by Marco Vassi
Tommy had left for San Francisco shortly after that, and I thought I had lost touch with him forever. But here he was, with a new moustache, his hair dyed red, and looking absolutely ravishing in bell bottoms and cutaway shirt. “What are you doing here?” we said simultaneously.
So we went for a drink, told our respective stories, and found to our surprise that he lived at the Circle, too. At the time he was working in an art supply store by day, and at night working on a series of collages, shooting speed, and doing a lot of fucking.
After several hours at the bar he leaned over and said, “You have any plans for tonight?” I suddenly remembered that I was going to get a sandwich and contemplate my future as a bum. “I was going to get something to eat,” I said.
He smiled. “I’ll get you something to eat,” he said. “Come on.”
I followed him out and we went to the drugstore at the edge of Chinatown and bought a box of amyl nitrate. This was before the whistle was blown on the popper scene, causing prices to soar, and the things, ultimately, to become unobtainable without a prescription.
We left, and headed down Broadway. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the baths,” he said.
My memory of the baths are from the two cesspools of blind lust I frequented in New York. It wasn’t until I returned from the Coast and revisited them with a new perspective that I learned how to find sapphires in the mud, how it is possible to soar into the greatest ecstasy when one is at the depths of degeneracy. But at that moment, I recoiled. I was in no mood for urine-caked hallways and paint-peeling walls and dribbling old men. Tommy must have read my thoughts. “Wait until you see the baths here,” he said. “It’ll blow your mind.”
We went under the overpass of the expressway to the warehouse district and entered a discreet door with the one word on it. Inside, it was pure Hollywood. Richly carpeted floors, a color TV in the lounge, a clean, lively atmosphere, with all the attendants being pretty young boys. The rooms were impeccably fresh, and even the johns were spotless. And roaming up and down the halls, dressed only in towels around their waists, were the loveliest of San Francisco’s fairies.
We each took a room, and I met Tommy in the lounge. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said, and taking me by the hand, led me upstairs.
Up we went, past the sun lamp room, past the weight-lifting room, down a long, dimly lit hallway, and turned a corner. At first, I thought we had gone into a pitch-black space. I stood there a long moment, peering into the darkness, and gradually, as my eyes accustomed, a scene out of Doré burned into my eyes.
There, under a lamp that gave off but a few photons of light, in a round room with a diameter of about twenty feet, were some thirty or forty men in a great writhing pile of bodies. From their center came the continual sound of heavy breathing, groaning, sighing, all punctuated by cries of passion and pain. Almost the entire room was a circular leather couch, perhaps two feet high, and around the couch was a narrow walkway. Men posing like characters in the stud magazines leaned against the wall, while their counterparts knelt in front of them, variously sucking and licking and biting. Here and there, a figure would tumble off the couch, lying half on, half off, doing something into the mass of bodies and being done to by one of the men in the ring outside.
Tommy turned to me and smiled. “Something else, isn’t it?” he said.
“Let’s go,” I said.
And we took a popper apiece, broke them, filled our nostrils with the heady fumes, and dived headfirst into the sea of bodies.
The next fifteen minutes had no description, simply because there were no discrete units of activity. It was all touch, all liquid, all sound, all excitement, all images. During that time, I went through every imaginable variation on the physical homosexual act imaginable. There was neither the chance nor the inclination to take any of them to their full conclusions. Rather, it was a sort of smorgasbord, with the joy coming in the many different flavors and sensations. It provided me with the single most glorious moment of total anonymity I had ever experienced in my life, and when I finally crawled out, I felt as though I had gone through a baptism of orgasm.
I went down to the lounge and had a Coke and a cigarette. Within a few minutes, Tommy joined me. We exchanged conspiratorial smiles. “Nothing like that in New York,” he said. “Amen,” I said.
He looked at me. “Let’s go to my room,” he said. My stomach dropped, and I lowered my eyes. I was still at the stage of pre-coming out where I was too embarrassed to make it with someone I knew. I could only do it with strangers. “I can’t,” I said.
“Can’t?” he asked.
“Won’t,” I said.
“Well I’ll be fucked,” he said.
“That’s the way it is right now,” I said.
He stood up and blew out a lungful of smoke. “Later, baby,” he said.
I stayed for a few more hours, used up the rest of the poppers, and had sex with perhaps a half dozen men, not one of whom I can remember. And at three in the morning, my head aching from the drug, my soul sick from excess, I made my way back to my room.
