“Is anything for rent there?”
“Sure. It’s who you know, and she knows half the people out there because they love the Jolly Roger.”
“Did she get a place?”
“You didn’t know she was looking, did you? Sorry man. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“No, I knew she was looking. For sure. Just not there.”
“Well, Dodge City is as close to heaven on earth as you can get,” says Grail. “A very cool place. It’s all art and music and surfing. Almost everybody is young. Freedom, man. Everybody shares. No material trips at all. Establishment unwelcome. It’s cheap and close to town and you can walk up into the canyon, all the way to the lakes or the Living Caves or Top of the World if you want. Deer and quail and coyotes. Raccoons and they say mountain lions but I’ve never seen one. And bobcats. I have seen them. Wildflowers in the spring. There’s a bunch of us, we hike to the peak near Top of the World on Sunday mornings. Watch the sunrise. Chant and worship whatever gods we choose. Totally spiritual and cosmic. Take off our clothes if we want. Let love in. No egos. Stay for hours. Sometimes ’til sunset.”
In Matt’s smoky mind, it sounds pretty good, except for the naked part. Maybe Julie can get a place that’s cheaper than Third Street, but has enough room for him not to live in a garage. Enough room for Kyle when he gets home, and for Jazz to have her privacy. Maybe two bathrooms. No Nelson Pedley!
“She was hoping to find some work out there, too,” says Grail. “Something she could do from home.”
“Like what?”
“There’s not much. Housekeeping maybe. Tutoring or babysitting the kids. Kids all over the place out there. When I saw your mom yesterday, she had just gotten off work. And wearing the stupid pirate garb they make her wear.”
“She doesn’t enjoy that costume.”
“Chauvinist piggish to be sure. Matt, let’s go hear what Tim has to say about the psychedelic experience.”
18
Matt squeezes into the standing-only crowd in the back of the meditation room, with Christian and Grail and some of the brothers. The high ceiling is pale with smoke and the branches of the potted ficus reach into it. Christian’s grand, explosive Cosmic Mandala presides over all.
Leary stands at the podium looking not at all like the college professor he is. He may be a man nourished by knowledge and admiration but to Matt he looks more like an outdoorsman, a surfer or fisherman maybe. He looks over six feet tall and is well built. He has over-the-collar sun-bleached blond hair and amicable blue eyes. Well-tanned, with a wide-open white Mexican wedding shirt and baggy linen pants. There’s a boyish merriment in his face, something of the prankster. He’s quick to smile. Even amplified by a mic, his voice is earnest and pleasant.
Leary says he’s a victim of the cops and the Establishment press, which gets a rowdy response from the crowd. Says he’s not a pusher of LSD or anything else, except the right of any adult to choose what goes into his or her body as guaranteed by the Constitution. Whether you want to kill yourself suddenly with cyanide or slowly with cigarettes, it’s up to you.
As if on cue, Furlong and Darnell come in from Coast Highway, the crowd parting for them. Furlong is scowling and Darnell smiling. Catcalls and curses and pig snorts from the audience. Someone turns the ceiling lights up high so the intruders are fully displayed. The MAW customers have been especially hostile toward the cops since Furlong pulled the allegedly obscene drawings and astrological sex-position chart off the gallery wall and booked them into evidence at the station. Christian and Matt and one of Christian’s lawyer friends had gone downtown the very next day and gotten them back, made copies, and hung them in the windows facing busy Coast Highway where they could offend thousands of people a day.
“Officers!” Leary calls out. “Welcome to Mystic Arts World and to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and to the very first night of the rest of your lives!”
Furlong stands with his hands on his hips, facing the boos and snorts; Darnell turns in a circle, smile gone but waving. Matt wishes they wouldn’t call her a pig. He uses the newly brightened lights to search the many faces for Jasmine. But she’s not here, just as he knew she wouldn’t be. For the hundredth time Matt feels in his gut that Jasmine hasn’t just run away from home. Feels it really strong now. Something else has happened. Is it the secondhand pot making him feel this way now? Afraid and anxious? He doesn’t think so. He should feel afraid and anxious.
The ceiling lights cut through the smoke and the Cosmic Mandala floats in the upper layer like an artifact from the mists of creation. Matt enjoys his secondhand high right now, decides marijuana isn’t so bad. Darnell catches his eye and all he can think to do is wave to her.
“People, people!” Leary calls out, the mic close for volume. “Nobody is as far out as a cop, so let’s not be critical. Officers, join us! Learn about the psychedelic experience. Don’t judge us and we will not judge you.”
Someone turns the lights back down and the boil of ridicule from the crowd lowers to a simmer. Matt watches Furlong and Darnell retreat from the meditation room then pass from his field of vision into the front of the store, and, he guesses, make for the exit. Chants of aloha follow them out.
In their smoky wake, four bikers swagger in, two of them huge and two skinny. The muttering falls to silence. They’ve got dirty black jeans and harness boots, wallet chains and hunting knives holstered on their belts. Long tangled hair and beards, vests and back patches that read: HESSIANS. The logo is a skull with a sword thrust through the back and out the front, between the eyes.
“Welcome, friends,” says Leary. “I’ve never met an outlaw I didn’t like.”
To Matt, they seem to be looking for someone, just like he is. He notes that Johnny has disappeared. The Hessians finally turn their attention on Leary, then they turn and walk back out.
“Brother bikers!” Leary calls out. “When confounded, go mystical! Stay and be! Rest your bodies and expand your minds! Experience!”
Nothing from the bikers but a slamming door.
Leary smiles and waves and continues his program, explaining how he based his book, The Psychedelic Experience, on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he and two colleagues translated into English and is NOT “an embalmer’s guide,” but a book to teach the living HOW to die. It is FOR the living. It’s a passage guide, he says. A guide to attaining the next of the many higher planes of consciousness a person will experience in their several lives and incarnations. Another way of achieving this higher consciousness is through psychedelic compounds such as peyote, mescaline, and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
Leary introduces the three basic stages — “Bardos” — of the journey in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
First Bardo: The Period of Ego-Loss or Non-Game Ecstasy. Second Bardo: The Period of Hallucinations.
And the Third Bardo: The Period of Re-Entry.
Matt has almost no idea what Leary is talking about, but by the silence in the room he assumes that everybody else does. He looks around at their expressions, very church-like, based on the several times his mother and father took the kids to church.
After the program, reappeared Johnny Grail invites Matt and Christian to stay in the meditation room after the crowd leaves, just hang with a few of the brothers and Tim and Rosemary, have a toke and brainstorm and experience. Matt knows that to “experience” means to “trip,” which means LSD. Matt has heard that Leary and Grail ingest spectacular quantities of acid, almost a competition, and Grail always takes the most. Matt has heard them bragging how great acid sex is, especially if your old lady is tripping too.