Wear Flowers In Your Hair

“And Spring brought me the frightening laughter of the idiot!”

-Arthur Rimbaud

A Season in Hell

On a Friday in April, we crossed St. Johns bridge outta Portland and into the sawmill country below. Before we pulled out, the lines on a local college station were open, taking requests and Big John put in the call. They were swamped and the DJ finally threw on “Velouria” ten minutes later as we curved along Oleson road, passing Hideaway Park. The DJ must’ve been jolted by our Pixies request, because right after that song finished, he spun “Drivin’ on 9” by the Breeders, somethin’ for us to vibe to.   

By twists and turns we shifted our way to the coast and then it was a straight shot there from there across state line into California. Big John bought one a them small camper trailers that hook to the back of your car, and was drivin’ down to Eureka to pick it up. I had fuck all else, so I tagged along.  

We pushed south past Salem and decided we’d turn and zip to the coast when we got to Eugene. Then that asshole got sucked in by the scenery and decided to forego the 101 and keep tra-la-la’ing around the inland, alternating between hills and farmland until we wound up along some piss-creek called Williams, which in turn emptied out into a piss-puddle called Webb Reservoir.

“Man, what if it’s like that Stephen King story, fuckin-uh-… You Know They Got a Hell of a Band? Where that couple get lost on the Oregon backroads and happen on a town where dead musicians live, like Elvis and Janis Joplin an’ all that shit? But they’re evil and, like, keep them there forever?”

“I bet I could take Otis Redding’s seaweed-covered ass in a fight –”

“Or we come across one a them hippy groups that read too much into Beatles lyrics?”

“No, that’s California. As far as I know we haven’t crossed state lines yet.”

We killed the engine on the shore and got out. Leaning on the hood, we passed a fifth and after we finished it, he took a leak in the puddle and I chucked the bottle, which barely missed him and splashed into the water, the yellow stream lost in a pool of green. Big John chewed me out for splashing his big pecker for about ten seconds, but I was looking over his shoulder at the other side of the reservoir.

At the mouth of a meadow two elms drooped and a little ways past, I saw something dull red and rusted.

I fetched a small pair of binoculars from John’s glove box and waddled up to the rim of that toady breeding pool and lifted the glass up to my eyes. Across the meadow, on the edge of the tree line, there sagged a hollowed-out bus smeared with faded day-glo that looks like it could’ve toured with The Grateful Dead.

“A forest clearing with a burnt-out Ken Kesey freak-out bus? Nope. Nope nope nope.”  

John brought the car around.

A minute later and we’re close enough to see movement in the thicket past the bus. We leave John’s cage under the elms and creep across the knee-high yellowed grass like Brits sneaking up on Boers for a “gotcha-bitch!” massacre.

“I dunno. Maybe it’s like Scott McKenzie sez: you’re gonna meet some gentle people there.”

“That was easy to say about Frisco before Charlie Manson happened.”

“Charlie happened in L.A.”

“Yeah, but he did his first round of recruitment around the bay area. That’s where he got Mary Brunner knocked up.”

As I say that, eyes ahead, we both see a tatte’d beefcake stand up from the dull green in the shadow of the communal whip, a real ass-cleaver by the look of what’s dangling there between his legs. 

“I think there’s a man behind all that ink, and I’ll bet you ten he became a green party activist after listening to Serj Tankian’s sick guitar licks.”

“What do you think these people do out here?”

“Probably hitch up ’n down the highway, hocking Edgar Cayce’s miracle cures - like how shoving an onion bulb up your ass will stitch up a shattered colon.”

A courtesy chuckle stops us dead. A passing whisper and we’re shitting cinder blocks. We whip around. Instantly, my Shining tells me: Whatever nanu-nanu bullshit Marshall Applewhite was into, these guys got it in spades.

The fuckin’ guy even looks like a Mork & Mindy era Robin Williams. The chick next to him and a few paces back is hot though. And they’re both wearing these grey shapeless ponchos down to their knees.  

He spoke calmly, in this sorta flat Stan Laurel voice with no intonation at all. The chick next to him, the whole time we would be there, didn’t say a goddam word.

“I’m Ask and this is my partner Embla. We’re the founders of this group.”

“Of course you are. Whelp, I’m Jay. This is my hetero life-mate Silent Bob-”

“Snoogins-”

“And we’ll fuck right off back to the toxicity of our cities before one of you decides to gut another blonde who looks like she starred in Valley of the Dolls.”  

“We don’t bite. And people are free to come around as they please.”

“What about Pagan sacrifices? Just wondering if you’ve met your quota on those.”

