by Marco Vassi
And once again I could feel familiarity slipping from my grasp. The thing is that there is a way of perceiving existence that has no description in any symbology whatsoever. All the yogas, mantras, yantras, and religious cookbooks are nothing but a set of exercises which are supposed to put your head in that single place where the understanding takes place. The problem is, if you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it. And if you read about it, you can con yourself into believing that you do have it. Especially if you take a psychedelic. For a short time you sail into a self-induced Nirvana and think you really understand what the whole trip is about. But as Krishnamurti points out, “Reality is not an experience.”
At one point in my inner and outer travels, I emerged with the phrase “the mysterious familiar,” which is a personal literary tag to remind me of what I am always forgetting about the nature of things. It is to say that what is, is essentially mysterious. There is no one, there never has been anyone, nor can there ever be anyone, including the total Overmind of all Being, who has the foggiest notion why anything exists at all, and all speculation in that direction is as futile as it seems to be ineluctable. However, to live in that state of awareness all the time is a shortcut to madness, and while it may be a glorious insanity, it is not worth the agony, not to me at least. Nietzsche, obviously, thought otherwise; Artaud had no choice.
The alternative is to see what is as familiar. Being mortal and finite creatures, we seek refuge in the known. We cease contrasting that which is before our eyes against the backdrop of nothingness. We forget the void. The sky, the sun, the bird, the self . . . these are things we know from birth, we accept their existence unquestioningly. But in this state, we lapse into habit, our perceptions dull, and we enter a period of stagnation. In short, we fall asleep and join the rest of mankind in its round of walking coma.
Between the two extremes of sleepwalking and insanity, there is simple perception, a seeing in innocence. One can look at a tree, and see it always for the first time. To see without the symbol, without the associations, so finely, so purely, is probably the highest good. But to sustain such a state of perception requires enormous energy, of the type that I was wildly squandering in my metatheatrical madness.
Now I was sliding into an area where all context is stripped away, and there was no way to get a fix on my actions. Which is not to say that I was acting spontaneously; it was more like a drowning man thrashing about to find something to hold on to.
Evelyn and I began hatching schemes to blackmail Harold. She would seduce him and I would come in with a camera; or I would seduce him and she would come in with a camera. Or we would beat him up and steal his video setup and jewelry and car and threaten to kill him if he gave us any trouble.
Harold became restless. His taste for new bodies and faces was making itself felt and he was itchy for a new set of conquests. The people around him were beginning to openly despise him, and he needed to dangle his millions before a different set of eyes. At one point, he opened talks with one of the motorcycle gangs, the same people who had stabbed Stanley the Astrologer in front of the Donut Shop. He cut off all money from the club and we knew the end was near. It was simply a question of when the properly attractive hustle was dangled before his eyes. And it was then that Esalen made the scene.
Esalen is a quintessentially American phenomenon of the middle twentieth century. As a mixture of therapeutic effectiveness and shallow hucksterism, of sincere humanism and power mania, it finds no equal on the entire social scene. It began as the private home and grounds of one man, who started a conventionally wealthy-man’s trip of inviting his friends to his country estate. After a while, his friends invited friends, and within a few years, there was a very quiet groovy scene going on, against the glorious backdrop of Big Sur, and centered around a hot spring bath in a cave overlooking the Pacific surf.
However, through some mechanism or other, the people there got the idea to turn the place into a human growth center, and they began to attract a long list of defectors from the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities. The Freudian Empire was in shambles, and the new therapies weren’t filling the gap left by its downfall. So modestly at first, but with increasing momentum, Esalen began its series of workshops in sensory awareness, sensitivity, encounter, massage, “meditation,” bio-energetics, and that entire range of techniques which has come to be known as “the Esalen approach.”
But a strange change took place once the place stopped being a natural home for a group of friends, and became a business. Soon, Esalen began to sell sensitivity, to charge stiff fees for joy, and maintain waiting lists for awareness. They came at the proper historical moment. Therapy had sunk to such a level of pomposity and granite stupidity that no serious or hip person could take it seriously. And on its dead body, Esalen, like a great vulture, nourished itself.
