The Stoned Apocalypse (15 page)
I also got a strange political education in Tucson. For the first time I got to talk to real right-wingers, and found most of them to be not the monsters I had imagined. Of course, I never met any of the Minutemen who practiced their maneuvers to the south, or any of the other real crazies. Rather, the average Southwest conservative.
I once rode on a bus with a crusty old-timer who kept looking sideways at me. Finally, he said, “You’re one of them hippies, ain’t ya?”
I smiled. “Yes, sir,” I said. I couldn’t deny it, looking the way I did.
“You’re all the time having wild sex parties and not working and taking drugs, ain’t ya?” he said.
I thought about it a moment, and said, “That’s right,” since it was an accurate précis of our life-style at the time.
“I don’t much hold with all that,” he said. Then he paused a long time and added, “But so long as you don’t come do it on my property, you go right ahead.”
I marveled at the succinct wisdom of it. Here, where there was still enough land for a person to maintain his privacy, it was possible to be very liberal about life-styles. Here, where the heat made life pleasant, even the slums were more than tolerable. The black ghetto of Tucson makes most middle-class white sections of Queens seem like hovels. Again and again I ran into that attitude. Even the police had it. Drugs, for example, were widely tolerated. It was almost impossible to get busted unless one started dealing in hundreds of pounds. The idea was that as long as the Feds weren’t dragged in, local problems would be managed according to local limits of tolerance. It was possible to walk down the street looking like a freaked-out Tiny Tim, and one wouldn’t receive so much as a sideways glance from the cops. But if one crossed against a red light, one was immediately stopped. The point was, obey the civil law, and your private life was pretty much your own concern. In all, it exhibited the most intelligent approach to practical politics I had ever seen in this country. And I am convinced that the one thing which made it possible was the simple fact of having enough geographic space to live in.
But this wasn’t to last long. The exploiters were moving in. Tucson’s population had gone from 30,000 to 300,000 since the end of World War II. And from the right and left the vultures gathered. That foulest of all forms of animal life, the real estate developer, was beginning to eye the vast stretches of unspoiled desert, converting natural beauty and ecological survival into the number of dollars that could line his pocket. And his cousin, the scene-maker, was beginning to see the vast stretches of peace and quiet waiting to be inundated by noise.
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.