Spring Turned To Winter
By Jim Parks

Spring turned to winter, but not all at once. First, there was summer with its green and gold, the tourists, the hustle giving way to a dead town for the month of August while the three of them, the alto from K.C., the tenor from South Carolina and the tenor from New York, starved and baked amid the stone buildings and cracked sidewalks and ancient paving stones of Montmarte.

Autumn came suddenly with leaves falling and northeast winds blowing gusty promise of freezing temperatures. They stood, still, outside the eateries and bistros blowing traditionals and be bop, their melodies and voicings intertwining jazz chords of indigo and blasting hot red and alternate purple highlights, their pork pie hats and top coats shrouding their faces and bodies in favor of the golden brass of their horns. Occasionally, the owner of a small bistro would invite them in for a quick drink and let them blow some jass hot, but they got no club dates, no offers whatsoever.

It was as if Paris had swallowed them whole, accentuated their negritude, made them anonymous in their American devotion to that which no one wants but everyone can hear like the sound of the underground chains someone mentioned one time in a verse or two.

Lucky died sitting on a park bench while the other two drank brandy from the bottle and argued about baseball alternating with yet more arguments about boxing and basketball.

He leaned forward until his chin was touching the tops of his knees where they were elevated from his putting his feet on the case of the tenor horn. Then he toppled sideways and fell off the bench.

They sat and looked at each other in shock. "Man, it looks like this totally uncool interlude is truly over, brother," the alto said to the remaining tenor. They stood and blew "Just A Closer Walk With Thee" in drag step time while they waited for the ambulance to come and take him away.

He was buried unceremoniously in a potter's field at the end of a Metro line while they blew "Oh, When The Saints..." and "Autumn Leaves."

Their agent in New York wired them money and plane tickets back to Kennedy. They blew themselves to one last good meal in a Left Bank restaurant, everything from oysters to soup and salad, fish, roast beef au jus, cheese and nuts. Then they took the taxi to Orly and settled in for the ride back to New York where they caught a train to downtown and the West Side clubs.

After a few days of sitting in with friends who got them up late in the second set, the cat from South Carolina looked at the New Yorker and said, "I think I'll go spend the winter down home, man."

His partner said, "It's been real, baby. So that's what Paris is all about, huh?"

"For real, brother. That's it, man."

The Union of One Thousand Breaths
By Jim Parks

When the dude with Massachusetts plates on his Mercedes keeled over dead while screwing the blonde who blew in that morning for the first time, her hair in a pony tail and declaring a preference for, a desire for "a really big dick," it was a delicate matter, but nothing unmanageable. I've seen worse scrapes in a dozen states. This isn't really a brothel, nor is it a bordello, cat house or house of ill repute.

Call me Louise.

I operate a club for people who like to get it on with other normal people in - well, let's say - interesting ways. After all, there are plenty of motels available.

I'm not really a Madame; think of me as a social director on a dude ranch for sport fucking. My place is the typical four-bedroom ranch house on an acre lot out in the Florida boonies. There's a screened outdoor in-ground pool, a hot tub, and lots of privacy provided by bougainvillea hedges with hearts of barbed wire and tops of razor concertina. Just because the pretty hedge has grown up around it doesn't mean it's not there.

Anyway, that's how I manage. You know, prostitution is a felony in this state. Why not have some fun with that, give them what they want. So, they're sex addicts? Give me a break. I should be such a victim.

The rules?

No means no. It's got to be safe, sane and consensual. Condoms are a must. No one gets hurt unless they're cruising for it. Other than that, I'm insured. It's like I've got a twenty-four hour a day party going three hundred sixty-five days a year.

Besides, everything is leased in the name of a closely held shell corporation with headquarters in a post office box in the Caymans. Of course, it's expensive. I pay off the local gendarmes, the state police, the sheriff's department, each individual county commissioner and my checkbook is open to all the well-known, and some not so well known charities.

So there. Go figure.

The dude got in early, way before any women had arrived for play time. He had a couple of drinks to unwind, got naked and hit the pool, then he boiled out the poison in the hot tub. He was there when the blonde drove up in her little Japanese roadster dressed in an extreme bikini, an Australian straw hat and a smile. I showed her the play room, the bedrooms, the public space - clothing optional - and let her wander out to the pool and spa area on her own.

What happened next is on videotape. It happened in the play room. You see, I've got eye in the sky just like any other casino. No way I'm going to let some sex maniac come along and put me in a jackpot.

She knew how to play, all right. She got him sitting down on padded bench, his back against the wall, put a gas mask with hose attached so she could control his breathing and screwed a nine-inch dildo on the end. Unless she blew air into the dildo while she sucked it, he couldn't get any air unless, of course, he chose to rip the mask off and spoil the mood. I won't say she showed any class; she was all flash. Diamonds to die for. A killer tan, boob job, perfect abs - you know, a yoga chick on a high protein diet - lean, mean, a racehorse fuck machine.

She donned a sleeping mask in black leather. Then she blew that big dick of his until it was standing up as proud as any flag pole you ever saw. I think she must have been a pro at some point. She put the Trojan in her mouth and slipped it on down with a quick thrust of her head, then it was all head and hand action.

He just leaned back and sighed. Then he got frantic for air, which she supplied him at the last possible moment.

It was on.

I was especially enjoying the play of muscles across her back and ass. I was thinking maybe tennis, maybe swimming, for sure aerobics. The pony tail kept bouncing up and down as she sucked on the dildo mouthpiece. The dude kept on heaving and breathing and screwing his brains out with her sitting reversed on his lap against the wall. She had him pinned. But then something really curious happened. She held a little vial up to her mouth and took a deep breath from it. It looked like poppers.

Then she blew it into the mouth piece. The dude turned forty colors, weakened after a surge of frantic screwing, then fought her for breath and to get away from under her weight. In his condition, he was unable to make the getaway. He couldn't even pull the mask off his head because of the way she was holding his arms. He slumped over dead.

I saw her when she came out of the playroom naked. She stepped into her sandals, grabbed her purse and her bikini out of the locker and threw the key on my desk, saying, "Bye, honey. You got a nice place here."

Then she stepped into the little sports car without opening the door and left the lot slinging oyster shell dust in the air, the nasty little engine growling like a bitch in heat with only one bone left to her name.

I thought, "What was that all about?" When he didn't come out for more than an hour, I went to check up on him and found him dead, slumped over and about to fall to the floor. I called my guy who fixes things. We watched the tape and agreed it was bad juju. Who knows what was in the vial?

This wasn't your garden variety spanking or face sitting. This was hardball. We erased it and put in another one. We would tell the dicks he was dead when we found him - alone - and something must be wrong with the video recorder.

Who knows? I know this. I found it out just yesterday and I'm moving quickly now. First stop, the Caymans, then on to Brazil. I'm sure I'll have to pay the pussy posse off, but, hey, it ain't no crime to scratch that itch for people in a place like that.

The private investigator who came in from Boston had news for me. The dude was a big shot in an insurance company who had absconded with a lot of cash.

Cash.

