by Sam Clemens
“Is something wrong,” Sadie asked?
Cosmo sighed. “No, Sades, nothing’s wrong.”
“Yes, Sades,” Laird said, staring at Cosmo, “I believe something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Are you okay, Laird?”
“That’s Lieutenant Lai—” Laird started, but cut himself off when the waitress arrived with the food. She placed two lemon drop shots on the table next to the burgers, and told them they were “on the house.” It was a different girl.
“That’s Lieutenant Laird,” Laird repeated—quieter—when she left. “Sadie, this is a leadership meeting and I’m afraid your role as executive assistant doesn’t qualify you to sit in. Run along now.”
She looked at Cosmo. “You said I could hang out.”
“Dude,” Cosmo said, with extra emphasis.
Laird folded his arms and scowled. “Rules.”
“What am I supposed to do?” she said, ping-ponging between them.
“Go play fucking Cruisin’ USA,” Laird said. “I don’t give a shit. Run along, now.”
She stared at Cosmo. Begrudgingly, he nodded. “We’ll be quick,” he said.
When she was gone, Laird stared across the table with vigor. Cosmo headed him off. “I don’t need any flak from you,” he said.
“The zoo?”
“It’s a nice day!”
Laird leaned forward. “You have a girlfriend, dude.”
“Not officially.”
“Dude!” Laird said, inadvertently smashing his fist into his own french fries. “Pork her all you want, but don’t start going to the zoo and shit.”
“Why not?”
“Because then she’s your girlfriend. And pretty soon she’s going to start thinking she can dictate policy, and next thing you know, you’re going to have to paint the pizza place pink.”
Cosmo looked away and exhaled.
“Women corrupt!” Laird continued. “Have we learned nothing from the Beatles?” He pressed a finger against his skull. “Think, dude. With your head.”
“It’s not like that,” Cosmo said. He put his palms out in a calming motion. “It’s not gonna be like that. You have to trust me.”
Laird stared at him.
“You think I called you here so you could chastise me?” Cosmo asked. There was defensiveness in his words now.
“No. But here we are.”
Cosmo inhaled deeply. “I got a plan,” he said.
Laird pointed toward the arcade games, where Sadie stood and looked at her phone. “Yours or hers?”
“She doesn’t even know about it. You’re the first person I’m telling.”
This calmed Laird a bit. He placed his hands on the table. “Go on.”
“Okay,” Cosmo said, dragging a fry through mustard. “Now that the business is up and running, it’s time to take the next step.”
Laird nodded.
“So check this out. I’m thinking: convent.”
“Hmm,” Laird said, carefully raising his burger to his mouth. “Continue.”
“Well, the way I see it,” Cosmo said, “you and I are ready to get out of these shitty little apartments. It doesn’t make sense for us—owners of a hot new pizza joint and leaders in this, um, religion—to live like that.” He stuffed a handful of fries in his mouth.
“So,” Laird said, “you suggest…convent.”
“Yeah. Check it out: you and me could, like, buy a big house to move into or whatever, but what if we get some place for the whole church? Like a resort or something. A bunch of cabins in the hills.”
Laird nodded. “That sounds very good, Charles Manson.”
“Not like that.” Cosmo waved his hands. “I knew you’d say something like that. No, here’s the deal: these people are committed to us. Time, money, energy, all that. For better or worse, they get off on this shit. What if we can give them something back? Something real.”
“A commune.”
“What if we can give them: an oasis.” Cosmo sat back and let the words sink in.
Laird sat still, eyes locked in a skeptical gaze. “So a commune,” he said.
“No, a convent.”
“An order of priests living together?”
“Listen,” Cosmo said, again conjuring the standoffish tone, “you can doubt this all you want, but everything I’ve touched so far on this has turned into gold. You know that’s true.”
Laird said nothing, because it was.
“Convent sounds better, so that’s what we’ll call it,” Cosmo said. “No, it’s not going to be a hippie commune. We’re not growing our own food. It’ll be a fucking summer camp for adults—that’s what it’ll be—where we all sit around and look at the stars and eat pizza and get drunk. And we have the money to do all of it!”
