“You stand accused!” the megaphone man said. I didn’t like the sound of that.
Neither did the audience. I heard hisses and boos. “Put him on trial!” someone shouted.
“Trial!” the group began chanting. “Put him on trial!”
As I often say, it was at this point that things began to careen out of control.
Everybody got to their feet, stamping the ground and clapping in unison and shouting “Trial! Trial!” The megaphone man raised a hand and began flapping it in the air. Three pigs approached me and said, “Come with us!”
We didn’t really go anywhere. They guided me around the clearing. As they did so, a dozen people lined up in a formation, which I will describe as a gauntlet, as in “running the gauntlet.” They formed a double row and raised their arms the way soldiers raise swords when a buddy is getting married so the bride and groom can walk beneath the crossed blades as they come out of a church. But the hippies just touched fingertips, creating a canopy beneath which I was required to walk. The path led back to the spot where I had stood accused, but by then there was a new addition.
A tall figure wearing a black robe and a large mask topped by the thunderhead of a white judicial wig was standing in front of me. I quickly put two-and-two together and concluded that I had just been escorted through a “Hall of Justice.” The symbolism of amateur theatrics has always tended toward the obvious, thank God.
The judge folded his arms.
A silence fell over the crowd.
And then softly … almost imperceptibly … the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” began drifting through the air. I assumed it was coming from the tape that I had sold to Otto. For those of you not familiar with “Gadda,” try substituting the first four notes of Dragnet.
I braced myself.
There was no doubt in my mind that the man behind the mask was Brother Chakra, and it was obvious that he knew what he was doing. His choice of background music was worthy of William Castle. When it came to manipulating the emotions of an audience, Brother Chakra knew how to push people’s buttons. But then so did Walt Disney and Elvis Presley. Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, missed the boat entirely.
The judge pointed a finger at my face and said, “Who are you, stranger?”
At that moment I would have given my right arm for an inexpensive lawyer. But since that option was closed, I was left with only one alternative: The Truth.
That was completely out of the question, so I said, “My name is
Doctor Lovebeads and I’m from Taos, New Mexico.” “Who … are … you?”
“He’s a fraud,” a voice said.
I looked around and saw Otto walking toward me carrying a shoebox.
“A fraud?” the judge said.
“That is correct, your honor,” Otto said, stopping beside me.
“What is the nature of his fraud?”
“This man is not who he claims to be.”
“Do you have any proof?”
“I have evidence,” Otto said.
I closed my eyes. “Evidence” is my least-favorite noun.
“Bring it forth,” the judge said.
Otto lifted the lid of the box. I looked down at the contents. There was a license plate and a Polaroid snapshot.
I looked at Otto. “What’s this?” I said.
He reached in, picked up the plate, and held it high for everyone to see.
“This man who calls himself Doctor Lovebeads claims to be from New Mexico. But this license plate was taken off the bumper of his van. It’s a Colorado plate.”
There were gasps from the audience. I couldn’t tell if the gasps were theatrical or real. If they were real, I could only conclude that these people were morons.
The judge reached in and picked up the photograph. He held it up to my eyes. It was a close-up of me and my love beads sitting in front of the adobe.
“Who are you and where did you come from?” the judge said.
I realized that the curtain had come down on my performance. I was scared, but not as scared as I would have been if I hadn’t been carrying a small plastic squeeze bottle of ammonia in my pocket. But I knew that the ammonia would act only as a brief deterrent if I found myself hobbling down the mountain leaving screaming hippies rubbing their eyes. No, the bottle wasn’t going to be much help, other than to give me courage, which I normally get from glass bottles.
“I know who this man is,” Otto said, pointing at me. “He’s a cab driver. He came to the gate last Wednesday.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I drove up here to get Janet and Vicky but you wouldn’t let me in, so I came back to see if I could talk them into leaving this ridiculous place.”
The crowd murmured its disapproval. But here’s the funny thing: the more dangerous I made the situation, the less dangerous it felt. I have had a lot of experience with disapproval and I have found that few individuals are capable of expressing it without being backed up by at least one other person. I have respect for individuals who can vilify me on their own, but I had the feeling that the people at the ranch were incapable of doing anything on their own. They would be too timid to attack me without a mob to draw courage from. Now the bad news: I was surrounded by a mob.
“Why don’t you take off that asinine mask and show me your face?” I said to the judge.
He raised an open palm.
“Don’t hit him!” Vicky hollered.
I glanced at Vicky. She looked terrified.
“Do not worry, little Moonbeam, I am not going to hit this trespasser,” Judge Chakra said, turning slowly so that his fake face faced Vicky. “As I have taught you, I do not believe in violence. I do not believe in bringing harm to any living creature. Nor do I believe that one person has the right to intrude upon the personal space of another. This mountain belongs to the family. Therefore this trespasser shall be punished in the manner of the olden times.”
He raised his palm higher.
“Exile,” he hissed.