Come to think of it, the chick who did him paid with cash. That's what I'm talking about. I've got a half dozen passports and major credit in all those names. I'm going to use one of them for the last time and just disappear if I can.

I'm sick and tired of living in mickey mouse-ville, you know.

New York, New York, The City Twice as Nice Before Giuliani

by Jim Parks

As the season turns, she will hit the time when leaves fall. Next, winds blow frigid weather from the northeast after the Gulf Stream's sudden withdrawal offshore. People take woolens out of mothballs, furs from cold storage. Scarves and gloves appear; overcoats and hats become common. The harvest season, mid-winter feast, spring festival of the rabbit arrive and the sun's orbit begins its slow turning from Capricorn to Cancer's tropic all over again, the crab nebula crawling high across the summer sky.

Meanwhile, Central Park turns a thousand shades of tobacco and fire, sheds its leaves and goes gray and white in blizzards of big, wet flakes while the city's true nature shows itself in naked views of brownstone, limestone, granite and marble. There will be row upon row of white brick on the upper east side and the west side reveals itself as the red brick oven of summer gone suddenly cold. Steam columns sprout in every intersection as people dart about bundled against winter's piercing blasts.

Grand Central fills up with those who have no home, sleeping on the floors; the downtown streets fill with even more desperate ones sleeping on grates beside the towers of finance.

Hawks living in the aeries of skyscrapers and owls that hide in the thick branches of the park begin to dive on rats, other rodents and the occasional snake.

The Apple beds down for the winter, packed in her own straw and blazing with the lights of eras millenia in the past.

My question to a proud father: Why should a young woman not make her escape in the urgency of planetary changes such as this?

She is a creature of the moon who lives under the sun.

The Legendary

applauds

one hand clapping

far away

on a prairie of stubble

in a land of old, partially toothless men.

A friend's note: "Edit again and send it to 'The New Yorker.'"

When they printed Dan Baum's account of burial detail officers accompanying the bodies of slain soldiers home from Iraq, I was moved to tears. I think it was my delicate mental condition that triggered my outburst - that and the fact that the Administration had insisted the media make no mention of American sacrifice in blood and life - but nevertheless, I broke down and cried as if they were my own sons, the two whose bodies Mr. Baum accompanied back to the land of the Big PX.

What did I do? I did what any self-respecting writer should do. I wrote a letter to the editor. In the letter, I praised the courage of The Magazine for defying the ridiculous order of the "war time" president who had demanded there be no pictures or publicity about dead and wounded soldiers returning to our shores.

Now, these days your turn around times are much more instant. You deal with e-mail. Therefore, imagine my surprise when the telephone rang only a day or two after I wrote and my lover was shouting at me, quieting her children, saying, "Honey, it's this woman from something called 'The New Yorker.' She wants to talk to you."

Fair enough.

Then it hit me. Mois? Little old me? About what? There was a very nice young woman on the line who told me she is one of the fact checkers at The Magazine and the editor demanded to know just what in the world did Jas. Parks mean?

It means that is the way I sign my name, I replied. Jas - period - W - period - P-A-R-K-S.

Exactly, she replied, but what does Jas. mean?

Oh, it means James.

Well, if your name is James, why don't you write it that way?

Because we are talking about a signature, here. I sign my name Jas. Parks to distinguish myself from James William Parks, Junior, who died in 1945, my grandfather, or James William Parks, Senior, who died in 1927, my great grandfather from Horseshoe Bend, Virginia, the James William Parks who was born in 1849, exactly one hudred years before my birthdate.

Oh, she said, with a professional smile in her voice, you are THAT Jas. W. Parks.

Thank you.

The Magazine intends to print your letter about Dan Baum's article in the next number.

I was elated.

We're right on deadline and it occurred to us that none of us know what Jas. could possibly mean? Are you sure you don't mean Jason?

Well, blow me down. You know, copy editors. They get like that.

No, it means James, just as Chas. means Charles Dickens, Benj. means Benjamin Franklin or Benj. Siegel, and Geo. means George Washington as does Abr. - Abraham Lincoln - Leibowitz or Lipschitz.

I was becoming somewhat exasperated. As you all know, I am somewhat peripatetic, in any case.

Righto, she said, ringing off cheerfully, but not before I let her know how thrilling I would find it to see my name in The Magazine that had published Truman Capote, Lillian Ross, Josephn Mitchell, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber.

So, happily, off to the rigors of the recliner and my afternoon nap.

I heard the phone ring again almost immediately. I just assumed it was for one of the kids. Their friends will not allow our phone line to be silent for more than a few minutes.

Wrong.

The little girl came to me this time bearing the phone.

Jim, it's that woman from New York again.

This time it was a lady with a somewhat Frenchified accent. What ees zees name Jas. Ees meaning Jasoan, no?

No. It means James. With whom am I speaking?

You are speaking with editorial assistant to ________ _________, editor of magazine.

Well, is English your primary language?

Click. Dial tone.

Fuck'em. I'd rather be right.

The phone rang before I could hang it up. This is __________ __________, the editor. What, exactly, does Jas. mean? We are right on deadline here in New York and we want to print your letter, but we do NOT understand your abbreviation.

It means James.

Then do you want us to by-line you as James?

No, ma'am. No one would believe it's me. You see, I sign my name Jas. W. Parks and...

Well, that stands for Jason, does it not?

No, ma'am, it stands for James. I want people to know you printed a letter I wrote in The Magazine and I signed it the way I would any other important document...

Now, you simply have to understand. This lady can place a phone call to a four-star hotel or restaurant and make the manager wet his Armani britches. She can snap her fingers and dispatch very talented writers - not reporters, but writers - to distant spots on the globe to write take-outs on diverse subjects which are then printed in The Magazine as "Letter from..." and the like.

What is your real name?

I have been by-lined as Jim Parks, madame, throughout a very undistinguished career as a police reporter, if you must know.

What was the newspaper of the largest circulation you ever wrote for, Mr. Parks?

"The Houston Chronicle."

The smallest?

"The Okeechobee News."

Where is Okeechobee?

On a big lake in southern Florida.

Oh, I see.

Fantastic bass fishing, you know. That's the place where they thought they could just tell a man, "I don't want that in the paper."

Well?

They can't keep you from printing it, but they can activate the Rotary, Lions, preachers and other pundits and get you fired, you know.

What if I by-line you as Jim Parks, then?

I would be delighted, Ms. ____________.

I once went to sleep in Sheep Meadow on the afternoon of the Fourth of July. I was a tramp. There were workmen setting up a portable stage. They were going to perform "The 1812 Overture" in honor of the occasion and as background music for the fireworks show.

When I awakened, there were men in black tie and women in gowns eating fried chicken and other picnic delights from silver chafing dishes.

Everyone clapped when they saw that I had regained consciousness and I was introduced all around. Someone got me a plate and a glass of champagne and we were off to the races.

Hizzoner The Mayor John Lindsay wheeled in riding in an ordinary Cadillac eight-passenger limo. He schmoozed all around, we shook hands and exchanged pleasantries under his ten-thousand watt smile. It was a good time. He worked hard at it.

