The Stoned Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page B

simply landlords and the people who had killed Christ, while Negroes stood in relation to us the way the Gallic tribes were viewed by Republican Rome. Our only natural enemies were Puerto Ricans, and by the time I was thirteen, more than twenty boys had been killed in a series of escalating gang wars.
    Since I couldn’t make the ethical choice between the racketeer whose money came from heroin and prostitution, and the priest who gave him social standing by loudly accepting his money gifts, I became an introverted fanatic, that is to say, a mystic. While still very young I was having visions of statues weeping and wondering why baby kittens died such horrible deaths in the cellars which became our natural playground. At eight I read the life of Don Bosco, and decided I would mortify my flesh in his example. I didn’t know how to make a hair shirt, so one night I put five hundred marbles in my bed, thinking to spend the entire time in prayerful anguish. Of course, the marbles merely made a deliciously erotic hard-soft stimulus between the mattress and my body. I was rewarded for my intended sacrifice with a most memorable wet dream, and the next morning found my mother standing by the bed demanding to know what the marbles were for. “It’s a thing for school,” I said, and my parents, having neither the ability nor the desire to explore the complexities of their son’s mind, wrote it off as yet another aberration to be patiently endured.
    The tale of my infatuation, disillusionment, hatred, return, and final renunciation of Catholicism is too stereotyped to warrant detailing. It ended with my making peace with the fact that, although I had discarded the entire content of Catholic thought, the structure of my mind was forever imprinted in a hierarchical fashion. In everything I perceive, I compensate for that, much like putting psychic english on my eyeballs.
    Before coming to terms with my organizational conditioning, I joined everything from social fads to occult societies to utopian schemes, and finally, to that modern paradigm of Catholicism, the Communist Party.
    When I left medieval Italy at nineteen I went into the Air Force — another joining — and after the training at Yale, found myself in Japan which, being feudal itself, seemed natural and comfortable to me. I quickly learned as much of the language as was necessary to do what I needed to do, which in those days was mostly to fuck, travel, and get stoned on the entire phenomenon of Japan. The total and thorough civilization of the place staggered me, as did the way in which the whole social structure was perfectly mirrored in the pyrotechnics of the language.
    I got to see things very clearly from the Japanese viewpoint, and it took no time at all before I saw the role of the United States there. The Americans were using Japan as a base from which to headquarter their entire Far East operation, from keeping Korea divided in the north to keeping Vietnam divided in the south. Japan was also the Rest-and-Relaxation center for the brutalized Army men on the Korean peninsula, and, finally, the tip of the sword aimed at China, depending on whether the right-wing elements in the government could get Japan to become a nuclear power or not. In return for all this, the United States allowed Japan to use it as a vast market upon which to practice, and later to master, the entire field of electronics. At home, disgruntled businessmen were either being silenced, satisfied with the maintenance of a high European tariff, or being promised a piece of the pie somewhere else, notably the Middle East and South America.
    With this vision, and the Gothic tale of horror which comprised the U.S. occupation of Korea, when I returned to this country I was ripe for revolution. Having had no real contact with America at large, and having been out of the States for three years, I had no idea where the real revolution was taking place, and with a burst of naïve fervor, attempted to