by Marco Vassi
The job I was given made the work in the mail room seem the soul of spontaneity. I was handed a pile of punch cards, and an equal pile of typewritten sheets. Each of the sheets had a more or less cryptic message written on it, and what I was to do was copy the messages onto the punch cards, printing in capital letters, putting one letter in each of the hundred squares on the cards. It was something such as might be given to a kindergarten student to have him practice the alphabet. I sat down, listened carefully to the instructions, feeling like one of the contestants on Beat the Clock. Later, I was to sense myself more like a chimpanzee in a bizarre psychological experiment. And still later, like a reject from a mental hospital doing the only form of work of which he was capable. I rolled up my sleeves, and began.
In a very short time, I realized that the work load was so planned as to keep me busy every second of the time. I didn’t have to rush, but neither could I slow down. I had to assume the untiring pace of a machine. Looking around, I saw my would-be peers, middle-class college graduates, each in his or her own cubicle, bored, wan, trapped. Their job was to write the messages which I was copying onto the cards. It was as though we were the middle components of some insane conveyer belt, transferring dada messages from an obscure source to an equally obscure end.
I went into a light trance and worked straight through, being interrupted by a tap on the shoulder for lunch and for each of the two fifteen-minute coffee breaks. At one point, the pile of messages disappeared, and I ground to an abrupt halt. I looked up and realized that I had finished. I walked up to the lady who had started me off in the morning. “Are there any more?” I asked. She looked up, puzzled. “No . . .” she said. And then, “Are you finished?” She looked up at the clock; it was twenty-five before five.
She gave me the kind of smile that teachers for the mentally retarded reserve for their most industrious students. “You finished ahead of time!” she cooed. “Why, that’s marvelous.”
To my intense surprise, I swelled with inane pride. It was the first word of praise for an accomplishment that I had received in months. And it was for an honest labor, however mindless. I almost kissed her hand. “Can I come back tomorrow?” I asked hopefully.
Her face fell. “No, I’m sorry. That’s all the work we’ll have for a while. Our regular girl is coming in tomorrow.” We stayed like that for a long moment. Then she added, “But if we need someone again, I’ll tell the agency to make sure to send you.” She looked up at the clock again, and as though she were handing me a star for my report card, said, “Why, you might as well leave early. After all, you’ve earned it.”
I walked out whistling in my private dark. I felt weighed down by the vision of millions upon millions of people working day in and out at these a-human tasks. At the same time, I had earned almost twenty-five dollars between the two jobs. My fortune was improving. I walked around downtown a bit, and feeling exceptionally flush, decided to go to the Stud Turkish Bath. I thought that a steam bath, and the possibility of some sex, would add a nice touch to the day.
I climbed the velvet corridor, paid my four dollars, and entered that equally, but differently, bizarre world. I paid for a room, and as I turned to go upstairs, I saw a sign on the wall: help wanted. A number of things fell into place at once. I inquired about the job, and learned that it paid two dollars an hour to start, and involved scrubbing down the steam rooms, cleaning the johns, vacuuming the halls, and in general being available for odd assignments. I would be working under an old black cat who had been doing this for ten years. I filled out an application, was introduced to the manager, and, using the proper jargon, tone of voice, and seductive glances, got the job. I was to report in two days.
Now, visiting the baths is different from working in them, although I was to learn that the hard way. They are open twenty-four hours a day, and are the nearest thing we have in our times to the classic Roman model. Baths across the nation range from the utterly vile to the totally sophisticated, and the Stud fell somewhere in between. It stood near an S&M bar with whips and leather jocks hung over the liquor bottles. The Stud was considered kinkier than the other baths in the city, which appealed mostly to the straighter homosexuals.
One of the first things I noticed when I started working there was that there was no way to tell the time of day other than looking at a clock. The windows were painted black, and the lighting never changed. It had the ambience of Purgatorio. People walked up and down the hallways, peering into the open rooms, in a slow rhythm, as though bearing some great secret burden. Except for late weekend nights, when there were wild carryings-on in the mass public bedroom downstairs. There were three storys of hallway, and off each hallway were scores of doors, each opening to a little room, some six by ten feet, which had a cot, a closet, and a spittoon. Part of my job was washing down the rooms at specified intervals. The job level above mine involved changing the linen in the rooms after each client left; and the highest job was taking money at the door and assigning keys.
The work itself was bestial. We had two hours to scrub down three steam and shower rooms, using ammonia and a great, stiff-bristled brush. The man I worked with was muscled like a discus thrower, but by the second day I realized that the job was at the limit of my physical capacity. I had a flash on using the job as a weight lifter uses exercises, and might have stayed with the strain of it, but the psychic heaviness did me in. All day, up and down they walked. Lonely men, horny men, confused men, sexually charged men. Wearing red towels around their waists. Their feet made slapping sounds on the floor as they walked. Whoever gave the name “gay” to the homosexual world had a cruel sense of irony. For the gaiety was all superficial, all hysterical. Mostly, there was pain.
