One Hand Jerking (27 page)

Several Huerfano Valley residents have gone to Barnes & Noble—the main bookstore in the Pueblo, Colorado area—and asked for a copy of
Huerfano
, only to be told that they don't have it. One clerk admitted that they do in fact have some copies, but they keep them hidden in the back, adding, “This book will never be put out.” Blame it on the cover. It's an old photo of the author, standing in an isolated field, apparently nude—“apparently” because, except for her smiling
face, arms, lower legs and bare feet, her body is blocked out by a treasure of freshly plucked weed that she's holding.

A review in the
Los Angeles Times
advised readers to “Ignore the picture on the cover of the naked woman hiding behind an enormous bundle of marijuana. This memoir of life in one of the great communes of the West is better than that—and for many people a road not taken that is fascinating to read about.”

Nevertheless, the use of marijuana was an integral aspect of communal life. In fact, with the grant money alloted to produce the book, Roberta bought a Pentax Spotmatic and some film, and David bought a Corvair camper and a kilo of marijuana.

“We use every part of the marijuana plants we harvest,” Roberta writes. “What to do with the stems and seeds is the biggest challenge and takes the most ingenuity.” And she proceeds to describe a recipe for marijuana butter, to be used in making brownies.

At Libre, a variety of hallucinogens were smoked or ingested: Windowpane LSD and Owsley Orange Acid. Sticky black opium from Vietnam. THC iced tea. Psilocybin mushrooms. Peyote at a solstice gathering. MDA that had been developed by the U.S. Army to dose hostile populations, in order to make them docile and manageable. Marijuana that been smuggled into the country in stuffed alligators from Colombia. Hashish that had been molded and wrapped as Maja soaps from Spain.

“You know,” someone observed while passing a pipe, “you don't have to smoke much hash to look at these cliffs and hear dinosaurs eating ferns.”

I once asked Ken Kesey, in reference to a phrase he had uttered, “What's your concept of ‘the communal lie'?”

“I remember delegates from two large communes,” he replied, “stopping by once at my farm and negotiating in great tones of importance the trade of one crate of cantaloupes, which the southern commune had grown, for one portable shower, which the northern commune had ripped off of a junk yard. When this was over they strutted around in an effluvium of ‘See? We're self-supporting.' Bullshit. A crate of melons and a ratty shower isn't enough summer's output for sixty-some people to get off behind. It was part of a lie that the entire psychedelic community, myself more than most, was participating in.

“When a bunch of people, in defense of their lifestyle, have to say ‘Look how beautiful we were at Woodstock,' I can't help but ask, ‘How was your cantaloupe
crop this year?' Being beautiful or cool or hip is too often a clean-up for not pulling weeds. Woodstock was beautiful, and historic and even perhaps Biblical, but Altamont was far more honest. Success is a great spawning ground of confidence and camaraderie; bald truth is found more often up against the wall. Bullshit is bullshit and neither the length of the hair nor the tie of the family can make it anything else.”

Libre was able to avoid that danger by the diligence of its inhabitants in developing self-sufficiency. Roberta writes:

“I wonder what to say on application forms . . . that after graduate school I acquired new skills? I can mix cement, blow dynamite, bank a fire, use a chain saw, split wood, milk goats, make yogurt and Parmesan cheese, bake donuts, ride bareback, hunt mushrooms, start fires, frame roofs, cure bacon, punch cows. That I've memorized the shapes of three thousand clouds, calibrated one hundred eleven rainbows, and watched five babies slide out into life? That big birds bring me messages, and I've stared straight into a cougar's yellow eyes? That I lived in the Orphan Valley for seven years with friends, crazies, and some who were both, that we were heroic fools or foolish heroes—I can't say which, and maybe it doesn't matter.”

