Memories of

DROP CITY

The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love

A Memoir

by John Curl

Part 1: CURLY'S EXPERIMENT

Part 2: THE ROAD TO DROP CITY

Part 3: THE SUMMER BEFORE LOVE

Part 4: BACK TO DROP CITY

Part 5: GETTING THE WORD OUT

Part 6: THE JOY FESTIVAL

Part 7: LIVING THE REVOLUTION

Part 8: THE COUNTERCULTURE

PART 7

CHAPTER 18

LIVING THE REVOLUTION

Curly and Jo didn’t prolong their leaving. A week after the Festival, they were gone. It took a while for it to hit us. We were all a little shell-shocked.

Patt and I took over their old dome and tried to make ourselves cozy, remodeled the inside a bit. Neither one of us brought up having a kid again at that point, and our relationship quickly slipped back, on the surface, to almost what it had been before. Patt didn’t unpack her bag, though.

Several of the newer people—Danu, Silly Michelle, Boston John, Bernadette, Brenda, Aurora, Zowie—moved into the top of the hole. I took on Jo’s old job as keeper of the chickens, rabbits, and goats. Leeda and Denton asked Pat and I if we wanted them to go ahead and repaint the outside of the dome, which was still covered with aluminum paint. We gave them the go-ahead, and in a few days our dome was turquoise, black, and white.

Many people who’d come for the Joy Festival hung around a while longer, despite the three-night limit to sleeping in the complex. People also slept outside and in their vehicles. Little by little they straggled off and thinned out. Many people left things behind. The Hog Farm bequeathed us a washing machine and a big pile of great clothes. Meanwhile other people still kept arriving.

After the Festival, Rabbit retreated back to his dome, except for meals and beating down the sun, which he still did every evening with a group of mostly newer people. Occasionally Lard or I would join them.

Giovanni was depressed. He moved out of the hole and began sleeping in the TV room in the complex. Marigold and he avoided each other.

“I’m going to leave. I’m too lost to be much good here.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

“I have to be alone and find myself.”

“Where?”

“I don’t want to go back to New York. Not yet at least. It would be too much of a defeat. I’m going to San Francisco. There’s a Subud group there. I want to get back into my spiritual practice, my ladihan. I can’t do that here. Now I know why I was having so much trouble with my ladihan. I was trying to break through into a higher knowledge, when I don’t know my own feelings. I don’t know how to love.” He pulled out his book of Ibn Arabi, the medieval Sufi mystic. “‘There are three forms of knowledge: intellectual, emotional, and knowledge of what is beyond the boundaries of thought and sense and sight, of reality, of the special love beyond description. A purpose of human love is to demonstrate this ultimate real love, the love which is conscious.’”

“Can I see that?”

He handed me the book. “Keep it.”

“But it’s important to you.”

“I want you to have it. When you’re through with it, pass it on.”

A few days later Giovanni left for San Francisco.

* * *

Meanwhile we got ready to participate in the Independence Day parade in Trinidad, and went about building a float. We painted this big old bread delivery van that somebody had given us, with a roof rack on top, in crazy colors and designs, built a wooden geodesic sphere that we painted aluminum and hung out in front from a pole like a carrot dangling in front of a mule, painted “Peace is our Profession” on the sides, and got dressed to kill.

It was quite a festive occasion, parading up Main Street and down Commercial, with the Trinidad High School and JayCee’s marching bands, cheer leaders and twirlers in red cowboy hats, football teams, boosters, homecoming queen and king, Chamber of Commerce, Masonic and Elks Lodges, American Legion and VFW, various churches, 4-H Clubs, horses, steers and us on top of the van in our gladdest rags waving to the crowd. At City Hall park, once the site of the Trinidad War, near the statue of Kit Carson, the high school principal was delighted to introduce the grand marshal mayor, who made a stirring speech, alluding with pride to the newest addition to make a mark in Trinidad’s great history, which we took to mean Drop City since he seemed to glance at us. The prize for the best float was awarded to the Presbyterian Church Quilting Circle, everybody ate a lot of barbecued hot dogs, and at dusk a few sky rockets were shot off.

Several days later Time magazine came out with their cover story on the hippie movement, including a big color photo of Drop City. This really set off an avalanche of publicity. In the weeks after the Festival numerous news media came to Drop City, from as far afield as the London Times. Hippies and the Summer of Love had become a hot story, and all the major outlets decided to do a piece on us. We were visited by the three major American TV networks, as well as the BBC. Time-Life Books published The Hippies, a trade paperback with an illustrated article on Drop City. Some of the TV footage later became part of the classic documentary The Sixties. That girl picking the wildflower is Patt. By media standards it was only a minor feeding frenzy, but nothing like it had been seen in Trinidad. At Drop City things got even weirder. Being barraged by the media made some Droppers suddenly think of themselves as Very Important People.

Encouraged by the new close relations with the town fathers, a few of us went to a City Council meeting, where Clard formally proposed his idea of building a climate-control dome over Trinidad. His proposal was met with a brief silence punctuated by meaningful glances among the Council members, a few cleared throats, followed by the mayor’s assurance that the idea, which they all deeply appreciated, would be taken under due consideration.

Soon tourist busses were driving by the land, looking at us through binoculars and taking pictures. Some of us flipped and began throwing rocks.

Yet in the middle of all the craziness the publicity brought, day-to-day life at Drop City went on, in a new dynamic because of the many new Droppers.

* * *

Clard was designing posters, and hooked up with a company in New York that printed several of them, and a couple of Lard’s too. Though at this point Droppers were no longer expected to throw all their worldly resources into the common pool, both Clard and Lard contributed most of the royalty money to the commune. Suzie Spotless wasn’t too happy with that. She saw Clard’s success as the route to some of her dreams, as far away as possible from the trailer camp she grew up in, and that dream did not include a communal kitchen and a tiny zome they shared with another couple and a kid.

The bottom of the hole became subdivided infinitely, so each person had a tiny niche. When all the Droppers poured out in answer to the dinner bell, it looked like the circus act where twenty big clowns exit a tiny car.

The top of the hole was left undivided, but everybody there had their own little area. Danu, the oldest guy at Drop City, became ringmaster. In his fifties, Danu—“Daynew”—hadn’t been a long-haired archetypal hippie for very long, but a career Navy officer, with a wife and two kids. A couple of hits of windowpane had turned his life inside out. For quite a while the young Dropper girls, of which there was always a new crop passing through, loved him a little. He was old enough to be Daddy, but so unlike Daddy. Danu was rarely known to hold a hammer in his hand or do manual work of any other sort. He spent most of his time busily studying and expounding on Eastern mystical texts. Danu’s wife and kids showed up one day and stayed for a while. In their van, not joining the pile in the top of the hole. They were very straight and pretty nice. His wife was baffled by the whole thing. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for fourteen years before. The kids, a pubescent girl and a boy of eleven, pleaded with Daddy to reemerge from this new crazy person and come home. A few of Danu’s women associates seemed not that much older than his daughter. We tried to be careful about not letting underage runaways stay, but nobody looked too close. In reality, most of the girls lost interest in Danu about as fast as he lost interest in them. In the end Danu’s wife and kids left, and Danu stayed, forever on the lookout for the next sweet young thing to roll into the driveway. I had to admit he seemed good at what he did.

After Giovanni split, Marigold rejoined the revolving circus in the bottom of the hole. Diggy Meg coupled with Jasper Button for a while and Silly Michelle with John the Hair. Marigold and Feather Tom both seemed to spin out and become loners, with an occasional connection.

Fletcher Oak, Nancy Maple, and Jim Quim kept talking about how they wanted to live in a beautiful forest, left for New England, bought some wild land in Vermont, and started a successful community called Mullein Hill.

When Fletcher, Nancy, and Jim left the old kitchen, Diggy Meg, her two kids, and Jasper Button moved in. But it was a short-lived nest. Soon Jasper was out and Feather Tom moved in. They made a well-balanced couple. Diggy talked all the time while Feather usually said nothing.

Jasper sank into a funk and soon started telling everybody about his hemorrhoids. He seemed to be obsessed with them; that’s all he could talk about. When nobody would listen anymore, he decided to get away for a while and jumped a ride for the Coast. A few weeks later we got a letter from a jail in Nebraska. He had been picked up and held for possession without being charged because there was no evidence. When he got back to Drop City, he shuddered, “The sheriff just arrested guys to bugger them. What saved me was my hemorrhoids. He couldn’t take my screaming.”

Feather Tom’s parents showed up and stayed for a week. They were a little strange, but much less than I would have expected. His father was a chiropractor from Kansas City, always in need of a shave. He re-aligned everybody’s back on a table in the kitchen complex or outdoors, doing an especially thorough job on the girls, to Tom’s mother’s frowns. One day a ceramic urn with a lid appeared in the complex, on the floor near the couches. Inside was sand. It looked like a big ashtray like in hotel lobbies. The smokers began using it. After a few days Tom’s parents were flabbergasted to notice the pile of cigarette butts stuck into the ashes of Tom’s elder brother. It had never occurred to them to let anybody know what it was, or to ask if we wanted it. They considered it improper to talk about anything important. I guess that’s why Tom said so little.

Boston John and Beatrice were star-crossed lovers, runaways, very young, inseparable. She had an Ophelia-like innocence about her. They had escaped her disapproving parents, and were always worrying that the authorities would find them, tear them apart, drag her back. While many others at Drop City were a bit loose in their romantic attachments, Boston John’s and Beatrice’s world seemed defined and limited by each other. But after a while at Drop City, Beatrice became homesick and wanted to see her family. Finally they joined a car heading east, leaving their meager belongings, planning to be back in a few weeks. When Boston John reappeared, he was with a different girl.

“What happened to Beatrice?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I fell in love.”

Three California valley girls arrived one day, fresh out of a middle-class suburban high school, an interesting trio. Brenda was black, the pretty one; Aurora was Chicana, the smart one; and Zowie was a Jewish Princess who ran around stoned all the time exclaiming, “Wowie Zowie!” Brenda and Aurora were really pretty conservative under their hippie veneers, wary of being abused by the guys.

Although I expected that Brenda might get chummy with Gypsy David since they were both black, they really just kept their distance. Brenda considered Gypsy David vulgar. One day Gypsy drove Brenda and Zowie into town and, on the way back, missed a turn, spun off the road, and crashed into a farmer’s field. Brenda got a few cuts and spent a day in Mt. San Rafael hospital. The others were just shaken up.

Gypsy David brooded all day, in a dry funk, not at all his usual shouting stomping self.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“You couldn’t understand it. It’s a black thing.”

“Try me.”

“I’m the only brother here,” Gypsy yelled, “and I go mess up the only sister.”