I hitched out the next morning and fetched up in Philly's sticky heat where I found work as a laborer putting up and taking down scaffolds for brick masons.

But that's another story.

It's almost like the one about my by-line in "The New Yorker." You can't even dine out on it. Oh, by the way, the fried chicken had a tad too much cumin and garlic in the batter, but it was an unusual touch for a southern boy's palate.

I couldn't have been more delighted.

Goose Creek

by Jim Parks


It was such a startling thing to happen under the overcast winter skies of the rice fields and the levees.

We little men came across the mound of the flood control project and up the muddy bank when suddenly we saw the huge snow goose hunkered down in obvious pain.

The honking began immediately as the creature swiveled and kept its tail to us, challenging any and all to come at it. It must have had a broken wing or some infirmity, all alone and as frightened as any such creature may be.

You never saw them up close. Usually you heard them on bitter cold sunny days miles high in the sky honking and keeping to their V formations. Sometimes they came sailing in at dark to light in the ponds and marshes out in that part of town where they kept the land covered with scrubby trees and the courses of waterways and terraces to absorb the flash floods in the swampy areas contained by the huge levees and flood gates.

We stood around on one foot and another, making comments, feeling deeply for the big bird we knew would die. No one wanted to bother it. No one wanted to leave, but soon we did, letting our little prepubescent legs carry us away while the bird honked at us furiously.

We were little men. Sad little men, but little men nonetheless.

The Belladonna Cure

by Jim Parks

They three crouched around the coals of a fire built of an oaken pallet by the tracks. The couple fussed with a thick soda bottle in which they brewed tea.

Just as it boiled, the woman in a long black skirt pulled a leather bag on a string out of her bodice and shook out three small seeds. She dropped them in the bottle and the man resumed heating it over the coals.

"Beautiful Lady," she told the tramp. "It's a living dream, the way witches flew." A black crow coasted on silken wings, landed at their feet, turned into a smiling man under a black slouch hat, danced away.

He found an empty boxcar on the line of tracks that was hot, loaded for trains eastbound out of the California valley of produce field and fruit orchards. Grabbed a cast-off brake hose with its galvanized fitting at one end, a mace with which to fight off attackers; jammed a spike in the tracks of the door to prevent its slamming shut and trapping him; arranged a slab of cardboard dunnage and rolled out his bundle of blankets for a snooze.

He awoke at dusk when the engineer jerked the train to make sure all the couplings were secure, waited for the percussive, hissing linear rifle shot to travel the length of the combination as they blew the air out of the brake system, put his back to the corner and got ready to ride uneasy when he saw the three tramps sitting with a half-gallon jug of wine at the other end of the car.

As they rode through the night, one of the tramps kept approaching him in the darkness to cast unsettling stares. He caught glimpses of his alcoholic face and toothless mouth in the shadows and moonlit reflection of snow and stone canyon walls, his evil expressions and his ragged frame clothed in filthy, frizzy gray hair, his body swathed in rags and a huge overcoat.

His attention attracted to a mountain pass covered with snow and spruce groves, their boughs drooping with icy deposits, he turned to see the man wielding a straight razor, preparing to make a slashing cut at him.

The smiling man did not panic. He stood quickly, spread his arms and shouted, eyes blazing.

A massive wind blew across the width of the car. It turned the tramp's coat into a sail, a dark, filthy spinnaker running before the wind that carried the screaming tramp out the door to cling for a moment with one hand; then he dropped into the rocky gorge below.

The other two men huddled fearfully in the corner as he approached them across the rocking, swaying floor of the boxcar, his smile intact under his black slouch hat.

They sat mute for a moment before one of them offered the bottle in drunken capitulation.

"Wanna drink?"

"Don't mind if I do."

In The Barber Shop

by Jim Parks

In the Metropolitan that Tuesday morning, all was brilliant refracted sunlight from the prism edges of the mirrors and the dull shine of polished dark-stained wood. The tiny hexagonal floor tiles gleamed from a fresh scrubbing and the air was redolent with shaving soap, liniment and tonic.

The old man came in, nodded to everyone and pulled a newspaper out of the side pocket of his coat after he hung up his hat on a mahogany tree at the door.

His hands shook too badly to do it himself, so he got a shave on Saturday nights, took "Little Bitty Grandma" to church on Sunday, then made the obligatory visit with her to some friends' place before dinner, and spent a lazy afternoon snoozing in his chair.

But there was hell and Jesus in his house now. He could get no rest.

The Klan came into the church on Sunday morning in their robes and one of them made a speech about protecting the flag and southern womanhood.

Little Bitty Grandma could not be consoled. They had committed that one unpardonable sin against southern womanhood. They had scared her.

"Bill, I don't go to church for that kind of trash to come in and talk to me - not that way. I wouldn't listen to them anywhere, much less in my church. I want something done about it."

She had said it over and over - each time the same way. She meant business, had stomped out of the church on the heels of her high button shoes and handed herself into the enormous touring car, then slammed the door with her nose in the air.

He asked what she expected him to do about it.

"I'm sure you will think of something if you know what's good for you, Bill ______."

He made so bold as to ask "Or else what?" It was the kind of thing that came as close to fight as they ever had.

"I will go back out to the place and live with Rebecca."

The "place" was their cotton farm fifteen miles out in the country. Rebecca was her oldest daughter who lived in a home in the compound of five houses they had built over the years so their kids could take care of the enormous place.

He found bedding - quilts, pillows and sheets - on the horsehair sofa in the living room downstairs. Nothing was said.

He could hear her crying upstairs. He went to their room and knocked on the door softly.

"Go away."

"Sarah, I..."

"Go away, Bill. I don't want to hear it." He felt despair as he stood in the wide hallway of the old house, staring at pictures of his children.

He did not sleep well that night. He did not fit the sofa.

That settled it. He would take action, personal and direct, though he was almost eighty, diabetic, and often found himself standing in one place or the other in his home or his yard wondering what it was he had intended to do next.

He waited for Tuesday.

They had found a white woman murdered, strangled and stabbed, her baby trying to nurse at her breast, in a house down along the railroad tracks just outisde the town.

The posse found a negro camped under a low trestle not too far away, dragged him to the jail, and the rest would enter the oral history of the town for the next century to come.

They chained him on a load of hay soaked with kerosene and touched it off. People said he screamed for awhile, then began to turn into a smaller and smaller sizzling piece of stinking, reduced and blackened burned tissue, sizzling smaller and smaller around the skeletal structure. Finally, his skull had exploded with a diminutive pop.

The old man had visited the domino parlor and the fire station. He knew who was responsible, had waited - he called it "laying around the lick log" - until he saw them enter the barber shop that morning, then followed them inside.

Suddenly, he laid his newspaper aside and said, to no one in particular, "Y'all gonna mind me."

No one paid much attention. They just kept on chatting and laughing at one joke or another.

"I said y'all gonna mind me. You will mind me, you hear? Y'all don't mind me, you'll wonder how come you didn't."

One of the barbers stopped in mid-sentence and said, "Are you talking to me, Bill?"

