"Well, you know how they are," I said. Then I asked him if he could give me the names of any Chicano leaders I should talk to if I decided to write an article about the scene in East L.A.
"Well, there's Congressman Roybal," he said. "And that real estate man I told you about. . ."
"The one who got fire-bombed?"
"Oh, no," he replied. "The other guy -- the one they intended to fire-bomb."
"OK," I said. "I'll write those names down. And I guess if I decide to look around the barrio you guys could help me out, right? Is it safe to walk around out there, with all these gangs running around shooting at each other?"
"No problem," he said. "We'll even let you ride around in a radio car with some of the officers."
I said that would be fine. What better way, after all, to get the inside story? Just spend a few days touring the barrio in a cop car. Particularly right now, with everything calm and peaceful.
"We see no evidence of any political tension," the Lt. had told me. "We have a great deal of community support." He chuckled. "And we also have a very active intelligence bureau."
"That's good," I said. "Well, I have to hang up now, or I'll miss my plane."
"Oh, then you've decided to do the story? When will you be in town?"
"I've been here for two weeks," I said. "My plane leaves in ten minutes."
"But I thought you said you were calling from San Francisco," he said.
"I did," I said. "But I was lying." (click)
It was definitely time to leave. The last loose end in the Salazar case had been knotted up that morning when the jury came back with a "guilty" verdict for Corky Gonzales. He was sentenced to "40 days and 40 nights" in the L.A. County jail for possession of a loaded revolver on the day of Salazar's death. "We'll appeal," said Acosta, "but for political purposes this case is finished. Nobody's worried about Corky surviving 40 days in jail. We wanted to confront the gabacho court system with a man the whole Chicano community knew was technically innocent, then let them draw their own conclusions about the verdict.
"Hell, we never denied that somebody had a loaded pistol in that truck. But it wasn't Corky. He wouldn't dare carry a goddamn gun around with him. He's a leader. He doesn't have to carry a gun for the same goddamn reason Nixon doesn't."
Acosta had not stressed that point in the courtroom, for fear of alarming the jury and inflaming the gringo press. Not to mention the cops. Why give them the same kind of flimsy excuse to shoot at Gonzales that they already used to justify shooting Ruben Salazar?
Corky merely shrugged at the verdict. At 42, he has spent half his life gouging Justice out of The Man, and now he views the Anglo court system with the quiet sort of fatalistic humor that Acosta hasn't learned yet. But Oscar is getting there fast. The week of April Fools Day, 1971, was a colossal bummer for him; a series of bad jolts and setbacks that seemed to confirm all his worst suspicions.
Two days after Corky's conviction, Superior Court Judge Arthur Alarcon -- a prominent Mexican-American jurist -- rejected Acosta's carefully-constructed motion to quash the "Biltmore Six" indictments because of "subconscious, institutional racism" in the Grand Jury system. This effort had taken almost a year of hard work, much of it done by Chicano law students who reacted to the verdict with a bitterness matching Acosta's.
Then, later that same week, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted to use public funds to pay all legal expenses for several policemen recently indicted "for accidentally" killing two Mexican nationals -- a case known in East L.A, as "the murder of the Sanchez brothers." It was a case of mistaken identity, the cops explained. They had somehow been given the wrong address of an apartment where they thought "two Mexican fugitives" were holed up, so they hammered on the door and shouted a warning to "come out of there with your hands over your head or we'll come in shooting." Nobody came out, so the cops went in shooting to kill.
But how could they have known that they'd attacked the wrong apartment? And how could they have known that neither one of the Sanchez brothers understood English? Even Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief Ed Davis admitted that the killings had been very unfortunate. But when the Federal D.A. brought charges against the cops, both Yorty and Davis were publicly outraged. They both called press conferences and went on the air to denounce the indictments -- in language that strangely echoed the American Legion outcry when Lt. Galley was charged with murdering women and children in My Lai.
