A Nation of Mystics_Book II_The Tribe Read online

  PRAISE FOR A NATION OF MYSTICS

  “A sprawling, epic novel of classic dimensions that vividly recreates the psychedelic Sixties—the hopes, the fears, the naïveté, the knowing that was at the heart of those turbulent times.”

  —Joel Selvin, culture and music columnist, San Francisco Chronicle, and author of The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution

  “Pamela Johnson’s colorful descriptions leave no doubt that she has been there with all of her senses receptive. I never thought to see our original hopes of the sixties presented so openly because of continued political backlash. It renewed my faith in our original dream of raising consciousness.”

  —Jean Millay, filmaker, co-creator of The Psychedelic Experience and author of Multidimensional Mind: Remote Viewing in Hyperspace

  “I was particularly moved by the story because Pamela captured the feel of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The book explores many of the facets of the scene, including LSD manufacturing and hash smuggling, from 1965–1970, both the sweet and the bitter, in a way that is very hard to accomplish in nonfiction.”

  —Tim Scully, underground chemist, Orange Sunshine

  Also by Pamela Johnson

  Heart of a Pirate / A Novel of Anne Bonny

  A Nation of Mystics series

  Book I: Intentions

  Book II: The Tribe

  Book III: Journeys

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Stone Harbour Press

  PO Box 206

  Oregon House, CA

  http://www.stoneharbourpress.com

  Copyright ©2016 Stone Harbour Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by River Grove Books

  For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Stone Harbor Press at PO Box 206, Oregon House, CA 95962

  Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover images: ©iStockphoto.com/Leonardo Patrizi; ©iStockphoto.com/Real-illusion; ©iStockphoto.com/Photolyric; ©iStockphoto.com/Click_and_Photo; ©iStockphoto.com/Christa Brunt; ©shutterstock.com/Ronald Sumners;

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

  Johnson, Pamela, 1947–

  A Nation of Mystics, Book II: The Tribe / Pamela Johnson.–1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Counterculture–United States–History–1961–1969 –Fiction. 2. Hippies–California–Fiction. 3. Social justice–United States–History–1961–1969–Fiction. 4. Nineteen sixties–Fiction. 5. Bildungsromans.

  I. Title.

  PS310.O369N38 2010813’.6

  QBI10-600059

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9968539-2-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9968539-3-4

  First Edition

  For Erik—who took me flying on a magic carpet and showed me the planets and the stars

  “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

  —William Blake,

  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790–1793

  To see a World in a Grain of Sand

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

  And Eternity in an hour.

  —William Blake,

  Auguries of Innocence, 1803

  A list of characters and a glossary can be found in the appendices at the back of the book.

  PREFACE

  The entire trilogy of A Nation of Mystics was a long time in the making. Shortly after I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980, I began to reflect on stories and incidents from the sixties that eventually became this series. Many of those remembrances concerned the motivations of the youth movement. As I looked around, I saw that those fragile and hard-fought ideas of the counterculture were beginning to bear fruit—environmental organizations, the peace movement, women’s rights in the workplace, the ongoing public awareness of racism, emerging gay pride, populist political groups, and the proliferation of health food stores, organic food, and yoga classes.

  I also knew that the catalyst for those ideas had been a mass leap in consciousness brought about by the use of psychoactive substances, by the ripping apart of “the filmiest of screens” as William James, the great American philosopher, declared after his initial experiments with nitrous oxide in 1882. At the apex of the sixties, over half a million people gathered at Woodstock in 1969, a single moment in time when those present became one person in mind, in large part because of shared psychedelic experience. From Woodstock, the tribes moved across the nation and the world, bringing with them a shift in personal values, from competition for money and transitory objects to a worldview that regarded humans as a single community and the planet as a living organism shared by all life.

  What I also saw in the eighties was a declared war on drugs, a lumping of all drugs into one notorious category and a deliberate stigmatization of those who altered their consciousness. Tens of thousands of families were affected by the incarceration of a loved one for nonviolent offenses against laws that were becoming more draconian and that often denied the spiritual conscience of an individual.

  In between raising three boys, volunteering in schools, and working in the community, I researched and wrote at a time before computers, searching through the stacks of UC Berkeley’s libraries, the Berkeley Public Library, and reading through numerous volumes on the sixties found in bookstores. Not having a computer myself, I wrote by hand. About 1988, almost eight years after my first line, I purchased my first computer and typed the work, saving it on large floppy disks. By the end of that year, I had a printed work of enormous size.

  In 1989, I decided to return to school for a teaching credential. Having spent so much time volunteering in schools, I thought it might be a good idea to get paid for my work. Little did I realize that a teacher’s life was a twelve-hour-a-day job, weekends included. The floppy disks and the ungainly manuscript sat on a shelf, forgotten, for almost twenty years.

