A Nation of Mystics_Book II_The Tribe

by Pamela Johnson

  “These people don’t have the same market you do,” she answered, a hint of pleading in her voice.

  “The scene’s pretty small. What do you say? Can I have it?”

  “Oh … I suppose so. This time. Richard, you do this deliberately, don’t you? You know I hate hassling over money.”

  “Thanks. I mean it.”

  Marcie took her hand. “Come on inside. Let these guys unload. You look like you could use a cup of tea and something to eat.”

  In the dining room, Kathy stopped to look through the sliding glass doors. The rain was lessening—just a drizzle now, more mist than rain. Across the valley, rolling white fog from the coast dropped over the hills. Above, the sky was a mixture of shades of gray. The wind was blowing cold, and thin wisps from the fog bank drifted across the hills. She shivered, grateful for the warmth of the house and the steady fire that burned in the living room fireplace.

  Standing before the hearth, she noted the new pillows sewn from paisley fabrics spread on the rug. The room was a patchwork of hues and textures, the room vibrant, contrasting wildly with the subdued colors of the hills outside. Tibetan thangkas hung from cords with frames of brilliant brocade, one thangka of the Buddha painted in gold, the other of Green Tara, Bodhisattva of compassion. Posters of framed psychedelic art lay against the white walls, no longer thumbtacked to the wall as they had been in the Ashbury Street house. The air smelled of incense and pot. The plants she had bought at Christmas—a Boston fern, a Schefflera, a huge asparagus fern—all were growing large and healthy.

  “The plants are thriving,” Kathy said, reaching out to touch the leaves of the fern.

  “Merlin’s been caring for them,” Marcie nodded. “You should see the backyard. Even in this cold and rain, he’s got vegetables growing. Come on into the kitchen.”

  “Where’s Greta?” Kathy asked, following Marcie and sniffing appreciatively at the aroma of the lentil soup steaming on the stove.

  “Food shopping. But it’s a drive. We could really use a natural food store in town.”

  Rubbing a hand along Marcie’s belly, Kathy smiled. “I can’t believe how much the baby’s grown in just the few weeks I’ve been away.”

  Marcie closed her eyes and held Kathy’s hand over the child, the women sensitive to this intimate bonding. “This is your godchild, you know.”

  For a long, quiet moment, Kathy stood there, sending a warm glow into the baby. “I know,” she said softly. “Have you and Richard made any decisions about the birth?”

  Marcie smiled, the deep blue in her eyes lit with happiness. “Oh, yes.” She twisted the dark hair that hung to her waist into a braid, and turned to the kettle sitting on the stove. “We’re definitely having a home birth. I’m not doing the hospital trip with its cold metal stirrups. And I’m not going to submit to forced labor to accommodate a doctor’s schedule. Do you know how unclean hospitals are? The risk of Staph infection. No, instead, we’ve chosen a midwife. This birth will definitely be natural and the baby will come when he’s ready. He’ll be born right into Richard’s hands.”

  “He?”

  “Well, maybe,” Marcie grinned.

  “What about your Mom? Have you told her about the baby yet?”

  Marcie turned up the fire underneath the kettle, avoiding Kathy’s eyes.

  “You have, haven’t you?”

  “Actually … we’ve been talking quite a lot. Mom’s relieved to know Richard and I are getting married. And before the baby comes.” She rolled her eyes and giggled. “As if it matters.” Then, she sheepishly added, “We’ve been talking a lot about you, too. She’s … um … right on the phone afterward to your folks.”

  Kathy sat up straighter. “What are they talking about?”

  “Do you really want to hear it?”

  Resigned, sighing heavily, Kathy took a joint from her pocket. “Yeah, I need to know.”

  “Well, in the first place, they think you’re doing a lot of drugs. And before you ask me which ones, you know they wouldn’t know enough to make any distinctions.” She began slicing cheese and fruit and some of the fresh bread she had just baked. “Here,” she handed Kathy a piece of cheese. “Eat something.”

  “What else are they saying?”

  “Well, your father was all worked up because he thinks the reason you won’t give them any way to contact you is because you’re pregnant. My mom calmed them down about that one. But they still can’t understand why you won’t come home.”