When Brenda got out, Aurora took her home to California, while Zowie stayed at Drop City and kept on partying.

* * *

Patt and I decided to take a trip to New Mexico, where friends and visitors of Drop City had begun starting other communities.

We stopped first at New Buffalo in Arroyo Hondo, not far from Taos Pueblo. The group was deeply influenced by the Indian pueblo, and was busy building an extraordinary round central structure of adobes and vigas. I was impressed with their multi-seat group outhouse, although I admit to feeling squeamish about everybody walking in and out. Buffalo had some good farmland, where they grew corn, squash, beans, and other crops. They were also involved with the Neo-American Church, an offshoot of the Native American Church, and held regular sweats and peyote meetings. At Buffalo someone gave me a handful of psilocybin mushrooms. I stashed them away, waiting until I got back to Drop City to eat them.

Another community, Lama, was just being founded in the hills near New Buffalo. Unlike the others, it was not a commune, but an ashram, a spiritual retreat, a foundation set up by a young “trust fund” couple. We helped them build a large main building, working with a crew from Taos Pueblo and a few hippies. We liked Lama in a lot of ways, although many at New Buffalo were contemptuous because Lama was so centrally controlled.

We stayed at Bear’s in Corrales, and got to know his wife Melody and two kids a little. On the surface they seemed pretty conventional, but it didn’t feel forced. They just knew who they were, and that seemed to free Bear’s imagination. Besides designing zonahedra for housing, he was experimenting with solar energy for heating.

From there we went to Placitas, a little Chicano ejido land grant town in the hills north of Albuquerque, where Karanga and Hickson, Bear’s associates, had started Drop South. They built adobes similar to the ejido houses, as well as earth and stone structures influenced by hogans and kivas. Drop South went through changes almost immediately, with some people moving out and others moving in.

* * *

When we got back to Drop City, the latest excitement was that we had been invited to submit a work to the Biennale Art competition in Paris, France. Everybody was putting final touches to the Ultimate Painting. The person who nominated us, a friend of Clard’s, told him that the winners had already really been selected, knowing the politics of the judges, and Drop City was being chosen as an also-ran. Which wasn’t bad. Clard and Lard packed the Ultimate Painting, while I translated my poem for it, with the help of a French woman from Albuquerque, and recorded it on a tape, to be played repeatedly as background while strobe lights flashed on the spinning painting. As expected, the Ultimate Painting didn’t win.

* * *

Through the summer of 1967 almost everybody went traveling.

Ed the Fed drove down to New Mexico and started a zome business together with Bear and Hickson from Drop South. Bear was the mastermind, so it remained his baby.

Gypsy needed to get away from Drop City for a while, and left for the Coast.

Lard decided to take a vacation from domesticity with Jal and Snoop, so hopped in a van bound for San Francisco. At the last second, Moron Normal squeezed in next to him among the piles of gear and junk in the back. Feeling abandoned, Jal and Snoop headed back East to visit her family too. Jal and Lard had a knotty relationship and always seemed to be on the verge of breaking up.

Meher Charlie was left without a girlfriend in the hole, so he decided to go out to the Coast too, to visit a former lover in L.A. and feel out the idea of moving there to pursue his old dream of making a music career. Shortly before he left, we got a letter from Lard. Moron Normal had flipped out on acid in San Francisco, been arrested wandering the streets naked, and was in jail. Lard was trying to raise bail, and expected Moron to get out soon, but if we had any extra bread they could use it. He was hopping between several crash pads, but people at the Psychedelic Shop would know where to reach him. Meher Charlie decided he would swing up to San Francisco on his way to L.A. and make sure Moron was out of jail. He borrowed the Ibn Arabi book that Giovanni had left with me. “I love this stuff. I can read it over and over again and still not understand it. Beyond the boundaries of thought! Makes me high, makes me fly, makes me lose the Drop City Blues! Ooo-eee baby, ooo-ooo-eee! Doo-bop-shabam! Let me take it with me, okay?”

We got a touristy Hollywood post card from Meher Charlie from L.A., saying he couldn’t find Moron or Lard in San Francisco, but had heard through friends that they were okay. He himself was having a great time and would be back soon.

Patt decided to bus to New York to visit her family and friends. I decided to jump a ride to San Francisco and try to find Lard and Moron Normal.

* * *

Chapter 19

THE AUTUMN OF LOVE

I arrived in San Francisco in the early fall of 1967, the tail end of the Summer of Love. I called the number where Lard and Moron had been staying in the Haight. It was disconnected. I tried Odessa and Jake, but that phone was no longer in service either. I had Ernesto and Cori’s number too, but they were in a far part of town. I also had an address for Giovanni, but it too was in a neighborhood I didn’t know, and he had been pretty depressed when he left Drop City; I was wary of getting hung up if he were on a downer. I went to the Greta Garbo Home for Girls. Now a wire fence surrounded some foundations and rubble on the large corner where it had stood.

I walked down Haight Street. It didn’t look too different from a year ago, except dirtier and more crowded. An air of fatigue hung over the street, and people didn’t have the same aura of innocence and excitement. I went over to the Psychedelic Shop, to look at the bulletin board for a room. In the window was a hand-written sign, “Nebraska needs you more.” It was empty and locked.

A passerby told me, “They shut down a couple of days ago. The best bulletin board now is over at the Free Store.”

The Free Store had not existed the summer before but I already knew of it from visitors to Drop City. It was run by the Diggers, a group who also organized free food in the park, the solstice and equinox celebrations, the Human Be-In, and had a hand in the free clinic.

Trip Without A Ticket: A Free Store, the sign read. The store was piled with clothes, kitchen stuff, furniture, a motley assortment of almost anything, some of it in pretty good shape. People were rummaging through things, trying stuff on. I perused the crowded bulletin board, which was filled with good leads.

“Ishmael!”

“Dawnrider!” She was as lovely as ever, in her strangely distant way. We exchanged a hug.

“Winston’s traveling in India. We get together on the dream plane.” She hadn’t changed a bit. “Have you come for the parade?”

“What parade?”

“The Death of Hippie/Birth of Free. On Sunday. It’ll pass right by here. It should be a great event.”

“I didn’t know about it but I won’t miss it. Is everything in this store really free?”

“Take whatever you want. I’m manager here today. Or, rather, you are.” She braided three strands of her long hair.

“All I need today is a place to stay.”

“You can stay at my pad. Is Patt with you? How is Marigold, is she with anybody?”

“Patt’s on her way to New York. Marigold is okay, she’s with two people, at least.”

“Is she happy?”

“Hard to tell.”

Dawnrider shook her head. “She’s really a romantic, she just needs to be with one person. That’s my opinion. Anyway, there’s been all kinds of people from Drop City passing through here. A guy about your height, very slim, dark hair, kind of a sensitive face, almost pretty.”

“That’s Larry Lard. Do you know where he’s staying?”

“No. I haven’t seen him for a while. I just work here play here one day a week.”

“How about Moron Normal? A little guy who talks in halts and spurts.”

“With long pauses in inappropriate places? There’s a note from him on the bulletin board. Did you see it?”

“No.”

She rummaged around the board. “It was to anybody from Drop City. It seems to be gone now. It was here for a long time.”

“What did it say?”

“He was asking for a ride back to Drop City. Another Dropper’s been around too, a black guy, kind of husky.”

“Gypsy David.”

“That’s him. The last time I saw him he was selling Panther papers.”

“What?”

“You know, the Black Panthers. They scared all the politicos last spring when they went into the capitol with shotguns. Didn’t you hear about it out there?”

“Some. I can’t believe Gypsy is involved in that.”

“The Panthers are okay. The guns are mostly symbolic. They’ve just got some bad press. They’re not racists. The Diggers and the Panthers are working together. Some of our people help put together the Panther paper. There’s a pile of old issues over there next to the Oracles. Check them out.” She brought her lips to my ear. “We also work with the anti-war groups. They send deserters over here for street clothes. We’ve got lots of blank draft cards for phony IDs. Do you need one?”

Later, sitting on the sofa in the living room of Dawnrider’s large communal flat, I read the “Inter-Communalist” Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

“It sounds pretty reasonable to me,” I said. “What did you mean when you said that the Diggers and the Panthers are working together?”

“You know, the Haight and the Fillmore, the black neighborhood, are right next to each other. The Haight used to be kind of a depressed white working class neighborhood before the hippies poured in. Anyway, at first the hippies and the black neighborhood people got along fine. Everybody mingled.”

“That’s the way it was last year when I was here.”

“Toward the end of the Summer of Love everything started to change. Right around the time of those riots in Newark. All of a sudden these gangs of black kids appeared, attacking hippies, mostly girls. A whole rash of rapes and robberies. The Hells Angels fought back. There were stabbings, even a shooting.”

“What are the Angels doing in the Haight?”

“Just hanging. Blowing grass and doing acid like everybody else. They started out very redneck, even attacking antiwar activists, but they cooled out. Most of them are pretty righteous. A little paranoid. But they hate authority as much as anybody.”

“The Amarillo Jokers came to Drop City. They turned out to be okay too.”

“Anyway, for a while it almost looked like there was going to be a race war here. It turned out that the black kids were being led on by some older guys who were calling themselves Panthers. The real Panthers were across the Bay in Oakland; they knew these guys but considered them jokers and called them the Paper Panthers. Anyway things were getting out of hand fast in the Haight. The Diggers went and talked with the real Black Panthers in Oakland. When the real Panthers heard about what was happening here they were furious. They printed a statement in the Panther paper. It went something like, ‘Warning to so-called Paper Panthers—stop vamping on the hippies. They are not your enemy, black brothers. Leave them alone or the Black Panther Party will deal with you!’ The trouble stopped overnight. That was how the Diggers and the Panthers started working together.”

“Who are the Diggers anyway?”

“They started out as actors in the Mime Troupe, you know, they always put on shows in the parks.”

So the Diggers were actors. The Droppers were painters and poets. The emerging new underground was most widely expressed by its musicians. The counterculture was a cultural and a political movement at the same time. Political art of the counterculture took many forms: Clard’s and Lard’s geometric fantasies aimed to open peoples’ minds to another reality, and in the Sixties that was political. I knew then that no one would ever be able to write a political history of the Sixties without including America’s artists.

The next day I called the San Francisco City Jail. They said Moron had been released two weeks before.

* * *

I went to dinner at Ernesto and Cori’s place the next night.

As I walked in, Ernesto said, “Did you hear? Che’s been murdered.”

“Che Guevara?”

“In the mountains of Bolivia, organizing the Aymara Indians. The pigs executed him.”

“That’s a shocker.”

“The saddest part is, only a handful of guerrillas were with him. He’d hardly organized anybody there at all.”

“That proves,” Cori said, “that the New Party’s line is correct.”

