by Marco Vassi
We sat and smoked some grass, listened to Mozart, played a game of chess. Midway through the middle game, I looked up. “Francis, I must tell you something,” I said.
“I see you coming,” he said.
“I’ve become a Scientologist,” I said.
He puffed on the pipe a moment, gave me a quick look, and said, “Vassi, that’s vulgar.” Then he paused and added, “But if you have to take the trip, you have my blessings.”
“It’s worse than that,” I said. “I had to turn you in.”
His eyebrows shot up, an extreme change of expression for Francis. “Turn me in?” he said. “Turn me in for what?”
“I told them that you said they’re fascists.”
“Oh,” he said, “that’s quite true.”
“And I have to disconnect you,” I added.
He puffed some more hash. “Well, if that’s part of the trip, sure, I can understand that.”
“I hope this doesn’t affect our friendship,” I said.
He smiled. “No, not at all. In fact, I’m rather enjoying the irony of it.” And with that we settled down to a quiet evening of serious smoking.
On the fourth day, I confronted Lana with a clear conscience. “I disconnected my friend,” I announced.
“Oh, how wonderful,” she bubbled. Then paused, and said, “How do you feel about it?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” I said. “We’re still friends.”
Somehow, the nuance of the transaction escaped her. She stood up once more, but with none of the gentleness which had marked yesterday’s exit. As Cummings would say, straightway she got grave. Once again she disappeared down the rabbit hole and this time came back with an order. “You are to accompany me to the Ethics Officer,” she said.
The Ethics Officer! My blood ran cold. And with good reason when I saw the man who served as the Scientological Gestapo. He was short, thin, and fish-eyed. He was totally devoid of expression or inflection to his voice. He was implacable. “You are playing games,” he said. I began to object but realized that from his point of view, I was. “You must disconnect your friend . . . totally,” he said. I looked at him and for the first time began to get an appreciation of the actuality of the situation. They were doing a tin-soldier version of fascism, but the stakes were real. “I can’t do that,” I said.
For an answer, he reached into a drawer and took out a mimeographed sheet of paper. “You are familiar with the Scale of Being,” he said. I nodded. It was a list showing some dozen states of existence, ranging from enemy at the bottom to clear at the top. “You are a suppressive person,” he said. I blinked. That was one notch above enemy. My Reichian friend was lucky; he was only nonexistent, which was the middle point.
He handed me the sheet of paper which had suppressive person printed across the top. It was an exercise in surrealism, and sounded like a list of admonitions to be given to a kindergarten student. The only unfunny thing about it was that these people were serious, and their activity was intended to have an actual effect on daily life. I became a bit frightened. The similarity to Nazism was becoming more than metaphoric. “Take this home and read it,” he said, and dismissed me.
The paper was a guide as to what constituted a suppressive person, and what such a person had to do to remove himself from that category. I spent the entire night thinking about it, and the next morning walked into headquarters with shaking hands. The situation wasn’t helping my clinical paranoia any. At the hotel I got a clear vision of what was happening: a mass of confused frightened people were milling around the evangelistic teachings of the world’s most recent salvation sweepstakes. Scientology was a racket which played with politics and education and religion and the workings of people’s minds with absolute cynicism and control. It was the perfect symptom of a decaying nation. I freaked.
I told the receptionist my name, and once again had to sign the registration book, and told her I had an appointment in the Ethics Office. She looked at me as though I were a leper and motioned me to sit down. Next to me was a thin, jumpy girl who had been waiting for the Ethics Officer for two hours, and was really pissed off at being made to wait. But like a nun to the Pope, she couldn’t admit that he was simply a little bastard who ought to be kicked in the ass and told to grow up. We talked a bit and she allowed as how she was tired of waiting, but added, “Yet, I understand. They work so hard and have so much responsibility that we can’t expect them to put everything aside to see us any old time.”
For one of the few times in my life, I grew intensely angry.
By the time he was ready to see me, I was furious. I strode into the office. He stared up, unruffled. “Did you read it?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered. “Well . . . ?” he said. I took a breath. “Rarely in my life have I seen such a blend of inanity and viciousness as is exhibited here. I understand the philosophic premises and psychological underpinnings of your scene, but in purely human terms, you are all depraved.”
He was about as impressed as the Spanish fascists were with Unamono’s denunciation. He didn’t bat an eyelash. He reached down and grabbed another sheet of mimeographed paper. On the top of this one was a single word.
It said: enemy.
“You are now in a condition of enemy,” he said.
“How did that happen?” I exploded. “I was just a suppressive person.”
“Please read the conditions,” he said, and handed me a book. It was the Scientology Ethics Handbook. As an enemy, I was informed, I could be beaten up, have my apartment ransacked, and my business destroyed by Scientologists. I took this as serious enough, but learned that I was lucky not to be any higher in the organization. For if I were in an advanced org, i.e., organization, and I became an enemy, I would be confined to quarters, forced to wear a gray armband, and constrained to perform acts above and beyond the call of duty to be reinstated, plus getting the individual consent of every person in the org to let me back in. By this time, I was sweating visibly. I had visions of assassinations.
