The Nirvana Blues Read Free

the hundreds, would-be poets and novelists were soon tending bar, dealing dope, buying Safeway lettuce with foodstamps despite bitter memories of the UFWOC boycotts, working for less—in the Dynamite Fetish factory—than even the natives were willing to work for, outmuscling local teachers for Headstart jobs, or applying to CAP for rabbit-breeding project funds. And soldiers of fortune, once Ibiza bar managers or Las Vegas croupiers, who suddenly found themselves hopelessly trapped in a Chamisaville traffic jam, established photographic laboratories, organic food stores, or garages that specialized in renovating old Bugattis.
    On Monday, all the fine valley carpenters, schooled in their trade for centuries, either spoke Tiwa or Spanish. Next day, half the valley’s carpenters had graduated from Yale Law or Columbia Medical and were married to brilliant psychotherapists who had decided to be pregnant with a genius for nine months: together, they built their own dream houses.
    Trapped in a cutthroat cash economy, old-timers, the impoverished sons and daughters and grandchildren of local residents, could no longer afford building with adobe. When finally losing their land to inflated taxes and unscrupulous developers, they moved into cheap Mutual Help–Operation Turnkey deathtraps, or bought second-hand trailers, renting hookups in Irving Newkirk’s park, or in the recently established Groovy Bumpus Trailer Heaven, or in Isiah Kittridge’s Trailer Towne. The newcomers, refugees from AT&T, MONY, or Merrill Lynch, Pierce, et al., had excess boodle, and immediately began building elaborate adobe houses boasting circular rooms and turrets, cupolas and bell towers, kidney-shaped patios and all-electric heating. Graduates of Exeter and Reed, Miss Hall’s and Goddard, they labored night and day, side by side, constructing sixty-thousand-dollar labyrinthine mud mansions. At the halfway mark, women filed in district court to recoup their maiden names; and the couples celebrated the completion of their exotic adobe palaces by bitterly filing for divorce.
    Abruptly, Chamisaville was riddled with young, separated, flatbroke couples juggling their three kids back and forth around the valley in a hurricanelike frenzy of guilt-laden activity whose logistics soon defied comprehension. Peyton Placeism reared its ugly head, as affairs between separated couples cranked up. But here again logistics were near-terminal, as ex-hubbies caretaking two kids patronized the drive-in movie with their best friend’s ex-wife and her three children, while his ex-wife and her ex-spouse demolished grasshoppers at the La Tortuga Bar, trying to forget that tomorrow morning those five little monsters were slated to pulverize their own infatuation with sledgehammer blows of infantile bickering.
    Deliberate instability, of course, was the name of the commercial game. Divorce is good for capitalism, which likes nothing better than an endless slew of two-house single-family arrangements: double the groceries, double the heating bills, double the automobiles, double the lawnmowers. And look at the windfall for the transportation industries—on the bus visits to Papa, on the plane trips to see Mama!
    Things went from bad to worse. Unloading their gorgeous Chamisaville houses at tremendous losses, the ex-husbands and ex-wives were then nailed for income-tax evasion, slipped into dark and devious drug and alcohol addictions, got themselves mugged and raped by sullen teenagers after the Friday night boogies at the La Lomita Dance Hall, and finally gave up, leaving town, heading for Israel to commit suicide in a Golan Heights kibbutz, or hitchhiking to Alaska for pipeline jobs as dynamite blasters, earning eleven hundred a week in a forty-percent mortality rate endeavor, getting their heads straight again, cleaning up their acts, Forging a Fresh Start. They left behind, in the Chamisa Valley, a little more confusion, a slightly bigger mess,