However convenient the dwellings,
You shall not remain there.
However sheltered the port,
And however calm the waters,
You shall not anchor there.
However welcome the hospitality that welcomes you
You are permitted to receive it but a little while.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”
By the end of our trek, we were metaphysically healthy but physically wrecked. We were all undernourished, beaten up, and broke. Bonnie Jean, who was pregnant during the trip, had pushed on even when there was little food. Elaine developed hepatitis and was malnourished.
But no one had it worse than Wavy. He liked to call himself the “Temple of Accumulated Errors,” but he had become the temple of accumulated diseases. Wavy was fearless. In India he would plop himself into any muddy body of amoeba-ridden water. At ninety pounds he had lost nearly half of his body weight. I was concerned about his survival, so I put him on a plane in Kathmandu for the United States. Upon arrival at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, in typical Wavy fashion, he won the dubious distinction of having the most illnesses at the same time. But after a couple of months’ convalescence, he was almost as good as new.
While everyone else wanted to continue exploring the outer world, Elaine was more interested in exploring the inner world. She and Linda, one of our friends from the Hog Farm buses, stayed in India to take Buddhist meditation courses. At one course she recognized Mirabai from the night at the Kumar galleries. Mirabai was an American meditator and Ph.D. student close to Ram Dass. She had been with us the night Brook had yelled “Holy men are full of holes” in Delhi. It didn’t take much to convince Elaine to go with her to the mountains to meet Ram Dass’s mysterious, secret guru. From descriptions in Be Here Now, the guru hardly seemed real.
While Elaine went north to the mountains, Hog Farmers who stayed in India went to Goa, the pot-smoking hippie paradise in South India. I took off on my own, first sleeping in ancient jungle temples in Burma, then taking a trip through Thailand where I found myself trekking near U.S. Air Force bases and getting into arguments with pilots about the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and Vietnam. I trekked through Laos and spent nearly a month there before leaving for Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and a quick visit to China until I finally returned to the States—a very different person after more than a year of wandering across the world.
In the fall of 1971 most of the crew of the bus trip to Nepal had gathered in New York. We hung around Greenwich Village waiting until Wavy was well enough to travel again, gathering supplies and readying the old Hog Farm bus we had left behind after the Medicine Ball Caravan filming had wrapped in DC. The plan was to take the now very pregnant Bonnie Jean from New York to San Francisco, where she wanted to give birth. Our itinerary included a stop in a suburb near Cleveland to see my mother.
Butch, still wearing the beaten-leather hat he had worn over the Khyber Pass, drove the commune on wheels across the New York Thruway to the Ohio Turnpike, through towns and suburbs of the Rust Belt. American roads were not a challenge after navigating the tiny villages and winding roads of Nepal and India. Most buses we passed had familiar destinations like “Chicago” or “New Jersey” on their marquees; ours was more aspirational: “OM.” After ten hours on the road, Butch eased the OM bus into the parking lot of my mother’s condo, blocking three or four parking spots.
Since my dad had died, Mom had been living on her modest income as a jewelry saleswoman. Compared with the Kurdish mud villages in Turkey and huts clinging to the sides of the Himalayas in Nepal, the marble and brass of her building’s lobby and the crystal chandelier hanging above us were over the top.
“You can’t come in, Larry!” she said, when I buzzed her apartment.
“Come on! Mom!” I shouted back through the intercom. “I’ve been gone a year and I’ve got a busload of tired and hungry people. Why can’t we come in?”
“Because I’m crying and my mascara is running.”
“Why are you crying, Mom?”
“Because you’re a doctor, but you’re living like a filthy dirty hippie.”
She wasn’t completely wrong, but I wasn’t living like a hippie, I was a hippie.
“Please, Mom.”
Bonnie Jean badly needed the bathroom. I intensified my pleas.
“The police are going to come and take that bus away, Larry! You’re blocking everything. You gotta get out of here!”
After ten minutes of negotiation, my mother relented. She dried her tears, touched up her makeup, and put on some of the jewelry she used to wear when my father’s jukebox business was flush. Twenty or so hippies coming up at once would have overwhelmed her, so Bonnie and I went up first. Mom greeted us at the elevator. I had not seen her in almost a year. There were big hugs and lots of tears.
Mom took one look at Bonnie Jean and said, “Oh honey, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. And the dirtiest! What are you doing riding on that bus when you’re this pregnant?” Mom drew a bubble bath for Bonnie Jean and gave her an oversized sequined dress from Miami, which suited Bonnie Jean just fine. Then Mom got out her gold-rimmed plates and finest silver to show off what we were missing by living the anti-materialist life she imagined we did.
