A Nation of Mystics

by Pamela Johnson

  A half hour later, Wade and Alison were on their way to jail, tightly handcuffed in the backseat of a white Ford. Sitting in front, “Phil,” the state agent he’d thought was a customer, held a brown manila envelope with evidence—half a lid of marijuana, five hundred hits of LSD, and $120 in marked money. The five kilos were in a bag at his feet.

  He watched as the agent smiled at Bremer. “Nice haul,” Phil said. “The Wiz did okay.”

  “Yeah,” Bremer nodded. “The acid was unexpected. A stroke of luck.”

  Wade, handcuffs cutting off the circulation to his hands, whispered to Alison through pale, trembling lips. “It’ll be alright.”

  But he knew it wouldn’t. He looked once again at “Phil,” introduced to him by … someone.

  Who? He tried hard to remember.

  He studied the narc’s frizzy natural hair and wire-rimmed Lennon glasses, the beads, the blue work shirt and bell-bottomed Levis, the peace symbol.

  How could I have been so stupid? I had a gut feeling about the guy! He’s older than anyone in my circle. He doesn’t fit. Why’d I have to bring this to Alison!

  An hour later, Wade sat in the interrogation room at the police station. The room was bare except for three chairs and a metal table with a tape recorder.

  “Okay, Tillich,” Bremer ordered, “we want it all. Names. Addresses. The lines of communication. And I don’t mean your customers, either. I want the guys over you. I want to know who you buy from.”

  “Just talk right here,” Phil—Agent Phillips—demanded. “Right into the microphone. Tell us who you bought those kilos from. Where’d you get the acid?”

  Wade didn’t answer. No way was he going to inform. You protected your brothers. These were the bad guys, violent men with guns. All he had done was turn people on.

  “What about the girl? What does she know?” Phillips asked.

  Wade fidgeted uneasily and looked into Phil’s face. “She doesn’t know anything,” he mumbled, quickly looking down at the floor again.

  “Now Phillips,” Bremer’s tone was soothing, paternalistic, “I’m sure Tillich here’s going to tell us what we want to know. Just give him a moment.”

  Wade watched Phillips fondling a billy club.

  “Just one name to start, Tillich,” Bremer told him, “and we’ll be able to work something out for the girl.”

  Wade’s breath became more rapid. His heart raced.

  Where is everybody? Where are all my brothers?

  The room was empty, the metal seat cold and hard. These men were huge, mature, powerful. The older one, Bremer, sounded like his father.

  “Before it’s too late, Tillich. Right into the mike.”

  Nothing. Nothing from me.

  For over four hours, Wade sat in the interrogation room—tired, nauseated, the same questions hammered at him over and over.

  “What’s the time?” Bremer finally asked.

  Phillips exhaled cigarette smoke and glanced at his watch. “Almost one.”

  “Yeah? I’m getting more than a little tired. And I want lunch. Let’s wrap this thing up. Let’s see …” Bremer studied the papers in the folder. “Yeah, three hand-to-hand sales. Five years each, that’s fifteen years. And the probation violation … you do remember the suspended sentence you got on that last number, don’t you?” Bremer said, in a cold businesslike voice, his sentences driven home with short, meaningful pauses. “A year suspended, wasn’t it? Now we’re up to sixteen years. The girl—what’s her name? Alison? Alison shares the rest of it with you. There’s the possession of the weed and the acid—add a few more years. Jesus, kid, we’re lookin’ at over twenty years.” Bremer threw up his hands in mock anguish.

  Wade sat in silence, looking at the floor. He was twenty years old, a sociology major dropout. A heavy breath escaped his lips. His stomach turned. He knew the game, knew he wouldn’t do twenty. But even if he did five years, his youth would be gone. All he could see was an endless sea of boredom, pain, slow time, and the routine of dominance, while someone else controlled every moment in his life.

  And Alison? Ali, who always wears flowers in her hair. She’s a nice kid, barely eighteen. Why should she go to jail because I’ve fucked up?

