PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

4. Birthday Party

        Out on the freeway again. I continued east. My destination was the Hog Farm commune out in New Mexico. I’d been there before back in the summer of sixty-eight.

        It must have been about September of 1968 when a couple of guys had pulled into the gas station where I worked in Needles, California. The radiator was exploding in their old Chevy.  They were desperate to get a large load of natural bulk food to their New Mexico commune. As we stood together looking at their sorry piece of junk automobile that would never drive another mile under its own power they told me all about the good things happening out there. They called me “brother” and said the world was changing and that I should give up the ratrace and come join them. I was recently and painfully separated from my wife and son and I was sick of my job—fleecing tourists in that desert gas station. That in itself took some healthy prayer under the stars and a lot of resolve, since I had no other way to support my wife and child but continuing with that evil. I had made my own decision and separated myself from the crud that had inflicted itself upon my soul. I also quit my 3 pack a day cigarette habit cold turkey. No slave was I. I contacted ministers, several of them, told them of my plight and asked their advice. Then I went a little berserk and left my family and was all alone. That is how I came to be in Needles, and low and behold, I was back working for a crook in a gas station again and feeling disgusted with myself. After all I had given up! And what for? To get money for food and gas? So there they were, these hippies in an old Chevy in this crooked gas station where I was working, and they wanted me to do something good with my life. They wanted me to help them feed a lot of hungry people who were Protesting against the War in Viet Nam. I was searching for a deeper meaning to my life. I was fully ready to do something good for a change. I listened with open ears to all the things they had to say. Afterwards I piled them and all their sacks of food into my Volkswagon van and drove them a thousand miles to the Hog Farm in Pionosa, New Mexico. Basically some pretty clear-minded people, Tom Law and Wavy Gravy and others, had put together a fleet of converted school buses and a whole lot of sincere brothers and sisters and they had been traveling around the United States speaking in Universities and everywhere people would listen to them about the way the Viet Nam war was causing innocent American young men to go into a brown skin third world country and learn the art of mass killing. Even children and women were dying in the American attacks. Terrible deaths, from weapons like napalm, which was burning gasolene. But not gas like you put in your car. No. It was gasolene that was thick and sticky like honey. And when it was dropped from a helicopter on people in a village they could not scrape the burning stuff off their arms and legs, or off the arms and legs of their children or wives or parents. It just burned. And our American young men were being told it was okay to do that. That is the sort of things Wavy Gravy's team was telling people about. It was pretty much new to me. All I knew about the Viet Nam war was what I heard on the evening news. Obviously I hadn't been told the full story. By the time we got to the Hog Farm I was doing a lot of thinking. What I saw there was a whole further dimension.

        The commune was camped deep in the national forest alongside a stream. Pure magic is what it was. First off, there was some good pot and hash and even some psychedelics, which I didn't know much about yet and was quite unsure of. Then along comes a incredibly beautiful half nude young woman and pops a little pill in my mouth. The forest dwelling place of this tribe all of a  sudden became a whole lot more magical than I had even realized.  All the beautiful sisters were wearing way-out perfumes and little else.  And the commune kitchen was preparing delicious food for everyone. And there was  wonderful music! The school buses were converted into homes, wild comfortable places. They were painted with wild fantastic designs and colors.There, amidst the trees on those rutted forest roads they were a busy little village. I felt like I was home. I should have stayed with them forever -- but after three days I got back into my VW and returned to Needles with a carload of California bound hippies. We traveled all night long tripping our brains out under the desert stars. And we talked and talked and talked and talked. That was how it began, way back in 1968. I quit that bad job in Needles and never again stooped to it again, no matter how cold or hungry or desperate I became. I drove the carload of people on into Los Angeles and dropped them off. And I myself began to travel around the nation speaking to people about the war in Viet Nam and how all concerned people needed to come together and make a stand against it. This "pilgrimage" was to occupy the next two or three years of my life and take me back and forth across the United States and Canada several times, and ultimately cause the FBI to bring charges against me as a "draft dodger". It wasn't the dodging they were concerned about. It was the fact that I could hop trains and hitchhike and cover huge distances very quickly. And I was having a very good effect wherever I spoke. Not in auditoriums, but in Student Unions and wherever I happened to be. Sometimes to two or three people, sometimes to twenty or thirty, a few times to a couple hundred. Eventually the FBI caught up with me and I was sent to prison.

