As the newcomers piled out of their vans, I heard the muted crash of tambourines, the squeal of women greeting women, and the undercurrent of men whispering hellos to old members of the various tribes. That’s what this was, I could tell—a gathering of the tribes. Maybe the last gathering ever. I mean, how much longer can adults continue to act like me?
But there were children present, too. I didn’t have a lot of faith that they would follow in their parent’s footsteps though. Believe me, if I had been forced as a child to live like I do now, I would have ended up president of Microsoft. Just the thought of me having access to billions of dollars ought to make your skin crawl too.
It was the kids who first drifted toward my psychedelic daisy-dotted wonderbus. Some were shy and some were brazen. Apparently their upbringing had not affected them because all kids are like that.
“What’s this place?” a boy said. He was about eight years old. “It’s a free store,” I said.
“Whatcha giving away?” he said, and all of a sudden I realized I had made an error in judgment.
As repulsed as I generally am by the concept of adulthood, there was one thing about grownups I did like. I knew I could count on them not to grab everything in my van and walk away. Adults were “mature” for crying out loud. But I had uttered the magic word “free” in the presence of kids.
Yikes.
I handed the boy the musical instrument.
“Flutes,” I said.
He handed it back. “I don’t know how to play a flute,” he said. “Me neither,” I said. I blew on the flute making it screech. The kids laughed. Making kids laugh—this I knew how to do.
But for a fraction of a second I became a Little League coach. I wanted the kid to give the toy a try. Come on, boy, don’t be a quitter! Choke up on that bat! Follow through on your swing! Slide, slide! Face it—the most bizarre aspect of adulthood is the belief that kids have to be taught how to play. I say give the kids a baseball and … then … just … walk … away.
But I felt bad. I didn’t have much of anything in the van that qualified as toys. And why would I? I hadn’t known that a solstice celebration was scheduled. I didn’t come prepared. You can carve that on my tombstone.
Otto walked out of the big house and sauntered down the steps. He strolled over to the spot where I was sitting and peered beyond my shoulder. “Just between you and me,” he said, “how much do you want for that Iron Butterfly cassette?”
I glanced around at the cardboard box where the tapes were tastefully scattered. “Make me an offer, man,” I said.
“Two bucks.”
“All yours,” I said. “I’ll tell ya what though. I’ll sell you the eight-track version for one buck.”
“No thanks,” he said, slipping me two bucks. I had the feeling he didn’t want Windsong to see this exchange of cash on solstice day. He handed it to me surreptitiously. I slipped him the cassette. You would have thought we were dealing in drugs if you were an optimist.
“Listen,” I said. “I’ll give you the eight-track version for free.”
He pursed his lips, then shook his head no.
I handed one of the dollars back to him and said, “Please. I’ll pay you to take it out of here.”
“You drive a hard bargain, dude.”
He reached into the box and grabbed the 8-track version of “Gadda.” I was ecstatic. I felt like a novelist who had talked a vanity press into publishing his memoirs.
He examined the plastic box, then lowered it and looked at my bleached muslin. “Nice shirt,” he said. “Looks like the real article. Where did you get it?”
“Tijuana,” I replied.
“When were you in TJ?” he said.
“That’s kind of hard to say. As far as I was able to determine from witness statements, it was during a spring break in college.”
He nodded again. “Where did you go to college?”
“UC …” I started to say, meaning UCD. But I caught myself in time and quickly transformed the letters “U” and “C” into the words “You” and “see” as in “You see, I went to a number of different colleges before I graduated, but I was a student at Kansas Agricultural University when I woke up in Tijuana next to a bottle of tequila. How that bottle got there I’ll never know. The policia filled in the rest of the details. Apparently I had bought this shirt at an outdoor flea market, although there seemed to be some dispute over the word ‘bought.’ I failed Spanish in college.”
I could tell by the look in his eyes that he understood my explanation about as well as I understood the Mexican legal system. Then his eyes dropped a notch and focused on the double loop strung around my neck.
