On the road north to Lake Mendocino,
I didn’t know what I would be going to, but I trusted that Bob-O knew. I hadn’t
figured that the Lake wasn’t anything more than a small reservoir. We got a
ride to the highway junction and walked the rest of the way up from 101 to a
camp ground on a peninsula overlooking the lake. It wasn’t such a bad spot, but
it was closed until spring. CAMP GROUNDS CLOSED. NO CAMPING! signs were posted
everywhere but that didn’t deter Bob-O. Besides, I didn’t like the looks of the
camp grounds. Like a lot of California camp grounds, it was more of a parking
lot than anywhere I’d want to pitch a tent.
As we put up a tarp over a picnic
table under a steady drizzle from an oppressively gray sky, despondent, I
complained, “We can probably get by with camping here tonight, but I doubt we
can get by with it for very much longer.”
Bob-O assured me, “No one comes
around here for days.”
We gathered up what dry twigs we
could find and waited until dark to light a small fire under the end of the
tarp stretched over the table. It made for a cozy little camp. Before leaving
Berkeley, we’d panhandled up enough for some beans and hot dogs and we put them
together in a pie-pan we’d found in the trash.
Cooking them over the small fire for
a hot meal under our tarp reminded me of better days with Stan in the A-frame
on the New Mexico Mesa. We hunkered down for the night and I said, “I get up in
places like this and I start thinking about my life… do you ever do that,
Bob-O?”
“Naw, can’t say as I have.”
“You ever think about God?”
Bob-O answered, but sounded annoyed,
“My mom was a Captain in the Salvation Army in Seattle.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of any kind
of churchy God.”
“Oh then, I met Jesus at this very
same camp-ground once.”
I thought about the guy in jail with
his story of Jesus on a railway trestle.
“People tell me that and I don’t know whether to believe them or not.”
“Well, you can believe me. I saw
him.”
Bob-O was a pretty strange character,
but I was getting used to strange, and strange wasn’t so strange after so much
of it and I was seeing and hearing so much strangeness that I was damned near
drowning in it.
I was just a little sarcastic by
then, “So, tell me, what happened, Bob-O.”
“Well, I was up here kickin’ back
with a bag of glue. I was trippin’ heavy and he was standing right in front of
me. He reached out his hand.”
“How did you know it was Jesus?”
“He had holes in his hands and there
was blood.”
I waved my hand in the dark over my
head thinking that perhaps Bob-O might not be as delusional as a jailhouse
wino, and rephrased the question, “Do you believe there is something, a
vibration of collective energy behind all this?”
That morning we awoke to another
drizzly day. Daylight filtered through a thick layer of dark cloud-cover that
went from one horizon to the next. We sat around our little camp; cold and
miserable until a park ranger in his green ranger truck toured through and came
to us.
“You boys read the signs?”
Bob-O stood up, looking around from
one side to another, he shrugged, “What signs?”
“You can’t camp here; the park is
closed for the winter. You’d best be moving on.”
“Okay, we’ll be out in an hour or
so,” I offered.
“That won’t do. I want to see this
site empty by the time I come back from my rounds.”
After the Ranger left, Bob-O just sat
down and continued reading a Louis Lamoure western.
“Hey, Bob-O, we gotta go. He’ll be
back soon, and I don’t want trouble.”
I rolled-up the tarp right out from
under Bob-O’s elbows and gathered the stuff from under the table. I had it all
in my pack and was ready to hike out, but Bob-O was still dithering around.
“C-mon man, that Park Ranger sounded
serious.”
“They all sound serious… that’s their
job.”
“Well, I’m hiking out in five minutes
whether you come or not.”
I kept to my word and started towards
the entrance to the camp grounds.
“Hey, wait-up, damn-it!” Bob-O came,
putting shit in his pack, as he struggled to catch up.
We were about a half-mile down the
road when a clean-cut man in an International pick-up truck came rumbling up to
us from behind.
The driver shouted through his rolled
down window, “Where you guys
headed?”
It was a green truck, close in looks
to the one the park ranger was driving, but a little older… maybe a lot older.
