A Crime Not to Try

By Herbert Borkland

The Fist of Beauty is an anti-Vietnam War collective of four theatrically good-looking young Berkeley University dropouts who tour the country opening protest rallies by enacting a sincere ceremony of hippie love by which they themselves live bound together in the innocent Children’s Crusade spirit of the early Sixties.

One hot night at the height of 1967’s Summer of Love, The Fist throw a Love-In at their California farm and, thanks to Mahatma Jerry from the local Indian ashram, they enter into a four-way Tantric Marriage – and The Fist become a laboratory set to test, on such perfect specimens, a flower child’s first certainty: “All you need is love.”

Their's is a Romance because, even when at each other's throats, no one ever ceases to hope after and hurt for the other three. A Crime Not To Try celebrates a quartet of laughing Sixties street heroes who, as the cynical Seventies arrive, make History by refusing
to stop caring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359184378

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COPYRIGHT 2018, BY HERBERT BORKLAND

All rights reserved. This is work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author.

Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

DIGITAL ISBN:  978-0-359-1837-8

PAPERBACK ISBN:  978-0-359-17624-3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Cover art by Elena Maza and Libby Lael

1969 photo of the author and Elena by Tom Greene

Editing and book layout-design by Libby Lael

To Aubrey Brown,

for all that never was.

I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation

(Talkin’ ‘bout my generation)

Just talkin’ ‘bout my g-g-g-generation

(Talkin’ ‘bout my generation)

The Who

TRIP 1

MAY 1977

"Ecstasy is a hard act to follow."

Springtime at lunch hour in the last great Western capital. These people are guilty. Look at them. Crime dreams awake, more real to this noon full of hungry sleepwalkers than is the city they dull. Guilty! Guilty! Once notorious and currently wanted by the FBI, John Chane (an alias) owed them all, each passer-by, the back of his hand. Sorry, but my close association with lawyers has coarsened me.

Across 16th Street, an oily fart blatted out of a Metrobus and hung its dissolving brown veil on the hot air, blurring what Chane saw ahead of quivering automobiles when the red traffic light turned green: a popular Washington D.C. public park set aside, sunny today, in the black heart of The Beast.

A sparse few city-blighted oaks scrubbed new leaves high over dry-rotten park benches circling a marble fountain too big and ugly for the little earth it crushed down on. Pale low-budget businessmen in suits fed out of their attaché cases, seated shady in short sleeves, eyeing delicately made-up secretaries in light pretty dresses animated by shivering yellow freckles whenever a breeze stirred the sun-shot upper tree leaves. Brown bags open on their laps, the working girls listened to some jive-ass Chocolate City DJ from a portable radio. Jackson Browne sang Running on Empty – crushingly apropos. Strolling along under these fine old municipal trees, Chane also clearly heard overhead the endless frying sound of dry invisible cicadas fine-grinding his fate.

Outwardly, just another neutral urban face, glistening slightly, a bright patch on a soggy crowd, with his honey-blond head set level and light-struck. Those chiseled Aryan features were the artwork of an aging Nazi plastic surgeon years ago. The world saw a bold mold of smiling lips, with a ruler-straight nose whose streamlined nostrils’ subtle flair was Modernistic, while the chin of his granite jaw couldn’t have been cleft better by Moses. Trouble was, between Moses and Modernism, this strong deceptive face, to a contemporary eye, simply looked passé and as out of date as the dashing old-fashioned heroes of silent movies.

Easy moving in his Weejuns, Chane was on balance but in motion for its own sake – the stride of somebody with nowhere really left to go. Although he’d rather be inside off muggy streets, Chane knew by experience; while browsing indifferently in department stores, too many older women would assume from his presentable patient air that he was a salesclerk. Or, anyway, such was their usual excuse for approaching him. So now the feet took a beating. The size-twelve flat feet of a six-three thirty-four year old middle-weight hurt today. Chane made his living, only a few blocks away from here, standing around all day floor-directing TV shows at WONE’s famous Broadcast House studios on K Street.

