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everyone to the left of Cardinal Spellman. I took refuge in corruption, and began paying attention to salary increases, decorating my pad, and seducing even more women. I was visited four times by FBI agents, and always there was a tall one and a short one, a heavy one and a reasonable one, and always with a barely hidden tape recorder. Our conversations were always congenial, and always ended with my refusing to give them names. In a sense, I felt a sense of shame in ratting on the gang. But also, since they obviously had agents in high places, it seemed stupid for them to ask information from me. I reasoned that they wanted my complicity more than my knowledge. The last I heard from them, the superintendent of one of my apartments let me know that the landlord had given the key to two thin, well-dressed men who entered my place and didn’t leave it for two hours.
    Subsequently, when I suddenly saw the Mickey Mouse nature of the entire scene and discarded politics as either a useful metaphor or a successful pragmatic, I have seen no trace of them. Yet, I rest secure in the knowledge that somewhere, right now, all the pertinent facts of my life have been programmed and stored on a punch card in one of the computers which form the bowels of our Central Intelligence Agency.
    Some lessons have to be repeated often before they are learned, and I had suppressed all wisdom concerning groups that promise individual or collective salvation, on the evening I walked into the Scientology headquarters. I was still reeling from my bout with Mrs. R. and my first three acid trips. I was living with Aster, an Aquarius lady from Detroit, in a fourth floor walk-up on Greenwich Avenue, and earning my living turning out free-lance editorial work.
    It had always been my nature to totally believe what any human being told me. I assumed honesty in others, and at the time I decided to “try” Scientology I was still entering into things with a blind passion. The advantage was that I penetrated to the heart of many matters in very short time, but the wear and tear on my system made it a Pyrrhic bargain. Aster had heard of Scientology from Prudence, the White Goddess of my twenty-fifth year, who got glowing reports from Cindy, who had been an Ayn Randite during my Marxist days. LSD was undermining what little conventional stability I had, and I had not as yet effected a new synthesis. Aster and I were locked in a sex-hate relationship, and when we weren’t sharing perfect simultaneous orgasms, were shouting viciously at one another. And New York was continuing to wreak its ravages on my soul. In short, I was paranoid, exhausted, and confused. And in the middle of this wreckage, the message was delivered to me: SCIENTOLOGY SAVES!
    I had translated the old Sufi saying, “If you can eat and pray with people, you can be at home anywhere in the world,” to “If you can get into the same psychic space as other people, you can understand them totally.” So I had no guards up as I entered the converted ballroom of the Martinique.
    Dividers had been set up so that the place was partitioned into an entrance room, a library-bookshop, a huge study hall, rooms for secretaries, auditing chambers, and secret back rooms. My first impression was of Utopia. Everyone in the place was beautiful, moving about quietly, efficiently, with order. Almost everyone smiled continuously, and those who didn’t were the newcomers. From the big room there would be an occasional burst of applause and loud cheering, from which would emerge a beaming, ecstatic person, accompanied by his auditor.
    As I stood there watching, the receptionist said to one of her passing compatriots, “I have a headache. Could you give me an assist?” The girl who had been asked put her two forefingers at each temple of the receptionist’s head and went into silent concentration for a minute. The girl sitting behind the desk worked along with her, closing her eyes and seeming to focus on some