Free Spirit Page 14

  I shrugged. I’d learned that adult exuberance rarely correlated with anything actually exciting, and this fifth-gear whiskey-ganja party was no exception. I turned back to my 145th hand of Go Fish with my new best friend and asked him if he had any sevens. Back home in New York City they just called him Rick. But I promoted him to Ranger Rick because he liked camping and bore a passing resemblance to the shaggy, saucer-eyed raccoon that graced the covers of Ranger Rick magazine. He told me he’d hitchhiked from the airport in Seattle down to Oregon and had been taking a piss in a ditch at the side of the road when the Roach Coach stopped to pick him up. Ranger Rick was on his way to Rainbow to find a new direction for his crummy life, a life that had been sidetracked by an all-consuming job. “You know how crummy my job is, Josh? All I do is sit behind a crummy desk all day pushing crummy papers around while some crummy boss yells at me. Do you have any kings?” I didn’t have any kings, but I recognized that Ranger Rick was a boy thrown into a thirty-year-old body, uncomfortable around adults, and happier playing cards with me than doing whiskey bong hits with the grownups.

  My mother’s new best friend, Michael Rodriguez, was also from New York City and about the same age as Rick, but he was a different kind of man-boy. He threw his lanky frame around like the star lacrosse player he was still proud to have been, earnestly trying to impress the other adults with how adult he was. He’d been the first one to throw off his clothes back at the reservoir, making a big show of his naked plunge into the frigid green water. And he’d jumped through the campfire barefoot just because Driver Dave said he used to do that back in Santa Cruz. When Gita told us she had smuggled opium out of India, Michael bragged about his backpacking trip through Nepal. And when Mike from Boston told us he’d overdosed on angel dust at Woodstock, Michael boasted that he’d once blown his mind on angel dust so bad he’d been arrested and then hospitalized for throwing himself through the display window of a department store.

  Michael wore his wavy orange hair short on top and long in back because he played Riff Raff in the shadow cast of the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in Manhattan. From his reenactments, I gathered that Riff Raff was some sort of creepy hunchback who fondled my mother’s breasts. Michael kept us guessing as to what his day job was. Claudia psychically intuited that he was a community organizer. Ranger Rick said that he probably worked at an ad agency. Gita and Mike from Boston both kept asking him whether he was a narc. But they were all wrong. I came the closest, he said, when I guessed that he was a rodeo clown, but he kept his profession a mystery.

  Gita was from Austria. She was a terrorist in the Red Army Faction and had been on her way to receive explosives training in the Middle East when she met Mike, who was playing a gig in London. Because her period had dried up and she’d been vomiting, she suspected she might be pregnant with Mike’s baby. She was on her way to Rainbow to have a hallucinogenic spirit quest to figure out whether the Goddess had cast her fate toward terrorism or motherhood. Claudia told her she didn’t have to choose between the two, but Gita felt that changing the world and changing diapers were mutually incompatible. Mike from Boston was from Philadelphia originally, and played bass, and no one could believe that he was forty. He had a twenty-year-old son out there somewhere. Gita and Mike had matching dreadlocks, nose rings, and tattered leather jackets. They rolled their own cigarettes and didn’t know how to talk to kids like me.

  View from the Roach Coach as it hits the open road.

  The other two Roach Coachers didn’t know how to talk to kids either. And they both had shaved heads. One was a young woman who was menstruating and had apparently taken a traditional Seneca women’s vow of silence while she was bleeding. The other was a perpetually pickled British chap who was either narcoleptic or sedated or both. He stank of booze and drooled out phrases like “bollocks wiffout me giro got no quid wiffout me quid got no smack wiffout me smack got no bollocks.”

  We all relied upon Claudia’s psychic powers to find the turnoff for the Rainbow Festival. But after several fruitless forays up rutted logging roads, even she conceded that we were lost. We skirted the edges of the vast Boise National Forest for about an hour until our sauced Briton yelled out: “Bloody ’ell! Look at dem geezers.” His arm extended toward a muddy field in which two bearded men in tie-dye were hugging each other. A third bearded man waved at us with a huge pair of deer antlers.

  Claudia rushed to the window of the Roach Coach. “Hey, brothers, which way to the Gathering?” Deer antler man waved his horns at a broad swath of mud that cut across the field and into the woods. Driver Dave gunned the Roach Coach forward and Claudia called out: “Thank you, brothers!”