“Also, fuck each other,” Laird said. “You forgot that. People always end up fucking everyone in these communes.”
Cosmo blew air from his mouth. “You should be so lucky.”
“I should,” Laird nodded. “Okay, Coz, fine. This all sounds great, but as your treasurer, I question whether we actually do have the money for this. Do you know how much a compound in the woods is gonna cost?”
“No. But we have a good deal of cash, and you’re going to find us a plot of land we can afford.”
Laird pointed at himself. “Oh I am?”
“Yep,” Cosmo nodded. “As my lieutenant, I’m tasking you with this job.”
“Shit,” Laird said, sitting back. He crossed his arms and looked across the sparsely attended pub. “You really are a psycho, you know that?”
“I’m thinking big, Laird, which you told me to do, if you’ll remember. You know what else you told me?”
“Yeah, yeah. Adventure,” Laird said.
“That’s right.”
“Fine.” Laird sat with it for a moment, drumming his fingers. “Okay, fine. You’re right, we could probably pull something off if we tried hard enough. But doesn’t this seem like we’re getting a little out over our skis here?”
Cosmo tilted his head. “You’re asking that? Of all people.”
“That should tell you something.”
“We need to give back to the congregation, Laird. These people have given us so much.” He leaned forward and tapped his index finger on the table. “This is a way to make a better life for us and them at the same time.”
“Are you trying to assuage guilt, Coz? Honestly. Is that what this is about?” Laird leaned forward himself. “What makes you think these people even want to live in a cabin in the woods.”
Cosmo nodded. “They will. And they don’t have to if they don’t want to—they can stay right where they are. This is an option, not an obligation.” He looked at Laird. “That goes for you, too. If you want to stay in the dingy studio, go right ahead.” Cosmo Hendricks stood up and looked in the direction of Sadie. “I gotta go,” he said. “But start looking for land.”
Thirty
The proofs of The Book of Cosmography were perfect; pocket-sized tomes in small green leather jackets, with the title printed in gold flake. Laird had inquired about the thin, silky pages found in many bibles, but it seemed no one online stocked such paper. No matter, standard off-white would do. Laird ordered 100 copies for the group.
Since their meeting at the Horse, the convent had been on his mind. It was a bizarre, ambitious, and altogether stimulating proposal, and at Laird’s core, he respected the hell out of it. Throughout this cult process, there had been numerous times when he’d had to drag his friend Cosmo along, like the owner of a prized pony trying to coax his money machine to the track. What Laird hadn’t seen coming is the emancipator leapfrogging his aspirations in such a jarring way; quickly and without warning. The guy wanted to buy a complex in the hills! If that wasn’t going all-in, Laird didn’t know what was. He’d resisted initially—a combination of confusion, shock, and the realization that the idea was a significant escalation of their day-to-day insanity—but when the dust settled, Laird developed a healthy reveren
ce for Cosmo’s move. Here he’d been worried about Cosmo losing his grip on the empire on account of female infatuation—how wrong he’d been! If Cosmo was going to make a mistake, it would be a mistake of aggression, not complacency, and that was a tactic Laird (and his high school football coach) could get behind.
Full speed ahead.
If one began at Pizza by Cosmo, drove north on 28th Avenue, and took a sharp left turn on Canyon Drive and followed Highway 119 along the Boulder Creek—steadily gaining elevation in a series of switchbacks through the gorge—all the way to the top, where the creek is dammed in a reservoir, one would find the town of Nederland. A thirty-minute drive if one is so inclined. Nederland—known to locals simply as “Ned”—is a charming little hamlet nestled in the foothills with a population under 2,000. It was originally settled as a trading post between the Utes and Europeans, and later became known as a place where one could reliably get a glass of box wine at 9 a.m. The people are bearded and keep to themselves.
And if one were inclined to continue on just a bit further, one could stay straight through Ned’s only roundabout and follow a winding road four miles north to the ghost town of Caribou, Colorado. Caribou has a history.
