The Zero - the Fool - the un-numbered card in the tarot, representing the un-anchored point of view, the un-limited range of possibility, the un-classifiable one who - while lightly clutching a small bundle of possessions - is teetering merrily on the brink of a precipice.

 

In the year-round summers of the late sixties, when masses of youth were concerned of nothing but making feral love and instigating anarchic and treasonous ideas of peace above war, I at age twenty-two was innocent, unsophisticated, and ready for anything. Within the milieu of all that passionate naivete however, lurked sinister forces that could have quite possibly placed me, and my friends, in the firing line of grave danger...

I only knew one thing for sure at age twenty in 1966 - I was restless. I could feel something tugging at my feet that made me want to pull up stakes and move out to the larger world - fly the nest. So when my buddy Brad and I loaded up my old Chevy in Topeka, Kansas and drove out old Route 66 for the west coast, 'I thought I was simply shifting to California to live with sun, sand, sea and date blond surfer girls; otherwise to carry on with life pretty much the same way I had been - with job, apartment, TV, a bar in the den and throwing parties on the weekends. I'd been a car salesman in Kansas, but would probably upgrade to insurance, once I got settled down in California. With no inkling of the new ideas that were bubbling on the west coast, I was unaware of even the possibility that everything in my world could upturn into something unrecognizable from the life I had known while growing up...

Gliding across the dark Mojave carpet of prickly earth full of rattlesnakes and horned toads, cactus flowers and tumbleweeds, our windows are down, our tank is full and we're stoned on coffee from the truck-stop oasis back in Barstow with the big sign that says irresistibly “EAT” on a tall pole beside the two lane highway which is the old Route 66. We're just getting KRLA radio now and they're spinning out tunes that hadn't even reached us yet back in Kansas. It's 3AM in the morning and we come over a rise out of the black soft night with its sagebrush air blowing all around us, and are blasted back in our seats by the sight of a ten thousand square mile carpet of diamond lights stretched out across the immense valley that is Los Angeles. Mick Jagger is singing a song about 'goin' home' that doesn't end and we're screaming and honking our horn to the sky. We timed it right and made it at last. We drive and drive, down onto the LA Santa Monica Freeway – Corvettes and Limousines flash past us and we're sure that Clint Eastwood and Angie Dickenson have to be inside them. Like the Stone's song that doesn't end, LA doesn't either, we feel like we're goin' home, and we drive and drive all the way out to the coast and head north up the Pacific Coast Highway 1 to Zuma Beach where I jumped into the ocean for the first time in my life at 6 O'clock in the morning, where the first wave that hit me blew all that exuberance right out of me and washed me back to shore like a wet towel.

“I had no idea that the ocean was really salty!” I told Brad over a big breakfast in a seashore café in Malibu. He laughed at this – I'd just thought 'the salty sea' was a poetic metaphor. I had no idea that waves were so powerful either and he laughed too at the way I got tossed around. He was already a muscular blond surfer, from one previous trip out here, and rather enjoyed intimidating me. But I didn't care, I liked him, we'd been buddies for awhile, and I was feeling so good, I could sense on this first morning at the edge of the continent, with that ocean out there and this smell and feeling in the air, that I'd indeed landed home. We bought a paper and searched the want ads and within one week we both had jobs and a little apartment in Santa Monica.

After a year of apartment dwelling in Santa Monica, I still felt a pull, I had visions of an old place on the beach - a house, not an apartment, with the sea breezes wafting through the open windows and lots of cool people coming and going through my open door. Sure enough, I found my dream house. Ray, my boss, a comedic milling-machine instructor at the Douglass Aircraft factory where I worked, was about to retire. We were having a beer after work one Friday afternoon and I asked him if he knew of any houses I might rent up in Topanga Canyon where he lived. It was a place that had recently lit up my imagination – I first heard the name on the radio when the dj passed on a rumor that Bob Dylan had been seen walking alongside the road in 'Topanga Canyon' after his mysterious accident and disappearance – the exotic name stuck. “You can have our place – we're moving out next month – buying a house up the coast. If my wife likes you,” he added quickly.

