A Nation of Mystics_Book II_The Tribe

by Pamela Johnson

  In that moment of silence, Kathy was also trying to determine her own position. She was really new at selling in quantity—and untried. She still hated talking about money, especially when the sacraments should be free. Maybe a hundred dollars was too high. She would be making $50 a kilo. But if Andy would buy from her at that price, it was a better deal than the $10 a key Richard offered.

  “I have a thousand dollars,” Andy said at last. “I might be able to do more when they’re gone.”

  “Okay,” she decided. “I have to go back to Marin to pick them up. Let’s meet later.”

  Kathy parked outside the Fairfax house in the late afternoon and carried in the big suitcase she had taken from her van. The rain had started to lightly fall again; the sky was already turning dark. In the distance, grazing cows were fading specks of black and white against gray-green hills, white mist from the coastal range swirling around them.

  “Hey,” Kathy cried at the kitchen door, where Marcie was already busy with dinner.

  “Hey, yourself. You eating here tonight? I’m starting some dal for dinner. I just picked up some very groovy new spices.”

  “I don’t think so. I have to go back to Berkeley. You remember Andy from the Haight? You know, he was doing a bit of acid. We had a long talk today about what’s going on out at Port Chicago. Anyway, I’m going to do him ten from that load later.”

  “Uh-oh. Then you’d better get out to the garage and pick them up. Alex is in there boxing.”

  “This won’t affect Richard’s market. I’m selling these to a guy at a price he’d pay way down the line.”

  In the garage, Alex was busy. Kathy stood at the door with Marcie and watched the way he moved, bent over, serious about what he was doing. He hadn’t changed much—handsome, well dressed. He and Richard had been partners for a lot longer than the months since they’d arrived on Haight Street; they had been friends since elementary school. Together, they’d put together a serious business. But while Richard had an awesome sense of humor and was open and social, Alex had treated Kathy to moments of pure vindictiveness. The fact that he wasn’t living in the house with the rest of the family members spoke volumes. Alex couldn’t compromise enough to be able to live communally; he was in a house of his own, alone with Honey.

  Lately, though, she thought, he’s been a lot better. Probably due to his running the tabbing machine.

  Whatever else Alex was, he knew machinery. His LSD tablets were distinctive—colorful, barrel-shaped, compact, and easy to ship.

  “How’s the new year goin’, Alex?” she asked.

  He turned, startled. “Looks good.” Slowly he smiled. “This is nice smoke.”

  Something in his posture suggested to Kathy that he might be changing his opinion of her. His grin was easy, open, and—for once—real.

  Maybe if I’d slept with him, she thought, just once. Then he could say he’d had me.

  “So you tried it.”

  “Yeah. I’m … well … just surprised it’s so good. It was easy to sell.”

  “Well, I need to keep fifty. See if I can spread it around in small lots.”

  “Can’t, Kathy,” Alex shrugged. “These are promised.”

  “Oh, come on, Alex,” she laughed lightheartedly. “You know as well as I do that’s the nature of these deals. They change from moment to moment. Besides, those are my keys. I can decide what I want to do with them.” She put down the suitcase and opened it.

  “They’re not yours anymore. Bringing them here gave us control.”

  “Now … wait a minute …” Confused, she was coming out of the relaxed pot stupor. “I live here, too, don’t I? I have a right to bring my stuff into the garage.”

  “Alex …” Marcie’s murmur held a plea.

  “Stay out of it, Marcie,” Alex snapped. “This is business.”

  He turned to Kathy. “This is Richard’s house. He pays the rent. As a matter of fact, simply having you bringing your stuff here puts added pressure on us. We’re trying hard to keep our trip secure, and you’re going to bring the Man in the back door.”

  Anger rose in Kathy, an ire she had not felt since the day in Jim’s apartment last spring, the afternoon he’d told her he was leaving for Mexico and she wasn’t welcome to follow. The time had come. Was she serious about taking control of her life? Or would she always be told what to do by men like Alex or Jim? Even Larry. Was she serious about dealing? And let’s face it—maybe things should be free, but you still had to pay for them in the real world. She needed a job.

