The Gorgon Festival (13 page)

Traveling light, he had brought only the suede shirt Freddie had warned him against wearing. When he washed the blood out and hung it to dry, he found it, the next morning, so shrunken as to be unusable. All that was left to him in the way of a shirt was the top half of the pajamas Ester had given him for his birthday. Before checking out of the motel, he took a towel to fashion into a turban. The white silk pajamas with the Nehru collar and the turban made him resemble a swami.

His appearance caused no flap on Sunset Boulevard, but the patrons of the Kitten Club were constantly stopping him to talk about the Indian rope trick, cobra training, or Hindu philosophy. Such conversations reduced his tips. While Freddie parked cars, often as not Ward was standing under the club’s canopy discussing the
Bhagavad Gita
with some tomcat or club kitten.

But he was developing his cunning. His suede shirt was so shrunken that he sold it to a filling station owner for $2.50 as a chamois cloth.

Ward’s sleeping accommodations were arranged by Freddie, who gave him directions to a hippie commune near Ferndell in Griffith Park and drove him there the first night.

On their way, Ward voiced his misgivings about sleeping out in a public place, unsheltered and unprotected, with no toilet facilities.

“Look at it this way, Swami. It’s like you’ve got one of the biggest pads in town, sixty thousand acres, airy and sunny, only an hour and a half’s walk from work. Public toilets on Ferndell give you free utilities, compliments of the taxpayer. Of course, you’ll have to use the restrooms before the gates open, because the cops will roust you if they find you in the park in daylight. Lay low in the ravine during the day. The hippies will feed you.”

“At least I’ll get to study those beasts in their natural habitat.”

“They’re people, Al. They’ll share everything with you. Trouble is, they don’t have much.”

When Freddie stopped at the gate to Ferndell at the end of Western Avenue, he admonished Ward, “Keep your shirt and turban clean for the parking lot, and when you come to work, walk on a straight line. The fuzz won’t stop you if you’re headed somewhere, like out of town.”

In the moonlight, Ward found the ravine without difficulty and stretched out with his head pillowed on his shirt wrapped in his towel. After he had removed a few pebbles from his bed, a weirdly pleasant nostalgia riffled his mind. It was his first sleep on the ground since the Battle of the Bulge, and Southern California was immensely preferable to wintry Belgium with German mortars dropping in. Though almost penniless and by now a hunted fugitive, he felt absurdly free.

“Man, where’d you get that groovy head?”

A young man, bearded, slender, wearing velvet jacket and tennis shoes without socks was looking down at him in the light of dawn. From somewhere in the ravine, Ward smelled the odor of food as he raised on one elbow.

“The haircut’s compliment of the taxpayers. The grooves come from the Orange County Patriots.”

“They broke Glue Head’s arm at the Laguna Festival. You bring any pot?”

“Pot? I haven’t even had breakfast.”

“I’ll tell Sadie to save you some, but don’t come till I call.”

Ward tried to go back to sleep, but the sun had broken through the hills and it blared into his eyes. He arose, stashed his shirt and turban in a rock crevice, and waited until the boy reappeared around a shoulder of the hills and whistled, “Okay, Baldy.”

Ward followed him up the ravine. Two girls and a boy passed them coming out, all three dressed in jeans, slit serapes, and floppy hats. Compared to Ward, they were well-groomed, and he said, “Hi.”

They said “Hi,” and averted their eyes.

Above, they walked onto a level area hardly larger than a tennis court and overshadowed by a huge oak. A girl was stirring something in a lard pail hung over a fire of charcoal briquettes.

“That’s Sadie,” the boy pointed, “and she’ll feed you.”

The boy turned and went down the ravine. Ward walked over to his hostess, a tall, raw-boned girl whose thin face peered through a slit in her hair as she glanced at him, momentarily, then looked away.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning,” she said, motioning toward the pot. “There it is. It ain’t ham and eggs, but it’ll do.”

She pronounced
eggs
as “eyeggs,” and he said, “You’re from the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

“East Tennessee,” she answered, not looking at him.

“Like it here?”

“Better than Dallas. Worse than Tampa. If you ain’t got no spoon, use the big one.”