  “Marcie, maybe … maybe I’ll write. I’m not calling them again. It’s too emotional.” She lit the joint, blowing a cloud of smoke into the room. “My father has a way of seeing the world in black and white. Literally. He’s not happy about desegregation. But then, he also sees every non-conservative political action as communism. ‘Capitalism or Communism,’ he’s always crying. ‘Take your pick.’ I mean, how hard is it to understand that you can have a free society and one where everyone has access to opportunity—education, medical care, food, housing. I’ve tried talking to them, over and over. I could talk myself blue and they wouldn’t understand.”

  “Mom’s coming out after the baby’s born.”

  Stunned, Kathy’s eyes widened, and at first, she could find nothing to say. “Are you kidding?”

  “I think it’ll be alright once she meets Richard and sees how good he is to me. The only problem’s his work, but I think I’ve got that figured out. I told her he was in the import business. And, after all, he is!” Marcie’s eyes twinkled as she poked at the Mexican kilo Kathy had carried in and set on the table. “I’m sure she expects him to be kind of kinky, so she might even be pleased with what she sees.”

  “It’d be pretty hard not to like Richard.” Kathy tapped ash into an ashtray. “What about Richard’s parents?”

  “Sore subject with Richard. His dad’s pretty pissed that he quit school and didn’t show up for his draft physical.” The blue of Marcie’s eyes deepened, and her body visibly shuddered. “Can you imagine Richard in Vietnam? Carrying a gun?”

  Kathy, high and thinking, simply stared at the plate of snacks Marcie placed in front of her. “You know,” she finally said softly, “you’ve done something really remarkable. Making this bridge between generations.”

  Marcie poured boiling water into the teapot and sat down next to Kathy to wait while the tea steeped. She placed her hand over Kathy’s. “I’ve learned something in the last months. I’m not just mother to this baby … but to Richard, to the members of this house, really, to all those I touch.”

  She squeezed Kathy’s hand. “Remember what I told you on my first acid trip. I was thinking about it the other day. I told you that it seemed as if a passageway had opened between my legs and I was at the center of all things, the Mother, caring. My job, I know, is not simply to carry life, but to nourish it.”

  On the morning after returning to the Bay, Kathy headed toward Berkeley in the emptied van. Berkeley, in many ways, was more interesting to her than the Haight. It was late January, and students were just returning to school and the new quarter. Telegraph Avenue vibrated as if motivated by a tangible sense of purpose. Yesterday’s rain had finally stopped, and she walked briskly through a shining winter day, wrapped in a warm wool poncho. She wore comfortable suede ankle boots, jeans, a silver concho belt, and a white embroidered shirt. Her dark hair was loose, grown several inches down her back in the last year, blowing in the light breeze. Her smile was a bright blur in the glass of the shop windows she passed.

  First stop, Moe’s Books, with its rows of used books, political announcements on the walls, and Moe himself, wired on coffee, a cigar hanging from the corner of his mouth. Her heart quickened as she regarded the leaflets taped to the glass windows. The excitement, far-reaching goals, all the political activity at LSU came rushing back—the fear and danger of demonstrations, the commitment to a just and integrated racial society, the morality of ending war …

  “Kathy, is that you?”

  “Andy?”
>
  “Yeah. We smoked that doobie in Buena Vista Park.”

  Kathy did indeed remember Andy. On an afternoon last summer, they had sat on the grass with a group of others in the small park on the fringe of the Haight. Even stoned, Andy had delivered a long diatribe on the differences between San Francisco hippies and Berkeley activists—between those who wanted to drop out and create their own reality and those who believed that to change the world, you had to be part of it and work for transformation. He wasn’t particularly fond of hippies, if she recalled correctly.

  “And a kilo,” Kathy said quietly under her breath. “Didn’t we exchange some money for some smoke? What are you doing these days?”

  “Going to school. Poly-sci. Do you have time for coffee?” He nodded toward the Caffe Mediterraneum across the street.