It started as a silver mine in 1870 and burned down ten years later. At this point Caribou was deserted, and remained so until the early 1970s, when things got interesting. A record producer named James William Guercio purchased more than 4,000 acres of the former town of Caribou, dubbing it “Caribou Ranch,” and set out to convert one of the property’s dilapidated barns into a recording studio. Guercio succeeded, and over the next decade lured a number of high-profile musical acts to the property, including Elton John, the Beach Boys and—regrettably—Rick Derringer. Even for artists who weren’t actively recording albums, Caribou Ranch became a beloved destination for rest, rehabilitation, and illicit drug use, and many legends were borne out of the area. One such tale involved Stevie Wonder, who—sensing the solitude and relatively nonexistent traffic on nearby mountain roads—decided he’d like to give driving a try. The blind pianist sat behind the wheel and instructed his personal assistant to tell him where to turn, and—as the story goes—successfully navigated miles of unpaved alpine roads, immediately vaulting him into the top ten percent of Colorado motorists.
Following tradition, the Caribou Ranch recording studio also burned down, in 1985. At this time, Guercio had grown bored with the music industry, and rather than rebuild the compound, he decided to parcel and sell much of the land to Boulder County. The county’s use for it was unclear, though it did have a history of hoarding large chunks of property in the ambiguous name of preservation.
Perhaps the county was facing a budget deficit, or maybe it just got tired of preserving all that land, but whatever the reason, Boulder County decided to put the Caribou Ranch property up for sale right when Laird began looking for their oasis in the hills. There was a notice in the Daily Camera, which Laird read over coffee. The property had sat vacant and generally unused for decades. Through numerous sales, annexations, zoning manipulation, and other real estate fuckery, the total size of the Ranch had been whittled down to 1,600 acres through the years. The County announced plans to parcel the land before selling, so as to widen the pool of potential investors. This was good, because Laird knew they couldn’t afford 1,600 acres, but they could probably afford, say, 50.
He finished his coffee and took a drive west.
It was a charming drive—peaceful and scenic up the winding canyon. Nederland sat at the top of the hill, past the big reservoir and at the exact intersection of hippie and redneck; aging cowboy bars across the street from regional art boutiques. Broken down trucks sat collecting overgrowth next to compost bins. A town completely devoid of planning. Refreshing, in a way.
Laird went through the roundabout. The road snaked north, past the fire station and community center, and into the wild. Five more minutes and he found the turnoff on the left side of the road. Laird navigated the Prius up the dirt path.
The hill sloped up and he found the edge of the property. There were a few flimsy signs posted with vague language about trespassing; Laird parked and stepped over them. Through a tangle of thin brush, past an aspen grove, the land opened up—Laird walked to the edge of an overlook and gazed down. It was dazzling.
It was only a small part of the property, of course, but it was the part Laird had selected to pursue—Zone 16, as identified by the Boulder County Bureau of Land Management and made available to the public in the pre-auction manifest. It was considerably grander than he’d expected. A wide, grassy valley spotted by stream-fed ponds, with ample flat land for building. Black cattle grazing in a gently sloping meadow. Along the far boundary, where the clearing met the forest, was a cluster of buildings. Clearly, the County had maintained the property in its ambivalent reign; this particular plot housed one (of many) collection of structures left over from the sprawling 1970s recording compound, and from where Laird stood, they looked as good as new. A collection of small cabins next to a long building that resembled a horse barn.
The sun peeked out from behind a cloud and its late afternoon light cast a golden glow on the open valley, turning the grass yellow. Above, a bald eagle glided amiably in the wind.
A fucking bald eagle.
Laird tried to resist, but it was impossible not to be overcome with reverence for this place. It was a pristine slice of earth that none of them deserved, and would suit the needs of Cosmo’s grand plans with befuddling convenience. The lieutenant maintained that religion was horse shit, but standing there, overlooking the uninhabited paradise, his cold heart was filled with unintentional, overwhelming spiritual satiation. He saw the truth, then—that it all was connected, humans to each other and to the earth, and to the beasts of the ground and the birds of the sky and the insects in the dirt. A single, clean tear slid down Laird’s left cheek as the grace of the universal sound was revealed to him, and he took a long breath to let it soak through him.
