The Singles Business

It is summer in New York City and I am down in the pit, right at the very bottom of the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink. When the weather's not cold, this sunken expanse of concrete is called the Promenade Café. It's 6:30 P.M. The sun has not yet set. They say the sunset over the Palisades across the Hudson is one of the most beautiful in the world. Sunset-giving smog is New Jersey's gift to the world, at least to that portion of the world above the 20th floor in New York skyscrapers, those privileged few who can actually put an eyeball on the red setting sun.

I have come to the ice-skating rink of Rockefeller Center on this hot, humid eve to meet some of the people who can see the sunset. In a few moments, they will begin to arrive, hordes of them, and each and every one coming down the steps to the rink will pay five dollars to the rotund, balding man standing to my left. This is the admission price to the Non Joiners Ltd. Club, a contradiction in terms if ever (continued on page 144)Singles Business(continued from page 139) there were one. For five dollars, each will be given two tickets (good for two rather weak drinks served in tiny glasses) and get the privilege of standing around in the 80-degree, absolutely motionless air of the Promenade Café with the very people with whom he shares the packed elevators.

I've been here only ten minutes and already I have sweated through my shirt, my trousers and my sports coat. The heat, the wet pants, the watered drinks, the ringing, metallic sounds of the disco sound system in the corner, blasting Barry White all over the echo-chamber concrete walls of the skating rink--all of it is getting to me. I'm in a weird limbo between panic and despair. Now, if you think this sounds a bit peculiar--maybe even masochistic--then you're with me.

They have begun to descend from the glowing towers, those frenzied folk who ascend each morning to work in offices the size of Madison Square Garden. Ed Helig, the man with the tickets, understands the impulse that moves the skyscraper set almost intact from job to beach town. He has established the Non Joiners Ltd. Club as a kind of watering hole on the way to the weekend. Right now, he is standing at the pay table in the shadow of Prometheus, the massive statue overlooking the entrance to the ice-skating rink. Why, pray tell, will 800 single New Yorkers pack themselves into a quarter of the Promenade Café, a space intended for about half that number, under a wet blanket of August heat, a carpet din of extremely amplified disco noise?

Ed, what's going on here?

"Disco. Hear it? Bop-a-da-bop-a-da. Good sounds."

Yeah, I hear it. But what's going on?

"Disco. Put it in a coupla weeks ago. Wanted to get people dancing and moving. It was getting kinda stale, know what I mean?"

Yeah, but....

"Non Joiners Limited.... Hi-ya, dear, glad you could come, good to see ya, come right in, here you are, these are good for two drinks at the bar, right over there.... It's my bottom club. My feeder club. We're gonna do about seven, eight hundred people tonight.... Hi, sweetie, sign the list, that's right, now the little card, that's a girl.... It's a good club, a good operation. Takes a lota time, but we're getting people from the offices around here, a good crowd. A class crowd, if you know what I mean. I started Non Joiners as a kinda mass-appeal thing. We're getting the people who would hit the bars tonight, but this is closer, we're hauling them in right after work, before they have a chance to change their minds. And it's outdoors. They like the music. They like the lifestyle. Our crowd won't feel the pressure they feel in a singles bar. They just go out there and get into it and do what they want to do."

Did I get you right? You said this is your feeder club?

"That's right.... Hey, watch it there, pal, pay the girl, that's it, give the man his tickets, honey, OK.... The whole operation is based on my Edwardian Club concept. It's called social affinity. We've picked thirty-five tonight."

Thirty-five?

"Yeah. Thirty-five guys and chicks. Total. We're looking for background, looks, class. Good breeding, in other words. A guy who leads with his mentality, not his penis. A woman on her way up. They'll be invited to the Edwardian Club later this week. Now, you see this girl coming in? We'll give her an invitation [whispers to assistant]. We're unique. We're matchmakers, but we try to do it with honesty and integrity."

How do you mean?

"Measure it out this way: You're a single guy. Where would you go? From Princeton to Greenwich, Connecticut, if somebody could put two hundred people in a room on your wave length, that's where you'd go. That's the Edwardian Club concept. Non Joiners is just a feeder to the higher club. A supplier. The Edwardian Club is my main focus.... Hi, honey, good to see you again, will you be coming next week? Good, good. Can you bring a friend? Sure, but check with me at the door, will you, dear? OK, have a good time.... What were you saying?"

Social affinity. What does that mean?