She makes reference to “raptograms” in the book. As she explained to me, “It was a point I was making on raptors being big birds, hawks and eagles. There are various parts of the book in which they brought me messages, or at least it
seemed
like they were bringing me messages at the time. So raptogram is a reference to those messages.” Her sense of communication with other species was sharpened while riding her horse Rufus, who, she wrote, “turns when I think about it, before I tell him with reins or knees. I experiment more, thinking, not moving my hands or my body, and every time he anticipates my direction. I don't tell anybody about our telepathy.”

In 1969, the first three couples at Libre got money from the National Institutes of Health, the federal government's medical research arm, in connection with a study to determine whether communal living facilitated psychic communication. I called Dean Fleming, one of those originals (after 20 years, Libre finally got telephones), and he described the experiment:

“Stanley Krippner came out to Libre, and he invited us to come to Maimonides Hospital in Washington, D.C., so we stopped there on our trip back east. The six of us went into this Dream Lab. It was basically a sensory deprivation chamber. It was completely dark, completely silent. He said, ‘Okay, now,
one at a time I want you to think of an image, and just think of it, and the other people will say what they get from that.'

“We were so absolutely right on that it was kind of terrifying. Unbelievable. I mean we caught it every time. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, yeah, we know exactly what it is.' For example, one us thought of the Chrysler Building in New York, and somebody else said, ‘I see the helmet of Kali.' I remember thinking of the Verrazano Bride, and then people said, ‘Yeah,' they see this like horizontal line above another horizontal line, there's two of them, they're two different colors. It was pretty interesting, but it wasn't absolute, in the sense of saying, ‘Oh, yeah, that's the Verrazano.'”

I contacted Stanley Krippner—co-author of
Dream Telepathy
and
Becoming Psychic
, and co-editor of
The Psychological Effects of War Trauma on Civilians
—and asked about his conclusions in that study.

He recalled saying something like this: “There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that ESP experiences are reported more frequently by people who are emotionally or physically close to each other than people who are strangers or who live at considerable distances. Because commune members share emotional and physical proximity, it would be expected that they would report mutual ESP. Whether this is actual ESP or ordinary communication thought to be ESP is another question, of course. I probably did not mention that commune members often shared sexual ‘closeness' as well, and lovers, or at least bedmates, report ESP more frequently than mere acquaintances.”

For Roberta, sexual closeness was a strong learning experience:

“David was the only person I'd ever slept with. . . . I was an idealistic monogamist, but we'd talked about it some. . . . We frowned on hypocrisy and the stifling repression of our parents' generation. You have to follow your heart, but it's dangerous, unchartered territory. ‘This is a consequence of freedom,' he said, ‘and we need to support everyone.' ‘How do you support people with conflicting lusts?' I asked. ‘These are frontiers we're facing,' he explained, as if we were a New Age Lewis and Clark. ‘We have to love them all.'

“In the year and a half we've been here,” she wrote, “there's been a lot of bed-hopping among our comrades. There were those cataclysmic switches at the first Thanksgiving at Libre in 1969, between our first and second visits, even before we moved west—when Peter's wife, Judy, left Peter after he went off with Nancy at the Thanksgiving dinner, and Nancy's husband went back to Austin, and she moved in with Peter and stepped over a broom and got married
to him. Linda left Dean that Thanksgiving and went off with Steve, who left Patricia. . . .

“So far, it doesn't seem as if any couple is holding up too well against free love. ‘It doesn't mean I love you less, you know,' David said. ‘We're capable of loving people in different ways at different times, and we shouldn't repress these feelings. . . . We have to overcome possessiveness and jealousy so that we can explore all the possibilities. If we love each other, we'll give each other this freedom.'”

One afternoon, Roberta brought a hand mirror to a Libre women's meeting: “We're going to look at our vaginas,” she informed David. “Men see their sexual organs all the time, and it's, well, empowering for women to see theirs.” She wrote that members of another commune, the Red Rockers, “are more on the cutting edge. . . . The men had a men's meeting, and they paired off and slept together, although they all kept their underpants on. . . .

