by Marco Vassi
Finally, she did leave him, and went to stay at her cousin’s house, which was a Christian community north of the city. She returned two weeks later, burning with an inner light, and I agreed to go with her to meet the people who had brought about the change in her. Paul had immediately bought the trip; more, I suspect, to save his marriage than out of any deep conviction, although the Christian rhetoric fit in perfectly with the selfless life he was already living.
At the commune there were the usual percentages of fanatics, lunatics, and sincerely intelligent people. The house was led by Steven, whose notion of Christianity was simply to “be all things to all men.” But it also included Walter who kept laying down, in Steven’s words, “that godawful pentecostal rap.” Walter was Cheryl’s cousin’s fiancé.
Of course, they tried to convert me. Time and again I patiently explained to Paul that while I empathized with his truth, I could only see it as a solution congenial to him, not to me. With untiring goodwill, he continued to try to bring my soul to Jesus. I did the Bible thumper’s equivalent of selling the Worker, accompanying them to the Haight, to bring light into the hearts of the erring hippies. It was quite tricky, attempting to keep Paul’s friendship while fending off his attempts to drag me into his metaphor. Accompanying him on his conversion crusades was a way of keeping all bases covered.
One night, after a day on the salvation trail, and after a beautiful dinner at their home, I went out to look at the stars and smoke some grass. A feeling of bliss and love for all mankind filled my heart, so peaceful was the evening. I went back to Paul’s to share my feeling with them, and tried to convey it in words I thought they could appreciate. “I feel that God is within me tonight,” I said to them.
They immediately leapt to. Now was the time, urged Paul, now was the moment when I should accept Jesus into my heart. I began to remonstrate, but some yielding took place inside me and I said instead, “All right, Paul, if you can convince me, I’ll become a Christian.”
We sat down facing one another, and a lovely brotherliness shone in his face. At that moment, I really loved him.
“What times cause you the most pain?” he began.
I paused for a moment.
“Isn’t it when you are most confused?” he continued.
I thought a bit. Yes, when things were clear, they were tolerable. It was only when I no longer knew who I was or what was happening that I became unhappy. I agreed with him, my estimate of his perspicacity going up somewhat.
He leaned forward. “Now,” he said, “confusion is the weapon of the Devil. It’s the Devil who makes your mind all muddy.”
I considered that. Yes, it certainly felt that way sometimes, as though some evil force were entering me and driving out all the joy and intelligence. I was willing to accept the Devil metaphor, but when I told him that, it sounded as though I were recognizing an actual demonic entity, not merely a symbol.
“The Devil begins by injecting doubt into your heart. He makes you believe that God doesn’t exist, that life is a pathway to sin, and that only your greed and pride should be served.”
A light bulb went on over my head. It was beginning to make sense! “Go on,” I said.
“It is doubt which confounds you,” he said.
“Yes, I can see that,” I said. “But what do I do about doubt? How can I handle it?”
He looked straight at me. “Jesus said, ‘Cast out doubt.’ “
I looked up, a slow smile forming on my lips. “Of course,” I said. The logic was unassailable. “How do you cast out doubt?” I asked.
“That’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Paul. “Just believe.”
“Believe?” I said. “Believe in what?”
And with a voice like thunder he laid it on me. “BELIEVE IN JESUS AND YOU SHALL BE SAVED!”
It was as though lightning struck my brain. I saw how, in a single gesture, I could solve all the problems of my entire life, simply by putting all of my confusions in the hands of Jesus. It made no difference what my intellect thought of the matter, my emotion reigned supreme. I jumped up from my chair, grace pouring down on me from Heaven.
“I believe!” I shouted.
“Say, ‘I believe in Jesus,’ “ said Paul.
I lifted my hand in the air, very giddy by now, and sang out, “I BELIEVE IN JESUS!”
“HALLELUJAH!” shouted Paul.
“PRAISE BE!” Cheryl said.
And all three of us stood there jiggling and beaming, oozing energy out of our pores and into the rocketing space of their small living room. I fell back down into the chair, elated and stunned.
A vibrating white glow seemed to light on all the objects in the room, and I became aware of the sheer presence of everything. “God is here,” said Paul, so simply, so matter-of-factly, that I bowed my head before the reality of that.
“I’ll have to give up my sophistication,” I thought. “Your sophistication isn’t worth anything anyway,” Cheryl said, and I looked up at her, amazed.
“Perhaps I’ll be the first saint of the Aquarian Age,” I thought as my fantasy machine began leeching off all the liberated energy in my system. I realized that I was playing with potentially dangerous, very powerful psychic dynamics. I had seen these two people undergo radical changes overnight. The scene had me very high.
But, of course, Satan was waiting in the wings. I developed a crush on Laura, Cheryl’s friend. Her fiancé, Walter, was an ex-con, ex-Marine, ex-speed freak, who was willing to kill for Jesus. His main rap was fire and brimstone and war on atheistic communism. And he was very suspicious of me, although he was willing to accept my conversion at face value.
