The Great Shark Hunt, page 24
But at the time it seemed necessary to come up with a candidate whose Strange Tastes and Para-Legal Behavior were absolutely beyond question… a man whose candidacy would torture the outer limits of political gall, whose name would strike fear and shock in the heart of every burgher, and whose massive unsuitability for the job would cause even the most apolitical drug-child in the town’s most degenerate commune to shout, “Yes! I must vote for that man!”
Joe Edwards didn’t quite fill that bill. He was a bit too straight for the acid-people, and a little too strange for the liberals—but he was the only candidate even marginally acceptable on both ends of our un-tried coalition spectrum. And 24 hours after our first jangled phone talk about “running for Mayor” he said, “Fuck it, why not?”
The next day was Sunday and The Battle of Algiers was playing at the Wheeler Opera House. We agreed to meet afterwards, on the street, but the hookup was difficult, because I didn’t know what he looked like. So we ended up milling around for a while, casting sidelong glances at each other, and I remember thinking, Jesus, could that be him over there? That scurvy-looking geek with the shifty eyes? Shit, he’ll never win anything.…
Finally after awkward introductions, we walked down to the old Jerome Hotel and ordered some beers sent out to the lobby, where we could talk privately. Our campaign juggernaut, that night, consisted of me, Jim Salter and Mike Solheim—but we all assured Edwards that we were only the tip of the iceberg that was going to float him straight into the sea-lanes of big-time power politics. In fact, I sensed that both Solheim and Salter were embarrassed to find themselves there—assuring some total stranger that all he had to do was say the word and we would make him Mayor of Aspen.
None of us had even a beginner’s knowledge of how to run a political campaign. Salter writes screen-plays (Downhill Racer) and books (A Sport and a Pastime). Solheim used to own an elegant bar called Leadville, in Ketchum, Idaho, and his Aspen gig is housepainting. For my part, I had lived about ten miles out of town for two years, doing everything possible to avoid Aspen’s feverish reality. My lifestyle, I felt, was not entirely suited for doing battle with any small-town political establishment. They had left me alone, not hassled my friends (with two unavoidable exceptions—both lawyers), and consistently ignored all rumors of madness and violence in my area. In return, I had consciously avoided writing about Aspen… and in my very limited congress with the local authorities I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine, a thing best left alone as long as possible.
So the ’69 campaign was perhaps a longer step for me than it was for Joe Edwards. He had already tasted political conflict and he seemed to dig it. But my own involvement amounted to the willful shattering of what had been, until then, a very comfortable truce… and looking back I’m still not sure what launched me. Probably it was Chicago—that brain-raping week in August of ’68. I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast.
For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst bad acid trip I’d even heard rumors about. It permanently altered my brain chemistry, and my first new idea—when I finally calmed down—was an absolute conviction there was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago. Suddenly, it seemed imperative to get a grip on those who had somehow slipped into power and caused the thing to happen.
But who were they? Was Mayor Daley a cause, or a symptom? Lyndon Johnson was finished, Hubert Humphrey was doomed, McCarthy was broken, Kennedy was dead, and that left only Nixon, that pompous, plastic little fart who would soon be our President. I went to Washington for his Inauguration, hoping for a terrible shitrain that would pound the White House to splinters. But it didn’t happen; no shitrain, no justice… and Nixon was finally in charge.
So in truth it was probably a sense of impending doom, of horror at politics in general, that goaded me into my role in the Edwards campaign. The reasons came later, and even now they seem hazy. Some people call politics fun, and maybe it is when you’re winning. But even then it’s a mean kind of fun, and more like the rising edge of a speed trip than anything peaceful or pleasant. Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he’s been trapped, but can’t flee.
The Edwards campaign was more an uprising than a movement. We had nothing to lose: we were like a bunch of wild-eyed amateur mechanics rolling a homemade racing car onto the track at Indianapolis and watching it overtake a brace of big Offenhausers at the 450 pole. There were two distinct phases in the month-long Edwards campaign. For the first two weeks we made a lot of radical noise and embarrassed our friends and discovered that most of the people we had counted on were absolutely useless.
