by Marco Vassi
I made my first contact with him and with Lad, the pied piper of the love movement, through an exchange of letters when they had bought land on Roatán Island off British Honduras and were setting up the headquarters of a worldwide commune and hip travel agency. The notion was that there were hundreds of thousands of communitarians all over the planet, and if they could identify with a single organization, it would be possible for any of them to travel over the entire globe, visiting their spiritual landsmen who were recognizable as members of the family.
Concurrently, the sexual mores of the old civilization would break down, and new possibilities of mating and matching would come into focus, creating a milieu of total sexual liberation.
There were two difficulties. First, the very nature of the hip civilization involves its total unwillingness to identify with anything, much less a fanatic travel agency. Second, Pan is one of those men who are quite lovable but who have trouble getting laid, so his sexual libertarianism was always laced with a kind of resentment and urgency.
At one point, through their sheer novelty and the force of Pan’s personality, Kerista was managing a hopping commune in the East Village, and staging orgies for various screen stars who found the whole trip amusing and pleasingly decadent. But they were busted for dope and indecency by the stalwarts of the New York vice squad, and Pan moved to the Coast.
I met Lad for the first time then, at four in the morning on Avenue B and Third Street, as I was walking with Susan Ashton, then head of New York’s Sexual Freedom League (although, alas, she couldn’t come). I heard the sound of bells, and turned to see Lad, with his eternal flute and drums and jingling knapsack, heading west. As always, he was handing out mimeographed sheets on which he, again, once and for all, explained Everything and gave detailed instructions as to How It Can All Be Straightened Out. He remembered the letters we had exchanged and we rapped a bit before he disappeared into the night, forever, as I thought.
But one afternoon, at the Experimental College, I met Pan, who also, to my amazement, remembered our correspondence. He was now married to a black girl, illiterate and right up from Georgia, whom he treated as a slave in the grand old tradition. She seemed to find the treatment tolerable, and was content to raise their two children and keep the house, worrying mostly that he didn’t spend the entire welfare check on dope or publishing the Kerista Tribe, the monthly movement newspaper.
Pan had aged. He had grown cranky. And he was having the most difficult time getting his sexual scene together, since his old lady was as physically unattractive as he was. But his mind had become a thing of wonder. Give him a few joints, a sympathetic ear, and he could spin out visions that would bring tears to your eyes. He would boggle the sensibilities by, in the middle of his fantasies, insisting that we “bomb Hanoi,” but I have long ago learned that people’s political prejudices are largely reflex actions and should either be ignored, or dealt with through immediate violence.
Kerista had transmogrified into an interesting organism, something that Pan could not recognize, since he still had hopes of an actual organization, with files and dues and obeisance to the Kerista Pope. But what had happened was that over the course of a decade and a half, some several hundred people had come to know one another slowly and well, through one or another project. There had been a continual cross-fertilization, a slow exchange of partners, a mutual assistance. And it had become a real family. And Pan was the unquestioned father of it. Like many fathers, he was roundly cursed and loved, ignored and listened to. Sadly, he still lived in the hope of his dreams, while he missed the stunning beauty of his actual accomplishment.
Harold, unfortunately, had none of Pan’s humanitarian scope.
The people he appealed to were inverse Puritans, those who still found sex salacious but couldn’t admit that to themselves. They were still being cute or heavy about it, a variety of closet tramp. The more decadent ones, such as lived in Muir Woods and Palo Alto, had put together a fairly discreet scene, and were content with enlarging their sexual circles to six or eight people. They were the type who fucked by scenario. But most of the married equivalents to single bar-hoppers had a different problem: how to meet other “swingers.”
One way was to answer the sex ads in one or another of the specialized papers or magazines. But this entailed certain difficulties. What if one met a real sadist? Or what if one arranged to meet another couple, and found them unattractive? How to extricate oneself gracefully from the situation? Or worse, what if one met someone with a really vile perversion, and found oneself digging it? After all, one wanted to be wild, but not too wild. Middle-class morality is very pervasive.