Our neat and trim upper deck apartment had suited me and my Kansan sensibilities for a time, but after a year my perspectives had been going through the twists and permutations that were affecting so many of us at the time - this suburban living was becoming way too tidy for me; I was ready for the country.

So on the following Sunday I took a drive up the coastline to meet her, and to see the house. I kept a sharp lookout for the obscure turnoff from the Pacific Coast Highway - “nothing more than a dirt driveway,” he'd cautioned me, “You'll miss it if you're going more than five miles an hour” I found it marked with a hand painted sign – 'So. Topanga Lane,' adorned with hearts and flowers. I turned off the wide pavement of Route 1 and bumped along a rutted corridor which descended to a subtropical enclave lying hidden to the world. It was enchantment from the first moments, situated as it was at the mouth of the canyon, where its creek broadens and spills its waters into the Malibu sea. Busy noise of the highway having faded away, my open windows welcomed gentle gusts of perfumed and salty air, small birds chirped wistful greetings. The pathway made a gentle turn and widened – a row of gaudily painted mailboxes heralded the nature of the inhabitants of this lazy gulch, now revealed to my wide eyes - a country cul-de-sac where life had slowed to the pace of the hands on a clock and dead-ended a couple of hundred feet down the way into the quietly flowing Topanga creek. Fruit bearing trees, vines bursting with blossom, thickets of broad-leafed undergrowth, tall stands of swaying bamboo fluttering their slender fingers as hovering hummingbirds honed in on nectar-bearing blooms. Buried in and amongst this tropical flora was an eclectic array of gloriously cobbled together dwellings wreathed in morning glories with painted shutters and planter boxes, like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. Reclining like jungle cats on an old overstuffed sofa sitting by the road, a couple of maned and shirtless men and a nubile young woman watched as I drove slowly past. I'd seen lots of 'hippies' – so dubbed by the reporting media, seemingly an entirely new breed of human beings – in Hollywood, walking around on the Sunset Strip. They seemed a bit undernourished and desperate, avoiding eye contact or else shooting glares of accusation at you for not being one of them. Here was a quite different subset: muscled, curvaceous, tanned and with a steady gaze through narrow eyes which gave them an air of 'knowing', like lions on an African plain - tentatively they waved. I waved back, but it sent my heart pounding. If these were to be my new neighbors, would I fit in here? Already I wanted this very badly and I knew that I must have it. But first I had to meet the wife.

I spotted the house number, turned off the engine and breathed in the pungently scented air, silently thrilled by what I saw. Letting the image of the little cottage sink in - elevated slightly from the road and nestled into the hillside, retaining walls and stone walkways defined its three levels of yard, patio and the cute little cabin perched above. It was old and weather-beaten but no shack. It proved even more charming than the place that hovered in my daydreams, but it made me all the more anxious; it wasn't yet mine.

I made my first footprint into the finely ground delta silt, and in a few steps was treading lightly up the side stairs to the trellised porch. I ventured through the shaded archway between the house to the back retaining wall - where I met Ray's wife, Fabiola.

I found her on her knees painting fake pastel cobblestones on the cement path around the rear of the main house. Startled at my sudden appearance, “Oh!” - she exclaimed as she got to her feet, tucked a fallen strand of long bleached hair back into her cascading topknot, and greeted me warmly; at the same moment Ray appeared from around the back wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, and took his place by her side. Before me stood a seasoned yet elegant caricature of Zsa Zsa Gabor and her stout little man, Mr. Magoo. This is exactly the image that appeared in my mind, and I had to stifle a laugh.

We went inside where Ray took his sun seat by the sectioned picture window that framed perfectly the green mountain that rose up from the other side of the creek; with a white sliver of the Moonfire Temple – built a by a local mad artist and architect - peeking out from behind the top of the ridge. It was such a cute little living room, with a table-top counter with bar stools separating it from the kitchen. It was old with lots of nooks, and a screen door that slammed – a silly little feature of my dream-house that I would conjure to pass the time while working on the assembly line at the factory. The little back bedroom off the kitchen had a dutch door that led to a small patio. I knew this house was mine, if only, if only. We had a beer and some talk about this and that, nothing about the house, but I was squirming. After awhile, Ray turned to Fabiola, “Fabby, whad'ya think?”