"Social affinity. OK. This is if you take a hundred guys and a hundred women and you put them in a room, you hope they'll all walk out as couples, right?"

Right.

"We're putting two hundred in an East Side bar every other week now, but ina coupla weeks, we're gonna be going to the Belvedere Suite of the Rainbow Room on the sixty-fourth floor of the RCA building. You should see it. It's a beautiful spot. Right up there in the clouds. We get good people at the Edwardian Club. It's like ... like a privilege to be asked to join. A promotion from the lower level. And we're starting a new club in the fall. We're skimming the cream off the Edwardian Club, the people we started with, the charter members, plus five people from each of the thirty-five nights of Non Joiners, until we get three hundred people. Then we'll really have something. I haven't decided what I'm gonna call it yet, but that's social affinity for you. It's a constant process of skimming, a real headache, let me tell you, skimming, skimming, all the time skimming, looking for the cream."

All 800 of them must be here by now. The place is jam-packed, a fetid sweat hole of bodies, jockeying, strutting in funky finery. The social affinity seems to be working. Over in the corner, near the disco console, is Tanna. Tanna is an aspiring actress, 25, tall, slender, attractive in a prefaded denim pants suit. There seem to be a lot of prefaded denim pants suits here. Tanna was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, "finished" at Pleasantville High School in Westchester County, the wealthy area north of the city. Tanna, what's the scene?

"For a social atmosphere, this is it for me. I think I've finally found it. This is like ... like Le Jardin, the disco, only better. I feel like I'm on a huge yacht or something, with decks and stars and music and people, and we're all on a great cruise, a cruise to nowhere. I come every week. It makes you feel like you're going to fall in love."

Ed, what do you think makes people want to join your clubs, aside from the dancing and drinking? They can get that, anyway, without joining, in a singles bar.

"Loneliness. Loneliness. That's what makes people want to join. They like the sense of belonging to something. My clubs are a refuge. This isn't the singles thing. This is loneliness. I guess you could say I'm in the loneliness business." (Since our visit, the Edwardian Club has been sold to Zane Gordon, who operates it with 500--600 attending and also a new organization called the Regents Club.)

•

Denver. I'll call my new-found friend Skeeter. His real name isn't important. He has changed it three times in the past few years. "Taxes," he explains with a grin ear to ear. I met him last November, in the high Colorado plains town, though by now he's probably gone. He moves around like other people change clothes. "Vibes," says Skeeter. He hangs out in a singles bar, one of the biggest in Denver, a giant cavern of a place on the near southeast side of town known as The Lift. It has three floors and will hold 700 throbbing (continued on page 188)Singles Business(continued from page 144) patrons at once. In the afternoons, you can probably find him at the Bull & Bush, another singles joint in the area. Skeeter digs the singles scene in Denver. "It's flush," he explains.

I'm going to enlist Skeeter's aid. He seems to have a finger on the pulse of what's happening. He hasn't missed a night on the singles scene in this town since he set up shop in one of those new "town house" developments one finds just off the freeway in large cities from coast to coast these days. "No lease," Skeeter says. He has been part of the singles scene since 1967, when he took his first job as a bartender in a little joint in his home town, Allentown, Pennsylvania. In later years, he moved on to the big cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver. "Action," demands Skeeter. "I like plenty of action."

He's got plenty of action these days. He quit the bar trade a few years ago and started selling turquoise, dealing a little grass on the side. The import side of his business led him naturally into his present trade: cocaine--"cecil, crank, blow, C, the rich man's aspirin"--which he deals in small amounts through contacts made in the singles bars. He flies from city to city, skittering through the scene like a cue ball on fresh felt, with the soft whhhrrr, the precise, careful speed that comes from experience, In many ways, Skeeter is the archetypal denizen of the singles scene. He has taken the singles lifestyle, so named by the news magazines in a spurt of press attention in the early Seventies, to its logical conclusion. "It's my profession," he says with pride.

Skeeter lifts a glass and touches it to his lips in the dim rose-colored light that gives everyone at the bar of The Lift a faint glow, a blushed, almost tanned look in the middle of the fall. The lighting--low, gleaming off the polished bartop, rising in gentle pillars through the smoky air, descending with a soft flutter to the pillowy leather sofas that surround the bar--is an important part of the scene. It makes everyone look so ... pretty. Tomorrow morning, the hunters and the hunted will appear different to one another--less glowing, more human--and the old illusion/reality trap will have been sprung again.

