The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

  Deliberate instability, of course, was the name of the commercial game. Divorce is good for capitalism, which likes nothing better than an endless slew of two-house single-family arrangements: double the groceries, double the heating bills, double the automobiles, double the lawnmowers. And look at the windfall for the transportation industries—on the bus visits to Papa, on the plane trips to see Mama!

  Things went from bad to worse. Unloading their gorgeous Chamisaville houses at tremendous losses, the ex-husbands and ex-wives were then nailed for income-tax evasion, slipped into dark and devious drug and alcohol addictions, got themselves mugged and raped by sullen teenagers after the Friday night boogies at the La Lomita Dance Hall, and finally gave up, leaving town, heading for Israel to commit suicide in a Golan Heights kibbutz, or hitchhiking to Alaska for pipeline jobs as dynamite blasters, earning eleven hundred a week in a forty-percent mortality rate endeavor, getting their heads straight again, cleaning up their acts, Forging a Fresh Start. They left behind, in the Chamisa Valley, a little more confusion, a slightly bigger mess, the transient, unrealized tatters of their dreams composing the flabby garbage of their brief struggle to achieve a sense of self-worth, an identity … Fulfillment.

  * * *

  EACH YEAR, each month, each week, each day, each hour, countless bizarre human beings drifted into Chamisaville. Many of them congregated at the Cosmic Banana, an outdoor café that sold organic alfalfa-sprout-and-avocado sandwiches. While they ate and sipped iced herbal tea at little toadstool-shaped tables, hippie clowns schooled in mime walked a tightrope three feet off the ground between two trees nearby, balancing fluorescent rubber balls on their noses. And a band, containing a sitar, a zither, and a xylophone, played combination hard rock–Elizabethan folk-song music. At night, exotic belly dancers undulated in creamy blue spotlights while diners dreamily harvested mayonnaised cutworm moths from their sandwiches, admired each other’s ruby-colored urban gypsy regalia, and talked about building bubble-shaped houses out of pressurized polyurethane. Or they reminisced about peace, love, good and bad karma, yoga, UFOs, Tibet (in the Gold Old Days), Indian jewelry, Stranger in a Strange Land, Castaneda’s Don Juan chronicles, Charlie Manson, est, far-out sex, soya bread, vitamin C, motorcycles, solar heat, and grow holes.

  Somehow, word had gotten out that Chamisaville was the in place to go to for religious, spiritual, sexual, and organic-gardening kicks. And all at once it was projected hysterically—in the Chamisaville News, Chamber of Commerce pamphlets, radio talk shows, drunken bar conversations, laundromat bulletin-board notices, and the town council’s weekly meetings—that half to three-quarters of America’s hopheaded freakdom (howling, bearded, syphilitic, drug- and sex-crazed, dirty, unthrifty, unclean, unbrave, unreverent, uncourteous, unloyal, unawed, unwed, un-pilgrimlike, ungodly, and, worst of all, unrich), having declared Chamisaville “Mecca West,” was planning to descend, like a plague of Afro’d and Tattoozied grasshoppers, upon the suffocating irascible burg mired indefinitely in the urine-colored clot of its own rampaging Betterment.

  And descend they did in the early and middle seventies: flower children, teeny-Bs, acid heads, burly bikers, road and speed freaks, stone-cold dopers, flatulent gurus, Edgar Cayce disciples, orgone idiots, hang-glider enthusiasts, and other exotic breeds. Appearing almost out of midair, they settled into the preposterous imbroglio already berating Chamisaville’s weary denizens. Suddenly, the crowded plaza seemed equally divided between bank examiners from Walla Walla, outfitted in spanking-clean blue or beige jumpsuits, and lanky zonked no-goodniks who only last week had been guzzling egg creams at Gem Spa on Saint Mark’s and Second Avenue, Big Apple, USA. The hippies cruised town enfolded in cheap blankets, stars on their foreheads, and Bowie knives strapped to their belts, waiting for some kind of Cosmic Cowboy to materialize and lay a thousand peyote buttons on them. Other newcomers, looking like a cross between Dennis Hopper, Liberace, and an exploding cock pheasant, were corporate executives’ sons and daughters fleeing their parents’ crass materialistic lives in order to grow horse peas, blue corn, and Nubian goats, and blow their two-hundred-a-week trust-fund allowances on scads of Colombia two-toke, mean Joe greenies, yellow jackets, Lucid Lucys, and whatever else was up for grabs whenever they were up for dropping, copping, snorting, tooting, or popping.