  Then, in 2007, on a whim, I took down the box with the old manuscript, dusted it off, and decided to read the first chapter, then the next, and found that I could not put the story down, having forgotten what I had written years ago. The pages were yellowed, the text was definitely a first draft—many revisions were necessary—but what I had was the kernel of a good novel, a remembrance for the children of the sixties who were now older. For many months, I searched for ways to convert the old floppy disks to a contemporary Word document, praying I would not have to retype the entire manuscript. Some of the disks were converted, some of the work was retyped, and much of what had been recovered was feisty on the page, refusing to be altered by margins and having a mind of its own. Through a great deal of finessing, I eventually came up with a document with which I could work and began the editing process.

  Several of the editors I approached suggested dividing the book into a trilogy, so the single, large story became three separate books, each with its own story arc. In Book One: Intentions, readers are introduced to the characters who arrive in the San Francisco Bay area during the Summer of Love, 1967. In Book Two: The Tribe, the forces and ideas that appear in Intentions continue to confront each other, finally
to collide in the historical events surrounding the People’s Park Movement in Berkeley, California, spring, 1969.

  No one person shapes the characters of these pages. They are an amalgam of the stories told to me in hours of interviews, scholarly and scientific texts, spiritual works, autobiographical and biographical readings, writings on the history of music, and days in libraries searching through old newspaper records for day-to-day events.

  This story is for all of you who have dared to dream and imagine and who have worked for a better world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Words cannot begin to express my deepest and sincerest thanks to many people who made this work possible: Michael Murphy, whose handwritten notes became the catalyst for the story; Dolores Muldoon and Kathleen Caswell who spent many hours helping to type the original handwritten manuscript; my forever readers and friends for their encouragement and advice—Katherine Czesak, Anne Einhorn, John Hornung, Cynthia Josayma, Clifton Buck-Kauffman, Wendy Lee, Kelsey Magness, Leonard Post, Annie Reid, Patrice Robson, Tim Scully, Carol Whitnah, and all you others who have taken time to read parts of the story; Julia Cooper Smith for helping me to understand how to cut a story to make it more powerful; Donald Ellis for his friendship, eternal support, and amazing knowledge of the publishing industry; Greenleaf Book Group, especially Hobbs Allison, for the time, concern, and orchestration of the editorial comments that led to the trilogy, Sally Garland for the hours of proofreading, and Neil Gonzalez, for his artistry and patience in working with me on the cover designs. I must especially thank Nathan True, copyeditor, who has worked with me daily over the last year with humor, good advice, vision, and most importantly, friendship. My forever gratitude to Susan Hauptman for sharing both her time and extraordinary artistic eye in helping to choose the cover art. To the dozens of you kind enough to take the time to give interviews, again, my sincerest thanks. To Jim Ketchem, Jean Millay, Nicholas Schou, Tim Scully, and Joel Selvin—busy people all—for your generous endorsements. As always, thanks to my family, to Erin, Owen, and Adam, who grew up watching mom write whenever there was a spare minute; to the women who love them, that they may know the waters from which these men spring—Sophie, Danielle, and Clarice; to Nicolas, Liam, Emery, Cayden, Nora, and Dyllan, for inspiring the fortitude to leave you a greater awareness of the world.

  And finally, to Erik—always my inspiration.

  KATHLEEN MURRAY

  TUCSON, ARIZONA, TO BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  JANUARY 1968

  Even in the cold of January, Kathleen Murray loved the desert. The high peaks that rose roughly from dry rolling hills; tall saguaro cactuses, green sentries by day and silver monoliths in moonlight; the quick rabbits with white tails; flocks of bright red cardinals; anxious roadrunners dashing across tar and gravel roads; the crying howl of the coyotes piercing the night.

  And then there was the hawk, the bird that called to her spirit, because in the bird she saw grace, perfection of form, and freedom as it circled high above the earth.

  She was beginning to understand that she liked many places—the beautiful, old city of New Orleans, where she’d been born and raised; cool summers in the San Francisco Bay; the bookstores of Berkeley; the winter green hills of Marin County; the rough coastline of Big Sur; and tonight, the desert south of Tucson, with its star-filled sky so large that she was once again a tiny speck in the universe, overwhelmed by the vastness of creation and humbled by the tiny thread she wove in this life.

  As she walked the moonlit road in solitude, the desert was cold, but she was in no hurry to return to the warmth of the fireplace. This was a new year—1968—and with the turning of the earth, there were infinite new possibilities. The original plan had been to see how California could mobilize thousands to political action, and Kathy had thought to take those ideas back with her to LSU. Instead, she had discovered a new kind of politics, one of spiritual revolution through psychedelic awareness. For the moment, she was deeply involved in bringing kilos of marijuana to the San Francisco Bay from the old barn on this ranch near the Mexican border.

  Overhead, a shooting star exploded across the sky.

  A good omen, she thought.

