Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

28. distractions

Despite the impetus — the interest of a major publishing house — some months were to pass before I began writing the book. To award it the full focus that any good novel demands, I had to extricate myself from both Seattle’s art scene and its blossoming psychedelic culture, areas in which I’d become increasingly enmeshed since returning from New York. Superficially at least, the two did not seem to overlap and they were never to really merge, but on a deeper level, each — modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments — offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe, a perpetually endangered species kept alive — and occasionally driven quite mad — by its capacity to love.

But let’s take care not to lose objectivity in a spasm of genuflection or shower of rose petals. Mediocrity is the standard rather than the exception among practicing artists (Sturgeon’s rule: 90 percent of everything is shit), and for the past hundred years art has been increasingly more about money and ego than truth and revelation. The periodic discovery, however, of a peach-size diamond in the dung heap of commerce was enough to keep one digging, never mind the fecal matter that accumulated beneath one’s nails.

As for psychedelics, too many of the sacraments were contaminated or counterfeit, too many of the imbibers intellectually and spiritually unprepared to learn from or even recognize the gods unmasked in their presence. Still, there were sufficient bolts of wonder to light up anyone’s personal sky, provided one kept his blinds open or didn’t run for cover at the first clap of thunder. (Mainstream media were staffed by copious coops of Chicken Littles, while the police state spun paranoia the way Granny Robbins spun wool.)

In any case, I allowed myself to be distracted from what I secretly knew, had always known, to be my true mission in life, dancing instead to the music of the zeitgeist. And what music, literally and figuratively, it was! From the Beatles to the antiwar movement, from Jefferson Airplane to the swelling tide of feminism, anthems of joy and revolution rang.

I reviewed art for several publications in Seattle and beyond, wrote essays included in museum catalogs, organized gallery exhibitions, contributed to shows (under the pseudonym “Max Saint Cherokee”) several assemblages of my own making, and was a ringleader in a boisterous neo-Dada gang of guerrilla artists, the Shazam Society, whose raison d’être was to disrupt and poke fun at those uptight elements of the Seattle art community that took itself far too seriously for art’s own good. I also participated in “trip festivals” (celebrations of the more external manifestations of the psychedelic experience) for which I created “happenings” (later known as “performance art,” an easy, self-indulgent medium that has continued to attract supremely untalented practitioners) with quaint ironic titles such a “Mommy/Daddy/Bow Wow/I Love You.”

The happening, bastard baby of Mr. Visual Art and Miss Theater, and by no means a by-product of the psychedelic revolution, can trace its origins, under different names, back to Picasso’s Paris in the 1920s. It was reborn, though for years only dedicated avant-gardists heard its squalls, in New York in the late fifties, when serious artists such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine pushed Pollock’s “action painting” to its extreme by eliminating the canvas altogether, moving the action off the wall and off the pedestal, out into the “real” and live space of the room.

By 1966, Seattle’s culturati were aware of the hybrid medium, but few had witnessed an example firsthand, so when the owner of Current Editions, a first-rate print gallery, decided to commission a happening for the entertainment and education of her well-heeled patrons, she turned to me. All too happy to oblige, I created a piece I called “Money Is Stronger Than Dirt.” Modest, if sarcastic and satirical in scope, its central element was an amateur banjo picker in blackface and full Uncle Sam costume complete with patriotic top hat. As, seated on a short wooden stool, our personified national symbol picked and sang — in a voice that sounded as if it had been run over more than once by farm equipment — corny old folk ballads, a quintet of Shazam Society artists knelt on the floor at his feet cutting one- and five-dollar bills into bits and dropping the scraps into a glass salad bowl. Did I mention that the theme was sarcastic? The staging modest?

After a half hour or so of this, the audience grew restless, as I’d expected it would, but none more discontent than I. I mean, if the spectators were waiting for something to happen, they were not alone. My pièce de résistance was failing to materialize. Literally. It rested, you see, on the shoulders of a young man I knew who’d recently taken a job selling vacuum cleaners door to door in the area around La Conner. The machine Bruce was peddling boasted a shampoo feature which, if its tank was filled to capacity, generated an amazingly voluminous amount of foam. My intent was that at some point, on cue, Bruce would stride out of the storage room in his salesman suit, launch into his pitch, set up his machine, aim its shampoo nozzle and completely engulf Uncle Sam and the money shredders (of which I was one) in a mini-mountain of suds. That was to be the grand finale. By showtime, however, Bruce had yet to show up at the gallery.

It was no problem to start without him, but as time passed and I waited in vain for some signal that he’d arrived, I commenced to fret. Eventually, I left the tableau and went to the storage room to check on him. No Bruce. Ten minutes later, I checked again, wondering if he might be hiding in there, experiencing a bout of stage fright. No Bruce. My anxiety was starting to inch over the panic threshold.

