Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen? To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, THE STONED APOCALYPSE, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.
Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.
The state of mind was what came to be known as the Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of the American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.
Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become THE STONED APOCALYPSE, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.
With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as sex novels, a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”
For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960s and early 1970s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt—quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.
But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the Flower Generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of the Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along, in his case pneumonia, conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.
Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in these new editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of the Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And, ultimately, it triumphs over them.
Richard Curtis