So nobody was ready for the second phase, when the thing began coming together like a conquered jigsaw puzzle. Our evening strategy meetings in the Jerome Bar were suddenly crowded with people demanding a piece of the action. We were inundated with $5 and $10 contributions from people whom none of us knew. From Bob Krueger’s tiny darkroom and Bill Noonan’s angry efforts to collect enough money to pay for a full-page ad in Dunaway’s liberal Times, we suddenly inherited all the facilities of the “Center of the Eye” Photography School and an unlimited credit-line (after Dunaway fled to the Bahamas) from Steve Herron at the Times-owned radio station, then the only one in town. (Several months after the election a 24-hour FM station began broadcasting—with daytime Muzak balanced off against a late-night freak-rock gig as heavy as anything in S.F. or L.A.). With no local television, the radio was our equivalent of a high-powered TV campaign. And it provoked the same kind of surly reaction that has been shrugged off, on both coasts, by US Senate candidates such as Ottinger (N.Y.) and Tunney (Calif.).
That comparison is purely technical. The radio spots we ran in Aspen would have terrified political eunuchs like Tunney and Ottinger. Our theme song was Herbie Mann’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which we ran over and over again—as a doleful background to very heavy raps and evil mockery of the retrograde opposition. They bitched and groaned, accusing us in their ignorance of “using Madison Avenue techniques,” while in truth it was pure Lenny Bruce. But they didn’t know Lenny; their humor was still Bob Hope, with a tangent taste for Don Rickles here and there among the handful of swingers who didn’t mind admitting that they dug the stag movies, on weekends, at Leon Uris’ home on Red Mountain.
We enjoyed skewering those bastards. Our radio wizard, an ex-nightclub comic, Phil Clark, made several spots that caused people to foam at the mouth and chase their tails in impotent rage. There was a thread of high, wild humor in the Edwards campaign, and that was what kept us all sane. There was a definite satisfaction in knowing that, even if we lost, whoever beat us would never get rid of the scars. It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise until the next election.
* * *
This worked out nicely—or at least effectively, and by the spring of 1970 it was clear on all fronts, that Aspen’s traditional power structure was no longer in command of the town. The new City Council quickly broke down to a permanent 3–4 split, with Ned Vare as the spokesman for one side and a Bircher-style dentist named Comcowich taking care of the other. This left Eve Homeyer, who had campaigned with the idea that the mayor was “only a figurehead,” in the nasty position of having to cast a tie-breaking vote on every controversial issue. The first few were minor, and she voted her Agnew-style convictions in each case… but the public reaction was ugly, and after a while the Council lapsed into a kind of nervous stalemate, with neither side anxious to bring anything to a vote. The realities of a small-town politics are so close to the bone that there is no way to avoid getting cursed in the streets, by somebody, for any vote you cast. An alderman in Chicago can insulate himself almost completely from the people he votes against, but there is no escape in a place the size of Aspen.
The same kind of tension began popping up on other fronts: The local high school principal tried to fire a young teacher for voicing a left-wing political bias in the classroom, but her students went on strike and not only forced the teacher’s reinstatement but very nearly got the principal fired. Shortly after that, Ned Vare and a local lawyer named Shellman savaged the State Highway Department so badly that all plans to bring the four-lane highway through town were completely de-funded. This drove the County Commissioners into a filthy funk; the Highway had been their pet project, but suddenly it was screwed, doomed… by the same gang of bastards who had caused all the trouble last fall.
The Aspen Medical Center was filled with cries of rage and anguish. Comcowich the twisted dentist rushed out of his office in that building and punched a young freak off his bicycle, screeching: “You dirty little motherfucker we’re going to run you all out of town!” Then he fled back inside, to his office across the hall from that of the good Dr. Barnard (Buggsy) and his like-minded cohort Dr. J. Sterling Baxter.
