The Aquarius Theater

....On one of those days Norm and I were at Fairfax and Sunset hitching a ride when a white German Sheppard ambled up to me with a crushed coke can in its mouth. The dog dropped the can at my feet and looked up at me with a pair of “Do you wanna play?” eyes that were hard to refuse. I tossed the can down the sidewalk and the dog happily returned it, dropping the can at my feet dutifully. This went on for a while and people began making kind gestures and dropping coin in the Green Power can I held in my hand at all times.
“What’s the dog’s name?” asked a nicely dressed woman who would not have ever stopped to give a dime to a hippy otherwise.
I responded immediately saying, “Jude,” I loved the Beatles tune ‘Hey Jude’, “Yeh… that’s his name… could you donate for some dog food?”
Jude turned out to be a boon until Norm and I got home and opened a can of dog food. Norm had lifted a couple of steaks from the grocery store on the way back to the pad but Jude would have nothing to do with dog food out of a can as long as there was a chance of getting his teeth into one of those steaks. Jude stayed with us for about a week and helped us out with panhandling. I had learned to tuck a steak or two into my pants on the way home every evening for Jude and was saddened when Jude took off one day and never returned.
It was the day after Jude didn’t return to the house I ran into Miriam at the market. She was friendly enough as she explained, “Max, I went to another Tony and Sue get-together. I’m moving up to their ranch.”
“Oh, see you later then.” I was crushed. I didn’t mind losing her to another man but this cult seemed too weird for me. I was surprised and disappointed that a street-smart girl like her would fall for it. Damn, I thought, I lost a girl, gained a dog and lost a dog all in a couple of weeks!

One place Norm and I found profitable for panhandling was the Aquarian Theater where “Hair” was playing. It was while we were there that conversation turned to New Mexico. I was burned out with L.A. but had nowhere else to go. The word on the street was that there were rural communes in New Mexico that welcomed refugees from Urbania. My ears perked as one freaky looking hippy told of the mountains and untouched land there free to anyone who wanted to settle it.
“What do you mean?” I queried, “There’s no such thing as free land unless you are talking about homesteading… do they still do that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about but I do know that there are communes there that welcome people like us.” The guy toned down his claim of free land a notch.
I then asked him, “Have you been there?”
“Naw, but a friend of mine knows someone who…”
Norm came running up to me excited and gesturing, “Hey, you wouldn’t believe what just happened. A limo pulled up to the curb where I was standing and this dude with a bald head gets out of the back seat and asks me if I have any change for the phone… I’m lookin’ at him and wondering why this guy needs change from me when he probably has some kind of  radio thing in the limo… just then… like he was reading my mind he says; ‘Some calls gotta be made by payphone and I don’t carry change’.”
Sounds bizarre…but interesting enough; I thought that was the whole story and turned to hear more about New Mexico.
“But that ain’t the end of it. I give him a quarter and, while he makes his phone call the driver comes up to me and says; ‘Do you know who that is?’ and I say no… who is he?”
There was a pause… I was getting annoyed… New Mexico was waiting.
“The driver tells me the guy is Otto Preminger. Yeh … Otto-fuckin’-Preminger!”
“Really?” I countered sarcastically. Man, I wasn’t impressed with celebrities and, besides, everyone pretended to be one in Hollyweird. I was surprised to hear Norm talking like this.
“But this is the good part…” Norm was excited and Norm wasn’t the type to get excited over nothing, “The good part is that this guy, Otto Preminger… you’ve heard of him haven’t you?”
“Yeh, I’ve heard of him.”
“Well he came up to me and thanked me for helping him out and then he gives me this card…” He flashed the card in my face so that I could see clearly the name, Otto Preminger, printed on the front with an address scribbled on the back. “So he says to get a few friends and show up at this lot and we’ll be guaranteed parts as extras in a movie he is making… a Western or something.”
“Yes, sounds good…”
“They pay extras good too… Union scale!”
The hippy guy added, “Count me in. Union scale is five hundred a day for extras.”
I scratched my chin, “I didn’t know Otto Preminger was still alive… did he ever make a Western?”
Norm had gotten hold of three hits of acid so we dropped it to celebrate our luck.
I had on several occasions wondered what would have happened had I followed through with the Otto Preminger shoot instead of dropping that tab of acid that night. You just never know where acid is going to take you. Sometimes it would be just another trip like the several before it. Other times an acid trip would have you making decisions that would turn your life inside out and upside down.
Norm and I ended up at the Taft house tripping through the night. Sarah was drinking wine, doing reds and ranting on about how Charlie Manson and his family were “set-up by the PIGS”. She’d finally taken one too many reds and pulls off the gallon jug of Red Mountain. She then needed to be walked all night to keep her conscious. Felix took her before dawn to the hospital emergency room and dropped her off. In those days most people who died from overdoses did so because their friends were afraid of the repercussions with the law for just being with someone who’d OD’d. Of course, ya just didn’t want emergency vehicles or police at the house.
That was the last bit of drama I could take in ole Hollyweird. As the sun rose we headed out to the freeway onramp on Sunset & 101 and put out our thumbs. There wasn’t any discussion about it but we both knew it was New Mexico, Taos. Otto Preminger would have to do without Norm and me. Once we got past San Bernardino it was easier to see the wisdom of our choice as the desert opened up before us. I had never been in the Southwest desert and Interstate 10 took us right smack dab through the most magnificent parts of the desert landscape. I felt a growing peace the further the highway took us from L.A. The sunset spread a crimson glow across the sky highlighting the Saguaro’s, they seemed to raise arms greeting us… welcoming us home like the prodigal sons. Conversely, they could just as well have been saying, “Halt! Stop before it’s too late.”