“We’re working with the New Party now,” Ernesto explained.

The apartment was a lot straighter than their pads back in the East Village.

“What are you studying at State?” I asked Cori.

“It doesn’t matter. Come the revolution, a degree’s not going to be worth anything.”

“You’ve been following TSU and Jackson State, haven’t you?” Ernesto said. “The black students are in motion. They’ve been fighting the pigs at all the Southern black colleges. They’re the front line. The white students are lagging behind. Cori’s getting them active. With me an orderly in the psyche ward at the city hospital and Cori enrolled at State, we’re organizing a worker-student alliance.”

“For what?”

He looked at me like an idiot. “To get the people mobilized. To stop the war. That’s why I quit medical school. We can’t lead normal lives.”

“And once they are mobilized,” Cori said, “we’re going all the way. This is revolution.”

We sat down to an elegant meal of baked salmon and fine wine. After dinner Ernesto lit a nice joint.

“If you meet other New Party people, for goodness sake don’t offer them dope. Nobody in the Party knows we smoke.”

“You’re kidding.”

“We’ve got to look straight. And don’t tell them we’re not married.”

Cori jumped in, “We can’t look like hippies. We’ve got to start from where the people are.”

Ernesto refilled my wine glass. “Stop the Draft Week is coming up. We’ve been building for this all summer. There are going to be actions downtown, at State, and over in Berkeley they’re marching down Telegraph avenue to the Oakland Induction Center.”

“I’d like to go.”

“This time we’ll be ready to fight back if the pigs attack,” he said.

“How come Che was wrong to take up guns, but it’s okay to fight cops?”

“That’s adventurism. This is mass struggle.”

* * *

When I got back to the pad where I was staying later that night, Dawnrider was still up.

“So what is this Death of Hippie parade all about?”

“The mass media created Hippie. It started out as rebellious and liberating, but the media made it into a new set of chains. So tomorrow everybody’s going to take off their beads and cut their hair and be free again. For a while at least. We’ll throw our old hippie paraphernalia into a coffin, then march to the Panhandle and burn it.”

The next day we joined the crowd just as the parade was turning the corner onto Haight Street. Traffic was stalled and snarled. They hadn’t bothered with a parade permit. Pallbearers with black hoods marched down the street carrying an open coffin, decked with black crepe paper. Painted on the side was, “Death of Hippie-Son of Media.” Following were black-veiled mourners, blowing penny whistles and holding mirrors up to the faces of the spectators. Sunlight flashed off the mirrors. Others chanted, “The streets belong to the people,” and handed out posters printed with the word NOW, which some held above their heads, and others taped to their shirts. Into the casket people were throwing items symbolic of the Summer of Love: flowers, beads, tie-dyes, sandals, hair, buttons, posters.

Down the middle of the white line, between the rows of cars, rolled a Hell’s Angel on a motorcycle, a veiled woman in a black robe standing on the back of the seat.

Cops in riot gear suddenly ran out of a side street and blocked their way. The woman climbed down. The biker revved up. The cops jumped him. The bike was on the ground, back wheel spinning. The parade stopped short. The cops dragged him off. Another biker jumped in, punching wildly. They threw both bikers into a paddy wagon, and drove off, siren wailing.

The parade seemed stunned for a moment. Then several more Angels on Harleys roared up and led the parade off Haight street, following the paddy wagon. A half dozen blocks away, we massed in front of the police station, chanting, “Free Hairy Henry! Free Chocolate George!” People threw money into the casket for bail.

Dawnrider and I stayed for a while, then split as the parade continued to the park for the funeral pyre.

* * *

The next day I called Giovanni.

We were sitting on his couch. “I like this neighborhood. It’s full of gay men. We give each other a lot of support. Did I tell you that Otis is here? I invited him over later. He wasn’t sure if he could make it. He said to give you his number. He wants to see you.”

“How is he?”

“He puts up a good face, like always. I think he’s been touring the bathhouses regularly.”

“And how have you been doing?”

“I learned a lot at Drop City, but I still can’t tell you how relieved I am to be here. Marigold was a nice girl, but it was ridiculous. Things still crazy out there?”

“Same old. Do you have a piano here?”

“I’m doing some accompanying at a ballet school. Kids. I love it. They let me practice some there, but I really need my own piano. I don’t know if I’ll ever really try to be a soloist again. I went to this Subud group once. I’m still not quite ready for it. I plan to go back. I’ve been depressed.”

“About what?”

“Everything. I wish I were involved with somebody, but when I’m depressed I don’t want to inflict myself on anybody I might really like. I go around in circles. I feel overwhelmed. I take everything out on myself. That’s what my whole family did.”

The doorbell rang and in trotted a groomed silvery white borzoi, tail up, followed by a familiar face.

“Otis!”

“Well, I haven’t seen you in ten months of Sundays! You’re looking healthy. Been working out?”

“In a gym? No. But we do a lot of construction out in Drop City. You’re looking pretty good yourself.”

“Now I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, but I can’t afford to toss it.”

I scratched the dog’s muzzle. “I never expected to see you here, Bubbles.”

“Wherever he goes, I go. A lot more sugar in these streets than back in that nasty Apple, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

He turned to Giovanni. “What’s so funny? Feather up your sweet butt?”

“Otis, you don’t always have to be so outrageous. I like you better when you’re not.”

“Well, I like you better when you’re not depressed and moralizing.” He turned to me. “Has this grown man been crying on your shoulder?”

“Not really.”

He shook a finger at Giovanni. “That ain’t going to get you nowhere. You got to cut that out! The trouble with you is that you don’t appreciate yourself. You got to be proud of what you are! Whatever you are! Don’t let nobody tell you it’s wrong! Don’t let nobody tell you different. You got to fight back! You never learned that, that’s your problem. I learned that back when I went down to Birmingham with the SCLC.”

“I’d almost forgotten you did that,” I interjected. “I remember being really surprised. Before that you always seemed so unpolitical.”

“I was unpolitical. I was drawn into it. Man, those crackers were vicious! But under those white robes they were just punks. And that’s where things still are in the gay community today. You can’t imagine all the shit we’re expected to take every day. But I for one am not taking it any more! I’m standing up! You got to learn how to fight back, Giovanni-boy. Everybody out! Be what you are! If they don’t like it, too fucking bad! When faggots support each other, they got no power over us.”

“I know you’re right,” Giovanni said. “No more closet. I’m through with that. I’m out.”

* * *

I decided to go to the Stop the Draft Week march of UC Berkeley students to the Oakland Induction Center, but I got side-tracked in the Haight and didn’t make it. That night Ernesto told me about it. “They arrested a hundred twenty-four students. It was all non-violent. We’re going back tomorrow. You know, tomorrow’s the March on the Pentagon in Washington too. Come with us. Bring a wet handkerchief just in case things get hot and the blue meanies start shooting tear gas.”

In the morning I heard a radio report that almost 100,000 had shown up in Washington to “Levitate the Pentagon.” Several hundred had tried to get inside and some were beaten by the military police. Thousands sat down in front of the Pentagon doors. There were mass draft card burnings and numerous arrests.

By the time Ernesto, Cori, and I arrived in Oakland, about a thousand people had already gathered. Ernesto and Cori wore red armbands. Ernesto slung his black medic bag over his back. A few people were on top of a sound truck exhorting the crowd. We joined a chanting picket line for a while. Then I noticed Odessa in the crowd.

“I thought I might see you here. Is Jake here too?”

“Somewhere. Good turnout, huh? We were both arrested yesterday. It was pretty low-key. I think things are going to be different today. A lot of people aren’t going to just let themselves be arrested.”

“What are they going to do?”

“That depends on what the police do.”

“Hey brother!” Jake and I grasped hands in the underground way.

“Looks like the war is really coming home,” I said.

“They ain’t seen nothing yet. We’re riding this baby all the way. Say, are you going to be in the Bay Area for a while?”

“Not really. I’m going back to Colorado.”

“Too bad. We’re part of a study group. I was going to invite you to join.”

“What are you studying?”

“What else? Revolution.”

On the sidelines I saw a few black guys in leather jackets and black berets, selling newspapers. One of them was Gypsy David.

“I’ll take one of those Panther Papers,” I said.

“Ishmael! What you doing here? How you been, brother?”

“Just visiting. Okay. How about you?”

“Everything’s right on. How’s the scene back in Drop City?”

“Getting along I guess. Pretty much the same. You’ve made quite a transformation. So the Panthers are involved in the anti-war movement too?”

“It’s black men who are being thrown into the front lines, and for what? To defend a racist government that doesn’t protect us? To kill other people of color who are being victimized like us? Black men should be exempt.”

“How’d you get involved with the Panthers?”

“You know me. I was minding my own business up in the Haight, getting stoned, doing my thing, know what I mean? When a lot of shit started coming down between the hippies and the local bloods. Everything had been cool until then. Anyway, I just got caught up in it, the Panthers stepped in, and before I knew it, I was out selling papers.”

“I came out here looking for Lard and Moron Normal.”

“A month or so ago I saw Lard hanging around the Free Store.”

“Did you know Moron got busted?”

“Get out of here! For what?”

“Running around the street with his pants off.”

“Oh, man!”

“He’s out now, but they’ve both disappeared.”

“Probably hightailed it back to Drop City. You better get back out there to Colorado too. Things are really getting hot around here. Chairman Bobby’s just gone to prison for six months. Everybody’s paranoid about police agents. The pigs are out gunning for Huey. Somebody’s going to get killed.”

Shouting from the other side of the crowd. People running. Hundreds of police attacked in formation, in flying wedges, wearing gas masks, wildly swinging batons. People were falling. Blood on the sidewalk. Canisters exploding with blinding smoke. Someone yelled, “Mace!”

“You got a wet handkerchief?” Gypsy yelled at me. “Tie it around your face like this!”

A demo leader shouted from the sound truck, “Fight back! Fight back!” Two pickups drove up, their beds piled with pieces of plywood about two feet square. Jake and Odessa handed out the panels to demonstrators, who used them as shields to ward off the blows of police batons. Ernesto and Cori dashed around, his black medic bag flying behind him. Demonstrators were dragging trash cans into the street, pushing cars into the intersection and deflating their tires, snarling traffic. Downtown Oakland was in chaos.

The next day I hopped my ride for Colorado. I never did find Lard or Moron.

When I arrived back in Drop City, Patt was still in New York. Both Lard and Moron had gotten back a few days before. Moron shrugged off the whole naked arrest episode as no big deal.

A letter had arrived from Meher Charlie’s sister, saying that he had jumped out of a third story window of a seedy L.A. hotel. Giovanni’s copy of Ibn Arabi, which he took with him, was still kicking around somewhere beyond the boundaries of thought.

