The Stoned Apocalypse (16 page)

The stay there was odd. The man who had been building the place was a fanatic who said, upon being questioned as to why he had put so much time and effort into the project, “I do everything for God, and for Mexico,” a patriotic sentiment I had seen only in history books. It gave me an insight into the growing power of Mexico as the next power center in our hemisphere after the United States comes to ruin. I didn’t enter into any deep relationships with any of the people except Louise, with whom I carried on a delightfully old-fashioned flirtation, but simply sharing the slow pace and hot climate of that nation brought us together in a gentle union. By the time we got back to Tucson, I was ready to approach the ministers about the Free U.

It was a mistake. The ministers had been looking for something to give their waning organization a shot in the arm, and this looked like it might be it. But they were extremely frightened of almost everything and everyone, including themselves.

At the third meeting, the dirty laundry came out. The lists of people who couldn’t be offended, the organizations which would have to be consulted. They wanted no “political” elements in the school, and strict controls had to be laid down as to who was allowed to teach. I watched with horror as these educated and supposedly intelligent men, whose lives were theoretically dedicated to doing God’s work, twisted and squirmed under fear of retribution, of having funds cut off, and of offending anyone down to the level of county dogcatcher. Very soon, all serious discussion about the actual Free U went out the window, and we were talking about the effect of even mentioning such a project would have on the careers of the ministers involved. It sickened me to see grown men crawl before their own cowardice. I was repelled, as I have hardly ever been, to watch them literally whine at any notion of freedom. They were the castrati of the dying culture, the living proof that Christianity is not only dead, but rotting.

I had gone in with ideas of actually attempting to give the young people, the hip and straight alike, a center where they could enter a no-bullshit relationship with each other and with those who felt they had something to teach, whether it be transcendental meditation or marksmanship. The notion was to let everyone crawl out from under the rocks and into the light of the sun, and let the people make their choice. I came out with the thin taste of bile as the meeting concluded with a resolution to make a resolution to further discuss the resolution to open a school.

Suddenly, I saw Tucson in a new light. That was why it was so orderly, so well-run, so much without conflict. It was a cemetery, and the one rule for living there is that none of the inhabitants show any sign of life. It was a city of the living dead.

I walked back to the Mandalia filled with gloom. And as I approached the store, I saw four of the people from Peace and Freedom painting a huge sign over the storefront. I almost fell over backward. They had written: the dead.

I rushed over to find out whether this was a psychic transference of the highest order, or some bizarre coincidence. It turned out to be both, but in an unexpected way. The entire sign was to read: the dead are coming. Referring, of course, to the Grateful Dead. Tucson was about to have its first rock concert.

The Peace and Freedom Party of Tucson was perhaps the single most innocuous political organization in the world. They had a store filled with revolutionary literature, held meetings all the time, went around saying “All power to the people,” to each other, but weren’t allowed to do a single thing. They, like everything else in Tucson, were allowed to exist as long as they didn’t break any civil laws. This, of course, included demonstrations, marches, speeches, and blowing up banks.

But now they had a cause. One of the local boys had just received five years for refusing induction into the Army, and the concert was planned as a benefit in his honor, as well as to raise funds for the Party. It was to be held in the university auditorium.

For the local revolutionaries, it was a great step forward. For the police and political heads, it was an event to be closely watched. For most of the university students, it was to be their first introduction to live rock. And for the townspeople at large, it was an oddity to be interested in.

The store was in great upheaval. “Everyone will be there,” John said. Not yet knowing the entire scene, I pictured a hundred scraggly hippies sitting in the front row. But yet another surprise was in store.

