by Marco Vassi
Visions of Stalin danced in my head. The secretary! I too had heard tales of how Uncle Joe never slept, of how a light always burned in his monklike cell in the Kremlin, as he pondered and wept over the fate of his people. While I went about my task, gaining influence through giving lectures and fucking the young Protestant ladies, it never occurred to me that my position was the most ludicrous posture a revolutionary might take. As continents went up in political flames, and massive economic war machines geared for the final battle in the history of man, I was bustling about, quite seriously, seizing control of the most inane, innocuous, and effete clique in a neighborhood composed of closet queens, déclassé executives, sex-starved secretaries, and Norman Mailer.
It was a tribute to my diligence and narrow-mindedness that within four months, I had become president of the organization. Success beyond my wildest dreams! The very next day I was told the names of the other members of the club who were also Communists, and I realized why I had won the election so easily. More than half of the eleven members of that dessicated WASP company were members of the Communist Party! In a sense, I had to admire their feeling for camouflage; this was the very last place J. Edgar Hoover would think to look.
Within a week, I received the word; I was to be accepted into the Party. I now had only to write a formal application, in which I denounced my parents’ petit-bourgeois ways, my former Catholicism, my days working for the Air Force, and in general every anti-Marxist thought I had ever had in my life. Not having ever been in the Boy Scouts, I missed the irony of the gesture.
It was with moist eyes and heavily beating heart that I met the man who took my application, shook my hand, and uttered for the first time a word I had previously only aspired to. “Welcome, Comrade,” he said.
Three months later he was found with excessive funds in his bank account, a wardrobe filled with custom-made clothing, and suspicious notebooks written in code. He was exposed, denounced, and expelled. And I watched with horror as the man who took that sheet of paper into his hands confessed that he was indeed on the payroll of the FBI.
I fled Brooklyn. I stayed away from everyone to the left of Cardinal Spellman. I took refuge in corruption, and began paying attention to salary increases, decorating my pad, and seducing even more women. I was visited four times by FBI agents, and always there was a tall one and a short one, a heavy one and a reasonable one, and always with a barely hidden tape recorder. Our conversations were always congenial, and always ended with my refusing to give them names. In a sense, I felt a sense of shame in ratting on the gang. But also, since they obviously had agents in high places, it seemed stupid for them to ask information from me. I reasoned that they wanted my complicity more than my knowledge. The last I heard from them, the superintendent of one of my apartments let me know that the landlord had given the key to two thin, well-dressed men who entered my place and didn’t leave it for two hours.
Subsequently, when I suddenly saw the Mickey Mouse nature of the entire scene and discarded politics as either a useful metaphor or a successful pragmatic, I have seen no trace of them. Yet, I rest secure in the knowledge that somewhere, right now, all the pertinent facts of my life have been programmed and stored on a punch card in one of the computers which form the bowels of our Central Intelligence Agency.
Some lessons have to be repeated often before they are learned, and I had suppressed all wisdom concerning groups that promise individual or collective salvation, on the evening I walked into the Scientology headquarters. I was still reeling from my bout with Mrs. R. and my first three acid trips. I was living with Aster, an Aquarius lady from Detroit, in a fourth floor walk-up on Greenwich Avenue, and earning my living turning out free-lance editorial work.
It had always been my nature to totally believe what any human being told me. I assumed honesty in others, and at the time I decided to “try” Scientology I was still entering into things with a blind passion. The advantage was that I penetrated to the heart of many matters in very short time, but the wear and tear on my system made it a Pyrrhic bargain. Aster had heard of Scientology from Prudence, the White Goddess of my twenty-fifth year, who got glowing reports from Cindy, who had been an Ayn Randite during my Marxist days. LSD was undermining what little conventional stability I had, and I had not as yet effected a new synthesis. Aster and I were locked in a sex-hate relationship, and when we weren’t sharing perfect simultaneous orgasms, were shouting viciously at one another. And New York was continuing to wreak its ravages on my soul. In short, I was paranoid, exhausted, and confused. And in the middle of this wreckage, the message was delivered to me: SCIENTOLOGY SAVES!