She squinted, sizing me up, toying with me, “Yeah, I think he’ll do.”

“Give 'im the keys.”

All the blood poured back into my veins. They handed it over to me as easy as that – no contract, security deposit or last month’s rent. I felt like I was now a true resident of California.

They moved up the coast to the beach, and I moved into the little dream house that would remain in my dreams for the rest of my life.

In time Raymond and Fabiola Parker would become more to me as surrogate grandparents than as landlords.

Moving day unfolded memorably with so many things coming to me all at once. I could take it at a leisurely pace; I’d already hauled all my stuff to my new garage a couple of days before. I’d been staying at my friend Annie’s; she fixed us a nice breakfast, I then took my last ride in the old Chev to trade it in for an Austin-Healy 3000, silver with wire spoke wheels and a red leather interior - I’d been working on this deal for two weeks. And now that I was out of that apartment I could have a dog; my next stop was at the pound to pick up Claude, the skinny mixed breed pooch I’d chosen the day before. With Claude riding proudly next to me, freshly sprung from jail and ecstatically hanging his head over the side of my new little convertible, his ears blown back; I talked to him and patted him all the way, and by the end of that five-mile drive, we'd bonded. Sailing up that beautiful stretch of coastline from Santa Monica to Topanga, I wished Annie had skipped work that day to be with me.

The only blemish of the day was knowing that there would be another person moving in as well – I was going to have a new roommate. Jim was not a guy I would have chosen to share the house; he was a friend of Brad's, who'd invited him. I’d met him a couple of times and consented, but a week before we moved in, Brad suddenly informed me that he was going back to Kansas - permanently - and vanished the next day! This meant that it would be just the two of us – near complete strangers, without the buffer of our mutual friend. Jim wasn't a bad guy, but I didn't feel much camaraderie with him; he was stuck in the model of the all-American beer-drinking frat boy. I was moving away from that – alcohol had lost its interest to me in favor of the introspective quality of cannabis - I had already become a hippie wannabe. I still had an all too clean-cut look, but only because of my awkward affiliation with the United States Marine Corp Reserves, who's once-a-month meetings demanded that my hair be clipped very short. I hated that more than anything, as I couldn't portray to be the person I felt to be at heart – plus the fact that girls almost automatically went for guys with long hair. The straggly Claude-dog was about the only thing that didn’t fit our projected image of a couple of not-so-undercover narcotics agents.
That’s why early visits from the neighbors were tinged with suspicion and in the nature of reconnaissance missions – we were being politely but warily sized up - and no one offered us a joint. I drove a sleek sports car parked in front of the most solidly built house in the lane - I wore knit shirts and desert boots, wheat jeans and polo jackets with close-cropped hair sheared closely up the back and sides with a little Kennedy tuft up front. Moving into this neighborhood sporting this appearance - well, no one thought that I wasn’t a narc. And Jim was even more button-down than I – he maintained a class-president look with JC Penney shirts tucked into tan slacks with brown leather shoes, and drove a family-type car. So here we were - two guys living together, probably gay, and to all appearances were FBI agents, planted to observe - we had "you’d better keep yourselves in line, and your marijuana well hidden! - written all over us.

“Oh yes, that’s what we thought.” Eva laughed as she passed me a fresh joint. It had only taken Jim a couple of months to bow out and return to his element in the suburbs; we both breathed sighs of relief as we bade an affable farewell; and I could now fully occupy my home without having to compromise. By that time I'd gotten rid of my 'straight' image, I was funky now in patched bell-bottom jeans, cowboy boots and a tan leather vest over a black t-shirt. Eva was one of the neighbors over for tea one afternoon, and was filling me in on the impressions we’d made on her and the rest of the neighbors on the day we drove up. “Everybody thought you were FBI. I still wonder about Jim!” I laughed at that, but assured her that was not the case. “He was never a narc, just a nerd.”
They knew by now that the reason for my short hair was that, one weekend a month I had to report for duty as a Marine Corps Reservist – something I’d gotten myself into some years before. I also explained that being in the service was actually keeping me away from Viet Nam, and that if my unit were to be called up to go to war, I would disappear into Mexico rather than to participate in that illegal war. If there were any shreds of doubt left over, I was completely absolved when my high-school buddy Larry turned up at my front door with hair down to his shoulders and beads draped around his neck. He'd been a lieutenant in the army but had given up his commission to join the new movement. He quickly endeared himself to my neighbors, thus by association validating me as genuine. I became a solid and respected member of the community.