And yet professionally anonymous was Chane, to guess from the casual East Coast propriety of a seersucker sports coat worn, already somewhat wilted, over a plain white Oxford cloth shirt with its button-down collar comfortably open and tieless. Hands slung low in the deep pockets of gray flannel slacks on a tall man keeping score from the corners of steep gray eyes. Awake, thanks, wide awake and hip to their shit. They are the true criminals. If only these people knew who ran among them angry today, disguised to the bone!

…Unless, of course, nobody else but Chane remembered anymore how publicly and violently he once loved them all. And they broke his heart.

Side by side, chewing on white bread tuna sandwiches, an Asian woman and one slim sloe-eyed male idly tracked the long-legs blond for a double-heartbeat before looking off elsewhere, rearranging their legs to air sticky thighs, still eating, always hungry. Chane spotted them. How damn much he’d like to reveille this city! Tell them all the truth, bawl out a noisy speech right now in their public park. Dare not speak to me of fame! Glory is exactly that dumb fountain, drizzling upward one spare yard to spill back over and over again the same stale marble cupful of lukewarm water!

The drumbeat of his hoarse inner fugues ratatat on through Chane but speechifying meant nothing strong anymore, and he knew it well. That hurt enough, just by itself, to keep his pot boiling, mad. Because, he happened to be a born public speaker, an historic spell-binder par excellence. So, wasn’t his hot air as Dantesque as Hell? To be stuck all-raw in a steamy eternity of backed-up Radical rhetoric, trumpeting deserted halls forever – Self’s antechambers, eh? Late at night sometimes, stoned, alone and emotional, it all boiled down to his insane untimeliness.

Wherever Chane might go, he lived as exile-in-residence, never better than unknown and on the run but famous once in his own country and time – the Sixties, this country, Vietnam wartime – when he protested mightily, became scrupulous to offend and broke scores of civil, federal, state and local laws. Hell-bent on stopping War in the name of Love, Chane had himself become big news, a celebrated spokesman, and this napalm-and-blood-guilty nation flinched at his vulgar fury as before a cracked mirror.

Chane, barefoot in torn blue jeans and a Fight The Power tee shirt, up on stage, two straight days without sleep and tripping on acid, microphone in hand – Peace and love, brothers and sisters! – swaying before two hundred thousand May Day protestors occupying the National Mall as far as TV news cameras could see. Stop The War! Chane stripped naked on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Stop The War! Chane blowing refer smoke in Walter Cronkite’s face one day and spitting on B.F. Skinner the next: Pavlovian reflex, professor. I salivate at the sight of fascists! Stop The War!

Chane got quoted, arrested, damned on newspaper editorial pages and mobbed in person: an hallucination of publicity. Paraclete to his generation and a Wilderness In The Voice! Rolling Stone called him a genius and a prophet, and The New York Times said Chane was a criminal sex cultist. Once – remember? – Youth spoke from Chane’s forked tongue, but then one day the war actually finally did end. And didn’t the Movement end up turning on him, with the air purpled by Indictments, and Chane went underground? Word on the street told about a face-change, complete plastic surgery so good his wife gasped, plus a brand-new identity cooked up by revolutionary Leftists who vanished Chane to prove they were still able to and very resourceful at hiding bonfires under bushels.

It all boiled down. To what? Reality as I have used it, sparingly, for medicinal purposes only… Not without a sense of humor, but then came crushing loneliness, crazy fear and sweating terrors late by night. It all boiled down to… A national crowd-pleasing street saint ending up with nobody left to love, not even himself anymore.

Arriving late at Broadcast House a quarter-hour ago, his assistant director named the West Coast guest scheduled to be interviewed at twelve o’clock sharp on Actuality and – trembling shock. Seconds later, Chane bolted out a side door. Now the morning crew stood around, light one floor-director, Union guys staring at useless TV cameras big as canons, shaking their crewcut heads because now a whole day’s schedule started to crumble, and up in Studio A control room, Chane’s producer sat brooding and murderous as only a big-market control freak who lives and dies by split-seconds of hideously expensive airtime can get.