"That's Mister Bill to you, boy."

"Mister Bill, what in the world is wrong?"

"What's right with the world? You tell me, fella."

He stood up and pulled off his coat, throwing it down on the bench next to him. No one missed the big .45 caliber revolver hanging down from the shoulder holster almost to his left hip. The dark brown leather rig held it snugly to what once had been a massive chest and huge shoulders.

His moustaches jumped up and down as he talked. His eyes flashed fire.

"Y'all burned that air niggah t'other day? I can't he'p that. Then you come to my wife's church and talked about it uninvited. That scared her. Y'all ought not scare her - any other women in this town, you hear?

"Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna promise you that if you try to burn anyone else, niggah or white, Meskin or Injun, I'm gonna come for you. You won't like that..."

"Aw, Mister _____, one of the Klansmen said, trying to reason with him.

"No, sir, you listen here to me, boy. Y'all gonna mind me. Y'all think someone done some killin'? Something like that? You turn him over to the Sheriff. Let the District Attorney get him indicted, then let a jury convict him unanimously. Then you turn him over to the Governor to make sure his sentence is carried out. It's that simple. Y'all try to do anything else - especially scare my wife or any other woman - and you'll answer to me."

He put on his hat and folded his coat over his arm, then stalked out of the barber shop, leaving the cloying mixture of odors - lilac and powder, shaving soap and liniment, bootblack, and the light machine oil they used on the clippers and scissors.

Outside, he felt better than he had at any time in at least twenty years. There was a bite to the early Spring air. He sprung along in his boots, then swung up into his touring car with its polished brass and dark-painted fenders and doors, its odor of rubber and gasoline, leather and dust.

He went home to a lunch of cold biscuits and ham, warmed- over coffee and an apple.

He said, "Little Darlin', I talked to them..."

"Do tell," she said, flouncing out of the kitchen as if she was eighteen again. She snorted as she went up the stairs to their room. "Go on and talk to them, old man. Just you be sure and talk to them, now. I'll bet they will be real impressed."

He burned for her, became fully involved in her rage. It was now a matter of survival. Little old men cannot make it by themselves. He knew this so well.

It was another little old man who telephoned him as he dozed in his chair in the middle of one of his famous afternoon naps.

"Bill, they're fixing to burn another damn niggah down here on the square. You'd better get on down here, old man."

"Don't you go nowhere. I'll be by to get you in just a minute."

He stuck his feet in his boots, hitched up his suspenders and shouldered into his holster. Jamming his hat on his head, he thanked himself for having an electric starter put on his touring car.

When they got there, the crowd had just started their war dance. Ugly hatred marched across every face in the crowd. The old man shuddered as he watched neighbors and business acquaintances lust for the blood of this unfortunate black man who was in a wild dither as he begged them to spare his life.

"Lawd, no, hell, no. Don't y'all burn po' me. I didn't do nothin' to nobody. Hell, no," he screamed, trying to break the chains as they laughed at him and made faces.

The old man drove up in the middle of the crowd, making them move out of the way of the big car with its big steel fenders and the incredibly long hood topped by the chromed swan taking flight. He hoisted himself out and stood on the running board, struggling to conceal how he had lost his breath.

He drew the old pistol, fired it in the air.

That startled the crowd, especially when they saw who had done it. It was well known that he had come into the country from Virginia, had made a lot of money and was very influential in business affairs.

"Put the niggah in the jail. Do it and do it now. Y'all gonna mind me, or you'll wonder why you didn't." He shouted it. His voice came from somewhere deep, down near his navel.

The same smart mouth who had tried to talk back to him in the barber shop spoke up.

"Now, Mister ______, you're liable to get yourself hurt."

The old man fired just over his head, his wobbly hand holding the pistol as steady as he could as the broken plate glass from a store front behind the "reserve" deputy crashed inside the window.

"I said you are going to mind me, and I don't mean maybe. So get busy."

The crowd melted away very quickly after that. Two deputies unchained the man and helped him down from the wagon.

"And y'all clean that kerosene off that boy, you hear me?" He was breathing harder than ever, close to a heart attack or a stroke. "I don't want my jail a'burnin' down. Y'all might think that's yo' jail, but it's not. It's my jail."

He watched bleakly until they had gotten the man down from the wagon and gone down the block to the jail, then he climbed back into the driver's seat and reversed out of the parking place and drove on home.

When he had dropped his friend off and wheeled into the old barn behind the house, she was waiting on the back porch to take his hat.

"I've been listening to the party line, Bill. They are all saying you done the right thing."

She looked up at him with pride, taking his elbow and pressing her breast to his side.

She felt the gun hanging from the holster pressed between them.

"And take that thing off. Don't you dare try to wear that into my house. Is it loaded?"

"Wouldn't be much good if it wasn't, would it, now?"

She laughed in spite of herself.

"You hungry, old man?"

"You know I am, Little Darlin'."

They laughed at each other again as they passed under the shotgun hanging on pegs over the door between the kitchen and the mud room.

Military Coup

by Jim Parks

Department of Defense Announces Plans For A Military Coup

The U.S. Armed Forces recently announced their plans for a military takeover.

Apparently, the plan is linked to a government bailout of mortgage companies, banks, Wall Street trading houses and auto manufacturers.

The U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute released a report warning that the U.S. military must prepare for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States" that could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse" or "loss of functioning political and legal order."

Entitled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development," the report was produced by Lt. Col. Nathan Freier, a recently retired officer who is a professor at the college - the Army’s main training institute for prospective senior officers.

"To the extent events like this involve organized violence against local, state, and national authorities and exceed the capacity of the former two to restore public order and protect vulnerable populations, DoD [Department of Defense] would be required to fill the gap...Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home."

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss- Kahn warned last week of riots and unrest in global markets if the ongoing financial crisis is not addressed and lower-income households are beset with credit constraints and rising unemployment, the Phoenix Business Journal reported. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Rep. Brad Sherman of California disclosed that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson discussed a worst-case scenario as he pushed the Wall Street bailout in September, and said that scenario might even require a declaration of martial law.

According to the War College report, "DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.

"Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance...DoD is already challenged by stabilization abroad. Imagine the challenges associated with doing so on a massive scale at home."

The Defense Department has made plans to deploy 20,000 troops nationwide by 2011 to help state and local officials respond to emergencies.

Although the 130-year-old Posse Comitatus Act restricts the military’s role in domestic law enforcement, a 1994 Defense Department Directive allows military commanders to take emergency actions in domestic situations to save lives, prevent suffering or mitigate great property damage, according to the Business Journal.

Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. military operations to liberate Iraq, said in a 2003 interview that if the U.S. is attacked with a weapon of mass destruction, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

By the year 2011, if funding is approved. A full brigade- strength military presence of three rapid reaction forces will be in place.

The first such unit, a 4,700 person unit at Ft. Stewart, Georgia - part of the Third Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, which rotated into place in the spring of this year, became available as of October 1, according to General Victor E. Renuart, Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.

Two additional teams will join 80 small National Guard and reserve units to support local and state officials - all trined to respond to what the Army calls CBRNE events (chemical, biological, nuclear or high-yield explosive).