Ooo-eee baby / Ooo-ooo-eee / Doo-bop-shabam / Drop Ci-tee

* * *

Chapter 20

BACK TO THE LAND

“A couple of people from Boulder we were counting on have pulled out,” Rabbit said to me. “We need more people. How about it? Come in with us. You’d fit in real well.” I was surprised that Rabbit wanted me to join the new community.

“I’d like to start over. But I still love this place. It’s home.”

“Drop City’s had it. Time to move on. If you’re worried about Denton, don’t. I can handle him.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re going to miss out on a hot thing.”

Weeks passed and Patt kept postponing her return. The reasons she gave over the phone seemed thinner and thinner. Finally she boarded a bus back.

The cold hug we exchanged at the station spoke volumes on the state of our relationship. We both knew we cared about each other, but were alienated, stalemated, drifting ever deeper into an impenetrable stasis.

With an early onset of wintry weather, visitors died down to a trickle. We got back to a vague semblance of normalcy at Drop City. The kitchen complex was a huge space to keep warm, but our two wood-burning Franklin stoves, with pipes stretching horizontally across the kitchen to radiate heat, usually kept it almost cozy.

“Suzie Spotless and I are getting married,” Clard said. “Do you want to come?”

“Is she pregnant?”

“How did you know? Does everybody know?”

“Of course I want to come. Are you going to have a big hippie wedding?”

“Suzie says that people who make a big fuss over their weddings are divorced a year later. We’re going to have a quiet little ceremony at the Trinidad Court House.”

Clard and Suzie, sweating and grinning, stood before the judge, with Lard as best man and her sister as maid of honor. A small group of Droppers, in our best ill-fitting duds, and Suzie’s family, in theirs, gathered around, the women and some of the men crying, as the judge read the plain, brief ceremony. Clard and Suzie exchanged a great movie kiss, one for the ages, and left looking truly happy.

* * *

I drove Patt to Trinidad on women’s clinic day. She hadn’t been feeling well. The room was packed and it was a long wait. After she’d been inside for about twenty minutes, the nurse asked me to step into the exam room. Patt was sitting on the exam table in a robe. She looked scared; I quickly took her hand. She breathed, “I need an operation.”

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Parks explained. “It’s not life threatening. This happens to many young women of childbearing age who have never been pregnant. It’s the result of an imbalance. I can give her hormones to help, but the best thing is for her to have a baby. That usually gets a young woman right back in balance.”

“If I don’t get pregnant soon, I might never be able to.”

Dr Parks took me aside. “Maybe it’s time for you two to start planning about dropping back in.”

Dr. Parks explained he was connected with a hospital in Albuquerque, where he could arrange for the operation to be done. Since we were destitute, it would be paid for by the state.

Patt was devastated. After the operation she would need a few weeks to recuperate in a clean, healing environment, and Drop City, with one bathtub among all those people, was not the place. We would also need money to live down there, and we had none.

“You can stay with us,” Luke Bear said.

A few days later we were in Albuquerque. Patt’s operation went well, and she was out of the hospital quickly. Bear and his wife Melody were wonderful to us. In my taking care of Patt we became much closer again.

While we were in New Mexico, I helped Bear with his work. He was experimenting with solar energy, which was just beginning to be developed. The problem was how to collect and store the inexhaustible supply. Bear devised a solar heating system with rocks for storage, and asked me if I’d build it with him and try it out. My dome would be a good location because it was on top of a small south-facing hill.

I also got a chance to visit Drop South more, and saw the larger counterculture community that had grown up in the Albuquerque area, with a lot of activity centered around a book store and a natural food store. A store selling only natural and organic foods was a new concept. I’d already seen a similar countercultural community formed around Boulder. Scenes like this were sprouting in every cultural center and college town.

The “Back to the Land” movement was in full swing across America, an integral part of the counterculture. Large numbers of people were trying to get back, and talk was everywhere in the media. It was one of the flip sides of the burgeoning anti-war movement, an affirmation born from the rejection of all the war stood for. The counterculture became a wild fire, ignited by the opposition to the war and fanned by the music, spreading out of control among young people everywhere in America, cutting across lines between city and country, across regional differences, across classes and races, the expression of a generation trying to relate to each other in new liberated ways, fueled by the optimism of knowing that the young people of the moment would inevitably someday take over the world.

Some of Drop South’s neighbors in Placitas, a sleepy little Chicano pueblo, weren’t too happy with being deluged by outsiders, but on the whole there were less neighbor problems at Drop South than at New Buffalo. Placitas had been a Spanish-Mexican land grant, but little by little the grant land had been, and was still being, subdivided and sold off. There was opposition, but the pressures of the money economy and mass culture made subsistence farming a close to impossible career choice for most young people. Still, the Chicano people there continued to farm with a common irrigation system and tried to keep the community culturally together. Meanwhile not far away, in Tierra Amarilla, an armed insurrection strived to reinstate the land grants.

New Buffalo was supposed to be the site for the shooting of the commune scenes in the movie Easy Rider, but they had some very antagonistic neighbors and one night their main building caught fire, probably started by arson, and burned to the ground.

A number of spiritual leaders began holding seminars at Lama, including Ram Das, formerly known as Richard Alpert, the old partner of Tim Leary. Lama published the original boxed edition of his work, Be Here Now. What a mantra!

The early Drop City was tamer sexually than some of the other intentional communities, but as more people poured in, things had gotten wilder and more like the others. A lot of people had sex with a lot of other people in all the communities. But really that was no different from what was happening all over America at that time. There was a lot of sex, as well as dope, going on everywhere. Still, almost everybody at Drop City was pretty selective sexually. Not everybody wanted to have sex with everybody else. As a whole Drop City was never really into group sex.

The main difference between sex in and out of the communities at the time, was that sex was a lot more open in communities, because we were living too close for many secrets. Which is not to say that everybody knew everything about everybody else. Everybody did not gossip nor was very interested in who was doing what with whom. The very closeness and lack of anonymity made many people seek a certain internal distance, similar to the way many small town people crave the anonymity of a big city to get growing space. A small town sense of community can be nice, but also stifling.

Just like folks anywhere, people in the communes kept coupling off, falling in and out of love, breaking each other’s hearts, looking for someone special to be with. Ironically, sometimes there was less sex inside the intentional communities. It could get too heavy and messy. If it didn’t work out, there was no place to get away, except by leaving. The communities were like little hothouses. People didn’t change miraculously when they walked in the door, but brought everything with them.

Open sex in the communities was almost all hetero; gays and lesbians weren’t very out. Besides Giovanni, there were other gay guys and lesbians at Drop City at different times, but they were quite closeted, compared to what I’d seen in the gay communities in New York and San Francisco.

* * *

After a while I missed Drop City, especially the constant excitement and activity there. I missed being part of its day-to-day development, and kept wondering what was happening while we were gone. Patt, on the other hand, had concluded more than ever that there wasn’t much of a future there for her, and kept talking about our staying down in Albuquerque.

When we got back to Drop City, we found out that Rabbit, Poly, Denton, and Leeda had finally purchased their new land, a hundred acres of forest not far away in the mountains, adjoining the national forest. They planned to begin building and to move out onto it the coming spring. They called their new community Libertad. According to Rabbit, Libertad would correct the inherent flaws of Drop City. Membership would be by invitation only; each member would basically be on their own economically.

Both Denton and Rabbit invited me out to see it, but I didn’t go.

I got a letter from Gypsy David. He’d left the Panther Party because there was too much paranoia. Police agents had infiltrated; accusations were flying in all directions. Everyone was suspicious of everybody. The Oakland police followed them everywhere. There had been a shootout and arrests. Gypsy wrote that after he left the Panthers, he took some crazy substance, went into a druggy haze. When he woke up he was standing in front of a teller’s window in a bank with a plastic gun in his hand, wondering, How the fuck did I get here and what the fuck am I doing? His letter was sent from prison.

Little by little Patt healed and got back to normal. As Winter solstice 1967 approached, Drop City was quiet and peaceful. A welcome relief.

We wanted to have some celebration for the mid-winter holidays, but nobody was religious.

“My old public school,” Moron Normal recalled, “used to put on an annual Christmas pageant. Everybody got a part. They were a lot of fun. Let’s do that.”

“We don’t have a script.”

“You’re a writer. Write one.”

I did and, with us as both actors and audience, we put on the one and only performance of, The Coming of Clitoris or Droppers Do It Too, A Christmas Play & Pageant Set to Musique & Mumming. At first a few people said they didn’t want to be in it, but as soon as they saw us rehearsing, they changed their minds. My draft didn’t have speaking parts for everybody, so Danu added a few characters.

It was pretty dumb but a lot of fun. The Clitorians were space aliens. The play began in the control room of a Clitorian saucer, which was just about to land to plunder Drop City. The Clitorians sang their national anthem:

All for Clitoris our mother
Queen of the universe
May her splendor ever smother
Those who would come first.
Though others may sometimes neglect her,
With passion we will try
To respect her, resurrect her,
That great Clitoris up in the sky.

As the plot progressed, Feather Tom sang:

I once had a thought
ho ho ha ha
But it went for a walk
in my hair
tweedledee
So I danced about
ho ho ha ha
Till it tumbled out
into the air
tweedledee

Moron Normal sang:

“Zounds,” belched the piggie who swallowed his snout,
“If I swallow the rest I’ll be inside out.
If I shit myself out then I’ll be inside in
If I eat my own shit I’ll be out/in again.”

Eventually the Droppers stripped the aliens of everything they came with, including their space shirts. It wound up in a big musical production number:

D is for the Dung we eat for dinner,
R is Rotting brain cells in our heads,
O’s the Onanism of our single guys,
reading marvel comic books in bed;
P is Piles of cat shit in the rice bin,
P is tourists Peeking in the door
E’s the Extra-secret hole beneath the hole
where Moron sneaks to score;
R’s our Revolutionary life-style
that’s undermining, shattering and jolting
the foundations of uptight rigid straight society,
R: we’re Revolting
R: we’re Revolting.

* * *

In the spring of 1968, Clard and Suzie Spotless moved to Boulder, supposedly just to have the baby. They said they would be back.

Shortly after, Rabbit, Poly, Denton, and Leeda finally moved to their land. It was quite a relief, after Rabbit and Poly’s being half in and half out of Drop City for so long. Others were joining them there, making it a real budding community. We were all envious of the hundred acres of forest, and wished them luck. With the addition of Libertad, there were now five southwestern intentional communities, each with a unique flavor. More than any of the others, Libertad seemed like a retreat into isolation.

Michael Bippl and a few others took over Rabbit’s old dome.

