Kingdom of Fear (13 page)

This was the lesson of Chicago—or at least that’s what I learned from Chicago, and two years later, running for the office of sheriff, that lesson seemed every bit as clear as it did to me when I got rammed in the stomach with a riot club in Grant Park for showing a cop my press pass. What I learned, in Chicago, was that the police arm of the United States government was capable of hiring vengeful thugs to break the very rules we all thought we were operating under. On Thursday night in the Amphitheatre it was not enough for me to have a press pass from the Democratic National Committee; I was kicked out of my press seat by hired rent-a-cops, and when I protested to the Secret Service men at the door, I was smacked against the wall and searched for weapons. And I realized at that point that, even though I was absolutely right, if I persisted with my righteous complaint, I would probably wind up in jail.

There was no point in appealing to any higher authority, because they were the people who were paying those swine to fuck me around. It was LBJ’s party and I was an unwelcome guest, barely tolerated . . . and if I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, I would get the same treatment as those poor bastards out on Michigan Avenue, or Wells Street, or Lincoln Park . . . who were gassed and beaten by an army of cops run amok with carte blanche from the Daley-Johnson combine—while
Hubert Humphrey cried from tear gas fumes in his twenty-fifth-floor suite at the Hilton.

A lot of people felt that way after Chicago. And in my case it was more a sense of shock at the sudden understanding that I was on the ground. I went there as a journalist; my candidate had been murdered in Los Angeles two months earlier—but I left Chicago in a state of hysterical angst, convinced by what I’d seen that we were all in very bad trouble . . . and in fact that the whole country was doomed unless somebody, somewhere, could mount a new kind of power to challenge the rotten, high-powered machinery of men like Daley and Johnson. Sitting in a westbound TWA jet on the ramp at O’Hare, waiting for a takeoff slot, it occurred to me that I was suddenly right in the middle of the story I’d been sent out to look for. What had begun as a dilettante’s dream was now a very real subject.

That was the way it began. And for the first few weeks of October, the 1970 sheriff’s campaign was a colorful, high-powered replay of the previous year’s “Joe Edwards for Mayor” uprising, which lost by only six votes. But the secret of our success, that year, was the failure of the local power structure to take us seriously . . . and by the time they understood what was happening to them, they almost croaked. Only a last-minute fraud with the absentee ballots—and our inability to raise $2,000 to challenge that fraud in court—prevented a 29-year-old bike-racing freak from becoming mayor of Aspen. And in the wake of Edwards’s loss, we created a completely new kind of power base, the first of its kind anywhere in American politics. It was a strange combination of “Woodstock” vibrations, “New Left” activism, and basic “Jeffersonian Democracy” with strong echoes of the Boston Tea Party ethic. What emerged from the Joe Edwards campaign was a very real blueprint for stomping the Agnew mentality by its own rules—with the vote, instead of the bomb; by seizing their power machinery and using it, instead of merely destroying it.

The national press dug it all—mainly on the basis of a
Rolling Stone
article I wrote about the 1969 election (
Rolling Stone
#67, October 1, 1970) which laid it all out, step by step. My idea, when I wrote it, was to line out the “freak power” concept for massive distribution—with the blueprint and all the details—in the hope that it might be a key to weird political action in other places.

(Michael Montfort)

. . .

So it was hard to know, on that jangled Wednesday night before the sheriff’s election, just what the fuck was happening . . . or even what might happen. The local power structure appeared to have gone completely crazy.

There was not much doubt that we had Owl Farm completely fortified. And our rotating “outside triangle of fire” was only the beginning. Behind that, waiting to take their turns outside in the moonless, bitter-cold night, was a whole house of wired-up freaks—all armed to the teeth. The only light visible from the road was the outside flood, but inside—behind shrouded windows in the big wooden kitchen and downstairs in the soundproof, windowless “war room”—a rude mix of people drifted back and forth on the nervous tides of this night: eating, drinking, plotting, rehashing the incredible chain of events that had plunged us into this scene . . . all of us armed, nobody ready to sleep, and none of us really believing that what we were doing was sane. It was all too weird, too unlikely, too much like some acid-bent scriptwriter’s dream on a bad night in the Château Marmont . . . some madman’s botch of a Final Politics movie.

But it was all insanely real. And we knew that, too. Nobody in the house was stoned or twisted that night. Nobody was drunk. And when it had first become clear, a few hours earlier, that we were headed for a very wild and menacing kind of night, we ran a very discreet sort of staff shakedown and carefully selected the half dozen or so people who seemed capable of dealing with the kind of madness the Colorado Bureau of Investigation had told us we were likely to deal with before dawn.

Clearly we were all doomed. Half the population would never live to vote, and the other half would perish in the inevitable election-night holocaust. When NBC-TV showed up about midway in the campaign, I advised them to stick around. “There’ll be a bloodbath if I win,” I said, “and a bloodbath if I lose. The carnage will be unbelievable either way; you’ll get wonderful footage. . . .”

That was back when we could still laugh about the hideous Freak Power challenge. But now the laughter was finished. The humor went out of the campaign when the Aspen establishment suddenly understood that I looked like a winner. Pitkin County, Colorado, was about
to elect the nation’s first Mescaline sheriff . . . a foul-mouthed bald-headed freak who refused to compromise on anything at all, even his taste for wild drugs, and who didn’t mind saying in public that he intended to hamstring, flay, and cripple every greedy plot the Aspen power structure held dear . . . all their foul hopes and greedy fascist dreams.

. . .

