New Age Cowboys

By Roger Kriney

Ren Hadley and Doug Gove, cousins from New Jersey, meet after years apart in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Both men, in their early thirties, struggling with failed marriages and child separation agony seek the assistance of psychotherapist Palmer Anderson. The three men along with another of Dr. Andersons clients, Jake Wilbert attempt to regain their foothold in the post hippy, cult oriented 1970s that was Saint Paul.

Thirty years after establishing and solidifying their relationship, despite their extremely diverse life paths, Hadley, Gove and Anderson along with Andersons brother, Ian, gather at the home of the now expatriate, Dr. Anderson in the Mexican western seacoast village of Sayulita. The decision to include Wilbert after all those years proves questionable. He drags them through the local illicit drug trade, sexual infidelity, a dangerous confrontation with an indigenous tribe and a romp through a New Age clothing optional resort. They establish liaisons with a Japanese-Mexican beauty, a pretty Seattle travel agent and a group of Alabama society belles ending with a violent clash with the unstable Mexican political scene.

This is a story of commitment and rescue between old friends. Their 1960s attitudes of acceptance and tolerance, tempered by the years, are tested in the post 911 world as they discover just how much they have come to still rely on each other and just how important that reliance has become as they have aged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467037778

Roger Kriney

Roger Kriney is a 32 year law enforcement professional who spent seven years working undercover during the 1980s. He was a member of the DEAs Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force and is a 1989 graduate of the FBIs National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. After graduating from the University of Charleston (West Virginia), in 1968 and attending graduate school at Montclair State University and Seton Hall University he was an ocean life guard, an army medic, a personnel manager and a business/human resources consultant before embarking on his law enforcement career. Roger has two children and five grandchildren. He lives at ther New Jersey shore with his wife, Marla where he continues to work in law enforcement. He has authored numerous short stories, poetry and is currently working on his second novel. Roger is a avid hiker, snow skier and an accomplished photographer.

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© 2011 Roger Kriney All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/21/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3779-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3778-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3777-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917302

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, copyright 1935, renewed ( c ) 1963 by John Steinbeck. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach reprinted with permission of Random House Inc.

Contents

Chapter 1

Getting There Across the Years

Chapter 2

Day 1

The Origin of High

Chapter 3

Day 2

The Old Kahunas

Chapter 4

Day 3

Heeeeeere’s Jake

Chapter 5

Day 4

The Pig’s Palapa, The Accident,

The Argument and The Ape

Chapter 6

Day 5

The Visit from Montezuma,

Where’s Juana, Mexican Politics

Chapter 7

Day 6

The Indian Village

Chapter 8

Day 7

I Wanna Juana, Puerto Vallarta and Emma Lazarus

Chapter 9

Day 8

In Search of the Love Nest

Chapter 10

Day 9

A New High Sister

Chapter 11

Day 10

The Naked and the Dead TV Stars

Chapter 12

Day 11

The Split and John Steinbeck Meets Palmer Andersen

Chapter 13

Day 12

The Nude Alabama Girls and the Rescue

Chapter 14

Day 13

Fears, Tears and The Mexican Army

Chapter 15

November 2006

Chapter 1

Getting There Across the Years

D oug, its Renaldo. I’m in LA and it’s about 9:25 AM here. I don’t know where you are, but I just picked up a newspaper and it looks like we’ll be flying into a hurricane. It’s just off Puerto Vallarta and heading for Cabo by Tuesday. Anyway, it’s just another adventure. I’ll leave my cell on call me when you get this message. I’ve got a lot of layover time. I won’t be going anywhere until, wait a minute, let me look at the ticket…2:14 PM. Give me a call back. Over and out.

Somehow Doug didn’t hear the ring on his cell when Ren called. He was sitting at the gate in the Bush Airport in Houston waiting for his flight to Puerto Vallarta; not watching television not reading a paper or in any way absorbing new and vital information. He was reading 1919, an old Dos Passos book about the early twentieth century in America and flashing through the collage of news snippets and the headlines of his time.

