In the Clear Light of Day
Part XXVII
Tucson
It was good to be back on the road again. I had clearly worn out the possibilities
of Maine and it was time to move on. I had also made a life-changing decision. It
felt good to be headed in the right direction.
Michael, Eric and I drove across the country from Maine to Tucson in the van
with our worldly possessions. Although it was already 1974, there was still a
whiff of peace and love in the air. Full-fledged disco would not arrive for several
more years. In my mind, the arrival of disco spelled the end of flower power and
the long slide into the “me decade,” so aptly symbolized by the election of Ronald
Reagan. Disco was just plain silly escapism and another excuse for narcissism
and mindlessness. With disco, the drug of choice changed from pot/LSD to
cocaine. It was a regression in every sense of the word. The “silly seventies”
would then be upon us full bore.
While driving across the country in our van, the three of us had no inkling that
this would be the case. We were still thinking in terms of the “Whole Earth
Catalog,” and building a new society. We were not the only ones. As
individualism and then greed reasserted themselves over the coming years,
community slipped away. It was to become “every man for himself.” But until
that happened, plenty of people remained committed to the old community ethic.
As the seventies moved on apace, this community became smaller and smaller
and coalesced around several points, such as the “deadhead community,” and the
“rainbow collective.”
When on our road trip, it was still possible to meet total strangers and have them
take you in, no questions asked. That happened to us. We met some total
strangers who invited us to stay at their house. It was a rambling old place with
many rooms surrounded by green grass and trees. We were given a floor to
“crash” on. There were lots of people about. We all ate together and had a quiet
party. The vibes were good. In the morning, we woke up, piled into our van,
thanked our hosts, and were on our way.
It is a sad day when it is no longer possible to have such experiences. I suspect
that kids growing up now would never think of doing such things. The days
when “longhairs” could hitchhike across the country and be picked up
automatically by their own kind in colorful vans are over. The commercial media
likes to mock such ideas. They have a penchant for reducing philosophies,
religions, and ways of life to triviality. They give you the impression that folks
who engaged in such activities were hopelessly deluded and should be held up
for ridicule. Instead of community, in which people can rely on each other for
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help, we are encouraged to be individual consumers, suspicious of each other. It
is much better for the economy, at least as it is presently structured.
As we got closer and closer to Arizona I began to feel more and more at home. I
had grown up in Albuquerque. It was the only true home I had ever known. For
me, big blue skies, fresh air, and lots of stars were the norm. We drove through
Navajo land and down the length of the state to Tucson. Although I had never
been to Tucson before, I felt at home there immediately, and have felt it to be
home ever since.
We drove into town on the highway and took the downtown exit. This area
reminded me of downtown Albuquerque. It could only be the Southwest. The
people were the eclectic mix I was used to, Hispanics, cowboys, Native
Americans, and plenty of colorful characters. In the southwest, the suburbs are
the home of colorless uniformity. Downtown is where you find the characters.
Just like Albuquerque, many shops had been downtown for decades. They sold
many of the same items I remember from my childhood. When growing up,
Albuquerque stores sold lamps made of cactus skeletons that you had to
assemble yourself. They came in their own cardboard boxes that resembled
shoeboxes. You could also buy a model “chuck wagon,” with a light bulb in it,
along with postcards of the “jack-a-lope,” to send to poor ignorant dudes back
East.
We walked the streets of downtown and it seemed like nothing ever changed
there. We found a Mexican restaurant located off of the street. We were walking
along a shaded porticoed sidewalk that kept us out of the sun. The restaurant
was set back and was dark and cool.
I had not had Mexican food in a long time. When I got back to the Southwest, I
had a craving for Mexican food and ate it every chance I got until I was satiated. I
walked into that restaurant from out of the sun, sat down in the cool and had a
wonderful Mexican meal I will never forget. It felt as if I had lived in Tucson all
my life and had been a regular at this restaurant forever. The southwest has that
effect on me. When in this region, I feel relaxed and at ease. I feel like the pace of
life is slow and there is no need for anxiety or stress. To me, the very
environment radiates peace. I have always equated the desert landscape with
peace.
For me, it made perfect sense that Jesus Christ went into the desert for forty days
and forty nights before embarking on the ministry that led to his crucifixion. For
me, mystics always journeyed into the desert to clear their heads and commune
with the divine. Desert air is purer and seekers can find silence and clear their
heads. The desert is the home of peace, where you have the long view. The
horizon surrounds you and the sky is enormous. When growing up I always felt
that the big sky of the southwest was the normal sky and that everyone else was
being cheated.
