The Nirvana Blues Read Free Page B

crystalline creeks with their feces, corrupt its children with drugs, co-opt its sacred cultures, tear down its religious institutions, rip off the merchandise in its stores, and make all its virgins, homecoming queens, and choir singers pregnant with children who would be born on the nod and with crippling, narcotic-induced deformities.
    Crime leaped: it was all blamed on the newcomers. An odd assortment of anomalies attached themselves to some of the area’s less reputable buckets of blood. Bearing names like Fertile Fred, Sam the Man, Garbage Honky, Dunlop Tyres, Indian Louise, and Myrtle the Turtle, these sweat-stained counterculturists stumbled into the bars like a rainbow just released from eighteen years’ solitary confinement in a federal slam, immediately ordered beers, and then, outing little tobacco pouches, commenced rolling joints.
    Psychedelic communes mushroomed. There was the Bull Frog Farm in the Mota Llano foothills; the Milky Way landed right next door. Buffalo Bill’s Ranch sprung up north of Vallecitos; the Purple Piglet Crash Pad materialized on Ranchitos Arriba mesa. Splashed at random across the valley were the Cosmic Consciousness, the Rainbow Village, and Garbage Honky’s Castle of Earthly Delights. And the Family of God commune’s chief honcho, Bill Dillinger, Esq., arrived in town lounging against the leather upholstery of a chauffeur-driven Rolls, with the intergalactically famous rock groupie, National Velvet, on his tattooed arm.
    A queer commune, settled several miles up Chamisaville Canyon, called itself the Duke City Streakers. A dozen men and women pitched three off-white tipis in an abandoned ravine, gobbled alfalfa-sprout-and-honey sandwiches, washed that down with kefir and some Red Zinger tea, stripped to the buff, and started running.
    Warming up with a Streak for God, they hit every Sunday service possible, from Bob Condum’s evangelical whoopee-do (nailed by a girl with beautiful waist-length strawberry hair who galloped through the noxious tent just as two dozen of Bob’s peroxide blond minirobed Saviourettes were garnisheeing the weekly paychecks of a hundred destitute Pueblo natives), to the Episcopal church, where Father Dagwood Whipple was so flustered by the bearded grasshopper thundering through his service rattling a tambourine that he tripped on his robe, tumbled against the lectern, opening a thirteen-stitch forehead gash, and dropped his twelve-pound Bible into the front pew, squarely atop a wealthy parish benefactor’s purple noggin.
    Next, they held a Streak for Peace, synchronizing nude dashes through state and county police headquarters, the town cops’ pillbox, and the National Guard armory, where several lackluster local doughboys polishing tanks whistled, cheered, clapped, and grabbed for the two buxom lasses wearing cheap Timex wristwatches and powder-pink Adidas track shoes.
    The commune’s third streak, heavily advertised beforehand by flyers appearing mysteriously under automobile windshield wipers one Thursday afternoon, was a Streak for Mammon. At 10:45 the next morning, little groups of Duke City Streakers, dollar bills taped across their foreheads, took coup on the First State People’s Jug, blowing kisses at the electronic-eye cameras as they sped across the granite floors. Tragedy ensued as a streaker leading the demonstration galloped smack into a plate-glass door, slitting his throat from ear to ear. When the mortally wounded streaker staggered backward flapping his arms and wondering which way to aim for heaven, the bloodthirsty security guard, Tom Yard, shot him three times in the chest … by accident.
    An ugliness settled upon the valley. Whipped up by the letters to, and editorials by, the Chamisaville News, disgruntled and unemployed local teenagers joined forces with sullen high-school football players, Minute Men, Boy Scout gunnery sergeants, old “Free Lt. Calley” buffs looking for a new