by Marco Vassi
“What’s happening, Gerard?” I said.
He looked up. “Jesus Christ, what happened to your head?”
I appeared nonchalant. “Oh, I was getting too attached to my hair, so I decided to get rid of it.”
A look of admiration crossed his eyes. “Far out,” he said. And although I didn’t know it at the moment, the seeds of another myth had been planted in my head.
“Fixing the truck?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m splitting tomorrow,” he said as he lowered his head under the hood.
“Where to?” I asked.
He looked back up. “Mexico.”
I wasn’t too sure where Tucson was, but I knew it was in the direction of Mexico. The coincidence was too perfect to ignore. “Mind if I come along?” I asked.
“OK. But don’t bring too much stuff. There’s four of us already.”
“I have just a knapsack,” I said, mentally discarding my suitcase.
“Fine,” he said. “We’re leaving early tomorrow morning.”
I went back to the hotel, packed one pair of pants, one sweater, one toothbrush, one book, a hunting knife, the remainder of my acid, and bid fairwell to the Circle Hotel. The next day, I headed south.
7
With Gerard and myself were Diane, Mark, and Julie. We went down Highway 1 in Gerard’s panel truck, painted dark blue to cover the Buddhas and psychedelic eyes and rock candy mountains it had sported in San Francisco. The idea was to get as inconspicuous as possible to avoid a bust in Mexico. We had enough dope stashed in the vehicle’s roof to put us all away for ten years. Mark, who spoke Spanish fluently, was going to take us through Mexicali at night, where, with some polite talk to the guards and twenty-five dollars, we wouldn’t be searched.
Their notion was to drive all the way down to British Honduras, where Gerard would buy land and they would start a farm. The idea erased Tucson from my mind. Diane had a satchel full of seeds, and all the way to the border fed us on germinated rice and wheat germ cookies. Julie was sheer waif. She had been traveling the country for two years, carrying only a flute. All the time I knew her she wore the same jeans and shirt, and went barefoot. She hardly spoke, but was always smiling and dancing and playing the flute. We had spent one night fucking, and the next morning I felt as though I had been making love to sea foam, very beautiful, very insubstantial.
As far as Santa Barbara, there was no trouble, and we spent the night there with friends of friends. But the next morning, everyone woke up freaky. It may have been some planetary influence, or too much raw rice, but where we had been easy and warm with each other, we were now rank with suspicion. The truck filled with friction.
We should have stopped until the thing straightened out, but we got hung up in L.A., getting tourist cards for Diane and Julie. And after four hours in that unreal place, we were filled with a panic-laced need to get out of the country. We decided to drive until we were in Mexico.
It got dark and cold as we sped toward the border, and the countryside began to look menacing. We headed down 86 to Brawley and then began that long lonely ride down 111 to Calexico. When we stopped for gas, it was like a scene from Easy Rider, long before that film was put together. With my shaved head, Gerard’s Jewish locks, Mark’s beard, and the braless chicks, we exuded paranoia amid the close-cropped hot-rod types hanging out in front of the nearby diner.
Our fear backed up among ourselves, and we were feeling a great mutual hatred. The sense that everyone wished we had never started the trip was thick, and we rode in heavy silence. The cold night wind whipped through the old truck, and it was impossible to get warm. By the time we got to the border station, we were almost welcoming arrest. But Mark’s plan was a good one; he had been this route a number of times and the scene was cool. We moved on, grimly pushing south.
We pulled into San Luis about three in the morning and decided to crash in one of the hotels. Exhaustion and cold had reached critical levels. At the hotel, Julie flipped out and claimed she was going back to California in the morning. Gerard took me aside and told me that he wanted to spend the last few hours with her, and since Mark was making it with Diane would I mind sleeping in the truck to guard the stuff.