He pulls back the corner of one lip and turns his eyes up.

“Don’t worry. We’re not the Wicker Man type of Pagans.”

“Whelp, I can’t tell you how reasured I am by your need to emphasize that.”

Big John pipes up, “zorry, but what’s the point of your commune? Seems like you guys just screw around in the bushes.”

Mork smiles and waves us to the tree line.

We made our way around the side of the bus, to the side facing inward into the wood, and saw the thick copper wires looping outta the bus windows and away into the brush. Ask lead the way. We shuffled a few more paces and as we came up to the nearest bush, the front of it swung open. Sweat and heat and b.o. instantly hit us and we saw two shagging Spahn Ranch rejects going at it in a wooden cabinet lined with metal plates on the inside.  

“The little power we need, mostly for odds and ends in the bus, is generated by these Orgone Accumulators which I’ve modified. In the 1950’s Wilhelm Reich discovered that all things in the universe were held together by these things called Orgones – kinda like the midi-chlorians from Phantom Menace, but fuelled by big dick energy?”   

“And now that you’ve told us, you have to whack us?”

“It’s free for all. Reich never did patent the idea. It’s for everyone to use. It’s completely green. And as for the point of our sustainable collective, Hayao Miyazaki said “I’d like more of the world to go back to being wild.” He also said: “It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization in my lifetime.”

I’m thinkin’: next he’s gonna give us the ol’ Kaczynski of how ‘the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.’

Branches waver in the wind and we see all the good people emerging from the fridge-sized fuck-bunkers stashed here and there, some embedded into the dirt. Slim chicks in thin robes. Some flop down, some make for the reservoir. 

This fire-crotch fox who looks like a young Kate Bush toga’d in a shroud held together at the shoulder by a safety pin sits on a big log rutted horizontally into the ground a few feet from the bus and fingers a guitar. The shroud starts to slip as she goes into a rendition of Cat Steven’s “The Wind”. 

Big John clamps a paw down on my shoulder. “I think red over there keeps flashing me her Basic Instinct. And I think it’s definitely working.”

I shrug his grip off and look around. I’m making this sour face until I see another nymphet pop out of a bush further on and saunter up to the bus. A small blone, looks like a young Tina Weymouth cicrca Talking Heads 77.

Alright. Fuckit. I grab her by the hand and hustle her back into one a them orgasmatrons.

As the sun goes down, sweat still dewed on my chest hair, I hang back in the shadow of the bus, watching the bonfire burning low in a heath cleared out in the middle of the knee-high grass. Everyone swarms to the bald patch, even Big John to hear Ask. Embla sits by the fire near his feet. His lanky frame looms over the burning wood as he starts in:

““I used to believe I was created. I was not created. I was the universe. And I saw many people walking towards me, and they were all me.” Siddhartha Gotama.

Your thoughts…mean nothing. Know what’s more powerful than any volition could ever be? Inevitability. What those fattened hens who cluck their tongues from their aeries call “radicals” are merely accelerationists. Man is willful. Nature is inexorable. You carve a piece of driftwood into an icon and assume you were likewise chipped into being because society chips away at you after you came into being. What you forget is that icon you hold, whether it is of a Persian execution device or a beaming likeness of the Ramakrishna, was shaped from something naturally grown first and foremost. Something that came into being without the hand, that the hand simply chopped and chipped when it stumbled upon it, a tree that could’ve reached its apex had it not been snuffed into a trinket. All the while the hens cluck and call you animals for crashing their cage, and what do they think they are?”

There was a chuckle from the circle and a few half-formed applause.

“The thumpers on the city corners dream of the perpetuity of man, but nature has and always has had perpetuity, precisely because it has no semblance to the works of man. You are an offshoot, a lump of acids and lipids, a bad flare-up that will pass. The face on the steeple demands worship, while the cracks in the steeple leave the hollow interior open to prying eyes. It is the crack in the rock that is indifferent, that draws us in with the temptation of prodding that crevice…”  

For a gardener with a Kaczynski complex, he sure knows how to give you a good jolt to the sack. There were more than a few times during his sermonizing when I can honestly say I felt that. But I drifted off in the shadow of the bus all the same.

I screw around for another few days. There is nothing for me here.

Big John’s draped in one of those velvet sacks, playing “Across the Universe” on a zither; and I’m wondering when he had time to learn.  

I stand under the elms and look at John’s clunker, now scrapped and not going anywhere, his final say on the matter of joining me back to Portland.

I turn and head into the trees, first northwest, then straight north. Ten minutes later I’m on Powell Creek road, sticking my thumb out, waiting for something better to come along.