5 Oct 2001 @ 11:48, by Zen Benefiel
When I proposed recording the life and wisdom of this great teacher, he at first demurred. "Don't you dare tell the truth. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail."
Michael Valentine Zomorrow, aka Ed Ward, made his transition in the late 90s, after succumbing to diabetes, at 78. An avid nueromancer, his quest for zest inspired at least a few. Here you will find just a few tidbits as another attempted to chronicle his uniquely twisted life. Enjoy!
13 DEC 90 LIFE OF SAINT HICK: Chapter 1
When I proposed recording the life and wisdom of this great teacher, he
at first demurred. "Don't you dare tell the truth. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail."
* * *
Saint Hick was renowned as a great family man. I asked him how many
wives he had. "Well," he pondered. "I'd have to get a tablet. . ." He
seemed sure it was at least fifteen, "But not more than six at any one time.
And don't forget the husbands. I must have had, oh, at least half a dozen
of them as well."
* * *
Even while he was a householder, Saint Hick stood out from his suburban
neighbors in his religious observance. When all the houses in the street
had Christmas lights, his was dark. The neighbors came to him to try and
persuade him to follow their custom, but he stood firm. This impasse was
finally resolved when the neighbors on either side strung Christmas lights
on his house, and provided the current to run them through extension cords,
and took the lights down again afterwards.
* * *
I asked Saint Hick about his miraculous birth. He knew this was a
requirement for saints and heroes, that there be something strange about
their entrance on the stage. And it happened that at age 53 he got his
mother drunk and learned this essential information.
". . .And after some trivia she stopped for a long pause, and I knew not
to speak first or I'd lose whatever was coming and the longer I waited the
surer I was I was waiting for the words of the goddess. And finally she
said, 'Did I ever answer your question?' And my training as salesman and
guide paid off in that I didn't say 'What question?' I said, 'No. . . Not
yet.'
"So, she told me, in response to this question that I'd never asked,
that my father was not the man I thought was my father. That she had met a
young man who was already engaged and they found they were soulmates
forever. But he went ahead and married this other girl he was engaged to,
so as not to cancel the wedding and disgrace the family and break his
promise etc. And he stopped by to say goodbye to my mother and there was
nobody else home that afternoon and the net result is me.
"Then he went off to war and died a hero. So I'm the son of a hero
who's remembered as such throughout my life, can do no wrong. God bless."
Saint Hick's birthplace, Boerne, Texas 78006, has since become a magnet
and haven for seekers after enlightenment. He spent his early years there
but found Texas too tough for him. After he was run over by a car at age
nine he got his parents to move to Southern California. He did this by
putting travel posters up on the wall. Framed by orange trees, elegant
Spanish villas looked out on the sparkling blue Pacific. It worked.
* * *
How did Saint Hick attain Saint Hickhood? It happened at the
culmination of his last known marriage when ". . .She was really chewing my
ass out for being evil since before the beginning of time, and I sat there
for a solid hour and enjoyed it until she left, slamming the door. And I
thought, what was the best thing I could do for her? She'd been wanting a
piece of paper giving her a share of future earnings and so on, but whatever
I wrote she was sure I was too clever and would cheat her out of it.
"So I took a piece of blank paper and signed my name to it, so she
could put whatever she wanted on it. I put it into an envelope for her and
that's when I achieved sainthood. I was glowing and amazed at myself --
what, me a saint -- I was incredulous -- actually modest for about thirty
seconds or so! And some inaudible voice from on high or inside said "Saint
Hick." Which really broke me up laughing, because my hickhood made me a
saint. God sends the good. Who sends the bad? Give me some of each."
* * *
All great men who are ahead of their time have been persecuted, usually
spending some time in jail. Saint Hick is no exception.
"Oh yes, that is one of my luckiest things. I spent many, many times
in jail. Let's see now, perhaps the most glorious occasion that comes to
immediate mind is one summer in Hermosa Beach, and there's a dance hall
where I play pool and drink with some hangers-on -- they like my style or
something, I'm vivid. And I look around and in front of me is this
beautiful ass, bent over at a weighing machine or some such, and being true
blue I leaned over and bit it.
"Well it turned out that this girl was the new true love and sweetheart
of my brother, who didn't have a high opinion of me in the best of times. I
was hauled away and arrested, the cops laughing at the description of the
crime, and fined ten dollars for disturbing the peace. I thought it was
about the justest thing I ever heard of.
"But basically I went through a seeking and escape through drunkenness
into a new realm that wound me up. I knew there was more somewhere, other
dimensions, or I acted as if there were, kept stretching the limits. So I
was in jail maybe forty or fifty times up to when I joined the service,
maybe twenty-something.
"There I went into the warrant-officer thing and passed miracles of
intelligence and luck to do it, thank God. They promoted me so high I
started getting fat and no fun. So the friendlies took hold of my head and
arranged for me to steal a fellow-officer's wallet at two in the morning.
He'd left it on a table in an officers' poker game. The net result was that
I received a dishonorable discharge -- and if anybody knew it I wouldn't be
getting a government pension, which I do, thank God. The records were
burned up in a warehouse fire.
"I was the first dishonorable discharge in seven generations of
patriotic America-makers who fought, bled and died. Our name is on the
land, our bones and blood are in it. And I was so much into suffering
morality, that is, morality imposed by my culture, that I knew that these
values were right and I was worthless.
"Well, later on, the first time I took LSD, all that vanished and I
broke out laughing because I could see, had I not done that, had the
friendlies not swept me through that dance, I would have stayed in, gotten
some kind of class A heart attack, just been a real mess. That was the only
way I could get out. I was in extended service, I was nuclear warrant
officer, knew lots of stuff. So I was lucky to get out, real lucky. The
way they wrote the story was just perfect.
