The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi Read Free Book Online

inner mood. Then the fingers were removed, and the two of them smiled at one another.
    But there was something about the exchange that struck me as artificial. I got a flash on their inner experience, based on perception of facial tensions and subtle body attitudes, and realized that the headache hadn’t gone away. And that the girl giving the assist was merely going through a ritual, without any inner substance. But when she finished, she looked down and said, “Aren’t you happy that it’s all gone?” and they intensified their smiles. In the eyes of the girl at the desk there showed a split second of confusion before she molded herself into an exact replica of the face smiling into her own. It was pure mind-fuck, invasion of the body snatchers.
    But the whole thing was so fleeting, so subtly ambiguous, that I dismissed it, and with that the room came back into mundane focus. I looked around and admired the organization of the place, and after a moment realized that this was the single most organized place I had ever been in. Everything was programmed. The people shuttled back and forth like ants in a colony. They were always carrying papers and forms, and I soon learned that practically every conceivable office transaction possible had been catalogued and given an abbreviation. It was the perfect bureaucracy, run the way one imagines the managers at IBM wish IBM could be run. These were the machine people.
    I walked up to the desk and the first thing the girl with the headache said was, “Would you please sign this?” It was astonishing that they were able to get a signature for a sale even before the pitch was made. I hesitated and was greeted with an insistent stare. It seemed I had to sign. This incident was to return to memory much later when a friend noted that Scientology sells enlightenment for about $3,000, or the same price as a medium-class Buick, showing a brilliant insight into the collective bargaining unconscious of America.
    Within fifteen minutes, I had signed some ten sheets of paper, including one which promised me to an introductory course and a preliminary auditing session. The speed with which I was whisked past any reservations I might have had took my breath away. It was psychic Camp. The thing was in such blatantly bad taste that one had to admire the sheer audacity of it to exist. It was with fatal self-indulgent humor that I sat through a five-minute home movie of L. Ron Hubbard, listening to the banal being reduced to the trite. My critical faculty went to sleep and I entered into the meta-theater of the moment. The fantasy machine went into full swing, and with a sort of giddy recklessness I began to indulge in sublimated paranoid fantasies of rising very rapidly to the top of this very slick, very powerful organization. The fantasies were duly fed by the slogans I heard all about me, such as, “The highest goal is power,” and “The higher the responsibility, the higher the rewards.” It was like the Reader’s Digest and the Mafia rolled into one.
    The fascist in me raised his head and sniffed about like some loathsome monster. I saw myself as the Pope of Scientology, fulfilling the oracle of a mad nun who taught me through the seventh and eighth grades, and whispered in my ear every afternoon, “God has destined you for great things.” The world would at last be mine!
    So I entered the game with sincerity and gusto, buying twenty dollars worth of books and diving headfirst into the manifest dream world of Mr. Hubbard, that classic American production which seems like an Orwellian nightmare choreographed by Walt Disney. I went home that night hypnotized into elation, and spent the next day immersed in the writings of El Ron, as he is chummily known by his minions. His work is an odd mixture of brilliant psychological insight, an eclectic synthesis of the high spots in all the world’s knowledge, and a penchant for such gross oversimplification as to stagger the mind. I immediately