Passing Through the Flame (66 page)

Now they were only about seventy yards from the side of the ranch drive, and the line of cars their skewed trajectory was cutting across wasn’t gaining ground on them, for they were still doing less than twenty on the rough ground, while Baum had the van up to sixty, barely under control. Sargent felt as if his kidneys were being rammed up his throat.

Twenty yards from the side of the road, and a dune buggy with two long-haired boys and a couple of chicks in bikinis burst out of the pack right by the roadside, cutting them off again.

Baum had to slam on the brakes, wheel to the right, then floor it again. Now they were racing the dune buggy neck and neck alongside the road, with the buggy holding the inside track, the driver hunched over the wheel, the two girls giggling and waving at the van.

Baum’s face was twisted into a snarl, and he was really into the racing trip as the van and buggy dashed straight at the line of cars ahead of them at close to sixty. The stupid fucker’s gonna get us killed! “Veer behind him, goddamn it!” Sargent shouted. “This isn’t Indianapolis!”

Baum screamed something, but he hit the brakes, downshifted, let the dune buggy dash a few yards ahead, then swung around behind it, and they were right alongside the ranch drive; they had reached their objective. But Baum floored it again and finally brought the van to a screeching halt three feet from the rear end of a parked camper, right alongside the dune buggy.

Baum turned off the engine, set the parking brake, and was out of the van making for the buggy almost before Sargent realized what was happening. Sargent jumped out of his side of the van and cut Baum off before he could reach the dune buggy, grabbing him by the arm.

“Cool it!” Sargent barked, whipping Baum’s arm around his back into a half-nelson bring-along.

The blond kid driving the dune buggy had a big grin plastered across his tan surfer’s face. The girls were laughing. “Hey, man, you can really drive that thing,” the driver said approvingly. Then he noticed the murder in Baum’s eyes. “Hey, man, what’s wrong?”

“My friend’s been mixing wine and whites again,” Sargent said amiably. “You know how it is. Isn’t that right, Aaron?” He gave Baum’s arm a quick jerk upward.

“Yeah,” Baum grunted.

One of the girls reached into a paper bag full of food and brought out a bottle of pills. “Have a couple reds,” she said. “Cool out your head.”

“Thanks,” Sargent said, “but we’ve got our own. Have a good day.” And he frog-marched Baum back into the van.

“What the fuck were you doing, Chris?” Baum snarled.

“Cool down. Remember we’re supposed to be peaceful hippies. Get in character.”

“But that son of a bitch—”

“I said cool it. Save it for Sunday when we’ll need it.” Sargent waved his arm at the weapons and ammo in the back of the van.

“We don’t want to attract security cops here, now do we?” he said.

Baum slowly subsided. “Right,” he said. “Guess I got carried away.”

Sargent exhaled, shook his head, and crawled into the back of the van. “Come on, let’s get our gear together and set up a campsite for rendezvous. The troop carriers should be parking now, and I want the flag set up pronto, or we’re liable to have a lot of crazies wandering all over this mob scene out of control.”

He turned and looked directly at Baum, whose face was still reddened with the aftereffects of rage. “And try to remember that
we’re
going to have to keep
them
under control for two and a half days, okay, Baum?”

“Man, this is fantastic,” Ivan Blue said, waving a half-smoked joint and bouncing along on the balls of his feet like a kid at his first sight of Disneyland. “Feel that sun! Dig the vibes! Look at the
people!”

The pack on Barry Stein’s back weighed him down, and the fiery sun had already covered his straining body with a film of sweat, but even so he couldn’t help sharing Ivan’s exuberance. People were emerging from the endless meadow of cars like thousands of rainbow butterflys hatching from metal cocoons.

Girls and women by the incredible thousands in bright bikinis, tie-dyed mumus, jeans and shirts, some bare-breasted, some festooned with feathered boas, cloaks of ancient crushed velvet in peach or red or forest green, long hair flowing as they walked, and in the splendor of the moment, even the plainest and most funkily dressed seemed beautiful.

Boys and men in even greater numbers—surfers with straight blond hair in nothing but trunks, bare-chested longhairs in leather pants, black dudes in elegantly tailored and brightly colored pants suits, men in strange white robes, others in the more familiar saffron robes and shaved heads of the Krishna Consciousness Society, acres and acres of blue denim, pachucos and low riders, bearded bikers in denim vests and black leather, every manner of Southern California bird of paradise.