The Yorty/Davis tirades were so gross that a District Court judge finally issued a "gag order" to keep them quiet until the case comes to trial. But they had already said enough to whip the whole barrio into a rage at the idea that Chicano tax dollars might be used to defend some "mad dog cops" who frankly admitted killing two Mexican nationals. It sounded like a replay of the Salazar bullshit: same style, same excuse, same result -- but this time with different names, and blood on a different floor. "They'll put me in jail if I won't pay taxes," said a young Chicano watching a soccer game at a local playground, "then take my tax money and use it defend some killer pig. Hell, what if they had come to my address by mistake? I'd be dead as hell right now."
There was a lot of talk in the barrio about "drawing some pig blood for a change" if the Supervisors actually voted to use tax funds to defend the accused cops. A few people actually called City Hall and mumbled anonymous threats in the name of the "Chicano Liberation Front." But the Supervisors hung tough. They voted on Thursday, and by noon the news was out: The city would pick up the tab.
At 5:15 PM on Thursday afternoon the Los Angeles City Hall was rocked by a dynamite blast. A bomb had been planted in one of the downstairs restrooms. Nobody was hurt, and the damage was officially described as "minor." About $5000 worth, they said -- small potatoes, compared to the bomb that blew a wall out of the District Attorney's office last fall after Salazar died.
When I called the sheriff's office to ask about the explosion they said they couldn't talk about it. City Hall was out of their jurisdiction. But they were more than willing to talk when I asked if it was true that the bomb had been the work of the Chicano Liberation Front.
"Where'd you hear that?"
"From the City News Service."
"Yeah, it's true," he said. "Some woman called up and said it was done in memory of the Sanchez brothers, by the Chicano Liberation Front. We've heard about those guys. What do you know about them?"
"Nothing," I said. "That's why I called the sheriff. I thought your intelligence network might know something."
"Sure they do," he said quickly. "But all that information is confidential."
Rolling Stone, #81, April 29, 1971
Freak Power in the Rockies
A Memoir and Rambling Discussion (with Rude Slogans) of Freak Power in the Rockies. . . on the Weird Mechanics of Running a Takeover Bid on a Small Town. . . and a Vulgar Argument for Seizing Political Power and Using It like a Gun Ripped Away from a Cop. . . with Jangled Comments on the Uncertain Role of the Head and the Awful Stupor Factor. . . and Other Disorganized Notes on "How to Punish the Fatbacks," How to Make Sure that Today's Pig Is Tomorrow's Offal. . . and Why This Crazed New World Can Only Be Dealt with by. . . A New Posse!
-- or--
"Just how weird can you stand it, brother -- before your love will crack?"
-- Mike Lydon in Ramparts, March, 1970
Two hours before the polls closed we realized that we had no headquarters -- no hole or Great Hall where the faithful could gather for the awful election-night deathwatch. Or to celebrate the Great Victory that suddenly seemed very possible.
We had run the whole campaign from a long oaken table in the Jerome Tavern on Main Street, working flat out in public so anyone could see or even join if they felt ready. . . but now, in these final hours, we wanted a bit of privacy; some clean, well-lighted place, as it were, to hunker down and wait. . .
We also needed vast quantities of ice and rum -- and a satchel of brain-rattling drugs for those who wanted to fi
nish the campaign on the highest possible note, regardless of the outcome. But the main thing we needed, with dusk coming down and the polls due to close at 7 PM, was an office with several phone lines, for a blizzard of last-minute calls to those who hadn't yet voted. We'd collected the voting lists just before 5:00 -- from our poll-watcher teams who'd been checking them off since dawn -- and it was obvious, from a very quick count, that the critical Freak Power vote had turned out in force.
Joe Edwards, a 29-year-old head, lawyer and bike-racer from Texas, looked like he might, in the waning hours of Election Day in November 1969, be the next mayor of Aspen, Colorado.
