The Stoned Apocalypse (3 page)
An adept! My ego inflated like a blowfish. I was flushed with success and the rest of my report came out distorted. “Well,” I said, “I felt as though I were trapped inside my own skull, and . . .”
“ENOUGH!” she thundered. “That’s pathology. Don’t bring that garbage in here to infect the minds of the other students. There will be no more of that here.”
I felt the collective condemnation of the room. She turned on the others with equal fury. “Take your attention away from him. I have told you countless times you have nothing to learn from one another, you can only confuse yourselves. Turn your attention here.”
I was grateful for having the heat removed from me, but I was smarting as though from a blow. I felt chastised and a slow fury began to grow in me. My anger centered largely on the fact that, despite the inaccuracy of her formulations, she was absolutely correct in her attitude. But I refused to admit this to myself.
So, I began to cheat. In the weeks that followed, I started smoking grass again. I began to tell my friends about the trip. Of course, they couldn’t understand why I found the Work valuable, and they put it down. Being suggestible, I felt the impress of their cynicism on my mind. The only person in the world who could understand exactly where I was at and could help me with it was Mrs. R., but she was an irascible old bitch to whom I had no access. I began to harbor resentments, to play head games with the situation, to take freaky risks with my morning exercise.
After two months of the routine, I began to fall apart. My leg began hurting, and I had to wear a support bandage around my calf. I began an affair with a German model who could come only if I whipped her with her brassiere. I started classes in hatha yoga with one of those benign imbeciles who get tired of holy obscurity in the hills of India and come to seek fame and fortune in New York City. Finally, I was introduced to a Gestalt therapist by the head of the Sexual Freedom League in the city, and spent nine sessions complaining to him about my guru. He was one of those brittle Englishmen whose humor is always at the razor’s edge. His entire therapeutic approach involved reminding me to breathe, and laughing at my woes. He thought my problems with Mrs. R. were uproarious, and one day I exploded and demanded that he take me seriously. He smiled and said, “Look, your precious guru sounds like a silly old lady with a dry cunt. The next time you see her, ask her if she’s good enough for you, and not the other way around.”
I never told her that, but the emotional content of his message burned inside me. Secretly I felt I was as good as she was, that she had no right to treat me like a slave. But she had the Indian sign on me, and there was no way for me to bring my feelings to the surface. True to her word, she saw that something was going on, and she told me not to come back to the group any more. “I’ll see you privately in a week or so,” she said.
The next time I went to her home, she racked me up cold. For the first time, she let the shades off her eyes, and began zapping me with megavolts on the astral plane. The words she flung at me were enough to wipe me out, and they were coupled to a force that had me literally wincing. She seemed to be reaching into my mind and heart and bowels, destroying any last bit of security or strength I thought I had. She catalogued all my weaknesses and sins, she openly mocked every trick of personality I had been using to manipulate my way through society. She forced me to see all the ways in which I lied to myself, cheated myself, fooled myself. At one point, I felt my perceptions go hazy, and her face became a ball of glowing light. I was forced out of my chair and pushed out of the room, simply by her sheer presence. I stumbled backing up, and almost knocked over a lamp. I apologized profusely. I was sweating. The effect of the woman was overwhelming. She was being pure woman, without any of the social artifices and cringing attitudes, without the coyness and seduction, without the strident self-assertion that gets mistaken for strength. She was letting me have it, the frank femaleness of her, and I couldn’t take it. I started to leave, almost literally bowing and scraping, when she barked out, “And you don’t even have the sense to thank me for what I’m giving you.” I looked up bleakly. What else did she want from me? Then she softened and said, “You’re right. There can be no thanks for this kind of Work.”
The following week was hectic. In the last issue of Escapade I had done a story on the East Village Other, and as part of the piece had run a photo of one of their covers, which pictured a bearded man holding a sign which read: fuck hate. The distributors refused to deliver the magazine to the wholesalers. Hypocritically prudish to a man, they were willing to distribute millions of photos of naked women, but balked when the word “fuck” appeared in print. There was panic. Some two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the magazine were stacked in warehouses, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were about to be lost. My job hung in the balance. The publishers wanted my head to roll, until the boss’s son-in-law got a bright idea.