        So now it was 1972 and I had just been released from a terrible period of confinement in Federal prison for this cause. Heck! I had come very close to dying in that prison, several times! I was traumatized and broken on the wheel. Now I needed to do some healing... I felt that the safest place I might go to, to pull in all my loose ends, and recover my human sensibilities which prison had damaged, was the Hog Farm.  I thought I would surely find kindred there. I thought they would all gather around me and pat me on the back and pour special cups of sage tea for me, and maybe even some pretty girl would rub my feet. After all, even though they all had espoused the cause of speaking out against the war in Viet Nam, how many of them had actually been swallowed up in the belly of an ugly prison for that cause? Beaten to a pulp in a tiny cell? Given a "punishment drug", Prolyxin, without the Cogentin that is supposed to go with it, so that it makes you gasp for air unable to even turn over on your own, leaving you on your back, on the verge of drowning in your own mucas???!!!!!  The punishment drug's effects lasted three days. Some of the prisoners they did that to died. But I had survived! And now I was sort of coming home in a way. I had a funny warm feeling that I was heading for a surprise birthday party! A coming home party! A great celebration! I passionately remembered the Hog Farm Commune's intense beauty and I firmly believed that nothing would ever change them.

***

        The Hog Farm was no longer in Pionosa but I didn’t have too much trouble discovering their new location by asking around. It was one of the most famous communes of all time

           They were widely known to be a kind of Mecca for wandering hippies, a place where the off-beat philosophy was actually being practiced. Supposedly it was a community of clowns and backwoodsmen, gypsies and artists; a radical amalgam united in the purpose of their escape into the underground. Their protests against the nation’s mindless machines has made the nation’s newspapers time and again—like August 1968 when they took the four-hundred pound pig, Pigasus, to the Democratic national convention and tried to get him nominated for president.

        So I toted my backpack into their farm one winter morning feeling like I was arriving on the winds of destiny to take up my portion among them, to lend my strengths to their future. But what I found was not encouraging. There were many acres of land and a few buildings, and some stock corrals and hen houses, and the remains of many abandoned vehicles, all covered with snow. The main house was smoky and not very clean and full to the brim with the belongings of several people who lived there. The weather was biting cold, snowing every day. Coming from southern California and Tucson as I was, I was grateful to stand around the woodstove in the main house and warm up when I arrived. There I met a few of the Hog Farm’s winter-dwellers. Most were out and about doing their things.

        I was surprised to discover only one woman on the whole commune—and she sure had her hands full. She wore a tired look as if she was the mother of ten small boys all spaced nine months apart. She drudged wearily around the wood stove, cooking and cleaning for everyone.  Sometimes she stopped and sighed and wiped the sweat from her forehead with a dirty sleave and gazed through the window at the snowy fields. I spent my first day at the farm sitting inside the main house talking with her. But she didn’t like the feeling my short hair gave her. No amount of talking seemed to instill any trust in her.

      That night the men returned from their chores and excursions. They gathered in the main house and stood off aways from me. The dim lantern light revealed sinister sidewise glances in my direction and short muffled whispers beyond my hearing. Mostly they ignored me.  Once when I tried to strike up a conversation with someone another person came forward and told me harshly that no one present really wanted to hear any of my rap so if I would just shut up that would make everyone happy. His eyes leered at me in the darkness. He was waiting for trouble—expecting it. Wanting it. I kept my silence. In the black corners several men laughed at me. It felt like a den of snakes. But I refused to let their bad manners get to me. I’d lived at communes. I knew the necessity of testing newcomers. I was willing to be tested. But tired. Too tired to stand there in the dark and be tested all night long.  A new A-frame loomed nearly finished just up the hill from the main house. I was told I could roll out my sleeping bag there for the night.  Someone said they’d hold a meeting in the next day or two to see if I could stay for a one month trial period.

        The following morning I sized the situation up further and realized they weren’t like any other commune dwellers I’d ever seen. They weren’t kind or optimistic or trying to enlighten each other, nor expostulating on our sacred Oneness, nor the simple joy of Gathering together. They weren’t homesteading families either. I saw no children.  They were a pack of very ornery bearded men—and not very peace-loving.  Each guy seemed to be trying to be as macho as he could, strutting, bluffing, threatening. Right off the bat they asked me if I was some sort of nark or government agent, not once but several times. They were never satisfied with my answers.

