The Stoned Apocalypse (7 page)

Afterward, I put on a recording of Ravi Shankar’s, and led the group in a period of spontaneous movement, telling them to imagine that they were puppets, and that each of their severed parts was attached by strings to the fingers of a great puppet master. Using this artifice allowed them to let their bodies move without the usual tension cliches, and the total effect of over a hundred people moving easily and sensually was glorious. We ended by chanting Om, and when the class was over, the strangers had shared a moment of pleasant ease. I left very quickly, before anyone could talk to me; the night had exhausted me and I just needed to crash. What I didn’t know was that my honest performance and sudden departure planted the seeds of a myth. The people began to whisper that a true holy man had come among them.

Meanwhile, the guru was having his problems. I had just begun a ménage with Rita and Leah. It was a blind attempt at union which swung between ecstasy and despair, during the course of which I learned how two women can make love, and have since been forever humbled in my own sexuality. We were swept up in the beauty of what happens when three people can, even for a brief time, become one organism on at least two levels of consciousness. But we also suffered the pain and paranoia which follows the tearing of the fabric, when all the delicacy of give-to-get builds higher and finer until the slim foundation of time-shared can’t sustain the great elaborations of the erotic superstructure. We were at a point where I was finding out the difference between male chauvinism and manhood, and the women were struggling between the desire for wider communion and the biological instinct of possessiveness of the mate.

That week, my preparation for the class navigated the tricky rhythms of our troika. By the time Wednesday came, my subconscious was totally enmeshed in questions of human sexual relationship. I arrived only two hours early this time, cleaned up the Lounge in a hurry, and on my way back from smoking a joint sent up a prayer to Venus, which had just begun to glow. It was getting darker earlier as the year dipped toward winter.

Once again I put the crew through their paces. This time there were almost a hundred and fifty of them. When I started my opening rap, I found myself talking about sensuality. I spun an elaborate schema of the way in which sexuality tends to bum out the more delicate needs of touch and glance and breath, and ended by noting that many people wind up fucking someone just because they need to be held. The admiration from the psychically pubescent women in the class was palpable.

But I was feeling expansive and depleted from my efforts of the week. It suddenly came upon me that tonight I should teach the men how to make love to the women, how to be gentle and responsive. So, after the softening-up relaxation period, I broke the class down into groups of four, and led them into a mutual feeling session, in which three people massage the fourth, until all have been both active and passive. I took great pains to outline what to look for, what kinaesthetic clues lurked inside the body, and what could be learned from observing another’s breathing and skin tone and subtle motions. Halfway through the exercise, the air started getting steamy. Everywhere I looked half-erect cocks bulged through jeans, female crotches yawned over the entire floor, and succulent buttocks contracted and expanded as unimaginable eddies of exquisite sensation ran through dozens of nearly virginal thighs.

By the end of that round, I was slightly out of control. I took an unexpected turn, and had them all lie down again, and once again took them on an inner voyage, feeling their bodies with their bodies, or letting the bodies be aware of themselves. But this time I lingered over the genitals, spinning out fantasies about what the inside of a cunt feels like, of what happens inside a penis when it expands. Aroused, half-hypnotized, willing, they let themselves be swayed, and soon sighs of rapture and moans of pleasure began to erupt. They were beginning to let it all hang out.

The music I used that night was from the Stones, which perfectly took the amorphous sexual flow and coagulated it into a driving hard rhythm. At the end of the first side of the album, everyone had blood in their eyes. I took the vibes down again, and ended with a large circle, with everyone’s arms around everyone else’s shoulders. Of course, with all that kundalini running free, the circle became electric, and soon, eyes closed, they were swaying in the single most beautiful jellyfish I had ever seen. I asked them to let sounds out, and within a minute the room was filled with all those different voices, each in a different pitch, with the whole blending into a giant sound of praise. My eyes began tearing, and I couldn’t absorb any more, so before they finished, I quietly left.