  All three men flashed us peace signs, and antler man called back: “Welcome home!”

  As the Roach Coach struggled up into the forest, the curving muddy road widened, and a steady stream of smaller vehicles began passing us from behind: a pink VW van flying the Jolly Roger and a peace flag; a skeletal dune buggy loaded with yellow crates; and a convoy of battered pickup trucks bearing rainbow flags. The men and women clinging to the trucks were weatherworn and solemn, but flashed us the peace sign like the rest.

  My mother had her head out the window, flashing peace signs back at them. “Oh, Joshey: rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! Go like this, Josh!” She was showing me the V of her first two fingers. “This is the symbol for peace. This is no hip thing to do. We don’t grin and laugh at one another like straight people with their ‘have-a-nice-days.’ Here, we’re eager to show each other how strong we are. This is not the sixties anymore, Josh. This is the eighties. We are for real. This peace sign is for real. It means courage, a pact, a dedication, a hope.”

  After an hour of muddy switchbacks, the Roach Coach finally came to rest in the clearing that served as the parking lot for the Festival. We staggered off of the blue bus and slogged through the mud toward the trailhead, where a crowd of people was singing “We are one with the infinite sun” and blowing bubbles. At the mouth of the forest we passed through a gauntlet of half-dressed white people wearing Indian buckskins and feathers. “Welcome home! A-ho!” they greeted us.

  A young woman squatted down to greet me and stared into my soul with bright eyes. “A-ho, little man,” she said and pressed her pointy little breasts against me in a deep patchouli-soaked embrace. “Do you know what A-ho means?” I shook my head no. “It means peace in Indian.” I knew that couldn’t be quite right since there were hundreds of Native tribes that must have had a multitude of mutually unintelligible ways to say “peace.” But I didn’t say anything. She had been dispensing some sort of treats from a paper bag, and I didn’t want to risk offending her. Instead I stared with exaggerated curiosity at her bag. “Here, little man, have a halva from the Goddess,” she said, handing me a brown flaky candy. I placed it on my tongue and gagged. It had the consistency of sand and the unmitigated taste of raw sesame. I spit it out onto the forest path and joined the pack of pilgrims stumbling their way through the dark fir forest toward redemption.

  We finally emerged into the light at the edge of a broad treeless slope covered in thick, wet knotweed. The bottom of the hillside sunk into a murky stream, and the top disappeared into a fog-draped crest of Douglas firs. “Welcome home!” someone called. All the adults whooped, and most of the women around me took off their shirts. “Now we’re free,” one of them said. Ranger Rick later told me the disrobing ladies were his favorite part of Rainbow. Not mine. I shivered looking at all those naked breasts on such a chilly day. “Welcome home!” yelled a hairy naked man with a parasol. Up and down the wet hillside, people were unfurling tents and erecting teepees. We trudged up a broad, treeless slope for a while, slipping on the slimy green knotweed, before Ranger Rick declared he’d found a spot flat enough to pitch his tan pup tent.

  My mother stopped with a stunned look on her face. “I didn’t bring a tent,” she said to no one in particular.

  “Yikes,” said Ranger Rick under his breath, his cheeks flaring in a sympat
hetic wince.

  The earth tilted ever so slightly on its axis in that moment, and I saw Claudia for the first time from a new angle. She was no longer omniscient. She was still my mother, but she was also a pale-faced city slicker woefully unprepared for the reality at hand. Ranger Rick’s subtle “Yikes” meant that I was not alone in this conclusion. I gained in that moment the ability to see my mother through the eyes of others. She was an imperfect person, just like any other. “Does this mean I’m growing up?” I asked myself. This thought was closely followed by “Where the hell are we going to sleep?”

  “Hey, Josh,” called Ranger Rick. “Come help me hammer in these tent stakes. They keep slipping around in the mud.” I busied myself with the tan pup tent and eyed Claudia and Michael Rodriguez skeptically as they ran around the hillside like children, gathering up discarded plastic bags, bumming plastic sheeting off of better prepared Rainbow warriors, and raiding a pile of construction debris dumped at the edge of the woods. They soon had a tiny garbage wigwam formed over a skeleton of fir branches.