I had translated the old Sufi saying, “If you can eat and pray with people, you can be at home anywhere in the world,” to “If you can get into the same psychic space as other people, you can understand them totally.” So I had no guards up as I entered the converted ballroom of the Martinique.
Dividers had been set up so that the place was partitioned into an entrance room, a library-bookshop, a huge study hall, rooms for secretaries, auditing chambers, and secret back rooms. My first impression was of Utopia. Everyone in the place was beautiful, moving about quietly, efficiently, with order. Almost everyone smiled continuously, and those who didn’t were the newcomers. From the big room there would be an occasional burst of applause and loud cheering, from which would emerge a beaming, ecstatic person, accompanied by his auditor.
As I stood there watching, the receptionist said to one of her passing compatriots, “I have a headache. Could you give me an assist?” The girl who had been asked put her two forefingers at each temple of the receptionist’s head and went into silent concentration for a minute. The girl sitting behind the desk worked along with her, closing her eyes and seeming to focus on some inner mood. Then the fingers were removed, and the two of them smiled at one another.
But there was something about the exchange that struck me as artificial. I got a flash on their inner experience, based on perception of facial tensions and subtle body attitudes, and realized that the headache hadn’t gone away. And that the girl giving the assist was merely going through a ritual, without any inner substance. But when she finished, she looked down and said, “Aren’t you happy that it’s all gone?” and they intensified their smiles. In the eyes of the girl at the desk there showed a split second of confusion before she molded herself into an exact replica of the face smiling into her own. It was pure mind-fuck, invasion of the body snatchers.
But the whole thing was so fleeting, so subtly ambiguous, that I dismissed it, and with that the room came back into mundane focus. I looked around and admired the organization of the place, and after a moment realized that this was the single most organized place I had ever been in. Everything was programmed. The people shuttled back and forth like ants in a colony. They were always carrying papers and forms, and I soon learned that practically every conceivable office transaction possible had been catalogued and given an abbreviation. It was the perfect bureaucracy, run the way one imagines the managers at IBM wish IBM could be run. These were the machine people.
I walked up to the desk and the first thing the girl with the headache said was, “Would you please sign this?” It was astonishing that they were able to get a signature for a sale even before the pitch was made. I hesitated and was greeted with an insistent stare. It seemed I had to sign. This incident was to return to memory much later when a friend noted that Scientology sells enlightenment for about $3,000, or the same price as a medium-class Buick, showing a brilliant insight into the collective bargaining unconscious of America.
Within fifteen minutes, I had signed some ten sheets of paper, including one which promised me to an introductory course and a preliminary auditing session. The speed with which I was whisked past any reservations I might have had took my breath away. It was psychic Camp. The thing was in such blatantly bad taste that one had to admire the sheer audacity of it to exist. It was with fatal self
-indulgent humor that I sat through a five-minute home movie of L. Ron Hubbard, listening to the banal being reduced to the trite. My critical faculty went to sleep and I entered into the meta-theater of the moment. The fantasy machine went into full swing, and with a sort of giddy recklessness I began to indulge in sublimated paranoid fantasies of rising very rapidly to the top of this very slick, very powerful organization. The fantasies were duly fed by the slogans I heard all about me, such as, “The highest goal is power,” and “The higher the responsibility, the higher the rewards.” It was like the Reader’s Digest and the Mafia rolled into one.
The fascist in me raised his head and sniffed about like some loathsome monster. I saw myself as the Pope of Scientology, fulfilling the oracle of a mad nun who taught me through the seventh and eighth grades, and whispered in my ear every afternoon, “God has destined you for great things.” The world would at last be mine!