“Nice beads,” he said. “Did you buy them in TJ, too?” I glanced down at the love beads.
I shook my head no.
“I bought them at Woodstock. A flower child was selling handmade necklaces from a tent.”
“You were at Woodstock?” he said with his eyebrows raised. “That’s what my lawyer tells me.”
He nodded and continued to gaze at the beads, then he looked me in the eye. “Is the necklace for sale?”
I reached down and began fingering the beads, and shook my head no. “It would be impossible to put a price on a genuine souvenir carried away from the biggest luv-in of the sixties,” I said, perhaps the most irrelevant truth that ever fell from my lips.
“I can dig it, man,” he said, then he turned and walked away.
I raised the remaining dollar bill with both hands, then squeezed and snapped it a couple times. I saw Otto walk past a trash barrel. He dropped the 8-track into the barrel. That really made me feel like a novelist.
I reached into my book box, pulled out a paperback, and placed the dollar bill inside it. I did this unconsciously. It was a habit. I feel compelled here to state that doing things unconsciously with money is not a good habit to get into. But I had other things on my mind.
I was hoping that Vicky or Janet would show up, at which point I might be able to talk them into going home. I knew I had to leave the safety and security of my van and start mingling with the crowd. There hadn’t been any new arrivals during the past half-hour. Maybe this was the entire guest list. I wanted to know how many people might be frowning at me when I tried to take Janet and Vicky away. It might set a new record for mass frowning. I set the old one in college. It happened at KAU during Crazy Days, a spring break festival. Believe it or not, the frowning had nothing to do with my streaking incident. But given the high tolerance level of college students when it comes to bizarre behavior, it’s probably best we move on.
I began drifting toward the middle of the front yard, where people were dancing the “upraised-arms” dance that you see on the “Greatest Hits of the 60s!” infomercials filmed at love-ins.
Excuse me. Luv-ins.
Some of the hippies had formed a kind of conga line and were dancing around in a large circle. Within the circle were more hippies doing the arm dance. Hippies were seated on the ground playing guitars. Tambourines were being slapped. Woodwinds were being played, though not flutes. I don’t know what the instruments were. I was in band for only three weeks before I dropped out. My Maw was furious. The music store that sponsored the Blessed Virgin grade school orchestra gave ten free lessons with a private tutor if you bought a musical instrument. “Those ten free lesson are going to waste!” Maw snarled. I wanted badly to argue with her logic, but I was afraid I might lose the argument and have to go back to band practice. I played the trumpet. Badly. I still have the trumpet. It is an object of hatred. But I can’t bring myself to throw it away because it cost my parents one hundred dollars, and that was in 1960 dollars. God only knows how worthless it is today.
I decided to join the conga line. I was so swept up in the freewheeling festivities that I momentarily forgot that I was forty-five on a mountain. Even in San Diego I wouldn’t have found enough oxygen to last eight musical bars. I placed my hands on the shoulders of a girl in front of me. That part was okay. We hopped and kicked, hopped and kicked. Then I felt someone’s hands on my shoulders. They were large. Suddenly it wasn’t fun anymore. I felt trapped. I’ll be frank here. I had gotten myself into another mess. A small mess, admittedly. Even an insignificant mess. But I couldn’t breathe fer the luvva Christ.
“Improvise!” a voice inside my head pleaded. It was Joanne Woodward, and she sounded exhausted.
I thought about pretending to trip and fall down. Crude but effective. Yet I was afraid the people behind me might see right through me and get suspicious. This has stopped me from doing more things in my life than you might believe. How about a coughing fit? Maybe the dancers would think I had been toking jays. People who smoke marijuana cough frequently, so I’ve been told. Not to get off the point here, but the legalization of pot could feasibly result in filter-tipped reefers. As a health-related issue that’s certainly a strong argument, if not totally disingenuous.
Then I saw a hippie ahead of me drop his hands and walk away from the conga line. My God—talk about up front. Where did he find the courage to do exactly what he felt like doing? Hippies were a breed apart.