  “I don’t have to live here,” she told him. “I can get a place of my own. Especially if it means trading my freedom for a bedroom.”

  “A bedroom. Isn’t that where you conduct most of your business?”

  “Alex!” Marcie cried.

  “You’re going to try to tell me about business?” Kathy’s voice was hard, pointed, her face red; a rush of heat rose from her toes to her mouth. “Who do you think introduced you to your business?” And she had. Without her introductions to key players on Haight Street, Alex and Richard would still be midlevel dealers rather than at the top of their game and getting better.

  “You fucking cunt,” he threw back at her angrily. “Richard and I worked every day from the first moment we hit Haight Street.”

  “Well, so did I. Is that what irks you, Alex? Knowing a woman could do it, too?”

  “Kathy,” Marcie mumbled, “maybe we should just wait for Rich …”

  Kathy was dizzy, yet her back was straight, her chin up, the voice not her own. “As for bed-hopping. I’ve seen you at the Fillmore, Honey shoved off in some corner.”

  He lifted his fist, ready to swing. She could see the fury in his eyes. No woman was ever going to talk to him that way. He stood, shaking, with his arm raised, deciding. At the last minute, he turned away from her, his eyes glistening with tears of frustration.

  “Alex, I’m taking fifty keys.” Kathy’s voice was shaking. “Maybe you’d better be out of the garage by the time I get back. Marcie, help me get my trunk from the van.”

  Kathy took Marcie’s hand and was well outside before she stopped to feel the pain, the choked feeling in her throat, the lump in her stomach that made her feel as if she might vomit. “Oh, Marcie!” she cried. “Did that really just happen?”

  “He was … ready to hit you.”

  “Come on. Come on. It’ll be alright. It’s my weed. I paid for it and brought it out. I want those fifty. There will be other loads. But right now, I need these to get my business started.”

  When they returned to the garage, Alex was gone. Kathy loaded forty keys inside two trunks. Ten went into the suitcase for Andy.

  “Marcie,” Kathy was suddenly holding her tight, “you know I can’t stay here anymore.”

  Marcie started to cry. “I was afraid you’d say that. Please don’t let Alex drive you out. He can do it. He’s always wanted to. He’d drive me out too, if I let him.”

  “He’s right about some things. Richard does pay the rent.”

  “But you know he likes to do that. It’s … it’s his way of being both loving and controlling.”

  “And I am putting added pressure on the scene here. You really don’t need the Man coming in your back door.”

  “No one’s getting busted, Kathy.”

  “It’s more than that. I just can’t live here. In Marin, I mean. It’s quiet. Spiritual. But I couldn’t live at the ranch, either. I need the stimulation that Berkeley gives me.”

  Tears were heavy on Marcie’s cheeks. “You’ll keep in touch?”

  Kathy felt the desperation in Marcie’s tense body, saw the frightened look in her eyes.

  “Oh, Marcie, I’m part of your family. I’m going to be at the birth. Will you tell Richard I’ll give him a call for orders in a couple of days?”

  Marcie nodded.

  Softly, her tone changing, Kathy asked, “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered miserably, wiping her eyes.
“Alex is so unsettled.”

  “Look. I’ll call tomorrow after you’ve had a chance to talk to Richard. And don’t worry about Alex. Richard will deal with him.”

  CHRISTIAN BROOKS

  AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

  JANUARY 1968

  Christian was asleep in the airplane seat when a powerful gust of wind bounced the plane. Unconsciously, he searched for a more comfortable position. His dream mind still reached for Lisa, shimmering, illusive, her green eyes asking him to join her in the ashram.

  Another shudder of the plane, and the image of Lisa began to fade. He slowly woke, disoriented, frustrated, remembering that Lama had told him years ago that women would be a distraction.

  At least it wasn’t the nightmare, Christian thought ruefully.

