The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Epilogue

  Books by John Nichols

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I sat down to begin The Milagro Beanfield War in 1972, I had no idea the story would grow into a trio of books. But I soon realized I had more to say about the vision of life essayed in Milagro, and so I wrote The Magic Journey. It was a different, and very difficult, book for me: I had an ambitious, even grandiose plan at the start, but wound up, as I usually do, desperately trying to salvage a novel.

  Even before The Magic Journey came out in 1978, I knew I would be saddled with another Chamisa County novel. I felt bad, realizing this, because I had wanted to incorporate The Nirvana Blues’ themes, mood, and message in one, or both, of the preceding and above-mentioned books.

  But my stories often sprint away from their original intentions like delinquent children, gallumph blindly into all sorts of unforeseen pitfalls, and finally, with luck, stagger to the finish line as total strangers to the original schemes that launched them.

  All three novels are set in mythical Chamisa County, where the folks, the situations, and the landscapes resemble parts of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Should they survive, I suppose future interested persons might refer to these books as “his New Mexico Trilogy,” even though the name of New Mexico never appears in any of the texts.

  But that’s okay by me. All I truly care about is that people realize the novels are spiritually linked: together, I believe they complete an overall picture.

  An aside, here, addressed largely to my “regional” constituency, and especially to all my friends and enemies in the Taos area. Like most novelists, I often borrow physical traits or quirks or adventures of real people as the embryonic starting points for my characters and tales. Then I proceed to invent people and situations that exist solely within my works and nowhere else, hoping that these imaginary creations, by representing universal truths, will seem familiar to the reader. I have been perhaps too successful doing this, for I find that wherever I travel in northern New Mexico or southern Colorado, people are always telling me who my imaginary people are drawn from in real life. Hence I have learned that in actuality a certain character from Milagro was born and raised exclusively in San Luis … and in El Rito … and in Alamosa … and in Santa Fe … and in La Madera!

  But I abhor the roman-à-clef and work hard to avoid that naming game. Patiently, I explain to the curious that if I get locked into dealing with an actual person I usually blow the writing, because it’s very difficult for me to invent stories and adventures and dialogue when in my mind I’m dealing with a real life human being.

  So anybody who happens to pick up this book should realize that The Nirvana Blues is a make-believe story with invented people in it. All the usual disclaimers apply: any relationship of characters in the book to real people is absolutely unintentional. Put less officially: Please, give me a break and accept these fictional personalities as figments of my own imagination!

  A final note. Occasionally I, and my editor, Marian Wood, have differences of political opinion. More than once, in fits of pique, she has angrily denounced me as a “Stalinoid!” and a “four-foot dwarf!” Nevertheless, we have managed to work together now for more than a handful of years. Marian not only salvaged my floundering career by publishing Milagro in 1974, but she has also been an enormously careful and encouraging arbiter of my talent ever since. She was aided and abetted, during a time in the latter seventies, by her fine former assistant, Sally MacNichol, to whom I am ever grateful for having had the courage to believe strongly in The Magic Journey long before it was launched.

  My editor’s sanity, humor, and no-nonsense approach have kept me afloat on the chaotic literary seas. I love, depend on, and am very grateful for the friendship, and the working relationship, that I share with Marian Wood.

  J. N.

  Taos, New Mexico

  PROLOGUE

  (Our story so far)

  Clouds and Thunder:

  The image of

  DIFFICULTY AT THE BEGINNING.

  Thus the superior man

  Brings order out of confusion.