So that Mom wouldn’t feel overwhelmed, the rest of the crew came up one by one to shower and eat. She laid an outrageous spread on the table. In the middle of dinner, Mom piped up, out of nowhere, “Larry, I’m really so sorry to hear that Elaine is living with another man!”
I was incredulous. “What are you talking about, Mom?”
“She left you, Larry. Elaine left you. I saw it in the telegram.”
“What telegram, Mom? Where’s the telegram?”
“She’s living with a guy named Maha-something. And someone named Ron is there too.”
Ah! Relief. Telling me that my wife was living with Maharaji, pictured in Be Here Now as a fat old guru wrapped in a blanket, and his student Ram Dass did not worry me, though it would have been entirely possible that Elaine was living with someone else. She and I hadn’t had much contact since India—the primitive communications of the 1970s limited us to telegrams and letters to set up appointments for short, expensive phone calls. There were no phones in the ashram. “Write me in Nainital,” she said, but I didn’t know where that was. I was sending letters to her at the American Express office in Delhi. She sent me telegrams, all of them saying the same thing: “Come back to India. You have to be with Maharaji.” But I never received most of them.
Yes, she could have been living with someone else. We did not establish rules about who was with whom when we went our separate ways in India. We had more relaxed definitions of relationships back then. There were times on the buses when it seemed like everyone was sleeping with everyone else. But there were also times in the temples and monasteries when nobody was sleeping with anybody. Elaine and I had both slept with other people on the Medicine Ball Caravan. Neither she nor I considered this a big deal. Our relationship seemed to transcend all that. But I missed her so much during the six months we were apart. I noticed how Elaine’s message sparked feelings of jealousy and loneliness, all while I was surrounded by friends, family even, from the commune.
After two days of hot baths, food, and recuperation, Mom began to let her guard down. She had a moment of wide-eyed astonishment when she entered the tie-dyed, psychedelic bus, especially when she realized what the sleeping arrangements meant; but she did love the color scheme. She came to adore the hippies. The next day, we said goodbye and got back on the road for San Francisco.
Outside of Denver, we stopped for gas at a Chevron station at the Tomahawk Truck Stop, parking there for the night, right under the sign. In the predawn hours, Bonnie Jean went into labor. As Dr. Larry, I had planned for the “imponderabilia”—the unexpected risks that befall travelers—by shopping in New York for extra medical supplies, including an emergency home delivery kit, clean sheets and forceps, and especially some nitrous oxide if needed as an anesthetic. I had helped deliver babies in much more difficult settings—Wovoka on Alcatraz, another Hog Farm baby on the bus in Europe, and several babies in the hills of Nepal. Bonnie Jean’s labor in the back of a clean bus was thankfully without complications. She named her son Howdy Do-Good Tomahawk Truckstop Gravy. “He was born under the sign of Chevron, with Texaco rising,” she said. As soon as he was old enough to be legally able, Howdy Do-Good Tomahawk Truckstop changed his name to Jordan. Wavy, who had flown ahead to San Francisco when his back was hurting too much to stay on the bus, came back for Bonnie Jean and his new son in Denver.
Bonnie Jean, Wavy, Howdy Do-Good, and I arrived in San Francisco to a complete mess at our Turk Street apartment where we planned to stay. Elaine and I had departed in haste, and The Body Politic subscription money, which arrived in small checks in the mail, was left in the hands of a friend who managed to blow it all, along with the last of his neurons, on drugs. It was the beginning of my longtime hatred for some of the poison being peddled on the streets.
Everything we had left in the apartment was trashed or gone. Now we had to figure out how to close up shop and repay the thousands of dollars in subscriptions we had collected from nearly five thousand readers. But I knew I could raise the money by working as an emergency room doctor if I had the time, and I was in no hurry to go back to India.
Elaine and I suffered through agonizing phone calls: “Come to India,” she said. “Come home to San Francisco,” I replied. Stalemate. While neither of us was giving ground, I was more and more aware of how much she meant to me. In the end, Pakistan’s air force settled our standoff by bombing Indian army bases near the ashram where she was staying, heating up the third or fourth Indo-Pakistani war. “They have planes and bombs headed for us, and Maharaji is sending all the Westerners away,” Elaine told me just before Christmas. I could barely hear her voice, which was cracking over the crackling phone line.
