Arma Comes to the Angels

During the mid-sixties, San Francisco's Haight Asbury district -or The Haight as it was known to residents--became the epicenter of hippie counter-culture in the USA. In January of 1967, about 4000 people converged on Golden Gate Park for the first hippie Love In, which featured early psychedelic bands such as the Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane. Over the next few months, 75,000 to 100,000 young people, known as "flower children", descended on the Haight district from all over the world for what the media labelled the "Summer of Love". These young people claimed they were pursuing a new way of life, free from mainstream American values, through protest, drugs, free love and alternative religions.

Many people presumed that the females in the movement--'hippie chicks' as they were called--were sexually insatiable and promiscuous, possessed extraordinary erotic skills and would "ball" anyone who showed the slightest bit of sensual interest in them. These women were often addressed by the generic name, 'Sunshine', a reference to their sunny dispositions and a popular brand of LSD circulating at the time.

The Hells Angels motorcycle club were also headquartered in The Haight at that time. Like the hippies, the

Angels spurned middle-class, bourgeois mores and had a fondness for drugs and casual sex. The two groups interacted regularly and even had a very loose, unofficial alliance that grew increasingly strained because of the Angels'

penchant for violence and conservative values, both of which were at odds with the hippies' philosophy. This alliance ended on December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Music Festival when the Hells Angels, who were providing security for the concert, clashed violently with the audience and members of bands performing at the concert. The Angels killed one person and badly beat dozens of others.

The president of the Angels at that time was the notorious Sonny Barger...

* * * * * *

Karma Comes to the Angels

(In The Mythical Summer of Love)

Karma's heart sank when Ezra announced his plan to exit the traffic-choked interstate and follow a series of rural back roads to the coast highway where they would turn north for the final leg of their journey. After a week of camping rough in Sequoia National Park, she desperately wanted to get back to their apartment in San Francisco, lower herself into a hot bath spiked with Frangipani oil and soak the itchy residue of grime, dried sweat and wood-smoke from her skin and hair. The detour, she pointed out to Ezra, would delay that pleasure by almost four hours.

"We'll get there when we get there," Ezra said, waving away her complaint. "You need to get over this hang up you have about time, Karma. It's just an artificial construct that distracts us from the reality of the now."

Inspired by his own profundity, he launched into a lecture on the importance of fully embracing the present, a monologue that Karma had heard so often she knew every word by heart.

As Ezra droned on, Karma's attention drifted to the landscape outside her window: low, rolling grassy hills scorched brown by the summer sun and dotted with stunted oak trees and rocky outcroppings. It occurred to her that this terrain was the perfect setting for a classic Western and she envisioned a posse of hell-bent-for-leather cowboys led by John Wayne swooping down out of the hills to surround their Volkswagen van.

"Alright, pilgrim," she imagined the Duke drawling to Ezra, "the little lady's coming back to the fort with us, comprendo? She's heard just about as much about the importance of living in the moment as a girl can stomach."

The fantasy made her chuckle and Ezra halted his monologue in mid-sentence. "Do these concepts amuse you?" he asked testily.

"No, no," Karma replied quickly. "Sorry, Ezra, go on. I'm listening."

Ezra sighed and shook his head. "Why do I even bother?" he muttered under his breath before pursing his lips into a tight smirk meant to convey the futility of imparting his wisdom to someone so undeserving; a mannerism Karma had become all too familiar with over the past six months. It still wounded her but the welcome relief she felt as he lapsed into petulant silence dulled the sting of his insult.

Karma had not always found Ezra's verbosity so trying. On the contrary, his loquaciousness was a significant factor in her initial attraction to him the day they'd met in Golden Gate Park at San Francisco's premier Love-In that past winter.

She had been sitting cross-legged on the edge of the crowd of dancers, her neurons sparking merrily under the effects of a tab of window pane acid as she listened to the band play a dirge-like song about a mysterious girl named Alice, when a man seated himself beside her. With his dark, brooding eyes, long, brown hair flowing over the embroidered collar of his linen shirt and fine-featured face half-covered with a thick beard, she thought he resembled George Harrison, the handsomest and sexiest of The Beatles in her opinion.