"But instead of saying, yippee, new trip, I was still in that prison
until acid let me out."
* * *
Saint Hick found it was no easy matter to engage others in mystical
experience:
This is 1965, going on '66, and we've all been reading and dreaming
about LSD, the experience in our culture then, a big decision in those days.
And once we'd decided to do it, this group of friends, getting it was
another thing. I finally found five and there were five of us. We met and
decided how we were going to do it, and we were all as hip as you could get
without actually doing it.
It turned out that people kept calling up and copping out with one
excuse or another, you know, can't do it this week, and this went on from
September till the end of the year, and finally I flashed that I was glad --
because I'd have copped out if they didn't, and I didn't have to show I was
chickenshit too. So I got that, and then the friendlies gave me the message
that I was ripe and if I waited any longer I'd be rotten.
So about January 6th or 7th nobody showed and I took this stuff. My
real fear was it would drive me crazy, but some part of me had taken this
fear into account and decided to do it anyway, and I was a big winner
because I'd taken a real vote in myself. That made me very happy, and I
blissed up for an hour -- nothing, blackness. Then I came back down and I
realized I was in this body -- I didn't know what or who but I looked at
that room, and saw the purpose of this room which I'd furnished in a
previous life, and the purpose of this room was to look like a whorehouse
and to attract women who would drink and pass out or pretend to pass out and
therefore some fucking could take place. We could overcome our culture
through drunkenness. And I looked at this room and I thought that with all
the effort and money they'd spent on it you'd think they could get something
right. They really showed a talent for wrong -- everything was just off.
Then I realized I didn't know what kind of body this was. I would have
been very happy for an alligator with tail cancer, so I was very delighted,
though I weighed another 100 pounds back then, and was a miserable asshole
atheist argumenter. I didn't believe in shit except more mess and that was
what was going to happen.
So then I beamed back up to England in the coaching days and a half-
timbered inn, and people bustling around and I'm standing beside an oak tree
and one of the knots on the oak looks at me and turns into a small dragon,
very friendly, and I know it's my guide. "Let's go!" it says, I nod my
head, and we shoot up in the air and dive down into this scene, and I'm in
every creature there. I'm a separate entity sensing each one separately and
simultaneously. Very confusing. I retreat into the dog for a bit -- I can
do that! Then I was the ale-wife, and then the ostler who swept out the
stables and stole some hot toast, and did them all, about three days worth
in 30 seconds. Then the dragon said, "You're going to love this!" and took
me to a maypole, where people were dancing around in the order man-woman,
man-woman, alternating, and as they went by I became each one for a step.
Then the dragon, who's on my right -- my right-hand dragon! -- asked "Do
you want more?" and I said "Oh, God, yes." So he said, "You'll love this!
You get your choice of roles." We go down to a courtyard where there's a
gibbet set up, and judges with wigs, and he said, "Do you want a hint?" I
said "Oh yes." "Choose the prisoner. He's gonna get hung!" And at that
point I fell back down into this reality.
Then I went outside and my name was written in the stars, my new initial
though I didn't know it yet, I just saw a great "M" in the sky. And another
thing I saw was that I'd been on about a bottle of Scotch a day and it
wasn't that I was a drunk, I was just blinding myself to views of this
bigger world, hiding behind a plastic curtain, disconnected from meaning.
I saw the terror of the situation, a big spiral going down, gentle but
inevitable, and there was my soul on its way back to the soul pool, no longer
me, and that was totally just. I was now the prisoner before the judge, and
he asked if I had any last thing to say and I said, well maybe some parts of
me could be transplanted to somebody else. Well, that was liberating. That
turned me loose inside and told me I had learned something.
That was a vivid trip. My life changed. I didn't get drunk in that
fashion again and my consumption dropped to a bottle maybe every ten days.
When I tried it one time just as an experiment I couldn't get drunk.
* * *
St. Hick has placed himself far from the mainstream in his practice of
the sacrament of sex magic. However, he claims support for this
controversial observance in the Bible, in "Wherever two or three come
together in my name, there I am."
* * *
(Saint Hick has long been curious about the meaning of words, and this
curiosity can sometimes lead to deep revelations.)
It's around 1960, '61. I'm still living in Palos Verdes where
Christmas lights were compulsory and I'm at a New Year's party in a big
house with lots of mirrors and I'm wearing my Louis Roth iridescent outfit
so well tailored that it even makes my very portly figure -- I'm at least
260 -- look good to me in the mirror. It makes me look like a penguin
instead of the obese fat creature that I really am.
They're serving French seventy-fives -- sugar, brandy and champagne, I
believe, but whatever they were the name seventy-five comes from an
artillery gun in the first world war, and it's well named. I've had two and
I'm just starting my third one when I get one of those moments of celestial
transcendental clarity. It's a real high, a nice number -- you can see
things clearly. For a minute all your defenses are at least partly down and
you haven't yet blocked out your higher faculties. It lasts for me maybe
ten minutes out of the night. It's well known, a drunken clarity. You're
not yet drunk, but you're going to be drunk, you can feel it coming. When
they open and close the doors, something comes through the crack.
I look at the crowd, successful people like me, merchants, attorneys,
developers. Everybody's into ranking, and I've got Ward Richards, biggest
store in the neighborhood, I have 30 people working for me. Can't cash my
own paycheck, but they don't know that. I look at the crowd and I see that
they can be divided into two classes. I realize that everybody there either
couldn't say fuck or had to, and I'm in class two: I had to.
There are maybe ten or twelve people in class two, and I know they have
to say fuck, and I know they have to get drunk -- or at least look like
they're drunk -- before they can say it, and then they would have to. And
I realize the rest of the people, I can spot maybe twenty of those,
couldn't. If you were to pour hot lead up their cunt they couldn't say
fuck.
