The Nirvana Blues (2 page)

Another dozen motels and hotels had been added to the plethora of tourist havens that had inundated the town even before the resort and gambling complex made it onto Indian land. At the famous Cipi García Dynamite Shrine and Hot Baths, several new bathhouses and dining rooms were built to accommodate the added influx of pilgrims, thrill seekers, tourists, religious fanatics, big-game hunters, and Winnebago pilots who had flocked to the town ever since a miraculous explosion on the brink of the Great Depression had unearthed the fabled hot baths, spawned the Dynamite Shrine, and become the foundation of a tourist-oriented development that had eventually dispossessed most of the native, and largely Spanish-speaking people of Chamisaville during the American-style commitment to what amounted to cultural genocide.

In 1970, nearly forty art galleries, most of which sold western shlock, had been scoring a fortune in Chamisaville: eight years later, you could look up almost seventy galleries in the local phone book, as an accelerated middle-class in-migration occurred to completely change the sociological patterns of the once-lovely valley. The water table was down, Chamisaville's GNP was up, and monoculturality was spreading like a white fungus.

Chicanos die hard, and by the mid-seventies a few of them still populated the valley, hanging on to tiny plots and scuffling a living by the skins of their aching teeth, while praying for some kind of revolutionary rain that might bring about salvation in the face of the rapacious juggernaut overwhelming the valley, chewing it up, macadamizing its alfalfa pastures, concretizing its orchards, prefab-housing its galleries of native sunflowers, expanding its ski valley and polluting its creeks, and in general thoroughly pizzafying its ancient and powerful spiritual estate.

The odds were stacked against the locals, however. For yet one more restless, moneyed, and educated generation out there was on the prod, seeking solace in flight, searching for yet one more mecca to explore, exploit, and exhaust, before moving nervously, irritably, on.

In the thirties, Steinbeckian Okies in Guthriesque droves staggered dispiritedly from the Redwood Forests to the Gulfstream Waters. In the fifties, Kerouackian beatniks tugging on cheap Tokay behind the wheels of battered convertibles created lives that were just one endless run-on sentence after another. In the sixties, Tinkertoy revolutionaries long on rhetoric but short on historical perspective played the universities and ghettoes from coast to coast for suckers, and then burnt out early. And now, as the seventies ignominiously wound down, the privileged, ersatz revolutionary darlings of the Great White Wounded Middle Class hit the road in search of a different meaning for their comfortable, meaningless lives.

*   *   *

A
VAST ARMY
of incoherent pilgrims had descended on Chamisaville, outwardly uninterested in the town's evanescent tourist-oriented delights, but intending, rather, to “Settle Down.”

Sprung from incongruous though usually middle-class origins, they filtered into diverse and unprecedented careers in their new home. Microbiology PhDs showed up driving Karmann Ghias: two weeks later, wearing bib overalls and sandals, they had become sensational potters who ran Gestalt therapy groups on the side, piloted rattletrap '52 Chevy pickups, and left town twice yearly to attend Bangkok acaleph conferences, or symposiums in Ordway, Michigan, on the life cycle of the cinnamon teal. Joycean scholars, former Ivy League professors, arrived almost hourly, their families crammed into Volkswagen Beetles: immediately, they invented better hydraulic log-splitters and were soon inhabiting handmade hogans, eating nothing but rose-hip tea and roasted piñon nuts, and selling firewood, mail-order, to citizens in Cleveland and New York City. Stockbrokers, eschewing messy suicides, chose instead to become plumbers and electricians in Chamisaville. High-class Saint Louis sandalmakers became waitresses at the recently constructed Cosmic Banana Café, took ballet lessons from a onetime Boston physical therapist for the mentally retarded, did yoga on the side, and were constantly canvassing town for good yogurt-starter. Migrating by the hundreds, would-be poets and novelists were soon tending bar, dealing dope, buying Safeway lettuce with foodstamps despite bitter memories of the UFWOC boycotts, working for less—in the Dynamite Fetish factory—than even the natives were willing to work for, outmuscling local teachers for Headstart jobs, or applying to CAP for rabbit-breeding project funds. And soldiers of fortune, once Ibiza bar managers or Las Vegas croupiers, who suddenly found themselves hopelessly trapped in a Chamisaville traffic jam, established photographic laboratories, organic food stores, or garages that specialized in renovating old Bugattis.