The retiring mayor, Dr. Robert "Buggsy" Barnard, had been broadcasting vicious radio warnings for the previous 48 hours, raving about long prison terms for vote-fraud and threatening violent harassment by "phalanxes of poll-watchers" for any strange or freaky-looking scum who might dare to show up at the polls. We checked the laws and found that Barnard's radio warnings were a violation of the "voter intimidation" statutes, so I called the District Attorney and tried to have the mayor arrested at once. . . but the D.A. said, "Leave me out of it; police your own elections."
Which we did, with finely-organized teams of poll-watchers: two inside each polling place at all times, with six more just outside in vans or trucks full of beef, coffee, propaganda, check lists and bound Xerox copies of all Colorado voting laws.
The idea was to keep massive assistance available, at all times, to our point men inside the official voting places. And the reasoning behind this rather heavy public act -- which jolted a lot of people who wouldn't have voted for Edwards anyway -- was our concern that the mayor and his cops would create some kind of ugly scene, early on, and rattle the underground grapevine with fear-rumors that would scare off a lot of our voters. Most of our people were fearful of any kind of legal hassle at the polls, regardless of their rights. So it seemed important that we should make it very clear, from the start, that we knew the laws and we weren't going to tolerate any harrassment of our people. None.
Each poll-watcher on the dawn shift was given a portable tape-recorder with a microphone that he was instructed to stick in the face of any opposition poll-watcher who asked anything beyond the legally-allowable questions regarding Name, Age and Residence. Nothing else could be asked, under penalty of an obscure election law relating to "frivolous challenge," a little brother to the far more serious charge of "voter intimidation."
And since the only person who had actually threatened to intimidate voters was the mayor, we decided to force the confrontation as soon as possible in Ward I, where Buggsy had announced that he would personally stand the first poll-watching shift for the opposition. If the buggers wanted a confrontation, we decided to give it to them.
The polling place in Ward I was a lodge called the Cresthaus, owned by an old and infamous Swiss/Nazi who calls himself Guido Meyer. Martin Bormann went to Brazil, but Guido came to Aspen -- arriving here several years after the Great War. . . and ever since then he has spent most of his energy (including two complete terms as City Magistrate) getting even with this country by milking the tourists and having young (or poor) people arrested.
So Guido was watching eagerly when the Mayor arrived in his parking lot at ten minutes to 7, creeping his Porsche through a gauntlet of silent Edwards people. We had mustered a half-dozen of the scurviest looking legal voters we could find -- and when the Mayor arrived at the polls these freaks were waiting to vote. Behind them, lounging around a coffee-dispenser in an old VW van, were at least a dozen others, most of them large and bearded, and several so eager for violence that they had spent the whole night making chain-whips and loading up on speed to stay crazy.
Buggsy looked horrified. It was the first time in his long drug experience that he had ever laid eyes on a group of non-passive, super-aggressive Heads. What had got into them? Why were their eyes so wild? And why were they yelling: "You're fucked, Buggsy. . . We're going to croak you. . . Your whole act is doomed. . . We're going to beat your ass like a gong."
Who were they? All strangers? Some gang of ugly bikers or speed-freaks from San Francisco? Yes. . . of course. . . that bastard Edwards had brought in a bunch of ringers. But then he looked again. . . and recognized, at the head of the group, his ex-drinkalong bar-buddy Brad Reed, the potter and known gun freak, 6'4" and 220, grinning down through his beard and black hair-flag. . . saying nothing, just smiling. . . Great God, he knew the others, too. . . there was Don Davidson, the accountant, smooth shaven and quite normal-looking in a sleek maroon ski parka, but not smiling at all. . . and who were those girls, those ripe blond bodies whose names he knew from chance meetings in friendlier times? What were they doing out here at dawn, in the midst of this menacing mob?
What indeed? He scurried inside to meet Guido, but instead ran into Tom Benton, the hairy artist and known Radical. . . Benton was grinning like a crocodile and waving a small black microphone, saying: "Welcome, Buggsy. You're late. The voters are waiting outside. . . Yes, did you see them out there? Were they friendly? And if you wonder what I'm doing here, I'm Joe Edwards' poll-watcher. . . and the reason I have this little black machine here is that I want to tape every word you say when you start committing felonies by harassing our voters. . ."