One afternoon, I went to Paul’s and found Laura there alone. She gave me some coffee, and for a while we made some holy small talk and laced our sentences with “Praise be,” and then just once, in the midst of the scene, looked straight into one another’s eyes. And that did it. Pure lust smoldered. Instant flashes of fornication exploded all around us. All the hidden excitement of forbidden sex inflamed our limbs. I had grown so blasé in the air of sexual permissiveness which I breathed in the circles I traveled, that I had forgotten how delicious it could be to break a commandment. It also gave me an insight into the words a veteran Christian had once told me: “You don’t know what fucking is until you and your wife fuck in Jesus’ name.” I experienced the truth of it a while later when Leah also stumbled into Paul and Cheryl’s one afternoon and also converted for a day. That night, while coming, she spread her arms wide and shouted, “Oh fuck me, Jesus!” And with Jesus backing me up, so to speak, I sailed into an orgasm that I had never attained on the purely material plane.
Laura and I stared at one another; we were trembling. She reached out and took my hands. “Let us pray,” she said, and sank to her knees. I knelt down with her. We came close, our hands holding, our chests almost touching. Sublimation had never scaled higher peaks. “O Lord . . . “ she began, and our mouths moved ever so slightly toward each other when, suddenly, loud footsteps clunked on the wooden stairs outside.
She turned sheet-white. “It’s Walter,” she said.
Now, theoretically, we weren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, her fiancé should have been pleased to find his old lady leading a recent convert in prayer. But sex hung heavy enough in the air to be smelled by anyone who walked in. She jumped up. I jumped up. We stood there in confusion (the Devil again!) and looked classically guilty as he came in the door. He took one look, and he KNEW.
Laura ran out of the room. Walter dropped the groceries he was carrying and advanced on me with clenched fists. Mutilation was close when, with a brilliant inspiration, I snatched up a Bible, brandished it before me, and yelled, “In Jesus’ name, I ask you to consider.”
The conflicting emotions of murderous rage and ideological commitment stormed inside him. But that stopped him long enough for me to regain my balance, an
d I said, very quickly and forcibly, “We were praying, Brother Walter. You startled us.” He gave me a wary glance and went into the other room. In a few moments I heard shouting and thumping and a woman’s crying. After a while, he came back in. He was sober and deadly.
“Laura told me what happened,” he said, and from the way he said it I knew the game was up. “In a Christian marriage,” he continued, “the woman is beholding to the man, and the man is beholding to God. I can’t allow anyone to come in the way. So you leave, and never come back, and pray to Jesus to save your rotten soul.”
It was with this baggage that I entered my fourth class at the Gallery Lounge. I gave a stem lecture to the now more than two hundred eager faces waiting for bigger and better orgies. I spoke to them of the need for sobriety, and warned that, from now on, there would be no such shenanigans as took place the week before. I canceled the class for the night and told them that only those who were serious about using the body as a vehicle to reach the Holy Spirit should come back.
There was much shuffling, but I ended the talk by standing up and walking out. Several people stopped me. Among them was a young sophomore who assured me that I was the holiest man he had ever known. While another young man, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and who was very hip in the ways of being stoned, just looked at me a long while, and then shook his head and said, “Far out.”
During the following week, I woke up from the spell, and relegated my conversion to the long list of experiences which make up the mosaic of life. I was at a loss as to what to do for my next class, but never had to make that decision, for the students called for a general strike against the college.
Reagan, having become hip to the influence of student groups on campus, was maneuvering for a cutback of funds from all left-wing student organizations. The political crazies panicked, and at a meeting of the EC the next day, I was informed of the decision to strike. The Experimental College had come to an internal decision to vote against the strike, arguing that to strike would be to call in the police, and to call in the police would be to squash all freedom on campus.
But the prevailing opinion of the other groups was against them, so they went along with the majority. And so, the strike that was to enter history began.
At a general meeting of all the student organizations, the Panthers dropped by. Since they had no immediate involvement at the school, they decided not to intervene, but were explicit about their advice, which was addressed mainly to Progressive Labor. “If anybody starts any violence, they gonna answer to us, and we gonna kick ass.” PL got surly, but in the face of overpowering brawn, they acquiesced, and the strike was peaceful for a while, until the momentum of events swept everyone away.
I remembered when I first came into contact with Progressive Labor. Milt Rosen had just been expelled from the Party and was starting his Maoist wing. The people he gathered around him were all young pros, capable of creating a disturbance and hypnotizing a meeting. But there was something seedy about the lot of them. As Alan Krebs once observed, “Marginal institutions attract marginal people.” I sat in on a few of the early meetings Milt had, and found them even more tedious and regimented than those of the Party. There was an incredibly fanatic need to translate every facet of human experience into the collected works of Mao Tse-tung. Possibly no greater tunnel vision has existed since the days of the Inquisition.
One day, on campus, I had passed one of the many tables that different groups placed in front of the student cafeteria. I saw the PL banner, and a twinge of nostalgia gripped me. There was the usual stringy girl behind the table, with the same expression of beady intensity that marks a PL-er more clearly than any membership form. I smiled at her, and she greeted me with disdain, since I was quite stoned and dressed in an Indian robe. Nothing daunted, I started a conversation.