  Suddenly, the paternalistic tone was gone, and with knife-sharp clarity, Wade heard the menace in Bremer’s words.

  “I’m telling you, Tillich,” Bremer said, “a second bust and the judge is going to put you away. You’re a threat to society. A cheap punk who fucks a lot of young girls and destroys minds for bucks. You’re down. I put you there, and I’m going to make sure you stay there. I’m promising you time, Tillich. And I’m going to sleep a lot better at night knowing you’re locked in a cage for the next ten or twenty years.”

  “Right here,” Phillips said for the hundredth time. “Right here into the mike …”

  So easy to give just one name and they would be off his back. Then he could lie down and deal with it all later.

  Agent Phillips stood and slammed the billy club onto the metal table. The sound reverberated, loud and brutal, in the small room. “Let’s cut the shit with this punk! We’re not gonna get anything from him. Let’s go talk to the girl.”

  Bremer sighed as if he’d tried his best. “Alright.” He stood to leave.

  Wade felt himself falter, try for balance. Then he fell, falling down … down …

  “Okay!” he cried to their backs, tears forming. God, he didn’t want to cry in front of these bastards! “I’ll do what you want. Just … just leave Alison alone.”

  CHRISTIAN BROOKS

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  JULY 1967

  The nightmare was just beginning again, and Christian moved restlessly in bed, where he slept next to Amy. The dream had ebbed in the last year. Now, the hands that pulled him toward buildings alive with fire were less frequent, the recurring images of Nareesh running away from him more random.

  “Christian … the phone,” Amy mumbled sleepily into the dark of early morning.

  Usually, no matter how tired he was or how deep his sleep, Christian could always answer the phone on the first ring. But now, the phone sounded far away.

  “Wade Tillich went down,” the voice at the other end said. “He just called for bail. I understand it was sales. Interested?”

  Christian struggled toward reality, recognized the deep voice. Melvin Sparks, the bail-bond agent Lance Bormann had suggested. He looked at the clock next to his bed. Almost 2:00 a.m.

  Wade. He searched his memory. He didn’t know anyone named Wade personally, but he’d heard Mark mention the name, yes. And Kevin, in the Haight.

  “Yeah. I’ll cover it. Let me know when he’s out,” he said.

  “It’s his ol’ lady too.”

  “Bail them both.”

  “Who was that?” Amy murmured.

  “Sparks. I have to go out. Go back to sleep.”

  Quietly, so as not to wake anyone else in the house, Christian slipped into his clothes and left. A few minutes later, he was at a public phone booth. After several rings, Kevin’s voice was a heavy whisper into the receiver. “Hello.”

  “Cancel everything until you hear from me again.”

  A long silence, understanding dawning on the other end of the line. “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Christian called Mark, made two other calls, and gave the same message. Then he went home to wait for Sparks’ second call. It came just after nine a.m.

  “Come on over,” Sparks told him. “You’ll want to hear this.”

  Entering the small outer waiting room filled with people, Christian didn’t even have a chance to sit down. Instead, Sparks ushered him quickly into the inner office.

  “Two hours ago, I went to the police station to fill out the bail forms. Afterward, I drove Alison home. Wade stayed at the station. He didn’t say a word to me. Alison kept asking when I could bring Wade back to the apartment.”

  He held out the paperwork for Christian to se
e.

  “Bail was too low,” he continued to explain. “They call me at 1:30 in the morning and asked to get out, just like a traffic warrant. I paid the booking sergeant this morning. Alison said Wade had a refrigerator filled with acid. The cops took five keys and stash. Some money. That’s a heavy rap. It’s pretty obvious. He’s agreed to turn.”

  “Someone needs to make clear to Wade that it’s important to say nothing in a bust,” Christian told Sparks. “Not a single word. Only a few lines of conversation is enough to hook you. You feel you have to keep explaining. Or even teaching.”

  Sparks briefly looked amused.

  “It’s true,” Christian assured him. “The Man doesn’t want to hear about the Path. And he certainly isn’t going to understand your spiritual experience, no matter how much love you generate. It’ll all be used against you. Cops can make outrageous threats, but a good attorney can do wonders.”