  The Vietnam War was “over.” Richard Nixon, ex–President of the United States, had been gently ostracized for making a mockery of his high office. All other archcriminals of the Watergate scandal had spent a few months in prison and then become millionaires from publishing their bad novels and self-seeking memoirs. Mao Tse-tung, Chou Enlai, and Ho Chi Minh were dead. Chile’s experiment in democratically formulated socialism had long since gone down in Salvador Allende’s fiery death and the emotional funeral of the Nobel poet, Pablo Neruda. New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner had purchased two World Series for mucho bucks, but the Reggie Bar would never replace the beloved Baby Ruth. In Iran, the shah was beleaguered and tottering. But Israeli Zionists had no plans, as yet, for a “defensive” invasion of Russia and the United Kingdom. Notre Dame had won a national football championship. Pulp novelist Sidney Sheldon had raked in oodles of shekels. The noted evangelist Billy Graham was alive and flogging hellfire and damnation comme d’habitude. The current president’s brother, Billy, was using a flagrant beerbelly and his White House connection to build on his initial million. Uganda’s Idi Amin, impervious to assassination, was alive and well and hiding in Argentina, but poet John Berryman, a more effete personality, had jumped long ago, entering the legend books as one more precious aesthete down the pathetic self-destructive drain pioneered by the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Janis Joplin, and Elvis Presley. Alan Bakke had won his reverse discrimination case, but the Wilmington 10 had lost, of course, proving that all the regular prejudices were doing business as usual in the USA. The Ku Klux Klan was on the rise, and the Nazis had been granted a marching permit in Illinois, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union. Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali was eternally young … but J. Edgar Hoover had proved to be mortal after all. California’s Proposition 13 turned out to be just another tax-break scam that would ultimately pass on the hurt, as always, to the marginal consumer. GM profits were up, as was inflation. Horizontal cities continued to expand outwardly, magnifying all waste, while vertical cities collapsed. China was opening up, Russia was closing down. Former LSD experimenter Baba Ram Das was now messing with Hanumans, and the dollar was taking it on the chin from the yen and the mark. The prime lending rate had just leaped over thirteen percent. Harvey Swados, Jack Benny, James Jones, and Walter Lowenfels were dead; dictators Pinochet Uguarte and Tacho Somoza were still rolling merrily along, handsomely shored up by Jimmy Carter’s Human Self-Righteousness. Rhodesia was on the brink of bloodbathhood, Angola had gone to the left, Cuban troops had rallied Ethiopians against Somalia, Argentina had won soccer’s World Cup, Italy’s Red Brigades had executed Aldo Moro, two new popes had been crowned within a month of each other, the Baader-Meinhof leadership had “committed suicide” in their German jail cells, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s estranged wife Margaret was making movies, the first test-tube baby had been born, Broadway Joe Namath had hung up his gridiron cleats, thus ending yet another era, and three out of every five American blac
k girls living in big-city housing projects had been raped at least once by the age of fifteen.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Willie and Tammy and Waylon and Loretta and Ronnie and Merle and Crystal continued nasaling about divorce, adultery, alcohol, loneliness, alienation, and anger. Conservationist Barry Commoner was shrill, the ghost of Rachel Carson continued to haunt all ecologists, sociologist Seymour Melman was still laying it out in no uncertain terms, the Sierra Club bewailed, Buckminster Fuller looked drawn and unhappy, Ralph Nader was extended too thinly.

  Eight out of ten leading authorities on the subject said that cancer had become the USA’s national disease.

  America’s answer to all of this was more cars, more defense spending, more McDonald’s hamburgers, more leach field, open-pit, and strip mining, more highways, more pork-barrel irrigation projects, less welfare, less education, less health care, less ERA, more rape, more crime, more violence, more cops, more smog, more nuclear power, more GNP, more GSA, more GOP. “Growth for the sake of growth,” wrote Edward Abbey, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Abbey,” America replied.

  As always, it looked like curtains for the world.

  Those people tuned in to the situation had a tendency to hit the road, leaving the stink and tension of wherever they were at in search of a Safe Haven where survival could be more than just an abrasive chore. The Land of Milk and Honey, of Amber Waves of Grain, of Purple Mountains Majestic, and of an equal opportunity for one and all had come up dismally short in the Fulfillment Sweepstakes. Instead of a nation of plump, happy, blond, blue-eyed, milk-filled rubes, the boom of post–World War II capitalism had created a nation of paranoid, dissatisfied, shrink-badgered, alienated druggies and alcoholics and Maalox mainliners, befuddled by so much angst in the midst of so much plenty, having been brainwashed all during their early lives to lust for the “American Dream” (and its inherent promise of “Security” and “Happiness”). They were honestly bewildered by the fact that somehow they couldn’t grasp it.

