A Nation of Mystics

by Pamela Johnson

  “What the hell’s going on?” Bremer muttered to no one in particular, his gun hand shaking badly. “Where the fuck are they?”

  Several more officers entered through the front door.

  “There’s no one here!” someone called.

  “There has to be. Keep searching!”

  “They may have gone out the back.”

  “The back?” Bremer’s voice carried through the apartment. “I ordered the back door covered. Where the fuck were you, Neilson?”

  “We couldn’t get through a crowd of freaks on the street.”

  Bremer’s plan had indeed included having two agents cover the back door while the rest of the squad entered through the front. But when the order came to move in, the two backup cars were having their own problems. A crowd had gathered with music and flowers beside the police cars.

  Listening intently to the radio, the men in the cars appeared to be unaware that the spontaneous party on the sidewalk was for them. At Bremer’s command, they had stumbled through the car doors, only to run into the beat of conga drums and dancing. Blocked, the agents began to push and shove their way through the crowd, only to find that it moved with them.

  Alarmed, one agent ran back to the car to call for backup. Within minutes, vans pulled up, spilling out police wearing blue helmets and riot gear, carrying billy clubs and tear gas. The crowd around the cars slowly melted away, sifting into the usual Haight Street scene, frustrating the police, who could not tell where one group began or ended.

  Even as the agents finally secured the back of Kevin’s apartment building, the tactical squad was still milling aimlessly.

  Bremer controlled his voice. He turned to Phillips. “Where’s the dope?”

  Phillips held the ashtray out to him.

  “There’s nothing in the house,” one of the local officers announced as the men began to gather in the living room. “It’s clean.”

  “Go through it again,” Phillips ordered nervously. “There has to be something. How would they have had time to gather everything and get out?”

  A small light in Bremer’s mind began to glow. There wouldn’t be anything. “Get Tillich in here,” he ordered Phillips. “Now!”

  Phillips hurried out and returned a few moments later. “He’s gone,” he said. “He took off.”

  “Call the department. Have them pick up the girl—Alison.” A set up. “You said there was a phone call?” Bremer asked Phillips.

  “Yeah. Just as we were leaving.”

  Tipped off. Bremer suddenly knew. Who tipped him? It wasn’t Wade. He was too stupid, had too much to lose. No balls.

  Corbet? Corbet, who was always looking for a way to get even. Corbet, who thought he had his surly anger hidden? No. Not this time. The stakes weren’t high enough.

  Somewhere, there was a leak.

  Maybe even in the Berkeley Station.

  I don’t know who made that phone call, Bremer promised himself, but I’ll find out. It might take time, but eventually, I’ll find out.

  CHRISTIAN, KEVIN, AND AMY

  BERKLEY, CALIFORNIA

  JULY 1967

  The Pot Luck restaurant, located in Berkeley near San Pablo Avenue and Channing Way, boasted a French menu and a formidable wine list. Christian glanced at his watch, his attention not only on the people at his table, but also on Wade and Allison’s escape from the Bay Area and California.

  As the meal ended, Debbie placed a hand on Christian’s arm. “Thanks again for the warning, brother. If it hadn’t been for you, we’d be spending this evening differently.”

  “We’re family,” Christian smiled easily, pulling a carnation from the vase on the table and handing it to her. “We need all our people free to throw the balance our way.”

  “I don’t think they have much on me,” Kevin said hopefully. “A phony surname. No sales. No product. I’ll just … take a vacation ‘til things cool down. Stay with some friends in Hawaii for a few weeks. My landlord’s pissed as hell about the damage to the apartment. He said he’d collect my paintings.”

  Christian watched as Kevin’s body seemed to slump, something more than the stress of the day.

  “Anything wrong?” Christian asked.

  Kevin was wondering at that moment whether he should confess that he’d mentioned Christian’s name to Wade only two weeks before. A single, stupid moment of bravado. Now, confronted by his own ego, he closed his eyes. Why had he tried to subtly put Wade down by describing how connected he was with the Brotherhood? After everything Christian had done, how could he repay him by telling him he’d put his freedom on the line?