To bide time, and to relieve the awkwardness, the monotony, I found matches and ceremoniously lit on fire the scraps of money in the bowl. The torn bills flared and smoked. The gallery owner looked worried. Welcome to the club. For entirely different reasons, my own brow was so furrowed I could have screwed a hat on. “Money Is Stronger Than Dirt” was experiencing a kind of aesthetic erectile dysfunction for which a Viagra had yet to be invented.

Time passed. Uncle Sam was now on his third raspy rendition of “Oh! Susanna,” one of the few tunes in his repertoire. So stressed I could barely breathe, I finally rushed downstairs to the street and searched — in vain — for Bruce’s van. Arrgh! My impulse was to beat it to my own car and drive away. I felt the need to go home. Or, maybe to Alaska for a month or two, stopping by La Conner on the way to throw a Rotten egg at Bruce Wyman. (Bruce, I was later to learn, had encountered difficulty navigating the streets of Seattle. A small-town lad, he’d become lost in the labyrinth around Pioneer Square. He never did make it to the gallery.)

Reluctantly, I gathered what remained of my integrity and set about to face a roomful of bored, confused, and probably seething art lovers. On my way upstairs, I had a sudden and entirely desperate inspiration. Back in the gallery, where Uncle Sam was playing “Froggie Went A-Courtin’ ” for the third or fourth time, I stopped at the refreshment table and grabbed the plastic squeeze bottle of honey (a tea sweetener) I’d seen there. Resuming then my place at the feet of the great American icon, and smiling as if nothing was amiss, as if this was just the way things happened at a happening — and too bad for any philistine who wasn’t hip enough to dig it — I proceeded to squirt honey onto the burned currency in the salad bowl. Next, I scooped up a handful of the now-sticky ashes, stuffing them into my mouth while nodding to the confederates beside me to follow suit. Slowly, one by one, shooting me incredulous glances, they joined in. We ate the money. We just ate it all up. The audience — presumably unhappily — got the point. And that was that.

Or, almost. The following night, the conservative commentator on a local TV station devoted his entire on-air editorial to berating me and Shazam, accusing us of a shameful, unpatriotic act every bit as seditious as burning an American flag, suggesting that the scruffy lot of us should face criminal charges for insulting and destroying the currency of the realm.

We were not arrested. And several weeks later, I was commissioned to create a happening at an art center in an affluent Seattle suburb. One more example, I guess, of how nothing sells like controversy.

On August 20, 1966, “A Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice to the Goddess Minnie Mouse” was presented at the Kirkland Arts Center, the opening event of the town’s annual summer arts festival. To prepare the prospective audience, and to ensure that I didn’t find myself in a situation that might prove as stressful, as embarrassing, as the subversive dude at Current Editions, I included the following disclaimer on the flyer that was circulated to announce the event: “It is not the purpose of this happening to be comic, tragic, satirical, political, social, provocative, poetic, charming, enlightening, artistic, entertaining or even interesting. This happening has one purpose only: to happen.”

Well, it happened all right. And while I can’t claim it did prove artistic or entertaining, it was evidently provocative. It also — from my perspective, at least — got rather interesting. Especially after the cops came.

I fear I cannot take full credit for the police raid. The event got out of hand, true enough, but only because its sponsors had swallowed whole the misconception that a happening was supposed to be some kind of audience participation affair, and in publicity and at the door had, unbeknownst to me, encouraged spectators to become physically involved in the performance. I’d designed the “Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice” as a considerably more elaborate and nuanced presentation than “Stronger Than Dirt,” had recruited and rehearsed more than a dozen Shazam Society members (along with an erotic dancer from Seattle’s leading go-go club), and carefully orchestrated the whole show so that it would for all of its unruly appearance unfold in a theatrical procession that even Chekhov could have understood, if not wholeheartedly endorsed. Alas…

I’d made a tape loop of Joni James singing “I’m in the Mood for Love,” and as the song played over and over, over and over, my dancer was to periodically deliver, in succession, huge trays of fruit, vegetables, and whole raw fish to the assembled Shazamers, posed formally as if for a group portrait and heavily armed with art supplies. Each participant would select a food item, and eat it or decorate it or both as he or she saw fit. (By the way, each time my dancer emerged from the wings she was to have discarded some of her clothing, and she was hardly overdressed to begin with.)

This business had been under way scarcely ten minutes before spectators, apparently signaled by the well-meaning festival director, began lobbing old wooden printing-press type (thoughtfully supplied by the clueless sponsors) at us. Insulted, one of my performers hurled a turnip in retaliation. Taking this as its cue, most of the audience left its seats and merrily stormed the stage. Alas. It was at that point that my happening became a melee.

No punches were exchanged, no bones broken, but chaos reigned, paint and produce filled the air, and the dry-cleaning bills must have been staggering. At one point I encountered the festival director, the attractive wife of a Seattle surgeon, who was wandering about in the fracas, a dazed and helpless expression on her face. Spattered with green paint, her coif undone, she just kept muttering, “Somebody put a fish down my blouse, somebody put a fish down my blouse.” And all the while, Joni James kept singing “I’m in the Mood for Love.”