“What do I have to do to stop being an enemy?” I croaked.
His eyes directed me to the sheet. It had one sentence. It read: find out who you are.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Whoever had put this thing together had constructed the nightmare down to its final imbecile conclusion, and the whole scene was held together by an impeccable inner logic. I looked up at the fish. “I have spent my entire life, and will spend the rest of my life, doing little more than asking myself that single question, and you dare to present it to me in this debased and mindless form. Fuck you!”
He wasn’t impressed. He took a folder off the desk and put it into a file drawer with a large lock on it. “What’s that?” I said. “Your file,” he answered. I gazed at the file cabinet, horrified. In that file was everything I had said to Lana, the countless papers I had signed, a documented transcript of all my political crimes. The FBI had my life story in their files, but the Scientologists were cataloging my soul.
My mind raced ahead. What if they did become the political influence they were trying to be? What if they assumed real power? I screamed inside.
“You may go,” he said.
I was a broken man. “Is there any way for me to stop being an enemy?” I asked. “Not unless you meet the condition,” he said. “Or . . . every so often L. Ron Hubbard issues a general amnesty. The last one was two years ago.” He pointed to a telegram tacked to the wall above my head. Sure enough, the man had ordered that all political crimes be forgiven and all files be destroyed.
“As of now,” he said, “you may not enter any Scientology office, and if you do come back, you may not progress beyond Level Four.”
At that, he motioned to another man in the room, and the two of them escorted me to the door.
For the following month, I saw Scientologists everywhere. I suspected cabdrivers, people walking next to me on the street, delivery men.
I was certain that I would come home one night to find the Ethics Officer calmly waiting in the kitchen, smoking Balkan cigarettes, pointing a small-bore pistol with a silencer on it at my chest, with Aster lying naked in the bedroom, having achieved her revenge by betraying me to the foe.
There was nothing for it. I had to leave. My free-lance work offered no satisfaction, the air in the city was unbreathable, everything I touched crumbled, and anything I had thought to be a stable influence in my life was proving to be yet another menacing illusion. I arranged to sell my pad and furniture and books, and reduced all my possessions to what would fit into the back of a station wagon. I decided to go west!
I gave a farewell party to which I invited everyone I knew, some hundred and fifty people who had been and were lovers, friends, close acquaintances. It was like a cheerful wake. Although most of the people didn’t know one another, since all my scenes were scattered, everyone was able to communicate using me as a focus. And through a fog of low, warm conversation, I drifted around, saying my farewells to each of the people there, giving them what seemed like my final words.
Since then, I have had almost nothing to do with Scientology, except for meeting people who were in various states of rapture or disillusionment with the organization. There has been some public recognition of Scientology in the popular press. England has declared them a menace, although they flourish in South Africa. William Burroughs brought his junk-addled mind to bear on the problem, and after being processed emerged with an odd attitude of complacent criticism.
Meanwhile, the Sea Org has some seven yachts, roaming the seas of the world, calling unobtrusively at all the ports of all the nations, gathering data. And late at night, the dreams are spun, of how there will be a government of the world centered in North Africa, where all the countries will send their kings and presidents. And this world union will have its own army, the only army, while each nation will be allowed its own internal policing. And behind this neo-Pharaohnic throne, like the Jesuits in the Vatican, the Scien-tologists will advise on how the human race should be run.
Aster and I left on a hot July afternoon, saying good-bye to my mother under the El on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, as she went off to her job supervising forty Cuban refugee women who strung beads for a costume jeweler at a dollar an hour in one of our latter-day sweatshops. It took five days and two thousand miles for me to shed the immediate buzz of panic which had begun to drive me mad in New York. And as the vastness of America unrolled before my eyes, I began to breathe again.
But when I got to San Francisco, other modes of insanity were lying in wait, ready to ensnare my mind.
3
I found a place in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, a hippie hobbitland at the end of the Mission District. It was an old Italian neighborhood where goats had once grazed on the hill which now served as the base for a giant Army radar screen. It was now peopled by a goodly number of heads who had much of the gentle anonymity of the early Haight love children. Aster and I came to an abrupt parting of the ways since the excitement of travel had somewhat supplanted the intensity of our sexual trip, and we were left with only the hate portion of the relationship. She split for a farm in Oregon and within a few weeks I found myself the sole inhabitant of a damp apartment that overlooked a dead-end street in the front, and opened on to a garden in the back.