  Middle-class college-educated folks especially were in search of a guru, an identity, and a meaningful relationship … though their working-class counterparts, of course, were only interested in loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.

  Hence, millions of broken-down VW buses, crammed full of iridescent pot smokers, had set to plying the nation’s ample highways and byways, searching—like the fabled boll weevils of a golden yore (and lore)—for a spiritual (a psychic), an actual (a beautiful, unpolluted, laissez-faire) home.

  Thus it was that throughout the seventies they made pilgrimages to Bolinas, Woodstock, Stowe, and Carmel, Kennebunkport, Austin, Mount Shasta, and Bellingham, Taos, Aspen, Sun Valley, and Jackson Hole. And last—though of course not least—they also headed for the diminutive colorful southwestern Rockies’ town of Chamisaville, where three cultures—Anglo, Chicano, and Pueblo Indian—existed in “radiant harmony” in the shadow of the glorious, thirteen-thousand-foot-high Midnight Mountains, in the heart of one of the heaviest “Karmic Playgrounds” on this battered and sputtering globe.

  * * *

  ALMOST A DECADE had gone by since electricity entered the Chamisaville Pueblo, and, thanks to the efforts of one Joseph Bonatelli, now known as the terrible Tarantula of Chamisaville, a dog-racing track and a resort development with a ninety-nine-year lease had been constructed on reservation land. At the completion of this large project, the town’s surviving power brokers had redoubled their efforts to exploit every last inch of that once-pastoral burg’s picturesque terrain.

  Another dozen motels and hotels had been added to the plethora of tourist havens that had inundated the town even before the resort and gambling complex made it onto Indian land. At the famous Cipi García Dynamite Shrine and Hot Baths, several new bathhouses and dining rooms were built to accommodate the added influx of pilgrims, thrill seekers, tourists, religious fanatics, big-game hunters, and Winnebago pilots who had flocked to the town ever since a miraculous explosion on the brink of the Great Depression had unearthed the fabled hot baths, spawned the Dynamite Shrine, and become the foundation of a tourist-oriented development that had eventually dispossessed most of the native, and largely Spanish-speaking people of Chamisaville during the American-style commitment to what amounted to cultural genocide.

  In 1970, nearly forty art galleries, most of which sold western shlock, had been scoring a fortune in Chamisaville: eight years later, you could look up almost seventy galleries in the local phone book, as an accelerated middle-class in-migration occurred to completely change the sociological patterns of the once-lovely valley. The water table was down, Chamisaville’s GNP was up, and monoculturality was spreading like a white fungus.

  Chicanos die hard, and by the mid-seventies a few of them still populated the valley, hanging on to tiny plots and scuffling a living by the skins of their aching teeth, while praying for some kind of revolutionary rain that might bring about salvation in the face of the rapacious juggernaut overwhelming the valley, chewing it up, macadamizing its alfalfa pastures, concretizing its orchards, prefab-housing its galleries of native sunflowers, expanding its ski valley and polluting its creeks, and in general thoroughly pizzafying its ancient and powerful spiritual estate.

  The odds were stacked against the locals, however. For yet one more restless, moneyed, and educated generation out there was on the prod, seeking solace in flight, searching for yet one more mecca to explore, exploit, and exhaust, before moving nervously, irritably, on.

  In the thirties, Steinbeckian Okies in Guthriesque droves staggered dispiritedly from the Redwood Forests to the Gulfstream Waters. In the fifties, Kerouackian beatniks tugging on cheap Tokay behind the wheels of battered convertibles created lives that were just one endless run-on sentence after another. In the sixties, Tinkertoy revolutionaries long on rhetoric but short on historical perspective played the universities and ghettoes from coast to coast for suckers, and then burnt out early. And now, as the seventies ignominiously wound down, the privileged, ersatz revolutionary darlings of the Great White Wounded Middle Class hit the road in search of a different meaning for their comfortable, meaningless lives.