"Rati?" the man said to her with an undertone of astonishment in his voice. "Is that really you? How wonderful that you've decided to come to earth to honour us mortals with your divine presence!"

Straining to hear his words over the loud music, she leaned in closer to him and said, "Rati? Uh, I think you're confusing me with somebody. Is Rati a friend of yours?"

"No, no. Rati is the Hindu goddess of love and sensuality," he explained. "Are you sure you're not her? It doesn't seem possible that there could be two such beautiful entities in the universe!"

In Karma's experience, hippie pick-up lines were seldom more creative than 'Hey, babe, ya wanna ball?'. By comparison, Ezra's ice-breaker was positively Shakespearean and instantly charmed the twenty-year-old woman.

"Uh-uh, sorry, you've got the wrong chick," she had answered, entering into the playful spirit of his banter. "I'm just plain old Raelynn from East Oakland, not a goddess of anything. Not yet anyway."

Ezra winced and shook his head. "Raelynn? Oh, no, no, that won't do. Raelynn is far too mundane a name for such an otherworldly beauty. Hmmm. Let's see. Yes, I've got it! Today it was my karmic good fortune to connect with you, a radiant, otherworldly woman who I'm sure was my soul mate in a past life. I'm going to name you Karma. Yes, from now on, you are Karma!"

Fascinated by his eloquence, good looks and unabashed interest in her, Karma spent the duration of the Love-In hanging on Ezra's every word. That night they shared a lumpy mattress on the floor of his sparsely furnished apartment in The Haight and a week later, she moved in with him. She had barely unpacked her backpack when Ezra began to educate her on the fine points of Eastern religion, culture and philosophy.

Prior to meeting Ezra, Karma's attraction to San Francisco's hippie scene had stemmed mainly from its hedonistic ethos of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll rather than the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment and inner exploration that interested many of her counter-culture peers. Her idea of nirvana was ingesting various psychedelics, dancing to loud, frenetic music with whatever long-haired stranger caught her fancy and later, if the chemistry was right, sharing her tall, big-breasted and long-legged body with him.

But Ezra quickly convinced her of the spiritual rewards to be gained from practicing meditation and yoga, enhancing her Chi, realigning her Chakras, chanting the OM mantra, and studying the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and other sacred Indian texts. Inspired, she opened herself up to a brave new world of possibilities beyond, as Ezra phrased it, 'the narrow confines of your hopelessly earth-bound and atrophied consciousness".

Ezra was the first man Karma had ever met who appeared to have more interest in cultivating her mind and soul than ravishing her statuesque frame. He wanted, he said, to lead her into a state of profound spiritual awareness and grace, and a grateful Karma strove to be worthy of his guidance and attention.

There were times, however, when the demands of following Ezra's teachings were difficult to bear. Instead of transporting her into the shimmering realms of ecstasy that he spoke of incessantly, his rigid mentoring frequently left her feeling irritated, restless and frustrated.

Their camping trip in National Sequoia Park had been a case in point.

When Ezra had proposed the trip, Karma was jubilant. She loved being in nature and envisioned dropping acid and dancing naked under the gigantic redwoods, making love two or three times a day on beds of pine needles and wild flowers and spending evenings around the campfire smoking Acapulco Gold while gazing up at the vast, star-filled sky.

But the reality of the trip fell far short of her vision.

Ezra believed that LSD was "sacred medicine" and not meant for recreation. Three days into the excursion, he gave Karma a small dose of acid and insisted that she sit cross-legged in the hot mid-August sun as he read to her in a dreary monotone from the Tibetan Book of the Dead for several hours while hoards of mosquitos feasted on her sweaty, sun-reddened body.

Pot smoking around the fire at night was limited to a single bowl of weed imbibed from Ezra's small pipe, followed by chanting the OM mantra with eyes shut, oblivious to the display of celestial splendor unfolding above them.

But more than anything else, it was their love-making during the trip that had disappointed Karma as it had from their first night together. Karma liked her sex rough, wild and uninhibited. She loved the feel of greedy hands mauling her breasts and a hungry mouth slavering over her pussy before her lover positioned himself between her legs, eased his hard cock into her and seesawed away until orgasm engulfed her.