  “I was just thinking of Wade. What a waste.” Suddenly, Kevin was grinning. “What I wouldn’t have given to see Phil’s face when he’d discovered Wade had split from the police car.”

  “Phil was the only agent who saw you, wasn’t he? Grow a beard. Let some time pass and memories dull. Tomorrow, the first thing I’ll do is put Phil’s name and description out over the grapevine.”

  Amy looked at Christian, saw the determination in his eyes, and worried. He saw dealing as some kind of war—the people of vision pitted against the elements of darkness.

  “Where’d you get Wade and Allison that set of IDs?” Kevin asked. “Debbie and I could use a set.”

  Christian thought back to the meeting he’d had with Joe O’Brian, the investigator, a few hours ago. Lance Bormann had been right. Joe was smart, committed, professional, and a good source of fake identification.

  Moreover, he was a conscious brother, enlightened. Since meeting some weeks ago, the two men had tripped, the bond between them strong and growing. Joe had gone out of his way to come up with Wade’s IDs in a couple of hours because Christian had asked.

  “I’ll need passport photos,” he told Kevin. “We’ll put it together when you get back.”

  Once again, Christian checked the time on his watch, anxious for Wade and Allison to be out of the area. “What time is their flight to Miami?”

  “Midnight. From Reno. Who’s taking care of Sparks now that they’ve jumped bail?”

  Christian picked up the check and laid several bills beneath it. “I am.”

  Regarding Kevin’s disquiet, he smiled. “Don’t worry. You have a great time in Hawaii. Ready to get to the airport?”

  “I owe you big time,” Kevin said, taking his hand.

  “We both do.” Debbie hugged him. “Thank you, Christian.”

  By midnight Christian was back in his living room looking out over the Bay. The night was clear, the fog still holding over the ocean. White lights dappled the land like jewels on black velvet. Above the Golden Gate, a full moon polished the water an iridescent blue-black. He toked on a jay and reached over to rub his hand along Amy’s leg.

  “Close,” he murmured to her. “It was so close.”

  “We lost five hundred doses when Wade got popped.”

  “It’s okay. Those tabs will still make their way back into the scene. With Wade gone, the cops will sell them for pocket change.”

  “You’re going to owe Melvin Sparks the rest of the bond money.”

  “It’s only about three grand. But you’re right. When everything’s added up, Wade will have made an expensive error.”

  Christian mentally went over the financial books. For the first time in weeks, he remembered Lisa’s share off his deals with Bob. One of these days, he was going to have to take care of getting it to her. She might leave the ashram and really need it.

  “I love you, Christian,” Amy whispered close to his ear, touching his earlobe with her tongue. “You took care of everything, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he said softly, already drifting into the warmth spreading in his body, ready to forget the day and feel only her soft caress. “It wasn’t me. We were protected by the Light. And as long as we hold to right purpose and right thinking, the Light will be with us.”

  MARCIE AND KATHY

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  JULY 1967

&n
bsp; Marcie and Richard were really high as they stepped into the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. A few hours ago, they had tasted a new sample of Owsley’s White Lightning. Marcie breathed in the rich smell of warm, humid air, mixed with the scent of soil and vegetation. The room was pulsating, breathing with life, every plant a utopia of shifting shape and color and texture.

  “Look at this one!” Richard exclaimed loudly, kneeling beside a small blossom that moved and sparkled with dozens of pink hues. His cry held such enthusiasm that other visitors gathered round them as they stared at the tiny flower. Perplexed, people slowly edged away, not quite sure what it was the two of them saw in the rather ordinary looking blossom. But then, the pair themselves looked rather strange—red-faced, with broad grins, on their knees, intensely concentrating on the small plant.

  Richard and Marcie left the conservatory, laughing hysterically, and stumbled to the Steinhart Aquarium. Pressing their noses to the glass, they watched glittering fish multiply into brilliant interweaving patterns, exploding through green liquid. Then, arms around each other, they walked the entire length of the park, past the buffalo, to the Dutch Windmill. At the ocean near Cliff House, ambling over the ruins of the Sutro Baths and through a tunnel dubbed Hobbit Hole, they found a more private beach, where seals bodysurfed the waves. A cool, foggy breeze swirled around them, silky and silver. Marcie snuggled close to Richard, his jacket draped over her shoulders.