  “You know,” Sparks told him, becoming serious again, “sometimes you sound like you’re involved in some kind of war.”

  Christian nodded. “In a way.”

  “Just be careful. There are always winners and losers in a war.”

  A half hour later, Christian exited the building, leaving an envelope behind on the desk amply covering Sparks’s time. Christian wasn’t overly concerned for his own safety, but he didn’t want either Mark or Kevin to have a problem. And hopefully, neither had ever mentioned his name to Wade.

  Now his mind held one question.

  Where would the Man hit?

  It would be soon, he knew—before word was out that Wade was hot.

  WADE TILLICH AND KEVIN

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  JULY 1967

  At the same time Christian was making his way to the meeting with Melvin Sparks, Wade Tillich was fidgeting, his body on adrenaline rush. Agent Phillips sat to his left in the Berkeley Police Department. Around the table were eight other agents—federal, state, and local. At first, Wade was surprised by the deference accorded Bremer by the federal agents. In the folklore of the underground, the feds and state boys hated each other, yet at the noon briefing, the feds sat in the background, listening intently as Bremer outlined the game plan.

  Suddenly, Wade understood. Everyone in the room was under thirty—except Bremer. Bremer was father to them all. His speech was smooth, mixed with terse phrases, his eyes dark in his tough face. Sometimes, peals of laughter burst through the room at his anecdotes. His delivery carried weight. His decisions were quick, sure, gruff.

  The phone on the desk rang. Bremer was on top of it and soon arguing. “Look, pay him the $150, and if he gives you any trouble about it, I’ll take out his file and remind him why he’s working for us. He’s an informant, for Chrissake. He doesn’t tell us what to do. And if that doesn’t shake his ass up, I’ll enforce the search stipulation on his probation. I’m pretty sure he’d be unhappy about us going through his apartment …”

  Bremer looked up and saw that Wade watched him. Wade dropped his gaze.

  “Phillips,” Bremer said, breaking the phone connection, “you’ll walk in with Tillich. When you enter the house, you’ll be covered.”

  From the window of the unmarked police car, Wade watched the crowd that milled happily around the corner of Haight and Masonic. Only a few seemed to recognize the Man immediately—three white Fords parked on Masonic, one behind the other, two holding men in suits. He sat in the third car with Agent Phillips, Bremer at the wheel, ready to move to a parking space in front of Kevin’s flat. From the startled looks in his direction, he could feel the tremor that ran through the people on the street, sense the message that was being passed along, block after block. “Watch what you’re carrying, man. Narcs on the street.”

  Kevin and his lady lived on the top floor of an old house on Page Street, one block from Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle. Wade knew the couple well. Kevin had been the one who’d bailed him the first time he’d been arrested for street selling—a small amount of weed, earning him a probation sentence from the judge. Afterward, Kevin had set him up with a place to crash when he was broke and hungry and sleeping in a doorway. Slowly, and through his own integrity, Wade had managed to establish a market, find an awesome old lady, and move on.

  Until someone had fingered him.

  Wade walked up the stairs of Kevin’s building, terrified and sickened by what he was about to do.

  Why, he still asked himself. Who put Phillips and Bremer onto me? Why would that person want to ruin my life?

  At the moment, he refused to acknowledge that he was just about to ruin someone else’s.

  From the front peephole, Kevin looked out to the hallway, recognized Wade, and was suddenly furious that Wade had brought a stranger to his home. Christian’s call in the middle of the night had made him jittery and paranoid. Angrily, he threw open the door.

  “Yeah?” he asked, standing in the doorway, his body blocking the entrance.

  “I need to see you, man!”

  Kevin hesitated.

  Wade’s voice rose. “It’s important!”

  No sense in making a scene, Kevin thought disgustedly. He pulled a piece of leather from his pocket, tied his hair back, and slipped into his sandals, ready to deal with whatever was coming through the door.

  “Okay. Come on in. What’s the matter?”