I learned later that they stayed for a half hour after the class, not wanting to leave one another’s physical presence, and talking about the mysterious man who comes to perform miracles and then leaves before anyone can speak to him.

During the next week, the thing with Leah and Rita fell totally apart. We reached the point where we were criticizing one another’s method of washing dishes. The viciousness was barely ameliorated by its pettiness. We were all heartbroken, because we all loved the hurting moments when we sat at the kitchen table, holding hands before dinner, listening to the silence of the house. But the scene was beyond our ability to manage, and we knew it, and now had to do the deadly business of getting to hate one another before we could garner the energy to split.

I took refuge, as I often did in those days, in The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. Between the heavy blows dealt my mind by that book, and the emotional upheaval I was experiencing, and the growing unreality of my scene at the college, I freaked. It suddenly occurred to me that I was gathering hubris at a rapid rate. The underbelly of megalomania showed its greenish light, and all of a sudden I saw myself as a charlatan, a breaker of hearts, and agreed with Evan that I was a black magician.

My mind turned around. I remembered that I had forgotten God, and had fallen into the modem heresy of thinking that man was the supreme entity in the universe, that I had forgotten my own limitations. I decided that I was leading the people astray, and during the next class, would call for a spiritual regeneration. That this fell in with the image they were forming of me as a spiritual leader was the type of coincidence that would have delighted Jung.

I got to the campus very early the next morning. To my surprise, strangers kept approaching me, asking me if they might join the class. One girl came up to me, and after some preliminary small talk, suddenly grabbed my hand and said urgently, “I can’t come. Please help me. I know you can.” I gave her my phone number and told her to call me in a few days. The scene was too much out of Feiffer to be erotic. Members of my class, as they recognized me sitting on the grass, would come up and sit silently in front of me for long periods of time and then, reverentially, get up and leave without saying a word. Without doing a single thing but following the inner logic of my madness to its most baroque extension, I was becoming a guru to an entire generation.

The third week’s class was a masterpiece of metatheater. I very humbly cleaned up the Lounge this time, picking up every cigarette butt by hand. I found that four or five women were helping me, and I realized that my first group of inner disciples was forming. Then I sat on a piano bench in full lotus, and waited for the throngs to arrive. They came slowly and made a giant crowd at my feet. One thin blond girl came up and laid a bouquet of flowers before me. Here and there, joss sticks were lit.

And, in a phosphorescent flash before my third eye, the solution hit. To blend the erotic and the godly, the path was through Tantra.

My talk that night was all about that superhedonistic yoga of quintessential fucking, that marvelous ritual whereby color and scent and fabric and food and long, careful preparation go into making that consummate human action. I spoke of the way in which the male sits rigid and knowing, moving the kundalini up from the base of his spine to the thousand-petaled lotus above his head, while the female works in the ecstatic movements of Sirasvati until, at one grand moment, the male explodes in cosmic consciousness and full physical orgasm, and the female rides the tumultuous waves of universal orgasm, that of the Great Mother giving birth to existence itself.

Everyone got stoned on the image.

The class that night was all breathing, very slow movement, and exercises in penetrating perception. I did a very long facial relaxation, and then had everyone let themselves be seen in their full inner nakedness, while they gazed on all the others in that state. At the very end, I allowed the gentlest of touching to take place. It all went so beautifully that I forgot to check my meters, to see what kinds and levels of energy were building beneath the surface of appearances.

I asked them all to form a large circle, and begin closing in on the center, my idea being to bring together on the physical plane the communion that was taking place spiritually. But no sooner did that troupe of bodies pass a certain critical mass than the tension snapped, and in a flash the Gallery Lounge was a pile of writhing, meshing, groping bodies. I was horrified, much as the old Tibetan monk leading a group of novices in Tantric practices, and leaving the room for a minute to come back to find his charges fucking merrily on the floor.

It grew orgiastic. Hands grabbed cunts, mouths went to nipples, asses flashed and rolled. I stepped to the edge. “Stop,” I cried. “Stop.” As an answer, three pairs of arms reached up and grabbed me, and before I could react, I was pulled into the sea of flesh.