Soon after the baby was born, Clard and Suzie Spotless moved to New York instead of coming back to Drop City. Clard had been offered a job there as art director for the company printing his posters. Clard drew Lard into the mix, so Lard followed him to New York. Since her son Snoop was in school, Lard’s partner Jal stayed at Drop City.

Both Lard and Clard wrote that they would be back from New York soon. I already had my doubts that Clard would return, and he never did. Lard got back after a couple of months.

Clard arranged for the Ultimate Painting, now returned from Paris, to be exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum. After that show it wound up in a garage on the east coast, and somehow was lost, probably forever.

Drop City was a very different place now. With all the early Droppers departed except Lard, Patt and myself, this was almost a new Drop City again, a different mix of personalities, another changed dynamic.

Bear and I built a big plywood box on the south side of my dome about ten feet wide, five high and six deep, and filled it with river rocks. We dug out the hill a bit, built a long sloping box with sheets of corrugated tin between air spaces and a glass cover. The sun heated the air around the tin sheets, the hot air rose and circulated through the rocks, the rocks stored the heat, cooler air recirculated to the bottom of the collector, and the heat entered the dome when I opened a flap.

The solar collector would provide most of our heat the next fall and winter. However it worked only when there was enough sun out and saved only enough heat for one day. But it proved the viability of supplementary solar heating. Stewart published a description in one of the early Whole Earth Catalogs, and Lama Foundation published a broadside called Sol Shot containing a drawing of the heater and letters exchanged between Bear and me.

Everybody was agitated and going through changes in the spring and summer of ‘68. It was just in the air. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated; inner cities around the country were burning. The Viet Nam war and the anti-war movement were intense. Lyndon Johnson was challenged by Bobby Kennedy, and the Democratic national convention was looming at the end of summer.

* * *

SEIZE THE LAND
(Fisher’s Peak, Trinidad, Colorado, 1968)

Late afternoon, summer,
a hot wind out of the west,
Drop City shimmers.

Mike Bippl stumbles out of his dome,
eyes veined, takes a long piss.
“Mike,” I say, “they just killed Robert Kennedy.”
Face screwed blinks & shakes his head
then nods in the distance, still pissing.
“See that mountain? Well it’s still there.”

The mountain, by the way,
is owned by the Rockefeller family.
There’s a barbed wire fence around it.
When I mentioned that to a lady from town,
she replied,
“How nice of Mr. Rockefeller
to provide
such a beautiful view
for the people.”

* * *

We kept hearing news about the big nonviolent disruption planned for the Democratic convention in Chicago in the fall. Droppers were split. We couldn’t fool ourselves that it would just be a revolutionary hippie Mardi Gras, a big street party. Nobody really believed it would be nonviolent, as long as the Chicago police were involved, so we were torn about going. Almost all of us had totally given up on the Democrats. Some of us planned to support Eldridge Cleaver for President on the new Peace and Freedom Party.

Big Bill, delicate and soft-spoken, who loved to walk alone down by the wildlife-filled banks of the Purgatoire, was excited about Chicago, and organized a contingent of Droppers to go. I was afraid that another separation at that time would totally collapse my relationship with Patt, so I decided not to join them.

Hickson, one of the founders of Drop South, had gotten himself elected as a delegate to the convention, and a group from that area was going in a caravan. They stopped at Drop City on their way and picked up Big Bill, Jasper Button, John the Hair, Silly Michelle, Marigold, Little Joe, and Boston John. Hickson showed us a printed target area map and directory that the demonstration organizers were distributing. The meadow of the park set aside for everyone camping out was designated “Drop City.” We had become the generic “Hooverville” of the decade.

The next day a black guy, a white guy, and a big curly-haired dog came trotting down the hill toward me from the parking lot. It was Otis, Giovanni, and Bubbles.

“On our way to Chicago, babe.”

“We’re going to Levitate the Democrats!”

Otis grabbed my arm. “Give me the royal tour. We only got an hour.”

“I never knew street politics is so fun,” Giovanni said. “I swear I’ll never vote for a straight candidate again. Is Marigold here?”

“Maybe you’ll see her at the convention.”

“After Chicago,” Otis said, “we’re circling back to the Apple.”

* * *

Two days later Stewart appeared with two friends. Stewart, with wavy red hair and bright eyes, was always on the move, networking for the Whole Earth Catalog.

“Don’t tell me you’re on your way to Chicago too!”

“It’s my policy to never get caught in a riot. We just came from the mother of all demos. Not an anti-war demo. A computer conference.”

“A what?”

“Put on by the Augmented Human Intelligence Research Center, in San Francisco and Stanford.”

“That sounds like Tim Leary.”

“Not at all. Doug Engelbart.”

“Who?”

“The world’s first public demonstration of an interactive system, networked computers, videoconferencing, on-screen cursors, split-screen live TV pictures. I was helping with the cameras.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Do you know what a mouse is?”

“A mouse?”

“You can get right inside the screen! You can communicate computer-to-computer over any distance. It’s going to change the world. It’s going to empower everybody.”

“Technology only empowers the people who control the technology.”

“This is different. Nobody will be able to control it.”

“High-tech toys aren’t going to change the world,” I argued.

“A riot in Chicago is not going to change the world,” he countered. “That’s only going to get a lot of people hurt. This will make it possible for anybody in the world to communicate instantaneously with anybody else. This is the future; that’s the past. You’ll see.”

On TV that night I sat with Stewart and his two friends watching TV pictures of peaceful demonstrators being beaten and arrested by the Chicago police. I searched the small flickering black-and white screen for faces of Droppers, and in a crowd running from a phalanx of police batons I thought I saw a black guy, a white guy, and a big silver borzoi.

* * *

Chapter 21

A DIFFICULT EXTRACTION

The winter of ‘68 and the spring of ‘69 were pretty uneventful. The most exciting episode was removing the flush toilets and going back to outhouses.

I realized I now had a different time sense in my mental clock than I had back in New York, a sense of endless duration. A sense of sameness. Despite the constant flow of visitors, everything was the same every day at Drop City. Every day was the same as the last. I both loved and hated it. Would it matter if it was yesterday or tomorrow? Would it matter if the day began or ended?

For the first time I felt bored and out of it at Drop City. The early Drop City had been a storm of ideas and actions; being at its center was exciting and stimulating. Now it felt directionless, marginal, out of the mainstream. The eye of the storm had passed and the survivors were left with the cleanup. The world had moved on.

Through the spring Patt kept at me to make some plans beyond Drop City, but I still couldn’t see beyond it. I kept putting her off. I still believed in the concept of Drop City, and also didn’t want to face the outside world.

But for the first time since I moved in, I began having fantasies of living somewhere else. If Drop City was not going to be my permanent home after all, where was it going to be? Would I ever have a permanent home? Living at Drop City meant, in a way, retiring from the work world. I realized now that I was not ready to really retire from the world. If so, the only thing to do was to jump back into it. I had no idea how I could support myself. I didn’t want to think about it much. The momentum of the daily routine at Drop City kept me going day by day.

Marigold had settled down to being a loner, though she took up with an occasional guy briefly. She spent most of her time by herself, usually working on gloomy watercolors, a lot of blacks and reds, and wasn’t very talkative. She occasionally opened up about her paintings or about the abuse she had suffered as a child and in a mental hospital, but not about much else. In the early summer Marigold moved into the old kitchen dome with Feather Tom, Diggy Meg, and her two children. They became a threesome. Marigold seemed much happier, but Diggy Meg seemed unhappier. Tom seemed thrilled having all the attention, as he had been mostly avoided by girls as an adolescent. Now he stammered a lot less than ever before.

* * *

In early summer, 1969, Riceman brought a bunch of magic mushrooms back to Drop City from New Buffalo, and I ate some.

Lying on the floor face up, eyes closed, I saw a curious image in the back of my head. It looked like an ancient Mexican painting of a man in a red and black bird mask, dancing a strange jerky repetitive dance, with stop frames, like the strobe effects on the Ultimate Painting. I wondered where in the world he was coming from, since I hadn’t seen any image like this, at least not recently. Maybe he was arising from some obscure corner of my mind, considering that it’s all consciousness in one way or another. Or maybe he was coming from the mushrooms. The dancer’s movements were soothing, calming. When I finally opened my eyes, I felt an overwhelming urge to somehow cleanse myself.

I’d carried the manuscripts of two novels to Drop City. I was not very happy with either one. I had put so much work into writing those novels, and they had been such disappointments. I fished them out. They looked strange now, particularly on mushrooms.

I realized I no longer cared. I built a little fire on the hill and fed my only copies into the flames, page by page. As I watched the pages darken and crackle, I rolled a cigarette. At Drop City we tobacco addicts used to roll our own. At my first drag, a cold sweat rolled down my body, leaving me nauseous, and with the strange idea that a second cigarette would fix the sickness. I rolled, lit and dragged on another, and felt worse.

I’d started smoking tobacco at sixteen, along with most of my high school friends. My mother’s death from cancer had shocked me into trying to stop, but reaching for a cigarette had become engrained in my many daily rituals, so to break the addiction, I had to break it in each situation. I’d tried a few times but had always hit a moment of weakness and had been unable to. Smoking did nothing for me, except relieve the anxiety its addiction caused. At least marijuana got me high, wasn’t physically addictive, and wasn’t going to kill me, as far as I knew. I threw the cigarette into the fire along with the manuscripts and resolved to never smoke tobacco again.

When I came down from the mushrooms I felt a twinge in my jaw. A toothache came on quickly, within hours throbbing so badly it made me forget my feet still hurt in my tight boots. I went into denial for a couple of days then slunk to the dental clinic in Trinidad. The dentist said that an impacted wisdom tooth had to be extracted. The tooth was partially lodged under the back of my jawbone, so I needed to go to an oral surgeon. The closest one was eighty miles away in Pueblo.

Ed the Fed drove me. By the time of my appointment I was really hurting. I had tried to raise the money I needed, but was about fifty dollars short. I explained that to the receptionist and offered to pay the rest off. She brought out the oral surgeon, a young man with a stiff chin.

He said, “We don’t work on credit.”

“Are there any corners you could cut?” I asked.

“I could do it without Novocain. It’s your choice.”

As my dad used to like to say, the American medical system is the best in the world because we have choice. I thought of old western movies where the patient bit on a rag while the barber sawed off his leg. How much worse could it hurt than it was hurting already? I paid what I had up front and went into surgery. He positioned a chisel on the tooth and hit it with a hammer. This really happened.

I had not known the meaning of pain until then. There seemed to be no world left outside of my pain. My mind pulled away to a faraway place, distant from my body and I no longer experienced the pain in quite so immediate a way. I felt oddly removed from my own body, and could see the whole scene, the whole horrible mess, as if I was watching from outside myself. I was both myself and a different person. The doctor hammered on the tooth until it broke, and pulled it out in several pieces. As soon as I opened my eyes I flew back into my body, and the pain returned with a vengeance. The doctor showed me the pieces of tooth, dripping with blood.

