I’m unsure how the evening would have ended if the police hadn’t come. They’d been called, as it turned out, not by a concerned citizen reporting a riot at the fine arts center, but by Maxine Cushing Gray, a kind of professional smut-sniffer who wrote a bland, prudish brand of art criticism for an upscale Seattle weekly. Ms. Gray had seen fit to summon law enforcement because my dancer was, in Ms. Gray’s opinion, “indecently dressed.” In point of fact, the dancer was now hardly dressed at all, unless green paint could be considered clothing.
Police presence brought things to a rather abrupt end. The place cleared out with amazing speed. The dancer and I were detained, but once the cops heard my side of the story -- and got their eyes full of her -- we were released with a warning. And while their warning didn’t specifically state that I should refrain from ever staging another happening -- like most of the audience, the cops never really comprehended what a happening was supposed to be -- it didn’t need to. I’d already come to that conclusion.
As if I didn’t have enough distractions, I agreed in late 1966 to host a weekly show on KRAB-FM, one of the very first listener-supported radio stations in the nation. Called, with a nod to Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, the show aired at ten o’clock on Sunday nights, a less than ideal spot for a broadcast; the signal, outside the greater Seattle area, was as weak as baby bird farts; and my voice, as previously stated, was so flat it made that faux “Uncle Sam” sound like Beyoncé. Nevertheless, Notes From the Underground had devoted listeners from the start, primarily because it dealt in a positive, even celebratory manner with the three basic food groups of the era: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Skating on ice just barely thick enough to keep from plunging the worried station into the punitive waters of the FCC, I delivered audacious bits (often culled from underground newspapers) on such timely topics as civil rights, war resistance, ecology, abortion, police brutality, political corruption, consciousness-expanding chemicals, and alternative lifestyles. Mostly, however, I played recorded music, the new music shunned by commercial stations from coast to coast.
It happened to be one of those rare times in the course of human history when the popular music of the day was also artistically and socially important music, though you’d never know it from listening to AM radio. Wed to a rigid old format that demanded that no song on the air exceed three minutes in length, AM stations stubbornly refused to play album cuts (the majority and best of which had broken free from the three-minute straitjacket), so even as the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, et al dramatically altered the soundscape of the English-speaking world, commercial radio sugared the airwaves with bubblegum singles.
Inner cities were burning, an unnecessary and immoral war was raging, gender stereotypes were in flux, protesters of many stripes challenged the barricades, an unprecedented generation of ecstatic truth seekers flirted with its neurological destiny, and all the while Seattle’s KJR and KOL trotted out a teenybopper sound track of aural fluff. For a couple of hours on Sunday night, Notes From the Underground sought to provide a relevant, sympathetic, irreverent refuge from obnoxious advertising, disc jockey prattle, and Top 40 inanities. In fairness, many AM stations did eventually come around, adopting a playlist of songs from higher up the food chain, although, for example, I was playing The Doors’ “Light My Fire” a good six months before it aired on KJR. And with that, children, I -- whose voice was the vocal equivalent of week-old roadkill on a Tennessee truck route in mid-July -- with that I made my contribution to radio broadcasting.
I could have made another. One Sunday, as I waited to go on the air, a stranger dropped by KRAB’s rather ramshackle one-story wood-frame studio. Thin as a spaghetto, the guy had long, wild black hair, a pointy black beard, and wore a Mexican poncho across which like a bandolier was strapped a cheap guitar. In other words, he looked not unlike a thousand or more other skinny, hairy, ostensibly musical young men then yo-yoing up and down America’s West Coast. He talked like them, as well, scarcely introducing himself (he said his name was Charlie) before treating me to an earful of peace, love, and total liberation. Even as he mouthed the prevailing hippie philosophy, however, he did it with an articulation that was impressive and an intensity that was nothing short of galvanizing.
The more Charlie talked, the more convinced I became that he not only truly believed that philosophy, he, for one, was actually living it. There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was “like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.”
At any rate, the dude said he wrote songs and wished to perform a selection of them on Notes From the Underground, with which he was somewhat, somehow (he was not a local resident) familiar. Ordinarily, I would have consented, for while my shows were fairly well organized, it would have violated their spirit, the spirit of the times, not to be open to -- even eager for -- change and surprise. The following morning, however, I was leaving on a monthlong jaunt to Arizona and for that show only I’d actually scripted a program with a beginning, middle, and end. Any interruption of the Aristotelian flow would have sabotaged it, completely wrecking the desired cumulative affect. So, I turned Charlie down and sent him on his way.
Visibly disappointed but polite enough about it, he shuffled off into the summer Sunday night and vanished there. Two years would pass before I recognized his picture in the newspaper and realized that for better or for worse, I’d rejected -- and turned down an opportunity to tape a live performance by -- Charles Manson.
29
the book
Throughout all those diversions -- the art columns, the happenings, the radio show, rock concerts, protest marches, pot parties, etc. -- the old literary pulse continued to throb in my blood. On occasion it would reverberate like a musical saw, but most of the time it beat like tom-toms: distant, faint, mysterious, yet persistent, somehow urgent, prompting my left brain to murmur, “The natives are restless tonight.”