The magazines were owned by a printing firm that had been founded by a shrewd Italian who arrived in America some thirty years ago, with no money and no knowledge of English. Within that time, he became a multimillionaire, and now owned nine tenths of a small Connecticut town, including the printing plant, the supermarkets, the theater, the bowling alley, and the rest. The town was largely Italian, and he ran it like a feudal kingdom. The old man’s son-in-law had every last copy of the issue brought back to the town, marshaled some three or four hundred of the girls who worked in one or another of the old man’s enterprises, and set them to work with magic markers. Within three days, using an assembly-line technique and working with coffee and sandwiches around the clock, every last fuck had been covered over with black ink. And within the week, a quarter of a million copies of Escapade moved once more onto the newsstands of America, with the offending picture bearing the one permissible word: hate.
It was at that time that I began to get the first flashes that I had to leave New York. I didn’t know to where, or how; but things were closing in. And I decided that I had to settle things with Mrs. R. My humiliation had transmogrified into pride, and I squashed all impulses to be honest with myself. I just wanted to attack and destroy, to get the guru monkey off my back. And so, one afternoon, amidst the stacks of photos of naked women and the sign over my desk which read “Help stamp out Fuck,” I called the lady and demanded an appointment. To my surprise, she said, “Very well, come up now.”
I took a cab to her apartment. Some tension had been resolved in me, and I was ready to let it all hang out. I no longer cared whether she threw me out or not, although deep within myself I felt my losing contact with the Foundation might be an error I would regret all my life. Yet, I took all my doubts and hammered them into the point of the warhead I was aiming at the guru’s citadel. I would force her to recognize my worth, to stop treating me like dirt.
I stormed past the doorman with an angry glance, daring him to attempt to stop me. I rode to the fifteenth floor, my anger now having obscured whatever good sense I may have had. It felt very good to be so mad. I rushed to her door, and stopped cold when I saw that it was a few inches open. Deep inside me a warning bell went off as my animal nature instinctively recognized a trap. But fools rush in, etc.
I took a giant step inside and shut the door hard behind me. I walked to the entrance of the living room and saw her, sitting quietly, smiling faintly, watching me. I wasted no words. I drew my sword, flung back my cape, and charged toward her. Instantly I became a horde of furies, an army of avenging knights. I felt invulnerable, eternal, mighty. I got halfway across the floor when she said, very gently and firmly, “The rug.”
I froze on the spot. Rug? What rug? What did that mean, the rug? The koan transfixed me.
Then she said, “You kicked over the edge of the rug.”
I looked back. Sure enough, one edge of the rug was turned over, perhaps a few inches of it. I swung my eyes back toward her, my glance holding a steel-edged condescension. “I came here prepared to confront you on something vital,” I said, “and if all you can notice is something as trivial as a rug . . .”
Without moving, she set off her explosion and derailed the train. “If you can come into my home,” she said, “kick over the edge of a rug, and not even realize that you have done it, then what sort of confrontation can you hope to have with me?”
And with that, she threw me out.
For a few weeks I maintained a state of self-righteous indignation. And then, slowly, I began to realize that I had not distinguished myself in the relationship, that despite all the esoteric jargon, despite all the circuitous maneuverings, the Foundation had something that I desperately needed and wanted. They were people who were dedicated to waking up, to dispelling the hypnotic trance which continually leads the species into stupidity, into war, into misery. And they eschewed all the mystical claptrap, the pseudo-religious trappings. They valued critical intelligence highly, although, to this day, I am not sure to what degree they were free of their own sociological conditioning. At one time I received an invitation to see a filming of sacred dances performed at the Gurdjieff Foundation in France. The work performed there exhibited the highest level of intelligence I have ever seen, a profound reverence for the mystery of existence coupled with an uncompromising understanding of that portion of the universe which can be known. But once again, the people who attended all looked as though they had pokers rammed up their asses. The film showed at one of the East Side movie houses and was attended by most of the Gurdjieffites in the Western Hemisphere. The movement puts some stress on wealth, for a person must have enough means to move about to wherever he needs to be at any given time. I felt as though I were at a convention of psychic closet queens. The head of the Work was there from France, a superbly manicured woman wearing a sable jacket. She was fawned over as though she were royalty. And I saw that above all else the Work is an excuse to form another clique, a group of people among whom complicity was the chief virtue. They had all agreed to play life according to a similar set of rules, and within that matrix, were more or less successful.
