After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  But there were other duties and distractions, and this summer the Shanti Sena was operating short-staffed. Although veterans Garrick Beck and Joanee Freedom had arrived from New York, she was hobbled by crutches after a near-fatal car accident, and he was busy looking after her. It wasn’t until a few days later that Barry Adams found himself in Kid Village, looking at a pile of toys on the ground.

  Kid Village was the center of the world for the youngest members of the tribe, a fairytale night-and-day care center. The Rainbows, who prized the qualities of childhood—innocence and unbridled emotion, not to mention an underdeveloped superego—fiercely protected their children. At Kid Village, junior hippies romped in open spaces, fed by their own kitchen, shielded from all-night bacchanalia by the stream that separated them from the main meeting area, by a screen of Christmas-tree-sized evergreens, and by their families’ tents ringing the Kid Village perimeter.

  This year, youngsters played hide-and-seek among the trees and tangled themselves in a homemade spiderweb jungle gym. But now, the Shanti Sena were learning, the web might have sinister overtones. A man, perhaps the one Adams had heard about earlier, was spotted hanging around nearby with these action figures, talking to the kids. “It just feels funny.” Adams heard the same kind of talk as up in the parking lot. “This dude has no kids of his own, but he’s hanging around here a lot.”

  Barry Adams picked up a four-inch, hard plastic Obi-Wan Kenobi figure still in its sealed plastic wrap and turned it over and over in his hands. These weren’t scuffed-up castoffs; each one looked to be worth a few bucks. He asked parents at Kid Village to alert him if the man was seen again. Anyone might be welcome at the Gathering, but not to harm children. The question had suddenly become pressing: Who was handing out these mysterious gifts, and at what price?

  Adams and Buffalo were finishing breakfast around a Sunday morning campfire when another Rainbow man approached. “I hear you’ve been looking for the fellow passing out stuff to the kids,” he said.

  “We’re interested in talking to him, yeah. What do you know?”

  “He’s up in Bus Village. I saw him with the Taylor boys on his bus, and I told him he had to leave. But he’s still there.”

  This was serious news, not only because it pinpointed the mystery man’s location, but because one person unilaterally forcing another from the Gathering breaks one of the few rules of the rule-resistant Rainbow Family. Adams at first condemned the informant’s actions, but then realized he couldn’t ignore his information.

  “We better go up to Bus Village and see what’s going on,” he told John Buffalo.

  Folks who drove to the Gathering in mobile homes of any kind could choose to stay in them through the week, only semi-roughing it in Bus Village, which this year was nearly an hour’s trek uphill to a ridge overlooking Main Meadow.

  “I can’t stop thinking about the dude John Wayne Gacy,” Adams said to Buffalo as they walked, referring to the infamous Chicago serial killer who dressed like a clown to entertain the neighborhood children.

  En route, the two men met another friend, who was carrying her camera. In the absence of weapons, the Shanti Sena had learned that photos proved useful, so they asked her to join them. The three had reached the top of the path when they heard the sound of an engine. Coming into view of the parking lot, they saw a blue converted school bus revving its motor. The trio drew nearer and spotted a vaguely familiar figure at the wheel, so they ducked around to the front, cutting off the bus’s escape route. From this closer vantage, Adams and Buffalo looked at each other in dismay.

  “Oh, man,” said Barry Adams. “That’s Jose Antonio Ramos.”

  “I know this dude from Michigan,” John Buffalo said. “And he’s up to no goddamn good.”

  John Buffalo was one of a handful of Rainbow Shanti Sena who had a history with Jose Ramos, starting three years earlier at the 1983 Michigan Rainbow Gathering. On one of the last nights of those festivities, Buffalo found himself in the main supply area closest to the road out of camp, standing guard over a dark-haired, disheveled Ramos as the rest of the Shanti Sena Council assembled.

