by Marco Vassi
At this time, my experience with communes was limited to the one that I had visited in Oregon. That was a forty-acre farm which had a dropout mathematician as its head. He did free-lance computer programming to support the place, and ran the farm on pure communist principles. Everything was held in common, including clothing and sexual partners. It was a sort of intellectual Tobacco Road, since most of the people there were from the cities and had fairly good educational backgrounds but had decided to drop all the civilization games. Their major activities were farming, cooking, and fucking. Everyone had his or her own room, or nest, and there was a large common bedroom for group sex in the main house. They were people totally without ambition and lived for no other reason except the living. After two years, they had transmogrified into a large, amorphous family. Interestingly, most of them were from Minnesota, and were in contact with the great Minnesota dope circle that operated up and down the Coast. At the commune, grass came in kilos and acid came in numbers.
Olompali was quite different, since it was close to San Francisco and was plugged in to the urban scene very heavily. The mise-en-scène the day Leah and I visited was extraordinary; they were having a party. Hundreds of acres of rolling hills, horses cantering by, a huge, sparkling swimming pool, and almost five hundred men, women, and children. The dress ranged from nudity to Renaissance gear. The entire mood was one of freedom. Here were a horde of strangers, suddenly thrown into an intimate and random situation, with the result being a peaceful and loving communion. Some years later, Woodstock was to attain national prominence for the same scene, only over three days and with half a million people. But the seeds had been planted long before in places like Olompali up and down the West Coast.
There was some desultory music-making and dancing, until, around two o’clock, a middle-aged man with a shaved head walked out to the table near the pool and plunked down two plastic bags. It was four pounds of pure THC. He looked around at the assemblage and with a small smile said, “Cocktails.”
By two and threes we worked our way to the source. I had never had the stuff before, so I didn’t know how to judge amount. As usual, I was ready to err in the direction of too much. I took four hits, two in each nostril, and then waited for some fifteen minutes. I felt a slow rise, and had four more hits. I was chatting with a bearded blond boy who suddenly began to look like an ancient Greek, when my body dissolved into a mass of watery pinpricks. I got hung up on the fear flash which often accompanies such sudden changes in the state of the sensorium, and immediately walked off by myself to wait until the mood passed. I walked halfway to the large house when I turned, saw Leah, now also quite stoned, looking at me with knowing affection, and then, without warning, we were both racing for the pool, only to dive wildly in, laughing and quite prepared to drown.
We didn’t leave the water for four hours. During that time all the possible sea changes took place. We became fish, we became seals, became coral reefs. At one point, Leah did a bit of womb therapy on me, allowing me to float in her arms in the water until every last bit of tension had washed out of my body and I had regressed to the consciousness of an embryo.
Midway through the madness, a naked young man with a Roman helmet on surfaced near me. He blew the water away from his face, turned to me and shouted, “To all good things of the earth you are invited; the price of admission is sin.” And then dove under the water and swam away, helmet and all.
Our paths kept crossing, as well as those of several others. Leah and I found ourselves part of a group. Before we fully realized it, we had become a troupe, doing psychedelic guerrilla theater in an arena which was already in the upper realms of living theater. With the heat and the dope and fantastic vibrations and naked bodies and period costumes, all sense of the twentieth century had disappeared. We were in a timeless state. And while this is common enough when one gets stoned, it rarely happens with so many people in such perfect communion.
We came to name our group, “the Verbals — a Mime Troupe,” and began with some of the usual games. We did a finger lift, laying Leah down and lifting her with our forefingers, just five of us using one finger apiece. We built a human monkey cage, and did parodies of every movie ever made (“You there, down in the life raft”). Terms like “reality” and “fantasy” became utterly meaningless, for we were in the realm of pure play.
When the sun began to go down, many of the people began to get worried. We all flashed the existential dilemma of our reliance on the sun, that source of all life which is so obvious we come, stupidly, to take it for granted and forget, each day, to reel in the wonder of its existence. “What if it doesn’t come up tomorrow?” someone asked. Our troupe went from person to person, trying to find a volunteer to take care of the sun’s rising in the morning. Finally, we found someone ready for the responsibility. We put him in our astral elevator and went up to the sixth dimension, and left him off, where he promised faithfully to insure that we would indeed have a dawn the following day.
And now a strange thing happened. The guests began to leave and each of the families came down by the pool, and stood in knots on the grass, watching us. The Verbals took stock. We were not only strangers to them, but we did not know one another. A moment of decision came down, and all at once, we began, raggedly at first, a long ululating howl, aimed directly at the moon, and in a moment, we were sending up the most beautiful wavering cries of passion and longing that had been heard in those hills since the wolves had been driven out. Soon, the other families joined in, and before long, the entire night sky resounded with the untrammeled vibrato of human voices in their full power and expression. I remember thinking that if any of the straight people from the outside world had come in at that moment, they would have thought us insane, and the next day would have filled the gray morning of millions of office slaves with the newspaper pictures of bearded and naked loonies howling at the stars. How far civilization has brought man down, to the status of a frightened cloth robot who cannot understand the joy of sheer exuberance.