  A mimeographed newspaper, brainchild of, and financed by, various bigwigs in the Chamber of Commerce and given away from newsracks in every chamber member business, immediately appeared and hippie-baited in no uncertain terms. It called the influx “unkempt, diseased hordes” whose only reason for living was to pollute Chamisaville’s crystalline creeks with their feces, corrupt its children with drugs, co-opt its sacred cultures, tear down its religious institutions, rip off the merchandise in its stores, and make all its virgins, homecoming queens, and choir singers pregnant with children who would be born on the nod and with crippling, narcotic-induced deformities.

  Crime leaped: it was all blamed on the newcomers. An odd assortment of anomalies attached themselves to some of the area’s less reputable buckets of blood. Bearing names like Fertile Fred, Sam the Man, Garbage Honky, Dunlop Tyres, Indian Louise, and Myrtle the Turtle, these sweat-stained counterculturists stumbled into the bars like a rainbow just released from eighteen years’ solitary confinement in a federal slam, immediately ordered beers, and then, outing little tobacco pouches, commenced rolling joints.

  Psychedelic communes mushroomed. There was the Bull Frog Farm in the Mota Llano foothills; the Milky Way landed right next door. Buffalo Bill’s Ranch sprung up north of Vallecitos; the Purple Piglet Crash Pad materialized on Ranchitos Arriba mesa. Splashed at random across the valley were the Cosmic Consciousness, the Rainbow Village, and Garbage Honky’s Castle of Earthly Delights. And the Family of God commune’s chief honcho, Bill Dillinger, Esq., arrived in town lounging against the leather upholstery of a chauffeur-driven Rolls, with the intergalactically famous rock groupie, National Velvet, on his tattooed arm.

  A queer commune, settled several miles up Chamisaville Canyon, called itself the Duke City Streakers. A dozen men and women pitched three off-white tipis in an abandoned ravine, gobbled alfalfa-sprout-and-honey sandwiches, washed that down with kefir and some Red Zinger tea, stripped to the buff, and started running.

  Warming up with a Streak for God, they hit every Sunday service possible, from Bob Condum’s evangelical whoopee-do (nailed by a girl with beautiful waist-length strawberry hair who galloped through the noxious tent just as two dozen of Bob’s peroxide blond minirobed Saviourettes were garnisheeing the weekly paychecks of a hundred destitute Pueblo natives), to the Episcopal church, where Father Dagwood Whipple was so flustered by the bearded grasshopper thundering through his service rattling a tambourine that he tripped on his robe, tumbled against the lectern, opening a thirteen-stitch forehead gash, and dropped his twelve-pound Bible into the front pew, squarely atop a wealthy parish benefactor’s purple noggin.

  Next, they held a Streak for Peace, synchronizing nude dashes through state and county police headquarters, the town cops’ pillbox, and the National Guard armory, where several lackluster local doughboys polishing tanks whistled, cheered, clapped, and grabbed for the two buxom lasses wearing cheap Timex wristwatches and powder-pink Adidas track shoes.

  The commune’s third streak, heavily advertised beforehand by flyers appearing mysteriously under automobile windshield wipers one Thursday afternoon, was a Streak for Mammon. At 10:45 the next morning, little groups of Duke City Streakers, dollar bills taped across their foreheads, took coup on the First State People’s Jug, blowing kisses at the electronic-eye cameras as they sped across the granite floors. Tragedy ensued as a streaker leading the demonstration galloped smack into a plate-glass door, slitting his throat from ear to ear. When the mortally wounded streaker staggered backward flapping his arms and wondering which way to aim for heaven, the bloodthirsty security guard, Tom Yard, shot him three times in the chest … by accident.

  An ugliness settle
d upon the valley. Whipped up by the letters to, and editorials by, the Chamisaville News, disgruntled and unemployed local teenagers joined forces with sullen high-school football players, Minute Men, Boy Scout gunnery sergeants, old “Free Lt. Calley” buffs looking for a new cause, and other hopelessly irritated and disorientated citizens—and the so-called Chicano-Hippie war began.

  It was the old imperial story: a people divided easily conquered themselves. Chamisaville’s power brokers settled back in their Barcaloungers, ignited cigars, and awaited a favorable outcome. A general anguish, a state of constant flux and uncertainty and confusion, could release the last remaining plots of agricultural land into the development market, while further breaking down culture, increasing commissions, and making easier the transformation of Chamisaville into just another haven for middle-class angst.