I was in class two, and I had to say fuck. I was going to go around
with a story. I had some plan, like the State Department, to go around here
and go there and it would be time, about four drinks from now, to break out
the fucks.
It dawned on me that there had to be somewhere else where fuck was just
a word. So I went to Denmark and got lucky, picked up a beautiful woman in
the Tivoli Gardens. I'd heard you could just go up to a woman and say let's
fuck. I said I'd like to buy you a drink and could we fuck? She said yes,
to both counts. Blew my mind. So we went to my place and had a wonderful
sexy time, very exotic, she gave me head, suck cock in those days, big
forbidden thrill, and that was just great.
The next night I was limp as a friendly worm. She tried to help, but
nothing worked. Then I had a dream that night. I was 9000 feet high on a
mountain. I'd gone to hunt elk, and was camped out in a tent, when I heard
a noise, and here were a bunch of elk coming at me, all female. They were
all saying shoot me, please shoot me! So I picked up my gun, and a little
bitty bullet rolled down, and the barrel bent and the bullet fell on the
ground.
Before I went to Copenhagen I thought I knew what culture shock was and
that I was above that. I didn't know I still belonged to a culture where
men had to chase women. But my body knew it, my cock knew it.
* * *
(I inquire about Saint Hick's remarkable progeny:)
I have a legitimate bio-son. His name's Kalo. I delivered him myself
at fifty. This was a real event in our family. It revitalized. My mother,
Suzy Q, was just dying of lack of interest. She had a comfortable income
and used to get up every day and go to Basketville, and she was getting
bored of all this, withering.
But when Kalo showed up, this was the first grandchild of her genes, an
unexpected late-blooming miracle. Kalo was really a divine spark. When he
was conceived Diahi called out "Plant your seed in me!" the most romantic
thing I ever heard. She knew she was pregnant, knew it was a son, painted a
picture of an ovum in the stars. I delivered him with a beautiful woman
named Diana, in a great house on Maui, great view, beautiful setting -- the
friendlies really cooperated to make it a big show.
Kalo was collecting edible seaweed from the bottom of tidepools when he
was one year old. He was telepathic. When someone needed a chair to get
something down from the wall, Kalo had it in place before they even knew
they wanted it.
But as soon as Diahi got half of my oil money she decided to completely
jump off that trip. Which was certainly fair. She'd started off as Susan,
found herself a couple of years later living as a sex goddess in a
Gurdjieffian mystery school and coming for Jesus Christ with strangers.
She loved it for a while, but then she finally had a chance to sit down
and think about it, when she got her first check and I told her to go to
Hawaii for three weeks and think about her life. We'd been together five
years then.
So she did that and decided she wanted to divorce me and take Kalo,
which I approved of.
When Kalo was eighteen I wrote to him and something seemed to be
opening up for a minute but that ended abruptly. I think she had something
to do with that. She had cancer then, and six months later she was dead.
Kalo is now in the marines, reminds me very much of gentleman thug,
very military. When I asked him if he ever wanted to hear from me again he
said, "No, sir!" I wouldn't be surprised if he was one of the first into
the Persian Gulf.
* * *
Then there was my stepson Stephen Prince. That was his real name. We
used to play Wart, from Once and Future King. Wart would grow up to be King
Arthur one day. I would be a hayseed Merlin and take him on drugless trips,
just acting as if he were hypnotized. There's a magic secret in that, which
I learned from a friend whom I'd married to a woman named Sharla in a high-
minded, bless-the-world, ceremony.
He then proceeded to teach her how to steal luggage at the LA airport,
and they were very successful at it. I didn't understand this at all. It
was the Age of Aquarius and we hadn't yet learned to snarl and use machine-
guns to write Love on the wall. We were in the first bloom of innocence.
He came to me and said he had to give me a present. It was important
that it be passed on ear to ear. He didn't like me very much, but I was the
only one who was qualified. That made me very delighted. He said, "Will
you pay my price?" and I knew enough about magic not to dicker.
What he gave me was the secret of holy hypnotism, which he acquired by
being stolen at age four and raised as a gypsy. "One of the reasons you've
been misjudging me is that you don't what's happening." I said, "That's
absolutely right." He said it was his holy duty as a gypsy prince to steal
from the rest of us. They even have a word for us, and they see us as their
flocks for fleecing. There are complex religious reasons for this but it's
supposed to be good for both sides, teaches us alertness and so on.
The secret of hypnotism is for whoever's being hypnotized to agree on
what we're up to, and ask, "Please hypnotize me." You ask for it. It's a
ritual, and it tells all kinds of creatures within you this is not something
somebody's doing to you, but what you want to do. It's all in that magic
word please.
Before I started taking acid, I was fascinated by hypnotism. I thought
with my black-hearted false ego I could get women to do whatever, and had
many such jack-off fantasies. Then after I started taking acid, I could see
the powers of hypnotism, you could create all kinds of things. I decided
that my hand couldn't hold that knife. It was too sharp.
That was one of the luckiest decisions I ever made. But now we have
this new secret of holy hypnotism. How is it to be handled? One of the
safeguards is to tell the person being hypnotized that they can never again
be hypnotized accidentally, mechanically or on purpose without saying
"Please..."
You don't use it for something silly like quitting smoking without
finding out why you need to use your mouth so much. Those energies have
some reason to express themselves that way. If you stop them one place
they'll leak another. Christ talked about seven devils, if you chase out
one, there's a nice clean empty spot where seven will appear, each one worse
than the first.
* * *
My myth-son, Stephen Prince, put himself through his own Bar Mitzvah.
For some reason it couldn't happen, so he decided to do his own. He acted
all the parts, great actor that he was, and when he became a man by his own
ceremony he handed me a note saying, Michael, from now on I'm going to
listen to you because I really like to hear you, but I'm going to do just
exactly what I please myself to do.