        I wanted them to know me—to trust me. It was important. So I spoke to them of my dream—the dream that had started among them and that I had carried in my heart as I had wandered North America, the dream that had kept me singing “Yasger’s Farm” loud and clear all through prison...  I told them about the heart I had witnessed at the Pionosa Hog Farm in ‘68... I asked them what had happened to them since then? It was embarrassing how impudently they gaped at me as I sought my words. My words echoed in my mind, choked in my throat before their stares.

        Everything I said sounded euphemistic and empty around them. They sneered sullenly. They didn’t seem to be Crosby, Stills and Nash people at all…There was no feeling of  “silver people on the shoreline”... Obviously times had changed.

        I scored few if any points in telling them about my recent release from prison. To my surprise they didn’t count it as anything remarkable to have been jailed for opposing the war in Viet-Nam. It even seemed to have become more fashionable to side with the military! I’d been away from the underground for two years but I had never expected that! I reasoned that probably living out there on the fringe must have gotten rough, what with the war coming to an end and Nixon going down; the world must have cornered them time and again to flush them out, to make them fight, to beat them or threaten them, taking away from them one thing after another, coercing their loved ones, flagrantly hating them. So probably, under all that pressure they must have changed their attitudes in an attempt to soften the blows directed at them, just so they could in some way survive. I suppose someone like me showing up on their doorstep full of all the old commitment and just out from serving two years in prison for those beliefs was a major threat to yank them backwards into the oppression they’d hoped to leave behind. Anyway they treated me like shit. Heck! Maybe they were saturated with Narcs and government Heavies! Maybe there wasn’t a single human being left among them! Maybe that’s why they were so nuts about narcs.

        One night I tried to put a new spin on things. I pulled out my Tarot deck and offered to give a reading to anyone. This is a thing I have always done pretty well. Back in nineteen sixty-nine there were times I had hundreds of people clustered around me as I sat reading Tarot in the University of California at Berkley and at the University in Albuerquerque and at Boulder. I carried a deck with me on all my travels and even managed to have one in prison. I have a way with the cards and they usually do some amazing things. Needless to say, I held their attention in the main house for an hour or two. When I put the cards away I could tell I had given them many things to think about.

        I continued to sit around with them that night. The fellow sitting beside me was playing the guitar rather badly but they needed entertainment enough not to be particular. They were all listening to him. At some point he asked me if I played. When I answered that I did they sort of scoffed in disbelief and he handed the guitar to me as if to say “Prove it”...

        I had spent the better part of my imprisonment learning to play the guitar. I’d had a pretty excellent teacher as my cellmate and good friend Roland, a lead-quitarist from Tucson. There was practically nothing else to do that stretched my imagination so I had practiced for five or six—or ten—hours every day and after all that I’d actually gotten pretty good. My voice was in good shape, too. So there in the main house, sitting on the bunk, I belted out some pretty fervent songs: “Wooden Ships” and “Child of God”, “Wild Horses”, “Carolina”, “Fire and Rain”—and they were a bit astonished and somewhat sheepish then. They’d begun to realize what I’d been telling them I’d been through wasn’t just a bunch of bullshit. On the other hand I believe they began to see me as some kind of “loose canon”—perhaps powerful enough to affect them in either of two ways: Either I might drag them into controversies with the establishment that could jeopardize them or I might usurp someone’s personal power or position in that shaky anarchistic society. Whatever. Anyway, how do I know what was actually going on in their heads? Both those speculations might be wrong. All I know is that they became more belligerent towards me afterwards.

        They just plain weren’t like any “hippies” I had ever known! They disdained peace and love! They wanted hard-rock screeched at them. They were brawlers! A couple of them pushed me around to try to get me to fight! That kind of stuff is all right out in the stupid drunken bars of America—but I had been thinking for a long time that we were an alternative mindset to that poisoned culture -- for truly those violent insane attitudes are a miserable ignorant sickness that spawn and nourish wars and economic slavery and every kind of senseless inhumanity.  And I told them so, too. It’s my nature to speak truth to people who claim to be “brothers” and “sisters”. So I didn’t get off on a good foot.