At first I didn’t care, but as I lay there, shivering and feeling sorry for myself, I got more and more angry, and when dawn broke I put my bag together, hitched north, and found myself in Yuma, Arizona. Destiny had me by the scruff of the neck. I bought a ticket for Tucson at the Greyhound Bus Station.
But a half hour hadn’t gone by when I looked up to see Julie standing in front of me. She too had hitched a ride, and found herself dropped off in the same place. She had the address of a friend in Tucson and had decided to go there, independently of my saying anything to her. I bought her a ticket and together we headed toward the unknown city.
The first flash was disappointing. A downtown section that could belong to any small-sized city. The bus stopped outside a taco joint that was the Southwest equivalent of a cheap pizza parlor. We asked directions for Sixth Street, and began to walk toward the bookstore where her friend could be reached, a place called Mandalia.
When we arrived, the store’s owner, an astrologer named John Soames, was giving a class in celestial influences. John is a six-foot, thin, bisexual madman who rarely speaks English; everything he says is in astrological terminology. He has a long wispy beard, hair below his shoulders, and sports Merlin robes. My first feeling was wonder that such a person could not only exist, but flourish, in Tucson, which I imagined would be totally straitlaced.
I sat in a corner while Julie went in search of her friend. I didn’t realize that my appearance was so odd, and only later learned that a shaved head usually meant that one had been busted in Mexico. After a while, however, a young and earnest boy came up to me, sat cross-legged and said, “Are you a yogi?” There was no reason why I shouldn’t be. “Yes,” I said. “What’s your name?” he asked.
I looked out the store window and saw silver clouds scudding past the sun. “Cloud,” I said.
“Far out,” he said.
I sat while John ran through his rap, and met Mortimer Sand, a pacifist from Vermont, working now at the Peace and Freedom Party Headquarters next to the bookstore. I asked him if he knew of a place to crash, and he offered to let me sleep at his house, where three other people were staying. I thought Julie would come with me, but she found her friend, who was living in a Tucson equivalent of the Waller Street pad, and since I had had enough of that kind of scene, I parted ways with her. I moved in with Mortimer and Wanda and Doug and Susan and their one-year-old daughter.
To understand that time, it is necessary to grasp the texture of the place. The city is on a broad, flat plain which is ringed by mountains. In the summer, the temperature goes up to over a hundred each day, and in the winter simmers along at an even seventy. Most of the time, the sun rises in the morning and sails through a totally clear sky all day long, only to set in a cloudless sky. The effect of having that much startling sunlight beating down without relief is to make everyone who lives there, from the youngest hippie to the oldest shopkeeper, a stoned head. In Tucson, everyone is high.
There is a legend among the Indians that when the world suffers its next cataclysm, which should be any day now, Tucson is one of the places which will remain untouched. It is easy to see why. The ground is hard desert floor, and the surrounding mountains are like the shields of the gods. Now, for some obscure reason, the place is also ringed with ABM’s and other pseudo-defensive paraphernalia. The inhabitants are safe not only from acts of nature, but also against the devilish Rooskies.
In all, the city had a great sense of security, and my reactions of familiarity were flashes I was receiving from childhood, when I grew up in the Mafia enclave of East Harlem. What I remember most pointedly from those days was, that while gambling and narcotics were rife, no violence was allowed. The men who ran the great c
rime empires had no desire to bring in heat on the basis of petty crime, so they assisted the police in making sure that all the civil laws were strictly kept. In fact, I have never had any trouble with police, since from earliest days I saw them as foreigners (they were usually Irish) whose function it was to walk peacefully up and down the street, accepting small bribes to look the other way when there was a crap game, or when the local merchants sold firecrackers for the Fourth of July.
In many ways, it seemed the ideal condition. For gambling and drugs are relatively harmless pastimes, and such indulgence seemed a small price to pay to insure that there would be no beatings, stabbings, muggings, raping, murders, or other crimes of physical violence. Of course, this is a purely right-wing selling point, and was the major vehicle for the Nazi appeal to the masses, as is the law-and-order appeal in our time. The one thing necessary for it to work is that the neighborhood or city or nation be totally assimilated, in terms of race or nationality or religion. This is why the Nazis had to kill the Jews, and why the Italians fought such bloody wars with the Puerto Ricans when they moved in. Crime inside a “family” is always less vicious and damaging than crime between alien entities.
