Midnight in the Desert

They dropped acid in their backyard, the California desert.

The power at Barker’s’d gone out, so Charlie and the girls went out and spent the night in the scrub. The arroyos of the scrubland, wolves kickin’ up dust in the ditches chasing a desert hare, the goddam Solar system spread out above, and a flat boulder, a stone alter to this Bizarro-world version of the Merry Pranksters, to copulate. This was a little over a year before Van recorded “Into the Mystic” when he was doin’ ‘Moondance’ at A&R in New York, but at that moment, this must’ve been one of those waves Charlie always claimed he could send out, and Van caught it.

Sweaty and buzzed, they set up a bonfire.

“Babe, I’m not on the Astral Plain, I AM the Astral Plain! I am the grass and the lion, the fifth Beatle and the tree Siddhartha sat under. I am the stone wall Bodhidharma stared at for twenty years!”  

Charlie pointed to a snake with a rattler on its tip winding along just past the fire light.

“See that Sidewinder? I am that Sidewinder!” 

“You sure are, Charlie!”

“You’re a star, a big bright shiny star!”

In the shadow of rusted-out buggies, to be refitted, modded, armored and ready for the apocalypse--Charlie on that Mad Max wave a decade before the movie was even pitched--booze and marshmallows and stories of how they’d hide in a bunker out here, or up in the trees, until the blacks were in charge again, then they’d come out and beneficently guide them, like the old plantation days. The hippie chicks nodded, right on. Tex knocked over his beer bottle and picked it up.

Charlie broke down the lyrics to Revolution 9. It’s all right there, man, John, Paul, George and Ringo all know what’s up.

“Yeah, man, sure”, Tex nods along.

When their backs to the wall…

“With less people, less pollution, man”. Clean water, healthy air…Al Gore was with them in spirit, I’m sure.

…They were livin’ it, The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, they were livin’ it; Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley. What Thomas Pynchon spent the rest of his life catchin’ up to. What Jerry Garcia never let go of.

Three years on, Hunter would write: “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The wave broke with Charlie. You could say: “Well, it was Woodstock, Altamont Freeway, Kent State, or Easy fuckin’ ‘well, we blew it’ Rider”, but the surf was already crashin’, and Charlie risin’ outta that sea’s what finally broke it.

Ha Ha.

They told each other horror stories, huddlin’ and gropin’ and imaginin’ a boogeyman Nixon stalkin’ out there in the night, grazin’ the brush just past the bonfire, checkin’ under your bed and in your rectal cavity; and the specter of Reagan, even farther away, so far away as to be impossible, just a clown on a screen, no way, couldn’t happen. He couldn’t happen.

And that spook tappin’ on your shoulder, well that’s just your imagination.  

Totally. 

“How you gonna go out, man? How you gonna go? You gonn’ say: ‘Don’t kill me, I’m worth more to you alive than dead!’? or you gonna go ‘Go ahead. You’ll only be killin’ a man.’?” Charlie grilled Tex, his American Rasputin eyes--the same eyes bootlicking honkies would be scared to death of hypnotizing a jury in a year’s time--burrowing into him. Tex swallowed, unsure.

“Eichmanns and pigs, Tex, Eichmanns and pigs.”

“Sure, Charlie, sure. Whatever you say.”

Having fun. They were all having fun. Patricia and Leslie, Tex and Linda. Susan, Mary and all the rest.

“We had fun, didn’t we?” somebody murmurs in the silence. Maybe Squeaky.

“They got barbed wires and gas chambers, we got tye-dye and Brian Wilson.”

Tex finishes another brown bottle and belches: “The blue bus is callin’ us. Driver where you takin’ us?”

This gets celebratory laughs, a round of applause. Glass shatters against a log as Tex chucks the empty at the bonfire.

Lights flash out there, in the even more deserted desert. They watch them for a while. Greens and blues, and a red one too. The greens and blues fade. The red one lingers a little longer, then it descends and they lose sight of it, but get the suspicion it never left.

Some doze off. The yipping of the coyotes brings them to, then a few moments later their heads slump forward again.

Charlie’s head tilts over at an odd angle; A cold gaze meets the fire.

“In my mind’s eye, my thoughts light fires in your cities.”   

“What’d you say, Charlie?”

“Ya coulda called Mein Kampf sloppy, but there’s one thing you can’t deny: It’s a thought that lit the world on fire. All ideas, in due time.”

“Sure. I dig.”

“Heh heh, when we get through, who’s even gonna know we were here? I’m not even here, man. People, if they’re the right kind people, will always be aroun’ to catch what I’m sendin’ out. And they’ll know who it’s from. And the Georrings and Bormanns will call them retards and gas them. They’d try to do the same to me, if I weren’t not there.”

“I get ya. It’s like…Josef Mengele will never die, right? Because they keep him alive. One day, they’re even gonna adopt his methods. You’ll see.”

They sat there a long time.

‘Where do we go from here?’, a voice asks from the dark.

…The chick from Valley of the Dolls got pregnant. Charlie kept the hits comin’. Susan got a brain tumor and Squeaky’s Colt jammed.

Charlie’s probably still out there, by that fire, waitin’ for the magical mystery tour bus to come pick him up.

The power was back up and running when they reached the shack at sunrise. One would like to think they were singin’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” as they walked.