All this represents a nearly seven-fold increase in five years, something Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said "would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable" in remarks before the Center For Strategic and International Studies. He called this a "fundamental change in military culture."

It's enough of a fundamental change to alarm such widely divergent groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute, both of which decry the potential for domestic spying and a military presence that might become oppressive and inhibitory.

But the notion that enemies of the nation might not confine their hostilities to areas overseas persists. Subjecting the U.S. to attacks by nuclear devices in major cities might cause the defense establishment to give up the fight.

Late in 2007, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive approving more than $556 million over five years to set up the three response teams.

Planners assume an incident could lead to thousands of casualties, more than one million evacueees and contamination of as many as 3,000 square miles, an area the size of that affected by Hurricane Katrine. The Federal Emergency Management Agency began a $1.8 million pilot project in November, according to McHale. It includes operation areas in Hawaii, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Washington and West Virginia - each of which will focus on a particular threat such as pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, hurricane, earthquake and catastrophic chemical release.

It's all part of federal and state emergency planning that began in 2003.

Winston

by Jim Parks


Larry Smith's life changed forever on a morning in March, 1970, as he sat reading the competition in the editorial offices of a west coast newspaper and lit a filter-tipped Winston "Super King" to go with his coffee.

"Winston," the girl who sat next to him said with a grin. "Winston whom? Winston Smith or Churchill? Where's your blue boiler suit, old man?"

She murmured in her usual way. He wasn't at first sure if she was talking to him, or not.

She dressed and groomed herself the way most of the flashy young women in the business world were at the time. Bright colors and scarves in paisley, incredibly short skirts and no stockings over richly tanned, very muscular legs. Skier's legs, in her case. A dancer's legs.

"Your point is?"

"I just mean, well, like, from a marketing standpoint, they have chosen oxymoron, haven't they? Super King and Winston? A tobacco product produced in a former colony - highly addictive, of course, and exported solely for the purpose of taxation and profit because it serves no real useful pupose. After all, let's be plain. It just goes up in smoke."

She grinned again.

That's when it hit him, the feeling of altered perception of space and time. He could hardly fathom if it was noon or midnight, June or December. Colors faded to a dull shine, then burned brilliantly; sounds came and went, surging in volume and diminishing to a point of tinny irritation to the ear.

He'd been dosed.

Acid.

He looked at his watch and became engrossed in the weave of the oxford cloth of his sleeve. After staring at it for maybe fifteen minutes, he roused himself when he heard her dialing the phone and calling for an ambulance.

"Mister Smith is having some sort of seizure. Yes, here on the second floor."

They had eaten breakfast together in the greasy spoon down the street. It couldn't have been the coffee. Hot liquids attacked the LSD, rendered it impotent. Must have been in the ice water.

He sighed.

She winked.

"Better luck next time, cowboy. Better living through chemistry, I always say."


While he waited, she slid an Army identification card across the desk. It said she was a Specialist 5 and words to that effect, had a different name than her by-line, naturally, and bore a mug shot of her with the same grin she had fixed on him.

The Texas Long-haired Rifle Association

By Jim Parks

It took me a minute or two before I realized that Harry wasn't trying to pretend he didn't know me. He knew me once he got to where he could see me. The crowds passing by on Bourbon Street streamed around us on the narrow sidewalk. Some of the drunks shoved him and he struggled to remain standing.

He jerked his glasses off, tried to wipe them with a very shabby red bandana, and ever so carefully draped them back on his misshapen head. It was a head with a deep crater that ran the length of his part line on one side and there were wide, flat shiny scars that radiated out of a spot on his brow and through his hair on the other.

Harry’s glasses were bifocal, bent, smudged, chipped and sat askew on his head as if placed there by some absent-minded child with curls of greasy graying hair spilling over his eyes and the collar of his olive drab field jacket. He really was an absent-minded, childlike man wandering the streets of the Quarter like a stray dog, a piece of surplus war equipment. To me, he was a fellow Navy veteran, a shipmate.

He couldn't help the fact that as soon as he got a new pair of glasses, they would get all bent up when he went into a gran mal seizure. They usually got thrown off his head. When he took them off and tried to hold them in his hand, they got all bent up.

We gave each other the secret Texas Long-haired Rifle Association handshake.

"They leave this stuff out here all the time," he told me, grabbing a half-eaten hotdog in its little paper gondola and downing it in two gulps. "Can’t take it in the clubs with them." He meant the tourists in their child-like quest to see it all, to see more, to rush from place to place with dollars in their hands.

There you had it, as far as Harry was concerned. He was a child that had stayed too long at the fair, lost his way and could no longer find his way out of the maze, enraptured by the bright lights, the crowds, the odors, the noisy frivolity of the setting.

I asked him why didn't come around the Avenue uptown any more. Why he didn't come see his brothers, just stayed around that old lame tourist trap like that?

He ignored the questions, searching among the uprights of a little wrought iron fence. He found another half-eaten hot dog, this one with congealed chili on it.

He was like a scavenger fish on a reef eating the detritus of others’ feasting and disposing of the inedible.

He licked his fingertips in a dainty gesture that contrasted with his overall impression, that of a man so completely coated with the filth of the streets that you were sure he would have been unrecognizable to family and friends.

He downed a watery cola drink, ice and all, and placed the waxed paper cup in a convenient curbside waste basket that was emblazoned "Throw me somethin’, Mister," the traditional cry of the Mardi Gras parade spectators begging for the krewe members on the floats passing by to throw them beads and doubloons. It was decorated in the Orleans provincial Mardi Gras colors of purple, gold and that funny shade of green.

He had a simple story, simple enough for anyone from our side of the tracks to understand. He had gotten injured severely riding a "Patrol Boat - River," the Navy’s parlance for the PBR, a very rapid little fiberglass number with twin .50 caliber machine guns, plenty of rocket firepower, and the ability to stop in half its length or turn tail in the blink of an eye with its twin propulsion nozzles.

He received a small pension for what had happened to his head one sun-drenched afternoon in a Mekong River tributary as he toured Vietnam at government expense.

"I have the Veterans Administration send the money to a bank account for my ex-old lady and kid," he said proudly when anyone asked.

It had been like a cartoon, he would say. His war had been like a Technicolor movie only it had the logic of a cartoon, the kind that they used to show in matinees. Stuff like the Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner.

There were no heroics. He was lolling half asleep on the stern in the sun as the boat churned down the muddy brown stream. When she hit a mine, he got blown out over the water and he hit on his back. Just as he hit the water, a piece of the hull hit him in the head. In any other war, he wouldn’t have survived, but the medevac system, the Navy hospitals in Japan and California, and the medication enabled him to live in a perpetual state of fat Tuesday.

But nothing would stop the seizures. They came at any old time and he couldn't hide them.

No employer in his right mind would allow him to come on the job in that condition. It was just too dangerous in any industrial setting. In the service industry, it had a very negative impact on the company's image. It turned customers off.