For the first few weeks, I spent most of my time exploring the land. Mortimer would take me in his VW van to the Indian reservations, to the great stretches of desert to the northwest. One afternoon, we drove for three hours through an Indian land and came upon a small village with about twenty horses, and assorted corrals. It was about six o’clock and smoke was rising from the chimneys. The sky was absolutely clear, the sun shining in perfect stillness. The land was hilly, with huge barrel cactuses growing every ten feet or so out of the caked earth. And everywhere, there was a deep silence. Not a sound. My ear reached for the smallest noise, and found nothing. I wondered for a long time what it must be like to live here, in this village, where the sense of timelessness was as palpable as the rocks below one’s feet. I got a flash like the one I had received the first time I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon, of the utter vapidity of civilization, of the immense vain pride and pretentiousness of man, who in a few million short years thinks he is of some ultimate value in the scheme of creation. Here, in the desert, where the tens of millions of years of geological time are constantly staring one in the face, where the great sweep of eternity paints the world with bold strokes, it is impossible to be anything but humble, unless one is the typical American.
And, less than a hundred miles away, in the heart of Tucson, the self-indulgent madness continued.
The house I was living in was tied in with a loose family of perhaps a hundred people who had roots reaching back many years. They came mostly from Los Angeles, and now formed a thin line of houses and farms and stores from the coast to the desert. As with so many of these families, which are tied by spirit and not by blood, there were no clearly defined limits, and people drifted in and out. One always found somewhere to live, one always found some way to make work. In Tucson, two establishments formed the heart of the family, the Mandalia and the Grainery, an organic food shop. Within three months, I had floated in and out of all the subdivisions of the group which revolved around these two nodes, and even taking off with the gypsy wing, led by Gilbert and Eve.
Gilbert is a beautiful man who has also decided to live a life of poverty. He panhandles and begs, sometimes does odd jobs, but mostly goes without money or possessions. Like the Ernestos and Julies of our time, he is totally free, traveling wide distances simply on the basis of his being. I have run into him in Oregon and Mexico, and he is always the same, always smiling, always willing to help.
Eve used to be a cripple. She had a birth defect which shortened and deformed her torso and left her no more than four feet tall. Half of one side of her rib cage is missing, and for a long while she thought of herself as a hunchback. Until she met Gilbert, who, upon seeing her, immediately understood the beauty in her. I went camping with them in Sabino Canyon one week, and one day, as I was smoking catnip by the water hole, saw Eve go in swimming. She was nude. Her legs are perfectly formed, and her face and breasts are those of a lovely woman. What a shame, I thought, that she is crippled. And then, she looked up at me, and smiled, and in the radiance of that smile, in the joy of her eyes and the purity of her heart, refined by so much suffering, she glowed with transcendent beauty. Her disfigurement disappeared. It was literally impossible to see her in any way as ugly. And then I realized that we judge ugliness only by comparison with some standard we carry about in our heads, and that any human being who is whole within himself or herself is beautiful by virtue of being whole. And then I saw what Gilbert had done for her; he had taught her how to see herself as a whole human being. I found that tears were streaming down my face, and then Gilbert came up behind me. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said. “So are you, brother, so are you,” I said. “Praise be,” he said.
It was a blessed time, rising in the early mountain morning, amidst the trees and streams, loved by the sun and the warm hearts of those people around me, and climbing to the high spot to overlook the vast and silent desert. If I had had any sense, I would have pitched a tent and remained there. It was there that I came into contact with the true invisible underground of America, the psychedelic hoboes, dark men who travel light, who move from camping ground to camping ground, going into towns only under dire necessity, roaming the deserts and unmapped portions of Idaho and Oregon, men without names, men content simply to exist, and to keep their own counsel. To sit by a campfire with some of these men is to understand how utterly shallow we others are, we who measure our worth by the weight conferred upon us in social terms, who need constant reassurance, constant contact, constant commentary.
