The End of the World Party

The year end party for the New Jersey Area Center was scheduled for December 30th, 1982. In January of that year I had completed the est Training. (For how I ended up in that unlikely situation see The Cult and the Crossing Guard xombyte.) The New Jersey Area Center was the organization that produced the Training along with a host of other workshops and seminars. Much if not most of the work involved in said production was done by Assistants. An Assistant was someone who had graduated from the est Training and in some capacity or another volunteered their services to continue transforming the world one person at a time.

The preceding paragraph alone is probably enough to convey to any sensible reader that I had fallen in with a wacky bunch of folks. But no matter how crazy all that sounds, the powerful truths and insights that attracted so many people to est greatly improved my life. So when I heard about the year end party I agreed enthusiastically to help out.

My enthusiasm wasn’t solely that of a joyous heart celebrating the est experience. The year end party would combine est with another of my most beloved activities; drinking. This was ironic in that the est Training is where I first began to realize that alcohol and drugs might be a problem in my life. (See One Toke Won’t Hurt You xombyte.) But like most alcoholics who achieve sobriety, realization was not followed by recovery for some years.

We anticipated several hundred people at the soiree so there was lots of work to be done. The night before the party several of us got together at the Seminar Site to set up the big room for the party. This was not an official est function so the planners agreed that having completed the Training was not a prerequisite to help out. So I brought some of my teenage friends along to lighten the load. My friends quickly dubbed the event the End of the World Party. (They equated est’s founder Werner Erhard with Jim Jones and encouraged each other not to drink the kool aid.)

This was not the first est activity that my friends had attended. The est organization became legendary for pressuring it’s adherents to proselytize. You were expected to get family, friends, or anyone else for that matter to attend Guest Seminars. I never truly embraced this aspect of things and rebelled in my own way. I brought my wiseass, cynical teenage friends to these events.

My friends firm policy when attending est events was simply to lie. Lie about what they did, lie about where they lived, provide fake phone numbers and, above all else, use aliases. I couldn’t help but get a kick out of watching the sincere if somewhat misguided people of est as they became ensnared in the web of deceit that my friends wove.

We had been setting up for a couple of hours when Sally finally arrived. Sally played a vital role in our group. She operated a restaurant in Manhattan and had agreed to supply numerous cases of wine for the festivities! She seemed haggard and upset as we gathered chairs in a circle for a “clearing meeting.”

At est whenever you were about to commence with any activity the Assistants would gather together to clear the “space”. Usually this only involved the initiated so people felt very safe to share whatever was on their mind. Of course this time the circle included three young men whose obligatory name tags read Travis, Cabot, and Boo. Unbeknownst to the woman who had just arrived these were really the decidedly unsafe Joe Ryan, Danny Popow, and Jimmy Hyland respectively.

Our little group was facilitated by Rich Lang. He immediately invited the late arriving Sally to share. She apologized for her tardiness and reported that she had been caught in a horrific traffic jam. Then tears began to stream down her face and her voice cracked as she said “My husband left me today, and all he left me was the fuckin’ wine.” A more courageous moment of willful vulnerability I have never witnessed.

Unfortunately for her, the moment the words were out of her mouth my friends began poking elbows between each other’s ribs. In just a few seconds my friend Joe lost that age old battle of the wills. He broke first sputtering with uncontainable laughter. His mirth, her anguish, and my chagrin topped out simultaneously.

God Bless Sally for not just getting up and walking out then and there. Rich Lang acquitted himself well too. He didn’t scream or chastise Joe, rather he reassured him saying “It is okay Travis, nervous laughter is very common at moments like this.” Joe insisted that he wasn’t laughing. Then he started laughing again.

Well, that clearing meeting wrapped up in record time. Had Sally shared that at a “normal” clearing meeting she would have had only my heartfelt sympathy. But I have to be honest, if one of my friends brings it up to this day we can’t stop laughing. It was like an audience for The Man Show attending a taping of Oprah.

The night of the party was very significant for me. I got drunk, blacked out, and became morose over the unrequited love of a beautiful girl named Mary Anne. On the way home from the End of the World Party I tried to throw myself out of the car on the Garden State Parkway. My friends restrained me and told me all about it the next day. That would be my last really bad drunk. Forty nights later I would take my last drink. My battle with drugs would continue for several years.