Next door were Fred and Melissa who had been living together for two years, erupting every two months in another “final” separation which lasted for a week or so. Pat lived upstairs, a wise old/young lady of twenty-six years who read Doris Lessing and listened to Satie as she smoked each day away in vaguely pointed yearnings. Later, for a while, Leah was to be with me, my bisexual sister of a hundred encounters, with abyss-suggesting brown Taurus eyes and entrancingly small breasts. Across the way were Harry and Mary, a psychedelic version of the nice American couple. He played guitar and fixed motorcycles, while she tried to keep the house together and make babies. Above them were Paul and Cheryl who were later to become Christians.
Although I had about two thousand dollars and a car, easily enough to live on for six months on the Coast, I still had my New York habits, and was soon busy looking for something to “do.” My best gig was, ironically enough, teaching classes in relaxation, which involved getting people just to lie down and breathe, until they entered a state of light hypnotism, at which time I would take them on mind trips. I had learned the gimmick some years earlier while working with a fearless and feckless therapist who kept rediscovering the psychological wheel. Every month she would come roaring in with a new theory, only to have it pointed out to her that Freud or Aristotle or Buddha or somebody had written it all down years before. I was her patient for a year, her partner for six months, and her therapist for six months after that. It was a strange relationship, but one which taught me more than a little about how simple it is to mold people in any direction whatsoever. During that time we stumbled onto Reichian breathing, thought transfer, body language, and the whole panoply of jargonized insights which has since made Esalen such a pile of loot.
I now began tracking down encounter group leaders through the Barb, and finally found myself at San Francisco State College, where the Experimental College on campus was in the midst of transforming the structure of education.
My introduction to the scene was through Loren Jones. Loren is a rare combination of scholar and revolutionary. He had been initiated by one of the secret esoteric orders, and could make a candle flame do tricks at ten paces. He was short, due to a spine defect which kept him in continual pain, and wore a noble beard. In all, a kind of hippie Toulouse-Lautrec.
The Experimental College was one of a group of student organizations, along with the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, which was in the process of radicalizing the almost thirty thousand students on campus. In addition, there were the usual splinter groups of political crazies, SDS, PL, and ad hoc freak brigades who wanted everything from instant assassination of Reagan to an end of Western civilization.
The EC was, unquestionably, the most successful and least overtly threatening of all the groups. It was looked upon benignly by the administration because its courses consisted largely of things like astrology, dance, poetry, and the other unmartial arts. When I arrived in September, they were about to hold an open registration, to run for an entire day. The approach was simplicity itself. Anyone who wanted to teach wrote up his course description in a catalogue. On registration day, each would-be teacher would stand under a sign listing his course, and students would have a chance to dig on the person teaching as well as the formal catalogue blurb. The class size was limited by the appeal of the teacher. The college allowed no credits for any courses taken at the EC, but this didn’t stop students from signing up for as many as six courses, while letting their official schoolwork drop.
The reason was clear. Most of the people at the EC were young, or knew what the young mind is about. The course descriptions covered a general area, but almost every course at the EC had a single subject matter: life. How to live well, fully. The aridity of the academic curriculum stood out in sharp contrast to the joyously pragmatic attitude of the counter-college. And the beauty of the entire scene was that the administration was so busy looking in the closets of the overtly political organizations that they missed the fact that the real revolution was taking place in that hotbed of freaks in the gaudily painted barracks at the center of campus. Because the EC was allowing the students to dance and laugh and exult, to let their minds roam freely, to take pride in their sex and demand honor in their relations with their fellow men. And this is what the right- and left-wing fascists cannot stand: the sheer exuberance of living. It is not a political question; it is a question of being.
That year, the registration was to take in over three thousand students, and this was only in its second year of functioning. Registration day was like a flea market of the mind, with every frustrated teache
r, homegrown guru, and visionary in the Bay Area hawking his psychic wares to the young people coming through. It was held in the Gallery Lounge, a great flat building which someone had the sense to leave completely empty. Of course, everyone was stoned, on grass, on good vibrations, and the wild music of the young Hassidim from the House of Love and Prayer. It was a day of Renaissance, a birthday party for the new culture.
The EC itself was autocratically run, by the EC “staff.” At their head was Evan Standard, a twenty-six-year-old leonine and pockmarked saint. He was gaunt, with teeth missing, and a shock of hair and beard that totally covered his face and shoulders. As with most of the heavies there, he was thoroughly well-read in all matters of the metaphysical and occult, mostly through an Oriental bias. His major mode of expression was the guffaw.
Loren Jones was his right-hand man. During meetings Evan would sit, his six-inch aura dominating the room, with Loren next to him, cooling off the vibes. The rest of the staff were second-stringers, good people but not in the same class as the boss. Later, when I had precipitated a crisis by attempting to force my admission to the staff, Evan blocked my entry and disillusioned the others, who were under the impression that the staff was a democratic group. At the meeting, Loren announced to the group, “Evan is the EC. And I am here to protect him. That’s the way it is, and nobody here have any notions to the contrary.” I had succeeded in blowing the lid off the scene, and for my pains suffered ostracism from the overlord and his underlings.