I moaned all the way back to Drop City, each bounce of the road punctuating the awful throbbing in my head. The next few days were a hellish blur, but gradually the pain faded, my head cleared and the world returned. The experience left me with new respect for my untapped mental resources.

As I got back to normal from the surgery, I started to have the urge to smoke tobacco again. But now I was determined to keep my body clearer and cleaner. My ordeal with oral surgery had left me feeling I had the strength to do anything. When I went crazy for a cigarette, I slipped off mentally into the distant place I’d discovered during oral surgery, where I could watch myself from outside my body. In that mental space I wasn’t addicted at all. Like the pain in my jaw, the anxiety of nicotine withdrawal gradually subsided. Breaking that habit was the most difficult thing I had ever done.

Patt was very happy, she had been urging me to quit ever since we met. She couldn’t stand to be around smoke. She was happy, that is, until she saw me light a joint.

“I never said I was quitting grass. Just tobacco.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Marijuana isn’t a drug; it’s medicine.”

* * *

Jasper Button received a letter from a friend telling him the date and location of a Ute Sundance a half day’s drive west. Jasper had attended the year before and now planned to go again. He said that visitors were welcome. I knew nothing about the Sundance, except the Hollywood version, and not much about the Utes. I once saw a movie where they sliced the skin of the dancers’ chests and tied them with rawhide straps to a big pole. I asked Jasper if they really did that.

“The Utes don’t do that. They just dance.”

I decided to go, a little reluctantly because one of our goats was due to give birth any day, according to my calculations. Not that goats ordinarily need help, but I had gotten to know the animals pretty well and had become protective of them.

“Do you want to come?” I asked Patt.

“I don’t know what a Sundance is all about.”

“Neither do I. We’ll find out.”

“Do you think we’ll be welcome?”

“That’s what Jasper says.”

“That’s what they said about that wedding we went to in Taos Pueblo, which was a disaster.”

“If the Utes don’t want us, we’ll just come back. Do you remember that native woman Nani and her husband who stopped by the Joy Festival very briefly? She was living at Drop City when I first got here. He’s a Ute. She said he was a sundancer.”

“I’m not going.”

“Suit yourself.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“The dance is for four days and nights, so I’ll be gone six days, maybe a week.”

“I’m not staying here by myself.”

“Why not?”

“You know I can’t relate to some of these new people. I’m going to New York.”

“New York?”

“I haven’t seen my family in a long time. You can come with me, if you want.”

“I think I’ll go to the Sundance.”

“Come with me to New York instead.”

“I’m going to the Sundance.”

* * *

Chapter 22

INCIDENTS AT A SUNDANCE

A group of us crossed the Spanish peaks in the Karmann Ghia and the painted van, to the dance grounds near Ignacio. With me were Jasper, Lard, Jal and her son Snoop, Feather Tom, Diggy Meg, her two kids, Ed the Fed, and Marigold. We arrived in the late afternoon.

In the middle of an open field was a large lodge, perhaps sixty feet across. On the far side was a village of tipis and shade lodges. Visitors were to set up camp near the parking lot. There were a half dozen other guest vehicles, and about twenty-five visitors in all, mainly hippie types. The dance was to begin the next morning.

We pitched camp near our vehicles, dug a little fire pit, and gathered some wood. I walked cautiously around the field. Ute families looked involved with activities related to the dance, as well as cooking, eating, and socializing. They mostly ignored me. The lodge was built of a dozen hefty posts about twenty feet high, connected by long rafters, the sides filled in with saplings and brush. A doorway was left open, facing east. I peered inside. In the center a great forked tree had been erected, with different colored fabrics tied to each fork and stripes painted around the bottom of the trunk. Next to it several older men were performing a ceremony and praying. There were some objects in the tree’s crotch, that looked like fur, feathers, a bundle of sticks; I assumed they were ritual objects. Long rafters attached the center pole to the posts at the four directions. Around the far side were leafy shades and beds of leaves, that people were working on. In the afternoon, drumming began.

“Ishmael?”

“Hi, Nani.” She was in a dress now, with colorful fringes, instead of the jeans she always wore at Drop City. “Is your husband dancing?”

“No, Barrigon’s not dancing this time, but some of his cousins are. Is anybody else of the old gang here?”

“Lard is here with me.”

“How about Jo and Curly and Clard?”

“They left Drop City. They’re gone.”

That evening she appeared at our camp with Barrigon. We sat around the small fire.

“The Utes are much luckier than my people,” Nani said “They’ve been on this land for a very long time.”

“All the mountains of Colorado and Utah were Ute land,” Barrigon said. “Now we only have a little. Sometimes the buffalos wandered up into these mountains in the summer, but mostly they were down in the plains. We only began to go down and hunt them after we had horses. But soon we were using the buffalos for everything. Our lives revolved around them. That’s when we started to Sundance. The Sundance is for the tribes who hunted buffalo.”

“Where did it come from?”

“The roaring thunder taught it to a medicine man a long time ago, they say, a Cheyenne, and the medicine men passed it from tribe to tribe.”

“How do people feel about us being here?” I asked.

“Some of the people don’t mind. Some don’t like it.”

“Tell him what happened last year,” Nani said.

“That was the first time a group like you came to the Sundance. A group of hippies. Over the years there have been white people at Sundances, but they were almost always somebody’s guests. This isn’t a pow wow. We don’t advertise in the papers. This is a community event. The hippies just showed up uninvited, like you did. They probably meant well but they didn’t know the right things to do. Some of them tried to participate in the ceremony. Some Ute people thought the hippies were mocking them, and were offended.”

“Should we leave?”

“You’re our guests now. Just watch. Don’t assume anything. Change your clothes as much as you can. Be clean. If you see a feather fall on the ground, don’t pick it up. Tell a Native person. Ask if you’re not sure about something.”

“You’re not expected to know everything,” Nani said. “I’d never been to a Sundance either until I met Barrigon. My people, the Choctaw, don’t Sundance.”

“Last year a white man chopped wood and put it in the pile that the fire tender uses to feed the sacred fire. He was trying to help but it was very inappropriate. Other bad things happened too. We don’t want to repeat them. Some of the hippies seemed to think that the Sundance is a party. There are Indians who come to party too. Have nothing to do with them.”

“There’s a reason that you’re here,” Nani said, “even though we don’t know it yet.”

The drumming, which had been going on continuously, suddenly stopped.

“That means the dance will begin soon.”

A little while later, the drumming started again. The moon was overhead, and by its light I could see dancers assembling in single file near the forked center pole, behind an elder who had been performing ceremonies during the day. They marched around the outside of the corral several times, blowing on whistles which someone said were made from eagle’s bones, a large group following them. They disappeared inside.

Jasper stood. “Let’s go inside.”

“Do you think it’s all right?”

“Sure.”

“I’m going to stay with the kids,” Diggy Meg said.

Jal echoed her. “Me too.”

Lard, Feather Tom, and Marigold got up.

“Aren’t you coming?” Marigold asked me.

At the far end of the Sundance lodge was a drum circle. Every once in a while the drumming and singing would be stopped by blasts of the whistles. An elder prayed at the center pole. The drummers began to beat and sing again. After four strong beats, the elder began to dance, followed by others one by one until a large group was dancing.

The dancers were all men, barefoot, wearing only a kind of skirt with designs and sketches of animals. They stood in a semi-circle before the center pole and began dancing toward it, then back, to the drumming and singing, back and forth, blowing eagle bone whistles tied with white feathers, always facing the center pole, each dancer in his own path. Many wore elaborately beaded belts with beaded bags hanging from them, which must have contained ritual objects. At times they all danced simultaneously, but some also rested while others danced. Family members attended each dancer while they rested. The dancers partook of no water or food during the entire ceremony. Barrigon occasionally brought fresh leaves and other items to the pallet where his cousin rested. As they danced, a man lit and tended a fire to the east of the pole just outside the dance space. Ceremonies were periodically led by elders with eagle feathers and various sacred objects.

The dancing continued deep into the night. Finally we stumbled back to our camp and crawled into our sleeping bags.

I felt like I’d only been sleeping a minute when someone shook me. It was Lard. “Come on. We’re going to the sunrise ceremony.”

The dancers, holding down feathers, were in four lines behind the center pole, blowing whistles as the drummers sang. With the sun’s first rays, the dancers raised their arms, then began patting their bodies with the feathers. They filed over to the firepit and sat in a circle around the ashes, wrapping themselves in blankets. After a few songs, whistles, and prayers by the elder, the fire tender gathered up the ashes and carried them out of the corral. The dancers retreated to beds of leaves in arbors around the circumference of the lodge, where they rested, attended by their families.

We went back to our camp and made breakfast. A few hours later, loud drumbeats signaled that the dance was beginning again.

The day wore on and the sun bore down. It was a strenuous ordeal, dancing under the sun without water or food all day, with only a break at noon and another before dusk. In the evening another fire was lit and the dance began again.

That night a few of us were sitting at our campfire when a crazily painted VW van drove up. Through the windshield I saw Winston Warlock and Dawnrider.

“I know it’s more than a coincidence,” Dawnrider said, “meeting you here.”

Winston seemed a little calmer and his speech was less cascading. “Now we’re just touring around, etc, etc, until we find a place to settle down for a while, etc. Traveling on this plane is too strenuous. I just want to dream travel now.”

They had psychedelics and grass that they were selling to finance their trip, but kept it all stashed away.

I missed the sunrise ceremony the next morning. My body was pretty creaky from sleeping on the ground. When I got to the Sundance corral, the dance had already begun. There was now a buffalo head sitting in the crotch of the center pole. Woven into the hair and draped around the necks of some dancers were white furs that looked like ermine. Some of the dancers had designs painted on their bodies and faces. Several elders, sick and frail, were helped in. One by one they stood barefoot at the Sundance pole, while the chief performed a blessing and curing ritual over them.

Later Feather Tom and I walked silently around the dance grounds. He almost never said much, and I liked him for that.

“I’ve been having trouble with Meg and Marigold,” he spat out suddenly. “We just can’t seem to work things out.”

“What’s the problem?” As if I didn’t know.

“Meg’s uptight, possessive. At first she liked us all together. Now she doesn’t. The kids love Marigold. She’s a second mother to them.”

“Maybe Meg doesn’t like that.”

“She told Marigold to move out. I don’t want her to. Marigold doesn’t want to either.”