There were a few bars that specialized in this sort of activity, but they were in the Los Angeles area. The swingers had not yet worked out as successful a subculture as the homosexuals, and couples-cruising was an unformed art. It was at this point that Jim had his Idea: why not a club for swingers?
He advertised in the trade journals and set it up as follows: a couple would come for an interview, and if accepted, pay a yearly registration fee. For this they would be able to come to two weekly parties, and have access to subsidiary services, such as party pads, etc. At the club, couples would be assured of meeting only other couples with similar interests, and the screening service would keep out the more dada types. Also, there would be a lightly suggestive ambience, so that one could look others over without pressure. On the face of it, it was an intelligent program, complete with socially redeeming value.
It ran aground on the shoals of reality. First there was the granite personality of Jim to contend with, his ability to discourage anyone with any degree of sensitivity from joining the club. Then there was the venality of the people who worked there. Also, the fact that Harold kept running out of cash at times when crucial investments were needed. And finally, the customers themselves.
For the concept of swinging is based on the supposition that a couple have got it so together, are so filled with love and respect for each other, have such a perfect sex life, that they spontaneously break the bonds of the twosome and reach out to include others. For the people who went to places like Vantage, nothing could be further from the truth. They were, almost to a person, characters out of Albee. Tight-mouthed, loose-assed, bickering, jealous deadheads who didn’t have enough energy to follow the simplest debauchery to its logical conclusion. Not one of them could have tied de Sade’s shoelaces or understood the depth of The Story of O.
As in every other human endeavor, the constitutionally strong, attractive, wealthy, and successful were off in some private corner, having their orgies, while the losers groped around the public places, searching to be found.
I sat across the desk from Jim and tried simultaneously to sell him a bill of goods and find out exactly what his scene was; I met the rest of the crew: Ellen, a delicious Taurus heavy into junk; Margit, a black Aries of twenty-six who worked hustling drinks in the jazz clubs, and must have been the world’s most unconscious dyke; Madeleine, Jim’s wife, a long-suffering woman of exquisite emotional sensibility and extreme social deprivation (I later took her on her first acid trip and had my mind blown as her Cancerian personality emerged and she kept saying, “I am the mother, I feed the bodies, the minds must grow.”); Ralph, a pimply would-be orgiast who got the job of putting out the monthly newsletter, with interesting tidbits for all the swingers; and Evelyn, who had a permanent crash-pad in the outpatient clinic at Marin General Hospital’s psychiatric wing; and the to-be-expected mélange of petty thieves, unsuccessful whores, declassé hippies, and strange floaters.
It was several days before I met the Man. It was going by the name of Yen at the time. I had dropped acid with Pan about a month earlier, and in a burst of affection, I told him I wanted to “join” Kerista. He was outrageously happy. I was his first convert in almost ten years. The first thing that had to be done was to get me a name, it being a Kerista rule, derived from an early vision o
f his, that everyone in Kerista must have a name with only three letters in it. We repaired to the Ouija Board, placed our fingers on the pointer, and Pan rolled up his eyes. “0 great ghost of Gurdjieff, guide us in finding a name for this new member of our Tribe,” he said. I smiled inwardly, thinking about what old Mrs. R. would say if she could see the scene. The Board did its usual magic, and the letters emerged . . . Y . . . E . . . and then a long hesitation. Was my name to be YES? It was a glorious vision, but the triangle scooted past the S and went to N. YEN. I was delighted. Yen, as the dictionary points out, means a desire, and the phrase which crystallizes the Scorpio nature is “I desire,” so that much of it checked out. Also, Yen is the standard Japanese currency, and I had been in Japan for two years and did much of my identification with that culture. Then, spelled backward it was NEY, pronounced “nay,” which was no. So the name became NO spelled backward. Finally, it had a devastatingly exotic ring to it.
