The Stoned Apocalypse (10 page)
Considering the fact that none of us had the slightest idea what we were doing, the commune held together very well for several months. It had a number of things going for it: the rent was paid, food was available, dope was plentiful, and there were always at least a few people with yang vibrations in the place. It became a center, and soon people from New Mexico and New York were coming through, crashing for a while on their way to other places. Everyone had a friend who had a friend who knew about the pad. We became terribly close, running as we were a cross between a psychedelic hotel and a church.
The pad was occasionally highlighted by someone of extraordinary capacities, such as Robert. He had been making the commune circuit, following the sun, for over ten years, and his ultimate ambition was to go to India to become a sun yogi where he would need to do nothing but sit and stare at the sun from morning to night, living on a bare handful of food each day. He was a master of asanas, although he never did a regular program of yoga. But every once in a while he would stand on his head or break into the fantastically difficult scorpion pose, as easily as anyone else might walk across the room.
He taught us the snore pose. It is used to stay awake while driving at night. The point is that one can’t sleep while someone is snoring, so if you do the snore pose yourself, you will keep yourself awake behind the wheel. He stayed for three weeks, during which time he hardly ever left his room. Mostly, he meditated, or read, or talked gently to whoever was there. Friends of his would come, including an old Okie couple right out of Steinbeck. The man was a toothless farmer who, when toking grass, would say, “O Lord, make me perfect, but not just yet.”
On one of his rare walks Robert met a young blind man who worked in one of the health food stores run by the Tibetan Mountain Yogis. They were a group of hard-climbing, hard-fucking types who went up Mount Tamalpais every week, there to sit and chant mantras late into the evening. Their trip was to grow organic vegetables on their country place, and sell them in their two stores in the city. Their goal was to open a school in which, as it said in their pamphlet, “it would be understood that we, the monks, would have no knowledge of those very subjects our school would teach. We would rely on the technical expertise of others to provide detailed knowledge.” They were a self-conscious hierarchy, and were sponsored by Lama Govinda, whose political nose had already smelled out the fact that the United States, and not Tibet, is the place to set up a spiritual autocracy. Their motto was, “The highest art is to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary manner.”
Technically, they allowed no drugs, but there was hardly a soul in San Francisco who didn’t do dope in one form or another. The blind cat had a freezer filled with peyote buttons which he used by boiling them into a soup and taking it via enemas, which allowed for rapid absorption and bypassed any risk of nausea. He came by with a few dozen buttons one day, and the bunch of us gobbled down the bitter fruit in between bites of banana. Robert began rapping about seeing the clear white light, and the blind cat kept hollering for him to shut up talking about light. We reached one of those points where everyone in the room was simultaneously sailing off into an unbearable awareness of the fact of our actually existing, there, in that time and place, when Robert remarked, “Oh, but it’s so obvious, so obvious that we should all one day be sitting here, in this room, with these people, understanding all these things.” My hair stood on end, and I stepped sideways into cosmic perception. One of the chicks was hit by the same revelation and began keening, “All hail to the Holy Truth, all hail to the Holy Truth.”
With the scene at the pad, spending long, amorphous afternoons smoking grass, swimming in people who were always strangers and always immediately intimates, moving in an ambience of religious vibration and political confusion, I began once more to slowly go mad.
To step outside the house was itself a trip of great magnitude. All around the Haight were the dregs of the psychedelic revolution, those few honest souls who still had faith in the Hashbury as a community, those who were trying to remind the others not to get lost in the miasma of speed and violence which rose from the streets, and those who had nothing left of their humanity except their physical bodies. To walk into the street was to confront the Diggers in their Free Store, the Hare Krishna freaks overcompensating for their basic cosmic insecurity. Lad playing his Kerista flute in the park.
