The Stoned Apocalypse (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  And the minute I thought that, an insane giggle came to my lips. A giggle! Like a burst of sunlight, the face of Joel exploded in my mind. All at once, I relaxed. “Can I use the phone?” I said.

  He looked at me a moment. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  I dialed Joel’s number, and in five minutes poured out the whole story. By the time I got to the part where Al wouldn’t let me out, he began giggling, and suddenly everything was all right again. I had someone to talk to. Someone to talk to. Such a simple, such a rare, thing.

  My perspective flooded back. I wasn’t out of the water, but I was no longer drowning. “Can you come get me?” I asked. “I can’t come tonight,” he said, “I’m doing my drummer gig. But I’ll come get you in the morning and we’ll give you some coffee and grass. You’ll be all right.”

  I hung up, and turned back into the ward, my eyes wet with tears. I still had dues to pay. The experience had to be regurgitated and eaten, again and again, in a thousand different flavors, before I would be through with it.

  I got the chills. It was getting dark. And the nighttime routine on the ward was beginning. One of the most terrible aspects of schizophrenia is the way it often robs a person of his ability to sleep. And so, with my blanket wrapped around me, I began to pace the long floors of the ward.

  Some of the people were huddled in front of the television set. Larry made endless trips to the coffee urn. I went to the window and peered helplessly at the stars. I lay down and closed my eyes. Immediately, paranoia flared. I became convinced that someone would come up and slit my throat.

  At midnight, the graveyard shift came on duty. And from outside their office I watched them. They looked like MP’s guarding a military prison. They were brisk and efficient. They signed numberless forms, and filled log books with notations. From where I stood, they seemed pale and nervous, while those of us outside were dark and weary. It was the same story all over again, the white men and the niggers, the Germans and the Jews, the bosses and the workers.

  Tim came up to me and stood by my side as we peered into the room where, just yesterday, I had sat, stupidly thinking that by going through the routines of schedule I was in some way helping the suffering of the poor madmen who were outside. And now I saw, clearly, once and for all, that the same sickness which produces schizophrenics insures that they will never be cured. For the cure is measured by a standard that any truly sane man would have to reject.

  There is too little understanding of the nature of things, and those who understand are too few to be of any help, or too battered to care any more.

  “Do you see them?” I said to Tim.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I been seeing them for a long time.”

  “Well, what . . .” I began, and then didn’t know what to say.

  “Oh fuck, man,” he said. “Don’t even think about it. Let’s go get some more coffee.”

  The next morning, shortly after daybreak, Joel came to get me. By then I had pulled myself enough together to present a face to meet the faces I would meet. I shaved and put on clean issue. I spoke calmly. And when no one was noticing, Joel opened the back door and spirited me out. We drove back to the warmth of his home.

  “What about them?” I said. “The ones still in there, who can’t get out so easy?”

  He gave me one of his beautiful stoned sad looks. “So,” he said, “go make a revolution.”

  10

  “. . . goin’ back to New York City, do believe I’ve had enough . . .” sang Dylan over and over again as I sat in Rita’s San Geronimo pad. As always, when I had nowhere to turn to, Rita appeared as if miraculously and gave me the stability I needed to make it to the next cycle. Georgia had called and told me she wasn’t really pregnant and was going back to Mexico for a divorce. My string in California had run out. I felt the need to go home, even though home was a polluted, snarling, criminal city with all the ills of our time concentrated in its zoo-like buildings. I needed, more than anything, people who had known me a long time, people who would just let me be, and among whom I could relax and let the scars of the trip heal. I needed, desperately, although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, to put the wildness of this year and a half in perspective, and the best way to do it was to tell its stories to old friends, to integrate through sharing.

  I had no money; the snafu at Sacramento had never been cleared up and the funds which were to have paid me didn’t come through. So I hit the odd-job trail again, and wound up working for a gardener who kept all the trees and flowers which grew in the islands of the shopping-center parking lots in Marin County. He had spent fifteen years as a Canadian Mounted Policeman, and during his long isolated rides through the northern winters, had become a strict Christian fundamentalist. He believed the world was created in 4004 b.c. I teetered on the brink of hysteria every time I just spoke to him. In the condition my mind was in, I was ready to be imprinted by anything I heard, and when he started on his rap, I would have to bite my inner cheeks to the point of making them bleed so the pain would distract me from what he was saying. And I had to be polite; I needed the money.

  The job in itself was a horror. It involved, each day, tearing up hundreds of flowers by the roots, because the supermarkets wanted the floral display rotated every few weeks. They treated living things like so much scenery, to be moved around at will. For almost a week I hunched over the islands of earth as cars rumbled past my heels, watching the hordes of housewives do their shopping, and methodically killing flowers.

  I had to get out. I didn’t know what was awaiting me in New York, or how that city would appear to me now after all my changes, but I was certain it couldn’t be worse than my situation at the moment. I picked up my first paycheck and counted a little over eighty dollars. A plane ticket was a hundred and fifty. But that night I came across a notice for a half-price fare, which turned out to be the return portion of a half-used round-trip ticket. I bought it, threw my things into my knapsack, and went to the airport as M. Carpenter. I said good-bye to Rita, perhaps for the tenth time.