The pioneers of that soon-to-be psychedelic Grossinger’s stumbled onto a seeming truth, that if one lays emphasis on health, on growth, on joy, it is a more effective means of dealing with mankind’s ills than by delving into the pathological aspects of the personality. And if it had remained merely a corrective to the older forms of psychiatry, it would have been a reasonably healthy manifestation. But, as with all things, it was organized, ritualized, jargonized, and finally turned into a religion. It went rapidly from Bill Schutz’s workshops called JOY, to Stu Miller’s workshops called MORE JOY and stopped just short of SON OF JOY. The fact that a human emotion was sold the way the detergent of the same name sells its washing power did not seem odd to any of Esalen’s founding fathers.
Also, the community remained silent on the fact that going into a room full of naked strangers, being led in a massive group grope, and running out among the breathtaking grandeur of Big Sur will turn anyone on, and has nothing to do with the supposedly theoretical underpinnings of any psychological approach. Esalen’s major crime came in refusing to cop to the fact that all they were doing, essentially, was providing tired and uptight middle-class America with mild orgies and a vain hope for a fuller life. They have never spoken about what happens when the Esalenized person steps back into his web of conditionings, into the fall of his civilization, with its wars and corruption and poisoning of the water and air, and its ethic of violence and greed. As with so much of the California scene, no one there seemed to have the historical perspective to see themselves not as a cure for society’s ills, but merely one of its more vulgar products.
On they went, charging higher and higher fees, with Bernie Gunther helping people to discover that feeling the bodies of young girls would make you come more alive, with Betty Fuller leading giant workshops, with some five hundred people at a time processed through a four-hour pastiche of “growth techniques.” The initial sense of family had disappeared, and big business took its place. Esalen became a groovy-factory manufacturing jollies. It even formed a “Flying Circus” to go around the country, “to introduce the Esalen techniques,” as though intimacy and true sensitivity and flexible intelligence could be taught through “techniques.” It held a weekend bash in New York City where some six thousand people paid almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to see the Esalen heavies put in a two-hour appearance apiece. Therapy transmuted to show business. And always, in the background, the sound of cash registers clanging.
Concurrently, hundreds of growth centers, spurred on by the Esalen success story, sprang up like warts around the country, and anyone who had spent a few hours with an Esalen teacher, or had been processed by an Esalen teacher, called himself a group leader, and the encounter madness began. Esalen made matters worse by setting up a “leadership program,” whereby one might spend a month getting stoned at Big Sur and then go forth as an “Esalen-trained leader.”
Esalen’s chief general hit the benefit trail, and by the end of the decade had insinuated the Esalen mystique into almost every organization having even vaguely to do with personality change. Their latest conquest was a visit to
England where they spoke of the growing success of “the movement.”
Sadly, although none of them is any better or worse a human being than anyone else, they have given birth to yet another ism, another form of regimentation whereby people can hypnotize themselves. They have become the American-born version of the Tibetan hierarchy, for while they seemingly transcend politics, they are most influential in guiding much of the tone of the nation, much of its texture. Whatever the political outcome, Esalen will be on top. If the money is right, one can picture them just as easily leading sensitivity groups for the Weathermen as giving massages to Air Force generals.
At the club, Harold was visited by Esalen’s San Francisco agent, who had been tipped off to Harold’s scene, and had joined the line of those who wanted to clip him for some bread. But they had good bait. Harold and one of Esalen’s big guns, it turned out, had been fraternity brothers, and Harold was flattered that the great Esalen chief remembered him. Esalen was trying to get him to buy them a house for their city headquarters, and were promising him lifelong admittance to all workshops, prestige, and orgies at the baths. It was the first time I saw Harold lose the calculating look in his eyes.