The cries died down, the families began making for their rooms, and we knew that we were in. The man with the shaved head came up and invited us to his room. And then the trip began to get really strange. I had finished reading The Magus not too long before, and suddenly I saw our mysterious host as Conchis, and me as the fuddled Englishman. We entered the main house, and went up the baroque stairway. The scene became Fellini, and as we wound our way upstairs, we started to chant Gregorian hymns.
His room was done in rich rock style. Silk banners and grotesque posters and cunningly arranged lights. Half the room was a bed that stretched twenty by twenty feet. We settled down and our host began to roll hash joints as big as a ring finger. Opium appeared. Trays and tumblers of cocaine. Harry began doing imitations of hash peddlers in Morocco and then sang “Codeine.”
It is impossible to describe just how high we got. Our mysterious benefactor kept nodding and saying, “You people are fantastic. I would like to back you as a group.” And then smiling wickedly and adding, “What else can you do?”
Of course! I immediately flashed that he wanted us to perform an orgy for him. I went up to him, took him aside, and said, “Is it you, Mr. Conchis?” His eyes gleamed. “Don’t tell the others,” he said.
By this time I had relegated critical judgment to the level of obstruction. Everything was happening too high too fast for me even to begin to stop for questions. The only confusion came in, as always, when it became clear to me that the others were getting an entirely different reading from the scene. I realized that this reality, as all realities, was totally open-ended and could develop in any direction whatsoever. I thought I knew what the director had in mind, and even had his mysterious wink to use as evidence. But the others were drifting off into unknown realms. Paranoia set in.
I began to get nervous. I started opening and closing windows. I searched for clues to verify my existence. None was forthcoming. Each of us had consume
d about half a pound of dope apiece, just in weight alone, not counting quality and kind. And the lines of communication had not been checked at each point along the way. Everything was going so well that I assumed that everyone was on the same trip. And now, as I felt forced to some kind of decision, there was no one to talk to. The formerly friendly faces of the others began to look sinister, and the random events of the day seemed, in retrospect, to be part of an enmeshing pattern. It reached a point of gibbering panic when, like an angel of mercy, Leah came up to me.
“Let’s split,” she said. “I can’t take these vibes any longer.” Gratefully, I led her out to the car.
The car! I realized that I had to drive over forty miles back to San Francisco, and I didn’t even know what my name was. Extreme circumstances make for heroes and fools, and a bit of both. I started back. One of the discoveries I made during that trip of two eternities was the probable reason why accidents happen so readily on highways. My body had been extremely sensitized by the drugs, and I got into the rhythm of the tires on the road. In that direction, it was all soft, all air and rubber, so much so that I forgot the steel and glass component of the car. At one point, I was dreaming along, anesthetized by the soft swaying of the machine, when I became suddenly aware that I was in an iron juggernaut, hurtling down a black ribbon of highway, with other monster machines whizzing by within inches of me. I freaked, but there was nothing to do except trust my instincts and keep going forward.
I found the perfect speed to be 371/2 miles an hour. Faster than that, and the road blurred; slower, and the wheel wavered. I came upon stoplights like a diver coming upon a sunken galleon, foggily, as from a great distance. Interestingly, although my mind was lost in some lotus land of indescribable fantasy, my physical reflexes remained perfect, and I brought the car to rest in front of my house with the delicacy of a ship landing on the moon.
For weeks afterward I floated on the high I received that day, digesting it, reliving it, weeping at the sheer beauty of it, tortured because I knew such a time could never be repeated, could never be accurately described. It was one of those moments that make one realize the poignancy of the haiku which goes, “‘How exquisite,’ I say, but with each thing I see, spring passes.”
Yet, that was not the heaviest of things which happened during the Haight sojourn. I had yet to come into contact with Frontiers of Science.
Since I was used to the New York brand of scene, with its rapid-fire punch and localized geography, it took some time before I could see the pattern of places and events which Rod Confers had put together. He was a physicist who claimed to have been taken up by a flying saucer one night and given a mission to turn on the world. It was part of the sublime naïveté of the man that when he told the story, it was impossible not to believe him. He held Wednesday and Thursday night gatherings, usually in the Grace Memorial Church and at the College of Marin. His basic trip was the formation of a kind of humanistic religion based on scientific principles, and he rented a huge run-down country club a few hundred miles north of San Francisco, where he began to put together one of the most outlandish communes on the Coast.
In the beginning, he attracted only true believers. These were people who fell into his scene the way I had dropped into Scientology. The essential difference was that Rod had no power trip going, nor any plans for world domination. Also, no money lined his pockets. In the beginning, one heard him talk, was moved, and simply turned over all one’s belongings to the Foundation. They took money, clothes, car, etc., and in return you were given a room, fed, and allowed to become one of the family.