And it was with no little self-conscious suavity that I stood before the bed of the millionaire and said, “My name is Yen.”
He looked at me with coolly appraising eyes which, because of the booze in his blood at the time, had trouble focusing. But I saw his posture immediately. This was a man who for all of his life had people approach him hat-in-hand. Although he was superficiality itself, he had learned that in social interaction he need do nothing but lean back and let others perform. As an endless stream of people did, in fact, do. He had the place, he had the bread, he had the power, and had to do nothing but be there, like a magnetic spider.
In all fairness, I must note that there was no malice to the man. He was merely spiritually corpulent, inane, and mentally fuzzy. Yet he did know how to appraise the motives of others in relation to himself. I decided that my tactic ought to be to confront him harshly, for I calculated that he was basically a passive homosexual and wanted nothing more than to be controlled by another man. But my functioning tripped up my reasoning, and I ended by flirting with him instead. This was as successful for the short run, because I knew how to handle him, and he knew that I knew the game we were playing. His eyes flashed and he said, “You are a very shrewd person. Yen,” and I flashed back, “Like yourself, Harold.”
But shrewd I wasn’t, for he never gave me his money, only his funny paper. We talked about my role at the place, and it was decided that I was to serve as a psychic host for the weekend gatherings. Since the people who came were largely guilty, games had to be provided to warm them up. The women working for the club had the function of walking around in see-through gowns, serving drinks, and acting as models for body painting which, it was hoped, would spread to the wives present.
I was later offered the same job by the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League, at the Ashbury Street headquarters. But the scene there was even more deadly than at Vantage. It was the large basement room of a private house, and each Wednesday, dozens of couples would come for a sexual cocktail party, sipping martinis and making small talk. One portion of the room was sealed off by hanging blankets and partitioned into cubicles behind that. The bit was, you flashed on someone you wanted to fuck, and if there was mutual agreement, you went behind the wall and did it. It was as ribald as a group of preteen-agers playing spin-the-bottle.
At least the decor at the club showed more imagination. Harold did all the decorating himself. The entire third floor was a large room, some forty by fifteen feet. He blacked out all the windows and then hung, laid, and suspended about a thousand dollars worth of ersatz Middle Eastern junk. There were gaudy overstuffed throw pillows, pseudo-Persian rugs, hideous little wooden sculptures, and fake bronze gongs. Indescribable posters lurked in the shadows. To the side of the main room was the master’s bedroom, equipped with madras cloths hanging from the ceiling, blinking lights, and a Playboy bed. Beyond that was the kitchen and dining area, which held a jukebox, a bar, and a set of weights. Aikido classes were given there on Saturday mornings.
My workshop series ended in disaster the first night when Evelyn’s schizophrenia was precipitated by the relaxation exercise, and she began freaking out by screaming and running wildly through the halls. After that I quickly joined the mood of the others who worked there, a kind of depressed lassitude. I began making it with Ellen and she stopped crashing at the club and moved in with me to a room in the Haight in an apartment we shared with two Kerista rejects. He was a New York Jew trying to be a West Coast Gentile, and his old lady was right out of Olympia Press. At the time, he was using her as a model for beaver flies. In the same pad were two homosexuals, one a cheerful chipmunk who stayed stoned, worked in the post office, and spent most of his spare time at the baths. The other was a serious interior decorator from Ontario, and he had built a complete environment in one of the rooms, out of tinfoil, strobes, mirrors, and Christmas tree lights. It was a pleasure to take mescaline in there, listen to his Laura Huxley recordings, and pass around an inhalator of amyl nitrate.
