The Nirvana Blues (31 page)

Tiring of gastrointestinal themes, they ran down the Morning Disaster Report, a regular feature of the Prince of Whales, and tuned into religiously by the 4,837 people in this town (sarcasmed Joe Miniver while pretending to fanatically devour his newspaper) who were writing novels. Norman Mailer never said it, but he might have had he visited the place: “Just give me ten minutes in the Prince of Whales Café, and I could write a two-thousand-page novel about Chamisaville.”

What else was new? Drunk for the eleventh time in as many days, Cobey Dallas had gone on a rampage last night. It ended when he tried to smash his Volkswagen Beetle into the La Tortuga, where, apparently, Suki Terrell (with whom Cobey had had an affair) was sharing a number two combination plate with the EAT ME drummer, Tom Yard.

Terry and Perry Kahn were in trouble also. Terry resembled a great many newly arrived Chamisaville women Joe knew. Three times weekly she had dance classes at the Chamisaville Art Association auditorium. She acted in two plays every year and taught part-time at the Shanti Institute, where all three Kahn kids were educationally interred. In winter she took her offspring skiing, and raced in the Nastar events herself. She was blond and blue-eyed, tense, and very competitive. They were charter members of Tennis Heaven and spent six hundred dollars a summer on memberships and lessons alone. All the children took piano lessons. But Perry was straying way off course. Three years ago he had been a handsome young developer, fresh out of Miami real estate and construction. Then he started smoking dope and playing the guitar. After cleaning up on his first half-dozen subdivisions, he seemed to lose interest. His hair grew long, he adopted a colorful headband. When he and Joe occasionally met, Perry babbled about psychic energy and psychedelics. Rumor had it he was into some heavy shit—LSD, mescaline, maybe mushrooms. Perry this past year had grown filthy, gentle, absentminded, and abstract, as Terry panicked. “You know what?” Perry had told Joe one day. “I'm really losing interest in making money.” Last week he had run off to a Colorado ashram where he hoped to learn the art of psychic healing. And Terry was at the end of her rope. Yesterday she had complained to Mimi McAllister: “If that man becomes a hippie do-gooder, I think I'll commit suicide!”

Pearly Stan, a man with a silver eye patch who had leased the La Lomita Dance Hall from Wilkerson Busbee, had jumped town last night, taking all the money and leaving his employees in the lurch, some to the tune of a thousand dollars. According to what Cobey Dallas had told Tribby (when Tribby bailed out Cobey early that morning), just before he split, Stan had offered to sell County Sheriff Eddie Semmelweis information on all the local dope dealers and buyers, but Eddie had refused, the county sheriff's LEAA stocked coffers being semi-low after some untoward embezzlement. Eddie also told Cobey that Nikita Smatterling had tearfully staggered into the station last night to report that his elder kids, Sanji and Tofu, were getting ripped on Moroccan kif every day, and making daredevil junkets out underneath the girders of the Gorge Bridge, where passing motorists could hear them singing the best of The Who while dangling a thousand feet above oblivion. As an afterthought, Nikita admitted to Eddie that he had just poked a pistol into Ephraim Bonatelli's stomach and pulled the trigger. Ephraim, apparently, had entered the Cinema Bar around closing time last night, wearing a gorilla mask and waving a pistol, and had threatened to kidnap (and sink his sexual meathooks into) Nikita's youngest child, beautiful, seven-year-old Siddhartha, the blessed progeny of a brief union between Nikita and a hippie woman, originally from Scarsdale, named Rachel (Wisebaum) Whitefeather. She had spent time up at Davishi right after that eclectic Sufi commune was founded by Nikita and some of his friends during their off-hours from Pueblo construction jobs.

Eddie S. had held Nikita for almost thirty minutes (outrageous!) until Belle London appeared at the jail accompanied by Tribby, to post a ten-thousand-dollar property bond for his release. Over at the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital, the diminutive Bonatelli's heart had stopped thrice during the night while doctors Phil Horney and Ed Diebold labored to save the warped little scumbag. “Stable” was his most recent listing. Rumors had it the senior Bonatelli had not yet decided whether to put the contract on Nikita for traumatizing his kid or for failing to eradicate the useless little bum.