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Of course, Tucson is a different kind of desert than Albuquerque. New Mexico is
immersed in a high desert populated by shrub grass and pinion trees. Arizona
desert has more cacti. Arizona is the sole home of the famous Saguaro cactus
that has become synonmous with the southwest.
After we ate, we had to find a place to live. The university student housing office
provided us with a list of rentals. We parked the van in a parking lot behind a
gas station across from the University on the corner of Campbell Avenue and
Speedway Boulevard. We went through the list and checked off pads that looked
promising. Eric volunteered to make the phone calls.
Our new landlord was a retired carpenter. We rented a small old house from
him right on Speedway Boulevard about a mile from the campus. We thought it
was great that we could rent our own house, and he was happy to rent it to us.
He was a friendly guy and explained to us that he did not much care about the
house, because he was just holding on to the plot of land, located on one of
Tucson’s principal thoroughfares. As soon as the value was high enough, he
planned to sell the land to a commercial buyer who would tear down the house.
Until then, we were welcome to live there.
We each got our own rooms. There was an old-fashioned 1950’s style kitchen, a
living room, and a couple of bathrooms. I moved my trunk into my bedroom.
None of us had any furniture. We immediately put together the standard beatnik
ensembles. I put a mattress on the floor, built bookshelves out of cinder blocks
and boards, and purchased lamps from the Goodwill Store.
In those days, every city still had its “hippie hangout.” As a college town in the
laid back southwest, Tucson had a burgeoning counterculture centered on two
neighborhoods. One was on Sixth Street running along the southern edge of the
university, and the other was on Fourth Avenue, an old street not far from
downtown. The Fourth Avenue neighborhood was not too far from the railway
station, which used to be the center of Tucson commerce. It featured a series of
multi-storied rooming houses for people that worked on the railroad. It was the
scene of a famous book called “Chicken Every Sunday,” which vividly described
Tucson boarding house life early in the twentieth century. It later became a
feature Hollywood film that was a big hit in the 1930’s. Bonnie and Clyde also
stayed in this neighborhood when they visited Tucson. From Fourth Avenue
they drove to the Pima County Sherriff’s picnic and ate with the sheriff. He had
pledged to take Bonnie and Clyde “dead or alive,” but failed to recognize them
although they were standing right in front of him.
Each of these neighborhoods was home to the usual run of head shops, natural
food stores, bike shops, coffee shops, and other small businesses catering to the
hip crowd. Cheap pads in which the hip crowd could reside without spending
much money surrounded these neighborhoods. The old Fourth Avenue boarding
houses were now broken up into cheap apartments. The neighborhood centered
on the Fourth Avenue Park, another relic of the bygone era.
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In addition to the hip counterculture stores, Fourth Avenue featured several
used clothing stores such as the Goodwill Store. Right off of Fourth Avenue was
“Peace Surplus,” a hip used clothing store that sold old Army castoffs and other
unusual cold war era items. We bought most of our wardrobes from these
stores. It wasn’t difficult, since we mostly wore boots, jeans, and work shirts. I
also had a penchant for western wear and would occasionally buy a cowboy shirt
or a pair of cowboy boots from a western wear store. I still have cowboy boots I
purchased in 1974. They last forever.
Eventually, I branched out into Native American jewelry. Most Native American
jewelry is made in Northern Arizona and New Mexico by the Navajo and Hopi,
and by Pueblo tribes located along the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. People
who want to pay a lot of money for Native American jewelry buy it in Santa Fe,
where the selection is great and the markups very high. I think the best place to
buy Native American jewelry is Farmington, New Mexico, just off the Navajo
reservation. Farmington is home to old trading posts that have sold jewelry for a
long time. Some of the traders are third generation trading post families. It is
fun just to pass the time of day with them and pick their brains, even if you don’t
but anything. Sometimes I stop at ramadas by the side of the road on the rez and
buy jewelry directly from Native Americans, or from shops located right on the
reservation.
Once we furnished our bedrooms with the latest in cinderblock and boards and
mattresses, we found furniture for our living room. One old reliable is to get
discarded wooden spools that held industrial cable and saw them in half. This
gives you two tables. The hip thing to do is then get Chianti bottle (it has to be
one with straw wrapping) and stick a candle in it for that “coffeehouse effect.”
We also acquired several lawn chairs. We put these on the roof of the garage
overlooking our back yard and the alley. Our back yard consisted of dirt and a
few weeds. It was great to sit in our lawn chairs on the roof and watch the sun
go down in the evening. The sunsets are one of the great things about living in
the southwest. In Tucson they are spectacular (as they are in Albuquerque).