  Andy took a tray carrying a cappuccino and a pot of tea to a round marble table near the back wall, and Kathy followed. Around them, conversations rose in the air, intense, in different languages, speakers leaning forward and focused on the topic. At other tables, lone students sat reading, a tall latte placed to the side, sometimes yellow highlighters striking across the words of a page. Kathy studied the book covers as she passed—a math textbook, a bound copy of stapled academic articles, a book of Rimbaud poetry, a young woman making her way through Madame Bovary, another, The Canterbury Tales—and she knew a sudden longing to read, to discuss, to once again be a part of a class.

  “So, how are you?” Andy asked, pulling the wooden chair closer to the table. “Are you still living in the Haight?”

  Kathy took a good look at him. Still the same—moderately long, curly, brown hair, thick, dark mustache, black-framed, round glasses, about six feet tall. He looked like a young Leon Trotsky.

  “I have a room in a house in Marin,” she told him. “And I’m moving around quite a lot. Sometimes, home’s my VW bus.”

  “A lot of people have left the Haight. You still selling tabs?”

  “No,” she laughed, “not really. Kilos. You remember the tabs?”

  For a few weeks last summer, she had roamed Haight Street with a small plastic bag of biconvex white tablets—smooth, brilliant LSD dubbed White Lightning.

  “You had twenty tabs in a bag and were selling twos and fours. I bought four. Good acid. Things seem to be slow with acid these days.”

  Kathy’s voice lowered. “That’s because they popped Owsley right before Christmas. Got his lab in Orinda. Lots of crystal, I’m told. Enough for about 250,000 doses.”

  “Owsley went down?”

  Not only was Owsley the best of the underground chemists, but he was also sound manager for the Grateful Dead.

  “So …” and Andy’s words became tinged with anger, “they’re beginning to put the leaders away. Doing it with the law. Two years ago, they busted Timothy Leary with a half-ounce of marijuana coming across the border in Texas. The Texas court sentenced him to thirty years and thirty thousand dollars. Nothing mattered about his vision for the future—or his politics—just that he had a bit of plant in his pocket. Or, rather, his daughter did. He claimed possession, and they convicted him under the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.”

  “But he’s not in jail, is he?” Surely she should know this. She had to start stepping back into the world.

  “He’s out on appeal. According to the law, he didn’t pay a tax on the marijuana.” Andy laughed, sarcasm thick in his voice. “As if he’s supposed to tell a federal agent he has illegal marijuana so he can pay the tax. What’s at issue are his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. He’s taking it to the Supreme Court.”

  Kathy leaned back in the chair and, not for the first time, thought about possibilities in the law. Sure, there were unjust laws. But laws also defined standards for a human society, ethics, an underlying written morality. She had begun to imagine that if you were smart enough, or lucky enough, laws could be created that helped people—good laws against discrimination, unjust war, enforced poverty, freedom of religion—even if your perception of God was based on symbiosis with a plant.

  “So what’s the acid scene going to do with Owsley out of the picture?” Andy asked.

  “There are others.”

  Kathy poured tea into her cup, pondering Richard’s announcement last night. He had told the family that he wanted to try to fill the void Owsley’s arrest had created. He was looking for both a chemist and base—ET, ergotamine tartrate. With ergotamine, a good chemist could make lysergic acid, a main component of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.

  “So, what’s happening with the antiwar movement in Berkeley?” she asked.

  “Quite a bit.” Andy’s face fell, the flash of anger back. “Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder is still bombing North Vietnam. To date, they’ve dropped more tonnage than in all of World War II. And they’re still using chemical weapons. Nasty stuff. Napalm. And Agent Orange. All being produced by Monsanto and Dow Chemical.”

  “Agent Orange?”

  “It’s a variety of toxins mixed with jet fuel. They’re spraying it on forests and it just kills everything. The idea is to do away with tropical tree cover so the Vietcong can’t hide in it. But they’re also spraying villages and farm fields. If you can’t grow anything, then you cut off the enemy’s food supplies, right? Only they don’t seem to get it that the farmers and their families also need to eat. Where do they go once their traditional villages and fields are destroyed? How can they feed themselves or their families?”