  Shunning a central authority, Rainbows only took action by consensus, so at Gatherings every decision—no matter how small—required a council. Bigger councils often numbered in the hundreds and they took hours, sometimes days, before agreement was reached. Moving around the circle, one speaker at a time held a feather or shell—a rock off the ground would do—and no one could interrupt until the sacred object was finally passed on. But on this starless, overcast northern Michigan night, a core circle of Shanti Sena members crouched on logs around the fire pit, and there was no need for a feather to keep order. This group had known each other for years. Well-spoken, urbane Garrick Beck, one of the first organizers, was a renowned Rainbow figure with deep roots in New York’s counterculture movement. Calm, measured earth mother Joanee Freedom, another New Yorker, recognized the man being watched by John Buffalo from the streets near her home in the East Village. Dave Massey, a relative newcomer to the Shanti Sena, just sat quietly and listened.

  Carla Breen had summoned the group together, despite the late hour. Days earlier a distraught mother had left the Gathering abruptly, claiming this man had “messed with her kid.” But that wasn’t enough to go on, until a twelve-year-old boy had come to Carla to report another incident. The boy was in a sleeping bag in Kid Village, when Ramos lay down next to him, reached into the child’s bag, and touched him. It was unclear from the boy’s account whether the advance had been sexual.

  “I pretended to be asleep,” the boy went on, “and he finally took his hand away.”

  “Could you have been mistaken?” Carla had asked him gently. The boy looked her straight in the eye, and she believed him. He wasn’t hysterical and he wasn’t terrorized. He just didn’t like what had happened.

  “What he did was wrong,” he said.

  Carla agreed, and she grabbed Ramos the next time she saw him coming back into the Rainbow camp late at night from a trip to town with Saxophone Sonny, a New York street musician who was Ramos’s traveling companion. She had both men sit with John Buffalo to wait while runners went out through the various camps to gather the Shanti Sena. As the group straggled in and learned why they were meeting, reactions were wildly mixed, from “String him up!” to “Healing crystals!” In 1983, the Rainbow Family, as much as the outside world, was just learning about the prevalence, indeed the very existence, of child molesters. Around the fire pit, the vibe of tolerance and acceptance that characterized the Family now clashed with moral outrage and disgust. Finally John Buffalo brought the man over for the council to begin.

  “What were you doing with this boy?”

  “Why would you put your hand on a child?”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

  Ramos seemed surprisingly unfazed as he faced more than a dozen accusers, like it was almost a big joke to him.

  “Oh, c’mon, I didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” he said. The collection of amulets and colored pins that hung from his worn black vest jangled as he raised his hands in a what’s-the-big-deal gesture.

  “It was all a misunderstanding, just a mistake.” He’d found this tent, he was cold, he stumbled in and fell asleep next to this kid. “It was no big deal. I was just trying to keep warm.”

  “This kid said you put your hand in his sleeping bag. That you touched him.”

  “Naw, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. What’s the big deal?”

  “It is a big deal,” Carla said. “This is really serious. You might not have hurt him, but you can’t even play around about this kind of thing.” Even for a Rainbow Gathering, this man’s affect was odd, out of place, like he was detached from the scene and any sense of personal responsibility.

  “People are always mistaking my sense of humor, and it gets me in trouble. I wish they would just understand me. Remember, Sonny”—he turned to his friend sitting nearby
—“it was like that in Palm Beach? And the same with that Etan Patz thing, remember?”

  There was an audible gasp from Joanee Freedom. Later she took Carla aside and explained. “That’s that famous missing kid from New York. If he’s mixed up in that, it’s serious shit.”

  Still in the circle, Ramos tried a different tack. “You’re going to make me a victim, too,” he said, and finally one woman took his hand as if to soothe him. This was the Rainbow way, to heal instead of judge. The people around this campfire had all been victims of bigotry and preconceived notions for the way they lived their lives. And if others at the circle weren’t in a healing mood, there was still no evidence of a crime.

  “We’ll give you a choice,” Carla told Ramos. “We want your word you will not go near a child here again. By rights we can’t force you to leave, but if you stay, you must agree to be walked.” It was glorified babysitting, an oft-used technique, especially effective in domestic disputes. If he chose to remain, Shanti Sena would stick by Ramos’s side around the clock through the rest of the event. Ramos looked contrite and said he wanted to stay.

