The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (29 page)

I heartily agreed. Though I returned to Paonia many times that year, and many times since, I would never again be its prisoner.

I want to pause the narrative there, in 1968, and take a moment to acknowledge how my feelings about Paonia have changed over the decades. I last visited my hometown in the fall of 2011 as a pilgrim doing research for this book. I wanted to reflect on family roots, on the ties that bind a life to a place and time. I flew into Aspen and poked around there for a day, looking for the old haunts where I’d lived in summers past, but everything had changed. Like buildings in the film
Dark City
, those in Aspen had morphed and re-morphed over the decades, some torn down, others thrown up, others renovated, many in that pseudo-Tyrolean style that tends to plague ski towns. While Aspen remains a theme park for the über-wealthy, a plastic cocoon of tasteful but corporatized shops and restaurants and galleries, the rest of Western Colorado is a different story. Like most everywhere else, circumstances have gotten harder there: foreclosures, unemployment, no health care, crumbling infrastructure, a sense of America collapsing into a sort of stunned Third-Worldism as the country realizes its day in the sun is over.

And yet, for all that, life was good on that warm and clear October afternoon, with the aspens in full color in the high country, the hills dripping with molten yellows and oranges, aflame with the dying foliage giving up its soul in a carotenoid riot. The sky was brilliant blue with wispy clouds aloft and a lot of lenticular cloud formations—a good sign! I drove out of Aspen and headed for Snowmass Village, still more a bubble than Aspen will ever be, a planned community from the start. I knew Cyrano’s, the restaurant, had been gone for decades, but I spent an hour wandering the mall, which was eerily empty in the offseason; I felt I’d stepped into an old computer game like Myst. I stopped where I was pretty sure the restaurant had been, but the surroundings were all different. As for the little lake a short walk from the lodge where I’d stayed in 1968, perhaps that had been an artificial reservoir. I’m not sure, but a later search for it via Google Earth after my trip led me to think it might be gone as well.

Returning to the highway, Colorado 133, I passed through Carbondale with its lovely, redone main drag, lots of cobblestone, little shops, street sculpture, and even a medical cannabis dispensary—a hopeful development. Why shouldn’t this simple and good medicine be available at your local apothecary, as it once was? There’s far too much handwringing about things like this that could be so simply solved. I took the back way into Redstone, inching through town, watching out for the kids, until I reached the Redstone Inn, as imposing and quaintly out-of-date as ever with its towers and dormers, wraparound balconies and gingerbread banisters. In the plaza formed by its U-shaped driveway was a chromed metal sculpture of a falconer, complete with falcon, seated on a chair. It was a cool sculpture, but I couldn’t decide if it fit there or not. Any change from the past as I remembered it introduced a kind of cognitive dissonance. I ate in the inn that evening, but I stayed at Chair Mountain Ranch, always a bittersweet experience. It’s hard to be at a place that figured in so many family memories without feeling eight years old again. And yet there, too, much had changed. The lodge’s outward appearance was much as I recalled it, but the old cabins were gone, replaced by a row of very nice two-bedroom cabins across from the new fishing pond—“new” meaning not there when I was a boy. The current proprietors are nice folks, but of course they can’t understand how, for me, the ranch is like a family heirloom that’s been sold off to someone with no connections to its past.

The next day I drove to Delta with my cousin Judy to visit my beloved Aunt Mayme on her ninety-seventh birthday. Medicaid paid for her to live in a nursing home in return for the lien on her house, this being the brutal way we provide for the extremely old; finally, you lose everything, they take it all. But it’s a good place, clean and bright, and she was well cared for by the attentive staff. Though she could no longer see or hear well, and was out of it most of the time, behind her rheumy eyes her lively spirit and sense of humor were still there, I felt, but just not getting out. I thought she had a flash of recognition at the sight of me, but that may have been wishful thinking. Still and all, it was a somewhat depressing and sobering encounter, her grim plight a reminder of what lies in store for many of us, that is, to live for years beyond the joy of being alive. I made a mental note to remember to secure myself that tincture of hemlock so it’s there when the time comes. I’d rather exit in style, under my own volition, or so I say now. We’ll see.