A few blocks away was Golden Gate Park itself, and hippie hill, where the golden exhibitionists did their thing on sunny afternoons. Nearby was the Donut Shop, where the amphetamine heads nodded out until four in the morning, and Stanley the Astrologer got stabbed by a motorcycle gang because he was walking with a black friend who got killed that same night. From time to time, some of the Berkeley people would come by, wanting to sop up some of our relative peace and at the same time putting us all down for being apolitical.
I started to retreat into myself. I picked up, by some bizarre stroke of fate, DeRopp’s Master Came, the handbook of psychic fascism. And in the mornings, after breakfast at the Krishna Temple (which ended when they caught me wearing leather sandals), I would walk through the park, trying to “step into the silence.”
As I lost my own center, I began to become tyrannical with others. At the commune, I started to insist that we cut down on the number of people who could crash there. The family split into opposing camps. And finally Ernesto left, looking at me sadly and saying, “Someday you’ll learn that there’s no way to keep anybody out. Everybody is part of our family.”
I got onto a baroque Zen trip again, and took to wearing red robes and carrying a staff. I took the smallest room in the house, no larger than a pantry and having no windows, and fixed it up with madras cloths and pictures of Meher Baba. I went in heavy for incense and long hours of mysterious wall-gazing. I refused to laugh. I hid the rest of my acid. I stopped fucking. I felt an inner call to purify my people, to raise them above the level of mere getting stoned and thrashing about a crash pad.
“We must center ourselves, we must find our own soul, before we can help others,” I taught. “There must be silence in the house at all times, and one must speak only when there is something immediately necessary to say. Meditation is foremost. There will be hatha yoga every day. We will eat only rice.”
As usual in such circumstances, my program was met with the twin reactions of submission and hatred. Those who understood what I was trying to do responded to the honest attempt I was making to bring order out of confusion. For, with all the good times and parties, there was an underlying unhappiness from no one’s having the slightest sense of who he or she was, and covering that ignorance with jargon and drugs and activity. The others saw me merely as a troublemaker, one to be overthrown as quickly as possible. On occasion, one of my friends would drop in, and the response would be a snicker, a realization that I was on another one of my trips, and nothing could be done with me for the duration of it.
But the fire was in me. I began to give classes again, only this time I didn’t have the restrictions of working on a college campus. Once again I discovered the great inner poverty in people which allows them to place themselves in the hands of total strangers, bringing their confusions and problems to someone who may be in deeper personal trouble than they. It was on the basis of this facet of human nature that the therapists, and priests, and gurus plied their trade. It was only necessary to let it be known that I was available for consultation, and people responded, almost certainly to the image of the man I was pretending to be.
And because I had begun to believe in myself, I manifested an energy which translated into consistency, and in any given endeavor, consistency is the major rule for success. As I became successful, I became outrageous. I took greater risks, feeling that I couldn’t fail. A girl came to me because she couldn’t get her warlock boyfriend out of her consciousness. She claimed that he would invade her mind each night, even when she slept alone, and bedevil her with his evil words. And at the same time, she couldn’t stop seeing him. What could she do?
“Take off your clothes,” I commanded. She did as I ordered.
“Lie down,” I said, “and spread your legs.” She did.
I picked up my staff and placed the tip of it against her cunt. “When you realize that the only interesting thing about you lies between your legs, and stop this fantasy concerning the value of your mind, you’ll have no further trouble with warlocks.”
She leapt up in anger, mortified. She began to reproach me. “Put on your clothes and get out,” I barked.
A week later, she returned. She wanted to thank me for the lesson, and told me that she was free of her boyfriend’s influence. But by this time I had forgotten what it was I had told her, being eyeball deep in a dozen other involvements at the time. She was quite put out and, I’m told, later spent a good deal of time talking about how the guru was a fraud.
Another night I led a relaxation group, during which I offered to take one of the delicious young aspirants into the next room for a massage. She said, “Later.” But when she came around later, I was already negotiating with another young thing for the same treatment. So I took both of them to my chamber. And there laid them down, face down, side by side, naked and expectant, and slowly, with a low droning voice, put them into a light hypnotic trance. From there on it was pure pornography, fucking first one and then the other, my red robes flapping behind me, my holy man’s staff a symbolic phallus propped against the wall. Over my head was the sign I had made two days earlier when, after two weeks of celibate holymanship, I suddenly realized that all my energies were going into other people’s balling. It read, “Stop teaching, start fucking.”