Previously, going to the baths, I had entered either to bathe or to fuck, and from my goal-oriented viewpoint, missed the larger sense of the place. Now I had a privileged position. It was house policy that none of the workers could have sex with the patrons, and it was strictly enforced. To get the job, I had to have mug shots taken for the police files, since the baths walked a thin line between respectability and illegality. The police knew what went on there, and were nervous about it, but since it was all discreet, and since everyone was “a consenting adult,” they pretty much left the place alone. Of course, that there were payoffs went without question.
So, the customers began to approach me, but not for sex; instead, they began to talk. And I learned many stories. The one thing which emerged most clearly is that there is no difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. They have the same range of problems, from impotence to promiscuity, struggles with fidelity, guilt. They have the same joys, the same fears. And they completely share the general sexual sickness of the nation.
In one thing there is a difference. The homosexual community, by and large, is much more upfront about its condition. Especially in a place like the baths, where one thing is admitted right out. Everyone is there for sex, pure and simple. It was not unusual to have a three- or four-hour intense, intimate, and totally satisfying sexual encounter with another person with whom one did not exchange a word. In many ways, there was a greater honesty here, for in its essence, sex is not between personalities, and it is not necessary to know the name of the person one is fucking.
Of course, fucking gives rise to feelings of tenderness and warmth, and in the meat rack, these feelings are suppressed and ignored. But this is no different from the cruising that is done in heterosexual bars, at parties, in the suburbs, and up and down every stratum of our culture.
For the first time, I entered the gay social community. Up to then, my encounters had been only sexual. Even when I went to gay bars, it was only to cruise. And my observations were private ones. For example, it is possible to see the entire anthropology of the American male by spending an evening in a gay bar. Of course, as Gurdjieff notes, one can’t understand another human being without agreeing with that human being. And that means, to know what it means to
be homosexual, one has to be homosexual. Any psychologist attempting to deal with homosexuality who has not himself sucked a cock is a hypocritical liar, and ought to be arrested for malpractice.
My experience with Tommy that night in the Circle Hotel had been the first time I had cracked the barrier of mixing sex with friendship. Now, however, I began to get involved in the lives of my fellow workers. I began to enter into the affairs and marriages of these men. One of the men who worked at the Stud had been married for seven years, an unusual thing in the gay world, and when he spoke of his home, it was with all the love and fervor that any happily married heterosexual would show. I found myself going to private gay clubs, and discovering all the social roles which exist in a world of dancing, and loving, and living, and working, with one’s fellowman. And within a short time, my chameleon personality being what it is, I became gay. That is to say, I assumed the ambience of a homosexual. My clothes changed, my way of talking altered, I even walked differently. Not that I wanted to become swish, but that all the soft, undulating aspects of my psychophysical self came to the fore.
It was then that I had to make a decision. I knew that if I continued to work there, I would soon make my way up the hierarchy, first to room boy, then to desk clerk, and on into the bar, and higher echelons of the organization, which embraced stag movies, bookstores, and branched into design, art, and all aspects of the civilization. And I decided against it. Not because I had any prejudice against the gay life; it was in many ways more gentle and humane than that offered by the straight world. But I couldn’t accept having come so far, experienced so much, broken through so many barriers, to exchange the straight establishment for the gay establishment.
Already I could see that this world had its own mores, its own codes, its own taboos. The maverick in me was too strong. If I was to be homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual or orgiastic or celibate, it would have to be an ad hoc decision, based on the promptings of my instincts at any given time. I wanted to hang no social identification tags around my neck. Also, there was a horrible moment when, coming out of the S&M bar, I saw three young girls passing on the street, and my heart filled with dread at the idea that I would never have a woman again. To make a choice which sexually rules out half the human race seemed idiotic.
And so, I walked in one afternoon and tendered my resignation. It was met with regret by the men whom I had come to know as co-workers and friends and lovers. I had made enough money to tide me over for a while, and wanted to take a week or so to plan my next move. The letters from Georgia were getting frantic, and I knew that I had to find some way to bring her to the city, or else go back to Arizona, or else tell her to have an abortion and call the whole thing off.
That night, I dropped by to visit Leah and found her in bed with a dropout psychiatrist named Steve. I sat down and the three of us got stoned for a few hours and Steve began talking about some friends of his who were setting up a new psychiatric ward on the Peninsula. It was to be a blowout center, based on the type that R. D. Laing had set up at Kingsley Hall in England. I became interested at once. I had read Laing two years earlier, and had been much turned on by his words. He had dropped acid and come to see how rotten psychiatry is at its core, and set about doing something to change it. During the course of it, he flipped out a few times, and met with such resistance from his fellow doctors that his work remained limited to what he himself was able to accomplish.