On the third day of the Sundance, many dancers carried eagle feathers and one held an entire eagle wing. I watched for a long time, mesmerized by the power of the dance. A Native man came up to me, a strange look in his eyes. “Do you want to sit in on the drum?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s good. I can fix it up for you.”

There had usually been five or six drummers. People alternated. But they looked like they had been drumming together for a long time. It was very precise. They would go faster or slower depending on the song, always changing cadence or stopping together at exactly the same instant.

I remembered that Nani had told me to just watch. “I couldn’t do that.”

“The drummers are all special friends of mine. Next time they sit down to play, go join them. It’s okay. It’s good.”

Later a few of us drove into Ignacio, about twelve miles away, to buy supplies. Patt was supposed to be arriving in New York that day, and staying with a woman who lived near her old apartment. I phoned but got no answer.

That night I fell in and out of sleep. I kept dreaming and waking, recalling fragments of dreams, falling off again. I woke feeling scared, couldn’t sleep for hours, then dozed off fitfully. That continued until dawn. I was very tired, shaky, in a funk.

“Are you all right?” Dawnrider asked. “You don’t look well”

“I was having strange dreams.”

“Tell me about them.”

I just remembered fragments. Patt was in the dream. She kept trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. Also in the dream was the same image that had come into my mind in Drop City under magic mushrooms the day I burned my novels, of a dancer in a bird’s beak mask, flat and stylized, like an ancient Mexican hieroglyphic painting. I couldn’t see his face under the mask. Also the Ute man who had asked me to drum. It was him and it wasn’t him at the same time. He was wearing some kind of ceremonial clothes. In place of one of his feet was a mirror. I couldn’t remember what he did in the dream, but it was something disturbing.

“You have to watch out for the man with the mirror foot,” Dawnrider said. “He’s a trickster. I grew up with him, or avoiding him. My grandmother was a curandera. A healer.”

“You’re Chicana?”

“Just half.”

I could see it in her now.

“They’re both helpers. In Mexico the one with the mirror foot is known as Lord of the Night,” she went on. “He can bring good, if that’s his whim, or he can bring evil. The one in the bird’s beak mask is known as Lord of the Day. Try to make friends with him. He’s much more reliable. He’s the bringer of arts and skills. The Lord of the Night and the Lord of the Day seem like opposites, but they’re really both part of each other.”

“Why would I have a dream like that here at the Sundance?”

“The Utes and the Mexicas are cousins. The Hopis are cousins too. We all spoke the same language a long time ago. This whole region is special for Mexicas. Have you ever heard of Aztlán? Our center, our place of origin. It is right here.” She placed her hands on the sides of my head. “That’s good. Your spirit used to cling too tightly to your body back in San Francisco. You used to say you were interested in dream walking. Have you tried it?”

“I don’t know how.”

“If you want to dream walk you’ll have to loosen that connection even more, to step out. But not here. This is not the right place.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept getting hung up in the transition of falling asleep, the space between waking and sleep. I got very close to that instant of sleep, then backed off, afraid. Finally I lost consciousness. The next morning I took a long time to wake up.

I found Marigold and Feather Tom at the campfire, the kids chasing each other nearby and tumbling on the ground.

“Last night I had a dream about Patt,” Marigold said.

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. Finally I asked, “What happened in the dream?”

“She said she’s not coming back to Drop City.”

I drove into town and phoned the apartment where Patt was supposed to be staying, but there was no answer.

* * *

On the last day of the Sundance, many of the dancers were carrying freshly cut sticks. Several chiefs made orations, in the Ute language, and seemed to be exhorting the dancers.

“The Sundance chief,” Barrigon explained, “is challenging them to take power from the center pole, from the buffalo. Do you see those willow wands the dancers are carrying? They are to pull water, to pull power to the dancers. The Sundance chiefs are also telling them how important and beautiful it is to live according to the old traditions, in the Ute way. They’re dancing not just for themselves but for rejuvenation of all people.”

As he spoke, one of the dancers fell over backward, or—it all was so fast—his feet suddenly rose into the air until they were almost even with his head. He looked like someone levitated by a magician for an instant. Then he fell flat on his back and lay there as if dead. The drums and dancing stopped. The other dancers watched him for a minute, then carried him over to one of the beds of leaves by the side of the lodge, his head facing the center pole, and covered him with a sheet. The drums began again and the others resumed dancing.

“His spirit has gone to receive counsel,” Barrigon whispered. “When he returns he will dance with his thirst quenched.”

About an hour later he rose, almost floated over to his dance path, and began to dance again, blowing his eagle whistle.

* * *

A buckskin was laid over the spot where the fires had been, and Indian people filed by, piling it with beautifully crafted objects, bolts of fabrics and money.

When the last dance was finally completed, all the dancers gave blessings to various elders. A bucket of water was brought in, a ceremony performed over it near the center pole. All the dancers went to their leafy beds, and the water chief gave each a drink, one by one. The dancers stood and followed the Sundance chief out of the lodge. All the Indian spectators lined up, and the water chief gave each a drink of the water. Our group of non-Indians watched.

“Aren’t you thirsty?” The man who had suggested that I join the drum was standing beside me. “Get in line. It’s all right. That is sacred water they are drinking. You’ll receive a blessing.”

Suddenly I had a raging thirst. It felt like I would die if I didn’t have a drink. Somehow I controlled myself. “Thank you, but I think I’ll just watch.”

The man turned and walked away.

While the gifts on the buckskin were being distributed, Nani and Barrigon came over. “There’s going to be a feast in the Ute camp tomorrow. We’d like you to join us.”

* * *

At end of the feast, we said goodbye to Nani and Barrigon. “Next time you’re passing by Drop City, stop in and visit. Stay as long as you want.”

“It’ll be a while,” Nani said. “From here we’re going to California. To a meeting.”

“What about?”

Nani glanced at Barrigon, who said, “Tell him, it’s all right.”

“According to treaty rights,” she said, “Indians can reclaim land that the government has taken but no longer needs. They closed down the prison on Alcatraz island, and now they don’t use it for anything. It’s Indian land. We’re going out there and taking the island back in the name of all tribes. We’re bringing the media with us, so if they want to massacre us for the island, they’ll have to do it on television.”

* * *

Chapter 23

DREAM WALKING

I finally reached Patt. We exchanged pleasantries, both of us tentative and cool.

“Why’d the trip there take so long?” I asked.

“We stopped off in a few places. I wanted to look at schools. We had to go out of our way a couple of times.”

“When will you be coming back?”

“It might be longer than I said.”

“How much longer?”

“I’m not sure. There are things I want to do here. People to see. Places to go. You know.”

I finally asked her outright, “Are you coming back?”

She was suddenly silent, then whispered, “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you just say no, instead of leading me on?”

“I haven’t been leading you on.”

“It’s cowardly”

“Don’t start calling names.”

It got worse, and ended with me slamming down the phone, more confused and upset than before. I called right back, but she had left it off the hook.

I called Patt again the next day, but just talked with the woman she was staying with. She didn’t know where Patt was or when she would be back.

I licked my wounds. I told myself our relationship was finally over and I should be glad; it had dragged on too long, going nowhere.

* * *

Winston Warlock and Dawnrider followed our caravan across the mountains, down the eastern slope, and stayed at Drop City for a few days.

At first it felt good to be at Drop City without Patt. I kind of liked being alone. I smoked marijuana for the first time since before the Sundance trip, and laughed a lot. I caught up on the animals, all of whom had survived very well without me. The pregnant nanny still hadn’t given birth. They say that goats are supposed to have very regular gestation periods, so I must have calculated wrong.

My high wore off pretty quickly and I started feeling depressed, out of it. A lot of the Droppers were traveling. Drop City was half empty.

I tried to get involved with construction. But it hit me how lethargic the atmosphere had become. Work on the place had pretty much stopped. Nobody knew where to go from here, or had energy to do it. The biggest unfinished project was the theater dome, which remained in the state that Clard had left it. It had been his baby. The dome was too big and open a space for living quarters, and nobody else had plans to start a theater. It was a white elephant. Why bother?

I was down in the goat corral, feeding and brushing our pregnant nanny, when Feather Tom wandered aimlessly by, looking upset.

“Is something wrong?”

“Meg told me I have to break up with Marigold or get out,” he stammered. “I love them both.”

Later that day I saw Marigold carrying some of her stuff out of the old kitchen up to the hole.

The Sundance had left me with a gnawing hunger inside. Seeing the sundancer levitate while receiving a vision, left me feeling that my own spiritual quest had bogged down. I hungered for the kind of revelation that so many spiritual disciplines seemed to promise, that left you permanently fulfilled inside and liberated.

From being around Winston Warlock and Dawnrider again, I’d come to feel that they had some knowledge that I wanted too. They would be leaving in two days. This was my chance.

“How do you control a dream?” I asked Winston. “It sounds impossible.”

“It’s really very easy, once you empower yourself,” Winston replied.

“Tell me how. I’d like to try it.”

“Do you really want to know? It can be dangerous, particularly if you’re not in a group.”

“What does a group do?”

“You help each other come out.”

“Tell me anyway. I’m not afraid. I want to know. Would you help me?”

“In our group, we try to connect people with helpers of the opposite sex. The energy works out better, at least for your first time out. I’ll talk to Dawnrider, and see if she thinks you’re ready and if she’s willing to be your helper.”

I sat with Dawnrider on the hill above the complex. Violent clouds were moving quickly across the moon. Sheet lightning flashed across the sky, followed by distant rumbling thunder. The atmosphere was thick. It was trying to rain.

She said, “All the power anyone needs is already right inside. But you have to seek it with the right intentions, without attachment or ego. If you just go looking for personal power, you’ll crash.”

“I don’t want power over other people. Just over myself. My life feels out of control, unbalanced, out of whack.”

She moved her hands around a couple of inches from my face. “The connection between your spirit and your body really is looser.”

“I think it started when an oral surgeon pulled out an impacted wisdom tooth without Novocain,” I replied.

“For first time travelers trying to break through the obstacles of ego, acid often helps.”

I looked at the little translucent square of windowpane LSD. As I placed it on my tongue I recalled a story Patt had told me a long time ago, back in New York, about a girlfriend of hers who did a lot of mescaline, and said that she had come to understand everything except death, then, few days later, she dropped again and walked out of a window. Why was I taking LSD? Was I trying to kill myself too?

It was the strangest acid trip I’d ever taken. I got very high, but nothing really happened. Everything looked the way it does on acid, only it also looked normal at the same time. I was having no revelations. I was learning nothing. Yet I felt cleansed of excess mental baggage. Thoughts just flowed through my mind.

I wondered if the place I was at was where Patt’s friend been when she walked out the window. Though I certainly couldn’t make the claim that she did, that I understood everything except death, I felt that the reality passing before my eyes was all there was.