For the time being, the big Denver singles bar is serving its purpose well. There are at least 300 people in the bar and it's still early. They seem to swirl around one another in a kind of sexual hustle--a turn here, a glance there, dipping and touching and swaying in a disco of the mind.

People have laughed off the singles bars for years now. When living together became not just acceptable but chic, the singles, who only a few years ago fairly danced on the tip of the sociologist's pen, were forgotten. Left to rot in that nevernever land of yesterday's fad. But the sheer enormity of their numbers and the obvious power of their dollars have kept the bar scene alive. But what else is going on? How healthy is the singles-bar end of the loneliness business? Skeeter, what's the story?

"Hey, man, just look around you. This is Desperation City. It's worse than it ever was, the hunger, I mean. I don't know what happened, man, but this scene is bigger than ever. What do you think I cruise the singles joints for? Pussy? Are you kidding? For me, these places mean one thing. Bucks. A gram of coke is a hundred dollars. I get rid of a half-dozen grams a night out in the parking lots around these bars. I'd never deal inside, man. Uh-uh. If the management ever got hip to my scene, it'd be Shit Can City. I spent too many years working the other side of the bar in joints like this to step over that line, man."

Ok, enough with the dealing scene. Everybody knows it's hip. You can't walk into the Johns of these places without hearing somebody in a toilet stall who sounds like he has a terminal case of the sniffles. What's with these people?

"This scene has become self-perpetuating, dig? It used to be fed from the bottom, with kids out of high school and college, hungry for action, the way it always was. But nowadays, the scene is fed sideways, from the top, every way, with divorcees, men and women in their thirties, the chick who took a walk from a bad marriage, a guy who left his lover holding the pillow and the phone bill. For a lot of these folks, being single has become a permanent thing."

It's an older crowd, by and large. "You've got the young dudes and the little chickies running around in threes and fours, out for a good time, but a lot of people are plenty turned off to the straight life. Why do you think I get rid of so much cecil on this scene? Sure, everybody's got bucks to blow. But, man, there's an edge to it now. A crazy edge. You see some incredible stuff. The three- a.m. scene. Yankola. And then you see some beautiful stuff, people with their eyes all full of love and their noses full of crank, getting it on, living out there on a plane other people--the ones who sit home and watch TV and smoke a joint--will never dig. I wouldn't take a walk from this scene for all the tea in Thailand."

With that, Skeeter pulled a flat, antique-silver matchbox from his waist pocket. It was engraved with initials and hung from his belt loop on a slender silver chain. He flipped open the top with a thumb and dipped a tiny ivory spoon hanging from his neck deep into the matchbox and, holding it beneath his nostril, his head bent to the level of the bartop, inhaled with a sharp whhhaaaa intake of breath. Not one head at the bar turned.

"Getting back to it, man ... aaahhh, whew! ... What was it you were saying? The loneliness trip? Yeah, I can see that. They look and they sniff and they go home and they fuck and they come back for more. It's like a hole with no bottom in it, right?"

But aren't these bars really feeding on the loneliness of people? You seem to say the singles business is a noble struggle to help people find solace in the company of others.

"No, man. Look here. This is a ghetto, see. It's a weird analogy, which you might not dig, but it's like the gay scene. There've always been gay bars. For years, they've been run by the Mafia. Why? Because nobody else would touch them. Well, the singles bars are a little Mafia of their own. It's like, if you're a young guy or a young chick on the make, the bars are all you've got. Now, you know that's not true and I know that's not true. You could probably make out better at your local Baskin-Robbins. But how come you find what they call the singles ghetto surrounding the bar scene in cities around the country? In New York, it's the East Side; in San Francisco, it's the Union Street area; in Washington, it's Georgetown; in Boston, they call it the Combat Zone; in L.A., it's Marina del Rey. You find those ghettos because a lot of singles figure that kind of high-compression scene is their only shot. Look, gays are an oppressed minority, right? Part of their oppression has always been that they've had to go to Mob joints to get it on socially. Well, you can make a case that singles are an oppressed minority if you accept the notion that singles bars have a strangle hold on their lifestyle. Which they don't. But I'll tell you what. I've got a hundred dollars here that says most of the people in the bar would agree with you, if you made that argument."