For five years these two had controlled Aspen’s affairs with a swagger that mixed sports cars and speed with mistresses and teeny-boppers and a cavalier disdain for the amenities of the medical profession. Buggsy handled the municipal action, while Baxter ran the County, and for five fairly placid years the Aspen Medical Center was Aspen’s Tammany Hall. Buggsy dug his Mayor’s act immensely. From time to time he would run amok and abuse his power disgracefully, but in general he handled it well. His friends were many and varied—ranging from dope dealers and outlaw bikers to District Judges and horse-traders… even me, and in fact it never crossed my mind that Buggsy would be anything but a tremendous help when we kicked off the Edwards campaign. It seemed entirely logical that an old freak would want to pass the torch to a young freak…
Instead, he refused to go gracefully, and rather than helping Edwards he tried to destroy him. At one point Barnard actually tried to get back into the race himself, and when that didn’t work he shoved in a last-minute dummy. This was poor Oates, who went down—along with Buggsy—to an ignominious defeat. We beat them stupid, and Barnard couldn’t believe it. Shortly after the polls closed, he went down to City Hall and stared balefully at the blackboard when the clerk started posting the returns. The first figures stunned him visibly, they said, and by ten o’clock he was raving incoherently about “fraud” and “recounts” and “those dirty bastards who turned on me.”
One of his friends who was there recalls it as a very heavy scene… although Dylan Thomas might have dug it, for the Mayor is said to have raged horribly against the dying of the light.
And so much for what might have been a very sad story… except that Buggsy went home that night and began laying feverish plans to become Mayor of Aspen again. His new power base is a thing called the “Taxpayers’ League,” a sort of reverse-elite corps of the booziest Elks and Eagles, whose only real point of agreement is that every animal in this world that has walked on two legs for less than 50 years is evil, queer and dangerous. The Taxpayers’ League is a really classic example of what anthropologists call an “atavistic endeavor.” On the scale of political development, they are still flirting with Senator Bilbo’s dangerously progressive proposal to send all the niggers back to Africa on a fleet of iron barges.
This is Buggsy’s new constituency. They are not all vicious drunks, and not all mental defectives either. Some are genuinely confused and frightened at what seems to be the End of the World as they know it. And this is sad, too… but the saddest thing of all is that, in the context of this article, the Taxpayers’ League is not irrelevant. In the past six months this group has emerged as the most consistently effective voting bloc in the valley. They have beaten the liberals handily in every recent encounter (none crucial) that came down, in the end, to a matter of who had the muscle.
Who indeed? The liberals simply can’t get it up… and since the end of the Edwards campaign we have deliberately avoided any effort to mobilize the Freak Power bloc. The political attention span of the average dropout is too short, we felt, to blow it on anything minor. Nearly everyone who worked on the Edwards gig last year was convinced that he would have won easily if the election had been held on November 14th instead of November 4th… or if we’d started whipping our act together even a week earlier.
Maybe so, but I doubt it. That idea assumes that we had control of the thing—but we didn’t. The campaign was out of control from beginning to end and the fact that it peaked on election day was a perfect accident, a piece of luck that we couldn’t have planned. By the time the polls opened we had fired just about every shot we had. There was nothing left to do, on election day, except deal with Buggsy’s threats—and that was done before noon. Beyond that, I don’t recall that we did much—until just before the polls closed—except drive around town at high speed and drink vast amounts of beer.
There is no point even hoping for that kind of luck again this year. We began organizing in mid-August—six weeks earlier than last time—and unless we can pace the thing perfectly we might find ourselves limp and burned out two weeks before the election. I have a nightmare vision of our whole act coming to a massive orgiastic climax on October 25th: Two thousand costumed freaks doing the schottische, in perfect unison, in front of the County Courthouse… sweating, weeping, chanting… “Vote NOW! Vote NOW.” Demanding the ballot at once, completely stoned on politics, too high and strung out to even recognize their candidate, Ned Vare, when he appears on the courthouse steps and shouts for them all to back off: “Go back to your homes! You can’t vote for ten more days!” The mob responds with a terrible roar, then surges forward.… Vare disappears.…
I turn to flee, but the Sheriff is there with a huge rubber sack that he quickly flips over my head and places me under arrest for felony conspiracy. The elections are canceled and J. Sterling Baxter places the town under martial law, with himself in total command.…
Baxter is both the symbol and the reality of the Old/Ugly/Corrupt political machine that we hope to crack in November. He will be working from a formidable power base: A coalition of Buggsy’s “Taxpayers” and Comcowich’s right-wing suburbanites—along with heavy institutional support from both banks, the Contractors’ Association and the all-powerful Aspen Ski Corporation. He will also have the financing and organizing resources of the local GOP, which outnumbers the Democrats more than two to one in registrations.
