The Nirvana Blues Read Free Page A

the transient, unrealized tatters of their dreams composing the flabby garbage of their brief struggle to achieve a sense of self-worth, an identity … Fulfillment.
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    E ACH YEAR , each month, each week, each day, each hour, countless bizarre human beings drifted into Chamisaville. Many of them congregated at the Cosmic Banana, an outdoor café that sold organic alfalfa-sprout-and-avocado sandwiches. While they ate and sipped iced herbal tea at little toadstool-shaped tables, hippie clowns schooled in mime walked a tightrope three feet off the ground between two trees nearby, balancing fluorescent rubber balls on their noses. And a band, containing a sitar, a zither, and a xylophone, played combination hard rock–Elizabethan folk-song music. At night, exotic belly dancers undulated in creamy blue spotlights while diners dreamily harvested mayonnaised cutworm moths from their sandwiches, admired each other’s ruby-colored urban gypsy regalia, and talked about building bubble-shaped houses out of pressurized polyurethane. Or they reminisced about peace, love, good and bad karma, yoga, UFOs, Tibet (in the Gold Old Days), Indian jewelry, Stranger in a Strange Land, Castaneda’s Don Juan chronicles, Charlie Manson, est, far-out sex, soya bread, vitamin C, motorcycles, solar heat, and grow holes.
    Somehow, word had gotten out that Chamisaville was the in place to go to for religious, spiritual, sexual, and organic-gardening kicks. And all at once it was projected hysterically—in the Chamisaville News, Chamber of Commerce pamphlets, radio talk shows, drunken bar conversations, laundromat bulletin-board notices, and the town council’s weekly meetings—that half to three-quarters of America’s hopheaded freakdom (howling, bearded, syphilitic, drug- and sex-crazed, dirty, unthrifty, unclean, unbrave, unreverent, uncourteous, unloyal, unawed, unwed, un-pilgrimlike, ungodly, and, worst of all, unrich), having declared Chamisaville “Mecca West,” was planning to descend, like a plague of Afro’d and Tattoozied grasshoppers, upon the suffocating irascible burg mired indefinitely in the urine-colored clot of its own rampaging Betterment.
    And descend they did in the early and middle seventies: flower children, teeny-Bs, acid heads, burly bikers, road and speed freaks, stone-cold dopers, flatulent gurus, Edgar Cayce disciples, orgone idiots, hang-glider enthusiasts, and other exotic breeds. Appearing almost out of midair, they settled into the preposterous imbroglio already berating Chamisaville’s weary denizens. Suddenly, the crowded plaza seemed equally divided between bank examiners from Walla Walla, outfitted in spanking-clean blue or beige jumpsuits, and lanky zonked no-goodniks who only last week had been guzzling egg creams at Gem Spa on Saint Mark’s and Second Avenue, Big Apple, USA. The hippies cruised town enfolded in cheap blankets, stars on their foreheads, and Bowie knives strapped to their belts, waiting for some kind of Cosmic Cowboy to materialize and lay a thousand peyote buttons on them. Other newcomers, looking like a cross between Dennis Hopper, Liberace, and an exploding cock pheasant, were corporate executives’ sons and daughters fleeing their parents’ crass materialistic lives in order to grow horse peas, blue corn, and Nubian goats, and blow their two-hundred-a-week trust-fund allowances on scads of Colombia two-toke, mean Joe greenies, yellow jackets, Lucid Lucys, and whatever else was up for grabs whenever they were up for dropping, copping, snorting, tooting, or popping.
    A mimeographed newspaper, brainchild of, and financed by, various bigwigs in the Chamber of Commerce and given away from newsracks in every chamber member business, immediately appeared and hippie-baited in no uncertain terms. It called the influx “unkempt, diseased hordes” whose only reason for living was to pollute Chamisaville’s