  A nervous six hours later, at seven in the morning, the jet touched down at Kennedy Airport. By the time I paid for the buses to Manhattan, I stood on the corner of Seventy-second Street and Broadway with five cents in my pocket. I walked over to Zelda’s apartment, and woke up my lover-friend of seven years. She looked at me once, smiled, and said, “You’re back. Come in. Have some breakfast. You need a place to sleep? You need some money? Come in. Sit down.”

  And with the first breath of relief I had taken in a very long time, I sat down and let myself be ministered to in classic prodigal son style.

  I delayed calling my parents. My mother would immediately have wanted to know “What have you been doing?” and the thought of being confronted by that question right now boggled my mind. Zelda laid some bread on me. Now that she had decided she didn’t want to be an actress after all, she was racking up a high salary at an ad agency. And then she went off to work.

  For a few days I just prowled the streets, letting the city vibrations wash over me. The one comforting thing about New York is its utter imperviousness to individual madness. The city’s population has reached such a convoluted and intense pitch of constant anxiety that I found it restful simply by contrast. Of course, I realized that if I stayed in it too long, I would be absorbed into its movement and find myself drawn into that tense, headlong rush to oblivion.

  I decided to plug back in to the New York action, and gave Francis a call. During the time I had been away, he had undergone a radical change in temperament. In the old days, he was strictly a private person, and spent most of his time in his fortress loft, without telephone or doorbell. He was involved in an effort to paint, abstractly, the AHA! experience described in Gestalt psychology. His canvases emerged as dense swirling drifts of subtle pigment, absolutely monochromatic, which kept enticing the eye, challenging it to discern shapes. His technique i
nvolved getting very stoned, climbing to the top of a twelve-foot ladder, and leaning down into the canvas, painting precariously, while Mozart played for twelve or fourteen hours. He was hyperthyroid, with a metabolism about three and a half times faster than normal, was skeletonally thin, and slept about two or three hours a night. He has perhaps the world’s only head library.

  Now, his metabolism had reverted to normal, he had become sociable, and had given up painting for videotape. He had met some video freaks who gave him acid and had him watch a screen for three hours, looking at the white noise patterns. As anyone who has tried that knows, one gets stoned on the infinity of possible perceptions. One is watching pure energy, the random dance of electrons across a magnetized screen. And in a while, it becomes the ground upon which any possible figure may appear. For a while, one writes the effect off to hallucination, and then one realizes that standard television is merely the arrangement of these same electrons into patterns which, through conditioning, are “recognizable.” The line between perception and hallucination is quite thin, and from the subatomic standpoint, the difference between reality and illusion is merely a matter of prejudice.

  When one takes the further step in realizing that what we call physical reality is also the configuration of electrons into familiar patterns, the psychological revolution is complete. One understands that television is the art form of our epoch, standing in relation to our renaissance the way painting stood in relation to the Italian Renaissance.

  Francis was involved with people whose notion was that the counter-culture, the worldwide society of heads, might build an actual alternate network, which would begin with the mailing of tapes and continue to the use of satellites. Since the misuse of technology by power- and money-hungry bandits has brought the world to the brink of ruin, and since it is too late to go back on our technology, the technology itself could be used to extricate ourselves from the peril it helped get us into.

  I was swiftly swept up into this latest phase of the revolution, this wave which called itself media ecology. I began to meet the media freaks, and spent many weeks, very high, talking about international networks, and computer interfacing, and the new consciousness which the children of the television age are manifesting. Everything fit into place. And I got lost in the folds of the conception, which put together all the aspects and pieces of the human problem, cosmically, and historically, and psychologically.

  As the title for this gathering of forces, Francis chose the name: RAINDANCE, which implied that the electronic exoskeleton had to be understood as a real part of the earth’s ecology before it could be intelligently used.

  Stoned on images, I forgot to check my internal meters, and found myself on another trip before I was aware of it. Still, I grew strong on the energies which were being unleashed, until the fatal error was made. Francis and Barry, a reporter whose ambition was to become the electronic Henry Luce, got infected with dreams of wealth and power. Raindance stopped being an activity of friends and revolutionaries, and attempted to become a business.

  From then on, everything got ugly. For to do business, one had to deal with businessmen. And it took some three months before the message filtered through our enthusiasm that there is only one principle in all business dealings: Profit is good, everything else is bad. Already CBS was coming out with a system for distributing home cassettes. But in their usual totalitarian mode, they were going to manufacture tapes for which they had the sole printing process. They were not going to allow the people to make their own tapes, their own art, to record their own history. The very improvement in technology which might have signaled a revolution in the human spirit was to be used to further enslave that spirit. All the ideas we had were being had by the businessmen who run the country, but they were interested in extending their own empires, not making the world a saner, healthier place to live.