Joints were being passed around like candy and bottles of wine, and the air was redolent with the smoke, electric with the massed sounds of talk and shouting and laughter. It seemed to Stein as if he were seeing the lost tribes of America bursting forth from the anonymity of their mass-produced vehicles into full open flower. It seemed like the birth of the new age.

“Was Woodstock like this?” he asked Ivan.

“Sort of. But there’s more
power
in the air here. You can see it. You can feel it. Oh, man, it makes you feel like you could do anything you tried to do!”

Even Ruby was grinning like a little kid. She grabbed his hand and held it tight as they threaded their way past the last cars and onto the open fields filled as far as the eye could see with people moving north toward the People’s World’s Fair and the campgrounds like a migration of ecstatic lemmings.

“Have a joint,” Ivan said, handing the one in his hand to a sallow-looking kid in cut-off jeans, who took it, dragged, passed it on with a smile.

“Wow, you’re Ivan Blue, aren’t you?” said a girl in a tie-dyed dress.

“I’m whoever you think I am,” Ivan said, kissing her while the guy with her looked on. “And you’re whoever you think you are.”

“Far out.”

“Right on.”

A biker wearing Satan’s Slaves colors handed Stein a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. He took a gulp of the coarse red wine and passed the bottle on to Ruby, who drank and moved it along into the huge moving crowd.

“Ah, I feel the power!” Ivan roared. “Y’all feel the power?”

Voices around them laughed and shouted, and some heads turned their way.

“It’s the power of love on the march!” Ivan shouted. “Yes, Lord,” he quavered, mimicking a Bible-thumping preacher. “Ah feel the power, it’s with us today!”

“Right on!”

“Yeah, yeah!”

“
Whoo-ee!”
Ivan shouted, breaking up into mad giggles.

They continued north, moving with the flow of the crowd, motes in the human sea and digging it. They passed by a large wire enclosure filled with tents, prowl cars, and men wearing baggy brown uniforms and floppy police caps. Even the rentacops didn’t seem to be a damper on the tastiness of the day; they looked more like doormen in very cheap hotels than the Los Angeles tight-pants-and-boots fascist pig image.

“Don’t look very threatening, do they?” Stein said rather loudly, as much for the benefit of the crowds of people around him as for Ivan and Ruby.

Ivan immediately picked up on what he was doing. “Just a lot of fat old dudes picking up a few days’ pay,” he said in the same stage voice. “You could blow on them, and they’d go away.”

But the sun was shining, and the grass was flowing like the wine, and nobody seemed to be paying much attention.

They passed through the first campsite area, but these campsites were farthest from the natural amphitheater, and this early in the day, few people had chosen to pitch their tents this far from the action. There were only a few widely scattered camps and tents, and one couple balling naked in the grass while the crowds swirled around them.

Looming immediately to the north of this cleared area was the People’s World’s Fair, and Stein could feel the hushing of the crowds as an almost physical force as they approached this unlikely wonderland.

A tall spiraling building, like an immense snail shell or the Guggenheim Museum in New York, painted in crazy day-glo swirls of yellow, green and purple, dominated the area immediately ahead of them. Rows of shacks, tents, tepees, stands, and temporary buildings in bright reds, blues, yellows, greens, and metallic candy-flake colors arced away into the distance on both sides of the psychedelic snail shell. From this angle, they appeared as a great amorphous clutter, since they were all facing inward onto the wide central promenade which ran in a roughly east-west arc along the crest of the small rise that the crowd was ascending like pilgrims to Oz. Across the promenade, Stein could see the tops of two big geodesic domes: one transparent and filled with lush green foliage, the other faceted with silver mirrors and flashing like an immense diamond in the sun.

About midway between the two domes, an electric billboard about a hundred feet long and sixty feet high soared above the ground on steel pylons. The surface of the billboard was a gridwork of thousands of colored light bulbs. Ever-changing patterns blossomed and transformed into each other on this screen—mandalas, exploding geometric shapes, simple cartoons, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and every sixty seconds the words “Welcome to Sunset City” in letters that flashed from red through blue, green, and yellow.

Way off to the right, Stein made out what looked like a huge red Coca-Cola sign, and at the far left end of the promenade, a huge gingerbread construction of interlocking cubes of various sizes and metallic colors dominated the skyline. Stein thought he could see automobiles perched dizzily atop the square spires of the thing, but at this distance he couldn’t be sure.