  “This is good acid, Richard,” she said, her words vibrating in the air.

  “I know. Let’s buy.”

  “You think it’s as good as the last batch we tried—when we took the cable car out to Fisherman’s Wharf? Remember City Lights Bookstore!”

  Richard and Marcie had sat on the floor of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, trying to read the titles of books on the shelves, only to have the letters float away, forming and reforming a strange new language they had tried to pronounce, laughing so hard that even the bookstore’s very liberal management had finally asked them to leave and return when they’d pulled it together. Defying literary censorship might be one thing, but stoned hippies sitting in the middle of the stacks, was another.

  Now Richard laid her back in the sand, looking into her face. She’d grown to love his face, had gotten used to seeing it move and blend on all those trips they’d taken in the past weeks.

  “We’d better be getting back,” he said reluctantly. “We need to meet Kevin at six. He’s just back from Hawaii, and I need his new address.”

  Marcie knew Richard was serious about his work. No matter how stoned, he never missed an appointment. And he was always stoned, always testing before he bought or sold. A natural with the business, he knew just which guesses to make. Often, sensing something not quite right, he’d let go of a buy that had taken days to set up. Other times, his daring left her breathless, and she knew she never wanted the responsibility of his kind of decision making. An error could give someone a jail term or rip off a carefully built nest egg. Nor did Marcie believe she had the kind of hard, sure energy that would draw people toward her to make buys. As the weeks passed and as she saw more of the ceremony associated with dealing, she sensed that although money and drugs might be the outward purpose of a transaction, a deal was something more—a very personal exchange of energy that had to do with mutual understanding and trust.

  If Marcie wanted to be with Richard, really with him in the same headspace, she had to take the same trips. And she wanted to be with him always.

  She learned quickly how to function with the hallucinogens, cultivated a sense of her body, knew when to eat and when to fast, often the difference between a good time and an uncomfortable trip.

  She learned to clean grass, separate the seeds and stems, and put the seeds away for anyone who wanted to plant them. She could weigh out a kilo for accuracy and then weigh out the lids. Individual kilos sold for $35 to $50 for 2.2 pounds. Ounces went for $10 to $12. Every so often, the accumulated stems and wrappings were thrown away in the trash containers of the park. “Wonder what the garbage man’s smoking?” became a family joke.

  Now aware of different grades of pot, she knew by looking where they were grown. Richard taught her to observe color and hue—the dull red of Panama, very rare; the subtle ginger-gold of Acapulco; bright green Oaxacan; seedless sinsemilla, its male plants pulled early, before fertilization, to make the female more powerful. When he could, Richard avoided cheaper grades of pressed kilos—keys, they were called—much of it mediocre leaves gathered from the bottom of plants and pressed with large stems and many seeds to add weight to packages sold by the pound. Some kilos were purchased wet or green, the leaves and buds uncured, or sticky heavy with the added weight of a cola, and as the weeks passed, those bricks dried to two-thirds their original weight. A careful buyer would avoid wet grass and scan for the amount of seeds in a package.

  She could roll a tight joint in a single cigarette paper—too much paper would make a hotter smoke—and took pride in the fact that she rarely coughed anymore.

  Using pipe cleaners, she would clean a hookah and fit the bowl with its tiny screen at the bottom. Hash was weighed, first by the ounce, $90 to $125 an ounce, and then by the gram, twenty-eight grams to the ounce, $10 a gram.

  There was Lebanese Blonde hash, red Moroccan, dark Nepalese, and black-green Afghani. Marcie tried them all, ran them through her body so she could understand the stone. She tried to imagine what the land was like that grew blond hashish, or red, or black, how different the conditions of each country must be to produce different colored results. Nepal—the name was a song to her. She longed to see the Himalayas, close to Tibet and India, and listened avidly to stories of travelers who spoke of yogis and holy men who knew truths far beyond what ordinary people could imagine. Morocco! She dreamed of Mediterranean oranges and Marrakesh and camels on the desert.