Ward took the bent ladle hanging over the side of the pot, squatted down by the fire and scraped the bottom for the remaining morsels of mulligan stew. His appetite overcame his fear of hepatitis, and he found the concoction tasty.

“Does everyone eat separately?” he asked.

“Just you. Your head ain’t nice to eat with. Scrape the can. It saves cleaning.”

“This is good chow, Sadie. Where’d you get it?”

“Scrounging. The bacon’s store-bought.”

The stew was vegetables flavored with bacon, but he said truthfully, “It tastes good, Sadie. Can I pay you something?”

“Put it in the can nailed to the tree.”

“What’s the charge?”

“Whatever you put in.”

Ward set the pail and ladle down and walked over to the tree. Inside the can were a quarter and a dime. The two coins looked so lonely they were pathetic. He dropped in four quarters, one-fourth of last night’s tips, after Freddie’s deductions.

“Wow,” a voice called from above, and Ward looked up to see a beardless boy with the face of a cherub framed in brown curls, shirtless and barefoot, his Levis straddling the limb of the oak.

“What are you doing up there?”

“I like trees. Do you like trees?”

“They all look alike to me.”

“They’re different, after you get to know them. Like this one’s my old man. It digs me.”

Childish enthusiasm in the boy’s voice brought agreement into Ward’s. “Maybe you’re right. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; nothing we see in nature that is ours.”

“You talk pretty, but, man, if we get rain, I bet your head grows a crop of corn. It’s plowed and sprouting already.”

Ward turned back to the glen where Sadie was kicking dirt onto the charcoal and walked over to help her.

“What do you do during the day?” he asked.

“Get out of the park, mostly, so’s not to pester people. Everybody but Glue Head and Nature Boy, yonder. Police don’t bother them. They ain’t right bright… Be seeing you.”

Sadie scooted down the path toward the restrooms and Ward waited a moment before following, to spare her the embarrassment of his company.

His first impressions of the hippies were mixed, but their first impression of him had been uniform—he revolted them. Instead of long hair, he had stitches dangling from the lacerations made by the Barber’s sprocket chain, and it took an act of courage for him to face the washroom mirror. As he plucked the stitches from his scalp, with each pull he cursed a Patriot by name. After he had run through the roster for the eighth time, Ward knew he could never return to his own age group until he had taught that segment of youth the wisdom of nonviolence.

His resolution was implemented when he returned to the glade and met the other victim of the Patriots, Glue Head. Shirtless, his ribs showing through the skin of his reedy chest, the boy was sitting yogi-style under the oak, his gaze focused far beyond the hills. His hair was plaited into black braids that dangled below his sternum and his bearded face was cadaverous. The right forearm, folded across his chest, was bent from an ill-set bone.

He resembled a mystic in a deep trance, but he looked up as Ward approached and said, “Shanti. Have you got any pot?”

“Shalom. No. Am I interrupting your meditations?”

“There are no interruptions for one who is one with Manito, the great spirit, for I am one-eighth Apache, of the tribe of Sequoia.”

“Manito was Algonquin,” Ward commented conversationally, “and Sequoia was a Cherokee. But does marijuana help in your religious transports?”

“Man, that’s where it’s at,” the boy said. “When I first talked to God I was sniffing glue.”

“That’s Glue Head, Baldy,” Nature Boy called from his perch as Glue Head’s eyes again drifted off focus. “He can’t get his head straight. He’s got more kinks in it than you’ve got in yours.”

Ward looked around at the hills, thinking, if there was one quick way to make contact with the commune, marijuana would be it.

Griffith Park encompassed a range of hills which would have been listed as a mountain range in Vermont. Somewhere in its gulches and canyons, Asiatic hemp might have sprouted, and he was familiar with the plant through lectures given by the San Jose Police Department.

He walked under the oak and called up into its branches, “Nature Boy, do you think you can tear yourself away from your dad long enough to help me hunt for
Cannabis sativa?
”

A floppy-brimmed felt hat dropped from the tree.

“I will if you’ll wear that.”