It was early September and Doug was meeting Ren in the Puerto Vallarta airport in Mexico later that day. He had started much too early in the morning when Ann, his wife dropped him off at the airport shuttle station in Toms River, New Jersey for a communal ride in a bumpy, noisy and unsafe mini bus to Newark Airport. It was a local so they stopped along the way to take on more wayfarers: couples headed for a week in Fort Lauderdale, businessmen en route to meetings in Chicago and St. Paul, elderly ladies visiting their daughters’ families in Boston, pretty college-aged girls, in pairs on the way to schools in Phoenix, Cleveland and points west.

Doug dialed Ren’s cell and he answered, Hey, Cuz. Glad you got back to me so quickly. Hurricane? Doug asked, Where did this hurricane come from? Palmer assured us that this was the perfect season. Hot, sunny…

Yeah, Ren said, I couldn’t believe it either. The LA Times has it on the front page. Say’s it’s right off the coast approaching the Puerto Vallarta area. Actually I was watching the Weather Channel here on LAX TV after I called you, and it has it off shore quite a ways. It looks like the rain bands are kicking ass along the coast.

Well, maybe you and I will be getting together in Guadalajara or Mexico City for a time. Do you have Palmer’s cell number? Maybe we ought to check in with him and see what’s really happening, at least in Sayulita.

I tried, Ren replied, his phone isn’t working or he’s turned it off, you know Palmer. I guess he and Ian are gonna have to sit in Puerto Vallarta Airport for a while if we can’t land there right away.

He’s a survivor, Doug said, those two together will be more than the Mexican airport security detail will be able to stand for too long. We might just have to bail them out of jail when we arrive.

Only you would think of that, Ren replied, but you’re right, Palmer’s bad, but Ian’s much worse. They’ll have them totally crazy in a short time. The Federales will either shoot them or kick them out for their own sanity.

Really Doug said, and changed the subject, When’s Jake supposed to get in?

I don’t think he will be able to get away until the day after tomorrow. He told Palmer that he’d been to Puerto Vallarta before and will take the bus to Sayulita. Ren answered. I haven’t spoken to him much, so I’m not sure what to expect.

That saves Palmer another trip into town, Doug said. No, I don’t know what to expect either. He was pretty freaked out the last time I spoke to him, some large money issue or something.

Or dope issue, he was really screwed up back in Saint Paul the last time I was back there, Ren recalled.

We’ll have to talk about him later, Doug said, How’s Collette and my favorite canine, Phoebe?

We’ll certainly have to talk later. Both are really doing great, he replied.

I’m scheduled to land first, Doug said, about two hours or so ahead of you, so I’ll meet you at your gate when you come in.

Sounds good, he replied, It’s been too long since we’ve been all together.

Yeah, I guess it was in Yosemite, last year. Palmer didn’t have a lot of time then, though… okay, look, I’ll see you in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico City, Hell, or with luck, Heaven if the hurricane gets us.

Cancel that thought, he replied, "I’m looking forward to a fish taco and a Dos Equis with you in Sayulita later tonight, hurricane or no hurricane.

It’s a date Cuz. Doug said, I’ll keep the cell on until I fly in case you get some more good news. I’ll turn it back on in Mexico after I land.

Later.

Bye.

The airport was crowded. Texas wasn’t Doug’s favorite place since the era of George W. Bush began. He spent some time there in the late sixties, at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and met some really good people from Texas but that was so long ago. Current events and the standing administration in Washington had, unfortunately, erased those memories and replaced them with visions of swaggering, sneering oil rich Texans getting richer at the world’s expense. As he looked around, his presumption of nouveau riche Texans was shattered by the appearance of the travelers. Most of the people he saw were the same weary, excited or business travelers as he encountered earlier in the day on the shuttle. He wrote off the shattered assumptions, deciding the Texans he had been expecting must all be beyond the walls of the airport or flying on private planes. He didn’t know why he expected to find those caricatures waiting at the gate with the regular folk. He guessed the name Bush Airport messed with his preconceptions.

Ren and Doug were first cousins. Both of them were born in New Jersey, in fact in the same hospital. Ren’s father and Doug’s mother were brother and sister. They’d spent precious little time in each other’s company except for the summers when Ren’s family and Doug’s would reunite at the Jersey Shore for a week.