On Monday, all the fine valley carpenters, schooled in their trade for centuries, either spoke Tiwa or Spanish. Next day, half the valley's carpenters had graduated from Yale Law or Columbia Medical and were married to brilliant psychotherapists who had decided to be pregnant with a genius for nine months: together, they built their own dream houses.

Trapped in a cutthroat cash economy, old-timers, the impoverished sons and daughters and grandchildren of local residents, could no longer afford building with adobe. When finally losing their land to inflated taxes and unscrupulous developers, they moved into cheap Mutual Help–Operation Turnkey deathtraps, or bought second-hand trailers, renting hookups in Irving Newkirk's park, or in the recently established Groovy Bumpus Trailer Heaven, or in Isiah Kittridge's Trailer Towne. The newcomers, refugees from AT&T, MONY, or Merrill Lynch, Pierce, et al., had excess boodle, and immediately began building elaborate adobe houses boasting circular rooms and turrets, cupolas and bell towers, kidney-shaped patios and all-electric heating. Graduates of Exeter and Reed, Miss Hall's and Goddard, they labored night and day, side by side, constructing sixty-thousand-dollar labyrinthine mud mansions. At the halfway mark, women filed in district court to recoup their maiden names; and the couples celebrated the completion of their exotic adobe palaces by bitterly filing for divorce.

Abruptly, Chamisaville was riddled with young, separated, flatbroke couples juggling their three kids back and forth around the valley in a hurricanelike frenzy of guilt-laden activity whose logistics soon defied comprehension. Peyton Placeism reared its ugly head, as affairs between separated couples cranked up. But here again logistics were near-terminal, as ex-hubbies caretaking two kids patronized the drive-in movie with their best friend's ex-wife and her three children, while his ex-wife and her ex-spouse demolished grasshoppers at the La Tortuga Bar, trying to forget that tomorrow morning those five little monsters were slated to pulverize their own infatuation with sledgehammer blows of infantile bickering.

Deliberate instability, of course, was the name of the commercial game. Divorce is good for capitalism, which likes nothing better than an endless slew of two-house single-family arrangements: double the groceries, double the heating bills, double the automobiles, double the lawnmowers. And look at the windfall for the transportation industries—on the bus visits to Papa, on the plane trips to see Mama!

Things went from bad to worse. Unloading their gorgeous Chamisaville houses at tremendous losses, the ex-husbands and ex-wives were then nailed for income-tax evasion, slipped into dark and devious drug and alcohol addictions, got themselves mugged and raped by sullen teenagers after the Friday night boogies at the La Lomita Dance Hall, and finally gave up, leaving town, heading for Israel to commit suicide in a Golan Heights kibbutz, or hitchhiking to Alaska for pipeline jobs as dynamite blasters, earning eleven hundred a week in a forty-percent mortality rate endeavor, getting their heads straight again, cleaning up their acts, Forging a Fresh Start. They left behind, in the Chamisa Valley, a little more confusion, a slightly bigger mess, the transient, unrealized tatters of their dreams composing the flabby garbage of their brief struggle to achieve a sense of self-worth, an identity … Fulfillment.

*   *   *

E
ACH YEAR
, each month, each week, each day, each
hour,
countless bizarre human beings drifted into Chamisaville. Many of them congregated at the Cosmic Banana, an outdoor café that sold organic alfalfa-sprout-and-avocado sandwiches. While they ate and sipped iced herbal tea at little toadstool-shaped tables, hippie clowns schooled in mime walked a tightrope three feet off the ground between two trees nearby, balancing fluorescent rubber balls on their noses. And a band, containing a sitar, a zither, and a xylophone, played combination hard rock–Elizabethan folk-song music. At night, exotic belly dancers undulated in creamy blue spotlights while diners dreamily harvested mayonnaised cutworm moths from their sandwiches, admired each other's ruby-colored urban gypsy regalia, and talked about building bubble-shaped houses out of pressurized polyurethane. Or they reminisced about peace, love, good and bad karma, yoga, UFOs, Tibet (in the Gold Old Days), Indian jewelry,
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Castaneda's Don Juan chronicles, Charlie Manson, est, far-out sex, soya bread, vitamin C, motorcycles, solar heat, and grow holes.