When they found him beaten to death behind a dumpster near Canal Street - the result, they said, of a dispute over who could have a bag of unsold hamburgers left over at a fast food franchise - we of the Texas Longhaired Rifle Association went to the dime store and bought toy plastic rifles so we could drill over his grave in a lonely part of the Port Hudson National Cemetery a few miles north of Baton Rouge ninety miles west of the Big Easy.

We had all met in the neuro-psychiatric ward of the New Orleans VA Medical Center. All of our clique were from Texas, slumming in The Easy, hospitalized for one reason or the other in the ward where they treated nerve disorders and mental problems. Some, guys like Harry, had been long term residents of the domiciliary system because of their war wounds. President Reagan had cut the funding for those programs to the bone and they were now trying to make it in the normal world.

We had determined to keep our spirits up by getting little plastic toy guns at the dime store and drilling in the second line of the Mardi Gras parades, that raucous moving party that follows the parade from its starting point uptown to its terminus at the ballroom downtown.

Funny looking street bums in filthy war surplus clothing sporting fierce looking little black plastic toy rifles, we sent Harry off with a twenty-one gun salute and joyfully upraised middle fingers.

"You know why twenty-one guns?" Fred David, Jr. asked the question as we rode along in Shorty’s old four-door Chevy with the expired Texas license plates. He fingered a knot the size of a walnut on the side of his head.

No one answered.

"It’s because that’s what seventeen seventy-six adds up to. Twenty-one."

"Shut the fuck up, asshole." Shorty blew his nose and repeated himself. "I don’t want to hear it. Shut up."

He had one of those scars that start at about the eyebrows and streaks up and over the top of the head where a bullet hit his helmet and rocketed around inside its curved top.

He was crying softly.

He didn’t try to hide it.

Passing

by Jim Parks
100 words
(reposted from December 17, 2008)

Two tipoffs a kid wouldn't notice. We went to the cancer doctor. I was twelve.

Wearing a fedora and marching World War Two tall, he came out in fifteen minutes, grinning.

"Let's go to the zoo."

We didn't spend much time there.

"Place smells like cat piss."

For lunch, rye bread toasted, Spam fried, with mayonnaise. On the crackling radio, Eddie Fisher sang "Oh, My Papa."

He hugged me and cried.At the airport, he said, "No tattoos." I asked why.

Your grandmother wouldn't like it.

"Why?"

"Why? Can't be buried in an Orthodox cemetery."

"I'm not Jewish."

"So, convert."

Fire Opal

by Jim Parks
(reposted from December 2, 2008)

Maria could not get her breath in the humidity and vaporous stink of Nuevo Laredo's Guerrero Street. At ten a.m. the miasma of the Rio Grande, the sewers, the automotive exhaust and the press of thousands of bodies all around her gave her a headache.

They had sold her mother's fire opal, a piece that had come from deep in the Sierra Madre Mountains. Set in a beautiful silver bracelet, it was polished to the point that it shone alternately blue, green, yellow, and in certain light flashed fiery tints of red and orange.

It was the end of something, having to abandon her mother's treasure in a Guerrero Street jewelry shop for walking around money and enough to drive to Monterrey. She felt sick about it.

They could never go back to San Antonio after what had happened with Ricardo and the other rivals for the dominance of the gang her novio, Arturo, had led for years before they made their move on his house. They had only barely escaped with their lives. The memory of the rapid fire gunshots prickled her skin and the tissue behind her ears every time she thought about it. She could only shake her head and say "No. No no no no no!"

Her back ached, her breasts throbbed and milk seeped through her bra and onto her dress in the heat. Sticky trails of sweat trickled down her sides and belly and behind her ears while soaking wet tendrils of her hair tickled her neck. She clung to Arturo's arm as they stumbled along the cracked and broken sidewalk.

Suddenly, two of the vatos locos from the San Antonio barrio where she and Arturo had lived all their lives stepped out of an alley and leveled sawed-off shotguns at them. She gripped Arturo's right arm as tightly as she could and screamed. Then he flung her to the curb and drew his automatic as the shotgun blast cut him in two with buckshot. She lay in the filthy gutter with its cigarette butts and trickles of putrid water running from air conditioners and the back doors of restaurants as one of the vatos stepped over and held the muzzle of the shotgun a foot from the back of her head. She heard him shuck a fresh cartridge into the chamber.

"Hail Mary, Mother of God, blessed art thou among women..."

Morningstar Ranch

For the Naked, Nameless, Homeless and Harmless,
Morningstar Ranch Was Home

By Jim Parks
(reposted from December 1, 2008)

Picture this.

A couple of uptight bureaucrats - you know the kind, good gray men with seniority, white shirts and ties, training, civil service status - have come to inspect the dwellings and sanitary facilities at an "open land" commune in sixties California.

As they approach the gate to the 31-acre property in the redwoods situated in the middle of apple orchards near Sonoma County's Russian River, they are met by a committee - most of whom are stark naked.

In fact, one man who never missed these confrontations was a tall black giant, his afro and ebony skin glistening in the California sun, white teeth glittering as he beamed at the officials with a huge grin, a nude white woman under each arm. Tied around his abnormally large male member there was always a pink ribbon done up in a fancy bow.

These confrontations persisted for years and they always began the same way. "Who is in charge here?" the bureaucrat, building inspector, health code enforcement officer or sheriff's department investigator would inquire.

No one seemed to be able to give a clear answer to the question. Now, it was a fair question, but it seemed it was always very difficult to answer.

It was like the scene in the Vietnam war movie "Apocalypse Now," an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story that had nothing to do with Vietnam and everything to do with authority and power relationships.

"Hey, soldier, do you know who's in command here?"

The reply, cheeky and matter of fact and succinct, "Yeah."

The character had nothing further to say. Just, "Yeah."

They were in the middle of a firefight at a bridge head and he knew who was in charge there.

"Yeah."

Vietnam. California. Berkeley. Communes. Universities, the military, corporations, powerful institutions of any kind. You name it.

People just kept on doing things to let the The Man know HE was no longer necessarily the one in charge.

The critics panned it, the politicians and pundits now deride it, but one thing is for certain, the era of free love, peace, social experimentation, alternative lifestyles - all these things that shook the American culture to its roots - just kept challenging that central concept in ways too numerous to define.

Dominance ranking, as the sociologists call it and measure it by such factors as disposable income and leisure time, was sliding and tipping disastrously, rather like an elegant sterling tea service on a gleaming teak table in a salon in a bounding, rolling yacht on an ocean in a snotty blow.

The Man kept asking the same question and he kept getting the same answer.

Do you know who's in charge here?

"Yeah."

So this was a daily scene at the socially experimental Morningstar Ranch, a counterculture enclave that flourished near Occidental, California, situated in the apple orchards and redwood groves of Sonoma County's Russian River country, the neighborhood where the apples are grown, Luther Burbank developed the seedless grape, and some of the finest California varietal vintages are produced.

What was really proven? Quite a lot, really. Mostly, it was about power relations - who has it, who doesn't, and why.

Lou Gottlieb owned the ranch after he bought it from John Henry Beecher, grandson of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, whom President Abraham Lincoln claimed was "the little lady who started all the trouble."