This was not Ezra's style. From their first night together in his apartment, he had insisted they practice his version of Tantric sex. This amounted to little more than lightly touching and kissing each others' naked bodies, sometimes for hours on end. Ezra had trouble attaining an erection so the act rarely involved penetration and never oral sex. Karma tried to dial down the voracity of her sex drive to sync with Ezra's cerebral, measured approach to the pleasures of the flesh. But it wasn't easy. She wanted more, and as hard as she tried to restrain her desires, she wasn't always successful. Once when Ezra was softly kissing her navel--as close as his mouth ever came to her vagina--, in frustration she had blurted out 'Please, Ezra, eat my pussy. Please!' Startled, Ezra lifted his head and, grimacing in disgust, declared the requested act "unsanitary and unnatural".

"Sexuality can either elevate or demean us," he explained afterwards. "Crude, animalistic rutting and debauched sexual activities like that just taint the divine spirit within us."

To Karma's ears, his statement sounded remarkably close to her staunch Catholic parents' views on sex and physical pleasure in general but she did not mention this to Ezra who looked down on organized religion and its acolytes with considerable resentment and smugness.

As a consequence of Ezra's rigidly doctrinaire approach to sex, the only orgasms Karma had experienced over the past six months were the result of masturbating in rare moments of privacy. Sometimes it seemed to her that the most tangible result of following Ezra's rigorous regimen of metaphysical self-improvement was a chronically unsatisfied libido. She was excited by the insights that Ezra's teachings had opened up to her and believed that they really had enriched her life and broadened her perceptions of herself and the world around her. Still, she wondered why it was necessary to quash the joyful fulfillment of her sexuality in order to lead her to a greater knowledge of herself and the divine world beyond. It made no sense to her.

But, she reminded herself, Ezra existed on an elevated spiritual plane, and knew what was best for her. Yes, his path was difficult to follow sometimes and he could be impatient and brusque but she told herself that this was evidence of his love for her and his concern for her inner well-being. Now as they cruised westward through the central California back country, Karma decided not to dwell on the current short comings of her sex-life and the disappointments of the past week. She resolved to overcome her shallow, self-serving feelings and have more faith in Ezra's wisdom and his plan for her spiritual ascendance.

She was jolted from these reflections when Ezra braked abruptly at a cross roads. He took a creased map from the glove compartment and spread it across his thighs. After squinting at it for a few moments, he turned onto a road even narrower and dustier than the one they'd travelled since leaving the interstate.

The sudden detour made her uneasy but she resisted the urge to ask Ezra for an explanation for fear of provoking his anger again.

But fifteen minutes later when the van's engine began to sputter half-way up a hill, she could no longer hold her tongue and asked, "What is it, Ezra? What's going on?"

Ezra looked perturbed but didn't reply as the van struggled onwards. It managed to reach the top of the hill before the engine went silent and Ezra, frantically working the clutch and gas, couldn't coax it back to life. They coasted silently to the bottom of the long slope where, using the last of the vehicle's momentum, Ezra steered the van onto the shoulder under the shade of a bank of slender trees separating the road from the brown grass land beyond.

"Ezra, what's happening? Are we out of gas?" Karma asked.

"No, of course we're not out of gas," he snapped as he opened the door and exited the van.

Karma stepped out her side and went to the back of the van where Ezra had opened the hatch to examine the engine.

"Do you have any idea what--?"

"For Krishna's sake, Karma, can you at least

try

to not to be such a bummer?" Ezra barked as he rose to his feet. "You're just making everything worse by freaking out! Now, please try to control your negativity and give me the space I need to deal with this situation!"

Karma shrank back as he yanked open the van's back door and rooted through a cardboard box inside until he found a thick manual titled "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive". Kneeling again, he flipped through its pages, looking back and forth between the dead motor and the operator's guide in his hand. Seeing the growing confusion on his face, Karma realized that although Ezra could read Hindu scripture in the original Sanskrit, he was virtually illiterate when it came to comprehending the instructions in the manual.

"Ezra, like, I really don't want to be a bummer or negative or anything like that but... what are we going to do?" she asked, trying to control her voice. "We're stuck in the middle of nowhere!"

This time Ezra didn't snap at her. He gazed forlornly at the engine with such a helpless, defeated expression on his face that Karma felt a mixture of pity and embarrassment for him.