So somebody from the great dead days shows up downtown, routinely pursuing his own life without guessing how its rounds bore down on an old friend, now named Chane. Last time they spoke, however many gone years and busted worlds ago, Chane sincerely offered to murder today’s guest. Below Chane’s scalding shame, a part of him old blues singers call his second mind whispered even worse: What if this is no coincidence but signals enemy action? Was Chane sold out? Were the Feds finally closing in for the kill?

John Chane!

Buttery clean slippery hair splashed sunlight as Chane’s head snapped around, heart rioting, but, no, Chane grunted in relief and finger-combed the cowlick out of his gray eyes. There was only another WONE floor-director coming through the high trees below a Federal skyscape of office buildings. Pat Reese: a short athletic twenty-four year old musketeer – with the brown pageboy haircut and bristling mustaches to prove it – sporting a blue polo shirt, tan chinos and white tennis shoes. Pat shouldered aside two glaring pedestrians smoking filter-tip cigarettes to put a strong hand on Chane’s arm and casually search his friend’s eyes.

"Man, I knew you must be here. I told Holland. He said to use the wagon."

Pat raised a cheerful can-do tenor voice, but, head back, his blue stare narrowed. He was on Chane’s side, whatever it was, but Chane knew the shorter man took his arm in case Chane was drunk or high or might require some polite manhandling. Pat lettered in high school football on a Maryland state championship team. Big guys didn’t intimidate him on the field and, off-field, they made good friends.

Pat jerked a thumb over his fullback’s shoulders at the wood-paneled Broadcast House station wagon idling at the 16th Street curb where drivers trapped in the lane behind the Chevy were already starting to lean on their car horns.

What’s the hassle, bro? You’re bum-trippin’ the whole damn studio.

Chane looked down to Pat. Not exactly a friend yet, but a born pal, the kind of a guy you might’ve known since grade school: always has your back and down for whatever – a dues paying member of the immortal international guild of guys standing up for guys.

We gotta boogie. Holland like to bust a gut.

Honk! Feeling numb, Chane shadowed Pat through the brown-baggers and after-lunch cigarette smokers and out of the old city park. A warm dusty smell of casual use and ownerless neglect filled the station wagon. Honk honk! Chane slammed the sprung passenger door, flattened the lock button with his elbow and then settled back in the seat after digging out a screwdriver from under his butt. Appropriate enough.

Chane sat there, breaking down now under intense personal pressure. Honk! Impossible to ignore what came next. Honkhonk! Seeing Hank Rollo. Honk honk honk! Admitting the man’s name aloud inside, despite himself, Chane winced. Pat threw him an interested look and then saw his chance to spin the wheel one-handed, stomp on the gas and jump into traffic. The car horns’ bullying bray dwindled away. Relaxing a squint tight around scorched gray eyes, inward-looking, John Chane’s temples were getting hollow five years after his last surgery.

2

A blunt capable hand shot up to adjust a droopy rearview mirror while Pat Reese cut through traffic. Ever competitive, virile, ahead, now he became the great expert, briefing Chane.

You know Hank Rollo, he began.

Do I?

"Don’t you read the Post? Hank Rollo from the Coast! George Will did a column the other day about ‘The Governor’s Guru.’ An ex-Yippie or Zippie or one of those old radical collectives. Yeah, he’s in town lobbying about nuclear reactors. Cuts his hair and puts on a suit and now he’s a big noise in California politics. What a gang of Martians. He used to take acid."

Chane thought grimly, I’ve dropped more acid with Hank Rollo than you’ve eaten aspirins.

Brown may get to be President after Carter’s two terms are up. A lot of smart money says so. Rollo’s got an inside track. That’s clout – much more than that rinky-dink public services director job he holds down. I hear he’s the guy who fixed the Guv up with Linda Ronstadt and got nude beaches legalized. You were there. Do you remember him from the Sixties?

…

A big Leftie? He ran around with all those cats you don’t hear about anymore, but this dude –

"Right! I know! Got it!"