One bright morning a cheery girl with a grin spread across her face appeared at my doorstep. Looking for a place to live, she’d heard of the little cabin up behind the house. I invited her in and while talking with her, assessed her on behalf of the landlords - Ray and Fabby regarded me as a kind of on-site property manager, and trusted me to make the decisions as to whom should rent the place. I was also covertly assessing her on behalf of myself.
“What do you do? Do you have a job?”
“Yes”, she beamed. “I’m a nude dancer on Sunset Strip.”

Tina had excellent qualifications and moved right in.
With Tina came change. Until she arrived my place had been a bachelor pad – a kind of psychedelic fraternity house. Tina brought friends - one by one another girl would show up hoping to get out of the city, hoping there would be room for one more. Julie took the front bedroom, Chloe and Martha moved into the cabin – it was already vacant, as Tina had moved in with me. All of them were dancers on the Strip, which kept them quite affluent meaning the bills got paid. The nature of the household was altered significantly, it became - a kind of psychedelic sorority house. The fridge was stuffed to overflowing and there was always something simmering on the stove. No one had a consuming drug problem and alcohol was non-existent. Gradually the living room became beautiful: I’d found an overstuffed couch and chair at a second-hand store, somebody's old front door with a weather beaten patina and beveled glass panel was our coffee table - I’d found that in the creek. A thirties’ vintage mahogany floor model RCA radio, a red Persian rug, our pick of music from rows of record albums neatly arranged on my component stereo shelves – the TV sat unwatched in a dark corner of the front bedroom, no reception, no interest - in fact I would never see another tv show for the next fifteen years. The girls kept flower vases full and plants tended and the place neat. I never locked my door, and nothing was ever stolen. Utopia.

The girls brought the real freaks out of the woodwork and through my front door.

There was a lunacy in the air – everyone was trying on personas. The girls loved to dress up in velvets and lace with flower braided hair, or in Victorian outfits, or their standby favorite, nothing at all. The men had a thing for the old wild west, sporting wide-brimmed hats and denim jackets mixed with flowered shirts and brightly embroidered jeans. Renaissance period costumes were also popular. Everybody wanted to be a poet or prophet, a minstrel and bard; through my doors wandered astrologers, clairvoyants, druids, forecasters, fortunetellers, mediums, palmists, predictors, prognosticators, prophesiers, seers, soothsayers, sorcerers, tea-leaf readers, witches, warlocks and wizards. Many a late night was spent sitting in a circle on my living room rug, passing joints, listening to music and philosophizing. Most were dilettantes; some were actually, quite astonishingly gifted. One such genius appeared one day who was to profoundly alter the course of my life.

The call of the wild
When Gypsy Jerry walked into my life - introduced by Tina - he brought the whole world with him. He’d just returned from a six-year expedition to every remote corner he could find in the Asian world. He might have looked a bit incongruous in his Moroccan robes and curly tipped shoes, being a stocky Texan, but with him it fit. He had the face of a nomad from the Sahara or Gobi Desert – eyes like laser blue slits in a weather toughened face framed with rumpled blond hair and a thin wispy beard; he looked more Tibetan than Texan. His smile was genuine, warm but full of mischief and a very definite satyr-like quality – his laughter was frequent, real, infectious - always because something was truly funny, and if it was it was often because he'd said it himself. When he walked into the room everything would instantly change.