In no mood to promote this balderdash, having found himself—these past few days—traveling uncomfortably close to the core of commensurately puerile shenanigans, Joe slowly chewed on his breakfast and pretended to read the newspaper. Yet his big-lobed ears were flapping. Oh for the guts to scribble down all these stories during the act of their telling! Of course, when he glanced up, surreptitiously letting his eyes probe each animated face in their group, Joe realized that he was ensconced in a den of similarly intentioned vipers. For although all heads were cocked in attitudes of conversational alertness, their heavy-lidded eyes had that half-glazed, introspective look of fireside cats, as they attempted to memorize choice goodies while frantically wishing for the chutzpah to withdraw their little notebooks and scribble frantically, indelibly capturing the rich mishmash of sardonic and histrionic information going down that could be money in all their Nobel banks one day.

Eager to get up, get out, and be gone, Joe couldn't move. He was held spellbound by the gossip. And anyway, where could he retreat to now that he had no home? While they talked of recent flying-saucer sightings on the gorge rim, Joe wondered: how could he ever face Heidi and the children again? While Ralph Kapansky described his recent aura-adjustment down in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Joe wondered how, even if he managed to raise the cash, he could evict Eloy Irribarren from his adobe shack, thus giving himself, however humble, a home.

They were discussing the Kabala—the Tree of Life. Somebody was thinking of joining that born-again women's Christian group called Women Aglow, where “they actually speak in tongues.” Somebody else had a friend who had recently joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They discussed biorhythms and decided how to pull a “cosmic trigger.” Ralph mentioned that he had met a lady, a millionaire tourist from Cincinnati, last night. She had offered to fly him to her Ohio digs where they would do a kundalini copulation in front of her videotape machine. Mimi said in her former life she had been—no kidding!—a grizzly bear in Yellowstone Park. “That's how come I'm a lesbian today.” Joe failed to see the connection, but nobody else had a problem with it. Where had she picked up this fascinating tidbit about her past?—from Nikita Smatterling, of course. Not only could the man paint ethereal monkeys, but he augmented his income by being a Past-Life Reader as well.

That is, when he wasn't wearing a loincloth and a pink turban giving naturopathic massages down in the “body cubicle” of Wilkerson Busbee's Spa and Sauna.

Mimi McAllister ran down the latest on the Hanuman scene. Somehow, the Eastern contingent had been sprung from New York City despite the lack of Baba Ram Bang's visa, and Fluff Dimaggio's Sullivan Law violation. Yesterday afternoon, Nikita Smatterling had received a telegram from Wilkerson Busbee saying that Baba Ram Bang (that ninety-three-year-old Darjeeling mystic who, in a previous incarnation, had missed selection as the Tibetan Panchen Lama by a mere millimeter) had expressed a desire to see Sahdra (formerly Penelope) Pinkerton and her belly dancers perform at the Cosmic Banana Café.…

I should have a tape of this conversation, Joe thought. Nobody would believe it. A ninety-three-year-old diabetic east Indian ether-brain sitting at an outdoor café table in Chamisaville, USA, eating an alfalfa-sprout sandwich and guzzling Red Zinger tea, surrounded by graying hippies in turbans, rice-paper shirts, and aoki sandals, watching a bunch of middle-class honky women (outfitted in diaphanous turquoise and salmon-pink crepe)—calling themselves Sahdra, Meshak, and Jamila (who used to be Penny, Peggy, and Paula)—undulate like Egyptian ecdysiasts.

And it's only the first Monday morning in June!

Then, apparently, somewhere in Ohio, the Hanuman bearers had run into trouble again. It all started when Iréné Papadraxis, who liked to tipple on a flask of cream sherry as they zoomed along, got drunk and, reacting to the hot afternoon sunshine, stripped to the waist. Almost immediately, the driver of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler jackknifed his rig, and Wilkerson had to swing off the road to avoid certain death from the catapulting trailer spewing chickens. Nobody was hurt, but they ended up jammed into a culvert. When police arrived on the scene, Fluff Dimaggio handcuffed himself to the precious Hanuman statue and swallowed the keys—a security precaution in case the cops locked them in jail. Baba Ram Bang retired to a nearby patch of rest-area lawn exclusively reserved for dogs and went into a deep meditative trance, refusing to move when law officers gave him orders. So they arrested the mystic. Rama Unfug tried to film the arrest for evidence in a later brutality case, and was promptly kayoed with a billy club. For good measure, they smashed Rama's camera, at which point Shanti Unfug kicked an officer in the groin, and Om Unfug whacked his kneecap with her Creative Playthings wooden mallet. Arrested en masse, they were all now cooling their heels in the Clarion, Ohio, hoosegow, even Fluff Dimaggio. The cops had transferred him, and the heavy statue to which he was chained, eleven miles in a lumberyard forklift.