Doug’s family moved to the small New Jersey shore town after the war in the late forties to get away from the encroaching suburban sprawl which his father had seen coming in northern New Jersey. He moved them all south, and much to Doug’s two older brothers’ chagrin, into new schools just as they were approaching their teens after their alliances were firmly established. Doug was the unexpected post war baby arriving in 1946 as his parents were approaching their forties.

Ren’s family didn’t stray too far from the old homestead and after the war Doug’s uncle Warren bought a house in the little town of Dunellen, New Jersey. He was a pilot in the Army Air Corps and a veteran of the China campaign where he flew over the hump, flying relief efforts from India into China over the Himalayas.

His uncle Warren and Doug’s father were both men who needed stability after a depression-wracked early adulthood and years of horrific war experiences. (Doug’s dad was a Seabee, a naval engineer in the South Pacific.) They both cast their post-war lots with old, stable Insurance corporations headquartered in New York City where they could expect to make a reasonable wage and raise their families in peaceful suburban areas with little chance of disruption and little risk. Like most men of their generation, they’d risked enough.

Ren’s family would arrive annually the first week in July at a rented bungalow in Island Heights, the resort town where Doug lived year round. It was the high point of Doug’s summer to have a relative his age around. He couldn’t wait to share his stories of the winter and hear about what Ren’s life had been like over the last year. They swam and fished together in the ocean, built rafts on which to cross the Toms River, and shared in each others hopes and dreams for the future. Those few days each year were some of Doug’s fondest memories.

As they grew older they had less contact. They saw each other at infrequent family events, funerals and weddings, and always gravitated toward each other. It was at their cousin Linda’s funeral in 1965 that they talked about rejecting their father’s staid legacies. They both wanted adventure rather than security. They had ideas of leaving the country and heading for Australia. They were both bearded shaggy-haired, embarrassing representatives of their respective families. Linda was eighteen when she died in childbirth along with the baby. Doug was eighteen, in college, and Ren was just nineteen.

Three years passed. Doug finished college in West Virginia and went back to life-guarding on one of the New Jersey ocean beaches and followed that up with a stint in the Army. In 1969 he married a girl from Delaware he met in college, they had two children, and he landed a nice, staid, safe career as a personnel manager for a large insurance company. How things change. Doug had become his dad, exactly what he didn’t want. He often had trouble fitting into the corporate structure. He never felt comfortable there and tried to get out several times. His escape plans were met by resistance from his wife, so he stayed where he was to keep his little family together in the security which his wife needed, choking himself daily on the tie around his neck.

Ren had one bad thing after another happen. In a strange incident at a Manhattan bar he became involved in a free-for-all fight. One of the combatants fell and struck his head on a curb and subsequently died from the injury. After an extended and excruciating investigation, Ren was cleared of all charges relating to the death, but only after being arrested and held briefly in custody in one of the infamous New York City jails. This shortened his college career at the University of Florida, and resulted in his attending Tulane University in New Orleans. Then a woman he had been rather seriously dating was killed in a traffic accident. He left Louisiana and in 1967 headed for the ski slopes of Vermont.

Viet Nam wasn’t a personal problem for Ren. His short bout with the NYPD made him somewhat undesirable as a draft choice. Doug still found it hard to believe that they let in people like Lt. William Calley and found Ren undesirable. That was our military then, apparently still is, considering the Abu-Gharib Prison scandal and the rape and murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl and her family. Most of the people with whom Doug served were pretty good guys sucked into a pretty bad situation. Some things never change.

Ren became an accomplished skier in no time and soon joined the ski patrol at Stowe. He lived in a cabin in the forest heated by wood he cut and split himself. One spring day, from out of the forest, a pretty Native American woman appeared at his door and eventually decided to stay. Two children and a degree in Marine Biology from the University of Minnesota later, he had a job with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Having become the world’s foremost authority on jumbo leaches, the primary bait for walleye pike, Ren was as trapped as Doug was in their father’s suits.