  On cue a Native American guy in a leather jacket emerged from the woods and inspected their handiwork. He straightened the eagle feather in his hair and nodded approvingly. “This is the way the ancestors would have done it, even more than these store-boughts.” He waved his hand at the conical white canvas teepees studding the hillside. “You used what’s provided, what the land had to offer.” He bid them “A-ho” and went off to escort a new crop of topless women up the mountain. Claudia and Michael did a little celebratory dance, basking in the affirmation of their authenticity. The garbage wigwam then collapsed under its own weight. As Claudia and Michael set about rebuilding it, Ranger Rick and I trudged up the hill in search of food. We followed the sound of conga drums and panpipes to the Rainbow Family kitchen, where a pungent cluster of bedraggled rainbow warriors held out their battered bowls for lentil slop. I lost sight of Ranger Rick in the jockeying for food, but he found me gnawing on a crusty round of bread by the fire.

  “Buddy, didn’t you bring a bowl?”

  “No. I don’t have a spoon either.”

  “You want to use mine?” Ranger Rick offered me his yellow plastic camping bowl and spork.

  “No thank you.”

  A sweaty naked white man with dreadlocks stopped to gyrate between us, firelight and shadow dancing across his streaky body.

  “You don’t like the lentils, huh?”

  “Not really. I took an extra loaf of bread for later,” I said, patting the hard round protrusion under my shirt. A group of fire dancers began spinning burning sticks in the air.

  “Hey!” said Ranger Rick. “Should I try to put out the fire on her butt!?” A topless brown woman in a grass skirt was shrieking as smoke curled up her backside. I nodded yes, but a muscular young man in blue body paint had already thrown her to the ground and was now on top of her, grinding the fire out with his hips.

  After dinner we slid and stumbled back down the hill, and I crashed with Ranger Rick for the night. The floor of the little tent was wet, and I shivered as I tried to fall asleep. A few yards away, underneath Michael Rodriguez and a pile of plastic and sticks, my mother was moaning loudly like a cat in estrus.

  “I’m real sorry, buddy,” sympathized Ranger Rick. “That must be real embarrassing.”

  “It is,” I said and wrapped the end of the towel that served as my surrogate pillow over my head.

  “I can’t believe what a wuss I am,” Ranger Rick regretted. “I coulda been over there like a tiger. That girl’s butt must have been on fire for a full thirty seconds before anyone else noticed it. Man! I coulda been the hero up there.”

  “Maybe someone will catch on fire tomorrow,” I offered hopefully.

  “Ha, that’s a good one.”

  The next morning, Ranger Rick spoke from the haze: “Hey, buddy, you can see a little sky peeking out from behind the rain clouds.” I rolled over and covered my face with a damp towel. It was drizzling and gray by the time the reek of recycled breath and rotting knotweed finally drove me from the tent. A thick mist blanketed the hillside, and nothing moved. For a moment I thought that everyone must have died during the night, leaving us as the only survivors, but then I saw a hunched figure scuttling down the hillside in the direction of the shitters. And I noticed the arrhythmic pounding of drums from up the hill. The perpetual drum circles were such a fixture of the environment, I’d momentarily forgotten that untalented humans were responsible for the noise. I donned my last not-completely-filthy garment, an orange-and-white-striped wool turtleneck, and began the climb up the hill into the woods. I wandered through the trees until I came upon a cluster of people packed into a big canvas tent called Madam Frog’s Tea House. I squeezed myself between muddy legs, sniffing for food. I smelled coffee, marijuana, and bitter medicinal odors, but nothing resembling breakfast. I turned to force my way out and bumped into my mother and Michael Rodriguez sitting together on a tree stump. They looked blissed out of their minds.

  Claudia saw me and gave me a warm embrace. “Oh, Josh,” she purred. “Isn’t it wonderful! The whole Gathering is like a metaphor. You come in at the parking lot at the lowest point, and a lot of people never get past that point. The bikers with their Harleys are all still down there drinking beer. Then you get everyone strung out along the hillside trying to get higher. And the higher you climb, the higher you get. And if you can make it to the top, you get to the kitchens of the tribes, and you made it all the way to Madam Frog’s!” She lowered her voice to let me in on a secret. “But, Josh, you can get even higher. There’s a trail up here that goes to a higher ridge, a higher level. That’s where the healers are—at the very top—giving massages, acupressure, chanting, meditations. There’s even a healing commune.”