So I entered the game with sincerity and gusto, buying twenty dollars worth of books and diving headfirst into the manifest dream world of Mr. Hubbard, that classic American production which seems like an Orwellian nightmare choreographed by Walt Disney. I went home that night hypnotized into elation, and spent the next day immersed in the writings of El Ron, as he is chummily known by his minions. His work is an odd mixture of brilliant psychological insight, an eclectic synthesis of the high spots in all the world’s knowledge, and a penchant for such gross oversimplification as to stagger the mind. I immediately wanted to meet the man. I felt that we could communicate very clearly very quickly. It was obvious to me that as with all organizations, Scientology was composed of a very few geniuses who put the thing together, and the hordes who blindly followed its dictates. I felt in the privileged position of knowing both that Scientology is a sham, and that in a very real sense, it does work.
The next afternoon, I took my first class in the large room that had been set up for some three hundred people. The two major groups were split up between listening to lectures and sitting, two by two, in completely frozen attitudes, staring into one another’s eyes. I dutifully went through the preliminary indoctrination, and while I was disparaging the squareness of the teacher, was admiring his absolute ease in managing the situation. He said that he had been an accountant, had taken up Scientology as a part-time study, and soon converted to full-time staff member. Along with all the other low-level worker ants in the place, he worked some thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, teaching, studying, and recruiting. His eyes burned with an unholy fervor.
After a brief talk, during which he told us to leave our mest — that is, our matter-energy-space-time — at the door, he set us to eyeballing one another. The scenario was to sit without expression while your partner attempts to make you laugh or blink or show any reaction whatsoever. The top grades in the organization have to be able to do it for two hours, showing no response while someone else attempts to push all one’s “buttons,” or weak spots in the personality. The point, I assume, is for a person to gain a sense of center from which to observe and operate, but since the process is managed through external conditioning with no concomitant sense of internal awareness, the result is the automaton quality by which one can spot Scientologists.
My partner was a burned-out product of Reichian therapy, and had been mangled by one of those horror-movie therapists of that particular school, where the second- and third-generation doctors had picked up all of Reich’s sternness and implacability, without any of his warmth or genius. He was like one of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who float from scene to scene, seeking some escape from their inner emptiness. I was to be his button pusher the first time around, and while he sat still, I made disparaging remarks, tried to evoke anger, and in general acted like a prick. He kept flubbing, and each time he moved I had to say, “Flunk! You moved.” I hadn’t yet read Giles Goat Boy so I missed some of the richness of the moment. But he startled me out of my role when he leaned forward and whispered, “These people all have the emotional plague.” It was like receiving a subversive message in a prison camp, and I looked up, startled.
The teacher caught my eye; something in the scene must have triggered his danger instinct, for he quickly came over to us. The student began to fight with him, telling him that this was an inhuman activity. They got into an argument and the teacher almost lost his cool. But then he drew a pad out of his pocket, scribbled something down, and thrust it at my partner. “I declare you to be in a state of nonexistence,” he said. “Go to the registrar to be rerouted.”
It got very curious, but I watched him leave with the sang froid of a desert rat who must leave his companion on the burning sands. War was not easy, and Scientology was waging an all-out struggle for ultimate peace and order. No Reichian agents could be allowed to infiltrate.
For my next partner I got someone who had been in the scene for over a year. He began by saying that he had had over eighty acid trips, and could tell me from deep knowledge that Scientology was the highest trip possible. This was still at a time when I naïvely believed that anyone who had taken acid was automatically made a more decent and honest human being by it, and his words helped me to dispel the doubts that had arisen when my first partner was banished to the void. He was very quick, and had me twitching and giggling all over the place. I got the flunk grade a few dozen times before the session ended. The one aspect of the experience which made the most impression was that he was able to put my mind through hoops, and although it was his turf, I had to respect whatever it was that had given him that ability. Scientology began to intrigue me in more complex ways.