I met him this way: After dinner one evening Tina said she had someone she wanted me to meet and walked me across the lane to John and Eva’s. I caught my first glimpse of him - he was squatting on a low bench, working on something in his lap. The moment we were introduced he started talking to me and showed me what he was doing - fashioning a small cabinet. It was nearly finished and I stared at it in wonder; it already looked like an antique from centuries past, but he told me, “It won't be finished until I dig it up – I'll bury it for a month or so”... Studded with brass nails around all the edges, it had little drawers with pulls made from hammered brass rings. The insides of the drawers were tightly lined with crimson velvet and the whole box was stained a deep dark brown. “I got the wood from a crate – before I got ahold of it you could actually use it for something – now I don’t know what I’ll do with it!” he joked. “But I know where I’m fixin' to put it, wanna see?” He led Tina and I back out to the lane and into a gray step-van; he lit two lanterns which were fastened to knurled bed posts and illumined a wondrous cavern – it was Ali Baba’s tent come to life. The sumptuous bed-chamber floated two feet above the Moroccan-carpeted floor and lined with mirrored tapestries, which surrounded anyone in the bed with little sparkles of light. “This’ll go here,” as he slid the jeweled cabinet into a special mounting he’d built for it, beside the bed. Draped crimson velvet theater curtains, held open by beaded camel halter-straps at the sides, would provide privacy in bed. The walls and ceiling were upholstered with printed and hand-woven fabrics, professionally tucked and finished off with silk piping, everything fashioned by his hand. An old wooden wine cask fed water into a little basin in the corner. He turned to us and his face mirrored the delight we felt at his creation. I'd never met a craftsman of this caliber in the flesh. “Show him your sitar, Jerry,” Tina said as we were starting to leave.

“Yeah?” Jerry said, pausing to decide whether or not he would. “When I start playing that thing I don't come back for a while...”

“Can you just show it to him?”

Conceding, he climbed across the bed to a shelf piled with mirrored and embroidered tapestries. From under this plush protective cover he pulled an enormous musical instrument, I'd never seen anything like it and had only heard of sitars because of the the Beatles, but had never seen a picture. It had two pumpkin sized gourds at either end for acoustic amplification and a flat board with curved metal frets positioned to arc over the string board. There are perhaps two dozen strings, stretched over and under the floating frets. The ones underneath resonate with the melody strings on top, Jerry explained. He strummed it a few times and played through a scale that produced a melody in itself. It was instantly trance-inducing, but Jerry put it down abruptly saying simply, “I'll play when we're all settled down some night.”
It was a promise of more to come and indeed it was the beginning of a life-long friendship - Jerry and I became instant confidants. My house became his - we’d talk at length about anything and everything; he possessed a naturally benevolent wisdom and a killer sense of humor. Sometimes we’d just sit on a park bench and laugh at the passing comedy of life, recognizing the same oddities in people, advertizing slogans, animals, anything could be funny. Once at Venice beach we both happened to see a seagull drop dead from a still, standing position – simply keeled over. Both of us happened to be absent-mindedly focused on the same bird – it was like a bit of performance art just for us – no one else on the crowded beach noticed. I tried once to get him to take some LSD with me; he declined – as he absolutely abstained from any and all drugs, tobacco or alcohol - but he stayed up with me all night under the moon while I tripped, and led me on a profound and hilarious odyssey. “After you’ve crossed the Sahara on a camel, you won’t need any drugs,” he once told me. Larger than life, he became my window to the world in a way I’d never known; he’d seen it and done it at ground level, had developed many already natural skills of music, mold-making and story-telling and no woman would resist him - he was a real magician and he cast brilliant spells that went into my bones. Seeds were being deeply planted and I began to ruminate over the possibilities of making a similar journey. I drank in and absorbed his tales, acquiring the lust for the open road that would eventually lead me to the far-off lands told of in these pages to come.

Tina shared her love between the two of us, not seeing the necessity of dropping me for him. We were a happy threesome and would make all-night forays in his gypsy van to Sunset Strip to pick her up after she finished her torrid dancing on the stage. We'd sit in the front row and watch guys drool over her and laugh – we had her any night. She’d come out with wads of cash; we'd have big meals at Barney’s then park at the top of Mulholland Drive, or climb on the Hollywood sign, or drive down to Norm’s in Santa Monica then go skinny-dipping at Venice Beach, getting back to the lane at sunrise. Jerry had several circles of friends between LA and San Diego; he’d turn up and disappear with little or no notice, but when he arrived everything would spring to life; he was the master of having fun.

