neo-Pharaohnic throne, like the Jesuits in the Vatican, the Scien-tologists will advise on how the human race should be run.
Aster and I left on a hot July afternoon, saying good-bye to my mother under the El on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, as she went off to her job supervising forty Cuban refugee women who strung beads for a costume jeweler at a dollar an hour in one of our latter-day sweatshops. It took five days and two thousand miles for me to shed the immediate buzz of panic which had begun to drive me mad in New York. And as the vastness of America unrolled before my eyes, I began to breathe again.
But when I got to San Francisco, other modes of insanity were lying in wait, ready to ensnare my mind.
3
I found a place in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, a hippie hobbitland at the end of the Mission District. It was an old Italian neighborhood where goats had once grazed on the hill which now served as the base for a giant Army radar screen. It was now peopled by a goodly number of heads who had much of the gentle anonymity of the early Haight love children. Aster and I came to an abrupt parting of the ways since the excitement of travel had somewhat supplanted the intensity of our sexual trip, and we were left with only the hate portion of the relationship. She split for a farm in Oregon and within a few weeks I found myself the sole inhabitant of a damp apartment that overlooked a dead-end street in the front, and opened on to a garden in the back.
Next door were Fred and Melissa who had been living together for two years, erupting every two months in another “final” separation which lasted for a week or so. Pat lived upstairs, a wise old/young lady of twenty-six years who read Doris Lessing and listened to Satie as she smoked each day away in vaguely pointed yearnings. Later, for a while, Leah was to be with me, my bisexual sister of a hundred encounters, with abyss-suggesting brown Taurus eyes and entrancingly small breasts. Across the way were Harry and Mary, a psychedelic version of the nice American couple. He played guitar and fixed motorcycles, while she tried to keep the house together and make babies. Above them were Paul and Cheryl who were later to become Christians.
Although I had about two thousand dollars and a car, easily enough to live on for six months on the Coast, I still had my New York habits, and was soon busy looking for something to “do.” My best gig was, ironically enough, teaching classes in relaxation, which involved getting people just to lie down and breathe, until they entered a state of light hypnotism, at which time I would take them on mind trips. I had learned the gimmick some years earlier while working with a fearless and feckless therapist who kept rediscovering the psychological wheel. Every month she would come roaring in with a new theory, only to have it pointed out to her that Freud or Aristotle or Buddha or somebody had written it all down years before. I was her patient for a year, her partner for six months, and her therapist for six months after that. It was a strange relationship, but one which taught me more than a little about how simple it is to mold people in any direction whatsoever. During that time we stumbled onto Reichian breathing, thought transfer, body language, and the whole panoply of jargonized insights which has since made Esalen such a pile of loot.
I now began tracking down encounter group leaders through the Barb, and finally found myself at San Francisco State College, where the Experimental College on campus was in the midst of transforming the structure of education.
My introduction to the scene was through Loren Jones. Loren is a rare combination of scholar and revolutionary. He had been initiated by one of the secret esoteric orders, and could make a candle flame do tricks at ten paces. He was short, due to a spine defect which kept him in continual pain, and wore a noble beard. In all, a kind of hippie Toulouse-Lautrec.
The
Aster and I left on a hot July afternoon, saying good-bye to my mother under the El on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, as she went off to her job supervising forty Cuban refugee women who strung beads for a costume jeweler at a dollar an hour in one of our latter-day sweatshops. It took five days and two thousand miles for me to shed the immediate buzz of panic which had begun to drive me mad in New York. And as the vastness of America unrolled before my eyes, I began to breathe again.
But when I got to San Francisco, other modes of insanity were lying in wait, ready to ensnare my mind.
3
I found a place in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, a hippie hobbitland at the end of the Mission District. It was an old Italian neighborhood where goats had once grazed on the hill which now served as the base for a giant Army radar screen. It was now peopled by a goodly number of heads who had much of the gentle anonymity of the early Haight love children. Aster and I came to an abrupt parting of the ways since the excitement of travel had somewhat supplanted the intensity of our sexual trip, and we were left with only the hate portion of the relationship. She split for a farm in Oregon and within a few weeks I found myself the sole inhabitant of a damp apartment that overlooked a dead-end street in the front, and opened on to a garden in the back.
Next door were Fred and Melissa who had been living together for two years, erupting every two months in another “final” separation which lasted for a week or so. Pat lived upstairs, a wise old/young lady of twenty-six years who read Doris Lessing and listened to Satie as she smoked each day away in vaguely pointed yearnings. Later, for a while, Leah was to be with me, my bisexual sister of a hundred encounters, with abyss-suggesting brown Taurus eyes and entrancingly small breasts. Across the way were Harry and Mary, a psychedelic version of the nice American couple. He played guitar and fixed motorcycles, while she tried to keep the house together and make babies. Above them were Paul and Cheryl who were later to become Christians.
Although I had about two thousand dollars and a car, easily enough to live on for six months on the Coast, I still had my New York habits, and was soon busy looking for something to “do.” My best gig was, ironically enough, teaching classes in relaxation, which involved getting people just to lie down and breathe, until they entered a state of light hypnotism, at which time I would take them on mind trips. I had learned the gimmick some years earlier while working with a fearless and feckless therapist who kept rediscovering the psychological wheel. Every month she would come roaring in with a new theory, only to have it pointed out to her that Freud or Aristotle or Buddha or somebody had written it all down years before. I was her patient for a year, her partner for six months, and her therapist for six months after that. It was a strange relationship, but one which taught me more than a little about how simple it is to mold people in any direction whatsoever. During that time we stumbled onto Reichian breathing, thought transfer, body language, and the whole panoply of jargonized insights which has since made Esalen such a pile of loot.
I now began tracking down encounter group leaders through the Barb, and finally found myself at San Francisco State College, where the Experimental College on campus was in the midst of transforming the structure of education.
My introduction to the scene was through Loren Jones. Loren is a rare combination of scholar and revolutionary. He had been initiated by one of the secret esoteric orders, and could make a candle flame do tricks at ten paces. He was short, due to a spine defect which kept him in continual pain, and wore a noble beard. In all, a kind of hippie Toulouse-Lautrec.
The
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