A novel had announced itself. It was coming to town. Posters were plastered on every wall in my cerebellum, a vacant lot in that vicinity had been reserved. The date of the first performance, however, was continually postponed. Obviously, annoyingly, there remained issues to be resolved.
I had my center pole, had had it for two years or more. The stolen corpse of Jesus and its reappearance in a funky roadside zoo: those elements could definitely support a literary big top. But a tentpole was not a tent and it certainly wasn’t the show itself. I needed wider context, a backdrop, a milieu; needed atmosphere, subplots, and a company of performers. Embedded in it as I was, it took time to recognize that the show I sought was unfolding all around me. Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafés, Melville his New England with its tall ships: I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.
Now, not to belabor the circus analogy, but I must mention that I’d also recently found a ringmaster, a music director, a designer to set the overall tone of the show; which is to say, I had at last found my voice. I discovered it very late one night in July 1967, while writing a review of a Doors concert for the Helix, Seattle’s underground newspaper. My review and the tone I found myself adopting in its composition were not derivative, not specifically influenced by Jim Morrison’s blood-dark, leather-winged poetics. Rather, it was that the concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions. When I read over the paragraphs I’d written that midnight,
I detected an ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax simultaneously wild and precise, a rare blending of reckless abandon and tight control; and thought, Yeah, this is it. This is how I want to sound. I’d broken on through to the other side.
Even so, writing a novel set in the sixties presented a challenge on at least two fronts: one was immediate and obvious before I even began. The other -- reactive and unforeseen -- inexplicably persists to this day. Of that, more later.
Tom Wolfe, my old schoolmate, has lamented that there has yet to be written a definitive novel of the sixties. Wolfe, of course, is an outspoken advocate of the nineteenth-century approach to the novel, the reportorial approach that amounts to journalism with a thin fictive gloss. I’d instinctively realized, however, that the Dickensian method, while it has its virtues, was simply inappropriate to the material at hand. It could not possibly crack the nut of the period, penetrate its essence; or untangle the multicultural, multicolored web of myth that enwrapped its heart. The sixties, you see, were characterized not by manners but by fantasy.
Fantasy being inscrutable under the microscope of social realism, I (again, instinctively), knew I must compose Another Roadside Attraction (I’d recently decided on a title) in a fashion for which there was no satisfactory model. My intent therefore became not so much to describe the sixties as to re-create them on the page, to mirror in style as well as content their mood, their palette, their extremes, their vibrations, their profundity, their silliness and whimsy (for despite the prevailing political turmoil, it was a highly whimsical age). Professor Liam Purdon of Doane College, addressing me personally, has written, “You committed to becoming a novelist during turbulent times. When the blank page offered resistance to the vortex of your imaginative creation, you began, as Burroughs did later in his writing career, simply to alter the novel form itself.”
Traditionally, a novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax along a gradually inclined plane. But while 95 percent of all novels are constructed this way, it was not a form that could possibly generate the plexus of effects, let alone evoke the gestalt, necessary to unveil the sixties and make them palpable, to coax them into giving up their secrets great and small. Eventually, it became clear to me that I must construct Another Roadside Attraction in short bursts, modeled perhaps on Zen koans, on Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes, and on the little flashes of illumination one experiences under the influence of certain sacraments. My book’s goal, then, was not so much to simulate reality as to become reality, a reality paradoxically steeped in fantasy.
Needless to say, such a novel -- a novel constructed of zip and zap and zing and zonk, a novel that does its own stunts -- seemed destined to test the mental agility of the critical establishment, but that was hardly my concern, particularly since I’d yet to put a word of it on paper. The tom-toms were nearer, louder now, however, the gong was interrupting my sleep; and the morning after I’d kissed off Charles Manson, as my new girlfriend and I motored down Highway 101 in a 1949 Dodge panel truck (hand-painted silver), the opening lines of Another Roadside Attraction were crawling along the screen behind my eyes.
Eileen had decamped a few weeks prior. We had an intense relationship, she and I, a union in which we seemed constantly competing to see who could most successfully blow the other’s mind. We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other’s garde. It was exciting, stimulating, but also draining, especially when coupled as it was with mutual romantic jealousy, arguably the dumbest, most useless of human emotions. In the end, Eileen trumped me, captured the flag, by packing up and moving to San Francisco, the epicenter of the new American revolution. Touché!
Eileen’s car was barely out of the driveway before -- vacillating between heartbreak and relief -- I drove over to the Pizza Haven in the University District and (figuratively speaking) wrapped up the joint’s cutest waitress in a checkered napkin and brought her home. Terrie Lunden had been flirting with me outrageously every time I went in for a pizza. She’d attended a lecture on experimental theater I delivered at Seattle’s Free University and had developed a crush on me that evening. I didn’t remember her from the class, but at the Pizza Haven she was hard to ignore. Always smiling, constantly cheerful, Terrie was as easygoing and uncomplicated as Eileen was challenging and complex. As an anecdote, a relief package, she struck me as an ideal companion for my projected road trip to the Southwest desert.