I lay in bed, eyes shut, watching the changing colors and images on the inside of my eyelids. I did what Dawnrider told me, I “tied a string around my finger,” meaning I would remember I was asleep when I saw my hands. I crept into the space between waking and sleep, the place of transition. I got a little closer to that instant of sleep, then backed off. There seemed to be a continuum of consciousness into and out of sleep, with no sharp breaks. I lolled in the space for a long time.

I wondered if I really was trying to commit suicide. Yet there was something I wanted to find out, and I could only do that by proceeding.

I looked down and saw my hands.

Then, to my surprise, I saw Marigold. “What are you doing here?”

“Dawnrider asked me to come.”

“Where is she?”

“You know where.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

I realized, of course, she’d be in the kitchen complex. The next thing I knew I was walking in the kitchen door. I stood behind Dawnrider, who sat at the table, braiding her hair in a mirror.

“I thought you were going to meet me,” I said.

She looked at me in the mirror. “We’ve met, haven’t we?”

In the mirror I saw Winston behind me. I turned but he wasn’t there. When I looked back, Dawnrider was gone. I was alone in the kitchen. I didn’t want to be alone.

“Ishmael!” It was Marigold. “Come here.” Her voice was melodious, and echoed, reminding me of the banshees wailing on the wind that Nani had pointed out to me when I first came to Drop City. Marigold was in a white bathrobe, as I’d seen her wear coming out of the Drop City bath numerous times, still dripping, barefoot, with wet hair. But now surrounding her was a pure white glow, the kind I’d seen around saints in medieval paintings. I was astounded at her beauty, and shocked at myself for never having noticed it before. I moved toward her. She opened her bathrobe. She had the same body as always, but now I saw it was not a little chunky, but absolutely perfect.

A tinkling. Danu, long, gray hair flowing, stood by the window smiling, ringing several small Tibetan bells, admiring Marigold’s body. He turned to me, made a gesture with his hand, and I heard the words in my mind just as clearly as if he were saying, “If you don’t have sex with that gorgeous woman, I will.”

Ed the Fed burst in the door holding up his middle finger and yelling, “Fuck this shit about money, I’d rather starve than have money, I’d rather starve than talk to those creeps. You can go lick out their assholes if you want, but not me.”

Danu made a face. “What’s his problem?”

I tried to reply, “Don’t you remember, those were his lines in the Christmas play?” But the words wouldn’t come.

Ed the Fed danced and sang, to a rumba beat:

I don’t agree
With any one of you
I don’t even agree with myself
But I do do like to moo.

Something kept flashing in my eyes, distracting me: a mirror, attached to one of Danu’s ankles. I suddenly realized he wasn’t Danu, but the mirrorfoot man I’d met at the Sundance. He flashed a sardonic grin. I drew back, startled, transfixed by his mocking eyes. He did a little dance and turned around, but instead of the back of his head, it was Rabbit, holding the drum he always used to beat down the sun. “Peace, love, joy,” he smiled, then ensconced himself in an arm chair, putting his feet up on the old octagonal kitchen table, where Curly and Clard were playing cards.

“Curly! Clard! Rabbit! What are you doing here? I thought you left Drop City.”

“What do you mean?” Clard replied, in his Kansas whine. “We never left.”

Rabbit waved two fingers. “All blessings.”

Curly held up a teapot. “Want a cup?” I knew there was marijuana in the tea.

Lard was sitting crosslegged on the floor, painting the playing cards.

Curly, Clard, and Lard looked strangely flat, two-dimensional. I realized what it was: “You’re all like your cartoons in The Being Bag.” They were drawn and outlined, each exactly like his cartoon alter-ego in the comic book story that they had published in Drop City’s first year.

Curly—or the Baron—raised an eyebrow and laughed, “Why is a crow like a mimeograph?”

“I’m glad you’ve begun asking riddles again,” Drop Lady said, suddenly standing next to me, wearing one of the funny little homemade skull hats she often wore.

On my other side was Alteresio, and on his shoulder was a crow. “It don’t take long to get hip.”

The crow said, “It sure don’t.”

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” Curly asked me.

“I give up. What’s the answer?”

Curly turned to Clard, who was the cartoon character Cleveland Troothsearch.

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Clard said.

“Neither do I,” Lard, who was now the cartoon Ratsy Eatsit, added.

“Beats me too,” Curly shrugged.

“Why do you ask me a riddle if you don’t know the answer?” I asked, exacerbated.

“I think I know,” Lard put in.

“You mean, you know you think,” Curly objected.

“It’s the same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I said.

“It’s the same opposite thing, and that makes it the same thing,” Clard insisted.

“No it doesn’t!” I argued.

Curly pulled Clard’s elbow. “There’s just no talking to him, is there?”

Drop Lady sighed wearily, “You might be doing something better with your time than asking riddles without answers.”

“If you knew time as well as I do,” Curly replied, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.”

“Stop arguing,” I cried. “You’re just cartoons. You’re not even real.”

“You really know how to hurt a guy,” Alteresio said.

“Maybe you’re the one who’s not real,” the crow said.

Lard combed his hair with a fork. “There’s no reason to separate reality from fantasy any more.” He laid his head on the table and instantly fell asleep.

“YES, THERE IS!” I yelled.

“Oh god,” Clard exclaimed. “There he goes again.”

Curly and Clard lifted Lard, carried him over to the bathtub, which was set in the middle of the kitchen, almost overflowing.

Rabbit, who had remained sitting with his feet on the table, now jumped up, his mirrorfoot flashing, beating his little drum, and crying, “Cacahuate!”

Curly chuckled, “Tat ti tit.”

Curly and Clard dumped Lard into the tub, water splashing all over me and pouring across the floor, while a strobe light flashed it all into stop frames from above.

I looked up. The ceiling had become the Ultimate Painting, filled with hurtling geometric objects and vast spatial contradictions, spinning hypnotically.

I flew through space, infinite in every direction, incredibly beautiful, filled with soaring crystals, stars, and planets. The earth, blue and bathed in clouds, got smaller every second.

Dawnrider, flying beside me, wearing a red bird beak mask, held my hand, smiling, “See, it’s easy.”

“You’re right. It is easy. I feel like I’ve always known how to do this.”

“Yes, you have.” As she flew, Dawnrider danced, with movements that were soothing, calming. “Look, there she is,” she whispered.

Marigold floated before me, hugging the glowing robe around her. As I approached, the robe seemed to vanish, as did my clothes; the world disappeared and we joined in an ecstatic embrace.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

It was Feather Tom, wild-eyed as I’d never seen him.

“I thought you broke up. Sorry.”

He grimaced and plunged a knife into my stomach. I spurted blood. Tom pulled off his face. Underneath was a mirror. The flash blinded me.

I suddenly realized that we were standing on top of the kitchen complex, forty feet above the ground. In the moonlight I could see the circle of art work hanging on the fences surrounding Drop City, the protective circle around it, setting it off from the world.

“Go ahead, jump,” the mirror-faced man urged in a soothing tone. “You won’t get hurt. You can fly.” He began to dance, with strange jerky movements.

I felt sick, vertiginous. My feet gave way beneath me. I was falling.

I awoke back in my dome, feeling torn apart, as if I no longer quite fit into my body. I burst out sobbing. I cried a long time, until I was cried out. I felt like I’d been in an auto accident, shell-shocked, disjointed, as if I were two bodies that didn’t quite coincide. I was glad to be still alive. I loved the world, I loved being in my body. Why did I ever try to get out of it? What was I thinking of? I vowed to myself I would never take LSD or any other heavy drug again.

A knock on my door. It was Marigold.

“I’m depressed.”

“Marigold, I’d like to talk with you, but this is a bad time.”

“Are you going to reject me too?”

“It’s just that I’ve dropped acid. I saw you earlier today carrying your stuff over to the hole.”

“Meg kicked me out. Tom just let her. Why is this is the story of my life? The odd one out. Always the loser. I can’t accept it.”

“Maybe you set yourself up for it.”

“I don’t know how not to. Do you have any more acid? I’ll drop with you.”

“That’s not a good idea if you’re depressed.”

“I’m fine. Where is it?”

“Winston gave me a couple hits of windowpane. They’re around here somewhere.” I rummaged around.

She put one on her tongue. “Dawnrider’s the only one who understands me, and she’s going away. I don’t know what I’ll do when she’s gone.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“Do you love Patt?”

“I think so. I don’t know. I’m very angry at her.”

“I’m very angry at Tom. I’m in love with him. I can’t believe he’d do this to me. I hate him.”

She put her hand on my knee. “Would you fuck me?”

“I can’t do that.”

She slipped out of her dress. “Aren’t I attractive to you? Tom wouldn’t care. I wish he would.” She kissed my neck, shoulders, worked her way down my chest. She looked up. “I want to hurt him.”

I held her face in my hands. “Marigold, this doesn’t feel right. We’ve got to stop.”

I was so deep inside her, I felt I was touching the center of her being.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

“I love you.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

I hesitated. “I’m sorry.”

The pools of her eyes seemed filled with all the sorrow of the world. She quickly slipped into her clothes and, without another word, left. Lightning cracked, followed by a roar, and heavy rain suddenly hammered on the dome.

I didn’t want to be alone. I dressed and staggered down to the complex.

Winston and Dawnrider were there.

“How’s your trip going?” she asked.

“Did you help me out on the dream plane?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Then maybe it happened and maybe it didn’t. Don’t take it too seriously. It was just a dream.”

Outside thunder crashed. Rain poured over the skylight, and into the kitchen through leaks in the roof.

Feather Tom burst through the door, his face contorted in terror. “Marigold shot herself. She’s dead.”

We ran to the hole, but I could barely look. It was a horrible scene, engraved forever into my mind.

An hour later Drop City was swarming with police, the hole cordoned off. We were all beside ourselves sobbing. Marigold had put a rifle into her mouth and shot off the back of her head. The rifle had been left behind by Kentucky Jeethro over a year before, when he fled on the scooter from the FBI. How fragile our lives are. How careful we have to be with each other.

The thunderstorm blew violently against the domes. We all huddled in the kitchen, water pouring through the roof in many places. All of a sudden I remembered that in the insanity I’d forgotten to lock the animals up for the night. I went down to the corral, lightning crashing around me.

The pregnant nanny was giving birth in her stall. Soaking wet, I knelt on the straw and helped separate the kid from the afterbirth, dried it off in a towel. It staggered to its feet, took a few halting steps.

In my mind Marigold’s death and the goat’s birth are forever entwined.

* * *

Next: Part 7: LIVING THE REVOLUTION

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Memories of

DROP CITY

The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love A Memoir by John Curl

LIVING THE REVOLUTION

The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love

A Memoir

by John Curl