So I had it all going on; in a short time - through no planning of my own - I had all the action, all the Ethos, Pathos and Eros that makes for great drama. In two years I rarely went out for entertainment because it all turned up right there under my own roof. This was the alchemical cocoon in which I was transformed from one way of seeing - of being - into another. These were potent times and the people involved were playing for keeps; pushing hard to leave the gravitational pull of the American middle class, imagining we’d go all the way to the point of no return, whatever that may have meant to us at the time.

On the periphery was another guy who, like myself, had a commune of sorts – in his converted school bus. His name was Charlie; we called him “Bus Charlie.” He’d pull into the lane every now and then with several women on board, not necessarily the same ones each time. I remember the first time I met him, he was sitting on the doorstep of his bus playing a guitar. I brought my out guitar - and sat down on the ground and began to play along with him. It’s what lots of us did all the time in those days. He was singing songs he said he wrote, I’d add little fill-in lead notes and runs. He was a strong singer and player, hitting it in full voice, with nothing of the timid folk singer about him. His songs were kind of a rant against society with lyrics like:

“In their cardboard houses…

And their tin-can cars…

Do they know that they’re losers?

Do they know who they are...?”

He stopped and looked at me. “You need a better guitar, man, you’d play better, too,” he told me, “Like this one,” indicating his own. It didn’t look very impressive to me; no inlays or fancy scrollwork. But I liked the idea of a better guitar; I’d inherited this one from Bradford, had learned what I knew on it and had gotten good enough to upgrade.
“How much can I get a good one for?” This one was worth about $25, so I figured for $100 I could get something at least as good as Charlie’s.
“Don’t spend anything less than 600 bucks!” I was stunned. I didn’t know anything about guitars, and asked him what his cost. “More than 600 bucks,” he said evasively with a sly grin.
“Why would it be so much?” I half-retorted, implying that I couldn’t believe that something so plain could be so costly.
“Listen to it. It’s about the sound, not about all that fancy shit. Play it.” He handed it to me, I strummed it and was struck at the way it resonated and the way the notes just leaped off its steel strings. “If you’re gonna play a guitar, learn about guitars.” He held the top of the neck up to my eyes. “Remember that name,” - ‘C Martin & Co.’ was humbly scripted across the tuning board. “See ya later.” He said, and disappeared into the big black bus.
“Who is that guy?” Tina asked me, rolling out some bread dough. She always had dough rising under a tea towel on the counter, or already in the oven. “I’ve seen his bus down here a couple of times,” she mused. I’d like to see inside.
“Yeah, just some guy, I don’t know. His name’s Charlie. He’s got this ordinary looking guitar that he said cost six hundred bucks. I didn’t believe it, but it sounded great. He writes songs.”
A while later Charlie appeared at the door. He sat down in the big chair and pulled my guitar to his lap - beat out a tune he said he’d just written. “Hey, come on down to the bus later on,” he said. “Have some tea. You come too.” He said, motioning toward Tina as he went out the door.
“Just ask, you shall receive,” I said to Tina.

We peered in at around sundown, and there were a few people sitting around a low table which ran the length of the front half of the bus, lavishly covered with a thick white ‘ermine’ tablecloth. There were some girls we hadn’t met and some friends from the lane, Eva and John, and Dennis from across the way - Eva - sun burnished and genial; buxom earth mother flower child with thick strawberry blond hair - John, her mate - heavily black bearded, shy - always with a big smile, seldom with something to say. Dennis was a fresh-faced cheery guy with a young family and a huge shock of hair. I felt comfortable around them but the other girls presented a rather reserved reception to us as we picked our way to a spot at the middle of the table. One of the girls handed over a joint as we settled into the overripe environs; the hanging tapestries and velvets seemed to evoke more of a medieval castle than Jerry's Arabian tent . Candles provided the light; incense smoke curled hypnotically, casting a purple haze through the air. Feeling a bit ill at ease we awkwardly bobbled our heads, taking in the decor and saying ‘nice, nice.’ The sight of Charlie emerging from the green door to the mysterious room that occupied the back half of the thirty-five foot bus - his inner sanctum - was a welcoming possibility of an icebreaker. He energized the terse atmosphere - “Glad you made it, man,” he said, squatting in the corner. “These people making you feel at home?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, not quite a lie - they did offer us a joint.
“How do ya like my little pad?” he said, motioning around the room.
“Yeah, great. Did you make it?”
“We all made it. You made it.”