In the two weeks before the concert, many strangers appeared in town. Some were clearly narcs, and others were clearly dealers. Like a great tidal wave, the Dead were preceded by swarms of birds and changes in the atmosphere. All of a sudden, there was a great deal of dope around. Grass and hash were to be had for the asking. It wasn’t even necessary to pay for it. Everyone had dope. Everyone was sharing. It was like the preparation for a saint’s feast day. The people were beginning to whoop it up. Also, for the first time, there were large-scale busts. Fifteen people got picked up on the street on obscure charges. They were released the next day, but the warning was clear. The cops were watching. Like schoolchildren, we could have fun, but would have to stay cool. On Mount Lemmon, ten people were busted for nude sunbathing in a totally isolated area. Once again the finger came down to point out the message. We were being reminded what the real power in the city was.

The day of the concert was like Mardi Gras. Peter came into town with a gunny sack of peyote buttons, and for breakfast that morning we boiled the cactus down into a strong tea, added honey, and sipped the heady mixture while sitting on the lawn. Peyote is, of course, a sacred plant among the Indians of the Southwest, and their reverence for its powers has extended to the young white dropouts. Peyote is never sold, for example. It is shared, and to ask money for peyote would be considered a sacrilege. It is quite bitter, and one must be careful to scrape off the whitish growth on top of the plant. Usually it is eaten with fruit, to cover the taste, but it can be made into tea.

It was the first time I had tried the sacred cactus in this form, and I had no way to gauge its strength. I drank several cups and after half an hour found myself pleasantly high.

For several hours afterward, I busied myself with a half dozen details, such as doing hatha yoga, reading, and making lunch. By afternoon, we had more tea, and I went with John into town to open the bookstore. He felt that with today’s excitement, there would be a brisk business. The store was his cross and his salvation. He worried over it like a mother over her brood. Profit was always at the margin, and his struggle was between ordering books which would sell widely, and books which he felt should be exposed to the public. The entire store was a mine of esoterica, and served as a miniature replica of Weiser’s in New York and Shamballa in Berkeley. If it had any fault, it was too heavy an emphasis on arcane aspects of astrology. But that could be forgiven, given John’s specialty of study. The walls were hung with the usual madras cloths and gravure reproductions of Krishna, and the place was redolent of incense and rock.

And it was a busy day. I found myself behind the desk, selling books, rapping with people, and ducking in to the back every now and then for a hit on the peyote bottle. I got extraordinarily high, but it was the sort of high that builds very slowly and gradually, so that I felt more like I was sitting on a high mountain peak than balanced at the tip of a flagpole. It was in the organic nature of the peyote, and the slow crescendo of the day, that I lifted slowly to a point where it was difficult to estimate just how high I was.

As the hour for the concert approached, the tempo increased. And finally, about seven o’clock, ten or twelve of us finished off the rest of the tea and strolled over to the campus auditorium. As soon as I walked into the place, I got a complete flash on the true scene in Arizona. For it was filled with thousands of the most beautiful people I had ever seen.

The city heads were only the tip of the iceberg. Out in the hills, in the desert, in the ghost towns, on farms and ranches, lived the members of the larger community, the dropouts who had dropped so far out that they were invisible. And so invisible were they that they could live in the heart of right-wing America, staying pleasantly stoned, living simply off sunshine and fresh air and good food, and never be noticed; for they had become one with their environment. And now they were massed together, and while there was little in the way of freaky dress or hippie insignia, I could see in the eyes and the smiles, the gestures and voices, the true gentleness which had been the hallmark of the early Haight. America’s love generation had been seeded back into the soil and was quietly living the good life in the last unspoiled areas of the continent.

I became the total impacted experience of the moment and zoomed immediately to the highest level of intensity of which I am capable. I went down front to find my seat, but found that the bookstore and food store family had all gathered in the space between the front row and the stage. Everyone was in costume. I was wearing my venerable red robe, a white cotton tunic underneath, a velvet cowboy hat, and shades. John looked like a wizard. The others were clearly from Oz.

The local head of the Peace and Freedom Party came out and gave a small talk, getting into the cat who was now in jail, and then introduced the Dead. As the curtains parted I looked around the auditorium. There were no police, no signs of control. And yet, there was a deeply felt order. There wasn’t the slightest vibration to indicate that things would get out of hand that night.