Perhaps, if I had just gone to bed, things would have been better. But I needed some comfort, and picked up one of my books, a thing I had found at Clear Lake called, pretentiously enough, This Is Reality. It was a handbook of meditation techniques based on the principles of Kriya Yoga. It was written, although I didn’t know it at the time, by a southern Baptist minister from Florida who had studied with Paramahansa Yogananda, one of that great stream of popularizers who have flooded our shores. Like so many of the self-proclaimed gurus who wend their way from India, Paramahansa was selling a superficial distillation of a very advanced practical psychology which had its roots in a totally different culture from ours, the practice of which assumed that the student had mastered a score of lesser yogas. It had taken root as a spiritual equivalent of the get-rich-quick mystique which feeds the American mentality, a promise of instant enlightenment. The great yogi’s death came, it is told, via a heart attack as he sat with a mouthful of roast chicken at a banquet given in his honor. His body still hasn’t decayed.
By the time the minister had watered down the already weak brew, his book emerged as a screaming parody on the whole idea of meditation. Of course, in my current state of mind, I took to it voraciously.
Basically, it was a system of self-hypnosis. One sat in a chair, regulated one’s breathing, and “felt” the energy going up the spine to the crown of the head. The book listed a series of recommended visions and sensations which were to accompany the exercise. It was supposed to be a kundalini yoga on the astral plane.
So, for the remainder of that night, and for the two weeks following, I alternated my time between freaking out at the baths, and spending hours practicing those venerable techniques. I should like to have a psychiatric description of my state of mind at the time. Certainly, it fit no categories I am familiar with. After a breakfast of bacon and eggs, and a quick trot through the pages of the Chronicle, I would return reverentially to my room, nodding hellos to my fellow debauchees at the hotel and then dutifully enter what I thought to be a meditative state. I can remember getting all sorts of flashes and buzzes and odd insights, and simultaneously wondering, Am I doing it right? Am I really getting enlightened? My critical faculty had been totally eroded, and I was completely at the mercy of blind whim.
Tommy hadn’t spoken to me for some time after that night, but one evening I ran into him on the stairs. There was a moment’s awkwardness and then the tension melted. “Come on,” he said, “I’m going to score some speed.”
Speed! Despite all my seeming hip concerning drugs and my familiarity with the psychedelics, the word struck a chord of fear into my heart. The house of speed freaks I had once visited in the Haight forever warned me away from the drug, for its end result seemed to be a kind of walking death, an endle
ss regression into the folds of the ego, until nothing was left but a strident voice insisting on being heard. On the other hand, the principle of try-anything-once was a guiding string through my life, and the time seemed to be right.
I went with him.
The dealer was a round, soft black faggot of about forty-five who seemed to radiate a calm peace. With him were his lover and a thin red-haired whore. She was walking up and down, agitatedly talking to herself about a date she had later that evening, and seemed to be arguing about some fine point of prostitutional ethics, which totally escaped me. Tommy bought a small white packet and then gave the man an extra three dollars. “Give him a hit,” he said, pointing to me.
A current of sexual excitement ran through my legs. I sat down. He spooned out some more of the powder and mixed it with some solution from a medical-looking bottle, and then sucked the mixture up into a syringe. I held out my arm. The needle entered. For five, ten seconds, nothing happened.
And then, suddenly, I was washed over with the most breathtaking waves of love I have ever experienced. My heart swelled and my body tingled. My mind became clear on the spot. There wasn’t a trouble in the entire universe. All people were brothers and sisters. God was All.
I looked at the man in front of me. Great affection poured out of me. It was he who had brought me this miracle, and I stood up to embrace him. I felt as delicate as a hollow egg, as gentle as a spring breeze, as warm as candleglow. I leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you,” I said. He seemed not to notice. I suppose he was bored with virgins.
Immediately, the spiritual flush condensed into sensuality, and when I turned to face Tommy, the sensuality exploded into sexuality. I burned with passion. “Ready to go?” he said.
We went back to his room, and while he locked the door and fixed himself a hit, I took off my clothes and lay on the bed. In a while, he undressed and turned to face me. I lay there in absolute calm, in total self-possession. I felt as though there could never be any confusion again for me. All the static which normally interferes with thinking and seeing was gone. All sense of urgency had left. Now was forever. I imagined I could stay in this spot for all time, being content simply to breathe and eat, and fucking whatever beautiful people came by. Speed! I had found my drug. It gave me all the things I had searched for in the psychedelics and never really found. Also, there was no nonsense with hallucinations and pseudo-cosmic insights. It was clear and immediate reality.
As soon as I thought the word, the two weeks of working with the book sprung into my mind, and I began running through all the practices, doing the astral kundalini. Only, now, with the drug giving me the energy, I could really do it! I became the baby Krishna, cuddly and omniscient, ready for a roll in the hay.
And then Tommy joined me. His skin glowing purple and bronze in the red light, his face an African mask of terror and joy, his body sleek and muscular, his cock a sensitive rigid pole of unendurable beauty.
And then we made love. We did nothing spectacular, nothing that men haven’t done with men millions upon millions of times through all the ages. Yet, with what concentration, with what exquisite edge of sensation, with what surges of affection! I explored every inch of his body, and surrendered totally to myself in him. Narcissus had found an image more substantial than his reflection in a lake.
