Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  He was silent for a while, sitting there, taking in his devoted audience. Then, placing his hands in prayer position under his chin, he began to speak slowly. And what he said was even more threatening to me than watching all those orange people do their sexy dance.

  “You are not asleep. You have chosen to do whatever you are doing now, and if you are in agony and anxiety and pain I want you to realize that it is because you have chosen it. Then you have to ask why—why you would choose a life of pain and suffering. There are reasons for it. You have to realize that only in sorrow can you be. When you are in ecstasy you disappear. Suffering gives you a definition. It makes you feel solid.”

  He went on talking about how we are divided by our pain, how misery separates and separation makes us more miserable. He told us that when we become happy the ego cannot exist. He asked us to take a look and see how when we are suddenly happy our egos disappear.

  By now the man had really terrified me. I could not remember the last time I was suddenly happy. The most I ever got was a mild sense of well-being, and I wondered if I even had an ego to lose.

  After more talk about ecstasy and ego and how the choice is ours whether to go deeper into pain or let it go and cry and laugh together so that we at last become one, he started explaining the initiation process. “All you have to do is tell me when you’re ready and I will be ready to receive you. When you do this it is not throwing away your responsibility; it is giving up your resistance. If you cannot trust yourself, then trust me. Please, pass through the Master in trust, in love, in surrender, and things will start happening.”

  God, this was tempting stuff. If he didn’t mean it, he sure knew how to say it well. Of course I felt everything he said applied to me. I was the ultimate self-help-book sucker. I was unhappy, and to some extent I suspected that I was engineering my misery, but I had no idea how to stop. It had become such an ingrained habit. To take it away would be to take away me. I’m sure that’s the way Mom must have felt the night she got up, climbed into the car, and started it for the last time.

  Yes, many things the Bhagwan said made seductive sense; but I was not yet sure if I trusted him. I had to get closer to him physically to find out.

  When the Bhagwan finished speaking, he placed his hands in prayer position, bowed to his audience, and, gathering his white robes around him, strolled regally offstage. As soon as he was out of sight, the two tall, bearded assistants removed his great white chair. Instantly, about fifteen or twenty women rushed up onto the stage, threw themselves down, and kissed the floor where the chair had been. “What are they doing?” I asked the person next to me. “That,” she replied, “is Bhakti yoga, the yoga of worship.”

  I filed out with the two thousand people dressed in orange and retreated to the Ritz to recuperate. I had to be alone. It was too confusing. I had lost my sex drive. It was too hot. I missed Meg a lot. I needed someone to talk to, someone not dressed in orange and in touch with irony. I needed to have a regular conversation with someone who was not smiling. The whole place suddenly reminded me of one big Christian Science camp, only everyone was dressed in orange and making love.

  My wish came true. At lunch at the hotel I met another person who was not dressed in orange. Her name was Melvy, and she was a mime from France. She was very androgynous, and I was attracted to her immediately. Her story was this: She had been on tour performing in America and she had an affair with a woman in Seattle. In this relationship she had an experience of melding that was so cosmic, so overwhelming, and so unlike anything she’d ever had before that she asked her lover where she could find out more about it all. The woman told her to go to Rajneesh in Poona, and Melvy did.

  I thought it was funny that she’d had a cosmic melding experience like that and fled to find out more about it when it was going on right there in Seattle. How French of her, I thought. She must have an analytic and inquiring mind. We became fast friends over a vegetarian lunch. I discovered that Melvy’s biggest objection to Rajneesh was that he had been putting down homosexuality in some of his talks and she had discovered cosmic love in a homosexual experience. So her plan was that she was going to have an audience with him and confront him on this issue. She told me she’d get back to me with her report.

  After lunch I went to sleep. It was too hot to do anything else. I woke in a sweat, feeling awful, lonely and confused. Nothing made sense. I wanted a scotch very badly. It was too hot to drink in my sweatbox of a hotel, so I walked down to the Blue Diamond, the only five-star hotel in town. I had scotch and a steak and everything made sense again. The Blue Diamond was dark and air-conditioned and I got into just fuzzing out. The booze worked as it always does: it slowed my head down. I felt like Dad.