  Bridges went up in flames; dynamite sticks vaporized automobiles; nude and pregnant hippie women sunning themselves by peaceful mountain hot springs were brutally raped; rude zooming jalopies ran Sunday bicyclers and joggers off the roads; bullet holes appeared in subculture business windows. Shotgun blasts riddled Chicano automobiles; tires on all sides were slashed; windshields were gratuitously broken, upholstery set on fire. Several dozen houses—commune shacks as well as three-hundred-year-old buildings continuously occupied by the same family since they were built—burned to the ground. Roving guerrilla hippie bands, emulating Clint Eastwood, crept around community outskirts where the poorest local people lived, indiscriminately slaughtering livestock in revenge for every rape, for every dynamited Volkswagen microbus. And a few more defenseless, Spanish-speaking old-timers who had inhabited the valley even before the Dynamite Shrine miracle had occurred almost fifty years ago, awoke broke, with nothing left for taxes, spiritual needs, or their grandchildren’s schooling.

  Quiet, religious farmers, these old pioneer people faced the Midnight Mountains bitterly asking: “Why is this shit happening to us?”

  And then, finally, almost all of these old-timers disappeared. Pushed out, dislocated, replaced, railroaded into impoverished anonymity in monolithic big cities hundreds of miles away.

  And with that, their mission accomplished, the hippies hit the road, took a powder, melted off into the American mainstream, trailing behind them a paraphrase of the old Kit Carson logo:

  “They led the way.”

  * * *

  BY THE LATE seventies, most of the communes had disintegrated; most of the small farms, native pastures, alfalfa fields had been absorbed in the development fold.

  Still, things—to put it politely—remained in flux. In fact, during the final consolidation push, Chamisaville was so unbalanced and disoriented, people did not know if they were dreaming or awake. And a host of totally unreal events occurred, indicating that for the moment there was little surface rhyme or reason in the flow of things.

  A small sand cloud, piloted by a confused trade wind, floated over the valley, depositing fine layers of grit. On the day it arrived, a galactic seer, Mojo Shir Bud, hit town, and, experimenting with astral projection, immediately went into a trance atop the plaza police pillbox, freed his soul from his body, forgot how to reel it back in on its silver cord, and keeled over dead as a doornail, becoming the first known case of “death by meditation” in the southwestern United States. Eight hours later, the town manager, Kenneth Eagleton, almost lost his own life under equally weird circumstances. Early that morning he had treated his head with a “dry look” hair spray. Around noon, when he lit a cigar after dining in the La Tortuga with a young lawyer, Bob Moose, and the mayor, Mel “Sonny” Christiansen, his hair exploded into flames, and only some fast moves by the mayor, who doused him with a pitcher of dry martinis, saved the town manager’s life. Hardly had Kenneth recovered, than insult was added to injury when a lanky freak wearing a red cape and a chartreuse ski mask walked into his office and nailed him in the kisser with a lemon meringue pie.

  Immediately, a rash of pie deliveries occurred.

  Mayor Christiansen was leaning against a bulldozer drinking a Coors despite the boycott when he almost suffocated inside a gooey pineapple concoction that came out of nowhere. Bob Moose (the elder) was playing tennis in his backyard when a chubby figure wearing a Superman costume waddled clumsily onto the court, and, aiming for the crusty lawyer’s startled face, plastered him instead in the chest with a cherry pie. Then this spastic apparition cantered blindly into the net, fell backward, scrambled on all fours off the court, and, tattered cape flapping, disappeared into some shocked hydrangeas blooming beside Bob’s mansion. After that the town moneybags, the Tarantula of Chamisaville, Mr. Joseph Bonatelli himself, during a First State People’s Jug board meeting, received his just dessert. A small skylight directly overhead popped open, and the old bastard looked up just in time to get hit flush in the face with an enormous banana-cream concoction, whose thick custard, driven on impact down his throat, through his stomach, and into his duodenum, almost choked him to death.

  The electric co-op’s tottering prexy, octogenarian Randolph Bonney, swore that the mince pie practically shoved up his nose came out of the telephone when he groggily answered it at 3:00 A.M. And the hospital’s new surgical whiz, Ed Diebold, got his—blueberry, with a whipped-cream topping—in the Our Lady of the Sorrows’ operating room while he had one arm halfway down Rachel Parker’s throat looking for her inflamed tonsils that another doctor, by the name of Lamont, had removed twenty-six years ago.