  Occasionally, there was coke or leaves from the coca plant. Sometimes, the powder was snorted; other times, it was smoked in a pipe with hash or grass. But coke was a luxury, rare and expensive. In fact, there had once been a coca bush in the Conservatory in Golden Gate Park, but the leaves had been stripped so many times that the plant had finally been removed.

  Wherever they stopped on their daily rounds, someone always had something to share. Marcie tried smoking powder DMT in a pipe—a massive true hallucinogenic burst for fifteen or twenty minutes, not the soft, subtle changes of LSD, but hard flashes of brilliance and reassembling of patterns into new shapes.

  Twice, there was sticky black opium, bubbling in a pipe, putting everyone to sleep with hazy, colorful dreams.

  From the Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona deserts came the small, flat, green cactus peyote, and once the vomiting of the bitter plant had ceased, her visions were soft, reddish designs of Indian art.

  From Oaxaca, they tasted long-stemmed dried brown mushrooms.

  True psilocybin, made from mushrooms or mescaline derived from the peyote cactus, occasionally appeared in capsules. But she learned that most of what hit the streets and was called mescaline or psilocybin was LSD mixed with a small amount of methamphetamine. The product sold for more than the original acid was worth but with far less LSD than an ordinary tab—a rip-off.

  No government regulations controlled these pharmaceuticals. No one would yet admit it, but it was a free enterprise economy in its most capitalistic sense. Supply and demand. Laissez-faire. Dealers could enter the scene, sell bad or watered-down products, make a small bundle, and disappear. People came and went in the Haight in vast numbers—new faces and new sources were always easy to find. But some, like Richard, planned to stay. So he was meticulously careful.

  In choosing acid, he made sure that most of what he was buying came through the Oakland Hell’s Angels and Terry the Tramp, a unique biker closely connected to chemist Owsley Stanley. The Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels, Richard explained, had a long history with the peace movement.

  On one particularly memorable march from the Berkel
ey campus to the Oakland Induction Center, protestors had been stopped at the Oakland city line by a phalanx of cops. Sitting down in the street, Alan Ginsberg had just begun to chant “Hare Krishna” when the Angels roared up on their motorcycles, beating demonstrators and demanding that the protestors “go back to fucking Russia!”

  Concerned that there would be more violence from the biker club on the following day, Ginsberg and Ken Kesey paid a visit to the Oakland chapter’s president, Sonny Barger. During that meeting, they had passed out tabs of LSD to Barger and everyone else at his house, and together, they had journeyed. By dawn, the two groups were chanting “Hare Krishna” together.

  Marcie had already learned that the production of acid was a complex process requiring an intelligent mind and a good deal of preparation. A chemist needed skills and resources. On the streets, the chemists were painted as alchemists, and like any good magician, whatever of themselves they put into their mix was transferred to the finished product. So the chemists acquired a reputation, much of it based on personal politics and spiritual awareness. Bear, as Owsley was called, and his chemists, Melissa Cargill and Tim Scully, were in a magical class by themselves.

  Recently, a new chemical had been compounded and released through the Angels. When they tested it, they swore it “cleaned out the carburetors,” and so they named it STP. For several weeks, everyone in the Haight was eating small pink wedged tablets with 250 micrograms of LSD and 10 milligrams of STP, a good dose by any standard.

  Sometimes, Kathy would talk about returning to school in the fall, and Marcie would think about everything she was learning on all those trips. How could life be more wonderful than spending day after day with Richard, taking out her guitar in the evening and singing? No, Marcie was finished with school. Her life was bound to Richard’s.

  Kathy’s first weeks in the Haight were markedly different from Marcie’s. While Marcie worked to get as close to Richard as she could, making a home, a comfortable place for people to hang out and eventually to do business, Kathy moved away from any relationship that looked like it might lead to commitment. On the street, she laughed and skipped and made friends, open with everyone, friendly, gracious, having a special quality that put people immediately at ease. But instead of choosing a partner, she wandered, searching, not really sure for what.