Somehow, word had gotten out that Chamisaville was the in place to go to for religious, spiritual, sexual, and organic-gardening kicks. And all at once it was projected hysterically—in the
Chamisaville News,
Chamber of Commerce pamphlets, radio talk shows, drunken bar conversations, laundromat bulletin-board notices, and the town council's weekly meetings—that half to three-quarters of America's hopheaded freakdom (howling, bearded, syphilitic, drug- and sex-crazed, dirty, unthrifty, unclean, unbrave, unreverent, uncourteous, unloyal, unawed, unwed, un-pilgrimlike, ungodly, and, worst of all, unrich), having declared Chamisaville “Mecca West,” was planning to descend, like a plague of Afro'd and Tattoozied grasshoppers, upon the suffocating irascible burg mired indefinitely in the urine-colored clot of its own rampaging Betterment.

And descend they did in the early and middle seventies: flower children, teeny-Bs, acid heads, burly bikers, road and speed freaks, stone-cold dopers, flatulent gurus, Edgar Cayce disciples, orgone idiots, hang-glider enthusiasts, and other exotic breeds. Appearing almost out of midair, they settled into the preposterous imbroglio already berating Chamisaville's weary denizens. Suddenly, the crowded plaza seemed equally divided between bank examiners from Walla Walla, outfitted in spanking-clean blue or beige jumpsuits, and lanky zonked no-goodniks who only last week had been guzzling egg creams at Gem Spa on Saint Mark's and Second Avenue, Big Apple, USA. The hippies cruised town enfolded in cheap blankets, stars on their foreheads, and Bowie knives strapped to their belts, waiting for some kind of Cosmic Cowboy to materialize and lay a thousand peyote buttons on them. Other newcomers, looking like a cross between Dennis Hopper, Liberace, and an exploding cock pheasant, were corporate executives' sons and daughters fleeing their parents' crass materialistic lives in order to grow horse peas, blue corn, and Nubian goats, and blow their two-hundred-a-week trust-fund allowances on scads of Colombia two-toke, mean Joe greenies, yellow jackets, Lucid Lucys, and whatever else was up for grabs whenever they were up for dropping, copping, snorting, tooting, or popping.

A mimeographed newspaper, brainchild of, and financed by, various bigwigs in the Chamber of Commerce and given away from newsracks in every chamber member business, immediately appeared and hippie-baited in no uncertain terms. It called the influx “unkempt, diseased hordes” whose only reason for living was to pollute Chamisaville's crystalline creeks with their feces, corrupt its children with drugs, co-opt its sacred cultures, tear down its religious institutions, rip off the merchandise in its stores, and make all its virgins, homecoming queens, and choir singers pregnant with children who would be born on the nod and with crippling, narcotic-induced deformities.

Crime leaped: it was all blamed on the newcomers. An odd assortment of anomalies attached themselves to some of the area's less reputable buckets of blood. Bearing names like Fertile Fred, Sam the Man, Garbage Honky, Dunlop Tyres, Indian Louise, and Myrtle the Turtle, these sweat-stained counterculturists stumbled into the bars like a rainbow just released from eighteen years' solitary confinement in a federal slam, immediately ordered beers, and then, outing little tobacco pouches, commenced rolling joints.

Psychedelic communes mushroomed. There was the Bull Frog Farm in the Mota Llano foothills; the Milky Way landed right next door. Buffalo Bill's Ranch sprung up north of Vallecitos; the Purple Piglet Crash Pad materialized on Ranchitos Arriba mesa. Splashed at random across the valley were the Cosmic Consciousness, the Rainbow Village, and Garbage Honky's Castle of Earthly Delights. And the Family of God commune's chief honcho, Bill Dillinger, Esq., arrived in town lounging against the leather upholstery of a chauffeur-driven Rolls, with the intergalactically famous rock groupie, National Velvet, on his tattooed arm.

A queer commune, settled several miles up Chamisaville Canyon, called itself the Duke City Streakers. A dozen men and women pitched three off-white tipis in an abandoned ravine, gobbled alfalfa-sprout-and-honey sandwiches, washed that down with kefir and some Red Zinger tea, stripped to the buff, and started running.

Warming up with a Streak for God, they hit every Sunday service possible, from Bob Condum's evangelical whoopee-do (nailed by a girl with beautiful waist-length strawberry hair who galloped through the noxious tent just as two dozen of Bob's peroxide blond minirobed Saviourettes were garnisheeing the weekly paychecks of a hundred destitute Pueblo natives), to the Episcopal church, where Father Dagwood Whipple was so flustered by the bearded grasshopper thundering through his service rattling a tambourine that he tripped on his robe, tumbled against the lectern, opening a thirteen-stitch forehead gash, and dropped his twelve-pound Bible into the front pew, squarely atop a wealthy parish benefactor's purple noggin.