I heard the sound of an internal-combustion engine starting up. At that moment I was grabbed by two pigs. They hustled me out of the clearing toward the exit gate where I saw the following words printed on the backside of the arch: “Entrance. Welcome to the Theater of Greed. Leave Your Soul Outside.”
They dragged me through the gate and out into the real world. I saw the pickup truck parked farther down the road. Brent was in the driver’s seat. Two men were standing on the flatbed holding torches. The headlights came on.
“Put him in the rear,” Otto said.
They forced me to climb onto the flatbed. I sat on the ribbed floor. The men with the torches sat down with their backs to the cab. “Don’t even try to climb out and run away,” one of them said. “We’ll catch you. We know these hills.”
I pegged him as another member of the mob—possibly Luca Brasi.
Otto hopped in shotgun. Brent wheeled the truck around and started driving downhill. I’ll admit it. I was rattled. In spite of my many years of fending off disapproval, I had never felt so disliked in terms of both quantity and quality.
We came down out of the trees and passed the pond. People were gathered around the campfire near the adobe. Kids were chasing each other, but they stopped and cheered when they saw the truck lit up with torches. I doubted that they understood what was going on, but then that was the nature of theatrics, not to mention its black-sheep brother, politics.
The truck slowed to negotiate the passage between the tree trunks, then picked up speed for the final leg of the downhill run. We came to a stop in front of the big house. The doors of the truck flew open. Brent and Otto came around to the flatbed.
“Climb off of there,” Otto said.
I got down. Otto jammed the license plate into my belly and held up a screwdriver. “Here,” he said. “Put your license back on and get the hell out of here. And don’t even think about calling the police. We know who you work for, and it wouldn’t be any trouble finding out where you live … Murph.”
I didn’t say anything. I took the license but ignored the screwdriver. I walked over to the van, opened the door and climbed in. I tossed the license plate onto the shotgun seat and reached into my jeans, pulled out my squeeze bottle, and set it on the seat. I pulled out my keys. I started the van. I drove onto the two-track and followed it to the main gate. The gate was open. I looked at the rear-view mirror and saw the pickup truck following me. I drove off the property and turned onto the asphalt road. I looked in the mirror again. The pickup had stopped. I could see silhouettes moving around by the gate. The peace/love generation had tuned me out.
I followed the asphalt road until I came to the picnic area on Flagstaff Mountain. I pulled the van off the road and parked in the same place where I had parked the previous day. I shut off the engine and was engulfed by silence. There must have been a reservoir of unused adrenaline inside me because my hands started to shake the way they did after a hard night at Sweeney’s—but in a bad way.
I opened the door and climbed out and walked back and forth in the darkness for a few minutes, taking deep breaths of thin air. Then I looked around to see if there were any cars parked in the area. Maybe this was a lover’s lane for students at CU, which was lit up on the plains below. All of Boulder looked like a miniature version of Los Angeles viewed from Mulholland Drive. You’ve probably seen it in the movies. Steven Spielberg said he got the inspiration for the design of the giant flying saucer in Close Encounters by standing on his head on Mulholland and looking at LA upside down. To be perfectly frank, I would like to know what Steven Spielberg was doing on lover’s lane when he should have been revising the script of 1941.
The air was cold on the ridge. I pulled off my Mexican shirt. I walked back to the van and opened the sliding door and started looking for something else to wear. Suddenly I stopped.
Everything was there.
All of the blouses and sandals and books and tapes that I had sold during the day had been put back in place. Even the 8-track that Otto had trashed.
A chill crept up my spine. It was like receiving a message that served to underscore the extent of Brother Chakra’s reach as the leader of an underground cult—a clear and unambiguous warning from the Theater of the Mind.
I started shivering. I dug around in the van only to realize there wasn’t anything suitable to replace the shirt. I picked it up and put it back on. Full circle, like everything else in my life. I would be going back to Denver empty-handed. Once again I had failed to come through for someone who needed my help. Not that everybody I helped asked for my help, but whether they asked for it or not, they got it.
I yanked off my hippie headband and tossed it to the floor. I grabbed a bandanna out of the box and tied my hair in a half-assed ponytail to keep it out of my face while I drove. I slid the door shut, walked around to the driver’s door and reached under the seat. At least my tennis shoes were still there. It was probably a good thing that I hadn’t put them on before going up to the ridge. I’m the kind of person who often makes a run for it without considering the consequences. It’s similar to the way I approach cooking.
I had lucked out, given the fact that I had been “chauffeured” to my van rather than chased a quarter-mile down the mountain. It was almost enough to make me never do anything on purpose again, and I had a pretty good record in that department. The few times that I did do things on purpose, it was usually to help someone out. Maybe my failure to bring Janet and Vicky home was a message from the theater of the gods that it was time to stop doing things altogether. Janet and Vicky were living in some kind of crackpot commune, and there was nothing I could do to alleviate the guilt I felt for having given them the free ride to Red Rocks. If I had left well enough alone on that day, they might have been at home right at this moment, or at least in some place where I couldn’t be blamed. That has always been bottom-line with me: avoiding blame.