We stayed an hour, sharing a little ice cream until lunch arrived and then quietly slipped out. Though I knew I might not see her again, somehow my sense of loss was not as great as it had been in the past; so much of her was already gone. She died several months later.

The rest of the day was considerably more upbeat. Judy and I stopped by the new Paonia Public Library, a beautiful facility paid for by donations from the community, including the purchase of fifty-dollar bricks, which afforded me the treat of standing in the lobby and reviewing the names etched on them, each one evoking old memories, faces, teachers, families. My civically engaged cousin is on the library board and is the curator of the North Fork Historical Society Museum, which we visited next. The place was full of artifacts left by the people who settled and built Paonia, some of them pictured in ancient, faded photos; I couldn’t imagine what was masked by the dour expressions on those long-dead faces. There was too much to process; old cameras, musical instruments, bygone baby clothes and adult fashions; an entire high school classroom, complete with antique desks; an office, a child’s bedroom, an old-fashioned kitchen. I spotted a few familiar items, including my grandfather’s old Remington typewriter, an uncle’s letter sweater, and the doll furniture and a toy kitchen set that once belonged to Judy and her twin sister. I even recognized the embroidered sentiment that hung in Aunt Mayme’s kitchen for decades: “Old friendships are like flowers in memory’s scented garden.” The flowers are faded now, their scent reminiscent of the inside of my mother’s purse when I was a boy, a vague amalgam of cheap lavender cologne and makeup.

Then Judy brought out the real treasures, stored in an old filing cabinet: nearly pristine copies of the
Eyrie
, the Paonia High School yearbook for 1968 and ’69. Here were the photos of my former classmates, old friends and enemies, girls I’d pined for with their crazy upswept hairdos—innocent young women, now aging like me. A few of my former schoolmates had departed the world by then, including my friend Tom, who died in 2011. The faces in those portraits had yet to be etched with the lines of character, of adversity confronted and overcome, or not. I was a junior that year, looking serious, and not too much a doofus in my horn-rimmed glasses. What a shock it was to turn the page and see my long-lost, long-lusted-for Rosalie—my God, that girl was beautiful! It was strange how just the name of someone I hadn’t thought of in years could activate long-dormant neural traces, bringing back a person’s laugh or another’s goofiness. That all of these people had grown up and lived their lives in some universe worlds apart from my own was almost impossible to get my head around.

That evening I had dinner with an old friend from those days. A few years ago, he returned to the family fruit ranch to care for his aging father, who had since passed on. His father had sold off his arable land, and the former apple orchard had been bulldozed to make way for grapes—Paonia has quite a reputation these days for its local wines. Without good cropland, my friend was stuck. The estate had yet to be settled, and his siblings hadn’t settled on a plan for making the homestead viable in the interim. He had considered building a greenhouse and growing medical cannabis, but the others vetoed the idea, and his parents slowly stopped spinning in their graves.

He looked good, as handsome as he was in high school, the lines in his face only adding to his character. He remained a committed Luddite, utterly convinced that we’ll wake up someday and find our smart machines have become our masters. He had no use for email or the Internet, which makes it hard for us to keep in touch, but we manage. I gently broke it to him that the takeover happened years ago and that he may as well get with the program, but he wasn’t buying it.

We had a fine meal that night at the Flying Fork, a relatively new restaurant in town. Paonia might have felt like a prison I had to break out of as a kid, but sharing the company of an old friend from those days, I was keenly aware how attached I remained to the land where I’d grown up.

Chapter 24 - The Church Lawn Bunch

By the time my senior year had started in the fall of 1968, Mom and I had moved into a modest apartment in Grand Junction, the lower floor of a duplex with a lovely, glassed-in porch. It was perfect for two people, and a short walk from my new school. The nine months Mom and I spent there were some of the best of our lives. It was a chance for us to bond again, to get to know each other and heal some of the wounds that my bid for independence had inflicted. I was still a crazy, scary teenager, but when Mom and I were together, without Dad in the picture, we got along quite well. I was smoking hash every night in my bedroom, and I think Mom knew that, but she was OK with it, or at least she didn’t make a scene about it. Looking back, I am grateful that we had that time together. Neither of us could know, of course, that she had little more than two years to live.