  Although he hadn’t woken screaming for many months, there was always the prospect that the nightmare might emerge, returning him to the sacred city of Amritsar in India, reliving the horror of a brutal riot. In the dream, Nareesh, his friend and chosen Indian brother, was endlessly running away from him, lost in the miasma of rampaging crowds and the heat and smoke of burning buildings. No matter how he tried, Christian could never quite catch him, Nareesh’s figure was always just out of reach, moving into a realm where the boundaries were unclear, obscured by a strange fog … and then … emerging from the fog, the image of the knife, the loathing in the eyes of the man who wielded it, his steps accelerating, the knife poised … and Christian would wake, drenched in sweat and screaming, imagining the dead at his feet.

  The morning after the riot in 1964, his father, a Christian missionary in a small village of Himachal Pradesh, had packed him up and, against Christian’s fierce objections, had placed him on a plane. His final destination had been a theological college in Oberlin, Ohio. By the end of the first semester, Christian had known he wasn’t ready for the ministry. Without consulting his parents, he’d left the college and had enrolled at UC Berkeley, lured by the ideas of the Free Speech Movement.

  Even now, he recalled the anxiety of moving to a new city without friends or funds. On his first day in Berkeley, it had been Matt who had found him sitting on a bench outside the admissions building, a suitcase with all he owned at his feet. Teasing him about his long face and strange accent—a mixture of American, British, and Indian English—Matt had invited him home, given him a meal, made up a couch for a bed, and helped him to find a job. Eventually, they had moved into an apartment near Telegraph Avenue as roommates.

  Shortly after school had begun in October 1965, Matt had brought Lisa home one afternoon as his new live-in girlfriend. Lisa had been nineteen years old and a dropout philosophy major at Berkeley. She had also been carrying a kilo of weed in a brown paper bag.

  Earlier in the year, President Johnson had authorized Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, sent in the first combat troops, and ordered the use of napalm. Lisa had been deeply involved in the activities of the Vietnam Day Committee led by Jerry Rubin.

  From the beginning, there had been an intense attraction between Lisa and Christian, a relationship that had grown passionate and intimate. Although Christian could not deny the attraction, he couldn’t nurture it that late fall of 1965. Matt was his best friend.

  In the end, because Christian had not asked Lisa to stay, he had watched as she moved to Laguna Beach to live with Bob, a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Bob claimed to have a more spiritual life, and Lisa had told both Christian and Matt that spirituality was her direction.

  Then, almost two years ago, Lisa had made another major life change, entering Ananda Shiva Ashram in Santa Monica and taking a brahmacharya vow of chastity—one she promised to renounce if Christian wanted a permanent relationship and joined the ashram as a devotee of its master.

  Still uncomfortably recovering from the physical lure of the airplane dream, Christian admitted that he did indeed want Lisa, but not at the price she demanded. He no longer entertained the idea of a further study of Hinduism. The only spiritual thing that mattered to him was direct personal teaching—the shamanic journey—through LSD trips or powerful psychoactive plants.

  Rubbing his hands over his eyes, clearing them, he grudgingly acknowledged that frustrating dreams of Lisa were better than nightmares reminding him that Nareesh had gone missing the night of the riot.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the stewardess announced over the plane’s intercom, “we will be landing at Schiphol Airport shortly.”

  Amsterdam. The persistent question of Nareesh’s fate began to fade.

  Christian sat up straighter and turned his gaze out the window, to the landscape coming up quickly. The afternoon sun was low on the horizon, the sea gray-pink, the outline of the coast darkening and already alive with lights. Just a few more minutes and he’d meet with Heinrich again.

  Heinrich. He and Nareesh had first met Heinrich Müller at the English boarding school in Dehradun. He had been six years old; Nareesh had been eight.