When, finally, after aeons of foreplay, he took me in his arms, kissed me, and penetrated me, I broke through all the barriers of shame and repression which had forced me to seek only the embraces of strangers. Again and again, as I rolled through the changes of desire and fulfillment, as he sank deeper and deeper into my flesh, always surprising me, always finding another level when I thought he could go no further, as I moaned and bit his ear, I would suddenly open my eyes and see his face, not the face of a stranger, but the face of a friend. And the friend was a man!
Once and for all the taboo of homosexuality was broken, and I realized how natural, how easy, how rapturous it is to give oneself up to the sweet closeness between people, to taste the richness of sex with them, and not once care whether it is a cock or a cunt which is giving pleasure, whether it is a man or a woman who is the vehicle of such great transports of joy.
We fucked for hours, and the cycle came to its natural end. Afterward, having taken the active role, he was restless. Having taken the passive role, I was ready for more. He split, and I got dressed. The speed was still working in me, although I was starting to bounce down.
I was still horny and began raiding the bars for scores, and spent several hours tricking in the backs of cars and alleyways. And after several hours of that, back on the darkened streets, I began to feel the dregs of the trip, the crash. I had not realized how euphoric the drug had made me feel until, when its effects began to wear off, I experienced the actual world as a dull, dirty, and infinitely boring place to be in. It is at this point that there is a temptation to shoot up again, to recapture that initial glow. Of course, one can continue to do this for days, weeks, even years. The result is the familiar burned-out speed freak that has become a part of our new folklore. And I almost yielded to that temptation, except that all kinds of warning bells went off in my head. It was at that moment, strangely enough, that my two weeks of Kriya Yoga came to the rescue. I decided to use the remaining speed energy working out on the techniques. I couldn’t go back to my room feeling the way I was, so I went to the Haight to crash at the Waller Street pad.
The place was fairly empty and I was able to cop the hammock for the night. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, going through my paces. Slowly, my eyes closed, and a most peculiar thing happened. I slipped, without any premeditation or foreknowledge, into the yoga of the dream state. This is described by the Tibetans and consists in learning how to remain conscious while asleep. This may sound mystical to anyone who has no imagination in these matters or who had not experienced it himself. Actually, it is quite simple. It merely involves activating consciousness at the muscular, cellular, and molecular levels (and in some instances, on the electronic level, but I was not to find out about that until a few months later). Then, one brings the conceptual consciousness to a single pinpoint, and while the “body” is totally asleep, the “mind” continues to register impressions. It was during this time that I “saw” my dreams, that is to say, saw the actual mechanism of the mind as it produces dreams, sat in the projection booth of the unconscious, as it were. This persisted for some time, and made up a complexly interesting experience, until my energy fell below the necessary level to maintain this clarity and multiplicity of perception, and I lapsed into normal mundane sleep.
The next morning I woke up in the ninth circle. To the degree that everything had been exhilarating the night before, it was enervating in the morning. I remembered everything and regretted nothing, but I felt that I could never experience such a scintillating state again without shooting speed. And it seemed that the gray world I now faced would last forever. I had no sense of its passing, as all things pass. The people around me seemed distant, and I couldn’t blend with their marijuana vibes. So I took off for the hotel again.
I went into my room and sat at the edge of my bed for an hour. Then, woodenly, without thought, I went to the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror. It was like an automaton regarding itself. I went to the dresser, took out a pair of scissors, went back to the mirror, and methodically began cutting my hair off. When I had clipped it as close as I could, I lathered my head and shaved it with a safety razor until my skull was totally bald. I washed the suds off, dried the dome with a towel, and stared uncomprehending at myself for a very long time.
I was without the slightest ability to recognize my own face.
Hurriedly, I went out into the street. I didn’t want to be around scissors and razors any longer. I didn’t feel suicidal, but neither had I felt like shaving my head. It was wise not to take chances.
“Look,” I reasoned to myself, “you haven’t
got the slightest notion of who you are, what you are doing, or where you are going. At this point you seem to be in real danger of getting heavily into speed and a sure-to-be disastrous affair with Tommy. You are also sitting like a loonie trying to find enlightenment in a book. And just an hour ago you shaved off all your hair. Now under the circumstances, what do you think you should do?”
The other half of the schizophrenic dialogue provided a quick answer: “Leave!”
“Very good,” said the first half of my personality. “Where?”
And from some psychic pit deep in that portion of my mind which taps into the collective unconscious there came a single word: “Tucson.”
“Tucson?” I said. “What’s in Tucson?”
But the voices of the gods kept silence.
I found myself walking once more to the Haight. Outside the pad on Waller, I found Gerard working on his truck.