  Melvy showed up and we drank cheap Indian whiskey and talked about her experience with the Bhagwan. She was very discouraged by what he told her. He said being homosexual was just a rebellion for her and that if everyone became homosexual tomorrow she would immediately become heterosexual. Melvy was furious and wanted to fly back to France after she saw the Taj Mahal. We drank more whiskey and continued to dish Rajneesh. We were the only ones holding out on him, and we were only able to do that because we had each other. Melvy said Rajneesh didn’t know what he was talking about with all this be-here-now crap. She kept raving about Proust and saying that Proust had demonstrated how the present always turns into the past before you can make any statement about it. She said that the French language was better equipped to deal with the space between experience and reflection. She was adamant about Proust and how well he’d written of how there can be no peace of mind when it comes to love because all love is only the beginning of more desire, which is endless.

  I was amazed to see how she’d changed her tune from that afternoon, and to calm her down I said that I would apply for a meeting with the Master and then we would exchange notes. The following day I got to the ashram early to sign up. I put my name on a list and was told to show up at the back gate of the ashram at four o’clock. I was to bathe first, with no scented soaps, of course, or after-shave, and to carry no cut flowers.

  By four o’clock the day had cooled down enough to be bearable, and I took a slow walk down to the ashram from the Ritz. About sixteen of us lined up at the gate, and again I was the only one not dressed in orange. The others were dressed in flowing orange robes, but because they had not been initiated yet they did not have the malla with the little black-and-white picture of Rajneesh around their necks. I assumed they were going in to be initiated. This made me think about why I was going in, outside of curiosity. I remembered something Rajneesh had said in his talk, about not coming to him out of curiosity but rather with a sincere and open heart.

  While I stood there, I did my best to open my heart, but I had no idea who or what I was opening up to. Just to be wide open seemed a little risky unless I was looking to be Christ.

  We were all led around to a little garden behind the house and told to sit. We sat cross-legged on the grass and stared with great anticipation at the big empty white chair. A young woman of about nineteen or twenty came out dressed in orange and sat cross-legged on the floor just to the left of the chair. I think this was one of his consorts. Then the Bhagwan entered and moved in a very direct and focused way to sit. He lifted his hands into prayer position, closed his eyes, and breathed.

  Opening his eyes, he said, in a most sensual and hypnotic voice, “Now I am here to receive you.” One at a time people were singled out by the bearded ushers to go up and kneel. As they did, the Bhagwan would look at them with this great open smile and study them for a bit until he intuited the right Sanskrit name to give them. When he got the name he would write it on a piece of paper and hand it to the initiate while he spoke it to them and told them what it meant. After he put the malla, with his little black-and-white glossy picture on it, around their necks, he got out a little pen flashlight and shined it on their third eye, then dismissed them. Most of the people were joyful and ecstatic; it was a big event for
them, I could see. But much to my surprise, I could also see that each initiation was being videotaped by one of the ushers off to the side and that there were two small microphones on the edge of the porch right at the foot of the Bhagwan’s chair. It was all being recorded.

  When my time came, the usher approached me and whispered, “Go up and kneel, but not too close or you may cause him to leave his body.” At that point I had a great temptation to get in very close, but I could also see that one of the ushers standing just behind Rajneesh was really a big bodyguard.

  When I got to him he smiled and, seeing I was not in orange, said, “What can I do for you?” At that point I felt very lost. Nothing came to mind, not even that I wanted to get laid. I just felt real lost and empty, and I told him I was confused and didn’t know what to do. He told me to take a workshop, and he listed some of them. “You can take the Enlightenment Intensive, the Centering Group, or Interpersonal Confrontation. Or you could try Primal Scream, Let Go, or Art Therapy. You choose one, do one, and then come back to me and we shall talk some more.”

  When I got outside I saw that there was a little counter set up where they were selling audio and video tapes of the whole event.

  Back at the Ritz that night I raved to Melvy. I was going into great angry diatribes, saying, “What does Rajneesh mean by ‘Live in the moment, forget the past,’ and then he goes and sells you video tapes of your past moments with him! All moments are not equal! There are some that will stand out in your memory, and we have memory for a reason. It’s like that song: ‘We were having moments to remember …’—you know, ‘the day we tore the goalpost down,’ stuff like that. I can’t stand it, Melvy. The Bhagwan is driving me nuts. It’s too hot here. I’ve lost my sex drive. And besides, I think all the people here have money. I don’t have enough money to go take a lot of workshops that won’t do me any good once I get back to the real world. I wish Meg would come save me.”