We lived in this pad on Speedway Boulevard for my senior year of college (197475). While there I continued my “whole earth” pursuits. I tried to grow an
organic garden in the useless dirt of the backyard. I thought I could reconstitute
the soil by making my own compost. That was a very hip thing to do in those
days. I mixed my “compost” into the soil and planted seeds. I insisted on
planting watermelon, which requires lots of water and is impossible to grow in
such desert conditions. My “garden” was not even irrigated. Needless to say, no
watermelon ever appeared. Eric tells me that the only things I succeeded in
growing were some radishes.
I also demonstrated my commitment to the planet by engaging in systematic
recycling. In 1974 there was no municipal recycling. Those wishing to recycle
had to separate their items, bag them up and take them to recycling bins. Not
many people in Tucson engaged in this activity. I collected our recycling and
took it to the bins every week and used food scraps to make my special compost.
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Since the landlord planned to tear down the house, we were free to indulge our
artistic instincts. We thought it would be cool to paint a mural in the living room.
We were all listening to “New Riders of the Purple Sage,” at that time. One of
their album covers featured a painting of desert plants growing in front of an
adobe wall. We used that as our model, went to a paint store, bought many
colors of house paint and actually did a decent job of painting the mural along
one entire wall of the living room.
As the landlord predicted, land values went up, a commercial buyer purchased
the property and tore our house down shortly after we left in 1975. It is now
home to a modern office building, which houses the headquarters of a
construction company.
We managed to amuse ourselves and have fun without spending much money. I
did not drink and did not go to bars and clubs. Our principal form of amusement
was spending time outdoors, hiking, and hanging out. Mountains surround
Tucson on three sides, while Saguaro National Monument preserves the
beautiful desert landscape from developers.
I had a powerful transcendental moment when we went to Colossal Cave. This is
a local tourist attraction not too far southeast of Tucson in the Tucson
Mountains. For a small sum, tourists can take a hokey tour filled with
stalagmites and stalactites and tales of stagecoach robbery, hidden loot and
gunplay. We had a fun day, with the tour a picnic lunch in the park and games of
Frisbee. It was a special moment when the sunlight was just right, the
temperature was perfect and everyone bonded. It was one of those moments
that seemed like they were so perfect that they would go on forever, but proved
to be all too transient.
The most beautiful spots were in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. The
mountains themselves are within the national forest, but the foothills were
private property. The view from the foothills was beautiful and it would be only
a matter of time before developers built gated communities there for the rich.
Campbell Avenue went straight from the heart of town into the foothills and
stopped at a dead end. This is where we parked our cars and hiked into the
mountains. At night, the lights of Tucson spread out below us. After the
construction of the gated communities, the area was closed to the public,
surrounded by fences and patrolled by guards.
We also hung out along Fourth Avenue and Sixth Street. The hip businesses let
us browse without buying anything. The Loft Theatre was located on a small
street leading off of Sixty Street into the campus. It was the proverbial “art
cinema,” found in college towns throughout the U.S. You had to walk up a long
flight of stairs to get into the cinema. Under that staircase was a small shop run
by two guys who sold home made frozen lemonade. They called it “eegees.”
They eventually built shops all over Tucson before selling out for millions of
dollars to a California corporation that now owns the franchise.
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I saw many a strange movie at the Loft. It was at this cinema that I saw the film
series of all of the major films of Indian filmmaker Satijit Rai. It was from him
that I learned about the Indian sensibilities. To western eyes it seemed like
nothing happened in the films. There was passionate romance with no physical
contact. Family members spoke endlessly about the tangled web of relationships
within the extended family group. Men and women communicated with shortshared glances. Much of what happened went on beneath the surface and you
had to learn many cultural cues. Things that were important to the Indian
subjects of these movies weren’t even on the radar screen of western culture.
Despite the subtleties and nuances, I enjoyed the films and found them very
powerful.
We also hung out on campus. The old Student Union was a very laid back place.
It was about four stories tall, and honeycombed with various “study rooms” and
lounges. These were the venues for the meetings of countless student clubs and
activities. There were clubs for anything and everything, from politics, to
religion, to art, as well as the traditional boosterism centered on collegiate sports
and sororities and fraternities.
These cool dark rooms contained comfortable sofas and chairs. Students stayed
there for hours studying, reading a book or sleeping.
The food at the student union was really good, especially the Mexican food and
the ice cream. It was also cheap. With a student card, movies at the Gallagher
Theatre were 50 cents. The Gallagher showed an mélange of old movies, art
movies, and Hollywood productions that were no longer current. It featured all
night movie festivals during which you could see three terrible movies in a row
until dawn. The movies were interactive, with the audience making comments,
booing, clapping and yelling throughout. Between the movies, I hung out in the
mall in the dead of night.
