by Marco Vassi
There was trouble with the town. The people there, like most people in small towns, were willing to be tolerant of anyone who didn’t blatantly upset the social ecology. If fifty freaks had moved into the old chalet, and held obscene orgies and cabalistic rites, no one would have objected so long as, during the daytime, they dressed and acted in a conventional fashion. One could understand their viewpoint; they were living way out of the city in order to escape the insanity of the city, and while they were closed to a good many things, and steeped in ignorance and prejudice, they could be friendly if one didn’t invade their homes with frightening displays of weirdness. But the young people had no sense of propriety. As far as they were concerned, the earth was theirs, totally, and they would allow others to live on it, as long as they didn’t interfere with their own sprawling, chaotic ways. They insisted on wearing the wildest of hippie-type costumes, and driving through the streets in psychedelically painted trucks. They flaunted their beards and bra-less chicks and smoked dope outrageously. Of course, they were merely flaunting their deep insecurity, but the effect was to give the insecurity a basis in reality. The townspeople began the usual harassment, beginning with edicts from the health inspector.
They were to be evicted some two months after the weekend I spent there, but that weekend ought to have been enough to rip the minds of any one of the good burghers if they had seen the goings-on. A good six hours after dinner was spent with serious turning-on. Several pounds of grass were smoked. Slowly, those who weren’t already coupled began to drift toward mates, and near midnight, we started moving toward the bedroom.
The bedroom was a single room, some sixty by sixty feet, totally covered with mattresses which had a single sheet over them. Some industrious chick had taken dozens of sheets, sewn them together, and made a covering for the state’s largest single bed.
Now, everyone there had to some degree or another dipped his hand into some form of pseudo-meditation, group chanting, massage, and relaxation. So, almost like saying prayers before bedtime, we began a round of head and body games, under the rubric of some eclectic Oriental structure. Within a short time, hands were kneading backs, nostrils blew in and out with alternate breathing, headstands were performed, and a low level sighing permeated the air. The scene lasted for half an hour or so, and then the lights were snapped out, as some forty couples lay down to sleep.
We formed a circle with all our feet toward the center, so that our bodies stretched out like spokes on a wheel. Within seconds, the sense of sexuality grew very heavy. Forty cocks lay to the ready; forty cunts yearned in secret anticipation. All the dope and gymnastics had worked everyone up into a fine sweat, and most of the people here were sexual strangers to one another, adding an edge of anticipatory excitement to the brew. All of that, coupled with the insane sense of religious fervor which sparked our every rustle, made the place as combustible as a Freedom March through Georgia.
Total silence ensued. Everyone was awake. Everyone knew everyone was awake. And everyone knew that everyone knew. And was waiting. A very long five minutes passed, and suddenly, from a segment of the wheel on the rim opposite from me, a sleeping bag rustled! Our ears strained to the sound. Another rustle. Silence. And then, the unmistakable slithering of a hand against fabric. And shortly after, a clear female sigh.
The room collectively relaxed.
The rest was fairly standard, except for the time intervals. Everything happened more slowly as the couple worked their way upstream through the consciousness of everyone else in the place. As for the rest of us, we had to navigate the waters of their fucking through sound alone.
Finally, we heard him mount, and the moaning explosion of breath as he entered, and then the joyous crying out as he moved inside her. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Ohhhh,” he said. “Ohhhh,” we all thought.
Of course, the domino effect took place. A few seconds later, a new moaning began. And then a third. And within five minutes, every single person in that room had thrown back his sleeping bag and was balling in full gusto. Cries rang out, and the air filled with the perfume of dozens of young snatches. It was the single most happy sexual time I had ever experienced, and more taboos came ringing down in an hour than Ellis was able to catalogue in a lifetime.
I found myself with a girl I knew slightly and a bullish young man who had attached himself to us. The three of us went at it, he with greater fervor than I since it was his first time with the woman. By the time everyone else had finished, he and she were still at it, and he bucked all his young strength into her as she let out the first uncensored yells of the night. Whereas everyone else had maintained a certain vocal discretion, Judy just lay back and wailed. At the height of her orgasm, someone switched the lights back on, and everyone else sat up, blinking, to see who was making all the noise. The two of them sat up after a moment and received the applause and cheers of their brothers and sisters with innocent smiles of joy.
We all smoked some more dope, the lights went out again, and one by one we fell asleep, to the sounds of stray couples who were having a second go at it. The next day we woke to a breakfast of fresh fruit and groats, and headed back to San Francisco.
During that time, I lived mostly in a commune on Waller Street. It was supported by Gerard, a dropout landlord who, one day, had sold all his houses in Philadelphia and decided to be a hippie, and then diligently set about learning how. I had met him in one of my classes at the Experimental College, and one afternoon, as I was waiting for a bus to take me to North Beach, he called to me from the second story of one of those Victorian houses which people the Haight like so many great Japanese wrestlers.