Now a radical — radical, of course, only within the context of the Neolithic psychiatric community — wing was being opened, and the people running it were looking for staff members. They wanted people who had taken acid, or who were into an Esalen bag, or who had establishment credentials and wanted to do more than the establishment allowed. Steve told me a bit about it, and I felt the call. It sounded like just what I needed. It would pay about a hundred dollars a week, and give me a chance to get back into my relaxation work as well as use my knowledge of drugs. Also, it would allow me to come to terms with my own insanity.
“Give Al Feldman a call,” said Steve. “He lived with me in Ukiah, and he’ll be the ward psychiatrist there.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
The next day I called Al and with that began a trip which almost destroyed my mind.
9
Al is a gentle Scorpio. Like many doctors who get bored with the routine of general medicine, he went into psychiatry. The way that scene is set up in this country, an MD has to know very little by way of formal psychological training, and needs absolutely no qualifications by way of sensitivity, warmth, humanity, or perceptiveness to start playing with people’s minds. About the only formal requirement is an internship in a mental hospital, but this is usually spent filling out forms and walking through the wards at a rapid pace. A doctor, to be a psychiatrist, only has to hang out a shingle proclaiming himself one. And the one advantage these inept witch doctors have over their lay therapist cousins is that they can prescribe pills.
But like a number of other psychiatrists, Al had dropped acid, and got a flash on what a con game the whole business is. The professional posture, the mask of objectivity, the jargon, the rituals, the high fees. And he became concerned enough to want to actually help his suffering fellow human beings. Of course, the acid insights took him to a realm of compassion which his level of self-knowledge could not make effective. He saw more than he could handle.
He was living with Larry, another dropout shrink who sported long sideburns, a cowboy hat and boots, and a general air of insouciance. Harish was also there, an enlightened Pakistani who looks like Meher Baba; Carol, Harish’s wife; and a constant stream of friends, crashers, well-wishers, and family. It was one of the warmest, most-together households I had ever seen.
I made an appointment to meet Al at the hospital. I arrived in the early afternoon and was charmed by the physical layout of the place. The weather was ideal, in the middle seventies, dry, with a slight breeze. The buildings were new and the grounds were immaculate. Almost everyone walking around was a patient or a staff member, the former practically all on Thorazine, and drifting about in a peaceful haze. At one point, a few weeks later, I saw two patients get into a fist fight, but they were so drugged on that horse tranquilizer that they fought in dreamy slow motion, making the whole scene unreal in the hot afternoon. If it weren’t so pathetic, it would have been funny.
My interview was with Al, Harish, and Teresa, who was a research psychologist. I was somewhat apprehensive because I felt that this was the perfect place for me to be, and I didn’t want to blow the chance. We chatted a bit, and then Al said, “What is your fantasy about working here?”
I thought a bit about it and answered very slowly. “I’ve been crazy a few times,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been in a place where I was trapped in what felt like eternal suffering, where no other person could ever reach me, and which I couldn’t communicate to anyone. And when I took acid, I realized that it was possible for me to go over that edge and never come back, I mean, to be in such anguish that my behavior would seem mad to everyone around me, and they would put me away. And then I read Laing, and he made sense. When he said, ‘If a person has one human being to talk to, then he’s no longer crazy,’ I realized that he had put his finger right on the issue, without any bullshit. Because I’m convinced that insanity has no objective definition. In the East they say, ‘The only difference between a schizophrenic and a holy man is that the schizophrenic doesn’t realize that he’s holy.’
“I heard about Laing’s blowout center in England, and I wanted to go there. From what I can gather, a person who is having a psychotic break is allowed and encouraged to see it through to the end, and the therapist does nothing but stay with him, giving him someone to talk to, like a guide on an acid trip. And I thought, if I could blow out like that, really go crazy once, just let it all hang out, look at it, feel it and taste it, then I would be free of the fear, and there would be no places left in my mind t
hat were dark corners.
“My fantasy about this place is that there won’t be any difference between patient and staff, that we’ll all be just people trying to help each other out of our pain and confusion. And that the people who work here will be able to freak out and get in touch with their own craziness. That we won’t dull anyone’s head with Thorazine, but really put our guts on the line to help one another through our bad trips.
“My ultimate fantasy is of a place where everyone understands that on the highest level there is no crazy or sane, no good or bad, but just this fact of life.”
Harish eyed me thoughtfully. “Are you familiar with any esoteric work?” he said.
“I studied with the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York,” I said, encapsulating that entire complex experience into a single sentence.
“Ah,” he said, and closed his eyes. He said no more for the rest of the time that I was there.
“What do you expect you can do at the ward?” Teresa asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Mostly just be there, get into people’s heads, let myself hang out, find out whether I can work with relaxation and massage as a means to getting people out of their bad trips.”
There was a general nodding of heads, in proper interview style, and then we all rapped a bit more about the whole psychiatry trip and I told them something of what I had done and been doing. We talked about drugs and politics and in general got a sense of one another’s psychic space.