  Someone brought Claudia her order of ayahuasca tea at this point, and her face disappeared behind a mug sculpted to look like a green goddess with snakes emerging from her nipples.

  “Josh, come with us!”

  I declined and excused myself to go look for Ranger Rick and, more importantly, breakfast. As I lifted the muddy canvas flap of the tent to leave, the drunk Briton from the Roach Coach shrieked and stumbled backward, shouting: “Look, it’s a bloody dwarf, it is.”

  A woman with a conical black witch hat comforted him: “Relax, it’s a child.”

  “Like ’ell it is! Why would a child be in a place like this?”

  I passed the Krishna Kamp, where freaky men and women with bizarrely shaved heads danced around in saffron robes, and found Ranger Rick around the fire at the Rolling Turtle Tribe.

  “Hey buddy!” called Ranger Rick. “I’m glad you’re here. Let me take a picture of you. Sit on that log in front of the ladies.” Ranger Rick took several photos of me sitting in front of a group of three women shaking themselves vigorously to the conga drums. Their naked breasts slapped around rhythmically, and the bands of white seashells wrapped around their ankles and wrists rattled like a hundred rattlesnakes. Rick seemed satisfied with his documentation and put his camera away. “Man, the guys at the office are never gonna believe this. Did you eat yet?”

  I shook my head no, trying to look as starved as possible.

  “OK, let me get you something.”

  I stared into the bonfire and closed my eyes, trying to project my spirit into the fire where it would be warm. I heard Ranger Rick somewhere behind me. “Uh, hey, brother, what’s your name again? Dog-worm? Dog-wort? Dagwar? OK. Hey, I’ve got a little buddy over here who didn’t get any breakfast… Really?… Well, what about that big pot?… But it’s still steaming. I can see it… Come on, please, man?… Look, he’s a kid… Well, can’t you just pretend he’s part of the Rolling Turtles?… OK, what about for five bucks?”

  Was I really hearing this? They were refusing to serve me? Ranger Rick returned triumphantly with his yellow plastic bowl overflowing with hot corn gruel. The day before I’d been too squeamish to share germs by using Rick’s unwashed bowl and spoon, but now I shoveled the tasteless
grainy mash down with gusto. “Boy, were you hungry. You going to be OK here? I got myself invited on a hike up to the summit with a couple of the dancing ladies.”

  “I’m good,” I said. There was no way I was going to go tramping off into the woods. Besides, I had a little score to settle with the Rolling Turtles.

  “OK, just bring my bowl and spoon back to the tent with you when you go.”

  I nodded. The bowl and spoon weren’t all that I was going to bring back. When I was done eating, I wandered around the Rolling Turtle Tribe’s camp, trying to appear innocent and curious. I ducked under the blue cloth flap that hung from their tarp-covered yurt and walked into a wall of hashish smoke, thicker and more pungent than your run-of-the-mill marijuana. A tangle of naked people were engrossed in massaging each other, so no one noticed when I liberated a green wool army blanket, a bag of apples, and a Tetra Brik of soymilk. I felt this was a fair trade for violating the creed of the rainbow warrior to feed all who were hungry.

  Taking refuge in Ranger Rick’s tent at the Rainbow Gathering, Boise National Forest, Idaho, 1982.

  The rest of the gray, drizzly day was spent hunched in front of dying bonfires under my new vaguely water-resistant blanket. When the Rainbow Family Tribe fire fizzled out, I moved back to the Sun Tribe, and from there to the Shambhala Circle. Toward evening I was drawn to a little drum circle mostly populated by black men. There was something special about these guys, and it wasn’t just that they were the only black people on the mountain. For one thing, their drums didn’t have the high, tight percussive whine of the congas. These were deep, low, hourglass-shaped African djembes, whose trancelike rhythms sounded truly tribal and ancient. These guys also weren’t high energy, trying to whip up crowds with their music. They were slow and steady, chanting with low, harmonic confidence. And they were dressed alike, with matching knit red, gold, and green tams and dark patterned robes. They all boasted serpentine, ropy dreadlocks and scraggly beards. They were the first people I’d seen at Rainbow, besides the Krishnas, who actually looked like they were members of a “tribe,” and not just a loose affiliation of hippies who’d come together to bake hempseed bread.