Bravo! He'd graduated. Real good young man. He learned to play
villain -- I helped him on this -- so when he played Booth who shot Lincoln,
he studied why Booth would do such a noble thing, from Booth's point of view
of course. So when he played the assassin, he was as proud as Lucifer and
cunning as a snake. He was magnificent! People came to hiss. And nobody
in the school wanted those real bad parts, so he got every one of them for
years. He really learned villainhood.
* * *
When I first began to move into Saint Hick from Ed Ward, I had a pad on
a dirt floor in a cellar in Redondo Beach where a couple that I love called
Gary and Mary were growing pot. All summer I smoked pot and threw the I
Ching and came to realize I was pregnant with a mind-child of unknown
parentage from a whole bunch of aliens and beings that inhabited me. I got
the idea I was a crowd and my job was to become a team.
Since I was pregnant I called Zabria -- she lived in Hollywood then --
and said I wanted to be her best girlfriend, so we talked girl talk and she
coached me in preparation for the happy event. Finally it happened, and I
discovered that my mind-child was named Coloque, and he/she was born
pregnant, continually hatching new things, ever more complex and always
helping the main plot, which is to go to the stars.
* * *
When you want to pursue your life goals, and especially to attract a
partner, do a little ceremony when you're nice and high, on a mountaintop or
stoned or going a hundred miles an hour, or whatever makes it easier for you
to communicate, because you're going to send a message up to what we call
the Free Press. Do it at least three different ways, say it and write it
and piss patterns in the snow. You're asking three different ways for your
partner to appear.
You're sending out a signal to the Friendlies above that you're doing
this, you're cheerful, and you want this for help to get their big job done.
Remember Adam. You need a partner to get the job done. And what you want
this time is your Eve and bring her a snake too, because you love apples.
Let's do it all over again.
That's where Adam blew it. He was in charge, and God came around and
said he'd fucked up, and he ducked and said it was her fault. What a way to
start a world trip! Next time, say, "Why, Dad. I know I passed your test.
You were just fooling. You'd never give me a whole Earth and keep back one
tree. I know you do things in wholes, you were just testing me, to see if I
understood you, right?" And the old fool could either accept that or start
over.
Of course we're still playing that number. The pot plant is currently
forbidden and look at all the fuss around that one. The more things
change, the more thay stay the same. Details change, but the pattern is
still there. The fundamentalists could set us straight if they ever got
round to reading the first page of the Bible.
_____________________________________________________________________________
(Genesis 1:29) And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb
bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth. . . .
_____________________________________________________________________________
This whole thing started with bureaucracy, a fellow called Anslinger
who wanted to expand his empire, and he had to lay some blame so that drugs
could become illegal, our God-given gifts denied us. So he waged a campaign
about black men down south raping white women on pot (and worse than that,
if the women got some they might enjoy it). And that's what the whole thing
comes from.
* * *
(Saint Hick's transition from businessman to saint produced some
unusual business experiences.)
In the Mind Machine company we had seven engineers. I advertised for
them on the come -- if things worked out I'd give them some stock. They all
came for their intitial interview to my downtown apartment in L.A. This was
a third-floor penthouse, but the building was old and coming apart, with
dog-shit in the halls and weird spice smells.
Diahi and I lived there, and to get to us you had to go to where there
was a wire hanging down which you pulled and rang a little handbell in our
apartment. Then Diahi would come down and get you.
They all came dressed up, shoes shined, and they were met by this
exotic woman and brought through a maze of rooms full of plants and a walk-
through closet to an immense room where the Mind Machine experiments were
arranged. We were making pieces of cards with random thoughts in response
to questions such as what three things would you wish your parents had given
you, or would you give to your children? We had one that said "Rave,
slobber and yarp." I stole a bunch of books on creativity from the library
and cut out bright sayings and had people make up the cards. They were
organized by shapes which had a meaning. A triangle would mean firm
foundations. An octagon would mean stop.
We called this one of our Mind Machines and I've a whole bunch of
stuff like this going on then. The engineers would look at these and come
back in a room with a couch and a coffee table and meet me for the first
time, and I was naked.
I weighed at least 230, on the edge of obesely fat, but I was turned
on, and I had the ability to pick up people's frontal lobes and turn them
around to see the world my way. I'd learned this in the waterbed business.
When somebody got fired up, I didn't think they were fired up until they
were gone for three days and then came back.
When they came in and sat down I'd ask them "Do you smoke pot?" and
they'd all say no, at least at first. Whatever they did, I said they'd
passed the test. Maybe seventy engineers came through in three weeks. Then
we had a meeting in a real engineering plant where I invited twenty and
seven showed up. They were so impressed by the difference. I showed them
left hand first. This was an orthodox meeting.
I'd sent them copies of a proposed contract in advance, and one of them
who had a mockup of a wristwatch skin resistance monitor and was really
eager stood up and said if he signed the contract he should be committed for
insanity, because it was a rotten-dog slave contract which promised
everything and secured nothing and depended entirely on whether I was
honorable and decided to give them something.
Then the owner of the building, a fine independent engineer with
seventy-odd patents in his own name, stood up and said, "I trust this man."
At the end, I went up to the man who'd rejected the contract and said,
"You're chief engineer. Write your own contract. Fix it so you and I
share equal."
He looked at me and said, "You crafty, cunning old son of a bitch.
It's a deal!" And he recruited all the others.
The first Mind Machine product was a thermistor you held in your hand
and watched a meter for biofeedback to help migraine headaches. It was a
six-inch scale and one degree change would move it the full range.
I had a nice ad in Cosmopolitan which brought in half its cost, not bad
for a first ad, and also a suit from the A.M.A. for false advertising at
$2500 per exposure times a million readers, or billions of dollars. I was
immensely flattered. I had negative worth at the time.
I thought I was prepared for this. In our group we already practiced
Giftie Gi'us -- give us the worst, the best, and how to improve the act --
and for the worst everybody said A.M.A. So we'd backed up our claims, but
I'd also read of Reich where the U.S. government ganged up on him and threw
him in jail where he died a miserable death at 53, which was just about my
age. So we figured out the best thing to do was to quietly disappear, which
is what they wanted us to do anyway.
Later on I went back and talked to the man who started the suit, who
was doing biofeedback research of his own, and he said I could probably have
gotten away with it by sending news releases to little country newspapers.
That could have had the horrible effect of making a million dollars for me
before I was ready for it, and getting me trapped in manufacturing, which I
know isn't my business.
* * *
(How Saint Hick was converted to the mystical realms.)
I was not just a skeptic, I was a cynic originally when I was Ed Ward
before I took acid. I was totally convinced that if you couldn't measure it
with hard science it didn't exist or was meaningless. I didn't believe in
intuition or any of these things.
Later when I was on about my seventh acid trip, around Easter, 1966,
Lots of realities were floating around. I was looking at a wonderful book
of drawings by Abner Dean. He used to draw thin, wierd-looking wimpish men
wandering around, all naked. And women were usually more powerful and above
all, they were brighter. One picture was of bare mesa country like Arizona
with the naked men walking around, and on top of their heads they wore small
platforms, like mortar-board hats, and on each platform was a naked woman.
The men were blindfolded, and tended to walk off cliffs and fall into the canyon. The women, who could see what was happening, stepped off one platform and onto another going in a different direction. This cartoon was
titled "Women's Intuition." I laughed so hard I started peeing.
It wasn't that the men weren't logical. The women had a better
viewpoint. If we were smart we'd take our blindfolds off and get a better
view.
After that I really came to believe in my wife Dori's intuition. One
time I had a CPA, a very smooth man who was going to make some money for me
selling stock in my business. What he did was fix my books so that it
looked like I was making money when I was losing money. Then I paid tax on
money I hadn't earned with money I didn't have, and I didn't know it. I
wasn't in on the scam. I gave him stock in the company and he didn't bother
to tell me about the thing he was doing.
I was totally impressed with him and his wife, his house, his style,
his education, his diction, he was nice, quiet, he was all the things I
wasn't. And Dori said, Ed, deal him out. I said why? She said, I don't
know, but I know it. It's going to happen. You'll see.
I went bankrupt twice there and saved the thing. I was the only man in
L.A. who ever did it once, with a furniture store. The creditors take over
the stock and if they think you can get any money from it they let you run
it. I'd seen it coming about 48 hours and I got all my friends to take
furniture home and stash it in their house. Fortunately I had good reliable
friends.
The creditors asked if I'd pay ten cents on the dollar. They'd have
been happy with that. I said no, I'll pay you all in full. They said,
you're crazy, you don't have to. I said, I don't have to for you, I know
you'll keep on selling to me. I have to do it for me, it's important.
And I went ahead and paid them in full, paid them ahead of time. I was
still in the bonds of honor in those days. It was necessary that I go
through that process. This was after I'd gotten my dishonorable discharge.
I was scrabbling to get back some shreds of self-respect and honor.
* * *
Then the I Ching came along. I bought it, naturally, out of false ego.
I had lots of books, and the only book that people in my new drug club
(namely pot or acid) asked me about was, do you have I Ching?
So I got one, and then I watched these people do it. I felt as if I
was in some Asian city where they were burning paper sticks to get fortunes,
very superstitious. But the answers they got seemed to me to make very
good sense. They came to my house to ask questions about business, because
I was business manager of the Oracle. And frequently the I Ching gave
better advice than I could have, in much better words. I was impressed.
But I noticed they never wrote the questions down, and after the I
Ching told them one thing, the question would change and the answer would
become another thing entirely.
As time went on I adopted the I Ching as a wise old friend who was in
no hurry. It didn't live in time, as it were. At first I'd ask it for my
best conduct at social or business situations, and I wouldn't look it up
until afterwards. I was just amazed, not only at its correctness, but at
the wisdom it spoke to me.
And as we became closer, it began to show me some very witty things,
especially laughing at my own false ego-pretensions, and amazing things,
I'd see all kinds of interrelationships. What it was doing was vastening my
head -- Frederick Pohl's term, I didn't know it then -- but it was certainly
doing it, my head was growing vaster.
* * *
(Saint Hick, by devious means, discovers the principle of female
sovereignty.)
I discovered, with the help of several good women -- I was very lucky
to discover this -- that it was a good idea when we got intimately involved
to have a rule that I'd stop whenever the lady wanted to. Just pat twice,
it meant stop.
Of course I was coming from false ego, it meant I could try anything,
any position, and if they didn't say stop it was OK, and it also meant they
could be more daring because they remained in control. I didn't realize
until then that all women want sovereignty. But the friendlies led me
through my lowest to this great truth. Or perhaps you could say I found the
jewel of wisdom in the palace of excess, another principle I was to draw
upon frequently in those days.
We were saved by the stop signal, Saisha and I. We could easily have
both killed ourselves. After she invented a better game by asking, "How can
I give you better head for Jesus Christ?" she came up with the words, "We
come as Christ irresistable we." I can't tell you what a powerhouse of a
phrase that is on that level. Since Christ is irresistable and forever and
so on, there's no particular reason you ever need to stop coming. You could
use up your total energy reserves, first wind, second wind, and central core
energy. We could have killed ourselves, but one of us, I still don't
remember who, gave the stop signal and we stopped. Then we realized that
we'd stopped right on the edge of a cliff. There was only one question for
both of us. Should we get back into it and go over that cliff and kill
ourselves? That came down as the coward's way out. We had a job to do.
* * *
When I was with Diahi and Saisha and several other very lovely wives,
with every drug and ritual and mirror and sniffer and whatever we could get
hold of -- the general idea was to find the jewel of wisdom in the palace of
excess, and we were palacing up excess -- several times I and/or my partner
slipped into a complete new realm. We popped into another world.
I had been reading that the object of all this stuff is that we wanted
to become god. "Thou art God" and all that, which I was really working at.
And it turned out that is indeed the way. But I had to take another 15
years and get rid of whatever was holding me back. I had first to become a
good human. No way to become god until you make human first, it goes in
stages.
But I would go to these god levels. The first one was a great big
space with a mockup of the planets, a clockwork arrangement, and I was the god
Thor with my hammer. But I couldn't keep this little solar system working.
The planets kept banging into each other and bouncing off in different
directions. The message I brought back was that I had no business being a
god. I was too fucking stupid. This was about the lowest form of god-work,
but no could do. So I got the lesson: be a human.
Then a week or three later, I popped into another of these god-worlds
where again I was inadequate. It was a beautiful little 300-foot globe that
had everything in it I could ever want, women, beach, sand, mirrors, and
guess what? I forgot water! That was about the driest I ever was in my
life.
So I was driven back to where I was, an inadequate human being, with
lots of work I could do, starting with myself. If I wanted to change the
world I had to change myself first -- all the spiritual standards came
through, like I was learning reading and arithmetic. I didn't know that
basic stuff yet.
On one of these god-trips with Diahi I discovered that there was a net
of consciousness around your head, like a big hair-wig or a bubble, and this
net is important, it's vital for certain things you have to do. And I'd
destroyed both hers and mine, through taking acid without a guru, by
plunging ahead on my own. I'd destroyed her net, which was vital for her
soul-growth, so I'd ruined her not only for this life but forever. Nothing
could be done about it, and I was lucky that I couldn't appreciate how
horrible I should feel about that because my net too was destroyed. I could
only perceive about 1% of the real horror. I saw her face warped and
ignorant with an IQ of an idiot. Finally I was going to be put in hell, and
had to agree to that, since I had been warned and gone ahead against
warnings. A demon appeared and grabbed me by the left hand and took me to a
big old-fashioned firebox, like you'd use under a boiler in a factory, and
it was full of burning wood. Before he threw me in he asked "Do you love
Jesus Christ?" I said "Yes!" and he threw me in the fire.
I popped through the fire into a great big old-fashioned very ornate
oriental-influenced Christian heaven. Father was on an immense throne,
obviously several hundred feet high, looking over his universe, and I was at
the very back and it was my job to stand there and admire. That went on
forever. Nothing to do but admire.
I had a Gurdjieff school on the big island. I woke up during that
thing for a few days, in the Gurdjieffian sense. On graduation night there
was a man named Jerry Sumner, a psychologist, beautiful guy, brilliant man.
He played the role of "somthing else" in this school. He'd been through
some such training.
Diahi drew a card which said "Fuck two students for Christ," which
turned out to be Jerry and me. And the great god Pan appeared to me, an
archetype, about eight feet tall, and smelling very pungent. He too looked
at me and said, "Do you love Christ?" I said "Yes," and then Diahi and I
fucked with Pan's blessing, Jerry too, and in the morning we knew she was
pregnant with twin female Christs.
After a few days she said, "Do I have to be?"
I said, "Of course not. If you don't want to be, you aren't."
"Oh, good. I don't want to be."
So that didn't happen. But during that same trip, towards morning I
saw Moses in a white robe, who turned into Elija and flew out the roof
access -- we had a deck up there -- and vanished into the sky, getting
smaller, while I ran up the ladder trying to catch him, saying, "Hey, wait!"
I came back down in drug shock right back in my total logical mind, and
I wanted everybody to write it down and witness to what I just saw, three
different accounts from three witnesses and so on. And Jerry said, "Mike,
would you realize and accept that I don't know what you saw, but I've seen
what you saw? . . .We don't need to write it down. You'll never forget it."
You can see how sanely he handled that. Because if he'd agreed to
write it down the next step would have been a logical argument about the
difference.
* * *
When I made the jump from that ring of experiences, I was still with
Diahi on the Big Island, and on one of those trips I ended up exceeding the
limits of soul adventures, or something like that, or I wasted myself. At
any rate, I did not pass soul course, and down I went in a funnel of dark
swirling liquid. At the bottom were rotary blades like a blender that would
grind up my soul, which was like an octopus with only five tentacles.
There was still time to have a conversation, and I had to give my
opinion of the justice of the situation. I wasn't being judged. I had to
judge. I decided it was fair. I didn't like it but no complaints, the
system was fair, I'd been warned or whatever. At least I didn't try to
blame it on anybody else, that's the big test. So I passed that one.
But I was still about to be ground up, and they asked me was there
anything else I wanted to say before I went? So I asked the only question
that could do it. I said, "Well, could they save any of my parts for
somebody else?" And that passed. End of that one. And I quit having those
jobs where I was the only god around and was always inadequate.
* * *
I started having dreams, in three of which Gurdjieff showed up. The
first time he gave me a pair of silver earrings. The left one fit perfectly
but the other one didn't. I interpreted it to mean that my heart was OK but
my organizational brain wasn't tuned in yet.
Again he appeared and this time he showed me a boxing ring. . . nice,
plain, square, level, vacant, ropes -- that was all that was there. Then
he went down with a conspiratorial wink, very sly, very Gurdjieffian,
Armenian rug dealer, and pulled up the skirt, as if he was pulling up the
skirt of the world, this is how the cunt works, this is creation, I'm
showing you THE secret.
And underneath the boxing ring were immense magnets, ray guns, springs,
pendulums, gyroscopes -- so that even though on top nothing could be seen, the
game was rigged. There were secret forces off-stage, and ways to cheat. So
I was never to think these boxers were independent and that I was seeing
the whole operation. Lots of stuff offstage.
He came to me a third time and again gave me the earrings. This time
they both fit. And when I put them on they turned to gold.
So that's the Gurdjieff I've seen.
* * *
About the fall of '69, Diahi and I had Kalo and were about to take a
trip around the world -- we hadn't started the water-bed business yet --
and we'd been instrumental in starting a commune, with a woman named Sharla
in charge of it. I wrote her a little ad and put it in the L.A. Free Press
that said we'd get acquainted or raise consciousness or talk about sex or
something. They had to mail in five bucks with their phone number and we'd
tell them where it was going to be, so there wouldn't be a million
gatecrashers.
Forty-two showed up, which was great. Two hundred bucks would pay the
rent on a twelve-bedroom house then. Sharla was upstairs getting
stollified. She was drinking orange juice and vodka half-and-half
reasonably rapidly, because she had chickenshit: her blood was starting to
shit and her heart was pumping it.
The people were beginning to get a little restless and Sharla wasn't
going to make it, so I went and got a robe that Diahi had got in Hong Kong,
made of Thai silk with iridescent colors, and when I raised my arms there
were wings that hung down. I got somebody to announce, "You're in luck!
Michael Valentine is here tonight."
I believe in starting off a crowd by making them do something, so they
start moving. You're there to move them and you cheat them unless you do.
So I say, "Stand up!" if they're sitting down, or "Sit down!" if they're
standing up, or move the chairs, or something so everybody get's the idea,
"OK, we're here for a show and it's going to happen. We're in it." You're
getting the audience into the act. That's what they want.
I had them ohming a bit and moving in a circle and alternating men and
women, loosened them up a bit. Then I said we were having a rebirth
ceremony and of course everybody knows when you're born you're naked. And I
took off my robe, which was all I had on. I had two or three shills who
started taking off their shoes and socks, and everybody went along with it.
There was a Swede carpenter about fifty-six and his daughter who was a
schoolteacher, and one of Sharla's buddies who was wearing lots of strappety
corset-type underwear, and there was a guy I threw out because he
couldn't help playing with his cock.
I got them rotating and dancing and chanting, "I am God, Thou art God,
We are God..." and after a while, suddenly we were. Which shows how a crowd
off the street has the power and the possibility. It just takes the right
leadership. They want to go there. That's why they came.
* * *
SAINT HICK: Chapter 2.
You're looking at the earth, your mother. And it's turning around, and
it turns faster and faster and stretches out and now it's a dancing woman,
about 900 feet high, and you're a little bitty fly-thing, one of billions
crawling around on her, and she looks around at all of them and chooses you.
She picks you up very tenderly on her palm and in her most seductive
voice she says, please, please, will you marry me?
____________________________________________________________________________
(Saint Hick talks about his deepest beliefs:)
I'm really convinced that there's an entire miraculous world of two
people -- let's say two or more people -- who are coming together for
Christ, with a deliberate and ritual intention of acting as if various myths
are coming through them, or they are the center point of a baton: One end
of the baton is the cornucopia and one end is hell. They're a bridge
between these various myths that come together as opposites or composites
and unite and transcend in their understanding, right in their very own
minds.
I believe we're ready for such play, to the idea of conjugate mind-sex.
And now even computers are info-fucking the world. How rich it gets!
Saisha and I, and Zabria too, used the Aquarian deck of cards. There
are some very powerful myth-pictures in that. Lust is shown by a golden
lion, with a naked woman lying on its back, face upwards, in a circus. You
can ride this lion of lust from stars to moons or whatever cards you choose.
We did that a lot.
When I think of the life I used to lead, and the life I live now, it's
just totally impossible for me to picture the expansion, the vastening of
the various theaters my mind lives in. And yet this is just the beginning.
The rate of change is accelerating, and that rate is also accelerating.
I believe that it's possible to wetware and hardware and cheatware and
software yourself so that whatever happens you keep coming more complexly
and enjoying it more. So that you yourself just become a process of
expanding enjoyment, outrageous, divine. And that's what we're up to.
* * *
Praise God for pills! These are something you buy mail-order, that are
advertised in some of the gaudier sex magazines. They're the chemical
equivalent of weight-loss pills, not recommended for people with diebetes
such as me. So naturally I thrive on them. I just cast the dice to take
two more and they said yes. Usually I take one.
When I was just starting off as acid guide, in the early days of the
Oracle, I'd taken ten trips, and then read all the books about it. I was
still caught in logic, a lot, but I knew I wanted to be an acid guide, and
had a talent for it, though I was afraid of it: What would I do about
suicides? Big deal in those days.
So finally I said, OK, I'll accept the first ten, but I won't count
them against my karma as if I had the power, because the minute I did,
maybe I did. It turned out there was only one suicide, that I know of, and
of course there was a murder went along with it.
My best man was Duke, Duquesne Dicky, first black cock I ever sucked.
He wanted me to take him on a trip with a girl he knew, a nurse. June and I
came up to his house and we all held hands and I wanted everybody's clothes
off, because that's the right way to do it. And we all did except the
nurse. Apparently she just wanted Duke. She didn't want an acid trip. She
was not interested in that kind of life at all, and she was beginning to be
afraid because her world was about to fall apart. When Duke finally got
nude I leaned over and sucked his cock for three significant seconds or
slurps or whatever, then turned to this woman -- it blew her away, me too,
but she didn't know where she was -- so I just took her hand and gave it to
Duke and said "Go!" And they did.
Everything was wonderful. In the morning Duke gave me "In Search of
the Miraculous." First thing I'd ever read about our wonderful beloved
double-G rascal guru. In fact you might call him triple-G. George
Gurdjieff Guru.
* * *
(Saint Hick has not hesitated to involve himself in questions of
violence and power:)
The last trip I took this good friend on, she invited me -- and I
needed to -- slap her, hard, for some shitty thing she did. That was the
only thing that would work, so I did it. And much to my delight, I didn't
like doing it.
But she did. That almost made me turn away, I cringed from it. That
proved to her, from conditioning that must have gone back more than one
lifetime, that that's the way men showed love for women. She wanted mastery
over her.
I've always suspected that such people are really responding to a deep
fear of exercising their own buried powers, their own unknowns. They're
afraid if they were put on the stage with a flag in their hand they'd let it
fall, or something. "The Craft of Power" says if you aren't ready for the
arena, better get out before your corpse clutters up the action for better
people than yourself.
* * *
(Saint Hick is renowned for his charitable and social work:)
There's a Leo lady whose name escapes me, for whom I rigged up a Buddha
swing as a bed for her to play with, and there we had strange sexual acid
encounters. Eventually I found what she really wanted. What she really
wanted was for the establishment to pay her some money so that she could
make terrariums. She was hooked, baby earth mother.
So I sent her down to a certain government office with a script, and
what they did was give her some money and some pills and put her in a cab
and sent her home and sent her checks every month from then on.
I ran into her a few years later, and at that time she had resigned her
pension, after going to school on her money, and was now working as a nurse.
* * *
(Saint Hick puts together an overseas mission:)
There was a wonderful woman, a red fox, who came from Minnesota or
some place. She was nineteen, was picked up hitchhiking by one of our
group, and was going to go to Maui with us until, on the night before we
were getting ready, we took an acid trip with Marcia, as she was then,
Zabria now. And Zabria had enough sense to say, let's ask the Ching, and it
turned out this other woman shouldn't go. She was supposed to go back to
Minnesota and finish school. And that's what she did.
We were working on the story-myth that we would go to Hawaii with a
group marriage in the waterbed business before a year and a day, and at this
point we already had the tickets. The dildoes and mirrors were already in
boxes on the water. We had a couple of cases of dildoes and lots of
mirrors. And a few waterbeds. Great big boxes.
Then thirty-six hours before we got in the air a Leo lady showed up,
and she came along as third wife. Before we left we had a crowning public
moment. We'd sent a waterbed to Dr. Hippocrates, who was a columnist in
those days, and his friend who made movies asked if they could come over and
see us. We said, sure, come on up. We'd a great place then, hot pool,
sauna, lots of mirrors, very theatrical, great selling machine. We got in a
big six-by-nine waterbed, Zabria and myself, both naked, and there was
another beautiful naked woman walking around getting coffee.
They asked us questions for a while, and all of a sudden I got this
flash of the scene from "St. Joan" where they bring her in before a fake
king and she calls, "Come on out, Charlie!" They didn't fool her. And I
was talking to the fake Dr. Hippocrates. So I asked if I could name the
waterbed after him and he looked to the other guy for a decision. So I
leaned back and laughed and said, "Come on out, Charlie!"
They were impressed. They wrote that up in "Rolling stone," three
pages, it's in the archives. They quoted me as saying I had three secretaries, one to take in the money, one to go exploring and one to suck my cock.
Then we went off to Maui with all our dildoes, waterbeds, etc., and we
lived in a cellar for the first couple of days until they said, Michael, go
do something better. I went out and promoted a five-bedroom house in a
high-class district on the far side of the island, and got waterbeds
distributed, got the circus going.
What happened in this circus is that Zabria and I had just learned the
basics of sex magic, and we were going to work this magic for what we
wanted. She was a very earthy Taurian and said, "Let's do this for seven
hundred dollars." I said, "Let's do it for seven hundred dollars and some
unexpected surprise."
We were going to sex-fast for three days and then tease each other for
three days and then come as much as we could in the three days that
followed. That worked great until the afternoon of the second day of the
tease cycle, when we cheated some way and declared the time was up, and went
to it.
When that was over we felt a string had snapped, and the doorbell rang,
and people started coming in with bounced checks and returning waterbeds and
wanting their money back. Then we went down to the post office and there
was the real bad news. Everything fell apart. So there we learned the
power of sex magic.
* * *
(Saint Hick does not shrink from admitting his errors:)
There were acid trips that I failed on. . .by my standards. There was
a tall, slim strip dancer named Criss Cross. Her husband, my buddy, had
just dropped dead of a heart attack. It turned out on the autopsy he'd been
living with five percent of his heart. This woman had, emotionally, let's
say, killed him. That's how she saw it.
So she took an acid trip with me after that. She was full of deep
guilt, had his picture up on the wall, candles burning. She was 120% into
atonement, and nothing would do but to become chief nurse on the emergency
heart ward where her husband died.
I thought I got her to forgive herself and go on into the bright
radiant future and so on, and we had a great night of sex. I was just smug
in the morning and talking as I was driving her home and suddenly she was
silently sobbing. I said, "Honey, what's wrong?" "I don't know. But it
sure is wrong!"
That crunched my heart in a cold fist. I saw later that I was in too
much of a hurry. I was in my chief feature, called Premature, God bless it.
Were I doing that today, I would take her down more into the grief, caverns
full of it. I wouldn't try to hurry her away from it. I'd just go into it
more and more, whatever the worst is. I'd say, let's go into the worst.
That's where you recover.
That's how it worked for me. The worst was I was a deep subterranean
evil monster and I did evil just for my own joy, including crushing my own
creations or worshippers. You know, with a god like me
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