The Democrats, with an eye on the probability of another Edwards-style uprising on the Left, are running a political transvestite, a middle-aged realtor whom they will try to promote as a “sensible alternative” to the menacing “extremes” posed by Baxter and Ned Vare. The incumbent Sheriff is also a Democrat.
Vare is running as an Independent and his campaign symbol, he says, will be “a tree.” For the Sheriff’s campaign, my symbol will be either a horribly-deformed cyclops owl, or a double-thumbed fist, clutching a peyote button, which is also the symbol of our general strategy and organizing cabal, the Meat Possum Athletic Club. At the moment I am registered as an Independent, but there is still the possibility—pending the outcome of current negotiations for campaign financing—that I may file for office as a Communist. It will make no difference which label I adopt; the die is already cast in my race—and the only remaining question is how many Freaks, heads, criminals, anarchists, beatniks, poachers, Wobblies, bikers and Persons of Weird Persuasion will come out of their holes and vote for me. The alternatives are depressingly obvious: my opponents are hopeless bums who would be more at home on the Mississippi State Highway Patrol… and, if elected, I promise to recommend them both for the kind of jobs they deserve.
Ned Vare’s race is both more complex and far more important than mine. He is going after the dragon. Jay Baxter is the most powerful political figure in the county. He is the County Commissioner; the other two are echoes. If Vare can beat Baxter that will snap the spine of the local/money/politics establishment… and if Freak Power can do that in Aspen, it can also do it in other places. But if it can’t be done here, one of the few places in America where we can work off a proven power base—then it is hard to imagine it working in any other place with fewer natural advantages. Last fall we came within six votes, and it will probably be close again this time. Memories of the Edwards campaign will guarantee a heavy turnout, with a dangerous backlash factor that could wipe us out completely unless the Head population can get itself together and actually vote. Last year perhaps the Heads voted; this year we will need them all. The ramifications of this election go far beyond any local issues or candidates. It is an experiment with a totally new kind of political muscle… and the results, either way, will definitely be worth pondering.
Tentative Platform
Thompson for Sheriff
Aspen, Colorado, 1970
1) Sod the streets at once. Rip up all city streets with jackhammers and use the junkasphalt (after melting) to create a huge parking and auto-storage lot on the outskirts of town—preferably somewhere out of sight, like between the new sewage plant and McBride’s new shopping center. All refuse and other garbage could be centralized in this area—in memory of Mrs. Walter Paepke, who sold the land for development. The only automobiles allowed into town would be limited to a network of “delivery-alleys,” as shown in the very detailed plan drawn by architect/planner Fritz Benedict in 1969. All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force.
2) Change the name “Aspen,” by public referendum, to “Fat City.” This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name “Aspen.” Thus, Snowmass-at-Aspen—recently sold to Kaiser/Aetna of Oakland—would become “Snowmass-at-Fat City.” Aspen Wildcat—whose main backers include The First National City Bank of New York and the First Boston Capital Corp.—would have to be called “Fat City Wildcat.” All roadsigns and roadmaps would have to be changed from Aspen to “Fat City.” The local Post Office and Chamber of Commerce would have to honor the new name. “Aspen,” Colo, would no longer exist—and the psychic alterations of this change would be massive in the world of commerce: Fat City Ski Fashions, the Fat City Slalom Cup, Fat City Music Festival, Fat City Institute for Humanistic Studies… etc. And the main advantage here is that changing the name of the town would have no major effect on the town itself, or on those people who came here because it’s a good place to live. What effect the name-change might have on those who came here to buy low, sell high and then move on is fairly obvious… and eminently desirable. These swine should be fucked, broken and driven across the land.
