25 William G
Somebody’d told Harriet about a free demonstration of something called Original Therapy and she asked me if I’d like to go with her. Neither of us had any idea of what it might be and I couldn’t care less but I went. Anything to keep my mind off the turtles.
The place was in Maida Vale, the people had long hair and wore sandals which they mostly took off. There were a lot of good-looking feet in the crowd. The bearded men looked like Great Men of History from the neck up: Darwin, Pasteur, Mendeleyev, Faraday. From the neck down they looked like layabouts. The girls looked better to me but then girls usually do, there seems to me to be more human solidity in women than in men. Odd how one says girls and men. More than half the men were boys and more than half the girls were women who looked as if they’d seen a good deal of a certain kind of life and had cooked many hundredweights of brown rice. Oriental pillows on the floor, Buddhist and Zen books on the shelves, the I Ching, Laing, Castaneda, Hermann Hesse, The Whole Earth Catalog. Smell of old incense in the air.
The Original Therapy lady was a rampant-looking woman of about forty. Shiny red hair in the style of old musical films, tight white trousers, gold sandals, silver toenails, bursting purple silk blouse. Swarthy boyfriend with a St Christopher medal and a racing-driver watch strap.
Her name was Ruby and she sounded as if she lived in a caravan, her voice and her way of talking. She began to tell us about her therapy while some of the people in the room sat in the lotus position with very straight backs and others held their heads. One girl wailed a little now and then, another muttered the whole time.
She was American, this Ruby. Told us how she’d knocked about, been a rodeo rider, done roller derbies, wrestled, had three husbands and all kinds of troubles. Discovered her Original Therapy whilst wrestling one night. Another lady had a scissors grip on her and was squeezing very hard, got a bit over enthusiastic and wouldn’t let go. Under the pressure Ruby experienced a strange alteration of consciousness.
‘I was seeing all kinds of coloured lights and shooting sparks,’ she said, ‘and the sound of the crowd was beginning to come and go like the roar of surf far away. Something began to happen to me. I could feel myself going way way down and way way back, like thousands of years, millions of years, glaciers coming and going and the dinosaurs sinking into the swamps and the primitive trees being crushed into coal. Farther back than that even, crawling out of a warm ocean and gasping on the beach and beyond that back to the sea and smaller and smaller, all the way back to a single cell. And back beyond that to nothing, just the warm sea, what they call the primordial soup.’
Ruby went farther than the soup even, she got to a point where there was nothing, no time, no her, no anything. Then there came something like the idea of a question, a kind of original YES or NO? It put itself together as YES. There was a mystical green pattern with no sound, then a red explosion in Ruby’s mind and the people in the ringside seats were picking the other lady wrestler out of their laps. That was the turning point in Ruby’s life, going back to the origin of life and finding the big YES, and she was going to show us slides and then demonstrate her therapy.
A lot of the people in the room were shifting about and trying to find space on the floor to lie down. Some were smoking hash. There was one chap who looked as if he’d been thrown together by dustmen from odd bits of upholstery and discarded clothing, he asked Ruby whether when the spirit goes out of the body another spirit could come into it. He had a high choked voice, fat unshaven face.
Ruby said that nothing like that had ever happened in her experience. There were no other questions, it was quiet in the room, one or two people were asleep. The last light of the day came through the windows, smoke drifted. Then the window curtains were drawn and Ruby showed us slides.
We saw many slides of Ruby in a bikini scissors-gripping people who also wore swimsuits or shorts. ‘The skin contact makes a difference,’ she said. ‘Smells are important too.’ We saw people bursting free as they reached YES, saw their happy faces afterwards. Ruby told us that people were revitalized in a variety of ways by returning to the origins of life via her scissors-grip. Illnesses disappeared and one man who’d been losing his hair stopped losing it.
The curtains were pulled back. It was evening now, the dim light of the street lamps came a little way into the room, ended in darkness. Candles were lit. Ruby withdrew briefly, bounced back in her bikini. A powerful presence. I felt depressed and anxious, Harriet seemed nervous, hugged herself forlornly. The wailing girl said, ‘Oh Jesus.’ The dustbin chap went red in the face. Several of the thinner people got up and left.
‘What’s the lady going to do?’ a little girl asked her mother.
‘Therapy,’ said her mother.
‘Like Daddy?’ said the little girl.
‘A different kind,’ said her mother. ‘Watch.’
Ruby put on a record. For atmosphere, she said. ‘There was this wonderful Disney film, Fantasia, years ago,’ she said. ‘There was a part with the beginning of the world, the red sky and the steaming oceans, and then later came the dinosaurs and all. I’ve always loved the music’
It was Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. In all the photographs I’ve seen of him Stravinsky looks to me like a man who was potty-trained too early and that music proves it as far as I’m concerned.
A mat was brought in and one of the bearded fellows took his shirt off and lay down on it. Ruby lay down at right angles to him and wrapped her legs round his waist. ‘Let your mind go completely blank if you can,’ she said. ‘Breathe out when I squeeze, breathe in when I ease up. Keep looking at me.’
The muscles leaped up in Ruby’s thighs, the bearded fellow gasped as the air went out of him and they were away. In about five minutes he reached YES, burst free, was happy like the people in the slides and Ruby went on to the next applicant. Nobody’d been told to bring a swimsuit, most of the men took their shirts off, some of the girls had a go in bras and knickers, other kept everything on. Ruby made a real effort with everyone, squeezing hard until they reached YES or said they had. One chap cried ‘Pax!’ but he was the only one. After a time I stopped paying close attention. We were all crowded round very close, Harriet’s bottom was partly resting on my right hand and a bare foot belonging to one of the better-looking girls was touching my left. I felt cosy and relaxed with the candlelight, the smell of hash and sweat, the breathing and the grunting as one person after another returned to the origins of life between Ruby’s muscular thighs. Even the Stravinsky became soothing with repetition.
It went on and on. I must say I rather fancied being squeezed by Ruby but I wasn’t sure I felt like doing it in front of everybody. Harriet was not tempted but we were both beginning to enjoy the evening in a quiet way.
Ruby was scissors-gripping a very good-looking young man named David when he began to groan but not in the ordinary way. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be in a sort of trance. He braced his hands on Ruby’s thighs and pushed as if trying to squeeze out from between her legs, worked a few inches of himself out of her grip. ‘Can’t breathe,’ he murmured as if talking in his sleep. ‘Round my neck, strangling me.’
‘It’s the cord,’ said a blonde woman with frizzy hair and a wrinkled face. She was American too.