Before noon they returned from the hills with their tea harvest and tedded it on a warm boulder for further drying in the midday sun. Ward split for Hollywood Boulevard, where he bought three corncob pipes, one for him and two for the commune. He still feared hepatitis.

At twilight, Ward smoked the pipes of peace with the children of the commune, eleven boys and five girls, feeling only a mild euphoria as they talked, speaking from spheres of alienation and listening to echoes from other spheres in the rock music on their transistor radio. Rapping with them, Ward elicited few generalizations about their life style.

They were supposed to be products of affluence, but most came from families which had long been casualties in the war against poverty. They were supposed to be products of permissiveness, but all had experienced parental indifference or brutality. Since few had salable skills, they were less drop-outs from society than rejects of the economy. They were supposed to be dirty, but most of the boys worked at odd jobs as dishwashers and at auto-cleaning racks and were well washed. He had heard they were promiscuous, and he assumed the rumor was true, since it was unlikely that they should differ from other strata of society in that respect.

As had Ward when young, they sought answers to the unanswerable, but unlike him they could not even frame the questions. Still, to learn their speech patterns, he listened attentively and, finally, sympathetically.

They seemed to value his audience and began to gather around him. He caught the drift of their changing opinion in the names they called him : Baldy, at first, then Groovy Head, and, after he rigged a sleeping hammock, finally Machismo.

With slight effort he could have become patriarch of the tribe, as Sadie was its matriarch, because he was a man of purpose and their minds were like medusae, amorphous, moved by random winds, tentacles trailing for chance nutrients. As the love generation, they were as eager to give affection as to receive it, and any man of authority, personal or official, he felt, might have commanded their loyalties by appreciating their affection. But he had other purposes.

Ward could not cavil over their choice of life styles. In the summers of his own youth, before he won a scholarship, he had gone long-haired and barefooted from necessity. And if one took the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty literally, these boys and girls were archetypal Americans.

Actually he felt a greater affinity toward Freddie, who was also work-oriented and purposeful. Freddie planned to study law in September to “find out what laws I can bend my way.”

Freddie’s hang-up was the white power structure, a nebulous entity that Ward himself had fought for half his lifetime. During a lull in their parking lot activities, Ward asked Freddie what he meant by “white power structure.”

“Man, I strum a mean bass fiddle in my own trio, The Untannables. But while a black artist like me’s mopping floors at the Daisy Chain, Glamorgan drags down twelve hundred a week mewling over buttercups, love, and all that she-it.”

Given time, Ward might have been sympathetic toward Freddie’s struggle with the white power structure, but Ward was too busy hustling, and a week after the haircut, he was trapped in Freddie’s black power structure.

Ward’s peonage began in the parking lot.

In his turban and silk Nehru pajama top, Ward was an impressive figure, and he struck the fancy of a kitten interested in Zen Buddhism. Since she considered him her guru, she often came down during her break between eleven and midnight when the floor show was in progress to discuss Zen.

On the night of his subjection to Freddie, Ward was demonstrating a method of attaining satori to the kitten in the rear of a limousine owned by a pussy-loving evangelist from Texas which was semi-permanently parked on the lot weekdays. In the beginning of the discussion Ward heard sirens along Sunset Boulevard, a not unusual sound, and as his demonstration got under way it sounded from the street as if a four-alarm fire had broken out. He was completing the zazen of the koan when he heard from the street level above a terse order shouted at Freddie, “Up against the wall, you black mother!” and knew a police emergency existed. Los Angeles police had entered the county sheriff’s territory.

“Keep low,” he whispered to the girl, who was also in a somewhat precarious position professionally, and they waited, an unusually long time, until the police completed their interrogation of Freddie and drove away. The kitten skittered back to her job, and Ward noticed the tail of her costume was broken. He started to follow and warn her, when some instinct bade him remain out of sight. Moments later, Freddie backed a car into the limousine, bumped it slightly, and got out to inspect the damage.

“Keep low, guru,” he whispered back to Ward. “I got some questions to ask. Have you assassinated a president?”

“You know better. With the money you pay me, I couldn’t buy an air rifle.”

“Is your real name Alexander Ward?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you tell me it was Atascadero?”

“I didn’t. You told me… What’s this all about?”