Lost at that, I nodded, “hm.”

“Nobody owns anything man, nobody owns nothin’. Do you want it? The keys are in it. You can drive it away right now.”
“No, no, man I don’t want it,” I laughed, strangely getting humor from this and happy to be able to laugh at something. Just then a girl appeared from behind the green door, wrapped only in a sheet, and sat down next to Charlie, nestling into his side. She looked disheveled, with a preoccupied, self-conscious sheepishness. Very stoned, she was. Charlie let the ownership issue of the bus go.
“What do you do?” he queried. “You got a big house. Fancy car.” He notices things, I thought.
“I run a milling machine at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft – work nights.”
“You like that?”
“It’s OK.”
“OK? Is ‘OK’ OK?”
Tina came to my rescue, laying a hand on my arm, “He works hard to provide us with a nice place to live.”
He seemed to study me for a moment.

“That’s good, man, that’s good,” letting up the pressure. He looked down and stroked his lady’s hair, ran the tips of his fingers down her arm very gently. “You all right?” he said to her quietly, intimately.
“Yeah, alright.” She said barely audibly.
I was used to odd conversations, many people at that time were floating in dreams, questioning and challenging everything. Radical ideas were in the air like dandelion seeds, and I was as good as the next guy at sprouting weeds of wisdom, but I was not about to offer the keys to my Healy to anyone.

“Hey Charlie, we got something cookin’ on the stove,” I lied, “see you later, nice place, man.”
“Yeah really nice,” Tina added cheerily over her shoulder, glad for the out. We clambered over laps toward the door.
"Alright,” he said with a grin that lacked a smile.

“See you later,” I ineptly repeated before stepping outside.

Charlie dismissed us with a backward nod.
Breathing in the air of the clear night, the sea breeze felt like indigo velvet.

“Wow, what a trip he’s got going,” Tina pondered. “What do you suppose goes on behind that door?” She laughed, both of us easily guessing the answer to that one - the patiently waiting Claude-dog was exuberant as we turned back into the tropical undergrowth and headed toward the creek, which ran under the highway bridge and out to sea.
“Whenever I've seen him he’s always got women with him, they look so stoned. They don’t say anything at all.” Tina said as we entered the musky gloom of the overpass.

We drug our bare feet through the silky sand of the creek bed and waded through the stream to the spaciousness of the open beach. The new crescent was hovering above the northern point of the distant Malibu coastline as it curled toward the horizon. We felt caressed by freedom and good fortune as we reflected on the direction our young lives were taking. We were very high from Charlie’s pot.
“Did you notice he was just talking to me? He didn’t say anything to John or Eva, or you or Dennis.”

Tina said simply, “He’s checking you out. He thinks you are on a power trip with women, like he is.”
That startled me. “He's checking me out? You think he thinks I'm on a power trip?”
“Yeah, look - there’s women all over the place at your house – and it is your house. Why wouldn’t he think that?”