Pat glanced sideways across the front seat. His voice changed; he thought John was a friend.

Damn, man, don’t blow my mind! You really do not want to work today, do you?

No, Chane sat furiously trying to push his guts back together. Mustn’t spill them. He rationalized, told himself it wasn’t likely Rollo might recognize him behind Dr. Augustus Vogel’s renegade Aryan artwork. Even assuming they could somehow catch deep sight of one another through hot diamond-white Klieg lights and a flying-wedge of Actuality staffers pandering for all they were worth.

In fact, Chane already had success casually confronting newsworthy old comrades at the TV station. Joan Baez, the Reverend Jesse Jackson several times and, when he ran for Congress, Tom Hayden with or without Jane Fonda. To date, none of those past faces moved him, much less wracked his barbwire heart, as today at the thought of being on the same studio floor a few yards away from Hank Rollo. Madness! Hadn’t Chane sworn to break his back? Stop it! A rush of all his long-denied memories was forever threatening to carve through Chane, blow him irretrievably away into the vast past.

"Verboten. No memories making! Hah! Dis iss a psychic-atry exzperiment mittout president. Dr. Vogel had adored lecturing captive Chane on the risks of what came down to externally induced schizophrenia – a shattered break-off from the first three decades of Chane’s existence. Choose between this experiment and prison for certain. The artful old Nazi mugged Chane daily with pre-war Berlin repartee and his charming insistence on your capitulation to his charm, but the piloting ageless mind behind his steady hands knew: No memories making!"

Fighting to stay present, Chane hung his eyes’ longest gaze high up 16th Street and, puffing out his belly, began to bellows each breath separately. Like a joint between a climbing boxy irregular skyline and the basic blue May sky, that tall steel lattice was the WONE broadcast tower, ruby-tipped and winking at night. Years of practice at this impossible portable amnesia didn’t make it any easier. Try harder. No earthly good in consuming a fresh chance by re-running every detail of his stale misfortune. Especially, knowing in advance how each detail branched, forked again and was re-riven into an infinity of split nerve filaments reaching past the stars themselves, back to God. And anything was possible. He didn’t know himself anymore. He truly might go ape in five minutes and strangle the bastard on television. Again, Chane resorted desperately to his meditation, ancient Chinese techniques, circulating chi. Back to God. Pat whiz-kidded the devil through fast traffic, turning, tires shrieking, onto K Street, crisis-charged on his special mission.

John envied Pat’s simplicity in silence, staring ahead, inwardly clawing toward calm. Think of anything else current. Chane had a movie date tonight to see Star Wars with Cindy McNamara, head of the Art Department. Everybody said it was a fun show. Chane drew down more deep breaths. Even on the streets, they smelled of May. Ah, yes, thank God for the undeniable soft insurgency of spring! Chane close his eyes as WONE approached, to feel light warm on the lids. Green pierced what sunshine softened: the worst is not always certain. Yes, the old Daoist drills are working, he realized abstractly. I’ve switched around again, and now I seem back into an Up Cycle. Slight manic-depressive and reasonably paranoid long before the good Doctor diagnosed Chane. F’k him, too! This mug was his fault. Or his masterpiece? Why did the old goose-stepper insist on playing both Freud and Goethe? "Beauty iss too disguise. No vun looks underneat ids mask, ha!"

Chane’s looks gave him troubles every day, beautiful people had their special problems, too, but nobody cares to be told, and, since his beauty was peculiarly false, it gave him double trouble. He aroused unsolicited ardor, triggering archetypal totemic reflexes in total strangers, exciting irrational expectations even among the unromantic. He got type-cast, unconsciously awarded a certain star billing and then often resented for it – when all he wanted most in the world was to meld into enfolding backgrounds and never ever stand out.

I’m, like, really bummed out, Pat. I need to get stoned. Or laid. Or both. It’s Spring Fever come late, is all.

Heavy, dude. Pat Reese glanced over and flashed a tough grin.