The Mayor lost his first confrontation almost instantly. One of the first obvious Edwards-voters of the day was a blond kid who looked about 17. Buggsy began to jabber at him and Benton moved in with the microphone, ready to intervene. . . but before Benton could utter a word the kid began snarling at the Mayor, yelling: "Go fuck yourself, Buggsy! You figure out how old I am. I know the goddam law! I don't have to show you proof of anything! You're a dying man, Buggsy! Get out of my way. I'm ready to vote!"
The Mayor's next bad encounter was with a very heavy young girl with no front teeth, wearing a baggy grey T-shirt and no bra. Somebody had brought her to the polls, but when she got there she was crying -- actually shaking with fear -- and she refused to go inside. We weren't allowed within 100 feet of the door, but we got word to Benton and he came out to escort the girl in. She voted, despite Buggsy's protests, and when she came outside again she was grinning like she'd just clinched Edwards' victory all by herself.
After that, we stopped worrying about the Mayor. No goons had shown up with blackjacks, no cops were in evidence, and Benton had established full control of his turf around the ballot box. Elsewhere, in Wards 2 and 3, the freak-vote was not so heavy and things were going smoothly. In Ward 2, in fact, our official poll-watcher (a drug person with a beard about two feet long) had caused a panic by challenging dozens of straight voters. The city attorney called Edwards and complained that some ugly lunatic in Ward 2 was refusing to let a 75-year-old woman cast her ballot until she produced a birth certificate. We were forced to replace the man; his zeal was inspiring, but we feared he might spark a backlash.
This had been a problem all along. We had tried to mobilize a huge underground vote, without frightening the burghers into a counterattack. But it didn't work -- primarily because most of our best people were also hairy, and very obvious. Our opening shot -- the midnight registration campaign -- had been ramrodded by bearded heads: Mike Solheim and Pierre Landry, who worked the streets and bars for head voters like wild junkies, in the face of near-total apathy.
Aspen is full of freaks, heads, fun-hogs and weird night-people of every description. . . but most of them would prefer jail or the bastinado to the horror of actually registering to vote. Unlike the main bulk of burghers and businessmen, the dropout has to make an effort to use his long-dormant vote. There is not much to it, no risk and no more than ten minutes of small talk and time -- but to the average dropout the idea of registering to vote is a very heavy thing. The psychic implications, "copping back into the system," etc., are fierce. . . and we learned, in Aspen, that there is no point even trying to convince people to take that step unless you can give them a very good reason. Like a very unusual candidate. . . or a fireball pitch of some
kind.
The central problem that we grappled with last fall is the gap that separates the Head Culture from activist politics. Somewhere in the nightmare of failure that gripped America between 1965 and 1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.
Our ten-day registration campaign had focused almost entirely on Head/Dropout culture; they wanted no part of activist politics and it had been a hellish effort to convince them to register at all. Many had lived in Aspen for five or six years, and they weren't at all concerned with being convicted of vote-fraud -- they simply didn't want to be hassled. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl. . . and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 magnum at various gongs I've mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of "White Rabbit" while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide.
Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and firepower -- but not for long. I lived a block above Haight Street for two years but by the end of '66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad sideshow. Between the narcs and the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live.
What happened in the Haight echoed earlier scenes in North Beach and the Village. . . and it proved, once again, the basic futility of seizing turf you can't control. The pattern never varies; a low-rent area suddenly blooms new and loose and human -- and then fashionable, which attracts the press and the cops at about the same time. Cop problems attract more publicity, which then attracts fad-salesmen and hustlers -- which means money, and that attracts junkies and jack-rollers. Their bad action causes publicity and -- for some perverse reason -- an influx of bored, upward mobile types who dig the menace of "white ghetto" life and whose expense-account tastes drive local rents and street prices out of reach of the original settlers. . . who are forced, once again, to move on.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 21