The third day, I met Lana. Lana! Tall, fair, Scandinavian mouth like one of the blow queens used for Norwegian cigar commercials. Her breasts rose like hot loaves out of her low-cut bra. She was introduced to me, smiled deep into my libido, took me by the hand, and led me to a private room upstairs for my first auditing session. She explained the rules of the game very quickly, and soon we were sitting facing one another, her with a black pad and a black box, me holding two tin cans attached to a meter which measures electrical conductivity, a primitive form of “lie detector.” She was going to repeat certain phrases, and she would write down my responses, all the while noting the movement of the needle on the meter.
The phrases were noncommittal, having to do with childhood memories, and I realized that I was being given the dianetic processing, whereby one relives the experiences of early traumas again and again until they are erased, and one becomes “clear,” the Scientological equivalent of enlightenment. It has always amused me that Hubbard took his central metaphor from adding machines. The mixture of the vulgar and the sublime, was, as always, grotesquely enchanting.
As the session progressed, the process took hold. I went into immediate psychoanalytic overdrive. I started hyperventilating. The associations came hot and heavy. Lana looked at me with warm, devoted eyes; she was cheering me on. I began to spill out my soul, not caring any longer about the context or the ideology, but simply swimming with the wondrous relief which comes when the dam of repression bursts and the heart can sing out its total joy and pain. I was completely infatuated with the moment, and at the height of my confessions, the doubt struck. I looked up at her and knew that I couldn’t withhold the slightest thing. She won from me the instant idiot loyalty that my poor Gurdjieff guru had tried to beat out of me. Once again, cunt proved superior to cunning.
My lips trembled. I spoke. “Lana,” I said, “I have been in so many organizations, and always I have been disappointed. I hope Scientology won’t let me down.” She looked back, breathing hard. “In Scientology,” she said, “you can have anything you want.” The sexual tension reached the bursting point. “Anything?” I said, peering between her swelling breasts. She returned my gaze, acknowledged. “Anything,” she sighed.
My last reserve was gone. I brought forth my deepest sin. “Lana,” I said, “in some ways Scientology seems to be a kind of fascism of the mind.” Immediat
ely, she froze. “Who told you that?” she said. The bond between us was broken and I was suddenly out in the cold, cast out of what I had hoped might at last be a family for me. I cast about in my mind for a scapegoat. I remembered one night, sitting stoned with Francis amid his paintings of coagulated inspiration and the dada artifacts of his ironic mind; we had been discussing Heraclitus in relation to Long Island. He had suddenly flourished a Scientology poster and said, “Look, the thought patrol.”
The words dribbled out of my mouth. “My friend . . . my friend . . . Francis . . . he said it . . . “ I was horrified. I had betrayed one of my closest friends and to a plastic Mata Hari. She immediately closed her pad and said, “Wait here, I have to find out about this.” I sat for fifteen minutes like a character in a Koestler novel, pondering the ambivalences of the cold war. She returned and sat facing me; she was conciliatory and warm. “It’s quite simple,” she said. “You’ll just have to disconnect your friend.”
Disconnect was the term used for severing all social, emotional, and honorable relations with anyone, including one’s mother, who disparaged the organization. “Tell him you won’t see him anymore,” she said.
I went to Francis’ loft with a heavy heart that night. This was my friend of many years. We had gone through all the scenes together, both understanding our mutual roles as mere costumes we wore as we went through the round of life, sharing the same space and time. We both realized that the fact that out of all the aeons of time, destiny had chosen us to know one another, was the single greatest miracle one might imagine, and all the details paled into insignificance beside that. We had sat for hundreds of hours, quietly smoking hash, reliving in our own form the partnerships of the ages, from Socrates and Plato to Lenin and Trotsky, with him always taking the path closer to the edge. While I was a Communist, he was editing a magazine called Treason, the editorial policy of which accepted any article on the single qualification that it would carry the death penalty if printed in time of war. When I was a hedonist, he was a solipsist. He had a permanent chair of philosophy on the astral plane, and was the founder of the East Village Wittgenstein Fan Club, of which he was one of three members. And now, I had to climb those familiar decaying stairs off the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue A and dispatch him, cleanly and with regret, but unequivocally.