As Esalen moved in, I realized it was time for me to move out. One night, when most of the others had gone, Ellen and I dropped acid and stayed in Harold’s bedroom to ball. We were deep into fucking, when there was a heavy pounding at the door. It was Margit. She had come upstairs and found the door locked. She screamed to be let in. Her worst nightmare was coming true. The man she hated and feared was fucking the woman she dug, and she was on the outside. Half out of malice, and half out of exuberance, the fucking got wilder and louder. We began making animal noises, and making the big bed squeak with our thrashings. Margit went to a back entrance and came in through the bathroom window, but not carrying a silver spoon. She burst into the bedroom and stood there, glaring. We ignored her. We fucked until we finished, with her watching us hatefully. And then, slowly and deliberately, we sat up and stayed in one another’s realm of attention, pointedly leaving her out.
Finally, she came forward and sat at the edge of the bed. I turned and looked at her, full in the eyes and with no reservations. For a minute she held my gaze and then said, “All right, you win.”
“I was never fighting you,” I said.
“I know that,” she said, “but I couldn’t help myself.”
The rest of the evening passed in normal acid waves. And at dawn, Ellen fell asleep while Margit and I went up on the roof to watch the city come to life. A little later, I went to Chinatown to buy groceries for breakfast. Walking through those silent streets, with the brisk solemn Chinese beginning their day taking down wooden shutters from the store windows, throwing buckets of water over the sidewalks, I felt a peace that rarely comes during a lifetime. When I returned, Margit put her arms around my neck and said, “Let’s be friends.”
“Sure,” I said. And we made a giant breakfast.
Soon after that, Ellen met some musician friends on their way to New Mexico, and split with them. I stayed for a while in the mad-tea-party house on Waller Street, and had nothing to do with the club until a few weeks later, after having dropped some acid, I climbed up the stairs to the top to find Harold, very drunk, wallowing in bed. He told me some stories about two young hippie girls who needed some money and had come to see him. “They were very nice to me,” he said in that oily way he had whenever he was referring to sex, “so I gave them ten dollars.” All the compacted degeneracy of the scene rose up in me like vomit, and with the energy I had from the LSD, I entered into a long seduction scene with him, at the end of which I got him to go down on me. I gave him some poppers while he was doing it so the experience would be burned into his psyche. And afterward, I demanded money from him.
“I don’t have much,” he said.
“Let me see,” I said, grabbing his wallet from his pants. He had only two hundred dollars, and I took that.
He looked up at me with fear and excitement. “That was very . . . nice,” he said. “I’ve never done that before.” He paused. “Can I see you again?” he asked.
“For that, you don’t need me, Harold,” I said.
“Do you know . . . someplace I can go?” he asked.
I looked down at him. “Sure,” I said. “Go find a urinal.”
6
As though following some predetermined curve, the next day I moved from the Haight pad to North Beach, and found a room in a place called, appropriately enough, the Circle Hotel. I paid the sixty dollars month’s rent in advance to a prototypic Irish landlady who was absolutely inured to the worst the species had to offer. Over the years she had come to view prostitution, drugs, murder, freak-outs, police raids, robbery, despair, and suicide with the calm of a Buddha sitting by a riverside chanting Om. She was an adept in the yoga of business, and had achieved her enlightened state through a thorough understanding of the dollar. One rented a room, one paid the specified price, and short of burning the hotel down, one was free to do whatever one liked. As far as I could see, she made no value judgments, cared not the least for anyone’s opinion of her, and treated mayor and criminal with the same scales of justice. I have met few people I have more fully trusted to be totally consistent within the parameters of social interaction. She had a husband, or boy friend, but his sole function seemed to be to check on rooms after people had left. The only times she spoke to him was to give orders, and I never heard a single word pass his lips.
The room was classic. Twelve feet by twelve feet, a rusted sink, a peeling dresser, and a squeaking bed complete with wrought-iron headboard. One entered from a long hallway that opened onto twenty similar rooms on each side of a complete square, making some eighty inhabitants to a floor. My room being on the inside, I could look out the window to a concrete courtyard, and the scores of other windows from which all the transient and already lost souls looked back.
When the landlady’s husband left after taking me to the room, and I locked the door behind him, I was totally without an identity. For one of the many times in my life, if I had died on the spot, there was not a single person around who would know what my name was, or how to contact next of kin. Of course, I signed in under a pseudonym, writing “Augustine Tocco,” with a flourish in the registration book.