  MEG DID COME the following day. She came to take me away to Kashmir, where it would be cool and real and just us. But first I dragged her to see one of Rajneesh’s talks. It was about the same old stuff, liberation from personal pain. Meg was not impressed. I was impressed by her lack of impression.

  Meg and I had a farewell lunch with Melvy. Meg acted jealous of and threatened by Melvy and was very withholding. I didn’t like Meg doing that, and for a moment I thought maybe I should stay there and not go.

  Then Meg started telling me how we’d live on a houseboat up in Kashmir and relax. I longed for the coolness of the mountains. So we left Poona that day, returned to Bombay, and flew right up to Srinagar. As we stepped off that plane the cool air washed over me. What a relief.

  We rented a houseboat on Dahl Lake. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t enough just sitting there on the boat looking at those mountains. So one day not long after our arrival, we rented a gondola for a tour of the lake. The boatman put flowers around our necks and sat us up in the bow. Meg looked great with the wreath of jasmine around her neck. The lake was very still as the boatman poled us across. This was so much nicer than the Ganges, only we couldn’t get the Ganges out of our minds because of the smell. Even the jasmine didn’t overpower it. We couldn’t figure out why the boatman didn’t notice. We thought he must have grown used to it, or had just learned, like any good tour guide, how to ignore it. As we were passing through the mouth of a shallow inlet, I bent over the bow of the gondola and saw a bloated, decaying, drowned baby calf stuck on the bow, like some big, stupid death bumper.

  All at once I was flying above it like a lake bird, looking down on the innocent boatman maneuvering us through the waterway with that dead calf stuck to the bow. I saw Meg trying to get her nose closer to her jasmine lei in order to wipe out that smell. And I loved her for that gesture then.

  After that outing, Meg and I gave up on the lake and began to take tours of the rug factories. That was interesting but nothing to write home about. Meg was fascinated by it. And I was jealous of her, because I wanted something wholesome to take my interest. Meg would take the tour of each of those rug factories and then go to the sales room. I went with her because I was curious and I didn’t have anything else to do. Although the rugs were beautiful, I was bored. Meg could see the patterns and workmanship in those rugs. She could see the story of how the rug was made, and it mattered to her. Meg wanted a rug to live with. She wanted to grow old with a rug. Things mattered to Meg, but not to me. I didn’t want a rug. I didn’t want to grow old, with a rug or anyone. I wanted an orgy. I wanted an endless orgy now.

  Now that the weather was cooler my sex drive was coming back but Meg and I were having problems with our sex life—problems in the sense that the drive for each other was absent. It was there before we came to India, and then it just went away like the windy mystery that it is. Maybe all the sights of death had helped blow it away.

  So the more Meg looked at rugs, the more I stood beside her and fantasized that I was back in Poona. Only in my fantasy the weather was cooler and I had at last decided to take one of the so-called Gestalt encounter groups. And I had taken on the orange, but it didn’t matter, because the group leader made us take off our orange robes as soon as we came into the room. So in this fantasy there were twenty of us: ten very good-looking young women and ten real handsome men, me included. We were tan and lithe and languid. And the group leader was a German Gestalt therapist who had given up her few belongings in Frankfurt and come to Poona to live. And she comes into the room where we are and says, “Just do what I tell you to do and trust me, because what I’m going to tell you to do is going to feel good. I want you to take a risk to feel pleasure. I want all of us to pretend that we are here today just to experience pleasure.” We’re all standing on these mattresses as she’s telling us this. The mattresses are covered with clean white cotton sheets that have just been hand-washed by a bunch of local Poona women. And the therapist, who I am now calling Hilda in my mind, Hilda says to us to please disrobe and hang our orange garments—raiments, I think she was calling them—on hooks that are all along the white wall to one side of the room. And as we all slowly slip out of our raiments, all kind of languid and humid, our muscles now completely relaxed by the warmth of the place, we look across the room and see that the whole wall is one big mirror. And Hilda hands us all some almond oil and asks us to begin rubbing each other’s bodies in front of the mirror. I can feel hands going down between my crack and my hands are going down between other cracks, and everything’s all oily and fluid, and as we stand there looking at ourselves naked in the mirror, Hilda adjusts the lights to a low amber and very relaxing Indian music begins to play. Hilda says in her German accent, “Come, people. Make a sitting circle in the center.” We do as we are told, no problem, and it feels right. It feels good to do this. It feels all so perfectly right, as if there is no other place in the world to be. And then we sit there just gazing at each other’s eyes, because we are still a little inhibited about looking at each other’s body parts, even though we just rubbed them all with almond oil. Now Hilda pulls out a long wooden hash pipe and says, “Before we go any further, I just want everyone to take a big hit of my herbal medicine here. I promise it will help you relax even more.” And she lights this pipe and passes it around the circle, filling the room with the sweet smell of hashish. The pipe keeps going around, and we all get real high and real mellow and real relaxed. I can feel the hash smoke go all the way down into my belly and fill up my balls. I can feel my balls begin to swell and roll. I can feel my lazy dick begin to sprout and peek out to see what’s going on. And it’s like Hilda is a great snake charmer who is gently bringing all the snakes out of their holes in search of new warm ones. And then Hilda gets up and says, “Now I’m going to turn the lights out, and I’m going out and I’m going to lock the door from the outside, and I’ll be back in two hours. I want you all to go to town—do crazy things you’ve never done before. See if you can feel where heaven is. I want you to go to the Garden of Eden before you knew there was an ap
ple tree. I want you to go to the Garden of Eden where the garden was only flesh, not flowers, when the landscape was you and not the earth, when your bodies were all the earth and the earth was your bodies, and there was no separation. Please go there. Please, please have the courage to go there just this once, so you will know pure pleasure before time and history, pure, pure, history-less pleasure.” And she’s saying all this wonderful stuff with a German accent as she turns out the lights and leaves us.