Sometime around midmorning on Election Day the
Life
correspondent rushed into our Hotel Jerome headquarters suite with a big grin on his face and announced that we were sure winners. “I’ve been out on the streets,” he said, “taking my own poll. I must have talked to two hundred people out there—all different types—and all but about two dozen of them said they were going to vote for you.” He shook his head, still grinning. “It’s incredible, absolutely incredible, but I think it’s going to be a landslide.” Then he opened a beer and began helping his photographer, who was busy wiring strobe lights to the ceiling, so they could shoot the victory celebration in color.

It was going to be a hell of a story—and especially for
Life
because they had an angle that nobody else could touch. They’d only been in town about 24 hours, but when they arrived at our headquarters on Monday morning they were confronted with a really mind-bending scene. Here was the candidate, the next sheriff of Aspen and indeed all of Pitkin County, Colorado, raving crazily about Armageddon and pounding on a desk with a big leather sap. We had been up all night dealing with a violent personal crisis that would have blown the whole campaign out of the water if we hadn’t contained it, and by ten o’clock on Monday we were half hysterical with fatigue, drink, and a general sense of relief that there was nothing else to be done. At least by me: Pierre Landry had the poll-watching teams organized, Bill Noonan was still getting our sample ballots printed, Solheim had a full schedule of radio ads laid out for Monday and Tuesday, and Ed Bastian was putting together a vast telephone network to get the vote out.

That Monday was the first day in a month that I felt able to relax and let my head run—which is precisely what I was doing when the
Life
team walked in and found me laughing about Freak Power and what a fantastic shuck we had run on the liberals. “We’ll put those
fuckers on trial, starting Wednesday!” I shouted. “Paul, do you have the list? Maybe we should start reading it on the radio today.” Paul Davidson grinned. “Yeah, we’ll start rounding the bastards up tomorrow night. But we need money for Mace; do you have any?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We have plenty of money—and plenty of mescaline to sell if we need more. Get the Mace—get several gallons, and some double-ought buckshot.”

. . .

Within two hours after the polls closed, the Battle of Aspen was over . . . at least that’s how it looked at the time, from the eye of the shit rain. Freak Power bombed early that night, and we didn’t need an RCA 1060 to project the final result—even after the early returns showed us winning. But not by enough. The early returns came from our hard-core freak strongholds in the middle and east end of town. We won handily in precincts One, Two, and Three, but our voter turnout was too light and the margin it gave us was not nearly enough to overcome the landslide that we knew was about to come down on us from suburban Agnewville and the down-county trailer courts. The backlash vote was kicking in, and the doom message was obvious in the eyes of our poll watchers about halfway through the day. They refused to confirm it, but I think we all knew. . . .

So somewhere around dusk we began loading up on mescaline, tequila, hash, beer, and whatever else we could get our hands on . . . and after that, it was only a matter of fucking with the national press and waiting for the axe to fall. Our elegant Hotel Jerome headquarters was a total madhouse. Everybody in the place seemed to have a long black microphone the size of a baseball bat, and all those without microphones had cameras—Nikons, Nagras, Eclairs, Kodaks, Polaroids, there was even a finely equipped videotape team from the California Institute of Arts.

The floor was a maze of cables, there were strobe lights taped to the ceiling. . . . The photographer from
Life
was muscled out of the way by two CBS thugs from Los Angeles; the chief cameraman on
Woodstock
got ugly with the director of the British TV crew . . . there was constant, savage jostling for camera positions around the phone desk and the fatal blackboard where Alison and Vicky Colvard were putting the
numbers together. Bill Kennedy, a writer from
Harper’s,
was maintaining his position in front of the telephone desk with a nasty display of elbow tactics summoned up, on instinct, from memories of covering the riot squad in Albany and San Juan.

Writers from
Life, LOOK, Scanlan’s, Ski, The Village Voice, Fusion, Rat
—even a Dutch correspondent from
Suck
—moved constantly through the crowd, hassling everybody. The phones jangled with longdistance calls from AP, UPI, the TV networks, and dozens of curious strangers calling from Virginia, Michigan, and Oregon demanding to know the results. One of the best quick descriptions of the chaos came later from Steve Levine, a young columnist for
The Denver Post
who had spent half the day as one of our poll watchers:

“It was madness and sadness and drinking and dope and tears and anger and harsh plaster smiles,” he wrote. “Parlor B in the old Jerome was jammed from wall to fading, flowered wall with partisan struggles, both full freak and moderate freak, and the press from London and L.A., and well-wishers, and many people were rip-smashed and optimistic, but some knew better. . . .”

Indeed . . . and the solemn, smoke-filled hideaway for those who really knew better was room Number One, about two hundred feet down the crowded hallway from the vortex-madness in Parlor B. It was Oscar Acosta’s room. He had been there for two weeks, dealing with one crisis after another and rarely sleeping in his complex, triple-pronged role of old friend, bodyguard, and emergency legal advisor to what
The New York Times
called “The most bizarre (political) campaign on the American scene today.” But the
Timesman
didn’t know the half of it; he had come to town early in October, long before the campaign turned so crazy and vicious that
The New York Times
couldn’t possibly have told the real story.

By the time Acosta arrived the Aspen political scene looked like some drug-addled Mafia-parody of a gang war scene from
The Godfather.
And a week before the election we actually went to the mattresses. Oscar, a prominent Chicano civil rights lawyer from Los Angeles, stopped in Aspen after a Denver visit with his client Corky Gonzales—the Chicanos’ answer to Huey Newton or maybe H. Rap Brown in the old days. In mid-November Corky was scheduled to go on trial in L.A. on dubious charges of “carrying a deadly weapon” during
the East Los Angeles riot the previous August, which resulted in the murder of Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy. Oscar would be the defense attorney in that trial, but in mid-October he found himself in Colorado with not much else to do, so he decided to stop by his old home in Aspen to see what the Honky/Gabachos were up to . . . and the nightmare scene that he found here seemed to convince him that white middle-class Amerika was truly beyond redemption.