The Stoned Apocalypse (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  I am not arguing that there should have been no change in Tucson. Certainly, it has its share of injustice, poverty, racial prejudice, provincialism, and sheer human stupidity. But that existed everywhere. Tucson had one advantage; it was still clean. To move in and raise the dust in the hope that something better might emerge from the ensuing chaos is the kind of maliciousness reserved for the emotionally childish. And so it began, with the first traces of Los Angeles pollution visible over the far horizon, and the thin dust from the copper mines settling over the valley, and the illiterate yellow journalism of the underground press starting up.

  Before any of that got to me, however, I was having food problems at the house. I have since become a vegetarian for simple aesthetic reasons, and after having learned what is done to meat before it reaches the plate. But at the time, I was ignorant of most nutritional lore, and like many others on the dropout trail, ate out of a mixture of religious, ideological, and economic conditionings. The people in the Grainery were split into two major camps. Half were macrobiotic, half were fruitarians. And they were all fanatic about their own scene. Since I was trying to ingratiate myself, and since I wanted to experiment with different diets, I ate whatever the clique I found myself with was eating. But sometimes I would slip, and then the trouble began.

  Tony, for example, had been living on watermelon for three weeks. He claimed that rice made mucus in the intestines. And when he and I went on a four-day hash binge together, I subsisted entirely on that fruit. But on the fifth day, when I went to the store, he wasn’t there, and Al was cooking up a delicious pot of brown rice, sesame salt, tamari, and onions. He invited me to join him, and I sat down to dig into the delicious stew. Halfway through, I heard a sound behind me. I turned and saw Tony’s face, two inches from my eyes. He was white with anger.

  “MUCUS!” he shouted into my ear.

  And then he grabbed a handful of rice and squeezed it between his fingers until it had turned into a pasty pulp. “That’s what it does in your stomach,” he hissed. I felt the food in my stomach like a great squishy rock, and simply put my bowl down, my appetite for rice squelched for a good two weeks.

  On the other hand, I had my hair almost turned white by Don, who described in detail what happens to fruitarians who don’t get enough protein.

  Mortimer was a purist, eating only avocados and sunflower seeds, quietly despising anyone who gorged himself on any unnecessary food. He would go on at great length about how the two of them gave a man all the elements of nutrition he needed.

  There were splinter wings. Two people insisted that no food be cooked, and when they were at the helm, I dutifully munched raw rice and carrots, and sprouted soy beans.

  To escape the food commandos was a chore, and one morning I was awakened before dawn by sounds in the kitchen. It was Susan making scrambled eggs. She looked at me with terror in her eyes, as though she were a witch being discovered making a brew by an Inquisitor. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Don’t tell them, please,” she said. “It’s for the baby, it’s not for me. Believe me, the eggs are for the baby. She needs eggs.” My mouth watered. “Can I have some eggs?” I said. A conspiratorial gleam came into her eyes, and together we hunched in the corner of the kitchen floor, scooping the most delicious scrambled eggs I have ever eaten into our mouths.

  Another time, I was awakened at two in the morning by John. “Come with me,” he whispered. I got dressed and followed him out to his car. “Do you want an ice cream soda?” he said. I looked at him, blinking. “I know this sounds stupid,” he said, “but I have to have an ice cream soda, and I really feel guilty about it. Will you come with me?”

  So we sped off into the night like thieves, to one of those horrible all-plastic all-night diners, where we gorged ourselves on cheeseburgers and ice cream sodas, and then drove to the top of Mount Lemmon, to smoke grass, belch in great contentment, and watch dawn break over the desert.

  At this point, three things happened simultaneously. John decided to have a celebration under the stars and asked me to do a relaxation meditation, someone came up with the idea of starting a free university, and I got involved with the Methodist Church’s painting party at an orphanage in Mexico. They came together over me in an odd mélange which served as the prelude for the event which was to open Tucson up to the rest of the nation’s movement.