Back in the city, it was the old set of games. Since I was an educated stranger with a shaved head, there was a certain amount of curiosity about me. Since I had some of those talents which were necessary to the burgeoning burghers of the Aquarian Age, my help was sought. Since I once more fell into a self-created myth concerning my role in the situation, I made matters worse. In short, I started to get involved in Tucson city life.
It was at this point that the many socially conditioned facets of my personality began to feel a pull from the miniature culture which any city is. Julie had since danced off into the mountains and I saw her from time to time as she came into town to take a bath or rustle up a few dollars. Aside from her, I had no links from my past to hold me down; I was, insofar as my public face, a tabula rasa, ready to be imprinted, and before I left the area, I got involved with everything from the revolutionary wing of the dropout community to the politics of the Methodist Church.
My relationship to the family was tenuous. They were willing to allow me in as a friend, but enough suspicion remained to keep me at a distance. Don, who ran the food store, was on the run from the Feds for draft evasion. He later turned himself in because, after five years, he got tired of hiding. At the time, however, any new person was suspect. John, another Scorpio, was the spiritual head of the clan. He resented my own Scorpio personality and the fact that, once I began to give relaxation classes, I pulled in bigger crowds than he did for his esoteric lectures. Also, an underground paper was being born, and in general, a “scene” was being created, and the accompanying tensions were making themselves felt in personal relationships.
I also got a strange political education in Tucson. For the first time I got to talk to real right-wingers, and found most of them to be not the monsters I had imagined. Of course, I never met any of the Minutemen who practiced their maneuvers to the south, or any of the other real crazies. Rather, the average Southwest conservative.
I once rode on a bus with a crusty old-timer who kept looking sideways at me. Finally, he said, “You’re one of them hippies, ain’t ya?”
I smiled. “Yes, sir,” I said. I couldn’t deny it, looking the way I did.
“You’re all the time having wild sex parties and not working and taking drugs, ain�
��t ya?” he said.
I thought about it a moment, and said, “That’s right,” since it was an accurate précis of our life-style at the time.
“I don’t much hold with all that,” he said. Then he paused a long time and added, “But so long as you don’t come do it on my property, you go right ahead.”
I marveled at the succinct wisdom of it. Here, where there was still enough land for a person to maintain his privacy, it was possible to be very liberal about life-styles. Here, where the heat made life pleasant, even the slums were more than tolerable. The black ghetto of Tucson makes most middle-class white sections of Queens seem like hovels. Again and again I ran into that attitude. Even the police had it. Drugs, for example, were widely tolerated. It was almost impossible to get busted unless one started dealing in hundreds of pounds. The idea was that as long as the Feds weren’t dragged in, local problems would be managed according to local limits of tolerance. It was possible to walk down the street looking like a freaked-out Tiny Tim, and one wouldn’t receive so much as a sideways glance from the cops. But if one crossed against a red light, one was immediately stopped. The point was, obey the civil law, and your private life was pretty much your own concern. In all, it exhibited the most intelligent approach to practical politics I had ever seen in this country. And I am convinced that the one thing which made it possible was the simple fact of having enough geographic space to live in.
But this wasn’t to last long. The exploiters were moving in. Tucson’s population had gone from 30,000 to 300,000 since the end of World War II. And from the right and left the vultures gathered. That foulest of all forms of animal life, the real estate developer, was beginning to eye the vast stretches of unspoiled desert, converting natural beauty and ecological survival into the number of dollars that could line his pocket. And his cousin, the scene-maker, was beginning to see the vast stretches of peace and quiet waiting to be inundated by noise.