I don’t think I had any thoughts at the time. Living with others had become intolerable. And I didn’t have enough money to take an apartment. And, most important, I hadn’t the slightest idea of where I wanted to go. All the guidelines which help an obsessive-compulsive over the hard spots were gone. Subjectively, I was one of the damned.
My possessions, by this time, fit into a knapsack and small suitcase. This was a long way down from the apartment full of clothes and appliances and furniture and books I had had in New York less than a year ago. But now I took out a half-dozen books, a few pants and sweaters, my hash pipe, and some of the cloths I had learned to carry with me. One of the women passing through the Waller Street commune had just returned from India and had taught me the poor man’s interior-decorating trick: three madras cloths, four holy pictures, an incense stand, and a small rug will turn any dingy room into a comfortable space.
I sat down to take stock. About four hundred dollars left from the stash I had come west with plus the two hundred I’d clipped from Harold. I had already sold my car. I was totally disillusioned with all the salvation scenes, and had had my fill of hippies. It was impossible to go back to the straight world, but I had lost my way among the dropouts. I continued to sit. I stared at the wall. Two hours passed. I began to feel as though I were getting as moldy as the woodwork. I wondered if I would just grow old here, become one of the thousand nameless drifters who slowly sink into social oblivion.
Perhaps I would become a bum. And with that thought, the first flash of my new insanity began. For somewhere in my private lexicon of folk heroes, the bum had always held a special place. Every now an
d then, while walking through the Bowery or one of its equivalents in other cities, I would meet a bum whose inner dignity burned through all the dirt of his rags. Perhaps a man with white hair and craggy features, with a fine intelligence in his eyes. A man who is aware that he is absolutely at the bottom of any social classification, despised by almost everyone who sees him. And yet, from the vantage point of sheer hopelessness, a fierce pride is born. The knowledge that he owes nothing to anyone, that he lives simply by what he can beg, and if he can beg nothing, then he starves. A man who sleeps on the streets in winter, knowing that he may freeze to death before morning. A man, in short, who has discarded all the pretenses of the world, and lives in the existential moment of breath. And of course, except for those very few bums who have the education and strength to transcend the judgment of everyone around them, these broken products of a sick culture come to see themselves as mere bums, and lose the single thing that a human being must maintain if he is to remain human: an unconditioned sense of inner dignity.
Yes, I thought, I would become a bum. I would drift through the streets in rags, silent, gentle, spit upon by all except those who could see through my disguise, those who would come to sit at my feet and learn from me the wisdom of poverty and self-renunciation. My eyes grew moist as the image took shape in my mind. I wanted to wax out on it, but heard my stomach growling, and decided to go to the MDR for a roast beef sandwich, and from there continue my plans.
But as I was leaving the building, I heard a familiar voice saying, “Far fucking out.” I turned, and it was Tommy Simon standing there, and a new phase in my life began.
Tommy was six feet tall, black, beautiful, and gay. I had met him in New York; I was an editor and he had worked as an art director. At the time I was not fully enough in touch with my own homosexuality to understand his scene.
Tommy and I were friends in the way that someone who is gay can be friendly with someone he digs, but who had not yet fully come out. I lent him money, he bought me dinners, we sometimes went to movies together. One day, bored and restless, I went to his cubicle to see him. He was out on a coffee break, and since he owed me ten dollars, I amused myself with a practical joke, leaving him a note which read PAY OR DIE with a black hand copied on it. There must have been some kind of psychic transfer which decided me on that particular joke because, at the time, he was some five hundred dollars in debt to a loan shark in the East Village, a man who was a minor Mafia lackey. I am told that when he saw the note he literally blanched. Of course, he learned that I had done it, quite innocently, and wreaked a peculiar kind of revenge. The next day, when I returned from lunch, I found that every single thing in my office had been Scotch-taped to everything else. Drawers, pens, typewriter, curtain, light switches, window handles, chairs . . . everything in a single web of sticky cellophane. I thought it quite funny, but the vice-president, a man who kept twitching his shoulders back as though he were a West Point student being criticized by an officer, looked at me suspiciously for weeks afterward.