I swallowed hard. I decided I was going to drop my hands from the warm shoulders of the girl in front of me and walk away. I had a problem though. What if the people behind me thought I was imitating the boy?
My shoulders drooped. Why oh why did I join the conga line? The music suddenly stopped and everybody walked away.
I stood in the middle of the yard not knowing which direction to go. All of the points of the compass had been “taken” by one or another person. No matter which way I went it might look like I was trying to be like someone else rather than going my own way as would a spiritually enlightened follower of the true path.
***
The dinner bell rang.
I fell in lock-step with the crowd hiking up the hill. I realized that my lifelong contempt for the herd mentality had blinded me to the benefits of complicity. Right then and there I vowed to myself that when I got back to Denver, I would never again do my own thing.
The adobe plateau was smaller in area than the yard down by the big house. Ergo, due to the nature of solids, the human bodies were clustered closer together. That’s just a roundabout way of saying it was crowded. I guess I could have just said that. I know that my English teacher in high school, Sister Mary Xavier, probably would not have approved of my admittedly frequent use of extraneous words as well as quotation marks and long dashes—such as this—when trying to make a “point.” But in my defense, I already knew how to speak English when I entered first grade, and I did not talk like Ernest Hemingway. For one thing he had a lisp, which most people don’t know about. He couldn’t pronounce his R’s clearly. When you hear him speak on Caedmon records, he sounds like Elmer Fudd. I’ve often wondered if the lisp had anything to do with his macho posturing, and whether a grade school speech teacher might have badgered him to pronounce his R’s correctly to the point that he rebelled by becoming one of the greatest prose stylists of the twentieth century just to show up the egghead with the hickory stick. That might make a good extra-credit research paper for a college student who has nothing else to do and no reason to go on living.
It quickly became obvious to me that not all of the guests at the feast were vegetarians. I could smell hamburgers cooking. The hippies themselves did not seem to have a distinct odor. For one thing there was not, as I said, much air at that altitude, and for another thing I had driven a cab for fourteen years and my olfactory senses had gone the way of the Dodo during year five.
I noticed that when it came to distributing the food among forty or fifty people, it was indistinguishable from a picnic attended by the bourgeoisie: people were patiently lined up with paper plates, kids were screaming, mothers were admonishing them. Need I go on? Don’t you have a family? Haven’t you ever been dragged to a picnic?
I played it cool though. I didn’t take any meat. Not even chicken. Doctor Lovebeads was a strict leaf-eater. I didn’t want to give anybody even the slightest cause to suspect that I was rational.
Since I was a virtual stranger at the gathering, it didn’t really matter where I sat. Plus there was the fact that everybody here was open and up front and willing to let each other groove on his own vibe. I grooved on my own vibe once in sixth grade and ended up standing on top of my desk. It’s a long story that pre-dates the Beatles. Let’s move on.
I held my plate of twigs close to my body as I wandered among the picnickers. I tried to make it look like I was searching for the ideal spot to sit down on the late great planet earth and commune with my food. But in truth I was looking for Janet and Vicky. I didn’t see them. I didn’t know what bizarre changes they might have undergone during their week at Brother Chakra’s “Luv Asylum,” as I had begun to think of this place. I get pretty sarcastic above five thousand feet.
I gave up and planted myself on the ground near the trickling stream where a man and a woman wearing ponchos were eating from bowls.
“Nice huaraches,” I said by way of introduction.
“Hey thanks, man,” the hippie replied, raising his chin and talking with his mouth full of beans.
“Are they hand-made?” I said. My intent was to bring up the subject of my traveling wonderbus and hippie emporium. In this way, I might be able to dominate the conversation and thus avoid listening to anything they had to say. My long-range goal was to keep them occupied until the end of the feast so I would not have to introduce myself to anyone else.
The hippie looked down at his sandals and shook his head. “I don’t know, man, we got ’em used.”
“Where did you buy them?”
“Taos,” he said. “That’s where we live.”