  “You’ve got to help me,” Wade told him. He appeared out of breath, his voice high-pitched. “I need some acid. I got burned in a deal last night, and I’ve got to make it up!”

  Kevin narrowed his eyes. This Wade was all wrong. Where was the brother who dealt righteously? He turned his attention to the stranger with the red hair.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, his eyes piercing Wade’s as he pointed a thumb at the stranger.

  “Phil.” Wade’s eyes slipped to his feet. “This is my friend, Phil.” Fear edged his voice as if it might go either way, into tears or laughter. “Phil’s helping me get the money back before these people come lookin’ for me,” Wade insisted before Kevin could ask more questions. “I need some acid. I need it now, or they’re going to come for me.”

  Kevin felt the Heat. The red-haired dude hadn’t said a single word, but Kevin knew.

  That little bastard! What did they threaten him with?

  Phil stepped into the silence and spoke, his eyes granite. “Look, man,” he took out a cigarette and lit it. “I don’t want to make you uptight, but your friend here’s in trouble. Last night, he lost a bunch of weed belonging to a friend of mine. They said they’d take acid in exchange. All they need is a few hundred tabs to make them happy. Wade said you’d front it until he got the bucks together to repay you. If you can’t, we’ll go somewhere else.” His voice was cool, his expression indifferent.

  “I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kevin said to Phil. He looked into Wade’s anxious face. “Sorry, whatever your game is, I’m not buying into it. Now … I’ve got work to do.”

  Phil scanned the room, searching for something. “You got an ashtray?” he asked.

  “Over there.” Kevin pointed to the low table in the corner.

  Phil’s walk was unhurried. He pulled hard at his cigarette one last time and absently crushed it out next to a half-smoked roach.

  “Come on, Wade. You won’t find any help here. Thanks a lot … friend.”

  Wade’s face was white and stark. “Wait … wait a minute …” he pleaded.

  “No need,” Phil said moving toward the door. “We’ve got all we’re going to get here.”

  “Kevin.” Debbie walked into the room from the back of the flat. Her feet were bare under a long colorful skirt, and her quiet entrance startled the room. “Phone call.”

  “Show these people out, will you?”

  At the tone of Kevin’s voice, her body started to visibly tremble. Only her own momentum carried her to the door, holding it open, and locking it quickly behind them.

  “What’s up?” Kevin asked into the rece
iver.

  Christian’s voice. “Wade and Alison had a visit last night. They’re both out now.”

  From Christian’s first word, Kevin’s skin had become electrified. Every nerve ending tuned to danger. “He was just here. With a stranger named Phil.”

  There was a moment’s pause, as Christian processed this on the other end of the line.

  “I’ll get Mark and Teresa to pick up Alison,” Christian told him. “Get out of there.”

  They had been prepared since early morning—not sure for what, but waiting. Debbie grabbed the paper grocery bag with the stash, some cash, the I Ching, and her sewing threads. She quickly followed Kevin out the back door. They moved down the back stairs, through a board in the backyard fence, through a neighbor’s yard, and onto the street.

  SUPERVISOR DOLPH BREMER

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  JULY 1967

  Bremer picked up the search warrant from the front seat of the car and gave a nod to Phillips. “Let’s go. The back’s covered, and the rest of the squad will be right behind.”

  “You,” he ordered Wade, “stay in the vehicle.”

  Once past the entranceway of the building, Bremer quickly took the steps to the third floor. He raised his gun, standing on one side of the apartment door while Phillips hugged the wall on the other side. “Police!” he shouted, banging on the door with the side of the revolver.

  Without waiting for a response from the occupants, Bremer’s heel hit wood several times before finally striking just right, splintering the lock. He and Phillips entered the front room, one holding his gun high, the other low. Moving carefully through the apartment, fearful, they stood on each side of closet doors, throwing them open, searching any space that might conceal a man. Bremer had a tight, tingling feeling of something not being right. It was too quiet. He looked left and right, staying close to the wall, careful.

  Suddenly, the back door splintered open with a loud crack. Nervously, Bremer swung his gun around.

  “Police!” a voice cried.