•

San Francisco. I am in the Tar and Feathers, on Union Street, in the midst of the thriving singles ghetto. Bar after bar after bar, Union Street is lined with them. Some, like Perry's, just down the street, are trying to get away from the singles image, claiming that it's hurting business. "It's a reputation we picked up about six years ago and have been trying to get rid of ever since," says one of Perry's owners. "Singles are notoriously fickle." By the looks of things, Perry's has done pretty well with the fickle singles. The place is packed with them every night, a noisy, manic scene.

Travel down to San Bruno to check out some of the "singles apartment complexes." They look like normal modern suburban apartment complexes. "The singles-apartment thing was a terrible failure," says a local. "Too structured. Not enough turnover. Apartment managers have taken a more pluralistic approach. About the only restriction you'll find is against kids, and some of them will even allow families with up to two children."

His reading of the failure of the singles-apartment boom of the early Seventies checks out. In L.A., complexes in the Marina del Rey, such as the Mariners Village, now actively discourage the swinging singles. "We're looking for a more stable crowd," said a spokesman on the phone. "The singles were unreliable, antisocial, a disaster."

A spokeswoman for Riverbend Club Apartments in Atlanta, says they still accept singles but encourage married couples as well. "What happened to the all-singles thing?" she asked rhetorically in a telephone interview. "Everybody got old. We're all in our thirties down here now. We're a bunch of thirties screaming singles and couples, rather than a bunch of twenties screaming singles. We still party and everything, but it's different. It definitely is. Quieter. Sometimes I think the place seems like an old-folks home Saturday nights. Same is true of the other singles-type developments around here. They all gave up trying to make it work a couple of years ago."

In fact, every singles apartment complex I called around the country, in cities such as Houston, Miami, Chicago and St. Louis, had changed policy, discouraging the swinging scene and relying on young marrieds and an older, more stable single crowd to make it financially. The real-estate business had a lot of hopes for swinging-singles apartments a few years back. The singles-apartment scene has been replaced by the weight of the singles' dollars in the condominium market. By 1980, experts say, 16,000,000 adults will be living alone. There is a major chunk of the economy banking on the notion that increasing numbers of them will buy their place of residence, whether it's a condominium, a new house or an old house that needs fixing up.

Builders couldn't make the loneliness business work for them with singles developments. Now they're gambling that there is a trend toward what Skeeter called "single as a way of life." Their gamble is that more and more single people will stop trying to find a mate, accept the fact of being single and go on from there. Builders are not the only ones operating on this premise. There is a growing trend in American life, fostered in large measure by the new quasi religions, the personal-growth organizations and groups, that says: Accept what is.

•

Los Angeles, last stop on the weirdness trail. A friend in San Fran had advised: Stay out of Hollywood, watch your rearview mirror and stay away from blondes in Porsches. OK, will do. Staying with an old friend, single, who doesn't hang out much. He's saving to buy a house. See what I mean?

What's this? An ad in the Los Angeles Times for something called the Top of the World Club. "Tired of the L.A. singles scene?" the ad asks. Sure am. Well, give us a call. OK. A half hour later, I'm in Hollywood--watch out--in a neat office building on Santa Monica Boulevard, home of the Insight Dynamics Corporation, according to the logo on the door. It's a buzzing little place, with the atmosphere of a political campaign in the final stages of Election Day windup. Everyone seems to move with precision, with enthusiasm, a sense of forceful purpose. There is the pervasive sense one is within the headquarters of a movement, not a business.

"Hi. I'm John Raymond." It's the president of the Insight Dynamics Corporation, the parent body of what turns out to be a veritable turnip patch of clubs and organizations, including a club for gays, a club for swingers and a travel club called Singletours. Twentynine, medium height, tanned, bushy eyebrows, neatly trimmed beard, a permanent-waved halo of dark-brown curly hair, Raymond shows me into an office that can best be described as modern sparse. Desk. Two chairs. Everything in beige and tasteful chocolate brown. He speaks with the crisp yet soothing tones of one who either has had a voice coach or has been through an executive self-improvement course, which, it turns out, he has. I sit down and he turns on one of those micro Sony pocket tape recorders as I take out my notebook.

"You're not going to tape this?" he asks with incredulity, as if the primitive act of scribbling words on paper had never occurred to him.

No. I always take notes.

"Oh. Well, you won't mind if I tape, will you? I tape everything I say, everything I do. You never know when you're going to have an idea that might come in handy someday."

Indeed. What's Insight Dynamics Corporation all about, anyway?

