working with the forceps of time

 

The Jewish Girl Who Could and the Green Berets 1971

 

                   "Shelter from the storm" Bob Dylan

 

a natural food co-op/commune at the edge

of Albuquerque, Osha(named after a root)

had been a junk yard zoned out by residential

and middle class neighbors....so to get even

the old cowboy who owned it

leased it to the hippies

 

after awhile it had about 2,000 members

and bolt by screw by nut by shard the hippies

had cleaned it up. there were large gardens, bees,

and the store where bulk grains, nuts, and organic

produce were sold

 

natural childbirth occurred there also with a midwife.

a guru, or two,

passersby of every shade, the psychotic, the religiously

possessed, the utopian skeptics as well, "when you live

outside the law, you must be honest" Dylan had sung

and one, a poet, who had read Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance,

had written on a wall due to the thievery, a blight to

the progress of the store

 

quiet refugees from the Vietnam war were there too,

Jason and his girl Wave who dressed like an American

indian....one of their preoccupations, sage enemas for

purification....the hallucinogens too...Jason with long blond

hair almost to his waist...an absolute space cadet some

of the lesser of the spacey thought....he was there because his buddy

Ron was there because Anandi(a made up name...really it was

Sasha)was there...she was the human Kibbutz incarnate...healing

togetherness,generous love of all kinds, massage, midwifery, share

the work, the wealth and each other...Ron said she was a very

trusting person....he lived with her....he understood trust from the

perspective of the middle of the war in Vietnam...

 

even the most utopian of the group was tempted to physically

shake Jason out of his stupor....until one day some Stomps,

cowboys drunk with boots to prove it showed up to decimate the place

(they didn't like this peacelovehippydippyshit)

it would have been a slaughter but Jason did awake from his psychedelic

slumber with attitude and Ron also a quiet one, as well, the Stomps

sensed the danger....later Jason said "I knew I could kick their asses...I had

the will to do it"...the Green Berets back from the war and hell

seeking shelter from the storm in the human kibbutz. Sasha the mover

and shaker

 

***

 

In the movie there were flittering moments

of Richie Goldberg, a medic with a white

armband going to the aid of an injured....

the supposed gunman stabbed by the Hells Angels

acting as body guards for the performers (this arrangement

rumored to have been suggested by the Grateful Dead)

 

the Fat Man at Altamont naked in is morbidly obese

birthday suit, his rolls of fat beat with pool cues again

by the Angels......he had presumed the "love" generation

encompassed him as well......later Ken Kesey said

that he "loved" the Fat Man, I wonder if the Fat Man

with his bruises in a public beating ever knew it

 

Richie who swooped to aid the stabbed....15years

earlier had been beat up a block away from Beth Israel

Synagogue on Yom Kippur by some older Catholic

kids.....Sussman who was big and tough refused to

come to his aid because it was Yom Kippur

 

Mick Jaggar on stage......Sympathy for the Devil

Goldberg with the bleeding stranger

 

taking the long view....the forty years of desert....

a nation of teachers and healers....

 

Yom Kippur at Altamont, a private movie for me

 

 

the rabbinical hippy ho didn't know it

 

the apricot blossoms warmed

the brown desert....the morning

chill abated, the sun now above

Sandia mountain to the east...

in Corrales the leaves still not

on the cottonwoods

 

the earth tilled....Joseph was intent

on planting the whole field with

garlic...it would take a few years

to come to fruition.....so this was

a distant harvest....he carefully

removed each clove from the bulb

and planted it with Hasidic intent

as to delay a lamentation.

it was quite possible to imagine

him wrapped in a prayer shawl

donning tefillin though he

didn't claim his religion

he was a picture of the part,

dark too.

 

he had a child who was with

its mother in a commune up

north....she was blond and

apparently had run off,

it appeared to be as simple

as her new friend could dance

a jig