In mid 1977 Doug was promoted and transferred by his company to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Within two weeks, his marriage, already rapidly falling apart prior to the transfer, ended. He guessed she wanted him to remain the kind of person that his father was and Doug was having real trouble with that. His wife took their two kids and left him in the new house, in the new area, with a new job which he hated and headed back east to hook up with a guy who was a close friend of Doug’s up until that point. He wallowed in his anger, sadness and loneliness in Saint Paul.

One day not too long after Doug began living alone, he heard from his brother that his cousin and childhood confidante, Ren, was also living in Saint Paul, and that they should get together. With the address in hand Doug went Ren hunting. At the back door on the first floor of an old three-family home in the heart of the city a blonde, bearded, guarded and skeptical face appeared at the door in response to Doug’s knock. Doug was clean shaven and dressed in a suit and looked much too official for that face to recognize as an ally. The face’s suspicion soon faded as recognition came and the next thing you know Ren had moved into Doug’s house north of the cities, giving up his rental where he was also living alone following his divorce. The pretty Indian woman had taken his children and headed for the reservation in northern Minnesota.

Soon Doug had a scruffy beard and longish shaggy hair again. He was missing work and being looked at with a cynical eye by his conservative mid-western employer who had passed up giving this executive level job to several accomplished candidates from other offices, opting instead, and incorrectly, it seemed for Doug: the best qualified candidate in the country.

They were two new bachelors in their mid thirties, with multiple emotional issues, wallowing together over their failed marriages and now, childless lives. The neighborhood welcome wagon never brought tea and cakes to the door and Halloween was a bust despite all the candy Doug had bought. The costumed neighborhood kids were obviously not permitted near the two strange men in the old Johannsen house in Vadnais Heights, Minnesota.

Doug’s employer suggested that he visit the company psychiatrist, a prominent doctor who was the head of the Psychiatric Department at the University of Minnesota. Doug spent an hour pouring out his heart to this guy. At the end of his allotted time the Doctor said, I can see that you’re angry and hurt. He then said Doug owed him $85.00. Doug asked him why he didn’t just put a gun to his head and demand the money without dragging him through the pain first. He didn’t understand, Doug didn’t push it, paid him and lost all regard for the practice of psychiatry.

Ren searched his contacts, got the name of a psychotherapist in Saint Paul practicing out of his home/office and began his once a week soul purging. Doug saw Ren getting healthier almost immediately. Since Doug was spending his time off not coming home, finding lonely women in suburban bars, and doing too much drinking, Ren decided that this therapist would do Doug a world of good. That’s where he met Dr. Palmer Andersen. Palmer was a Ph.D., married with two children and had a successful practice in Saint Paul. He was a year or so older than Ren and Doug, wore a long Fu Manchu moustache, a leather cowboy hat, tan corduroy pants and a brown leather jacket everywhere he went.

They were the three of them, radical, rag-tag, and semi-beat remnants of the pre-hippy generation of the early sixties refusing to let it go and dragging it into the mid seventies, which is why they hit it off so well. They soon discovered that they weren’t alone. There were a number of them still out there.

Palmer seemed to be a magic man with his techniques of probing and pushing buttons to get to the anger, the sadness and the loneliness issues surrounding divorce and child separation. He made Doug feel refreshed and almost whole at the end of the sessions. Doug was sold on the technique. Palmer, Ren and Doug, along with a couple of other deeply emotionally screwed-up people, began hanging around with each other to the exclusion of almost everyone else. They went skiing in Colorado together, they ate lunch most days with each other, they discussed their future, planned their perfect careers and lives and talked of their too infrequently seen children.

They had ideas about correcting their collective future course by bringing this wonderful counseling technique to businesses. They bounced around the idea of forming a consulting company, but all of them lacked any knowledge of the business end. Ren said that he knew someone who had some business experience, who was also one of Palmer’s clients, a fellow named Jake Wilbert. Palmer was more than a little skeptical initially, but consented to include Jake in the early stages of the formation of the business.