Of course, the esoteric aspect of the Work is the crystallization of a spiritual body, one which will continue, at a different level of consciousness, after the death of the physical body. The goal is immortality within the limits of the solar system, with immortality being understood in a special sense. Yet, despite all the hush-hush high-level work on awareness, there was for me the suspicion that the only thing Gurdjieff was saying was to wake up and enjoy life, its total joy and terror, its mystery and its revelations.
The entire affair concluded shortly thereafter, when I took LSD for the first time. The experience of the drug cannot be communicated through words. I went through the usual cycles, flavored by my own conditioning. My guide was freaked out on The Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time, and she kept reading me snatches from that hoary comic book. Oddly enough, Gurdjieff’s system is derived from the same sources as the Tibetan, and in fact, he learned much of his scene from the Tibetans while he was smuggling guns past the British into Asia. Among other things that night, I reenacted the tragicomedy of Abbott and Costello, and then sailed off into a full-blown Jesus trip, complete with glory, agony, death, and resurrection. Finally, I rose from the dead, resplendent in golden rays, and floated off into the heavens.
But at the height of my victory, with all the earth at my feet, I looked down and saw dumpy old Mrs. R. walking down the street. With a voice like trumpets I shouted, “Mrs. R. Look at me, I’m Jesus Christ.” Without so much as looking up, she muttered. “You’re Marco Vassi, and you’re still a fool.” At that moment, I may have become the first person to blush on the astral plane.
The next day I was down from the drug, and called her. “I took acid yesterday,” I said, “and I want to tell you that I am ashamed of the way I behaved.” She paused a long time and then said, “Oh, I suppose you’ll have to do the whole drug thing now. Call me when you’re finished with that foolishness.”
I never saw or spoke to her again. Her phone number mysteriously disappeared from all my records one day. She stayed in my consciousness as a living force for some time. There was little I did during that time which she didn’t actively super-ego. Her influence reached into my deepest core, and I had hardly got to know the woman!
Some time later I ran across several renegade Gurdjieff groups on the West Coast. John Klaxon led some two hundred people in bizarre psychic orgies each week. And a number of people who had read Gurdjieff but not come into contact with any teachers were using his ideas to put together their own syntheses of mind control. The most interesting person was Mr. F., however. His wife and he had both been members of the Foundation, and she stayed on while he broke away to form his own school. He claimed that the New York school had been overly Ouspenskyite in its orientation, and he called for a return to pure Gurdjieff. Old G. had hardly been dead a score of years, and already high-level factions were forming, complete with defections and purges.
I walked into one of F.’s groups carrying a copy of Search before I knew what the score was with them. One of the people came up to me and said, “Reading Ouspensky, eh?” And suddenly I felt like I had carried a copy of Trotsky into a roomful of Stalinists. My reflexes went into overdrive and I immediately dug the scene. “I find him . . . interesting,” I said. He nodded. “Yes, he says some valuable things. But one mustn’t be misled by him.” It reminded me of my days in the Party. The same guarded tones, the same innuendoes, the same air of complex intrigue.
Almost two years later, on a chill night in the desert outside of Tucson, with some fine Southwest grass coursing through my brain, I woke up simply to the fact of existence. And at that moment, Mrs. R. ceased being an influence and became simply one of the many people I had known in my life. I was returned to myself, and I knew that, paradoxically, I had found the place Gurdjieff talks about, without being a Gurdjieffite. Of course, I fall in and out of enlightenment, as I fall in and out of all the states which compose the human condition. After all, cosmic consciousness is just a part, and is no more or less real than a fart.