  The enthusiasm for videotape came from the evenings we spent using the equipment with one another, to create portraits, and modes of psychological insight, and sheer technological art. I suppose we all had our first flashes of power through those sessions, the realization that if one had access to the technology, he had as strong a voice in shaping the destiny of the world as the politicians and generals. And yet, how often need that old saw be repeated, that power corrupts.

  Ultimate corruption came in the form of a pleasant and friendly man named Edward who was a lawyer for a Wall Street investment firm. He volunteered to act as our attorney and advisor in return for a share of stock. And within days the air was redolent with talk of futures and options and raising millions of dollars and keeping an eye on competitors, and all the rest of the vicious jargon of our commercial civilization. The death stroke came when we ceased being Raindance, and became: Raindance Corporation (RDC). The last three letters were included for any business we had to do with large companies; it was felt that “Raindance” might sound too far-out, whereas “RDC” would make us sound respectable. This was perhaps the first instance in which a revolutionary force sold out before it even had anything to sell.

  One of our group happened to be a millionaire through inheritance, and he put up thirty thousand dollars seed money for equipment and salaries. And so, for a few months, I was content, learning about video, getting a pad on East Eleventh Street, and reintegrating myself into city life.

  But the euphoria couldn’t last. After a while, the initial investment began to run out, and we weren’t bringing in any money. Francis was totally erratic, disappearing for weeks and then showing up with a series of brilliant tapes which had, of course, no commercial value. Otto, our accountant, finally admitted that he didn’t know how to keep books. Barry kept spinning more and more grandiose schemes which had less and less relevance to real conditions. Hugh, who provided the money, got bored with the project, and since he was independently wealthy, felt he could drop it at any time whatsoever. And I became more and more unhappy because the group was committing the very sins it was put together to eradicate.

  We stopped understanding ourselves as comrades in a common venture and became business partners out to make a buck. We stopped exploring the joys of videotape and began drawing up proposals which we thought would show quick financial return. In attempting to solve the problem we became part of the problem. We had become too venal to continue as artists and revolutionaries, and were too inept to succeed as businessmen.

  Finally, the pressures began to mount to the breaking point, and the most intense friction occurred between Francis and myself. Filled as I was with the West Coast philosophy of euphoria-at-all-costs, I kept calling attention to the fact that Raindance had stopped being pleasurable, and that nothing good could come of an organization where the people were unhappy in what they were doing. From Francis’ point of view, I was creating obstacles to the smooth functioning of the group. Also, since I was in a privileged position to him, he saw me as a distinct threat. I became RDC’s first Trotsky. Also, our business commitments were forcing us to see one another more frequently than our natural rhythms would have dictated. And nothing will destroy a friendship or a marriage faster or more thoroughly than enforced contact. In the early days, after three weeks of being locked in his loft, he would come roaring out, hungry for companionship, and seeing him then was always a joy. Or, when after a particularly rocky trip, I would go in search of someone to allay my paranoia, Francis was a perfect one to visit. Now, with the scheduling of conferences, business dinners, and all the rest of that vapid ritual, contact became deadly. Slight irritations grew into mammoth resentments. Love turned to hate. And the explosion came.

  Francis was the group’s leader, but didn’t really want to lead. He wanted to be the brilliant innovator, and have others follow through on his ideas. He chose people that he liked to work with, but none of us was the type who knew how to follow through either. To follow through means to take away something from spontaneity, and we were enjoying the theater of our condition too much to worry seri
ously about the details of our plans.

  I began to rant and rave, changing my role to that of Savonarola. I proclaimed that we were sliding into ruin, that we were playing into the hands of the forces of evil. And time and again I took Francis aside to remind him that our friendship was worth more than any empire, for if the friendship failed, there could be no sound foundation for any empire to be built upon. This was the same problem that has faced every organization that has ever been formed. In the beginning, the bond is the shared vision of its members, but then the organization develops a life and momentum of its own, and the members become subservient to its currents and directions. The group becomes the monster, swallowing its parts. I had been through this at the state hospital, and I could see the same patterns emerging. But as usual, I was helpless to do anything but point frantically at the reality. As my frustration grew, my pointing became more annoying to the others. I was becoming a drag on the daily functioning, while everyone was trying to grab the golden ring of wealth.

  Finally, Francis went to tape a seminar at Princeton which was arranged by a sociologist who saw Raindance as a possible means to up his income to six figures a year. It included twenty of the world’s top scientists in some eight disciplines, and concerned the growing ecological crisis. They came to the sober conclusion, based on things like a three-year study of carbon content in the atmosphere, that life on earth has from thirty to fifty years left.

  I should have thought that this would make a perfect Raindance tape, disseminating this news to the world. But, in that odd way people have, the scientists refused to have any of the tapes shown. In the face of their own findings that the world was coming to an end, they were afraid that such controversial material might damage their careers.

  I couldn’t accept it. This was a betrayal on the scale of anything General Motors might be doing. But the others were of a different mind. We got a thousand dollars for doing the taping, and Francis and Barry got very high, rubbing shoulders with eminent men. The tapes were to be sealed and kept in the sociologist’s office, not even to be referred to.