  The house I was staying in had an immense back yard which lay under the majesty of a great fig tree. The tree was bare when I arrived, but by April had come out in a lush coat of deep green. For several weeks we put up posters on bookshop windows and the other attention spots in town. We planned a joint venture between Mandalia and the Grainery, with plans for a big macrobiotic spread in the yard, readings from Dane Rudhyar, a talk by John, and a relaxation session led by me.

  Tucson is a place that breathes the religious spirit, although formal religion there, as everywhere, has degenerated to empty social ritual. The hippie community especially, with its affinity for the Indians and its taste for peyote, imbibes the atmosphere of holiness with a fervor which verges on the embarrassing. The difficulty, of course, is that they have neither the framework nor the actual ethnic roots to understand the source from which they draw the inspiration. With them, also, there is something more of the artifact than the substance.

  The day of the happening was brilliant, perhaps the thirtieth straight day without a cloud in the sky. I went for a long walk in the nearby scrub country, and spent the time with my thoughts, as inchoate as they were, and smoked a lot of grass. There is a faculty to my mind which exemplifies the dictum once taught me by an old psychology professor at Brooklyn College, to wit, “Any logical system brought to its logical conclusion ends in self-contradiction.” With me, if I begin with a premise, I can follow it step by step, as in a Euclidian demonstration, and although each step is impeccably right formally, I often end like the existentialist who has proved that he doesn’t exist. This is the core of madness for me, and the most maddening aspect of it is that from the vantage point of my own cerebration, I can’t understand why my position seems odd to anyone else. At such times, I can’t understand that somewhere in the chain, a qualitative change has taken place which has removed me from the common view of mankind. Of course, that way lies both enlightenment and insanity, and which of those two poles one experiences oneself to be hoist upon depends on the degree of inner clarity and strength one maintains.

  Thus, by the time I returned, I found myself believing myself to be the savior who would dispel the clouds of illusion from the minds of the unwary and lead the children to Tillai. At that time, I had been reading Huang Po, and the iron centeredness of that crusty old villain had me in a psychic cramp. I had become bored with all the shouting about the Age of Aquarius and the constant cant of all the pseudo-systems which had become so popular, and I was ready to “point directly at Reality.”

  The dinner was a smashing success, and after a while, there were about a hundred people, stomachs full and pleasantly stoned, lying on the grass looking at the darkening sky. I let the environment work its magic, and then began a new variation on the rap which has become a leitmotif to my life. Relaxation was easy to induce in such a setting; by now, the sky was black, with prickles of light. There was no moon so the effect was that of staring directly into the galaxy. I knew this much, that everyone there was in the usual waking hypnotic state which doesn’t receive the full impact of the fact of the overwhelming thereness of the world. So my trip was simply to bring the awareness of the group into sharper and sharper focus.

  The technique I chose was quite simple. I told a fairy tale, an as-if story, concerning the actual setting. “Pretend we are enigmatic creatures, strangers to ourselves, and mystified by what is about us. Pretend that we are staring through an infinity of dimensions to an incredible landscape, a universe of blazing centers of light. Pretend that we are people, looking at the stars. And now, remove the veil of pretense and actually look, see
what is before you. Behold the stunning splendor of creation.”

  It was corny, but I was playing the sticks. I don’t know what it did for most of the people there, but I did receive invitations from young ladies to escort them to their beds, and I went home that night with a girl named Georgia.

  Also, a man who looked like a professional traveling pseudo-revolutionary came up to me and asked whether I would like to begin a free university in Tucson. Now, I had been through the mill at Experimental College, and had known Francis Schick when he operated the Free U on Fourteenth Street in New York, before the Maoist crazies threatened to put him in front of a firing squad to pay for his anarchistic bent, and at this point in time and space it seemed to me that I would make the ideal founder of a school. I envisioned something called “The School of the Southwest Sun,” where we would teach the value of pure air and food and water, and meditation, and where we would discover the true religious foundations of man. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was prefiguring the whole ecology flap by about two years.

