''There's a sexual element to house. E is an aphrodisiac and promiscuity is big. In everyday life men usually repress their `anima.' Ecstasy forces you to experience what's really going on inside.'' Diana (who runs her own house club down the block) is amused by Jody's inclination to talk about taboo subjects. Jody goes on proudly, exuberantly, and loud enough for everyone else in the street to hear. Being publicly outrageous is a valued personality trait in E culture adapted from Kesey's Merry Pranksters.
''E has a threshold. It puts you in that aahh experience, and you stay there. It might get more intense with the number of hits you take, but it's not like acid, which, with the more hits you take, the farther you're walking from consensus culture. With E, your ability to operate within the confines of culture remain. You can take a lot of E and still know that that's a red light, or that there's a cop here and you don't want to fuck up too much. On acid, you can be completely out of your head, and walking in a completely different reality.''
So E is not simply watered-down LSD. While acid was a "test," Ecstasy is a "becoming." Acid involved a heroic journey, while E is an extended moment. The traditional bell curve of the acid trip and its sometimes brutal examination and stripping of ego is replaced with a similar vision but without the paranoia and catharsis. By presenting insight as a moment of timelessness, E allows for a much more cyberian set of conclusions than the more traditional, visionquest psychedelics.
Rather than squashing personal taste and creating legions of Birkenstock clones, E tends to stimulate the user's own inner nature. Hidden aspects of one's personality – be it homosexuality, transvestitism, or just love and creativity – demand free expression. All this is allowed to happen, right away, in the E-nvironment of the house club. Reintegration on E is unnecessary because the E-xperience itself has an immediately social context. If anything, the E trip is more socially integrated than baseline reality. E turns a room of normal, paranoid nightclubbers into a teaming mass of ecstatic Global Villagers. To Radzik, the club lights, music, and Ecstasy are inseparable elements of a designer ritual, just like the campfire, drumbeats, and peace pipe of a Native American tribal dance.
Arriving at the club in time for the sound check, Jody and Diana dance a while under the work lights. Jody's diatribe continues as he demonstrates the new hip-hop steps he picked up in Los Angeles last week.
''The Ecstasy comes through the house music. The different polyrhythmic elements and the bass ... this is current North American shamanism. It's technoshamanism. E has a lot to do with it. It really does. I get a little nervous but I've got to tell the truth about things. But the system is probably going to react against the E element.''
Diana cuts in: ''And then they'll just shut you down like they closed our party last week.'' She takes a cigarette from behind her ear and lights it.
Jody still dances while Diana stands and smokes. Neither he nor the E culture will be taken down that easily. ''E is an enzyme that's splicing the system. E is like a cultural neurotransmitter that's creating synaptic connections between different people. We're all cells in the organism. E is helping us to link up and form more dendrites. And our culture is finally starting to acknowledge the ability of an individual to create his own reality. What you end up with, what we all have in common, is common human sense.''
The E-inspired philosophy borrows heavily from the scientific and mathematics theories of the past couple of decades. House kids talk about fractals, chaos, and morphogenetic fields in the same sentence as Deee-Lite's latest CD. Jody's ''cultural neurotransmitter'' image refers back to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which is the now well-supported notion that planet Earth is itself a giant, biological organism. The planet is thought to maintain conditions for sustaining life through a complex series of feedbacks and iterations. A population of ocean microorganisms, for example, may regulate the weather by controlling how much moisture is released into the atmosphere. The more feedback loops Gaia has (in the form of living plants and animals), the more precisely "she'' can maintain the ecosystem.
Evolution is seen more as a groping toward than a random series of natural selections. Gaia is becoming conscious. Radzik and others have inferred that human beings serve as Gaia's brain cells. Each human being is an individual neuron, but unaware of his connection to the global organism as a whole. Evolution, then, depends on humanity's ability to link up to one another and become a global consciousness.
These revelations all occur to house kids like Jody under the influence of E. This is why they call the drug a ''cultural enzyme.'' The Ecstasy helps them see how they're all connected. They accept themselves and one another at face value, delighted to make their acquaintance. Everyone exposed to E instantly links up to the Gaian neural net. As more people become connected, more feedback and iteration can occur, and the Gaian mind can become more fully conscious.
Jody and Diana both believe that house culture and the Gaian mindset literally ''infect'' newcomers to the club like a virus. As Osmosis opens, Jody watches a crowd of uninitiated clubbers step out onto the dance floor, who, despite their extremely "straight'' dress, are having a pretty Ex-uberant time.
''This looks like a group of people that might be experimenting with Ecstasy for the first time. They're going to remember this night for the rest of their lives. This is going to change them. They are going to be better people now. They're infected. It's like an information virus. They take it with them into their lives. Look at them. They're dancing with each other as a group. Not so much with their own partners. They're all smiling. They are going to change as a result of their participation in house. Their worldview is going to change.''
Indeed, the growing crowd does seem uncharacteristically gleeful for a Thursday-night dance club. Gone are the pickup lines, drunken businessmen, cokeheads, and cokewhores. The purposeful social machinations – getting laid, scoring drugs, or gaining status – seem to be overrun by the sheer drive toward bliss. Boys don't need to dance with their dates because there's no need for possessiveness or control. Everyone feels secure – even secure enough to dance without a partner in a group of strangers.
Whether that carries into their daily life is another story. Certainly, a number of new cyberian ''converts'' are made each evening. But the conversions are made passively, as the name of the club implies, through Osmosis. Unlike acid, which forces users to find ways to integrate their vision into working society, E leads them to believe that integration occurs in the same moment as the bliss. The transformation is a natural by-product – a side effect of the cultural virus.
As club regulars arrive, they wink knowingly at one another. Jody winks and nods at few, who gesture back coyly. The only information communicated, really, is ''I am, are you?'' The winkers are not so much the "in'' crowd as the fraternity of the converted. They're all part of what one T-shirt calls ''The E Conspiracy.'' These are the carriers of the cultural virus. No need to say anything at all. The E and the music will take care of everything (wink, wink).
''The sixties went awry because they wanted a sweeping cultural change to go on overtly,'' explains Radzik, nodding to two girls he's sure he has seen before. They wink back. "And that didn't happen. What's different about house is that no one's trying to `spread the message.' It's more like, we're into it because we love it, but we're not out to convert people. 'Groove is in the heart' [a Deee-Lite lyric]. We just want to expose people to it. People decide that they're into it because they respond to it on a heart level. I think the bullshit's going to come apart of its own accord.''