“Open marriages bloom all around us, usually before the old marriages wither and die and newly passionate couples spring up. . . . Our attitudes have changed so much from those of the repressed society in which we grew up. If you feel any affection or attraction for someone, it's downright rude and quite awkward not to make love if the opportunity comes along. It's not much more than a handshake to some.”

Finally, though, Roberta—who had a few flings herself—told David, “I want a monogamous relationship now or nothing.” He chose the latter and, after seven years at Libre, she departed, leaving her extended family behind. She is now an attorney, specializing in intellectual property rights. She has recently represented some tribes on cultural/intellectual property issues, such as Pueblo of Zia and her decade-long attempt to protect their sacred Zia Sun symbol from tawdry commercial use, and there has been a change in Trademark Office protocol on Native American symbols, largely due to her efforts.

And Libre, now in its 37th year, with 15 members, continues to flourish. Dean Fleming tells me:

“The first wave is mostly all over the place. The second wave is still here, like David, and all those people who came in the early '70s and stuck it out. Part of it was the people who started it were all kind of crazed and pioneer-type people, and they're obviously gonna keep on doing things full time. I'm a painter and so I wanted to have a good studio. I was in New York before on Broome St., thinking what's the perfect studio, and I said it has to be really beautiful in the country and it'd have to be surrounded by friends. So that was the reason for the Libre community.

“And it's still unbelievably beautiful and it's still full of friends. Not nearly as crazed as it was in the '60s and '70s. But it's still frail. We had a situation where the land would not belong to any individual, belonged to the whole group. And likewise for houses, so people come and go, they can't just sell them off, the land belongs to all of us, and we kind of keep checks and balances on it. And now our kids that were born here are becoming members, and even if they're not here, they're beginning to come and take care of the place, and maybe we'll get another generation out of it before it's worn out.”

Certainly, the Free Family had
its
evolutionary role. Peter Coyote wrote in
Sleeping Where I Fall
that “the Diggers understood fundamentals about the relationship between culture and imagination, and culture and politics, but our spurning of more traditional political alliances was, I believe, somewhat snobbish and counterproductive. The failure to curb personal indulgence was a major collective error. The ideas and moral positions that emerged during this period—the civil rights movement, feminism, holistic medicine, organic farming, numerous alternative physical and spiritual therapies and disciplines, and perhaps most important, bioregional or watershed political organization, were abetted by agents like the people remembered here: flawed and imperfect people certainly, but genuinely dedicated to creating more enlightened options for themselves and others.”

He tells me, “I was just at my daughter's wedding, where her guest list included many members of that family who are not related to her by blood, but people that she considers her ‘kin.' Our children (and their children) are still friends, still in close touch as we are. We're still all in touch, come to one another's aid when necessary, and are bonded by indelible experiences. The fact that one of our communes out of nearly a dozen collapsed is no more a death knell to the Free Family than the collapse of one star is to the rest of the universe.”

In a recent episode of
Doonesbury
, triggered while watching the ultra-materialistic
Cribs
on MTV (“This is my bling-bling room,” says a rapper, “where I put all my shiny, expensive stuff for my boys to envy!”), Boopsie's daughter asks her live-in babysitter, Zonker, “Did you really once live on a commune?”

He was only one of three million such participants.

November 22, 2003 marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, so I'd like to pay posthumous tribute to the queen of conspiracy research, Mae Brussell, particularly in view of a recent Op-Ed piece in the
Los Angeles Times
by Richard M. Mosk, who was a staff member of the Warren Commission.

“This year's decennial anniversary,” he wrote, “may well be remarkable for what will be missing: myriad articles and discussions debunking the Warren Commision's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

Mae Brussell was the daughter of Edgar Magnin, senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Beverly Hills, and the granddaughter of I. Magnin, founder of the clothing-store chain. House guests ranged from Louis B. Mayer to Thomas Mann, from Jack Warner to Albert Einstein. She attended Stanford University, majoring in philosophy. She was married and divorced twice. In her forties, she had an affair with Henry Miller.