The trip culminated the night of the nude encounter group. Once again I retreated into the mode that I knew best, understanding that no matter how hip or stoned anyone was, there was always a great pool of tension formed deep in the musculature and perceptual systems. And to unlock these orgone knots required little more than having people lie down, experience their bodies from the inside, release their breathing, and enter a yielding and passive state. Ethically, the leader in such a situation should then allow whatever develops to flower freely, and not attempt to structure it in any way whatsoever, but the scene was jumping with groovy possibilities, and I was quite willing to use my techniques for corrupt ends.
I was high on my own potency and on acid; I was high on the continual flow of energies coursing through the commune; I was high on the potential of the human species when it begins to really swing in a beautiful way. And I was high on the sight of a dozen naked women who looked to me as a guru and were ready to experience the all under my supervision.
There had always been an atavistic corner of my mind which harbored resentful fantasies of those men who have been able to command stables of women in sexual thrall, using them to make orgiastic murals the way an artist uses his paints. At a later time poor old Charlie Manson was to stare out demonically from the cover of the major magazines through having mounted the same kind of scene. Of course, the minute one human being uses another, in any form whatsoever, whether as a sex slave or as a corporate employee, he has committed murder. Since we all do this in one form or another, it seemed to me simply a matter of degree. If one were to be a sinner, he might as well go into it on a grand scale. Better a pirate than a petty thief.
That night I gave orders. No one was to remain in the house who was not participating in my class. Several left, and a dozen arrived. In all, seventeen people were ready to get experienced.
I began in chilling fashion, walking among them and glowering. Two or three who made foolish remarks or asked inane questions were rewarded by a blow from my staff. To my amazement, no one got up and wrapped the thing around my head. If one can play a role with enough self-assurance, there will always be enough of those who will take complementary submissive postures. I suppose that if I had had neither a sense of humor, nor an innate capacity for fucking up, I might have become a religious leader of some charisma. I have often wondered whether the main thing Jesus had going for him was a thorough commitment to his paranoia. Who else would speak of “loving your enemies”? Buddha never spoke of enemies. The notion that I was a species of Jesus has visited me more than once, and rarely have I been able to separate the delusions of grandeur from the realistic parallels. For Jesus was just a man; he knew no more about the nature of the universe than you or I. Even God may not answer the question, “Why is there anything at all?” He seemed to have one thing going for him: an ability to persevere throughout the most tortuous bendings which his febrile mind led him into.
I took down the hammock which hung over the entire living room, that cavernous space appointed with the barest essentials — a stereo, tie-dyes on the walls, a couple of roach clips. The assembly came to order. “We’re going to do this workshop in the nude,” I said, “so take off your clothes.” The men were eager but embarrassed; the women were more ready but more reserved. Among them were several of my followers from the Experimental College, and I was ruthless in collecting the proper amount of spiritual tithe from them.
I began in the usual manner, with everyone lying down. The difference now was that we were in a totally private space, everyone had their quota of drugs going through their veins, and I had a wild hair up my ass. I did not know what I was doing; that is to say, although I maintained my technical cool, I had no notion as to my purposes for going through with the scene. At another time, this might have made me wary; but as it was, I took it for evidence that my mind was truly operating in an uncluttered space.
The relaxation and breathing portions went well, and soon there were a number of bodies in total repose. I mentally leaned back to admire the way the candlelight played shadows over thighs and breasts, the way the pubic hair frizzled into sensuous valleys between the opened legs. I went around and pulled arms, lifted legs, massaged necks. I may have been mad at the moment, but the insanity manifested itself in a cool, detached expertise. It was the Adolph Eichmann of Esalen doing his thing.
