(Excerpted from The Incomplete, an unpublished novel based on real events.)
The Common College student arts organization, Wastelanders, had a budgetary crisis. We’d had a great run of poetry readings, art shows, and folk concerts, and now, with the school year coming to an end, our advisor told us we had a problem: We hadn’t spent a dime of our $4,000 budget. Actually, we didn’t know we had a budget. We just asked people to do stuff and they did stuff. “Use it or lose it,” the advisor explained. “Do you really want the school to give the money to ROTC?”
A couple of weeks later, after catching the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore East, we came across a troupe of hippies acting out anti-war scenarios on Sixth Street and First Avenue. They sang, they danced, they coaxed pedestrians to join them. I asked the leader if they ever did colleges. He introduced himself as “Maury Prankster, the Bill Graham of the streets,” and went into a sales pitch: “This is a real theater company. Three of us auditioned for Hair. We can’t do it for less than $400, man.”
“Add a zero to that and we can talk some business,” I replied.
And that’s how it came to be that a bus decorated with anthropomorphic trees and flowers eased through the Common College gate and released a swarm of hair, beads, flowered shirts, and overalls. Officially named the Clan-Destiny Theater Society, they came to be known around campus by their generic name, The Hippies.
Maury Prankster was in his early thirties, older than the others, with a receding hairline that he made up for with long sideburns and a handlebar moustache. Maury opened the show at Common by announcing, “The counterculture means more than letting your hair grow, dressing flamboyantly, and smoking marijuana, although that’s a good start. There’s an art to culture, and art must be cultivated. Watch our garden grow.”
The performance included skits extolling communal life and the joys of farming, songs from Hair (revealing why none of them got cast), and an audience participation segment during which students were invited to come on stage and have their heads massaged or the tattoo of their choice painted in the location of their choice. Meanwhile, cast members infiltrated the audience until the little theater was a whirligig of pantomime, dancing, massaging, and painting.
In the final skit, a young woman named Marigold played “The Child of the Future,” flitting from one evil situation to another, making each one right via a magic wand adorned with flowers. At the end, Marigold announced, “Alice isn’t in wonderland — wonderland is in Alice. In all of us. If we let it out, we’ll turn this world into a land of wonder.”
The troupe planned on sleeping in their bus but first there’d be a party at our apartment, which they offered to cater with a picnic basket of grass, hash, acid, and assorted pills. I explained to them that because I was politically hot, anything they wanted to take had to be ingested before coming over.
Back at the apartment, Juno, the only black member of the troupe, sat alone at the kitchen table, wearing a yellow T-shirt and blue jean overalls. His brown eyes seemed to float several inches above his head and I wondered about his view. He poured salt onto the table, then swept the salt into his left hand, which he lifted near his face. Transfixed, he shifted the salt from hand to hand, then smiled at me. I smiled back and nodded a lack of disapproval.
“Hear the waves?” he asked.
“The what?”
“The waves. Listen.” Juno’s voice wouldn’t have nudged a lie detector needle, but I couldn’t hear anything. “The waves....whoosh....waves.” He made a cresting motion with his left arm, finishing with a trickle of fingers.
Then I heard a car pass by. “Ah. The cars sound like waves.”
“Not sound like, they are waves. Simile imprisons; metaphor liberates. ‘I know not seems,’ said the Dane.”
“Yes, you are at the beach.”
Juno smiled his approval. “Sand. Salt is sand. I was sifting it through my hands like sand — it was sand — then I was at the beach sifting sand as the waves whooshed in the background. Are you with me at the beach or are you watching me at the beach?”
“When you’re at the beach do you sift the sand and it becomes a salt shaker and the waves become traffic?”
“You wound me with your version of reality,” he said softly, his eyes retreating. “I am wherever I want to be. Can you say that? All my life I have been places I didn’t want to be, and now I can go to the beach. To the mountains. How can I get up to the roof?”
I gave him directions and went into the living room, where one of the hippies leaned back, arms embracing the air, and announced, “Oh God it’s beautiful! I can trace the blood right from my heart and down my arm, feel it make a U-turn in my finger and go up to my eyes, where it makes everything beautiful.” I suggested he join Juno at the top of the mountain and pointed the way. Another hippie dipped her finger into an almost dry Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail jar and scooped up the last residue of sauce. She licked her finger and said, “I can taste them. Tiny, whole, delicious shrimp. Yum!”