Pat understood that Chane was making something like a man’s excuse for snuffing, however briefly, their esprit de corps. A rock-hard glint of approval passed between the two. After all, Chane sat thinking, a man of my generation. Pat began talking soothingly about pussy, on and on, grossly graphic. A sappy breeze bent resinously on its course through the open station wagon; Chane sneezed. A bump jiggled them through the suspension system (shot to hell years ago), easing over the parking lot entrance thank-you-marm. Broadcast House’s seven story shadow doused their sparkling windshield where the mid-day sun had cartwheeled rainbows across the glass.

Derailed Rollo waited, already off-schedule inside, being kept placated by oily coffee and small talk while the crew got rounded up. So inexpressibly contrite, Mister Rollo. Heads will roll oh so. Reese was a nice guy, very bedrock American and whole-seeming, all of a piece. Chane knew him for another likeable Seventies’ weekend barbarian motorcyclist, a Maryland public-schooled urban redneck with his psyche pried wide by Hustler magazine sex and occasional cocaine. But these new-life people came in matched interchangeable gray hues after one quick decade swirling full of terminal Day-Glo types like Rockin’ Rollo. Who couldn’t help but remind you of your vehement lovely Cuban-born wife Filipa and of Cherry, tiny exquisite dirty Cherry whose buds of breasts you kissed, sharing – and on whom it wouldn’t do to dwell, either. Everyone finally despairs of their revolt. Be a man. Sell out.

A special slot was set aside for the Broadcast House station wagon. Pat and Chane slammed the doors, stretching short shadows over the parking lot’s blue-gray gravel bed. Their walking feet crunched enough to mask Chane’s keening sigh. He glanced at Reese again. Did Pat remember The Fist of Beauty (…one of those old radical collectives…) or ever read or hear about a Tantric Wedding or… anything? What did teenage Pat do during the Sixties? Watch the Smothers Brothers on the tube? Root for Billy Jack? Go to San Francisco with flowers in his hair? What would manly conventional Pat think if I tried to explain how avoiding Hank Rollo made excellent sense if you took into account how once Filipa and I did happen to be married to him? And his wife.

3

Stationed outside the golden scentless inner lobby of Broadcast House, an overweight Rent-A-Cop got up without word-one to key open a heavy bullet-proof glass door behind his Security Desk. Turning, his back humped the blue uniform and, under its visor cap, dark short hair had been carefully water-combed down a fat neck cut by deep red furrows. Looks like the rain scars on a Carolinas clay bank, Chane recalled unhappily, willing himself elsewhere. Producer Paul Holland’s pale squinty blue eyes burnt holes in Chane through the thick soundless glass. He stood tensely in place beside an overgrown rubber plant, laying for Chane and Reese among the low beige couches and framed publicity stills of smiling on-air talent hung on gold-foil lobby walls.

Pat deserted Chane – no solidarity in hell – and with a mission-accomplished shrug of his wide shoulders, by-passed Holland to hurry off to Studio A. As the cop patiently waited, Chane leaned over the art-metal Security Desk, to check for Rollo’s signature on In/Out forms ring-bound in an open notebook. Yes, here: egomaniac loopings like two wheels between the smokestack of an artsy caricature of a locomotive. Hank Rollo – The Little Train Who Thought He Could. Chane nodded thanks to the cop who shut the security door behind as Chane made himself stroll casually into the deluxe lobby.

Carroty orange hair, low forehead, death-ray eyes – disgust with Chane broadcast from among slick green fronds unfolding against Neo-Deco gilt wallpaper. Nose too big, thin lips and pimple-rouged cheeks – the red-faced producer stood there blushing hatred in a silvery sharkskin business suit with bell bottom trousers and jacket lapels out to his shoulder pads. Nixon would wear that suit. With a wordless jerk of Holland’s potato nose, Chane got damn-well told to go to Studio A tout suite. Professional dignity was being demonstrated, much inorganic soul. Chane silently cursed Holland, slap-footing down and around the linoleum corridors to Studio A where Actuality was, as they say, taping.

What makes you breaks you. Television made Chane: news