heard from for two weeks.

The spirit went out of the place. One more dream had fallen through, and in the process, I seemed to have lost a friend. The revolution was a farce, mankind was lost, everywhere there was greed and deception and misunderstanding. And even here, among allies, among those who were trying to make a final effort to save the species from destruction, we were at one another’s throats. I couldn’t even blame anyone. It seemed simply to be part of the human condition.

While I mucked about the office, haphazardly going through the motions of running a videotape company, Francis consolidated his forces, and one night, about three weeks later, came marching back in with Barry, Hugh, Edward, and two others he had swept into the fold. He was clearly back in control, so I decided to leave.

I wrote a check for two thousand dollars, my first bit of embezzling. With that much money, I could go to Spain and live for over a year. Let the world perish, let the civilization collapse, let my friends go fuck themselves, let the entire insane dance of mankind come to its crashing end. I would go smoke dope and lie in the sun and watch the waves roll in. There seemed to be no other purpose in life worth living for.

I stood at a place where there seemed not the slightest hope for love or decency or peace. Everywhere I looked, there was blight. I became sick with the history of my people. Nothing would work, nothing could work. I scanned our path over the past six thousand years. It was always the same. The strong got into power and drove the weak into one or another form of slavery. There were revolutions, and a new set of strong men came into power. And the people continued, ignorant, sexually crippled, frightened, ill. This, then, was life, a series of disasters, punctuated by occasional moments of relief, and for the fortunate, brief periods of joy. I sank into deep pessimism. We are born in trauma, we die in solitude, and in between we stumble about causing damage.

I suppose any psychologist might have found the proper series of labels to pin on my condition at the time, as might the articulator for any school of philosophy or simple street knowledge. But where to find help? Just to walk down Second Avenue in the morning was a struggle. Before my eyes there lay the fact of existence, once again appearing as this mysterious and indifferent jig, this grotesque accident out of the womb of nothingness, with mankind the living abortion to mock it. Meaning drained from perception the way alertness drains from a sleepy mind The words from Gurdjieff came back to haunt me again. “Everyone is asleep.” And so it was. Even those I had once considered intelligent, most aware, were but another form of sleepwalker, doing another kind of absurd play. All the interests of man paled to insignificance, its politics, its art, its religion, its science, its senescent philosophy. “Look,” I wanted to shout, “being IS!”, and yet, the minute I put words to it, I sounded like another nutty mystic, another freak-out acid head.

I went into the Raindance office to get some things I had left in the desk, ready to split to the nearest airlines office. But Otto was there, sucking at his pipe, turning his quiet exasperation into clouds of blue smoke. He is a phlegmatic cat who had been a teacher of philosophy before dropping out and trying to make it as a hippie businessman. We had spent many long hours rapping about time, and whether numbers had an objective existence, and now, in a burst of weakness, I told him that I had taken the money and was splitting.

“Very foolish,” he said. “Barry will call the cops. You know how he is.”

“What about Francis?” I said.

“He’ll probably come after you with a knife.”

I thought about it. “Sure enough,” I said.

And in that, there was a kind of relief. The notion of some real action, having to dodge police and knife-wielding associates, snapped me out of the funk I was in.

I sat down. “You don’t think I should do it then?”

“Well,” he said, “you’re my friend, and anything you want to do is cool with me, but I hate to see you do it. You’ll be cutting yourself off from all your other friends.”

“What friends!” I shouted. “We started as friends. But everyone has become so fucking money-mad and power-hungry that it’s impossible even to talk to them without an appointment. They’re becoming just like the people they want to overthrow.”

Otto puffed philosophically. “Sure. You knew that before you got into Raindance. It’s always like that. The minute the good guys define themselves as good guys and decide to fight the bad guys, they enter the same arena as the bad guys, and before you know it they’re bad guys too. But the interesting thing is that they still think they’re good guys. Nobody believes that he’s a bad guy.”

“So what’s the point? Why not just take the money and run?”

“You’ll only have to take yourself with you,” he said. “And if you can’t manage living with your friends, what will you do among strangers? Besides, this is only temporary. You know that you and Francis will get it together again. Why make the split any worse than it is?”

My resolve seemed to drain out of me. “So, I’ll give the money back. Then what?”

“You ought to go out more,” he said. “Find yourself some chicks, go to parties. Why don’t you get into the literary circuit? You can make witty conversation.”

“Otto, you go from the profound to the inane with greater ease than anyone I know.”

“Let’s go see a movie,” he said. And off we went to see The Damned, which threw my own problems into relief.

I put the money back, and formally resigned from the organization. But the restlessness inside me would not be assuaged. I was filled with inchoate visions and unarticulated notions and undigested experiences. And there seemed to be no outlet for me that didn’t point to another round of confusion. There was no doubt about it; the civilization was coming apart at the seams and to be involved with it at all ran the risk of total contamination. Yet, what was the alternative?

Of course, the first thing which came to mind was suicide. It had not yet occurred to me that death merely relieves the ego of its burden of self-consciousness, but solves no problems. For the first time in my life I lay down to seriously and soberly consider whether killing myself might not be preferable to this endless round of conflict.