“Come home, now, please,” I said again.
“Maharaji said I should go back to America and return when the war is over and bring you with me. He said, ‘Bring the doctor.’ Larry, I’ll come back by Christmas if you promise that as soon as the war is over and you can clear up our debts, you’ll come back to India with me and see Maharaji.”
I feared losing both the phone connection and my Elaine connection so I shouted “Yes!” more out of panic than conviction.
When I picked her up at the San Francisco airport, it was like we had never been apart; it was love again. We now call those six months of separation time off for bad behavior. We went straight to Mount Shasta, a dormant volcano in northern California, to contemplate what it meant to put our marriage back together, what it meant to go back to India. The radio DJ Wes “Scoop” Nisker used to end his show by saying, “If you don’t like today’s news, go out and make your own.” I took him literally—I was pulled by that desire, by the force of politics, the urgency of current events, the drama of the daily news. To participate in full, I believed I needed to be in America, where the change was most likely to happen.
But Elaine wasn’t “Elaine” anymore. She had a new name: Girija, which means “daughter of the mountains” or “daughter of the Himalayas.” In Indian mythology Girija was Shiva’s wife, also named Parvati or Uma. Maharaji gave a new name to her as part of her initiation. He was apparently a new, but different, love of her life. It was a little weird.
She dressed differently too. She was wearing flowing cotton robes, draped scarves, loose pants, and sandals—what I imagined to be the ashram uniform. She tried to keep to an ashram-like routine of meditation and prayer. I felt the financial load on my shoulders as her new spiritual demeanor—and her jingling ankle bracelets—turned off prospective employers. Going back to India to sit at the feet of an old Indian yogi wrapped in a Scottish plaid wool blanket was not my idea of a good time. But to save my marriage, I had agreed.
To pay off my medical school debts, I signed up for an eight-week contract as a weekend emergency room doctor in Los Angeles, where doctors were in short supply. I also did a locum tenens for about a month, taking over a medical practice that covered several hundred square miles between Las Vegas and Reno after a Nevada-based doctor broke his leg. For one month, Girija and I lived in Tonopah, Nevada. We were vegetarians in the middle of cattle ranches and steakhouses. I traveled hundreds of miles around Nye County making house calls in a Winnebago, which I liked to pretend was my hippie bus, an extension of my experiences with the Hog Farm. Many patients came to see me at Nye County Hospital, including all the local prostitutes, who, by law, had to have a weekly vaginal exam and blood tests. Every Monday morning, I did two dozen vaginal exams before noon. It was an unusual way to get to know some of the kindest people I have ever met.
Elaine, I mean Girija, prayed every day that I would find God. That was not happening yet, but at least I found the money to get to India. I still needed to make good to the subscribers of The Body Politic whom I had abandoned, and to that end, my friend Stewart Brand donated five thousand copies of the Whole Earth Catalog that I could mail as a thank-you and goodbye for our subscribers. In an anti-materialist purge, Girija and I got rid of everything and prepared for our lives as renunciates.
We moved out of the Turk Street apartment into the basement of a house in tony St. Francis Woods owned by the Levitans, doctors who had welcomed me in my internship. We shared the space with Wavy, Bonnie Jean, and little Howdy Do-Good. Wavy was recuperating from spinal surgery—one of many spinal fusions he would undergo because of the number of times he had been beaten by cops at protests. He was in a full body cast that Bonnie Jean turned into art, decorating it with currency notes from the Hog Farm pilgrimage—British pounds, Turkish lira, Pakistani and Nepalese and Indian rupees, as well as more than a few canceled checks. Wavy christened it his “Cast of Thousands.” When space got tight, we borrowed a camper bus from a Hog Farmer named Lois and parked it in front of the house.
One night, Wavy heard that a famous Tibetan lama named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche would be speaking at “God Hill,” part of the graduate school of theology at Berkeley, where the churches stood and most religious groups held their ceremonies. We’d seen a few Tibetan lamas in India and Nepal, and the chance to hear Trungpa, who spoke excellent English, in our own backyard was cool. Waddling like a duck in his awkward cast, Wavy accompanied Girija and me to the lecture in his first venture out of the house. Bonnie stayed home with Howdy.
For the occasion, Girija wore her sari, and I put on a pair of overalls onto the bib of which Bonnie Jean had sewn an exuberantly beaded rainbow with a medical caduceus. I was proud of that rainbow-beaded caduceus. It was a symbol of my acceptance as Dr. Larry of the Hog Farm.