The group began its thing, and we listened through the first piece. But by the second, it was impossible to keep still, and we started moving. By the third, we were dancing openly, and by the fourth we were going wild in the aisles. Now, when this happens, the group on stage pays very little attention and keeps on playing as though it were in a studio. But the Dead were sensitive and responsive, and they did that thing which is most gratifying in the world to a dancer, they began to make our movements part of the music, playing to us and with us, responding to our responses, working to reach climactic points with ours. In short, we became a dance-and-music ensemble. And the audience was totally sympathetic. Within an hour, the place was rocking. Perhaps fifty people walked out, unable to absorb the heavy vibrations which were beginning to saturate the walls.

And by the second hour, all distinctions had been broken down. The scene was all sound and movement. And then, Shiva descended.

Shiva is perhaps the grandest conception that the mind of man has ever created. Coomaraswamy, in his Dance of Shiva, spells it out in detail. To understand, to really understand the scope and depth of the Shiva concept, is to have a world-view which blends the artistic, religious, and scientific modes at their highest synthesis, and to clothe the resultant metaphor in some of the world’s most sublime poetry. The entire history of the solar system is but a twinkling in the eye of Shiva, and it is his dance which destroys the cosmos in a grand conflagration which precedes the night of Brahma and the ensuing creation of a new universe. The dance itself is but metaphorical language for what science is recently reformulating in terms of its subatomic schema of existence.

Shiva dances and All is One. The male and female principles join, and in their union is born the entire manifest universe. All phenomena are but the flashing colors of the movements of Shiva’s dress. All dualities are but the striving for opposites to drop their illusory aspects of either/or and merge into a glorious both/and.

That night, the group of us began to move as a single organism, losing all sense of distinction, forgetting time and place while remaining in time and place. And we discovered again the crushing joy of the dance, that highest and most perfect of all man’s expressions, when the I and the Other become the One, and the One moves in an eternal round of ringing pain and pleasure, realization and sleep, creation and destruction.

The last piece played was “Let It Shine on Me,” and I felt borne aloft by the waves of the music. The electricity sent my body into rapid minute spasms each time the electric guitar bent a note; the molecular level of my body felt its quick panting rhythm each time the harmonica shuddered down the scale; and the beat of the drum sent the vegetative flow thudding up and down my limbs and spine. I went through all the historical forms, played all the sexual roles, visited all the halls of the deities, arid all in the pantomimic dancing exuberance of this thing called “I.” The body was the vehicle that night; it was the rapture of the body which informed the mind. It was the yearning of the heart which stormed the heavens and conquered the hells.

Then, the music died down and Pig Pen began a rap. We settled down to a jogging swaying rhythm. At one point he said, “Do you ever wake up in the morning and don’t know who you are?” Something in his voice caught my ear and I looked up at the stage. And found him staring down into my eyes. He pointed one finger and said, into the microphone so five thousand people could hear, “I’m talking to you.” I almost fell back two feet, and felt the eyes of the crowd on me. The question circled through my mind. “Yes,” I shouted. “You want to know what I do when that happens?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Well,” he said, “I always have a woman lying there next to me and the first thing I do is tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, baby, come on over and tell me what my name is.’ “

And then the group hit a mighty chord and rocked on toward the end of the piece. There was total pandemonium, and I remember the bunch of us leaping high into the air, throwing ourselves over the railing, and screaming and screaming as loud as I had ever heard people scream, until the music came to a crashing halt, and the curtains abruptly closed.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. I stood there, stunned, as all the people in the auditorium began to file out. I waited for some return, some feedback, but there was only the empty stage. I felt as though I had suffered some monumental ripoff, letting all my energy and perceptions and vibrations be sucked into the air, to feed the crowd, to feed the band, and received nothing back. There were just a bunch of whacked-out musicians making a few thousand dollars in an uptight town, for a group of teen-age would-be politicos. Shiva hadn’t descended at all. There was no Shiva, that was merely an idea. I had let myself be used, I had used myself, as psychic cannon fodder.