“PL,” I said, “I remember when Milt Rosen started PL.”
Her eyes lit up. “You know Milt Rosen?” she gasped.
“Knew him,” I said. “I’m not in touch anymore.”
Her attitude softened. “Yes,” I said, “I was there when he was expelled from the Party.”
“He quit!” she shot back.
I answered with a wave of my hand. “What are you people into now?” I asked.
She grew chatty. “Well, we’re mostly in the factories now, working with the consciousness of the workers.” Now, if there is any group more stolidly reactionary than the American working class, it must be the young Turks of PL. I was amused.
She looked at me suspiciously. “What are you doing now?” she said.
“Oh, I’m teaching relaxation,” I said.
She leapt up from the chair and almost spat at me. “Relaxation,” she said scornfully. “What’s that going to do for the working class?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Relax them, I guess. Make them less unimaginative.”
If she had had a gun she would have shot me, but that was not to be. The revenge of Progressive Labor was to come in adding poisoned fuel to the flames of the strike. SDS, of course, added its strident voice, calling for lists of nonnego-tiable demands. And the Black Student Union, with their Urban League mentality, got all liquored up at the prospect of being real militants. Great secret caucuses were held. Guns were strapped on. Plans were made to enlist the aid of all the student bodies of California, to close down the entire so-called educational system. I stepped out of my guru role for a minute, put on my political glasses, and offered an opinion that one should not call for violent revolution unless one were militarily stronger than the opponent, or unless one had the support of large masses of the people. But my voice was lost in the din.
It was laughable, in a tragic way, for the American ruling class, that odd amalgam of bankers, generals, top politicos, industrialists, oil barons, and heads of advertising agencies, has grown as stupid as dinosaurs in the ways of the world. They understand the fact of power, but have grown so lazy in their wealth that they have forgotten about the bases of power, and the ways in which they can be changed and lost. In short, they can’t recognize an enemy until the enemy hoists a great big sign on itself saying, “I am the enemy.”
Which is precisely what the strike accomplished.
It was the day before my thirty-first birthday, with Scorpio at the height of its influence, that the demonic forces were unleashed.
Overnight, the campus became a tense, ugly place. The radicals chanted, held mass rallies, presented demands, broke windows, and in general acted like a second-rate news-reel. There was the predictable litany of pompous speeches, much venting of justified rage, and the arrival of the police.
At the end of the first day, the spectacle had reached the point where the local SDS firebrand was shouting invectives at the administration building, while the college president, flanked by gray-faced attendants, stared at the students in stunned, stupid confusion. The twentieth century had just burst upon the poor man’s consciousness, and he was at a total loss as to how to relate to it.
The next day, I bought five hundred tabs of acid and flew back to New York, where I spent a paranoid ten days unsuccessfully trying to sell it to a city that was reeling from rumors of the Mafia’s putting strychnine in the LSD. “But this is pure,” I pleaded. “Right from the Coast.” The entire time was cold and bone-chilling, the telephone system suffering the first of its later-to-be-chronic breakdowns, the garbage men going out on strike, and the airlines grounding flights left and right. I finally got back, eight hundred dollars poorer, with a traveling lady of three days acquaintance who was drifting around the world at the time. But, by then, Hayakawa had arrived.
I caught his act a few times, and got bored. It saddened me that the hero of my youth, the man who first turned me on to language as a phenomenon, had become such an addled old romantic that he could, with clear conscience, make himself entirely misunderstood by the student body. After so many years as a
popularizer of other people’s thinking, he was finding his moment of original glory. It was a poor show for a semanticist.
The college finally returned to placidity, after most of the hip teachers and radical students had left or been fired. And the Experimental College became a memory in the hearts of those who, for one brief moment, saw a possible way out of the nutcracker which is crushing the skull of America. The tragedy is not that one or another political force had won, but that something beautiful and life-affirming was squashed in the nation’s forced march toward chaos and brutality.
Yet, in retrospect, I realize that the EC was only a dream. The sins of this nation have gone too long unpunished. And since we are the strongest military power in the world, retribution cannot come from outside. We are condemned by destiny to be our own torturers, judges, and executioners. We are doomed, like so many civilizations before us, to commit a ghastly suicide. And the only pity is that we may take the rest of life on earth with us.
But none of these considerations was active at the time, for I had begun to hear the siren call of Haight-Ashbury. I still had more than four hundred hits of acid left. I sold my car. And visited the Lexington and Concord of the Psychedelic Revolution.
4
The most pungent memory of those days was Olompali, a sprawling estate in Novato, northeast of San Francisco. It had a main house, and several cottages and stables, horses, dogs, and some forty families living there. The rent was paid by the son of a business magnate who had left over a million dollars for the supposed continuance of the family empire. But the son took the bread, dropped out, and began the support of a small portion of the Coast’s indigent people. Before long, Rancho Olompali had joined Morningstar and Frontiers of Science as one of the quasi-permanent scenes of the time.