  * * *

  A VAST ARMY of incoherent pilgrims had descended on Chamisaville, outwardly uninterested in the town’s evanescent tourist-oriented delights, but intending, rather, to “Settle Down.”

  Sprung from incongruous though usually middle-class origins, they filtered into diverse and unprecedented careers in their new home. Microbiology PhDs showed up driving Karmann Ghias: two weeks later, wearing bib overalls and sandals, they had become sensational potters who ran Gestalt therapy groups on the side, piloted rattletrap ’52 Chevy pickups, and left town twice yearly to attend Bangkok acaleph conferences, or symposiums in Ordway, Michigan, on the life cycle of the cinnamon teal. Joycean scholars, former Ivy League professors, arrived almost hourly, their families crammed into Volkswagen Beetles: immediately, they invented better hydraulic log-splitters and were soon inhabiting handmade hogans, eating nothing but rose-hip tea and roasted piñon nuts, and selling firewood, mail-order, to citizens in Cleveland and New York City. Stockbrokers, eschewing messy suicides, chose instead to become plumbers and electricians in Chamisaville. High-class Saint Louis sandalmakers became waitresses at the recently constructed Cosmic Banana Café, took ballet lessons from a onetime Boston physical therapist for the mentally retarded, did yoga on the side, and were constantly canvassing town for good yogurt-starter. Migrating by the hundreds, would-be poets and novelists were soon tending bar, dealing dope, buying Safeway lettuce with foodstamps despite bitter memories of the UFWOC boycotts, working for less—in the Dynamite Fetish factory—than even the natives were willing to work for, outmuscling local teachers for Headstart jobs, or applying to CAP for rabbit-breeding project funds. And soldiers of fortune, once Ibiza bar managers or Las Vegas croupiers, who suddenly found themselves hopelessly trapped in a Chamisaville traffic jam, established photographic
laboratories, organic food stores, or garages that specialized in renovating old Bugattis.

  On Monday, all the fine valley carpenters, schooled in their trade for centuries, either spoke Tiwa or Spanish. Next day, half the valley’s carpenters had graduated from Yale Law or Columbia Medical and were married to brilliant psychotherapists who had decided to be pregnant with a genius for nine months: together, they built their own dream houses.

  Trapped in a cutthroat cash economy, old-timers, the impoverished sons and daughters and grandchildren of local residents, could no longer afford building with adobe. When finally losing their land to inflated taxes and unscrupulous developers, they moved into cheap Mutual Help–Operation Turnkey deathtraps, or bought second-hand trailers, renting hookups in Irving Newkirk’s park, or in the recently established Groovy Bumpus Trailer Heaven, or in Isiah Kittridge’s Trailer Towne. The newcomers, refugees from AT&T, MONY, or Merrill Lynch, Pierce, et al., had excess boodle, and immediately began building elaborate adobe houses boasting circular rooms and turrets, cupolas and bell towers, kidney-shaped patios and all-electric heating. Graduates of Exeter and Reed, Miss Hall’s and Goddard, they labored night and day, side by side, constructing sixty-thousand-dollar labyrinthine mud mansions. At the halfway mark, women filed in district court to recoup their maiden names; and the couples celebrated the completion of their exotic adobe palaces by bitterly filing for divorce.

  Abruptly, Chamisaville was riddled with young, separated, flatbroke couples juggling their three kids back and forth around the valley in a hurricanelike frenzy of guilt-laden activity whose logistics soon defied comprehension. Peyton Placeism reared its ugly head, as affairs between separated couples cranked up. But here again logistics were near-terminal, as ex-hubbies caretaking two kids patronized the drive-in movie with their best friend’s ex-wife and her three children, while his ex-wife and her ex-spouse demolished grasshoppers at the La Tortuga Bar, trying to forget that tomorrow morning those five little monsters were slated to pulverize their own infatuation with sledgehammer blows of infantile bickering.