"I started I.D.C. as an alternative to the singles-bar scene. Mine is the oldest, largest personal-growth group for singles in the country. Up until now, we've spent all our time developing the world around man. Now things are going to turn inward, toward developing the inner being, encouraging him or her to grow, to adapt to our new surroundings."

That sounds familiar.

"Well, everything that's gone on up until now on the singles scene--bars, computer dating, singles living complexes--has all been rooted in the Judaeo-Christian ethic of assimilation. Meet and marry. In the late Sixties, this began to crumble, but the essence of our lives didn't keep up, didn't keep pace with the changes that were taking place. Personal relations have not kept up with technological growth. The computer-dating system was an attempt to change this. Well, we've all seen where that went."

Nowhere.

"Right. At I.D.C., we've changed the emphasis. Today we tell people if they're coming in with preconceived ideas about a permanent relationship, forget it. Rather than build up hopes, we destroy them. We tell everyone joining I.D.C. that until he's functioning as a healthy, single person, he will never be happy as anything else."

How do you do this?

"At our New Member Seminars, which are held for those who sign up and pay our two-hundred-twenty-dollar membership fee. During the seminar, which might last three hours and is given by one of my trained assistants, we give people insights into shyness, we show them how to communicate with others and we teach them how to transcend the anxiety that comes with the fear of rejection. You know what we say about fear, don't you?"

No.

"Fear is defined as False Evidence Appearing Real. F-E-A-R. All you need to know to kill fear is its definition. The other big problem most singles face is depression. We have a technique for overcoming depression. This is it: Depression needs a vacancy, and you are the motelkeeper of your mind. I've got these principles copyrighted. They're part of my five techniques to make your life work, and they're all part of I.D.C. We dissect the game of life. We make our members look at life in a new and academic way. We put our people through certain growth experiences, such as group dynamics. And we teach them how to use our Master Member Library, the M.M.L."

The M.M.L.?

"It's a newspaper containing the coded personal listing of every I.D.C. member with his or her description and interests and desires. It's like a private singles register, except with the M.M.L., you're protected. Only I.D.C. members can contact you. To do so, they call here and give their number. We check it out to make sure it matches the name. Then we give them the telephone number they request and the person's first name. We do not give out the last name or address of members. That way, we protect members from contact, other than by telephone, with anyone not of their choosing. We constantly update the M.M.L. It is the heart of I.D.C."

Raymond sat comfortably behind his desk, speaking with precision, sure of himself, sure of the organization and methods he described. He was dressed casually in neatly creased trousers, expensive loafers, an open-necked shirt with the collar points laid evenly outside his sports coat. He described himself as a veteran of the personal-growth field, having started the American Sexual Freedom Movement in Los Angeles in 1967, which was headquartered briefly in Lenny Bruce's house in the Hollywood hills. He has worked at everything from selling motorcycles to running a disco. He has been through Dale Carnegie training, Esalen, Erhard Seminar Training (commonly known as est) and several other growth disciplines. Listening to him was an experience in itself. He sounded for all the world like a cross between a Joey Heatherton Serta-mattress TV ad and an Army drill instructor. I asked him about the people who join I.D.C.

"We get all kinds, from young, successful professionals like lawyers and doctors to common laborers, to widows and widowers in their fifties. The average single person is winging it, taking the haphazard approach to life. He has been taught that there are no tricks to life: If you're good-looking, if you're popular, you're a winner. If you're not a winner, you're a loser. We're here to break down those barriers and, to break them down, we've taken stuff that was taught at Esalen, in est, in Dale Carnegie, and we've put it in a slick package. I'll be honest with you. I want to make this stuff available to the Archie Bunkers of this world. I've worked on this a long time, since 1967. Every time I got stumped, I took a course and learned something and put it to work. I've been through management and motivational courses. I've put knowledge from every facet of my life into I.D.C. Let me show you what I mean."

Raymond stepped up to a clean blackboard and took a piece of chalk. He wrote and underlined topic titles in a flow diagram across the blackboard as he spoke. I took notes.

"Singles will all agree you need confidence to get ahead."

Notebook: Confidence.

"This comes from awareness and experience."

Naturally. Awareness. Experience. They branch off from confidence like tributaries from a river.

"Now, you could take course after course from me or Esalen or est or anybody else and you wouldn't get experience. As you learn more and more about the complex game of being single, you pick up awareness. But you still lack experience. You've got to put what you learn to work."

That makes sense.