About one hundred people packed into the room, most sitting cross-legged on the floor. While Girija and I settled in the back, Wavy made his way awkwardly to the front past the formally dressed ushers, whom we called the storm troopers; he looked quite out of place in his Cast of Thousands and jester’s cap. He was in a lot of pain and asked to lie down near the elaborate British club chair and table that had been set up for Trungpa. Lying down in front of a makeshift altar adorned with a Tibetan dorje—a ritual scepter—a bell, candle, incense holder, and Trungpa’s private pack of Marlboros and bottle of Drambuie, Wavy looked like a decorated mound. To most of the hippies there it was as if the spirit of Woodstock had arrived.
Trungpa’s devotees chanted as he limped into the room; he had been partially paralyzed after crashing a car into a practical joke store in England with another man’s wife in the passenger seat. He was dressed in a three-piece suit and tie. In the back of the hall, I blew up balloons that read, “From your doctor for being good,” and tossed them into the room. As Trungpa settled into his seat, Wavy reached over to the altar, snatched the lighted candle, and set it into a puddle of wax on his cast just over his belly. Trungpa eyeballed Wavy, who muttered Om mani padme hum over and over until Trungpa began to speak. When Trungpa paused to light a cigarette, Wavy picked up the glass of Drambuie that Trungpa had brought in and took a sip, eliciting an audible gasp from the devoted. After Trungpa took a drag off his Marlboro, Wavy picked it up to take a puff.
“I’m very happy,” Trungpa began in perfect, almost Oxonian English, “to be here in Berkeley where so many important events have taken place.”
And then he got into the meat of his talk. “I know you are all well-intentioned, whether you are already Buddhists or you are devoted to another religion or even if you are hippies or antiwar and civil rights activists. I know you mean well and I know you want to do good in the world. But I want you to know that you can’t do anything of lasting benefit for anybody until you first reach a level of spiritual awareness that brings you enough wisdom so that you don’t go one hundred miles per hour in the wrong direction and end up doing harm. Before you can really help with anyone else’s suffering, you first begin the path toward your enlightenment by addressing your own suffering. You want to do good in the world, but you must first meditate so that you really know how to help others with their suffering.”
“What about the starving people in Bangladesh?” Wavy bellowed, interrupting.
Refilling his drink, Trungpa replied simply, “Meditate first.”
Wavy reached over and took a sip of the lama’s drink and let it rest on his tongue. “You’re right, Boss, but while we are meditating, let’s feed the people who are starving in Bangladesh.”
Trungpa took back the glass from Wavy, smiled and said, “Feeding the people is meaningless without intentionality. You must first clean your mind, find balance and direction, and start the path toward enlightenment. I say first you practice these three levels of Buddhism—Hinayana, then Mahayana, then Tantrayana—so that you can become a Buddha yourself, so that you will know how best to help others. Become a Buddha before you act, or your actions will only add to the suffering and muck up the world.”
During the next hour while Trungpa spoke, Wavy continued to puff from Trungpa’s Marlboros, which were burning slowly in the ashtray, and also to sip from his tumbler of Drambuie. He parried each thrust. “I agree with you, Boss. Let’s meditate. Let’s do nothing except seek enlightenment. One hundred percent. But, along the way, let’s feed the people. During every one of those stages to enlightenment, Boss, we must feed the hungry of the world. We meditate, then feed, chant, and then feed, pray, and then feed. The Hog Farm commune took buses with food and medicine to feed and treat Tibetans in refugee camps in India and Nepal. They were hungry—so we fed them.”
“It’s meaningless,” Trungpa replied, “unless you have the right motivation and wisdom. Feeding people doesn’t end their suffering. It doesn’t cut it out by the root. Only wisdom gained through meditation and spiritual practice can do that.” I was on Wavy’s side, but the memory of the near riot we had caused trying to feed people in Benares because of the lack of wise planning stung a bit.
Trungpa was extremely intelligent, adapting the practice of his esoteric Buddhism to the moment and his audience. But Wavy kept pushing back against his dogma. If Trungpa seemed patronizing, Wavy chanted “Om mani padme hung” in a mocking, singsong voice. When storm troopers moved in to carry Wavy away, the crowd in the room chanted, “Wa-vy, Wa-vy.”
The stalemate ended when Wavy declared, “Of course you are right, Boss, we will meditate first and do nothing else.” In a stage whisper he added, “But while we are seeking enlightenment, how about we all get together just a little bit and feed the people in Bangladesh because they’re starving!”