  And what happens when she goes out of the room is so delicious that it stops time and wipes out death. Death is nowhere in the room. The room turns into a pure impenetrable fortress against death as we slowly begin to pant and touch. And Hilda has even turned off the music so the room is completely dark and without sound, except for the sound of all twenty of us turning into pure animal heat. All the body parts begin to feel like parts of one body as we link and couple in that room. Some gentle hand has found my cock and is guiding it into a warm wet hole, while I have found another kind of tighter hole with my finger, as all the oily bodies fit together. Someone wraps a thumb and finger around my balls and squeezes just so, and ooh, what’s that? is that a tongue? and ooh, it’s in my ass, and oh, we lie there humping and heaving until no body and no hole is unstopped. The holes and all the parts get miraculously connected like a great flesh puzzle linked up at last, and it’s all done by sheer animal intuition. And everything gets filled up and satisfied, all the empty places get filled up. My ass is filled up solid with a cock and my cock is filled up solid with my blood and it fills up a waiting hole or mouth that a hand guides my cock to. And the whole room seethes and heaves and begins to fill with blue sparks that arch and jump around in the giant united body pile as everyone swells into a giant moan, watching the blue sparks fly in the mirror, and we all come in our various ways, in our various holes together. A bright blue Saint Elmo’s fire outlines our bodies as we come together, we all come as one big panting river of flesh. And for just one glorious timeless time it’s all one sound and one body. It is the Garden of Eden before the voice of God spoke to Adam. It is exactly that for all of us. And we know it, all at once, as we all come together and slowly collapse into a mindless, limp slumber, a slight river of drool and joy juice trickling from all the slack, satisfied cracks. And we just lie there in that timeless, absolutely satisfied body heap until at last Hilda opens the door and turns the lights up slightly so we can all look into each other’s eyes again. And we do it—as brightly and innocently as a team of 1950s cheerleaders at a high school in the middle of America. “Hi, guys!” our eyes say. “Hi, gang!” our mouths say. “Wasn’t that great?” “Yeah, that was far out!” “That was great!” “Let’s do it again tomorrow!” And we don’t even feel a hint of shame. Shame and guilt never enter that room. Of course we knew they were right outside the door. But we also knew we had consecrated a sacred place. We had created the Garden of Eden out of our bodies before the knowledge of good and evil. And we’d do it again next Wednesday. And the knowledge that we had the power to create that place, that it would be there for us again on Wednesday, made us able to live with the guilt and shame of the outside world. It purified us. And Hilda turned up the music real loud this time and it was Jamaican reggae, and we all danced naked, real happy, as we rubbed what was left of each other’s juices onto our bodies to show we had been initiated into the brother- and sisterhood of pleasure: the Garden of Eden Club. Or the Eden Garden Club.