        I had my St Bernard puppy with me. He liked to romp and play like puppies do. He chased some chickens one morning and they began talking about shooting him. I wasn’t about to let them do that. So there was another big hullaballoo. Later that night we were gathered in the main house again. Man, it’s weird to be packed tight in a smoky house in the middle of back country with a bunch of sex-starved, dirty, drunken, ragged radicals (with maybe a few bearded government agents interspersed…) Volatile! I’d been thrown bodily out of the main house the night before. They remarked that I was either very strange or very brave to have the gall to return again so soon as though nothing had happened. So they passed me the bottle. I didn’t feel like getting drunk with them though.  That didn’t seem safe. I had a sip or two but declined after that which made them mad enough to ask if I thought I was too good to drink with them. It was plain to me they wanted me to slip into a more vulnerable condition.

        Then someone got out a bag of Peyote buttons and everyone was immediately grabbing them up. Peyote is a holy sacrament to Indians and hippies alike. But I’d have to have been a pure fool to take such a powerful drug while cooped up so tightly with those renegades who obviously didn’t care much for me. So, I declined the peyote. That really got them. They figured only a nark would refuse to take a psychedelicasy like peyote. They kept urging me on.

        I admit I gave it a long hard thought. Peyote is a great healer and I definitely could use healing—but was this the right time or place? I hadn’t partaken of any form of psychedelic sacrament since getting out of prison. I still had the terrible headache constantly. I didn’t want to put any drugs inside my skull with that pain going on. Not even peyote. I had learned to use my mind to control the pain. If a drug evaporated my ability to control the pain—I might flip out bad. But most importantly, these guys weren’t “brothers” the way I used the term “brothers”. I didn’t trust them to be there to help me if I needed them.  So I wasn’t about to do Peyote with them.

        Naturally this rekindled their discussion as to whether or not I was a nark. I could see things weren’t going well for me. Frightened, I half-saw myself as a bloody heap over in the dark corner come morning, or frozen dead in a bloody snowbank. Then one of them picked up my puppy and tried to push some Peyote down his throat. I grabbed the dog away and a wrestling match ensued. They were cursing me bad. I’d seen young animals turned into basket cases by drugs. I refused to let them do that to my dog. So they ran both of us out of that house again—and the next morning they asked me to leave the farm.

        There was a horse-drawn wagon due to go into town, which was about five miles distant. I gathered my stuff together and got aboard.  There were at least ten others aboard the wagon already. No one was talking to me. By the looks on their faces I knew they were planning to beat the shit out of me at some point along the way. They weren’t exactly hiding it.

        The fellow driving the horses was a real galoot. He didn’t seem to care where the horses ran. We bounced severely in the back. It was not pleasant. All of a sudden some young dogs ran across in front of the horses and one got run over by a wheel. The galoot brought the team to a halt with great difficulty. A housewife with crying children at her heels came running out of a farm house and up to the wagon where she commenced in shrill tones to upbraid the driver for his carelessness. Her little boy held the body of the dead puppy in his arms, boo-hooing to beat the band. The driver screamed at her that he had already told her he was “sorry”, so what more did she want? And he got the team trotting again. I hopped off the back with my pack and my dog. Everyone hooted and yelled at me and I would have taken to the hills if they had stopped the team again but the guy was having too much trouble with the horses to do that, although he tried. The wagon proceeded on it’s rumbling way down the center of the road with Jerks and curses. I could hear the guys yelling at me that they’d better not catch me back at the ranch when they returned.

        I started walking along the country road wondering how I could get into town and past those crazies without suffering bloodshed. There was zilch traffic so I was surprised when I heard the sound of a car coming up behind me. I turned to shake a thumb. The car stopped and Gush-gush and I squeezed inside. A mile later we passed the horse-drawn wagon and I slouched down in the seat hoping I wasn’t noticed. So I got to town a good deal ahead of the wagon and took advantage of that circumstance. Hoisting my pack I walked briskly out of town along the snowy highway.

        I got rides enough, no problem. I was heading back towards southern California and warm weather.

***

        Seventeen years later in 1988. I met some great Hog-Farm brothers and sisters and ended up telling them the tale of that lousy experience.  They smiled and looked at their feet and with some chagrin told me how rough those early winters had been on them. The Hog Farm is still going strong even today. The people who have carried it through have a lot of heart—lot’s of families and lots of children.

        The chaff flew from the wheat long ago; the golden grain remain.