“I see it, but I don’t believe it,” Ruby said.

“Needless to say, Woodstock wasn’t like
this,”
said Ivan.

“Can you imagine the bread that went into all of this?” Stein muttered. “It’s almost obscene.”

“Jango Beck’s spared no expense to build us a first-class capital city,” Ivan said. “We ought to be grateful.”

“But not
too
grateful.”

Surrounded by the quietly murmuring throngs, they walked up the gentle rise immediately behind the brightly painted snail-shellshaped building. Up close, it proved to be made of spray-painted polyurethane foam, soft enough for people to rip off little chunks of the stuff with their bare hands and pocket them as souvenirs. The once-smooth back of the building was already becoming pitted and scarred at ground level. Ivan ripped off a green chunk of foam, and tossed it into the crowd, shouting, “Green cheese, it’s all made of green cheese!”

They followed the curve of the building to the right, past a large tepee done up in Indian signs, and emerged onto the crowded promenade almost directly across from the huge computer-animated billboard; Stein noticed a sign above the entrance to the snail shell identifying it as the Poster Palace.

Most of the people on the broad dirt avenue were slowly wandering along, drinking in the many sights, but about twenty people were sitting in the dust in front of the electronic sign, staring up at the ever-changing patterns in a psychedelic haze, obviously already tripping on acid. As Stein watched, three young girls, one of them bare-breasted, their eyes already trapped, sat down in the dirt without for a moment taking their eyes off the rippling patterns of light. Stein wondered how many people would be worshipping at the shrine of the electric god before the festival was over. And whether it would be possible to reprogram it as a giant message board once they had seized control of Sunset City.

Ruby pointed to a large geodesic dome filled with trees, vines, plantings, free-flying birds and brachiating monkeys. “They’re supposed to have set up the People’s Forum near the Ecoenvironment Dome,” she said. “Let’s get over there and get rid of these packs.”

They angled their way across the promenade, brushing bodies with dozens of people on the way, many of whom laughed, or smiled, or touched their shoulders or rumps, and by the time they had reached the other side of the dirt avenue, Ivan had another joint in his hand and Ruby was holding a quarter-full bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine. It was one immense party, a California Mardi Gras.

They walked west along the north side of the avenue, past the billboard, a candlemaker’s tent, a stand displaying tie-dyed clothing, a lean-to where a girl in a bright red dress was body-painting a nut-brown naked man with a gray beard, a couple of jewelry stalls, a tarot-card reader, an astrologer’s tepee, and a strange black shack with an unmarked entrance through which a flickering strobe was visible.

Finally, they reached a huge square canvas awning over a low round stage surrounded by hundreds of plain dingy cushions. A sign above the entrance to this pavilion read PEOPLE’S FORUM—EVERYBODY WELCOME. A series of tents surrounded this area on three sides with smaller signs over their entrances—MIMEOGRAPHY, MEDIA, PEOPLE’S ALLIANCE, SUNSHINE CONSPIRACY, MILITANT STUDENTS’ ACTION COMMITTEE, SDS, ACTION COORDINATION. At this early hour, the speaker’s area was empty; the place seemed newly set up and half-deserted.

“Dis mus’ be de place,” Ivan said, and bounded into the area toward the Action Coordination tent, which was the code name for the Revolutionary Action Committee headquarters.

Inside the tent were five cots, two folding tables, a dozen folding chairs, two kerosene lamps, and an old mobile blackboard on wheels. Dick O’Brian was sitting on one of the cots with a thin girl in jeans and an old army shirt whom Stein didn’t recognize. Rod McAllister was chalking a rough sketch of the festival grounds on the blackboard and sharing a joint with a long-haired guy in a Daffy Duck T-shirt.

“Ivan, Ruby, Barry, this is Chick Day,” McAllister said.

“The fabulous Rubber Duck himself?” Ivan said, grabbing Day’s hand in a Movement handshake. “Pleased to meet you, as one rip-off artist to another.”

“Yeah, right,” Day said without much enthusiasm.

Rubber Duck was the world’s largest record pirate—they reputedly had four vans full of the latest taping equipment, dozens of concealed mike setups that the CIA would’ve been proud of, and their own record pressing plant somewhere in New Mexico. Stein could well understand why Day wasn’t so pleased at being recognized. He could also well understand why Rubber Duck would show up at Sunset City in force.