Mr. Beecher lost his property when he lost his position as a teacher at San Francisco State University because he refused to sign a "loyalty" oath.

After amassing thousands of dollars in fines and court- ordered fees to bulldoze buildings ruled improperly constructed on his own property, Lou Gottlieb deeded the property to God. All this controversy wound up in the U.S. Ninth Circuit District Court of Appeals, which ruled that if God was named owner of real property on a quit claim deed, then there would be no recourse for the collection of property taxes.

Therefore, God has no property rights in the state of California.

It was a typical joke for the wise-cracking Gottlieb, who earned a Ph.D. in musicology at UC Berkeley and fronted the folk song trio, "The Limelighters" playing upright double bass on the weekly television program "Hootenany" after he arranged many of The Kingston Trio's hit songs.

Think "There's Going To Be A Meeting" and "It Takes A Worried Man (To Sing A Worried Song)."

Gottlieb had a concert grand he put in a hen house at the Morningstar Ranch. There, he played Brahms and other classical works. He meditated, did yoga and clowned while his sidekick, another musician named Ramón Sender Barayón, the son of Ramón J. Sender, the exiled Spanish novelist, played it straight.

Sender was literally born amid the sound of machine guns during "Red October," within close proximity of the opening battles of the Spanish Civil War, in 1934. His father, a native of Aragon, was a member of Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or P.O.U.M., the Trotskyist militia whose ranks were filled with international volunteers, including such literary luminaries as George Orwell, author of 1984. He worked as a journalist covering the revolution.

One of the party's founders later served as his literary agent in America after they had both reached New York.

One of Spain's great modern novelists, Sr. Sender wrote the novel Mr. Witt Among The Rebels, for which he won the prestigious Spanish National Prize for Literature in 1936. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for the body of his other work, including some which have been translated. They are Pro Patria, Seven Red Sundays Counterattack In Spain, Chronicle Of Dawn, The Sphere, Dark Wedding, and The Affable Hangman.

The Stalinist government of the Soviet Union controlled the funds and the supplies of the Republican effort to resist the Fascist forces commanded by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. During that conflict, the P.O.U.M. brigades found it increasingly difficult to find the means to resist the fascists. At one point, the Stalinists actually attacked the P.O.U.M. troops, though they were on the same side.

One night at the height of the war, a death squad jerked Ramon's mother Amparo out of a jail cell and frog marched her to a cemetery in her home town of Zamora in the province of Castile. There, paid fascist firing squad of assassins cut her down where she stood before a wall and buried her in a squalid grave after the local priest refused her absolution.

Sender, Sr., was able to get his two children, Ramón and Andrea, out of Spain. They eventually arrived in New York in 1939, stateless, homeless refugees because the senior Sender was on the run in Mexico, dodging the Stalinist operatives who were still hunting down and killing supporters of Leon Trotsky, as they had killed Trotsky himself in Mexico City in 1940.

Indeed, he considered the truth of the demise of his wife so sensitive that he took the secret to the grave in 1982 when he succumbed to a heart attack after a long career publishing his novels and teaching in various universities. It was only through meticulous research that Ramon Sender Barayón, his son, was able to piece together the truth of his mother's execution. He wrote "A Death In Zamora" and published it to respectable reviews in 2003.

Today, forty years after the open land experiment at Morningstar Ranch with Lou Gottlieb and such leading lights of the hippie movement as the Diggers, Sender sits in a bay window in a house high on a crazy hill on a sunny San Francisco street where fog comes pouring over a mountain on certain days. He roughs the tangled fur of his wiggly little dog, "Ricky Ricardo."

Asked how to lead and govern several hundred free spirits through gentle suggestion at the height of the psychedelic revolution, the Summer of Love, he readily responds, with no hesitation, "Buy a cow."

Buy a cow?

"Buy a cow."

Why buy a cow?

Near exasperation, Ramón Sender Barayón peers over the top of his half lens reading glasses and speaks very slowly, with the voice of experience, with exaggerated patience.

Because twice a day that cow needs to be milked. Everyone will come to watch or to get some milk or to socialize - or whatever. All you need to do to get their attention is to make sure the cow is doing fine, that everyone gets some milk, and you can communicate with them with no problem.

Here sits one of the earlist experimenters with electronic keyboards, or MOOG synthesizers, one of the organizers of the San Francisco Trips Festival of 1966, a joint venture composed of himself, Stewart Brand, Lou Gottlieb, Phil Graham, The Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Big Brother and the Holding Company and many other bands as well as the signature light shows that later became the standard for rock concerts - all staged at the ILWU Longshoreman's Hall, all staged over a three-day period in January of 1966.

He is very obviously a Spaniard. You can see it in the flowing gray hair, the bushy eyebrows, the heavy beard, the exaggerated gestures when he speaks.

He insists that if I ever suddenly find myself situated on prime property in a garden state suddenly overrun by the homeless, helpless, naked and nameless, I should buy a cow.

It's the first lesson, he told me.

Well, it's a start.

Indeed, all good stories have a beginning. The middle of this story is another thing entirely. Some would say the demise of the ranch through the intervention of the bureaucracy and the court orders to bulldoze the property was the end of the story.

But that's not true.

The end, obviously, is nowhere in sight.

At least, not from where Ramón Sender Barayón and Señor Ricky Ricardo sit looking out that bay window on that crazy hill in San Francisco.

The people who lived at Morningstar Ranch scattered like seeds before a whirlwind. Many of them perished on the streets from where they had come. There are many horror stories involving the retribution of gang wars, political assassination, drug overdoses and outright death by exposure and disease.

Others have thrived in places far and wide, most of them "on the land" at other communes in the west.

Sender continues to chronicle all that in an evolving e-book he calls "Home Free Home."

Very interesting reading, it may be found in "The Digger Archives" at:

http://www.diggers.org/home_free.htm

The Diggers were an almost mythical commune of people who tended to the needs of the burned out hippies during the Summer of Love. They gleaned produce and scored fish and meat from vendors who were willing to share. They printed instant newspapers on an old multilith in the back of a newspaper delivery van and distributed them to people hungry for information.

And they gardened.

Morningstar was one of the places where they maintained thriving gardens, the produce of which they hauled into San Francisco to feed starving hippies from everywhere who had arrived without a clue as to what they would do next, where their next meal was coming from, or where to go when their luck ran out.

What were some of the lessons learned?

First of all, what of the revolutionary idea propagated by Lou Gottlieb, an ex-member of the American Communist Party, that all should work in harmony in "removing the Territorial Imperative from the human heart"?

Lou Gottlieb called it LATWNID, or "land access to which no one is denied."

Ramón Sender remembers events this way. There were many fits and starts, legal hassles and emotional public meetings. "Anyway, the fact is that from the first get-go we terrified a whole lot of people."

Why?

Because, according to one popular definition of the concept by Robert Ardrey, the playwright turned anthropologist, who proposed the notion of human territorial aggression in "The Territorial Imperative," published in the 1960s, humans, like animals, are compelled by instinct to possess and defend territory they believe belongs exclusively to them...Territory enhances an animal's prestige and improves chances for survival. It was his idea that this dynamic drives human aggression.