Then she heard it; a low, throbbing rumble in the distance that increased to a roar as its source drew nearer. Shielding her eyes against the sun, she looked up the road and saw three motorcycles cresting the hill behind them. The thundering machines stirred up billows of dust as they advanced, making it appear as though the bikes and riders were emerging from thick clouds of infernal smoke.

The bikes slowed and came to a stop behind the van. Leaning their Harley-Davidsons on kickstands, the bikers dismounted and sauntered towards Ezra and Karma. The men varied in height and body type, but all three wore greasy jeans under leather chaps, heavy motorcycle boots and sleeveless leather vests over bare torsos. Mirror-lensed sunglasses covering the men's eyes reflected the bright afternoon sun and gave the men's faces a blank, expressionless countenance.

A wiry man with a whisker-stubbled, weathered face framed by a mane of black, windblown hair spoke first. "Looks like you folks got a problem," he said to Ezra.

Although shorter and less bulky than the others, he carried himself like a cocky bantam rooster and Karma sensed that he was the group's leader.

"Hello!" Ezra said happily, extending his hand to the man. "Yes, it appears that we do. Our vehicle was running just fine and then for reasons unknown it gave out on the hill. I've tried everything I can to get it functioning again but it's completely unresponsive."

The man ignored Ezra's out-stretched hand and looked disdainfully at the van. He shook his head and spat a wad of phlegm into the dust. "Fuckin' Kraut wagon. What you hippies see in these pieces of shit I'll never understand. Any idea what's wrong with it?"

"No, not really," Ezra answered. "But I have the manual here and--."

"Fuck the manual," the biker interjected. "Give me the keys."

He snatched the keys from Ezra's hand and passed them to a tall, corpulent man with a protruding belly and greasy bandana holding back matted, shoulder length hair. "Hey Bear," he said, "jump in and try turning her over."

"Sure, Sonny," Bear replied. He pulled open the door and hefted his bulk onto the driver's seat.

The third biker, a powerfully muscled man with a shaved head and full beard down to his solar plexus, stood beside Sonny, eyes fixed on Karma. He pulled a pint of whisky from the back pocket of his jeans, took a long pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"How you doin' there, Sunshine?" he said. "Wanna drink?" The thin smile on his lips made Karma think of a lizard.

He held out the bottle and Karma shook her head. The bald biker's frank scrutiny of her body suddenly made her conscious of her outfit. She had dressed lightly for the long, hot trip home: belly-baring jean shorts cut high on shapely thighs and a tight, tie-dyed tee-shirt outlining large, full breasts unrestrained by a bra. Trying to ignore the biker's leer, she shook her head and folded her arms across her prominent cleavage.

Bear turned the key in the ignition with no results. Shaking his head, Sonny addressed the bearded biker who still ogled Karma. "Hey, Mel, get me a screw driver and pair of pliers outa my saddlebag, wouljda?"

The man nodded and Karma's eyes followed him as he turned and walked toward the bike. Despite the heat, a chill ran down her spine when she saw the insignia on the back of his leather vest: a profile of a grinning death's head bordered by two crescent-shaped patches into which were stitched the words,

HELLS ANGELS

CALIFORNIA

Karma knew well the Angels' reputation for impulsive, brutal violence and rough treatment of women, and had always carefully avoided club members when they showed up at hippie events in San Francisco to offer sketchy security, hassle hippie chicks and sell or procure drugs. The realization that she and Ezra were now at the mercy of such men made her uneasy but she reassured herself with the thought that Ezra could diffuse any threat that might arise with his eloquence and authoritative charisma. He would not, she knew, ever allow her to be put at risk.

Mel retrieved the tools and gave them to Sonny. Reaching into the engine cavity, Sonny tinkered with the engine for a few minutes before telling Bear to pull out the choke and key the ignition. The engine flared, caught and died. Sonny shook his head in frustration and reached back into the cavity, cursing under his breath as he worked on the dead engine. Finally he shouted, "Okay, try the cocksucker again, Bear."

This time the engine roared to life. Bear revved it hard several times and the tail pipe spewed thick plumes of blue-grey exhaust into the hot afternoon air.

"Far out, man!" Ezra enthused. "Righteous! What did you do?"