  Andy stared at his untouched coffee. “And then there’s napalm. Now that’s an ingenious piece of work. Two acids mixed with gasoline so that it sprays easily, covers the skin, and burns the shit out of anything it touches. Wait until the number of birth defects begins to be recorded in the aftermath of all this—”

  Kathy involuntarily wrapped her arms around her body.

  “—and to top it all off, we’re beginning to hear reports that the US has been bombing Laos daily for three years without telling the American public.”

  “That’s … that’s impossible!” she cried incredulously. “Secretly? How can they do that? How can they expand the war without a congressional vote?”

  “National security, of course. I’ve been going out to protest at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. Ninety percent of the munitions for Vietnam are shipped from there. A lot of our activity’s been centered around blockading the napalm trucks. On a single day, I counted eight explosives trucks and seven napalm trucks. Each truck carrying thirty-six 750-pound bombs. There’s even rumors that nuclear weapons might have passed through last May. Huge trucks rolled in, labeled ‘Radioactive Materials.’”

  Maybe I should go out, Kathy thought. Join with the protesters. Could Larry and Richard wait while I took the time?

  “There’ve been a lot of arrests,” Andy continued. “And the judge trying the cases—Judge Renaghan, in Contra Costa County—insists that the morality of war is ‘irrelevant.’ He’s refused to allow testimony on international and moral law.”

  Kathy shook her head disbelievingly. “But after World War II … the Nuremberg trials … we tried, convicted, and executed men for the crime of obeying orders to commit immoral acts against humanity.”

  Andy’s knuckles were white around his coffee cup as he brought it to his lips. Finally, he nodded. “I’m becoming more and more convinced that to end the war, we’re going to have to resort to greater extremes.”

  “Extremes?” Kathy asked, suddenly wary. “Like what?”

  “Like force. I’m just so sick of waiting while the bombs roll on out everyday. And I’m sick of all the lies they tell. The lies of a constructed language. In the name of ‘liberty,’ we’re ‘freeing’ the country from communist aggression. When in actuality, in the name of liberty, we’ve unleashed the awesome arsenal of the greatest military power in the world against villages. Against a nation engaged in a civil war to determine the kind of government it wants. A government that’s been struggling for independence since World War I. They tel
l us they’re bringing ‘peace’ to Indochina with our armies and bombs for the ‘security of the United States,’ when actually, each bomb, each bullet, brings us closer to nuclear war.”

  Kathy sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. Slightly high and sensitive, she had that particular psychedelic capacity for being in the moment, and at this moment, she knew the dreadful angst of men, women, and children, American, Vietnamese, and Laotian, who simply wanted a chance at life and family against overwhelming odds. While she was safe in a café in Berkeley, somewhere else in the world a village was going up in flames, a child was burned, a young revolutionary was executed on the street.

  “What’s your draft classification?” she asked shakily.

  “At the moment, 2-S. I talked to this deserter at a Berkeley church the other night. Black dude on his way to Canada. Says his neighborhood’s been emptied of men his age. I’ve been putting people up in my apartment. Offering sanctuary.”

  Kathy reached into her bag and pulled out a lid. “Andy, here,” she said, passing it to him under the table. “For everyone in your house.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something that gets people thinking.”

  “This is thirty years in Texas,” he grinned. “You say you’re doing weed now?”

  “Kilos. Need anything? It’s good shit. Nice weight, good smoke.”

  “Could you do me ten?”

  “That lid’s a sample. When do you find time to study?”

  “When I can,” he shrugged.

  “When do you want to do those kilos? Do you have the money for them today?”

  “How much are they?”

  “For ten … a hundred apiece. I’ll deliver them.”

  Kathy watched as Andy computed quickly. She’d watched Richard and Alex break up a load of ten or twenty keys, knew Andy could sell half pounds for $50 each, making over $200 on each kilo. Andy needed a $1000 to make $2000—a thousand-dollar profit, tax-free. With the money, he could probably live for three months. Sure, it was somewhat risky: If anything happened to the pot, he’d lose everything he had, but a hundred dollars a key was a good price for a one-hundred-percent profit.