I’m unsure how the evening would have ended if the police hadn’t come. They’d been called, as it turned out, not by a concerned citizen reporting a riot at the fine arts center, but by Maxine Cushing Gray, a kind of professional smut-sniffer who wrote a bland, prudish brand of art criticism for an upscale Seattle weekly. Ms. Gray had seen fit to summon law enforcement because my dancer was, in Ms. Gray’s opinion, “indecently dressed.” In point of fact, the dancer was now hardly dressed at all, unless green paint could be considered clothing.

Police presence brought things to a rather abrupt end. The place cleared out with amazing speed. The dancer and I were detained, but once the cops heard my side of the story — and got their eyes full of her — we were released with a warning. And while their warning didn’t specifically state that I should refrain from ever staging another happening — like most of the audience, the cops never really comprehended what a happening was supposed to be — it didn’t need to. I’d already come to that conclusion.

As if I didn’t have enough distractions, I agreed in late 1966 to host a weekly show on KRAB-FM, one of the very first listener-supported radio stations in the nation. Called, with a nod to Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, the show aired at ten o’clock on Sunday nights, a less than ideal spot for a broadcast; the signal, outside the greater Seattle area, was as weak as baby bird farts; and my voice, as previously stated, was so flat it made that faux “Uncle Sam” sound like Beyoncé. Nevertheless, Notes From the Underground had devoted listeners from the start, primarily because it dealt in a positive, even celebratory manner with the three basic food groups of the era: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Skating on ice just barely thick enough to keep from plunging the worried station into the punitive waters of the FCC, I delivered audacious bits (often culled from underground newspapers) on such timely topics as civil rights, war resistance, ecology, abortion, police brutality, political corruption, consciousness-expanding chemicals, and alternative lifestyles. Mostly, however, I played recorded music, the new music shunned by commercial stations from coast to coast.

It happened to be one of those rare times in the course of human history when the popular music of the day was also artistically and socially important music, though you’d never know it from listening to AM radio. Wed to a rigid old format that demanded that no song on the air exceed three minutes in length, AM stations stubbornly refused to play album cuts (the majority and best of which had broken free from the three-minute straitjacket), so even as the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, et al dramatically altered the soundscape of the English-speaking world, commercial radio sugared the airwaves with bubblegum singles.

Inner cities were burning, an unnecessary and immoral war was raging, gender stereotypes were in flux, protesters of many stripes challenged the barricades, an unprecedented generation of ecstatic truth seekers flirted with its neurological destiny, and all the while Seattle’s KJR and KOL trotted out a teenybopper sound track of aural fluff. For a couple of hours on Sunday night, Notes From the Underground sought to provide a relevant, sympathetic, irreverent refuge from obnoxious advertising, disc jockey prattle, and Top 40 inanities. In fairness, many AM stations did eventually come around, adopting a playlist of songs from higher up the food chain, although, for example, I was playing The Doors’ “Light My Fire” a good six months before it aired on KJR. And with that, children, I — whose voice was the vocal equivalent of week-old roadkill on a Tennessee truck route in mid-July — with that I made my contribution to radio broadcasting.

I could have made another. One Sunday, as I waited to go on the air, a stranger dropped by KRAB’s rather ramshackle one-story wood-frame studio. Thin as a spaghetto, the guy had long, wild black hair, a pointy black beard, and wore a Mexican poncho across which like a bandolier was strapped a cheap guitar. In other words, he looked not unlike a thousand or more other skinny, hairy, ostensibly musical young men then yo-yoing up and down America’s West Coast. He talked like them, as well, scarcely introducing himself (he said his name was Charlie) before treating me to an earful of peace, love, and total liberation. Even as he mouthed the prevailing hippie philosophy, however, he did it with an articulation that was impressive and an intensity that was nothing short of galvanizing.

The more Charlie talked, the more convinced I became that he not only truly believed that philosophy, he, for one, was actually living it. There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was “like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.”

At any rate, the dude said he wrote songs and wished to perform a selection of them on Notes From the Underground, with which he was somewhat, somehow (he was not a local resident) familiar. Ordinarily, I would have consented, for while my shows were fairly well organized, it would have violated their spirit, the spirit of the times, not to be open to — even eager for — change and surprise. The following morning, however, I was leaving on a monthlong jaunt to Arizona and for that show only I’d actually scripted a program with a beginning, middle, and end. Any interruption of the Aristotelian flow would have sabotaged it, completely wrecking the desired cumulative affect. So, I turned Charlie down and sent him on his way.

Visibly disappointed but polite enough about it, he shuffled off into the summer Sunday night and vanished there. Two years would pass before I recognized his picture in the newspaper and realized that for better or for worse, I’d rejected — and turned down an opportunity to tape a live performance by — Charles Manson.