  In the first week of January, she’d bought a Volkswagen van in California. Running suitcases of keys through the San Francisco airport was becoming risky. That she’d managed this long without getting caught was a miracle. With wheels, she could drive on a regular basis without attracting attention—and she could carry a larger load. Like the hawk she admired, she was between worlds—a part of the Fairfax house in Marin County and also a part of the Tucson ranch and its family. The road between the two was fairly straight, from Richard and Alex to Larry and Jose.

  In the morning, she would leave this place and begin a new journey on her own. The thought of leaving Larry after spending months with him through a hepatitis illness and hospitalization, holidays, and trips of discovery, had caused her to consider long and hard. Once she was gone, the threesome with Carolyn would dissolve. Larry would turn to Carolyn to live in the day to day that ranch life demanded, while she would be on the road, facing a new horizon each morning. When Larry had asked her to stay and become his partner, saying again that he’d work something out with Carolyn, she’d learned something else about herself. She wanted to remain the hawk—graceful, in balance with air and earth, and free.

  “Kathy,” Larry called to her the next morning, “come out to the barn and take a look at the van. We’ve finished loading up.”

  “What do you think?” Jose asked. “I opened the panels in the rear, stuffed them with kilos, then repaneled. No one looking in here will be able to tell you’re carrying.”

  “Is there anything I can do about the smell?”

  Jose shook his head. “Not a whole lot. We’re going to have to come up with a better way to wrap the product. Someone was telling me about something called shrink wrapping.”

  “It’ll be alright,” Larry told her. “We bought the car secondhand in Berkeley for the license plates. At the California Agricultural Inspection Station, just get in the free lane of local returning traffic.”

  “I couldn’t get everything in the panels,” Jose said. “Some of it had to go into these two trunks, but we’ve made you a bed to cover them. You’re going to want to sleep sometime anyway. It’s at least a good two-day ride.”

  “How many are here?” she asked.

  “Two hundred. All primo weed.” Larry put his arm around her shoulders. “You know what you need? A partner. Someone to help with the driving.”

  Kathy nodded, fighting a sudden, hot stinging in her eyes, clinging to Larry and thinking herself silly to cry.

  He touched her face. “You know I’m sorry to see you go.”

  “I love you, Larry. But I have to do this.”

  He sighed. “If you can do a trip like this every week or two, you’ll make us all rich.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not for the money.”

  “I know. But we’re thinking about buying this place.”

  She started the engine and pulled out of the barn, slowly moving down the driveway and toward the gate. She had not answered Jose’s look, the knowing in his eyes, his awareness that she was moving away without Larry.

  At the gate, she looked up into the rearview mirror, only to see Larry and Jose get smaller as she turned onto the main road.

  The trip back to the Bay went smoothly, even though it had begun to rain as she neared the California coastline. Before long, she was crossing the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, making her way across a cloud-laced span, driving the bay coastline, and finally, through the green valleys of Marin. When she reached the house in Fairfax, she waited while Richard opened the garage door. She slowly pulled the van forward, stopping when he raised a hand to let her know the door could be closed.

  Made it, she thought with a sigh of relief, jumping from the cab.

  A year ago, Richard would have been considered outrageous—long, straight brown hair and a colorf
ul scarf about his head, a billowing shirt, striped pants, boots, and an earring—a pirate. A year ago, he had been part of the Haight-Ashbury street scene—the Summer of Love—one of tens of thousands of the young who had ventured to San Francisco to wear flowers in their hair. She regarded him now, no longer so outrageous—soft boots, tan, bell-bottomed cords held up by a belt, and a collared cotton shirt. He was clean-shaven with a neat mustache and a hair tie holding back his hair.

  “We can sell this in no time at all!” he announced gleefully, pulling open the sliding side of the van. “Merlin, grab that corner of the bed and let’s see what’s in the trunks underneath.”

  Merlin, on the other hand, Kathy observed, was still pretty out there. He had been a big part of the original Ashbury Street commune, and Kathy couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t look stoned. As he opened the trunks and began to stack bricks against the side of the garage wall, she watched him—bright red bell-bottomed pants with a scarf looped around his waist, a shirt that his old lady Greta had made for him on her very productive sewing machine, wavy, sandy-blond hair flowing around his shoulders, a darker beard and mustache. Every so often, he would raise a kilo to his nose and sniff, grinning up at her, blue eyes sparkling behind round, John Lennon wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Marcie,” Richard asked, “can you find a screwdriver so we can open these panels?”

  “There’s two hundred.” Kathy told him. “But I’ll need fifty for some friends in Berkeley.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Kathy. You can’t do that to me. You’ll screw up my exclusive. You know what happens when things get split up. Everybody thinks there’s a lot of shit out there, and they just lay back waiting for the price to go down. It’ll take me longer to move it, and I don’t want it sitting around here too long.”

  Can’t the profits be shared? she wondered. Arguing with Richard about stash and money tore at her. He was family. But other people had families, too. More of her friends had babies on the way.