The mall runs the length of the campus with “old main” (the building that was
once the entire university back in 1885 when the University was founded in the
center. It is a long grassy strip in the middle of a desert. It was a prime place for
sunbathing and flirting. Students played guitars and Frisbee and made out on
blankets. Some of the women removed their blouses and lay on their stomachs
to sunbathe. Some of the male students from more repressed developing
countries became considerably agitated when this happened.
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The mall was a lively place and reflected the times. Every group and philosophy
was found there. These included, communists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Students for
a Democratic Society, the Young Republicans, the Young Democrats, Young
Americans for Freedom, every mainline Christian denomination, Mormons, Jesus
Freaks, every kind of Buddhist, a selection of Hindu groups and gurus, and
unassociated “preachers” and speakers with no perceptible agenda who made no
sense whatsoever.
The revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini was going on in Iran at this time. The
University hosted a number of Iranian students. Some favored the Shah of Iran
and others the Ayatollah. The opponents of the Shah went through every book in
the library with a razor and slashed through his picture. The tension culminated
in a pitched battle between the two groups in front of the student union.
Afterwards, most of the activists were deported and things calmed down.
Total free speech reigned on the mall. The various groups and individuals were
free to make their pitches and the onlookers were free to respond. Sometimes it
got close to violence. The Lefties and the Jesus Freaks were the most aggressive.
Some Christian preachers tried to incite reactions from the onlookers by
insulting Islam, Hinduism, Hippies, the Grateful Dead, Homosexuals, etc. They
were particularly virulent when it came to Islam and delighted in insulting the
Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an and the Islamic faith. They made the Muslim
students very angry. The preachers were playing with fire. There were times I
thought the preachers would be attacked and torn limb from limb.
One independent preacher styled himself after a medieval monk. He wore
monk’s robes at all times and carried a staff. He kept his few worldly possessions
in a shoulder bag. Even though it was Arizona and quite hot, his robe was made
of scratchy wool. He slept under the bushes on campus. He was one of the
preachers that aroused a lot of enmity with his aggressive preaching and
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wholesale criticism of various groups. One day he had simply disappeared and
no one ever saw him again.
These preachers said everyone who was not “saved” would burn in hellfire for
eternity. They did not get many (if any converts). I remember one of them
saying, “I know you all like the Grateful Dead. Hippies are damned and going to
hell, and the Grateful Dead are truly dead and grateful for it.”
One day, at a small drive in on Speedway Boulevard, I encountered a group from
the “Children of God.” These were some of the more aggressive of the Jesus freak
groups and investigation would reveal that they engaged in prostitution and
theft and other felonies. I could tell that there was something wrong with this
group. They appeared like a tight-lipped pack under a stern leader and more
than a little dangerous.
In March of 1975 ISKCON’s Radha Damodara Sankirtan Party under the
leadership of Vishnujana Swami appeared on the mall. In his book “RadhaDamodara Vilasa,” Vaiyasaki das Adhikari describes the scene,
“On a bright sunny morning, the bus drives to the campus of the University of
Arizona in Tucson. As the brahmacaris set up the equipment on their little stage,
students begin to congregate. As soon as Sri-Sri Radha Damodara (the Radha
Krishna deities) arrive, Vishnujana Maharaja sits down in front of them and
begins a wonderful kirtan that only he can sing.”
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One of the participants, Naikatma dasa remembered that:
“When Vishnujana Maharaja started chanting, all the young people started diving
into it. I felt such an ecstatic rush.”
“Srikanta (another participant) is totally immersed in the kirtan. He loves it
when Maharaja introduces the various Indian instruments and describes their
qualities. When the kirtan stops, prasadam is distributed to all the students.”1
I was one of the onlookers for this event. I did not realize that Vishnujana, a
legendary figure within ISKCON, was performing the kirtan and delivering the
lecture. The students seemed to enjoy the presentation very much. Although the
book account does not mention it, there were several Christian fundamentalists
who tried to disrupt the event, with no success, as the students ignored them.
Radha-Damodara Vilasa (The Inner Life of Vishnujana Swami and Jayananda
Prabhu) Volume 2, Vaiyasaki das Adhikari, Sravanam-Kirtanan Press, 2009, page
627
1
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In Radha-Damodara Vilasa, Vishnujana states that this day on the mall at the
University of Arizona was a turning point for him. He loved sankirtan and mixing
with college students and having fun. In Tucson, his superiors told him to curtail
the presentation so that the ISKCON devotees could go door-to-door selling
books and collecting donations. It was on this day in March in Tucson that
Vishnujana realized that ISKCON had changed.
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