  Nestled in mountains surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, Dehradun was an old hill station of the British Raj. The educational institution established there was old and time-honored, offering a traditional curriculum and an experienced faculty. The dorms within its walled property housed the children of diplomats, the Indian affluent, and foreign businessmen. When Nareesh and Christian arrived it was immediately clear that the two did not share the other boarders’ wealth or travel experience, in fact, they were without standing—simply two friends from an insignificant village called Jalandhar in Himachal Pradesh. Little did others understand the strength of the bond of brotherhood between Christian and Nareesh, or know the importance of Jalandhar as a religious center for several great traditions. None could have imagined the hours of study and discourse with revered teachers, even at so young an age.

  Sometime in those first weeks of homesickness and taunting, Heinrich had come into their lives. Ten years old, Heinrich truly didn’t care what others thought of him and wasn’t afraid to say what he believed. Indeed, he saw something of value in the new arrivals and held out a wing under which they could shelter. He pointedly refused to pity the boys or to allow them to sniffle around him; instead, he introduced them to life away from home, acquainting them with the joys of the library, sympathetic and gifted instructors, a variety of sports, and the chess club.

  As the plane touched down on the runway, Christian began to consider the childhood secrets that bound him to Heinrich, the many moments of shared experience—classes, sports, the debate team—and off campus moments, like the Kalachakra initiation they had quietly attended together at a monastery in Southern India, purportedly on vacation at the seashore. Considering his present goal in reuniting with his old friend, he smiled to think of his curiosity as a twelve-year-old, persuading Nareesh and Heinrich to skirt the boarding school walls to take a trip into the alleys of the city.

  “There’s a new film on,” Christian whispered, motioning for Heinrich and Nareesh to join him out of earshot of others. “And Omar, the gardener’s son, says he’ll show us the shop where they smoke the charas.”

  “Who’s interested in seeing toothless old men smoking?” Heinrich asked. “Or chewing betel nut, watching as they drool red saliva?”

  “Some say you can see dragons when you smoke,” Christian insisted. “It’s like living in a dream while you’re awake.”

  “Rubbish. I’ve heard charas is nothing more than bits of plant and dirt. Anyway, who would want to be part of a hallucination that involves dragons?”

  “Well, wouldn’t you like to find out?”

  Heinrich thought about it for a few moments. “I don’t think much will come of the charas, but the movie is something else. Have you ever thought about touching one of those tits?”

  Abashed, both Christian and Nareesh looked away, reddening.

  Slipping quietly from the campus grounds, the wayward schoolboys maneuvered through the town with Omar as their guide. The afternoon slipped into a raucous few hours—a lo
w-budget Indian film with bad singing and a melodramatic plot, the alleyway of the shop serving strong tea, the smell of hashish filling the passageway, and finally, the Indian boy who offered to sell them a piece of the forbidden charas.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Heinrich told the boys.

  Inspecting the finger of rolled hash he was shown, he sniffed it and asked a price. “Outrageous. We’ll try elsewhere.”

  “Alright. Five rupees. Five rupees for an afternoon of delight,” the boy countered.

  “Five rupees, indeed! Certainly not over fifty paise. Not for bits of a plant.”

  “But, my friend, this hashish is the finest Himachal Pradesh has to offer. If you do not trust me, ask the aged one. No, it cannot be tasted for less than three rupees.”

  “My sources have told me that some hashish is mixed with mud and animal fat to increase the weight. Give us the advantage of trying this piece to ensure the truth of what it has to offer. But we can’t take a chance for more than seventy-five paise.”

  “But friend, you have only to look at it once more, to crumble a bit in your fingers, hold it close to your nose to smell the flower. You will judge from nose and eye that the quality is worth my final offer, without which I would see my friend paid but not a single paisa for myself. A single rupee.”

  The younger boys held their breaths. Bargaining was necessary, yet the bond of faith could not be broken. Surely a rupee was less than ever expected for enchantment?

  “Ninety paise. And that is robbery.”

  “Very well. Ninety-five paise. But I am the one who is robbed.”

  Like water on fire, a hissing sigh escaped the taut mouths of the coconspirators, while a look passed between Omar and the young merchant, each recognizing that the price was many times the Indian market value for such a small amount.