  “You’re my family now,” he said. “You’re the only family I have. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  John Buffalo started the first shift, watching over Ramos until morning, to keep him from disappearing back into the crowd. In the morning, when Ramos announced he’d changed his mind and was leaving, Buffalo walked the man out of the Gathering, gave him some loose bills and a look of disgust, and left him on the side of the highway.

  Back in New York later that summer, both Garrick Beck and Joanee Freedom would run into Ramos in the East Village. He peddled his salvaged wares on Second Avenue, one of the area’s many makeshift street vendors who laid their goods out on blankets off St. Mark’s Place. Ramos’s large white Akita, Jesse, attracted passersby, especially the children.

  Beck would pass him on the street on his way home from work, and they’d nod companionably or say hello. Beck didn’t make the connection to the fireside council in Michigan. One day, Ramos pulled him aside.

  “You’re a spiritual guy, I know.” Ramos leaned toward Beck. “Do you ever hear voices?”

  “No,” Beck replied, going for the joke. “Maybe you’ve heard me described as visionary or something, but not visions. Not like that. Why?”

  “Because I hear voices sometimes.” Ramos had a confiding tone. “I try to resist them, but they tell me to do bad things.”

  Beck was stumped. He didn’t know whether to laugh it off or try to say something visionary. He said the first thing that came to mind.

  “Well, you appear to be a strong person, who can speak well for himself. Talk back to those voices, and tell them to leave you alone.” Ramos seemed to accept this counsel and went back to leaning against the parking meter next to the ragged cardboard sales counter. Beck didn’t think much about the incident as he walked home. New York was filled with characters. He prided himself on being one too.

  Two years after their first encounter in Michigan, Ramos found his way to the 1985 Missouri Gathering, but his presence wasn’t immediately apparent. Instead, the Rainbow Family confronted a different threat to their children when a teenage girl was sexually assaulted by someone else in the early days of the celebration. This time they convinced the girl’s parents to bring charges. Ever since the Ramos incident in Michigan two years earlier, Shanti Sena like Joanee Freedom, Garrick Beck, John Buffalo, and now Barry Adams had become informally pegged as the de facto vice squad. The Missouri incident was resolved in a delicate series of maneuvers, as Shanti Sena corralled Rainbow Billy, a.k.a. William Bonine, led him to the edge of the Gathering, and turned him in to the Missouri State Police, who charged him with rape and sodomy.

  Maybe the security force’s resources were diverted by all this, or maybe ten thousand revelers proved effective cover, but no one spotted Jose Ramos in Missouri until the week was well under way. As dawn broke on July Fourth, adults began to assemble in the Main Meadow, hands joined in silent meditation for the Gathering’s capstone Prayer Circle. At high noon, the stillness was broken by thousands chanting “Om” in one voice.

  Then, as every year, worshipers heard high-pitched laughter and childish singing punctuated by horns and drums. The Kid’s Parade swarmed onto the meadow, where children with elaborately painted faces, draped in flags and feathers, giddily signaled the meditation’s end.

  Amid the noise and spectacle, Joanee Freedom spotted someone whose large aviator shades and rainbow-bedecked, wide-brimmed hat enveloped most of his face, but what was visible looked suspiciously familiar. This time Joanee had a camera. She tried to maneuver around, to see him clearly and take his picture, but he kept turning away. Joanee’s friend Stephen Principle watched her moving erratically.

  “What are you doing?” Stephen asked her. Joanee explained, and Principle walked over and put his arm around the man, turning his body toward Joanee for a clearer look.

  His hair was longer and his beard was thicker. He’d been calling himself Michael Rainbow. But it was Jose Ramos, his face covered by the hat and the oversized shades. Joanee raised the camera as he moved his head away again.

  “Stand still and look at me,” she told him, pointing and clicking.

  “I don’t like my picture taken.” That was a common refrain among the Rainbows and it was usually respected. But there were times the Shanti Sena reserved the right.