Trungpa got up and left. Everyone left. Some, not all, stopped to congratulate Wavy on challenging Trungpa.
As Wavy navigated through the well-wishers and balloons still lying on the floor, I realized something. Since my days in Ann Arbor, I had been part of a political movement for change, freedom, equality, and the end of poverty. During that time, there was a gradual, though unmistakable, shift in the movement toward spirituality, but I didn’t want to retreat to a cave, unable to alleviate at least some part of the suffering of others while seeking spiritual development. Even if I couldn’t eradicate all suffering, I wanted to do something about it. Wavy, himself in pain in his body cast, had reminded us that we can do both at the same time: seek personal spiritual growth and change the world—integrate hospitals and schools, march to stop wars, and work to end poverty. We didn’t have to choose between the inner and the outer work, nor surrender to the inevitability of war and injustice. We did not need to be passive spiritual observers. But at the same time, Trungpa also spoke to me: few of us had confidence that what we were doing as political activists was working. In order to be more effective, we did need more wisdom, more spiritual development.
San Francisco was not only the epicenter of communal living and spiritual experiments in the early 1970s; it was also home to many of the most radical political organizations. I had considered myself a radical until the intellectual and theoretically minded SDS picked up guns and morphed into the Weather Underground. When Wavy and Trungpa were debating the nuances of nonviolent social activism versus contemplation, left-wingers began bombing the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The radical politics we had embraced was becoming a New Left terrorism. While I was not attracted to the strict teachings of Trungpa personally, his warning about how even the best intentions could go terribly off track without a firm moral compass and spiritual grounding resonated with me—in much the same way as had Dr. King’s call for justice and nonviolence.
Trungpa encouraged us to read Buddha instead of Marx, the Dhammapada instead of Mao’s Little Red Book. “Read how the great spiritual teachers of history dealt with injustice and poverty and the struggle for freedom and equality.” He asked us to not get caught up in the costumes of spirituality, as he did in his aptly titled book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Putting activism into a spiritual context, he advised, would help us understand how to be more effective in the world. To which Wavy added, while we’re reading and studying, let’s get out and do some good.
It seemed to me that Wavy and Trungpa were re-litigating one of the oldest arguments over how to live a good life: how one can boldly act to bring about justice and civil rights and at the same time withdraw from the world to seek communion with God—whatever name and in whichever language you commune. The union of the two paths was clear in the actions of the spiritual followers of Mahatma Gandhi. His nonviolent activism, satyagraha, had far more impact on the British leaving India than hundreds of Weather Underground bombs would ever have on the American political system.
I was still considering this paradox on the eve of our departure for India. Girija and I made a final pilgrimage to Mount Shasta, the place where, just a few months earlier, we had recommitted ourselves to our marriage. Its white peak was an echo of the highest white peaks of the Himalayas, where the ashram of Maharaji sat nestled in its foothills. Near the top of snow-covered Mount Shasta, Girija and I prayed that our journey to India would transform us. We prayed that, like Ram Dass, we too would go to India and return as better people, more enlightened souls, by retreating from the spinning-out-of-control world of politics and taking a break from the seductive hedonism of American life. Girija was returning to the ashram she considered her spiritual home, and I was leaving my crazy wonderful Hog Farm family and my radical politics for a new life. We drove back to San Francisco, resolute, joyful, ready.
After taking our little borrowed bus to a car wash prior to returning it to its owner, we parked it in front of the house in St. Francis Wood. On the dashboard, Girija placed a photo of Maharaji wrapped in his Scottish plaid blanket, waving his finger, like a berobed Saint Francis. We slept in the bus that night.
“Larry, wake up!” Girija was shaking me. The bus was full of smoke. We rushed to the house to call the fire department. We were inside when we heard the explosion. I ran out to a surreal tableau of hypodermic needles from my doctor’s kit stuck in the trees and the medical supplies we were taking to India scattered across the yard and the street. The bus was on fire—its propane furnace, the flue to which had been bent at the car wash, had exploded. We rushed in to salvage what we could. I grabbed what was left of the medical supplies. Girija ran right through the flames to rescue the picture of Maharaji, which was barely touched—burned only in the corner where his finger was pointing.
“Maharaji woke me up,” Girija said. “I was sound asleep. I could feel his hand on my shoulder and that’s when I smelled the smoke. Larry, he saved our lives.” We took it as a sign to get on with our pilgrimage to India.