“And I can feel their pain,” Marigold said and curled into a fetal position.
One of the Common Politicos took a slug of beer and howled “Bullshit,” startling Marigold, who began to weep and ran out of the room. “Bummer childhood,” someone explained. “Loud noises. Flashbacks.”
“You people are keeping us all back. Grow the fuck up."
“Don’t lay your bum trip on us, man,” a hippie said. He was cut off by a shush-wave from Maury, who was writing and sketching furiously into a tattered, grade school composition book. “Look at this cover,” he said. “This uncredited masterpiece of Op Art.” He pointed to the Common Politico and said, “He’s not on a bum trip. It’s just not our trip.”
“I’m going to trip the hell out of here,” the Politico said and stalked out.
Maury continued sketching, finishing with a page-high exclamation point. A well-built hippie billed in the theater program as Don O’Vandylan watched over his shoulder. “What is it, Maury?”
Maury started talking excitedly. “I want us to do a really far out light show. We can use it for our gigs and hook up with rock groups. Maybe we can apprentice a couple of people with Joshua at the Fillmore. We’ll have to raise some bucks for equipment. I’ll call Zappa when we get back, see if he’ll do a benefit.”
As Maury spoke, Don-O paced the room then stopped abruptly and said, “Hey man, that won’t be necessary. I know how we can do a great light show for free.”
“Yeah? Talk to me, Don-O,” Maury said with the cynicism of a schoolteacher certain that after the kid speaks he’ll have to set him straight.
“It’s the most spectacular light show I’ve ever seen. Majestic, mammoth.”
“For free?"
“That’s the best thing about it, man. Why use artificial shit when the best fucking organic light show is free for everyone? Sunrise and sunset. When was the last time you really checked them out. Two shows a day, no matter where we are.”
Maury grabbed Don-O by the collar and pushed him against the wall. “Hey, Don-O, you wanna sing a couple of choruses of ‘The Best Things in Life are Free’? No no no! Not free, not by a long shot. We’re cultural revolutionaries paving the way for after the politicos have done their job. But they haven’t done their job yet. Peace and love are fine, but don’t think for a minute that the world runs on them. You want to sit around stoned and watch the sun rise and set, I can dig it, but we work. If you try to live off the land without working it, you eat dirt and pebbles.”
Don-O put his hands up in an I-surrender pose, then embraced Maury and kissed him on the lips.
Eventually a few hippies went back to the bus but most fell asleep all over the apartment. Maury and I sipped wine. “I like the way you cut through Don-O’s bullshit.”
“To some of these people, our bus is a magic traveling machine. For me it’s insurance and bank payments and a dirty nose when I look under the hood."
“You’re more down-to-earth than the others. Isn’t it frustrating when they’re in the clouds?”
“Sure, but I love them. Even Don-O, what a pisser. When I met him he was playing football for Rutgers. He picked a fight with me in a bar and I beat the shit out of him, then turned him on and two days later he shows up at the church with a duffel bag and he out-hippies all of us. I love the costumes, the games, the group improvisation. It’s a cool fantasy.”
“You don’t take all this as real?”
“Don’t talk to me about real, not unless you want to hear the bullshit rap I give to college students. We’re a theater company. Only difference is we live our parts.”
“Isn’t that hypocritical, or can’t I use that word either?”
“Listen, man, I fucking believe in our show. I feel much less hypocritical than when I was a social worker. What a lousy role that was, in a production that would have been a farce if it wasn’t such a tragedy. Everyone’s in a show: advertising executives with cocktail matinees, or college politicos with choreographed marches. My next part is going to be as an auto mechanic. A little repair shop will be my theater, with wrenches and hydraulic lifts for props. I’m lucky to have a bunch of actors who surprise and delight me. We’re exploring new ways to live, that’s what art is all about. And you can’t get realer than art.”
“What about the people like Juno, who think this is who they are and this is how it’ll be forever?”
“Sometimes,” Maury said, waving his arm around the room, “sometimes I’m jealous as hell of them.”