I went up, and found a family in the making. Gerard was there, a kind of benignly confused paterfamilias, paying the rent and buying some of the food, and in general walking the thin line between financial commitment and just being one of the gang. Ernesto was there, one of the true legends of the Haight, a fifty-year-old Italian who had dropped out at the age of forty-seven and become an actual saint, white-haired, bearded, gentle, pained, going from commune to commune, teaching them how to put together compost heaps, how to love one another. For all the time I knew him, he never carried a penny in his pocket, nor owned anything but the clothes on his back, nor had a home of his own. But the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head, and so forth, and Ernesto was the closest thing to the reincarnation of Jesus that I had ever seen, but with a jovial Italian pessimism instead of poor Christ’s Jewish schmerz.
Martin was there too, Ernesto’s brother, a gentle dock-worker who got high from running the length of Golden Gate Park every day. He lived in almost total silence and in complete simplicity, a younger version of the man his brother had become. Shirley lived there, in red-haired confusion. And Lucy Sunshine, who couldn’t stop smiling, except to cry. Gypsy, who couldn’t make the break with his criminal past.
In all, some two hundred people must have passed through those rooms in the few months I lived there. When I moved in, a decision was being made to close the place off, to try to bring the people living there together into a family. But the same problem kept tearing us apart: how to strike a balance between the need for privacy and intimacy which keeps a family together, and the desire to allow any one of the family who needed to crash to come in for as long as he needed. In this case, the notion of “family” extended to the entire human race.
The day I went there, I had a pocketful of acid with me, and Gerard decided to have a party in honor of the occasion of our meeting one another again. There were over forty people at the house that day, and I immediately went into the kitchen, poured four large containers of orange juice into a bowl, and dropped fifty tabs into the mix. We sat around sipping the brew until, about an hour later, everyone lifted off.
What happened during the next twenty-four hours was both the best and worst of acid. People standing for hours with their arms around one another’s shoulders, forming human flowers, chanting, having psy
chic orgasms. People freaking out when they would suddenly pop to and find themselves under a pile of bodies or looking out a window to a totally unrecognizable street scene in an alien universe. Comic vignettes such as a sensitive young girl staring for over an hour at a tall black man sitting totally fogged in a corner. He was gazing with empty eyes at his lap. As she looked at him, tears came to her eyes. Probably she was hallucinating some hallowed figure onto the man and mistaking his stupor for satori. Finally, she crawled over, put her face in his lap, and gave him a long and exquisite blowjob. When she finished, she looked up into his face and said, “Thank you.” And crawled away. I watched him for another ten minutes, during which time some very slow, very heavy changes went on in his face. The major question he seemed to be trying to decide was where in his obvious stream of hallucinations the scene with the chick would fit. I have often wondered whether he ever realized that what had happened was actual.
By the middle of the next afternoon, most of the people had left, with Gerard, Martin, Ernesto, and myself remaining as the males of the household, and Shirley, Sunshine, and Marilyn as the females.
Considering the fact that none of us had the slightest idea what we were doing, the commune held together very well for several months. It had a number of things going for it: the rent was paid, food was available, dope was plentiful, and there were always at least a few people with yang vibrations in the place. It became a center, and soon people from New Mexico and New York were coming through, crashing for a while on their way to other places. Everyone had a friend who had a friend who knew about the pad. We became terribly close, running as we were a cross between a psychedelic hotel and a church.
The pad was occasionally highlighted by someone of extraordinary capacities, such as Robert. He had been making the commune circuit, following the sun, for over ten years, and his ultimate ambition was to go to India to become a sun yogi where he would need to do nothing but sit and stare at the sun from morning to night, living on a bare handful of food each day. He was a master of asanas, although he never did a regular program of yoga. But every once in a while he would stand on his head or break into the fantastically difficult scorpion pose, as easily as anyone else might walk across the room.
He taught us the snore pose. It is used to stay awake while driving at night. The point is that one can’t sleep while someone is snoring, so if you do the snore pose yourself, you will keep yourself awake behind the wheel. He stayed for three weeks, during which time he hardly ever left his room. Mostly, he meditated, or read, or talked gently to whoever was there. Friends of his would come, including an old Okie couple right out of Steinbeck. The man was a toothless farmer who, when toking grass, would say, “O Lord, make me perfect, but not just yet.”
On one of his rare walks Robert met a young blind man who worked in one of the health food stores run by the Tibetan Mountain Yogis. They were a group of hard-climbing, hard-fucking types who went up Mount Tamalpais every week, there to sit and chant mantras late into the evening. Their trip was to grow organic vegetables on their country place, and sell them in their two stores in the city. Their goal was to open a school in which, as it said in their pamphlet, “it would be understood that we, the monks, would have no knowledge of those very subjects our school would teach. We would rely on the technical expertise of others to provide detailed knowledge.” They were a self-conscious hierarchy, and were sponsored by Lama Govinda, whose political nose had already smelled out the fact that the United States, and not Tibet, is the place to set up a spiritual autocracy. Their motto was, “The highest art is to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary manner.”