  Ramos turned his head. Stephen Principle tightened his grip on the man’s shoulder and turned his head back to face the camera.

  “I don’t like my picture taken either,” Principle said. “It’s a special day, though, so smile. The two of us are taking our picture together.” For the rest of the Gathering, Ramos was walked. Joanee passed the picture around as a warning, then filed it away with her other Gathering memorabilia, a matter of Rainbow record.

  A year later, in 1986, two months before Barry Adams and John Buffalo would come upon Ramos at the Pennsylvania Gathering, he showed up at an annual New York Central Park Picnic. Joanee Freedom wasn’t there—she was recuperating from her car accident. But there were other folks who knew to watch out for Ramos, including Dave Massey, one of the group at the Michigan council back in ’83. Instead of demanding that Ramos be walked, Massey, a slight man with a quiet intensity, sat back and observed him, unnoticed, until the crowd of children surrounding Ramos seemed to swell in numbers, growing louder and more boisterous. Massey suddenly had the uncomfortable sensation he was watching the Pied Piper. Hoping to avoid confrontation when the kids were nearby, he began talking softly to individual parents, and little by little they removed their children from the mix. Finally Massey moved closer, with a mental image of herding his prey. Now he wanted the man to notice him, and Ramos did. As Massey came within arm’s length, Ramos picked up a weighty oak table leg from a nearby pile of garbage and made a threatening gesture. Massey stopped, but didn’t retreat.

  “It’s important that you come sit and do some business,” Massey said quietly. “There’ve been some things said, some accusations leveled. Why don’t we straighten these things out?”

  They stared at each other for a long minute. Massey calculated Ramos had the reach to move forward and swing at him. For his part, the smaller man didn’t step in to risk getting his head cracked open. Finally, Ramos backed away and left the area.

  Later that day, Massey sat up on a hill with a friend and watched the hundreds of people blissfully dancing to an impromptu band in the late afternoon sunshine. “The problem is,” Massey said, after he’d told his friend what happened, “this brother sure seems like bad news, but who really knows if he’s done anything wrong? We just don’t have the evidence.”

  Dave Massey hadn’t yet arrived at the Pennsylvania Gathering, but in the parking lot, both John Buffalo and Barry Adams had no trouble IDing Jose Ramos, both from Buffalo’s personal encounters with him and from the old photos the Shanti Sena had passed among themselves, their version of a mug shot. Now the engine of
Ramos’s converted school bus was idling, ready to take off, but Adams and Buffalo stood in front of it.

  “Open up, Jose,” Barry Adams said as he banged on the door. “We’d like to talk with you.”

  The door folded in slowly to reveal Jose Ramos, his hands clenched on the wheel, looking ready to bolt. Click. Once again, a camera caught his defiant expression, as the woman who’d accompanied Adams and Buffalo moved in for a close-up. In the three years since Michigan, Ramos had transformed his look into the full-blown hippie prophet, with flowing, matted beard and hair that blended together in the dim light, obscuring most of his face. A red beret hung over sullen eyes.

  Adams’s words were friendly enough, but the acid tone made his displeasure clear. “Brother, are you the one with these Star Wars figures we been seeing all around? You been giving them out to our kids?”

  Ramos mumbled inaudibly.

  Adams tried again. “Hey, I heard tell that you’ve been with our kids, which is against our agreement. You remember that agreement you made not to be with our kids?”

  “Oh, no, no.” The denials were clearer. “No, I haven’t been with any kids. Everything’s cool.”

  There was a scuffling noise from the back of the bus.

  “What’s that?” Adams stiffened. “Who’s back there? Come on out.”

  Adams and Buffalo craned their heads around to look inside the dark recesses of the bus. A small shape emerged and took focus, seven-year-old Billy Taylor.

  Out of the thousands of Rainbows gathered here, Adams just happened to know this boy well. The curly head moved forward into the brighter front space, squinted his blue eyes against the light, and acknowledged his parents’ longtime friend.

  “Hey, Plunker,” he said.