The notion of “family” is a very important one on the Coast. One belongs or one doesn’t, and as in any family, there are no identification cards or passwords. You are known simply by your own face. This is why, when people went up to Harbinger Springs — the name of the place where Frontiers had its home — and asked if they could join, they were given a very elaborate runaround. If one felt he were part of the family, he just stayed, and then let the others decide on whether he could remain or not. As with so much else in California, a tacit agreement went a long way, and anyone who tried to be too explicit about things was vastly suspect.
The scene at Harbinger rapidly became one of dope and spirituality. The notion was that if a group of people could get it together and raise huge positive vibes, they would form a center from which salvation would flow. They did some dabbling in orgone meters, and were quite orthodox about diet. They also had some of the most beautiful hot spring baths in the area, and on any given afternoon there would be a small group of people sitting in the healing waters, gently stoned and smiling at one another.
Before long, they began to attract the attention of the straight world. They started to interest IBM executives and mathematicians and scientists from all parts of the country. The appeal was easy to understand. These were brilliant and sensitive men who had all their lives been channeled into the one arena society opened to them, and while they found its money and prestige and opportunity to use their brains attractive, they hated the regimentation, the deadly dullness of conformity and superficiality. Many of them also loathed the military meatheads who were turning their efforts into more vicious weapons of genocide.
Now, at Harbinger, they could move in a company of peers, for along with Confers there were gathered some of the finest acid minds of the day. The thing with LSD — which Confers himself never took, oddly enough — is that it illumines all the natural propensities and conditioning of the individual. The problem is that it has been taken mostly by people with little sense of culture or education, and has thereby bred an entire generation of idiots savants. One meets them constantly in California, smiling, wise, somber men whose eyes reflect the profundity of the sages, and yet who can barely string together two sentences in any kind of articulate discourse. At Frontiers, there were people who had a high degree of native intelligence, who were well educated, and who had mastered the vicissitudes of acid. In addition, there was the countryside, hundreds of luscious and often nude women, healthy babies, and pulse-pounding music.
Within a short while, Frontiers had become the psychedelic country club of the nation’s hip intelligentsia. If it had continued to succeed, it might have turned on an army of men who live at the heart of machine-America, inside the veins and arteries of its computers. But the government could not allow such diabolic rites in the woods to exist for long. At first, the local cops began harassment. They found health violations, and when these were taken care of, they began “looking for runaways.” One memorable night, six stalwarts from the local constabulary, pudgy and apple-cheeked innocents from the boondocks of northern California, pulled a surprise raid. Except it was they who suffered the greater surprise. They found six or seven hundred naked freaks, dancing and swilling acid punch, setting up a soaring cry which set the leaves on the trees to spinning. They rushed into the dining hall where the bulk of the party was going on, and froze to the spot. To a man, they blushed. They stated their official business, which was looking for underage runaways, and then quickly left, but not before four of them had been approached by a number of people and asked to come back when they were off-duty. The next step was to humanize the police.
Yet, from that day on, the group’s days were numbered. For in addition to outside pressure, they suffered from internal disunion. Less and less emphasis was put on work; more and more the place became a great sloppy crash pad in the woods. Money ran out, and hidden jealousies and suspicions sprang to the fore. Every two weeks saw a new regimen posted on one of the bulletin boards, and as any veteran of communes knows, once the rules have to be promulgated in print, the organization has become as rigid as the society which had been fled from.
My finest memory of Frontiers comes, however, from one of the way stations that had begun to spring up around the organization. Since the Springs could accommodate only so many people, those who were quasi members had begun to set up a series of
houses going from Vancouver to Big Sur. They had no official status, but once one cracked the Frontiers circuit, it was possible to live for months without money, simply traveling from house to house in the company of hundreds of other members of this subculture of a subculture. Again, to become part of the family involved learning a set of extremely subtle responses and mannerisms, none of which could be described by anything short of a kinesicist and video camera. Since I am a chameleon on the level of personality, it took no great trouble to blend in with the mix, and one weekend I found myself with almost eighty others in a haunted chalet at Clear Lake, near Ukiah (which, as someone pointed out, is “haiku” spelled backwards).
The people there were mostly between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, and were typical of the young acid graduates who lack the critical intelligence to view themselves as products of history as well as of eternity. These are the kids who speak with a vague optimism about the Aquarian Age, and in the face of the most mammoth evils maintain a faith in the salvageability of man that is simultaneously inspiring and appalling. They remind one of the ancient Chinese maxim which runs, “When the people begin to use auguries and superstitions to solve the problems of daily living, one may know that the state is in decay.”
Any attempt at perspective was taken by them as bad vibes, or paranoia. They had not yet reached the stage of understanding that the existence of real enemies is one of the ground rules of life, for all species. They were still at that vulgar level of misunderstanding which equates the Buddhist Nirvana with the Christian notion of Paradise.
The three days there were typical. Dozens of people came and went. Sacks of grain appeared mysteriously. No one had any money, no one had any plans, no one knew who lived there or how the rent was paid. Somehow, the house existed as an energy center and served as a focal point for a continual grouping and regrouping of these mangy ministers of some obscure god. They were as lovable as they were infuriating.