“We’re going back to the 101. You
goin’ that far?” I hollered back.
He opened the passenger door,
“Almost, I can take you there but, if you want a hot meal and a place to crash
for the night, I’m headed for a place a short ways from the highway.”
As soon as we were in the seat, Bob-O
came alive, “You from the Peoples Temple?”
“So, you’ve heard of us?”
 |
| If this part of the story reminds us of... well, it's true! |
“Yeah, Amen, we’re with you,” Bob-O
answered, “Praise the Lord!”
“Amen, brothers, welcome aboard. My
name is Larry.”
I climbed into the cab of the truck
after Bob-O. I looked over at Larry and sensed a hardness I’d seen from some
combat vets. Combat vets that had seen too much. It wasn’t real apparent, but
the guy gave me a chill. He was friendly enough and he had offered us a ride,
after all… but I knew that I didn’t want to be around this character much
longer than I’d have to. Perhaps the folks where we were headed would have a
better continence about them.
Larry went into a pitch of sorts;
“Father is in San Francisco today, but he’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe you can
meet him. He is an amazing dude. There is no one quite like him on the planet.
God put him here and I am so friggen lucky to bump into him when I did. I was
lost before that. Been to the Nam… Been in the bush for eighteen months… came home…
the ole lady ran off with a bunch of hippies… not even a dear fuckin’ John…
know what I mean? I met Reverend Jim and my life turned completely around, you
know.”
I sensed that Larry was reciting
something from rote; like he was trying to be authentic but there was something
hollow in his pitch… as though he didn’t believe it either, except for the
parts where he said his ole lady ran off with a bunch of hippies.
“I got nothing against hippies, mind
you. We’re actually doin’ a hippy commune thing… Everything in common… It’s one
for all and all for one. Everybody pitches in and contributes. Each man
according to his needs and each man gives according to his means. Karl Marx
said that. Father’s been to the USSR, too.”
“How about girls?” I was testing him
to see how serious he was about this business of sharing everything in common.
“How about girls?” His eyes got
steely again. “You’ll see, was it… Mark?”
“Yeh,” I answered. I wasn’t giving up
anything to this guy… especially not my name.
We pulled up to a regular looking
church. I half expected some sort of ramshackle hippie looking place, but it
was like any church built after the 1950s. It sat there on an empty looking lot
that looked like it had been plopped down rather recently. It had a cold and
austere feel to it… not at all what I’d expected. There were several people
outside and I was relieved to see that none had that hard-assed look that Larry
had. There were easy smiles, joking around and some very attractive young women
of every race: Asian, black, white, some Native American or Mexican.
It was lunchtime and, because a vigil
of sorts was going on in the large hall, a table was set up for lunch with a
serving line in an adjacent room. I felt a little uneasy as I was unwashed, and
I knew he had about me the odors of the road… campfire and so on. Everyone else
there was well scrubbed and cheerful to an annoying degree. After I ate lunch,
I decided to get out of there.
Several people tried to talk me into
staying for services, especially the one the next day when this guy they
alternatively called, Father, was to speak. I was assured
that it would be the most important service I would ever attend.
One cherubic girl in auburn
braids held me by the arms and exclaimed, “It will be like Lazarus, you know!”
A miracle was to be performed at any
time… a New Testament miracle like those of Jesus himself… and some of the
convincers that tried to persuade me were rather gorgeous to look at. Still, I
was determined to leave, despite feeling almost guilty for not staying after such
a good meal, but Bob-O stayed on.
It was about a mile and a half back
to the 101 and the drizzle was coming down hard enough to be considered rain. I
walked, putting one foot in front of the other, wishing that the Peoples Temple
was more to my liking and I wondered what sort of miracle was going to happen
that the whole place was abuzz about at mealtime. Still, I knew I had to get
out of there. It just felt strange enough for even my ‘strange adaptation
meter’ to accept. Back at the highway, I cried out to the grey sky; “Tell me
something… anything… anywhere… anyone?”
“Max, I hope you find it,” was the
answer I imagined.
Anger rose up from my gut, “Yeh, well
fuck you! You gotta come up with something better than that.”
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