Deeply, he exhaled.
And now, the feeling of a great weight of responsibility. They had these people, Laird knew, and however unexplainable, they believed in Cosmo and the words he spoke. These people would go to extreme lengths for him—they already had. The congregation had been seduced, and from here on out they would do whatever the leader told them. And it was clear then—brightly, cloudlessly clear; to purchase this land would be inviting catastrophe. It was simply too mighty, too convincing. Bringing the people to this slice of heaven in the hills would lead them all to disaster; there was simply no conceivable path to a happy ending if they took a leap and created a “convent,” as Cosmo called it, removed from society and drenched in their false religion. The rhetoric would continue to ratchet up until some tragedy—however unintentional—inevitably happened and ended it all. It was how it always went. He’d seen the documentaries.
Laird turned to walk back to his Prius. He faced the truth head-on: the seduction of this land was too powerful for their group of people. It would legitimize their operation in a completely new and terrible way, and would foster the type of commitment that brings along inherent darkness and inevitable collapse.
But in the meantime? Party!
The land was perfect. Laird patted himself on the back and began to scheme how he’d wrestle it from the bastards in city hall.
Thirty-One
In the rearmost booth at the Horse, Laird spread out a creased topographical map. He leaned above it and put his finger down.
“That’s it,” he said to Cosmo. “Zone 16. Thirty-five acres. It’s perfect.”
Cosmo nodded. “How many buildings?”
“About a dozen. Good shape, too, at least on the outside. We’d have to build still, but there’s some cabins and a horse barn we could convert into a bunk house of sorts.”
“And how much do you think it’ll cost?” Cosmo asked. He leaned over the map to examine.
Laird shrugged. “I’m hoping one-point-five. Two, two-point-five we can
handle. Tough to tell because it’s an auction. If it gets to three mil, we’re S.O.L.”
“We have two million dollars?”
Laird shook his head. “You don’t buy it all at once, Coz. It’s called a down payment. Between the cash on hand, plus pizza revenue and donations we’ll get when we announce the plan…yeah, we can make those payments.” He looked across the table. “Renovation might be significant, though. Those buildings could be shit on the inside.”
“Our congregation stepped up last time we needed construction help,” Cosmo said.
“And it’s only grown since then. Use free labor, that’s the spirit.” Laird looked around the bar. “Where’s your driver?”
“Around somewhere,” Cosmo said. “She’s in a bad mood.”
Laird perked up. “Yeah?”
Cosmo lowered his voice. His eyes shifted quickly, from side to side. “The whole Sadie thing is getting a little stale, honestly.”
“Of course it is,” Laird said. “That’s how those things go. That’s why you avoid them. That’s why when I told you not to date her—”
“I know, I know. I should’ve listened.”
“Yeah,” Laird said. “Now you’re on your own. Good luck.” He folded up the map and slid from the booth. “Don’t piss her off, though. We can’t have you fucking up the harmony of the group.”
“I am the harmony of the group,” Cosmo said.
Laird looked at him. “Sure. Whatever. Meeting tomorrow. We distribute the books and announce the plans for the commune.”
“Convent,” Cosmo said. “Commune has too many Manson family connotations.”
“Sure, right. After that, auction in three weeks.” Laird rubbed his hands together. “That’s when the fun starts.”
Cosmo’s next sermon focused on the convent. An “exciting new opportunity” to “take this wonderful group to the next level.” Unsurprisingly, his words were met with smiles and positive buzz. It seemed a new development was happening every week in Cosmography! How lucky were they to be part of such a dynamic and fast-moving society? The constant progress served as validation for many members—of course they were in the right place if so many big things kept happening. Of course it was real. Cosmo and Laird distributed the copies of The Book of Cosmography: The Way Everything Is (And Why It Is That Way) to robust cheers and a coordinated chant of, “It is written.” Taylor and Jordan were again in attendance, and when Laird called for the offering, he watched them both throw large bills in the hat.