  The problem was to get backing, and during the next week, while I pondered where we might get funds, I fell in with one of the Christian youth centers which serviced the University of Arizona.

  It was a classically nondescript religious function, replete with blond boys and girls, and hapless ministers. As with everything in that city, it held surprises. One of the ministers had been a drug-taking jazz musician before he found his own form of God, and another was a Hebrew scholar, and a third was a gently disillusioned man who realized the full depth of his own futility. There was something about the thorough naïveté of the young people there, however, which entranced me. I had never known people like that in my life. The one word which describes them, and which points to a quality which had always fascinated me, is purity.

  They approached everything with clear, frank eyes, and in everything from sex to dope, although they had clearly conditioned postures, they were never prudish or small. They seemed to be able to take life as it is, without judging others for the way they approached life. They were involved now in a charity project, involving bringing a couple of hundred gallons of paint to do an orphanage which a Mexican laborer had spent twenty years building in his spare time. It seemed, for me, as good a way to get to Mexico as any, certainly less complicated than the last time I tried to get there, so I signed up.

  The trip south was made tolerable only by my ability to appreciate things in their purely phenomenal aspect. I sat next to the minister’s wife, a woman of quintessential vapidity, and within ten minutes had exhausted all possible conversation with her. The others in the car were even less interesting at first glance, so I settled back to enjoy the passing scenery. But after about six hours of traveling I noticed something odd. One of the girls in the front seat, Louise, had not said a word or moved her position for the entire time. I found myself stealing glances at her. Either she was in a light trance or a Buddha in disguise. Later, when I asked her what she had been thinking, she said, “Nothing. I hardly ever have any thoughts.”

  She had been born and raised on the outskirts of Tucson, by a pleasantly conservative schoolteacher of a father and a warmly efficient housewife of a mother. The single largest impression in her life was the stillness of the desert, and she had grown up without a single complication in her mind. She was now in college, was moderately intelligent — as such things are measured in our so-called educational institutions — and had all the proper attributes of a young lady her age. But for one. When she wasn’t actively involved in something, her mind and body fell into automatic repose. An enviable state.

  The stay there was odd. The man who had been building the place was a fanatic who said, upon being questioned as to why he had put so much time and effort into the project, “I do everything for God, and for Mexico,” a patriotic sentiment I had seen only in history books. It gave me an insight into the growing power of Mexico as the next power center in our hemisphere after the United States comes to ruin. I didn’t enter into any deep relationships with any of the people except Louise, with whom I carried on a delightfully old-fashioned flirtation, but simply sharing the slow pace and hot climate of that nation brought us together in a gentle union. By the time we got back to Tucson, I was ready to approach the ministers about the Free U.

  It was a mistake. The ministers had been looking for something to give their waning organization a shot in the arm, and this looked like it might be it. But they were extremely frightened of almost everything and everyone, including themselves.

  At the third meeting, the dirty laundry came out. The lists of people who couldn’t be offended, the organizations which would have to be consulted. They wanted no “political” elements in the school, and strict controls had to be laid down as to who was allowed to teach. I watched with horror as these educated and supposedly intelligent men, whose lives were theoretically dedicated to doing God’s work, twisted and squirmed under fear of retribution, of having funds cut off, and of offending anyone down to the level of county dogcatcher. Very soon, all serious discussion about the actual Free U went out the window, and we were talking about the effect of even mentioning such a project would have on the careers of the ministers involved. It sickened me to see grown men crawl before their own cowardice. I was repelled, as I have hardly ever been, to watch them literally whine at any notion of freedom. They were the castrati of the dying culture, the living proof that Christianity is not only dead, but rotting.

  I had gone in with ideas of actually attempting to give the young people, the hip and straight alike, a center where they could enter a no-bullshit relationship with each other and with those who felt they had something to teach, whether it be transcendental meditation or marksmanship. The notion was to let everyone crawl out from under the rocks and into the light of the sun, and let the people make their choice. I came out with the thin taste of bile as the meeting concluded with a resolution to make a resolution to further discuss the resolution to open a school.