  Then, as swiftly as they had arrived, the pie throwers disappeared.

  No telling what would happen next, however. Perched atop his backhoe in a traffic jam, the city road crew chief, Robert Needles, noticed a bumper sticker on the car ahead: “Honk If You Love Jesus.” Well, why not? Robert honked, and the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen stormed out of the vehicle, withdrew a tiny .25 automatic from her alligator purse, and, screaming “Who the hell do you think you’re honking at?,” let ’er rip, emptying the clip at him but doing no damage because she was so enraged she couldn’t shoot straight.

  No sooner had Robert dusted himself off after that queer interaction, than a suspiciously green-eyed one-eared character chugged into town behind the wheel of a 1954 VW bus crammed full of wooden crates holding a dozen naked chickens each. Parking on the plaza, he unloaded the crates, stacking them on the police-department pillbox, set up a big sign—FEATHERLESS CHICKENS, JAYBIRD NAKED, BORN PREPLUCKED, NO MESS, NO FUSS—A BUCK A BIRD—and commenced hawking his wares, explaining to curious onlookers that the birds, produced through artificial insemination, had been genetically altered, not only to eliminate plucking, but also in order that one hundred percent of the feed protein would go into making meat instead of half of it being sidetracked into the manufacturing and maintenance of feathers.

  Well, what the hell? Several Spanish-speaking old-timers, who understood intimately that they needed a miracle to survive, decided to give it a shot. They took out short-term loans at the First State People’s Jug, and lugged home a bunch of crates. Come time to kill the birds, they chopped off their heads, disemboweled them with quick strokes, and tossed the preplucked fowl to their wives, who gaily smeared their golden skin with lard, and, humming happily, popped them into their ovens. In due course the family gathered expectantly for dinner. Papá sharpened his carving knife up good, and lowered the blade to cut a first juicy slice of bosom. But the knife skidded off the skin, clanging against the platter. Papá shrugged, grinned at his drooling family, and tried again … with the same result. Flustered, he lightly tested the blade … and almost cut off a thumb!

  Returning to the table heartily bandaged, and looking a trifle grim, the patriarch suddenly stabbed at the bird. But his steel blade bent with a noise like a saw sproinging, failed to penetrate, and twanged away from the carcass, bouncing across the floor. The old man grabbed the chicken, tore off a wing, and rabidly snapped at it with his teeth, breaking his top bridge in six places. Enraged, shaking a fist at the heavens, the old man carried the chicken
outside to the chopping block and went at it with an ax. But the roast bird jumped away from each blow as if it were an indestructible toy fabricated from the same rubber used in hockey pucks.

  In the end, an obvious answer presented itself. The only thing those genetically altered, preplucked chickens were good for was playing football.

  Then the telephones rang, calling in the loans. And another dozen marginal farmers—“Adíos, Chamisaville … Hello, Denver and Los Angeles!”—bit the dust.

  Lest Chamisaville’s few surviving farmers grow soft living in the lap of such industriously invented luxury, the town VISTA volunteers came up with a plan for saving those few animals remaining to the few ranchers remaining on the few ranches remaining in the valley.

  The problem to be solved ran as follows: Because the last existent agricultural land was poor and overgrazed, many ranchers often tethered animals around their houses, enabling them to munch on the lawn and on yard weeds. Unfortunately, numerous metallic scraps were usually scattered over these areas—little nails, roofing tacks, and beer tab-tops. Failing to notice the sharp bits, livestock often accidentally ingested them. And a few animals had been lost when the shards perforated stomach walls, causing fatal internal bleeding.

  A brilliant VISTA volunteer had read somewhere that if you forced a cow to swallow a powerful thumb-sized magnet, the magnet would capture and hold small nails and metallic shavings until digestive acids destroyed them, thereby averting disaster.

  Having convinced the CAP office that this was an indispensable program, the VISTAs were funded. They ordered five thousand magnets from a Saint Louis firm and plodded around the country convincing vestigial small farmers to shove the magnets down their animals’ throats, saving the beasts from the ravages of accidentally ingested metal. Even the valley’s most survival-prone old-timer, Eloy Irribarren, convinced by the VISTA lawyer, Bob Sartorisk, that his milk cow might be in danger, was persuaded to shove a magnet down his beloved Daisy’s throat. His sick wife, Teresita, begged him not to do it. But Eloy owed thousands of dollars for her hospital bills, his land was threatened, he would grasp at any straw to earn a nickel, or save a cow.