I loved going to a “big city” high school, which it wasn’t, really, but it was biggest the institution I’d ever attended. It didn’t take me long to find my cohort. There were already a good number of aspiring hippies, stoners, rebels, and alienated intellectuals, and I gravitated to them naturally. The stigmatized group at that school was known as the church lawn bunch, because we passed our lunch hours smoking on the lawn of the First Congregational United Church of Christ across the street. I soon met characters that would shape my experience there and beyond, as many of us were headed for the University of Colorado in Boulder after graduation.

Among the most peculiar was a guy I’ll call Craze. In fact, Craze was one of the oddest people I’ve ever known. Like me, he was a new student that year, having recently arrived in town. He was also the son of a single mother, again like me, or so it appeared to others. Craze was a soft-spoken, very blond, bird-like fellow who parted his hair in the middle. He had a refined aesthetic sense, effeminate mannerisms, and a quavering voice. He may have been into acid, or even on it most of the time, but frankly it was hard to tell. It wasn’t easy having a rational conversation with him under the best of circumstances. After graduation Craze moved to Boulder, where during my freshman year our lives became more entangled than I could have wished, mainly because we were both attracted to the same woman.

And what a woman she was! I met Peggy shortly after I started school, and she was to make me both miserable and ecstatic for nearly a decade. Peggy was possibly the prettiest girl I had ever seen. A Nordic blonde, then seventeen, she had long hair so fair it was almost white; pale, translucent skin that was flawlessly smooth; long legs, deep blue eyes, perfect breasts, and a face lovely and entrancing to gaze upon. Peggy was so preternaturally gorgeous her beauty crossed over from the erotic into the angelic, and it almost seemed sacrilegious to picture her indulging in an act as base as sex. I longed to be her lover in part because I thought she was so pure. She needed someone like me—no, she needed
me
—to protect her from the depredations of the other barbarians who only wanted to bring this angel to the ground.

In reality, of course, there was plenty of lust in my feelings, but I was in denial about it. Peggy actually had a gentle personality as attractive as her appearance. And she was kind to me on those rare occasions when I overcame my shyness enough to stammer out a bit of small talk. We developed a tentative friendship over that year. When both of us ended up in Boulder my obsession continued, as it would off and on for years, evolving through various phases of agony and exhilaration.

At first there seemed little chance of pursuing a deeper relationship with her. She wasn’t a druggie or part of the church lawn crowd; she was too ethereal and “nice” for any of that. Another inconvenience was that my new friend Craze shared my obsession and thus posed a threat. That Peggy would show any interest in a guy who was orders of magnitude weirder than I was made no sense. Nor did my jealousy. Peggy was no more involved with Craze than she was with me. But Peggy, being nice, was nice to everybody. She wasn’t really in the circuit of dating and relationships at the time, as far as I was aware.

Peggy and Craze are the two figures I remember most from those days, but there were others. Clint, for instance, was an athlete and intellectual, an exemplar of those young men we all knew in school, the high-achievers who the rest of us slackers were encouraged to emulate. But Clint was a great guy. He saw through all that and had a balanced perspective on life, and he liked to smoke hash, which is how he fell in with me. He was looked up to and widely admired, but he wasn’t full of himself. He ended up going to Stanford after graduation and lived in Berkeley for a while, so we stayed in touch long after we’d left Grand Junction behind.

Dirk was another memorable figure. He had a nice car, good looks, and a halo of golden hair. He was one of those rare people who shouldn’t take psychedelics, ever, because they are too delicately balanced. He may have had a genetic predisposition to psychosis or mania. After one too many acid trips, he fell into a long-term psychosis that spring—some kind of schizophreniform dissociative state—and suffered the interventions of the mental health establishment. He was institutionalized for months. When I next saw him in Boulder he seemed fully recovered, but then started taking acid again and within a few weeks had to be hospitalized. I lost track of him after that. He was a beautiful soul. I hope he recovered and went on to live an interesting life, as I have a feeling he did.