  Suddenly, I saw Tucson in a new light. That was why it was so orderly, so well-run, so much without conflict. It was a cemetery, and the one rule for living there is that none of the inhabitants show any sign of life. It was a city of the living dead.

  I walked back to the Mandalia filled with gloom. And as I approached the store, I saw four of the people from Peace and Freedom painting a huge sign over the storefront. I almost fell over backward. They had written: the dead.

  I rushed over to find out whether this was a psychic transference of the highest order, or some bizarre coincidence. It turned out to be both, but in an unexpected way. The entire sign was to read: the dead are coming. Referring, of course, to the Grateful Dead. Tucson was about to have its first rock concert.

  The Peace and Freedom Party of Tucson was perhaps the single most innocuous political organization in the world. They had a store filled with revolutionary literature, held meetings all the time, went around saying “All power to the people,” to each other, but weren’t allowed to do a single thing. They, like everything else in Tucson, were allowed to exist as long as they didn’t break any civil laws. This, of course, included demonstrations, marches, speeches, and blowing up banks.

  But now they had a cause. One of the local boys had just received five years for refusing induction into the Army, and the concert was planned as a benefit in his honor, as well as to raise funds for the Party. It was to be held in the university auditorium.

  For the local revolutionaries, it was a great step forward. For the police and political heads, it was an event to be closely watched. For most of the university students, it was to be their first introduction to live rock. And for the townspeople at large, it was an oddity to be interested in.

  The store was in great upheaval. “Everyone will be there,” John said. Not yet knowing the entire scene, I pictured a hundred scraggly hippies sitting in the front row. But yet another surprise was in store.

 
In the two weeks before the concert, many strangers appeared in town. Some were clearly narcs, and others were clearly dealers. Like a great tidal wave, the Dead were preceded by swarms of birds and changes in the atmosphere. All of a sudden, there was a great deal of dope around. Grass and hash were to be had for the asking. It wasn’t even necessary to pay for it. Everyone had dope. Everyone was sharing. It was like the preparation for a saint’s feast day. The people were beginning to whoop it up. Also, for the first time, there were large-scale busts. Fifteen people got picked up on the street on obscure charges. They were released the next day, but the warning was clear. The cops were watching. Like schoolchildren, we could have fun, but would have to stay cool. On Mount Lemmon, ten people were busted for nude sunbathing in a totally isolated area. Once again the finger came down to point out the message. We were being reminded what the real power in the city was.

  The day of the concert was like Mardi Gras. Peter came into town with a gunny sack of peyote buttons, and for breakfast that morning we boiled the cactus down into a strong tea, added honey, and sipped the heady mixture while sitting on the lawn. Peyote is, of course, a sacred plant among the Indians of the Southwest, and their reverence for its powers has extended to the young white dropouts. Peyote is never sold, for example. It is shared, and to ask money for peyote would be considered a sacrilege. It is quite bitter, and one must be careful to scrape off the whitish growth on top of the plant. Usually it is eaten with fruit, to cover the taste, but it can be made into tea.

  It was the first time I had tried the sacred cactus in this form, and I had no way to gauge its strength. I drank several cups and after half an hour found myself pleasantly high.

  For several hours afterward, I busied myself with a half dozen details, such as doing hatha yoga, reading, and making lunch. By afternoon, we had more tea, and I went with John into town to open the bookstore. He felt that with today’s excitement, there would be a brisk business. The store was his cross and his salvation. He worried over it like a mother over her brood. Profit was always at the margin, and his struggle was between ordering books which would sell widely, and books which he felt should be exposed to the public. The entire store was a mine of esoterica, and served as a miniature replica of Weiser’s in New York and Shamballa in Berkeley. If it had any fault, it was too heavy an emphasis on arcane aspects of astrology. But that could be forgiven, given John’s specialty of study. The walls were hung with the usual madras cloths and gravure reproductions of Krishna, and the place was redolent of incense and rock.