This idea had never occurred to me, and the thought that it might look that way knocked me out. “Yeah, you know what he told me the other day,” I said, “we were talking out in my driveway and he motioned toward my house, and the car. ‘You don’t need any of this. Why don’t you come with us? Nobody needs any possessions man, just give it all up.’ Just like that thing he was saying tonight, about giving me the bus - weird shit.”
Tina shifted the subject. “What do you think is really going on?”
“With Charlie?” I asked. “No, with everything,” she said. Everything’s changing, things are getting so strange…

We talked often about the strange days of our times - how great the new music was and the mass communication it was bringing; music was more than just music in those days. We talked about the changes of consciousness marijuana and LSD were bringing about, verses the consciousness of alcohol – about how dedicated we were to ending, not just this war but the idea of war itself - about how the whole ‘straight’ society supports war tacitly or outright – about the absurdity of war being accepted and sex being taboo... it was an ongoing commentary with all of us.
“A year ago, I was thinking about getting married to this guy - that would have been such a mistake, he was a lawyer. Can you imagine me married to a lawyer?” She laughed out loud. She went skipping down to the water's edge and twirled about with her arms held out like wings. Claude made mad circles at her heels, kicking up phosphorescent splashes. “We’re freeeeee of all that bullshit that we grew up with! Isn’t it great!” She grabbed me and hugged me and jumped up and down. I was happy, too, but not so unrestrained. I was still ensnared in the system, with job and Marine Corps; not so 'free of the bullshit' as all my new friends seemed to be, and was a bit self conscious about it. I was inwardly happy, loving this place and my place in it; but not exuberant. I was the cogitating philosopher, working things out in the mental realm. I was the silent observer, somewhat intimidated by the wildly creative and virile personalities all around me that romped through life without holding anything back. I was not yet at the point of being able to throw it all away as they had; to speak in present tenses with no thought of the morrow. I wished at that moment to grab her and go screaming down the beach in glee, but it wasn’t to be, I wasn’t there yet. Maybe I should say I wasn’t here yet. One must construct a 'model' for being free if one is not simply free. I fancied myself as the oarsman, keeping steady the course, and now, ‘the provider,’ as Tina had bestowed upon me moments before, back in Charlie's bus. I liked that.
“Tina, don’t you ever worry about the future?”
“No.” She said flatly and without any follow-up rationale. I envied and resented her certainty.
“OK. If it’s true that the world is going to crash down and none of our endeavors will mean anything anymore, then no problem, we’re all in the same boat. But what if that doesn’t happen? What then?” I was wrestling with conventional fears of failure, disenfranchisement - a dead-end life. I was in-between. I had no direction - nothing in mainstream America had captured my desire to dedicate all to, but I had not been sufficiently captured by our ‘counter culture’ either. I rambled on in terms that divorced me from the moment, and made me fearful, helped along I'm sure by Charlie's strong marijuana. Tina wasn’t disagreeing with me, she just wanted to drag her bare feet through the brine, to shake me loose from my brooding, breathe the air, look at the stars and shout for joy. Failing to get the proper responses from me, she grabbed me again, this time pulling me down to the sand, and under her skirts.
One day many months later Eva walked solemnly into my living room; she spotted me sitting at my bar having some lunch. Without a word she laid the latest issue of Life magazine down next to my plate. On the cover was a picture of our friend, Bus Charlie. Now at last he had a proper surname: Manson.

************

That any of us escaped unharmed from this band of ghouls who walked amongst us poses questions that can never be answered. Their victims were often those whom they’d known and had been perceived of crossing them in some way. There were a lot of people connected to my house, and Charlie most certainly had his eye on some of the women. Any one of us could have rubbed him the wrong way. Many of his known victims were acquaintances who had done just that - Linda Kasabian stayed for two weeks in my house, and she was the one who testified against them, and possibly during that very time! I have no theory of why we didn't come into their sites. He had a ‘strange vibe,’ as we put it, and we stayed aloof, but without directly shunning or insulting any of them. Of course none of us had any inkling of who these people really were – heartless and manic killers. I guess neutrality was our protection, but then - there are the other victims who’d never even heard of him…

But this chapter was not intended to revolve around them and the horror they reeked!

My years in Topanga Canyon Lane inspired me to a life undreamed of, from Gypsy Jerry and all the friends and crazy loons who passed through my doors. Ray and Fabby sold the house, I was released from the Marine Corps, quit my job, gave everything away, got a VW bus, drove it north, spent some time helping to build a big house in a commune in Oregon - later lived with a lovely girl named Karen back down in LA. During these times of intensive learning and experience gathering, I'd gradually become free and fearless enough… to get on with the journey…