"This is where the M.M.L. is invaluable. Every time you pick up the phone and call someone you've chosen from the M.M.L., you get experience. You've got to deal with the reality of either meeting or not meeting that person. You've got to deal with the reality of either having a scene or not having a scene. You've got to deal with rejection. You've got your awareness. Now you've got your experience. And that adds up to confidence. People must have confidence in themselves as single people before they can become fully realized beings. Now, everyone has confidence in his own area of expertise. You're a writer and you have confidence in what you write. But in meeting a person of the opposite sex, you might become introverted, shy. We overcome this with shyness training."

Shyness training. An out-of-work newspaperman of humble means, I could use some of that. What is it?

"Be careful of labeling yourself. Most people are careless about how they characterize themselves. One of my Five Principles That Make Life Work is selfacceptance. Accept yourself. Accept the truth of your own being. We give them my Five Principles. We give them my Five Techniques That Make Life Work and my Effective Living Plan and we send them out with the M.M.L. If they make it, fine. If they don't, it's their fault, and we tell them so, right up front. We teach all members that each person is responsible for his or her own experience as a single."

Christ, that doesn't sound like just est, it sounds like what I was taught as a lieutenant in the Army. Every platoon leader is responsible for everything his platoon does or fails to do.

"I can live with that. Nobody is going to take you by the hand at I.D.C. Nobody is guaranteed anything. You get out of I.D.C. what you put into it. But understand this. Nothing I do is about the conversion trip, like est, or any of those quasi-religious groups. I could have done that. Basically, it entails a form of conspiracy, the keeping of secrets from the masses. But once the cat gets out of the bag, you're through. We don't keep secrets here. This is a business. We're set up to make a profit. We tell the truth on all levels. The needs and frustrations of people are the same from coast to coast. The information to solve our problems is available. It's just that no one has packaged it properly. I take a definite responsibility to try to raise the quality of life in this country."

The inner sanctum of Insight Dynamics Corporation was suddenly quiet. The president has talked almost nonstop for over two hours. His rap was virtually the same rap he would deliver a week later at a New Member Seminar I attended. Same precision. Same authoritarian yet soothing tone of voice. Same blackboard notations. I felt like a new member. When he finished, Raymond seemed like a deflated balloon. He sank into a chair with an audible sigh.

"What else do you want to know?" he asked.

Where are you from?

"Jersey Shore. I hated New York. Used to refuse to go back and see my parents. I would agree to meet them in Aspen, someplace ... nice. I was caught in a slot, identifying New York with bad, L.A. with good. That kind of thing can happen to you in this game."

Is everything a game?

"Games. OK, you take my car. I used to drive a Volkswagen. I was selfconscious about money, afraid people would say, you're flaunting it, if I got a new car. I guess my relationship to time and money is different from most people's. I think about it a lot. I didn't want a Mercedes. A Mercedes is not consistent with who I am and what I feel. I finally settled on a Jag XJ6, used but in perfect condition. It is consistent with my level of success. I don't want to compromise myself. I've fought hard to maintain a personal space that is my own sanctuary. I tell people at I.D.C., if they see me at night in a disco or something, don't expect me to relate to you. When I go home in my Jag--I live only a couple of blocks from here, but I drive every day--I shut myself off completely. My feeling is this: If my mother dies, I'll find out about it tomorrow at noon. That's soon enough. I live for now. Right now."

The license plates on the pea-green Jag XJ6 in the basement garage read: IDC-1. Sleek, comfortable but not opulent, the Jag is parked in slot number one. Raymond got it for $6900, he told me excitedly, $300 below the asking price. The guy was leaving the country; he had to sell.

"I was in the right place at the right time," said the president of I.D.C. with the first really broad, open grin he had shown since we began talking. "I was lucky."

•

There is, of course, the matter of whether or not Insight Dynamics Corporation works. I spoke with a half-dozen members. For the most part, they were satisfied. It wasn't the deal it had appeared to be when they bought their memberships, but, as the guys put it, they got laid. It's a little like buying a car, one member explained. You take a chance. Each member extolled his or her favorite virtue of the club--the Effective Living Plan, the M.M.L., the Principles, the Techniques--in language right out of the mouth of the president himself. One hears similar parroting of doctrine from adherents of Scientology, est, Arica or any of the other authoritarian cults. Language, it seems, has become more than a means of communication. It has become a form of identification. It is necessary to adopt a way of speaking, a kind of verbal code, in order to belong. The boy scouts and the Masons and the Knights of Columbus appreciate this phenomenon. It is nothing new.