It was a most peculiar experience, for on the one hand I was sinking under the sheer sensuality of the scene, and at the same time I was trying to maintain my spiritual stance. It took me minutes to crawl out, and I fled from the scene, shaken. They went on like that for almost an hour, and many of them went off by twos and threes and fours to the beach and various apartments.

During the following week, I struggled for the proper way to continue the class, but during that time, I was converted to Christianity.

It happened one night when I dropped by to visit Paul and Cheryl. When I had first met them, Paul was one of the single most generous and warm-hearted people I had ever known. He was forever giving people presents of sculpture he had made, and was always willing to help someone in difficulty or to extend hospitality, but Cheryl continually talked about leaving him when he wasn’t around to hear her. “Paul is so sweet,” she would say, “but he doesn’t, you know, understand.” In her frustration, she rushed them through the several thousand dollars they had received in wedding presents, and ended by leaving the keys in their new MG one afternoon, and having it stolen.

Finally, she did leave him, and went to stay at her cousin’s house, which was a Christian community north of the city. She returned two weeks later, burning with an inner light, and I agreed to go with her to meet the people who had brought about the change in her. Paul had immediately bought the trip; more, I suspect, to save his marriage than out of any deep conviction, although the Christian rhetoric fit in perfectly with the selfless life he was already living.

At the commune there were the usual percentages of fanatics, lunatics, and sincerely intelligent people. The house was led by Steven, whose notion of Christianity was simply to “be all things to all men.” But it also included Walter who kept laying down, in Steven’s words, “that godawful pentecostal rap.” Walter was Cheryl’s cousin’s fiancé.

Of course, they tried to convert me. Time and again I patiently explained to Paul that while I empathized with his truth, I could only see it as a solution congenial to him, not to me. With untiring goodwill, he continued to try to bring my soul to Jesus. I did the Bible thumper’s equivalent of selling the Worker, accompanying them to the Haight, to bring light into the hearts of the erring hippies. It was quite tricky, attempting to keep Paul’s friendship while fending off his attempts to drag me into his metaphor. Accompanying him on his conversion crusades was a way of keeping all bases covered.

One night, after a day on the salvation trail, and after a beautiful dinner at their home, I went out to look at the stars and smoke some grass. A feeling of bliss and love for all mankind filled my heart, so peaceful was the evening. I went back to Paul’s to share my feeling with them, and tried to convey it in words I thought they could appreciate. “I feel that God is within me tonight,” I said to them.

They immediately leapt to. Now was the time, urged Paul, now was the moment when I should accept Jesus into my heart. I began to remonstrate, but some yielding took place inside me and I said instead, “All right, Paul, if you can convince me, I’ll become a Christian.”

We sat down facing one another, and a lovely brotherliness shone in his face. At that moment, I really loved him.

“What times cause you the most pain?” he began.

I paused for a moment.

“Isn’t it when you are most confused?” he continued.

I thought a bit. Yes, when things were clear, they were tolerable. It was only when I no longer knew who I was or what was happening that I became unhappy. I agreed with him, my estimate of his perspicacity going up somewhat.

He leaned forward. “Now,” he said, “confusion is the weapon of the Devil. It’s the Devil who makes your mind all muddy.”

I considered that. Yes, it certainly felt that way sometimes, as though some evil force were entering me and driving out all the joy and intelligence. I was willing to accept the Devil metaphor, but when I told him that, it sounded as though I were recognizing an actual demonic entity, not merely a symbol.

“The Devil begins by injecting doubt into your heart. He makes you believe that God doesn’t exist, that life is a pathway to sin, and that only your greed and pride should be served.”

A light bulb went on over my head. It was beginning to make sense! “Go on,” I said.

“It is doubt which confounds you,” he said.

“Yes, I can see that,” I said. “But what do I do about doubt? How can I handle it?”