But within seconds I had drifted off into a cinematic reverie concerning the melodramatics of my death. I would go off to the Grand Canyon, carrying a capsule of hemlock. A few of my dearest friends would accompany me, only those who could be counted on not to become maudlin, not to lose their sense of humor. We would spend a long time discussing the ramifications of the void, and then, watching the sunset fill that awesome space with light, I would pop my last pill and become One with the All.

The phone rang. It was Aaron Woodbridge inviting me to dinner.

I discarded the notion of suicide. The death of the physical body was the one sure thing in the world and would come sooner or later. Everything being equal, there was no point in rushing it. And so my existential decision was made on the twin pillars of banal coincidence and ennui. I recalled Wittgenstein’s serious joke: “I am committed, but I do not know to what.”

* * *

That night, I went to visit Aaron and his wife, whom I hadn’t seen since returning to New York. I thought of his tale of flipping out in Morocco, and lying on a bed for an entire night, deciding whether to live or die, after his most recent love affair had ended with the chick’s committing suicide. It was around that time that he had had his “religious experience,” and had stormed into his therapist’s office demanding to be labeled insane. “I feel like a saint,” he had yelled. “Can you tell me that I’m crazy?” And when his poor doctor couldn’t get around the fervor of Aaron’s trip, he quit all notions of therapy on the spot, coming out with a conviction that it is no different to be holy than to be crazy.

I had met him shortly after that, when I was working at a literary agency, grinding out ten letters a day to would-be writers who paid up to fifty dollars to be told that their style was reminiscent of Hemingway, but that they didn’t know how to create plot structure, and would they please try again, sending along another manuscript and another fee. He later married, this time to a chick who never quite made it past the nineteenth century, one of those girls who leave the Midwest and come to New York and graft on a patina of sophistication which, luckily, never quite masks their actual simplicity and beauty.

He retreated into a rigid life-style, getting to appear more and more like the Henry James he had done his master’s thesis on. He and his wife now lived an oddly tasteful life, capable of working up great circular delight over the trivia of daily occurrences, such as the expressions on their dog’s face. Rebecca is the only woman I know who is still afflicted by the vapors, and regularly takes to her room to lie for several pillow-tossing hours, periodically bringing lace-edged hankies to her nose.

Like so many sensitive and intelligent people trapped on the margin of a culture they cannot exorcise and cannot assimilate, they have taken refuge in routine, trading orgiastic outbursts of joy for steady minimal pleasure. Subliminally they served as symbols of what I most needed right now, a solidity which was still hip enough to laugh at itself. When I went over in my nylon jumpsuit and beard, with an aching need to be heard, I was like a lock about to close in over an obvious key.

Aaron was a little stouter than when I had seen him last, and now sported a bushy moustache. The two of them greeted me in their upper Fifth Avenue pad, complete with stultifying Spanish hardwood furniture and crystal glasses. As I stepped through the door, all the fragments which whirred through me came together and formed a stained-glass mosaic.

Through their window I looked down on the streets of East Harlem, now a snarling slum, while around me glowed the cameo comforts of that middle class to which my entire childhood had propelled me, and which had been at the core of all my revolt, all my search. This was my historical destiny, and I could accomplish nothing else until I accepted it. This is what I had been conditioned for, through my mother’s fears and my father’s failures. And all the twistings and turnings I tortured myself through were helpless to make me other than I am. With a shudder, I donned the garb of my sociological karma.

Aaron had invited a woman over, an editor from one of the chic publishing houses, and after a beer and some grass, he began to disentangle the knot of my experiences with gentle questions. And in a while, I found myself talking freely, letting the tales spill out.

Suddenly, it was good to be here again, with two years wiped out in an instant, relegated with a literary flourish to the realm of the past. In the familiar setting of a New York apartment, amid cultivated people, the screaming vision of my trip took on the coziness of an adventurer’s story told by the fire at a comfortable club. And from time to time Aaron would interject an “Egad . . . you don’t mean . . .” or, peering into his own past, would remark, “Yes, I remember well, when I had my Experience,” referring to the time he flipped out, still calling it the experience, as though it were the fulcrum upon which his life before and after was once and for all balanced.

By the end of the evening, I had completed reentry into the fabric of consciousness I had torn loose from when I headed west. I felt like I do after a high fever has passed, drained but sound. And yet, a disquieting grayness had seemed to settle over everything, a distance between myself and all other entities in the universe. A cold shadow passed over me and I grew afraid.

“After that night,” Aaron was saying, “I realized that I am dead, and that everyone around me is dead, and that every breath I take is pure miracle, and I should never expect another. But it makes it so hard to live in the world, because so few others understand that, that we are all dead already.”

At that point some essential tension which I had carried with me since the moment the cold steel of the forceps clasped my skull and pulled me from my mother’s womb, relaxed, and I was set free.

We went out to walk his dog, and we continued to talk, shifting to the war and the chaos in the nation. “I’ve become totally apolitical,” he said. “As far as I can see, they’re all mad, all the rulers and the revolutionaries. I’ve come to find satisfaction in my work, in my writing. It’s the only thing that means anything to me anymore.”

I looked up at the sky, the clouds, the brilliant moon. Two lovers were leaning against a tree. But Central Park seemed sinister, unsafe. Aaron’s voice spun out on the air like a leaf doing somersaults in the breeze.

“What happens with you now?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll find something to work at; there’s still the rent to be paid. But there seems to be no point to anything anymore, just a sense of futility pervading everything.”