Jake was married with a six or seven year old son. He was an advertising sales executive with an MBA who was about their age. He had been an officer in the Marine Corps and when he got out of the Marines he started working in Minneapolis for a small newspaper run by a friend of his wife’s, a guy named Sidney. Then the big one hit. Jake’s wife had enough of Jake and tossed him out. He was as frantic as the rest of them at the loss of his child from his life.

Palmer was a leader of a counseling community in Saint Paul, which advocated the very techniques that he was applying and having so much success with in his practice. It was by that time one of the last citadels of self described liberality east of Seattle and the San Francisco Bay area. It generally consisted of a group of older, semi-dysfunctional hippies and whoever was left of the beats, sprinkled with a few soccer moms (or the equivalent at that time), carpenters, a number of college professors, and some property and casualty underwriters, all with more psychological and emotional problems than old Palmer and the other professionals were able to accommodate. They needed help, and Palmer, with the other professional counselors, ran training sessions giving them the tools necessary to counsel each other. The classes and the other necessary methods of counseling were taught by the professional psychotherapists to anyone recommended by their own therapists as trainable. Doug had a degree in Sociology, the science of the obvious, which meant that he was trained to be pretty much an expert in nothing. Ren’s degree in marine biology somehow made him qualified and Jake was a business major with a concentration in marketing. They were all deemed trainable and taught to be co-counselors.

The premise was that all humans are innately warm, intelligent, caring and loving beings, however these natural qualities became clouded by experiences and varied distresses which they weren’t able to discharge, which now got in the way of being who they were born to be. Their instructors taught them that their natural purging processes such as crying, ranting anger and inappropriate laughter, had been socialized out of each of them by those in authority who misinterpreted them and tried to quiet such discharge. When during the course of their lives they were confronted by situations or problems which were similar to those that hadn’t been effectively dealt with in the past, they became stuck and subsequently weren’t able to rationally deal with the new challenge presenting itself, hence certain destructive behavioral patterns inevitably developed. The key to effective counseling, they were taught, was not providing advice but rather actively involved intimate listening, while encouraging the natural discharge process.

Ren became the most sought out counselor of the batch. He had a way, like Palmer, of getting you right to the patterns preventing you from doing those things in your life that need to be done. Doug would come out of a session with Ren or Palmer incredibly better than when he went in. It seemed almost like sorcery. Doug could never counsel with Jake, he never seemed to get it.

The community as a whole was against all forms of discrimination. It was determined to confront anything racist, ageist or sexist where it lived and when it reared. They realized the devastating effect prejudice had on society and on the individual, and how each time they became a victim it drove them farther into those destructive patterns which affected the ability to see clearly and take charge of their lives.

It didn’t take long for the community to take these issues on and attack them within itself. Problems like sexism, ageism, racism, class-ism, religious dogmatism, alcoholism, marijuana- ism, money-ism, etc., too many more ism’s than could be latently harbored in any group of supposedly liberated people began to be revealed. When one of the members felt that he or she was being treated unfairly or ism-ed by one of the other members the aggrieved member was required to holler foul. Small ism courts were convened where the affronted member could testify to situations such as I was re-stimulated by the sexist, ageist, classist way he or she looked at me, and consequently I was worse after the session than before I went in. The offending members were chastised and held to a stricter, more frequent series of counseling sessions in which they became the client. All this counseling began to take up all the time of the co-counselors who began adopting more and more of the ism’s from each other ending in further re-stimulation prompting more cries of foul, hence more mini- courts and on and on. Now, what they weren’t all crazy with in their own lives they became re-stimulated with and began adopting other’s insanity, a sort of counseling incest. If you didn’t see it the way the ism courts deemed, it seemed that your unhealthy patterns were getting in the way of your being able to see clearly enough to agree with the aggrieved party and the community as a whole. It began to feel more like a cult, rationalizing everything that was done or not done as being for or against the community, with ramifications and increasingly harsh consequences. Saint Paul’s own mini version of Jonestown was beginning to form.

More than once Doug had to rescue Jake from one ism-driven jam or another due to his talking patterns and his many biases. He scared people. He was big and loud and leered at women. One court Jake ended up in front of for whatever egregious infraction or re-stimulation was about to pronounce a death sentence on Old Jake, ousting him from the community and forbidding him