The Stoned Apocalypse Read Free

residents, and glaring suspiciously at any odd types who wandered in, such as delivery men, freaks, and anybody with dark skin. “How can a guru live in a place like this?” I thought.
    I gave the doorman my name, and he buzzed the information upstairs. A voice rasped back over the speaker: “Tell him to wait.” I sat in the lobby, doubly mortified. I consoled myself with the fact that this is the way Zen masters are reputed to treat those who come seeking assistance. I reasoned that she wouldn’t know that I was hip to the game, and this gave me an advantage in the coming encounter. I smiled as I imagined how I would wrestle the guru down and force her to admit my superiority. Then, having shown my strength, I would humbly ask her for guidance.
    Almost three quarters of an hour later, she had me sent upstairs. I went to the door, and stood there a moment, marshaling my forces. I rang the bell and almost stumbled backward when a plain, pleasant, middle-class woman, with friendly eyes and a dowdy dress opened the door to greet me. I stepped into an ersatz Victorian living room, calling to mind the line that Marilyn, my Bennington star, had delivered in relation to Gurdjieff. “Somehow,” she had said, “that entire scene reminds me of overstaffed furniture with thick cloth slipcovers.” The woman stepped back and motioned me inside. “Take off your coat,” she said. “And sit down.”
    I dropped my coat on a chair and walked into the next room. She turned off down a hallway and disappeared. I waited for another half hour. I passed the time by casing the joint. There was a well-chosen collection of books, a ring of Third Avenue antique store furniture, and several original Modiglianis and Renoirs. I began to smell the contours of wealth, and a subtle dimension braced my perceptions.
    She came back in bustling, and arranged herself tidily on the couch. For a moment we sat in silence, she smiling, and me “sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come.”
    “Well,” she said, “tell me about yourself.”
    I hesitated, but couldn’t find anything to hang the hesitation on. I took a breath and proceeded to give her about two hours of my best rap. Shortly, I went into a kind of hypnotic state, lulled by the sound of my own voice, and presently was no longer aware of what I was saying. I must have appeared like some mechanical doll which had been wound up and was letting out a mindless spiel. At one point, I noticed that I had stopped talking, and snapped to. I became aware again that I was in the room, with this woman watching me, blandly, openly. I sat back and waited for her reaction.
    Without changing the expression of pleasant attention she had worn for the entire time, she said, “I think you are such an utter fool that if you have acquired, by the age of forty, the courage to kill yourself, it will be the one significant act of which you are capable.”
    I stared at her in disbelief. I waited for some indication that she was joking, or offering the line as some sort of gambit. But she looked at me levelly, without malice or judgment. She had simply been making an observation and seemed not to have the slightest interest in how I received it. Very slowly a feeling of horror crept over my body. I began to feel worthless and somehow vile. I felt as though I had committed some kind of nameless sin, and was now being called to task for it. Except that the sin was the sum total of how I had lived my life up to that point. She remained pleasant.
    For a long time I waited for something to say, and then collapsed inwardly. I was a punctured balloon, and could do nothing but bow my head to receive whatever punishment she wished to mete out. She stirred. “Nonetheless,” she said, “there are some barely salvageable features about you; you are not an entirely broken machine.” She appraised me with a long look. “Perhaps something can be done,” she added.
    I squirmed with pleasure. A wave of gratitude washed