Technically, they allowed no drugs, but there was hardly a soul in San Francisco who didn’t do dope in one form or another. The blind cat had a freezer filled with peyote buttons which he used by boiling them into a soup and taking it via enemas, which allowed for rapid absorption and bypassed any risk of nausea. He came by with a few dozen buttons one day, and the bunch of us gobbled down the bitter fruit in between bites of banana. Robert began rapping about seeing the clear white light, and the blind cat kept hollering for him to shut up talking about light. We reached one of those points where everyone in the room was simultaneously sailing off into an unbearable awareness of the fact of our actually existing, there, in that time and place, when Robert remarked, “Oh, but it’s so obvious, so obvious that we should all one day be sitting here, in this room, with these people, understanding all these things.” My hair stood on end, and I stepped sideways into cosmic perception. One of the chicks was hit by the same revelation and began keening, “All hail to the Holy Truth, all hail to the Holy Truth.”
With the scene at the pad, spending long, amorphous afternoons smoking grass, swimming in people who were always strangers and always immediately intimates, moving in an ambience of religious vibration and political confusion, I began once more to slowly go mad.
To step outside the house was itself a trip of great magnitude. All around the Haight were the dregs of the psychedelic revolution, those few honest souls who still had faith in the Hashbury as a community, those who were trying to remind the others not to get lost in the miasma of speed and violence which rose from the streets, and those who had nothing left of their humanity except their physical bodies. To walk into the street was to confront the Diggers in their Free Store, the Hare Krishna freaks overcompensating for their basic cosmic insecurity. Lad playing his Kerista flute in the park.
A few blocks away was Golden Gate Park itself, and hippie hill, where the golden exhibitionists did their thing on sunny afternoons. Nearby was the Donut Shop, where the amphetamine heads nodded out until four in the morning, and Stanley the Astrologer got stabbed by a motorcycle gang because he was walking with a black friend who got killed that same night. From time to time, some of the Berkeley people would come by, wanting to sop up some of our relative peace and at the same time putting us all down for being apolitical.
I started to retreat into myself. I picked up, by some bizarre stroke of fate, DeRopp’s Master Came, the handbook of psychic fascism. And in the mornings, after breakfast at the Krishna Temple (which ended when they caught me wearing leather sandals), I would walk through the park, trying to “step into the silence.”
As I lost my own center, I began to become tyrannical with others. At the commune, I started to insist that we cut down on the number of people who could crash there. The family split into opposing camps. And finally Ernesto left, looking at me sadly and saying, “Someday you’ll learn that there’s no way to keep anybody out. Everybody is part of our family.”
I got onto a baroque Zen trip again, and took to wearing red robes and carrying a staff. I took the smallest room in the house, no larger than a pantry and having no windows, and fixed it up with madras cloths and pictures of Meher Baba. I went in heavy for incense and long hours of mysterious wall-gazing. I refused to laugh. I hid the rest of my acid. I stopped fucking. I felt an inner call to purify my people, to raise them above the level of mere getting stoned and thrashing about a crash pad.
“We must center ourselves, we must find our own soul, before we can help others,” I taught. “There must be silence in the house at all times, and one must speak only when there is something immediately necessary to say. Meditation is foremost. There will be hatha yoga every day. We will eat only rice.”
As usual in such circumstances, my program was met with the twin reactions of submission and hatred. Those who understood what I was trying to do responded to the honest attempt I was making to bring order out of confusion. For, with all the good times and parties, there was an underlying unhappiness from no one’s having the slightest sense of who he or she was, and covering that ignorance with jargon and drugs and activity. The others saw me merely as a troublemaker, one to be overthrown as quickly as possible. On occasion, one of my friends would drop in, and the response would be a snicker, a realization that I was on another one of my trips, and nothing c
ould be done with me for the duration of it.
But the fire was in me. I began to give classes again, only this time I didn’t have the restrictions of working on a college campus. Once again I discovered the great inner poverty in people which allows them to place themselves in the hands of total strangers, bringing their confusions and problems to someone who may be in deeper personal trouble than they. It was on the basis of this facet of human nature that the therapists, and priests, and gurus plied their trade. It was only necessary to let it be known that I was available for consultation, and people responded, almost certainly to the image of the man I was pretending to be.
And because I had begun to believe in myself, I manifested an energy which translated into consistency, and in any given endeavor, consistency is the major rule for success. As I became successful, I became outrageous. I took greater risks, feeling that I couldn’t fail. A girl came to me because she couldn’t get her warlock boyfriend out of her consciousness. She claimed that he would invade her mind each night, even when she slept alone, and bedevil her with his evil words. And at the same time, she couldn’t stop seeing him. What could she do?
“Take off your clothes,” I commanded. She did as I ordered.
“Lie down,” I said, “and spread your legs.” She did.
I picked up my staff and placed the tip of it against her cunt. “When you realize that the only interesting thing about you lies between your legs, and stop this fantasy concerning the value of your mind, you’ll have no further trouble with warlocks.”
She leapt up in anger, mortified. She began to reproach me. “Put on your clothes and get out,” I barked.
A week later, she returned. She wanted to thank me for the lesson, and told me that she was free of her boyfriend’s influence. But by this time I had forgotten what it was I had told her, being eyeball deep in a dozen other involvements at the time. She was quite put out and, I’m told, later spent a good deal of time talking about how the guru was a fraud.