We never made it to Arizona. Stopping by San Francisco to pay respects, we remained there for a month, sleeping and eating (tomato sandwiches, naturally) in the back of that old silver panel truck, parked on a side street in the Haight-Ashbury, too mesmerized by the scene thereabouts to any longer consider Tucson or Sedona. We visited museums, City Lights Bookstore, and the waterfront; danced to throbbing amoebas of light at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms (children and dogs scampering in and out among the dancers), but mostly we wandered the Haight, where there seemed to be no end to the spectacle, the psychedelic parade, the blossom-choked river of liberated meat. More than the ubiquitous costumes representing a multitude of periods and exotic lands; more than the relaxed smiles, blatant sexuality, and free-flowing gender-bending tresses, what impressed me most was the genuine spirit of caring and generosity emanating from virtually everyone I met.
Should I admire a passerby’s Edwardian waistcoat or Japanese silks, that fellow would insist that I have it, a stranger would literally give you the shirt off his back. If, on a hot street, I’d glance appreciatively at someone’s ice cream cone, she’d offer me a lick or else thrust the whole cone in my hand. The Haight was awash in Christian charity. These kids, simultaneously jubilant and introspective, were practicing what their elders preached. The Haight was the New Testament: animated, activated, brought to life in living color. The naïveté was so thick you could cut it with a Popsicle stick -- but so apparently was Christ’s. Years later, on a wild African savannah a hundred miles from even the crudest settlement, a pride of lions on one horizon, a solitary giraffe on another, I said to myself, “This is the way the world was meant to be and everything else is a mistake.” I’d thought the exact same thing in San Francisco during the Summer of Love.
Oh, and yes, by the way, I did search for at least a glimpse of Eileen in the exultant throngs along the Haight. She never appeared.
When, upon my return to Seattle, I actually sat down and commenced writing that first novel, I set no scenes in Haight-Ashbury. There were no light shows in my narrative, no love-ins, street theater, free clinics, demonstrations, rock festivals, or other public celebrations. My goal, as previously stated, was not to describe the sixties phenomenon as a journalist or historian might, but rather to encapsulate it, privatize and personalize it; boil it down to a reduction, distilling its esoteric yet peculiarly American rapture and uncorking that essence within the confines of a hot-dog-stand-cum-roadside-zoo in rural, rainy Washington state.
To fortify that distillation, I did from time to time make use of a collage technique, whereby I would skim through the underground press, KRAB radio program guides, political and poetry broadsides, concert fliers, even letters from friends, and try to pluck some quaint item or revealing image that, though taken out of context, might add historical weight when pasted into my more intimate, internalized portrait of the period. (In my second novel, the twilight-of-the-sixties’ Cowgirls, I would continue to collage occasionally, but only in regard to the book’s male protagonist, the Chink, who was partially inspired by R. Crumb’s crusty old cartoon antihero, Mr. Natural, and partially based on the subject of a prank “news” article that Paul Dorpat anonymously wrote and planted in his Seattle alternative weekly, the Helix.)
As Professors Purdon and Torrey suggest in a lengthy interview with me (Conversations with Tom Robbins, University of Mississippi Press, 2010), much of the content and style of Another Roadside Attraction, as well as of the anthropological and m
ythological aspects of the age in question, are personified in the novel’s two main protagonists, Amanda and John Paul Ziller. Both characters could be considered archetypes: the loinclothed, flute-tooting Ziller an Orpheus figure, using his music, his art to simultaneously charm the world and retaliate against it, all the while identifying with another place, a distant time; Amanda, a manifestation of the universal goddess (maiden, slut, and mother/wife), as connected to the earth as any mushroom, though given to innocently flitting about its posies like a butterfly. She’s wise, yet also naive, he’s playful yet also dark; and something strangely meaningful seems to cling to them.
All that sixties phantasmagoria was well and good -- fun to write, important to consider -- but remember, the center pole supporting this show, its fulcrum, was to be a certain mummified corpse. Since the very foundation of what many call Western civilization is its faith in the divinity and immortality of the man some call Jesus Christ, what would it say about the future of that civilization, about its ethics, morality, belief system, history, moods, and general psychic health if it could be irrefutably demonstrated that Jesus was not immortal, had not risen from the dead, and that the Church of Rome had been concealing proof of its presumed Savior’s fallibility for more than seventeen hundred years? My goal was to examine the ramifications of that question, and to incorporate them within a lively narrative constructed of incremental flashes, some which would illuminate and advance the plot, some which (I hoped) would illuminate and advance the reader.
Distractions still abounded, but in the autumn of ’67 I mailed off thirty pages to Luther Nichols in California. He read them approvingly and sent them on to New York. I was fishing for a monetary advance. It was only then that I learned that Doubleday had begun as a Roman Catholic publishing house. A number of senior editors, holdovers from that period, were appalled by my manuscript’s premise, baffled by its form. So, no contract, no money. Encouraged by Mr. Nichols, however, I persisted -- until eventually, sometime in ’68, I had written seventy pages more. These, too, Luther Nichols forwarded to New York.