Who were they? All strangers? Some gang of ugly bikers or speed freaks from San Francisco? Yes . . . of course . . . that bastard Edwards had brought in a bunch of ringers. But then he looked again ... and recognized, at the head of the group, his ex-drinkalong bar-buddy Brad Reed, the potter and known gun freak, 6’ 4” and 220, grinning down through his beard and black hair-flag ... saying nothing, just smiling . . .
Great God, he knew the others, too ... there was Don Davidson, the accountant, smooth shaven and quite normal-looking in a sleek maroon ski parka, but not smiling at all ... and who were those girls, those ripe blond bodies whose names he knew from chance meetings in friendlier times? What were they doing out here at dawn, in the midst of this menacing mob?
What indeed? He scurried inside to meet Guido, but instead ran into Tom Benton, the hairy artist and known Radical ... Benton was grinning like a crocodile and waving a small black microphone, saying: “Welcome, Buggsy. You’re late. The voters are waiting outside ... Yes, did you see them out there? Were they friendly? And if you wonder what I’m doing here, I’m Joe Edwards’ poll watcher ... and the reason I have this little black machine here is that I want to tape every word you say when you start committing felonies by harassing our voters . . .”
The mayor lost his first confrontation almost instantly. One of the first obvious Edwards voters of the day was a blond kid who looked about seventeen. Buggsy began to jabber at him and Benton moved in with the microphone, ready to intervene ... but before Benton could utter a word the kid began snarling at the mayor, yelling: “Go fuck yourself, Buggsy! You figure out how old I am. I know the goddamn law! I don’t have to show you proof of anything! You’re a dying man, Buggsy! Get out of my way. I’m ready to vote!”
The mayor’s next bad encounter was with a very heavy young girl with no front teeth, wearing a baggy gray T-shirt and no bra. Somebody had brought her to the polls, but when she got there she was crying—actually shaking with fear—and she refused to go inside. We weren’t allowed within one hundred feet of the door, but we got word to Benton, and he came out to escort the girl in. She voted, despite Buggsy’s protests, and when she came outside again she was grinning like she’d just clinched Edwards’ victory all by herself.
After that, we stopped worrying about the mayor. No goons had shown up with blackjacks, no cops were in evidence, and Benton had established full control of his turf around the ballot box. Elsewhere, in Wards 2 and 3, the freak-vote was not so heavy and things were going smoothly. In Ward 2, in fact, our official poll watcher (a drug person with a beard about two feet long) had caused a panic by challenging dozens of straight voters. The city attorney called Edwards and complained that some ugly lunatic in Ward 2 was refusing to let a seventy-five-year-old woman cast her ballot until she produced a birth certificate. We were forced to replace the man; his zeal was inspiring, but we feared he might spark a backlash.
This had been a problem all along. We had tried to mobilize a huge underground vote, without frightening the burghers into a counterattack. But it didn’t work—primarily because most of our best people were also hairy, and very obvious. Our opening shot—the midnight registration campaign—had been ramrodded by bearded heads; Mike Solheim and Pierre Landry, who worked the streets and bars for head voters like wild junkies, in the face of near-total apathy.
Aspen is full of freaks, heads, fun-hogs, and weird night-people of every description ... but most of them would prefer jail or the bastinado to the horror of actually registering to vote. Unlike the main bulk of burghers and businessmen, the dropout has to make an effort to use his long-dormant vote. There is not much to it, no risk and no more than ten minutes of small talk and time—but to the average dropout the idea of registering to vote is a very heavy thing. The psychic implications, “copping back into the system,” etc., are fierce ... and we learned, in Aspen, that there is no point even trying to convince people to take that step unless you can give them a very good reason. Like a very unusual candidate ... or a fireball pitch of some kind.
The central problem that we grappled with last fall is the gap that separates the Head Culture from activist politics. Somewhere in the nightmare of failure that gripped America between 1965 and 1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.
Our ten-day registration campaign had focused almost entirely on the Head/Dropout Culture: they wanted no part of activist politics, and it had been a hellish effort to convince them to register at all. Many had lived in Aspen for five or six years, and they weren’t at all concerned with being convicted of vote fraud—they simply didn’t want to be hassled. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl ... and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 Magnum at various gongs I’ve mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of “White Rabbit” while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide.