The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi

I am so grateful for this book. This is one example of how the written word has the ultimate power to transcend everything: class, time, prejudice, politics, fear, death. Marco Vassi died over twenty years ago and when I read this I felt like I had just made a very cool new friend.

I read this because it was on some list of classic erotic books. It is so much more than that. Given my history with Straight and running away, and the rest of what happens to a fourteen year old when she crosses the country on her own--I tried forever to figure out how it had affected me—hating the role of victim that people who were supposed to know liked to pin on me as a result --this book spoke to the person I was at fourteen. I felt like he was speaking from the great beyond and going, “it’s all good.”   

A quick description of the book comes from the back cover flap:

“The Stoned Apocalypse is Vassi’s autobiography, a chronicle of his cross-country trip on America’s counterculture byways. Vassi’s relentless quest for the perfect union of the spiritual and the corporeal provides a rare glimpse of one generation’s sexual imagination.”

We get to follow him through all manner of different cult “trips,” from the Gurdjieff meetings held off Park Avenue where “the mood was one of psychic constipation,” to the Scientologists, to a commune in Oregon, a Swinger’s club, San Francisco bathhouses, and all over the country crashing in random flop houses.

One thing I continue to refer people to is his description of working in a psychiatric facility. He confirmed my belief that many people enter the profession with a vague notion of helping people but with all too human fallibility and end up causing more harm than good. Someone had finally validated my feelings of outrage and disgust with the entire Straight experience.

The book also gave me a great way to learn about a culture and time in our country’s history I would have no other way to experience at such a personal level. I finally felt like I got this whole hippie thing. The piece of understanding I got was the innocence of the time.

After I read this I had a much better understanding of the  1960’s and the mindset that was innocent enough to believe there was still such a thing as a free ride, a free life, a free mind and body. I got to see what all that looked like, smelled like, tasted like, and became with the aid of all manner of drugs-- a spiritual experience.  His commentary was at times comic, tragic, sweetly innocent and naïve, and cynical depending on what was going on. I envied him these experiences and was also glad I didn’t have to go through all that to come to some of the views he arrived at and expounded on in later books.  When I read the last lines I felt sad, grateful, and a longing to make things different for him even as I felt so much of what he said resonated in my own life. I wanted to go forward with as much curiosity, honesty, and compassion for other humans as he did.  

The sense of freedom and validation as a writer I got while reading this was wonderful. Richard Curtis wrote the introduction to the edition I have and one of the lines I think sums up what I like about this book and his other books:

“What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew the mind is the most erotic organ of all.”

This is an important book. For me it was not fun in a cheerful way but in the sense that I got to experience everything without leaving the comfort of my life. It reminded me a little of Tropic of Cancer only it was much more easy to follow. This book is different than anything I have ever come across. It is not smut. It is not strictly a memoir. It isn’t even exactly a manifesto but I can understand why he had a cult following.

His words encourage me to be more open to every experience I have, to live more fully in every aspect of my life. Crazy as it sounds, it has even stuck in my mind in ways that allow me to be a better wife, mother, to pay closer attention to my husband and kids, and try to see the world through their eyes. This book is still impacting my life, I still refer to it in conversation and I hope through this review others will start to rediscover this book that I consider to be a classic and one of my very favorite books.