Yet one conversation I had with a member of I.D.C. stands out in my memory. I spoke with this gentleman, who wished to remain anonymous, after I attended the New Member Seminar. He extolled the virtues of I.D.C., as others had, in rather pedestrian terms. "I.D.C. works" could sum up his appreciation of the organization. He explained in great detail the Single Experience, a daylong encounter-type session (costing $100) held in a hotel ball-room that sounded remarkably like a miniversion of the est hotel-ballroom scene that has been so widely and, finally, boringly reported on. Then he told me about his sex life.

"I have scenes going with six chicks now," he explained earnestly, as if he were describing his stock portfolio to a broker. "I can think of one chick who fulfills me emotionally and intellectually, she's really sharp and good-looking and I enjoy being with her, but sexually, she turns me off. Then there's another chick who calls me up, comes over, we get it on and she splits. There have been nights when I never passed a word with her."

He paused for breath. He was speaking with an urgency I hadn't heard before on the I.D.C. circuit, not even from the president. He shot forth staccato bursts of words punctuated with chain puffs on a filter cigarette.

"I've found that people can handle the truth. Everyone I'm having a relationship with knows that she is only a part of the larger whole that is my life. I am who I relate to. I'm as happy as I've ever been, as happy as I'll ever be. It's like this: Every chick I have a thing with satisfies a need that I have. If I tried to find one chick who could satisfy all my needs, it might take the rest of my life. It's like walking around the streets looking for a hundred-dollar bill. You're never going to find it. I've learned to pick up all the change you find in between. The lesson I've learned is this: You can't love others completely until you have learned to love yourself. The final fulfillment in life is that, ultimately, there is no fulfillment. Now I feel OK the way I am. What is, is."

There is a kind of totalitarian beauty to this side of the singles scene, a completeness that stuffs the senses and clouds the mind, an oppression that is for some, perhaps, easier to accept than what is frequently perceived as the ultimate oppression: loneliness. One lacks a context into which to fit this final "single experience." Narcissistic? Yes. Selfish? That, too. But the believer is protected from these criticisms by his belief: If I'm guilty, others are, too. It all cancels out in the end.

The act of belief is a perfect detachment in itself, affording the protection, in this case, of a secular leap of faith. If one believes that the ultimate fulfillment is no fulfillment at all, then anything becomes possible. It is a Mansonesque ideal. Do unto others any old way you goddamn well please, because nothing you can do to them, or they to you, will have any effect. Nothing will impinge upon the human experience in such a way that the result will have meaning.

There is an irony here, the initial recognition that a problem exists, followed by a conjunctive belief that problems can be solved by the application of time, money and expertise. Sign up, take a course, follow a system of operation, have a plan. The breakdown is as old as recorded history, the classic split between science and faith. A process of problem solving such as that offered by I.D.C. is an abject departure from the age-old idea that life is a mystery, that emotions are inherently bottomless and impenetrable, that people are not machines that can be repaired with spare parts and technical know-how but souls, shadows of God that, like energy, can be neither created nor destroyed.

One is left gasping and groping and wondering. Has loneliness become an epidemic in America? Look at the evidence. The singles scene, 10 or 15 years ago a gaggle of bars on Manhattan's East Side, has been transformed beneath the weight of supply and demand into a national economic force. According to the 1976 Statistical Abstract, there are some 43,500,000 single, divorced or widowed people out there somewhere. Almost half of them are between the ages of 18 and 29. They spend well over 200 billion dollars a year. Yet no one really believes that any problems are being solved. The loneliness business is at best a feeble, capitalistic attempt to meet an impossible situation halfway. In coming years, the loneliness business will, in all probability, expand further, penetrating the society deeper and deeper. Already, the personal-growth field has sprung up, attempting to fill the holes of modern angst. It's overrun with singles looking for an answer and will doubtlessly bend itself to accommodate new needs of the lonely. After all, the credo of the personal-growth groups is, adapt to what is. The whole scene is so goddamn American. The end of the Seventies is going to be a strange trip. Perhaps we'll end up searching not for ourselves but for one another.

" 'Loneliness. That's what makes people want to join.... This isn't the singles thing. This is loneliness.' "

"Tomorrow morning, the hunters and the hunted will appear different to one another--less glowing, more human."