The Stoned Apocalypse Read Free Page A

over me. Involuntarily, I smiled. She was playing me like a mannequin.
    “Begin by getting rid of that foolish grin,” she ordered. “I haven’t decided to take you on as yet. There are some things you will have to understand first. You cannot fool me. Anytime you try to fool me, I shall know about it. You are to speak to no one about what goes on here. And you shall have to obey me utterly. Can you do that?”
    I was eager to please. “Yes,” I said, “I think so.”
    “Nonsense,” she barked. “You can do nothing.”
    “That’s right,” I said, “I can do nothing.”
    “Stop parroting me, you idiot,” she yelled.
    “Excuse me, I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
    “Very well. Now, sit up straight in your chair. You might at least act as though you had some pride in yourself.”
    With that she showed me a simple exercise for centering the self and gathering a fine grade of psychic energy. I was to do it every morning, simply sitting quietly, letting my body awareness move from my feet, up through my legs, through my torso and arms, and into my head. Nothing fancy. Simple body awareness. She put me through the paces a few times, and it was one of the most astounding experiences of my life. I wasn’t feeling my body; my body was aware of itself, and the “I” which I usually identified with became a kind of shadowy presence. “Try that for a few weeks, every morning, and then call me again,” she said.
    When I left, I was having acid flashes, although I hadn’t yet dropped acid and didn’t recognize the experience. It was as though everything I saw was washed clean, as though the entire world had just been formed that day and I was seeing it with newborn eyes. I was filled with hope, exuberance, and a roaring sentimentality. Much like the early Christians who bore the Eucharist through the streets among hostile Romans, I clutched my experience to my breast and walked warily to the subway. I resolved that I would change totally, that I would obey all of Mrs. R.’s directives, that I would do my morning exercise without fail. To paraphrase Orwell, I loved Big Sister.
    For the following several months, I was treated to a similar routine. Every three weeks I called the guru and went to her apartment, where she politely asked me about my progress. I dutifully reported my activities, describing the results of my morning awareness exercise. It was an odd period, for I received neither encouragement nor blame from the lady. It was like treading water, and I found myself becoming slightly bored. It seemed to me that I should be learning all sorts of esoterica and being initiated into mind-boggling rites.
    During that time, I quit my job at Americana. I had reached a point of near suffocation, and three weeks before Christmas, I handed in my resignation. With their usual lack of grace, they promptly rescinded the Christmas bonus I was to receive in the next paycheck. Infuriated, I wrote a four-page diatribe and left it on the president’s desk, and then went back to my office and gathered up all the correspondence and every back issue of the magazine, leaving nothing for any future editor to work with in continuing to put the book out. I waited until seven o’clock, and then piled everything into four cardboard boxes, took a cab to my pad, and threw the entire lot down the incinerator. I would have preferred dynamiting the building’s foundations but I didn’t have the means to match my fantasy.
    My next job was as managing editor for Avant Publications, hearty publishers of Escapade, Caper, and a small library of sex-cartoon books. The editor quit shortly after I got there, and willy-nilly I found myself running a suite of offices and six employees. Suddenly I had a huge office on Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, with two phones on my desk, a receptionist, a secretary, and a salary in five figures.
    The work consisted mostly of finding more or less palatable material to fill up the sixty-six pages of each