We became friendly with Jocelyn, who worked as the accountant, and who hadn’t written down a single number in two months. She was making it with a Navy jet pilot, and they were vicariously interested in swinging. We got stoned at their place one night, in the middle of the Navy officer housing. His pad had a ghost and for a full half hour we watched it shimmering in the corner and making the room as bright as sunlight. We smoked some heady grass which a friend of his had just flown in from Vietnam, and he regaled us with tales of the military mind. His conversation was studded with jokes about “nukes,” or nuclear weapons, and he described how beautiful it was to get really high on hash and watch the colors of napalm bombs as they exploded on Vietnamese villages. He once and for all disillusioned me of the idea that to smoke grass makes one a better person; the weed simply makes monsters more monstrous. Oddly enough, however, he came across as a likable person, friendly and sophisticated, with no illusions about the nature of his work. He provided me with one of my strongest insights into the computer mind, that modern mutation in man which will devise the most efficiently horrible means of destroying life on the planet without a single concern for the suffering involved.
It was that night that Ellen got onto one of her junkie rides and took me along, wanting us to promise a suicide pact. She said that three of her friends had gone to a mountain top two months earlier, and did the final nod-out. For a moment, I didn’t know whether she was speaking metaphorically and then realized that they had indeed committed suicide through psychic agreement. One level of my consciousness saw it merely as another manifestation of the Dance of Shiva and nothing to get concerned about; but the rice-and-beans portion of my being was horrified. My feeling is that life is once around for each of us, and there is something amounting to a sacred trust for each of us to live it most intelligently, most lovingly, most honestly. I am given the creeps by people who think, somehow, that death isn’t real. It indicates that they think life isn’t real. And it is unfortunate that the spate of translations from the East has given them the jargon to justify their inability to wake up to the reality of living.
The fucking we did that night was grotesque. At one point we would be locked in ecstatic embrace, and then, as in a Gothic novel, some nauseating nameless Dread would seize us, and we would freeze in position, for as long as twenty minutes, staring at one another in reptilian loathing. The poppers we were using only intensified the experience, and none of it was helped by the presence of the ghost, or of the boy bomber in the next room. Yet, despite all the horror, it was one of the deepest experiences I can remember, for through all the twists and turns of that grisly ride, Ellen and I hung in there together, in a wide and moving communion.
As it became clearer that the club was not going to make it, Harold became even tighter with money, and most of the salaries were cut or done away with altogether. Some of the people split and the rest of us broke down into small subgroups. The club became more of a crash-pad and place for meeting. One night I took Ellen, Margit, and Madeleine to Tina’s house
where we all dropped acid, strawberry barrels being the brand at the time. Tina was a sometime lover who was having a long thing with her therapist in Berkeley, a Jungian she went to see six mornings a week. She got up at five in order to get there for a seven a.m. appointment. It had been going on for almost two years, and there seemed to be no change except that he was some ten thousand dollars richer for it, and her parents, who were footing the bill, got a sense of helping their daughter.
By mid-evening, my clothes had come off, I had entered a barking contest with Tina’s dog, and was in an intense fight with Margit for the attention of the other women. She leaned her Aries dyke vibes into me and practically seared my eyeballs. Like any smart Scorpio, I laid back until she was off-balance, and then shot bolts of vibrant energy into her solar plexus. But she was unbelievably strong, and after an hour of struggle I said, “Look, I’ll split the chicks with you.” She refused to cop to what was going down and the fight simmered into a long night of silent antagonism.
Personal hostilities meshed with financial crisis, and the club came apart at the seams. I was in a state of growing and frazzled desperation. The constant worry about money was draining my inner resources. It was inconceivable that I should go to work; I simply wasn’t in any shape to go downtown and meet the Man. If I had gone into any office or employment bureau as I was, long-haired, wild-eyed, speaking what seemed to be gibberish a lot of the time, they would have freaked. And I had once and for all rebelled against the notion of putting on the “nice young man” act, pretending to be obedient and docile, selling my birthright for a mess of decaying culture.
The circumstances under which I was taking dope were making me crazy. One night I even stupidly dropped acid and went to the Carousel, a plastic rock palace, and had my sensibilities ripped off by the carrion vultures who swarm to such places to feed off the music and human vibrations.