Gottlieb sought an experimental solution to this thing of human aggression. He saw it as a problem, and that generated a lot of fear, according to his sidekick, Ramón Sender.

The fears all that generated in the minds of the neighbors fell along several well-worn lines.

First, they saw the free land movement "...corrupting our children, which I would rephrase (as) 'offering the younger generation an alternative to the Consensus Reality rat race.'"

Secondly, hippies running around naked, gardening, meditating and making babies they saw as "lowering real estate values."

Parenthetically, according to Sender, "...actually it's the value of the dollar decreasing..."

Neighbors perceived "an increase of crime in the area, including mostly burglary and trespassing."

They suspected "Cultivation of illegal substances such as marijuana, and probably some of the more paranoid thought we were cooking meth."

They feared "The spread of sexually transmitted diseases into the population, along with hepatitis. "'Dirty Hippies' was considered one word."

What lesson did Ramon Sender learn when Gottlieb deeded the property to God?

No one knows who instigated the move. A woman friend of his interrupted his morning meditation to tell him about Lou's problems with the law, the magnitude of his legal fees and court costs.

It wouldn't have been a bad idea to deed Morningstar to God.

Within a few weeks, that's what Lou Gottlieb did.

Later, he learned that John Henry Beecher had already deeded the property to The Goddess "because he was a member of the Catholic lay order of the Third Order of St. Dominic which occasionally met on the property. "They consecrated the ranch to the Holy Mother and named it after her, 'Morning Star.'"

Many people had seen a mysterious vision, the figure of the "Divine Mother," strolling through the trees from time to time, he recalls.

Ironically, that may have offered a legal avenue to certification as a tax-exempt and religious enclave community, according to Sender.

"...Lou discovered unfortunately too late to help with the appeal of the deed to God, that under Islamic law, it is possible to deed real property to Allah. It's caled a 'waqf.'...Whether Islamic law could have any standing in an American court would be interesting to research, but it seems to me that it could be argued that, under the First Amendment, Lou could, if he converted to Islam, make a waqf of Morning Star to Allah."

Finally, did the ultimate defeat of the community because of non-compliance with building codes spell success for the principles of freedom?

"Or do you mean 'spell defeat for the principles of freedom'? I think that's you intended to say," said Ramón. "ABSOLUTELY NOT! Okay, so Morning Star was a disaster in the sense that it could never have become a viable community, at least at that time and place, because it was too close to neighbors and too anarchistic in its basic Digger philosophical thrust to have ever organized itself into a self-supporting enterprise. I personally viewed Morning Star as an alternate society shrine where people came to be healed, just like at Lourdes. Other than live-in staff, there only should've been been visitors who stayed as long as necessary and then moved on, taking their healing and the message with them. And many did just that."

Many a young man or woman who had abandoned their lives somewhere in America and come to the Haight to see what would happen wound up totally zonked on psychdelics or other drugs and were basically wandering around stray and at loose ends, incapable of caring for themselves.

The Diggers picked them up, brought them to the ranch, and they spent their first night under a tree sleeping while the condensation dripped on them. In the morning, they found a communal stove in the middle of a meadow where people were preparing some sort of breakfast of oatmeal or soup. As the days went by, they scored canvas or sheet plastic and made a lean-to, then found a way to build a little structure. Some helped out with the gardening. Others went on runs with the Diggers to score food, lumber, anything that could be used to help build the community.

At one point the three septic tanks on the 31-acre place were streaming effluent downhill on the surface of the ground. It all served to madden the public officials and the neighbors. There were issues of public health and safety to consider.

But wasn't that exactly the point, according to Gottlieb and Sender, the two seeming radicals who dared to beg the question?

At some point, faced with their confrontational style, one had to ask oneself, what, exactly is radical and what is conservative?

Every night an estimated 88,000 people bed down on the streets of Los Angeles. They have no home other than the sidewalks, alleys, public parks, vacant houses and homeless shelters.

"If pot's allowed as 'medical marijuana,' then living on the land and building your own simple dwelling should be considered 'medical voluntary poverty' or some-such. And I'd love to find some expert willing to testify to the salubrious effect of not having to pay money to live on some slice of Mother Earth," said Ramón Sender Barayón.

Every so often, he and The Rev. Keenan C. Kelsey. Pastor, Noe Valley Ministry where Ramón retired as the Administrative director of the Ministry and Community Center, submitted a proposal to the San Francisco Mayor and County Board of Supervisors that would allow a triage of homeless by the Social Services Department.

"Proposal: If a person wants to camp out in nature, offer them a 'nature camp' where they can build themselves a lean- to in a hospitable climate (not too cold, not too hot) grow their food, raise some chickens, learn some crafts, and wait for their soul to regenerate. The basic axiom is that Nature is the Greatest Healer."

Where would they do this? On part of the sixteen million acres contolled by the Bureau of Land Management or by The State of California.

"Lumber, livestock, water, gardening equipment and food stamps would be provided."

The triage would be determined by the Department of Social Services's placement in one of three groups.

"Group 1) Willing to be trained and employed. These would remain in the city.

"Group 2) Physically or mentally disabled or drug-addicted, These would be placed in treatment centers, but many of the so-called mentally disabled would benefit by being placed in Group 3.

"Group 3) Unwilling to be trained but willing to 'return to nature' under minimum supervision, following the time-out center therapeutic concepts of R. D. Lang, et. al...Group 3 Program Participants would be encouraged to build their own living quarters - in the 1960s, on the so-called 'open door hippy enclaves,' we found this to be a very important aspect of the rehabilitation program. The participants would be encouraged to create a self-sufficient homestead. The basic model somewhat parallels The Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's. These TOIN Camps (Time Out In Nature Camps), scattered through isolated areas of the state, would also provide on-site volunteer fire fighting teams during the fire season. "Why don't you take your TOIN (Time Out In Nature)?" could become a catch phrase.

Under the doctrine of LATWIDN, or, that is, Gottlieb's notion of Land Access To Which Is Denied No One, the core idea is to move people onto the huge amount of land that is not in use. Nine-tenths of the nation's population lives on about one tenth of its land mass.

The people of America are now bottled up as never before, according to Ramón Sender Barayón.

At first, people arrived in outlaw fashion by being transported from Europe against their will. Later, the huge amounts of vacant land on the North American continent beckoned when people found it hard to fit in or they were starved out of their villages to make a convenient labor pool in the industrial cities.

Today, the marginal are left to wander the streets until they die.

Image 1 - Credit unknown
Image 2 - Lou Gottlieb, taken by ?
Image 3 - Ramón Sender Barayón, taken by ?
Image 4 - Diggers Free Store Window, taken by ?
Image 5 - Credit Unknown
Image 6 - Credit Unknown
Image 7 - Credit Unknown
Image 8 - "Mujer Pegada, 1985," by Manuel Neri, b. 1930
Image 9 - Ramón Sender Barayón, taken by ?
Image 10 - Credit Unknown
Image 11 - Credit Unknown

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