Pete, the DJ, seems a little uncomfortable when the conversation gets too far into science. Sounding as brainy as he can, he tries to ground everything back to music. ''The ecstasy comes through the music. The different polyrhythmic elements and the bass. It's technoshamanism.
Gregory kisses Pete's hands as if she's recognized the messiah. ''You're our spiritual leader, aren't you!''
''Well, spiritual leader entails a lot of responsibility and I don't think I want to take that on.''
''Nobody does,'' Radzik says, once again, trying to bring it all together. It's the unspoken rule here that if everyone's point of view can be integrated into the same picture, it will all be okay. "Nobody wants to be a spiritual leader. 'Cause everyone's got the access to the E-xperience. Everyone can create their own situation in the social context. House lets all those different experiences get on and synergize.''
Gregory's eyes widen. She slowly rises, her arms outstretched, her head falling back. ''With E, at 120 cycles a second through our heart, we're dancing. We must dance!''
Radzik's been overpowered. ''Well, the E's not responsible, but ...''
Gregory might be on the verge of a bad trip. She whips her head to face Radzik directly. ''It'll literally bust our spines, won't it?''
Radzik tries to regain control of the previously quiet gathering. ''That's a lie! Propaganda.''
But Gregory doesn't seem to mind her suspicions about permanent neurological damage. She clenches her fists together as if to hold back an orgasm. ''The peak threshold is bliss, is E, is now. We've condensed it down. It's powerpacked. It's now. We all, man and woman, we come together and dance. All our technology. We've heard of the side effects. E diminishes a vital chemical in our bodies every time we take it. The chemical is the essence of life. This is a gift which cannot be replaced. We're taking this fluid and spending it. The E is undermining our very existence. I feel a little bit of my life force being spent each time. It's bliss. You're dancing it. E gathers all your life's bliss at one time. If the world were supposed to end, we'd come together, take E, and dance!''
Gregory's allusion to a recent study linking MDMA to spinal fluid reduction in mammals, coupled with her oversimplified E-xuberance for the dance, gets everyone a little uncomfortable. Is this the transformed being we've been working to create? Luckily, the moment is interrupted by a young visual artist and video wizard who just happens to be distributing an MAO inhibitor called Syrian Rue. Radzik introduces me as, ''Don't worry, he's cool,'' which garners me four of the capsules. I put them in my pocket and thank the boy, but he's already busy rigging a projector to show a film loop on a wall near the dance floor. It's a ten-second cycle of two boys fighting over a microscope. I ask Radzik about the pills I've been given.
''It's called Syrian Rue. Mark Heley will be able to tell you a lot more about it. It has to be taken with other psychedelics. It has a synergistic effect. It's made from a bark.'' Not enough information to merit sampling. I leave it in my pocket and work my way back out into the club. I search for the periphery so that I may observe but not participate ... fully. Leaning against a noncommittal wall near the edge of the club is Bob, an oriental computer programmer from Oakland whom I met last week at Mr. Floppy's, where he operated the camera for some television interviews and got bitten by the house bug. He continues a conversation we had been having there, as if there were no break in continuity:
''Thought is a distraction of the moment. Whenever we're in a space we're processing information. In our reality, we're bombarded with information. So in Reichian terms, we put this armor on. You know the song, `I Wanna Be Sedated'? I think a lot of people are anesthetized by their surroundings. It takes some really piercing hard information to break that. Like piercing your cheeks. If you get Zen, you've got to let go, and let it all come in. But if you let it all in, you go crazy. But if you let it come in without processing it, without calling it good or bad ... people who label things bad have got a lot of heaviness. Go Zen about it. There is no black or white, then you can let everything in.''
I give him one of my capsules of Syrian Rue and move on.
Engineering the Synchronization Beam
Our evening at Toon Town is getting into full swing. Most of Norman's birthday partiers are gone, and several hundred more hard-core house people have crowded onto the dance floor. Buck, the novice DJ, is spinning well, and steering the energy toward deeper, techno-acid house. Nick, the rave pugilist, is on a small stage pumping his fists into the air, and the laser is finally functioning.
Meanwhile, on a balcony, Bryan Hughes, the cyberspace guide, leads a young man through his first virtual reality experience. Cap'n'Crunch uses one of his cameras to capture an image of the boy in his VR goggles. Another of Crunch's video leads comes straight from the virtual reality machine. He uses his Video Toaster to combine the two images and then projects a composite video picture onto a giant screen above the dance floor. The resulting image is one of the boy actually appearing to move through the virtual reality space he is unfolding in the computer. Superimposed on that picture are further video images of people on the dance floor watching the giant projection. Gregory notices me staring at the self-referential computer-video infinity. ''Works kind of like a fractal, doesn't it?'' I have to agree.
But Bruce Eisner, MDMA expert, who stares at the same video depiction of virtual reality, shakes his head. He is amused but unconvinced. ''Maybe one day the mystical vision will be realized in some kind of neurological link-up or a virtual reality. Technology does have a great promise. It could become seamless, so that what we think of today as magic will eventually be done by technology, and eventually we won't even see the technology. A neo-Garden of Eden made possible by technology. But the main rub is human nature. That's where I have a problem with the virtual reality people. I was at the Whole Life Expo, and Timothy [Leary] was there with John Barlow and Ken Goffman [R.U. Sirius] and they were doing a panel on virtual reality and I sat there for an hour and a half and listened to them talk about virtual reality the way they talked about LSD in the sixties – it was this thing that was intrinsically liberating. You hook yourself up to this thing and automatically you're better – you got it. And so I asked him a question. I said, `It seems to me that technology can be used for good or for bad. In the sixties, Leary told us he was looking for the cure for human nature. How is a new media intrinsically good?'
''Leary looked at me and said, `Bruce, I'm going to talk to you as I would to a ten-year-old child.' And then he went on to explain how when we have virtual reality, no one will have to fly anymore. No one will have to go to Japan to make a deal. You can do it in Hawaii on the beach. Fine. But why is that intrinsically liberating?''
Eisner seems almost sad. He's not in tune with the same harmonic as these kids but can, deep down, remember the sixties and his own acid experiences. He refuses to be lulled into that false optimism again. He stares out, losing himself in thought.
Meanwhile, the pulse on the dance floor deepens. I can feel the bass passing through my body like the subsonic frequencies of an as-yet-uninvented kidney therapy. The frenzy of the crowd iterates back to the DJ, and in turn to Mark at the laser. The walls are covered with projected images of fractals, tribes dancing, the fight over the microscope, a cartoon smiley shoots at evil, attacking letters. Another monitor displays the virtual reality bombardments of attacker pilots in the Gulf War, intercut with tribal dancing and the wild computer holographics of a tape called ''Video Drug.'' The strobe flashes like a brain machine.