“They'll never make it by Thursday!” everyone wailed.

Closer to home, various catastrophes and happy adventures were happening to people Joe knew only peripherally. The ex-husband of a woman named Sarah had driven in from Rochester last night and kidnapped her two children because he didn't like her living with Sam Halaby, a metaphysical teacher claiming to be on his last incarnation (and damn glad of it because he wanted never again to return to this scorched and degrading earth).

Several folks just in from the Wolf Creek Pass Film Festival claimed to have met George Raft … and they had never done so much coke in their lives.

Joe said, “During the three years I have lived in this town I've heard that everybody and their brothers and their little sisters and even their dogs and their cats and their canaries toot coke like banshees, yet I've never been in a room where people were sniffing, or quiffing, or whatever the hell it is they do.”

Diana said, “You're kidding. The only place they don't do coke in this town is in Foodway!”

Rumor also had it that a very rich guy had arrived in town seeking to finance an expedition of unscrupulous well-armed hippies to travel down to Lake Titicaca for the purpose of snatching the Golden Sun Disc of Mu, a precious stone belonging to the head of the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, Aramu Muru.

They talked about housing and land, about buying and renting and building and house-sitting and financing and searching.

“How you gonna find an acre of land anymore?” Jeff Orbison asked testily. “When Suki and I first hit this valley you could find land for a few thousand bucks an acre. A week ago, my next-door neighbor sold his half-acre for thirteen fat ones.”

“To who?”

“I think it was Ray Verboten.”

Mimi said, “I happen to know that Ray's first day there he sold the irrigation rights to the new Sonic Burger so they could get hooked up to city water. You know for how much? Eighteen thousand dollars.”

Everybody whistled. A great helium bubble of despair rose to the top of Joe's skull, doubling the intensity of his headache. No grace, no compassion, no class existed in the real-estate game. The Chamisa Valley was like a slave market, or a whorehouse. An entirely new breed had taken over the town and its once outlying, now incorporated, communities. Despite its pseudohip ecology-conservation rhetoric, when this new breed assessed landscape, all it saw was dollar signs. They rationalized, pretended, lied through their teeth, paid lip service to the Sierra Club, and brought in the backhoes. And Joe was one of them, too, wasn't he? Just another ego with money in his pocket, looking for a Chicano or a snail darter to stomp.

Mimi was trying to buy land from a freak named Baldini Miller: he was moving to Bolinas because he felt the Shanti Institute was too eclectic for his children. Too, the violence vibes emanating from the Pueblo's sacred mountain were too much of a downer. Her dealing for his half-acre and a hogan had been going great until Baldini put an ax through his foot eight days ago. With that, in an attempt to get straight with his karma, the freak had taken a vow of silence.

“Every time I go over there to clinch the deal, he just stares at me tearfully and shrugs,” Mimi said angrily. “His old lady, Ipu, keeps hitting him with a broom and ordering him to speak, make the deal, and grab the bread so they can split. But he merely continues to shrug, cry, and point at this big blood-soaked towel wrapped around his foot.”

“How much does he want?”

“Eighty-one thousand.”

“Wow! Where are you gonna score that kind of bread?”

“I have it all figured out. Part FHA, part family loans. Where do any of us get our money?”

Crazy Albert, a bearded and barefoot florist, entered the café lugging a newspaper carrier's sack full of pink and green carnations. Beatifically smiling, he glided from table to table dumping handfuls of flowers in front of the patrons. Joe had heard that Crazy Albert had his own greenhouse in which he grew nothing but these carnations. Apparently he lived on a trust fund, compliments of a bigwig relative at ITT.

Joe simmered, feeling crazy. The air jumped and bubbled with weird molecules of clarity that exaggerated his hearing, tricked his vision. A rush of animosity labored hard to clear his body. He had an urge to bash down his fist, tip over the table, and go ape blaspheming his cohorts: “Parasites! Fascists! Egomaniacs! Sexfiends! Me-crazy jingoists! Amoral fuckfaces! Neophyte Nazis!”

What rough beast, its hour come at last, had slouched into Chamisaville to be born again?