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zzambrosius_02CHAPTER ONE: ARE YOU GOING TO THE OREGON COUNTRY FAIR?
The Amtrak Cascades shook and wobbled, rolling the passengers from side to side as it passed over a rough stretch of track. Mr. Rothakis’ eyes popped open. He looked around as much as he could without turning his head, then relaxed and smiled a little.
“Yakety-yak,” the conductor’s voice came over the intercom: “Our next station stop is Albany. Yakety-yak.”
‘Almost there,’ thought Mr. R. He rolled his shoulders as well as he could in the seat. Happily, he had no seatmate, not since Portland. He stood up and stretched a little harder, then picked up his briefcase from the window seat and began to lurch forward to the Bistro car.
“A cup of coffee, please.” He handed over a couple bills, got a pittance in change. That went into the tip jar. It was dark, near ten o’clock, and the train was running two hours behind. No one else was in the Bistro.
“Why are you headed to Eugene?” asked the attendant, clearly bored.
“Mmm,” he said, sipping the coffee: “I have an online acquaintance who is an habitué of your Country Fair. She invited me to come hang out for the weekend, maybe get some material for some stories or essays.” Rothakis was bored, too. He wondered which of the so-far-standard responses he would get.
“Ooh, do you have a Camping Pass?” The clerk was one of the envious sort. “I wish I could get one...”
“Really?” At least this response was more pleasant than the ‘I-Hate-The-Country-Fair-Buncha-Dirty-Hippies’ rant. His seatmate from Tacoma south to Portland had been all over that one. That had been tiresome. “How tough would that be for you?”
She was about twenty-five, shorter than he was, and thin. She had blond hair turning brown as she aged, a snub nose and grey eyes. “Oh,” she said, “I guess I could do some food booth work or somethin’. It’s just this gig,” she waved around at the Bistro: “it makes it hard to do other stuff. A secure job, benefits, blah blah. But weird schedules. It’s hard to get time off, too.”
He nodded politely. He could see that she was looking him over; he knew that he was presentable. He was fifty-two years old, five-ten, a hundred-seventy. Not overly muscular or ripped, but wiry. The really striking thing about him, though, was his hair and beard. He had not gotten a haircut since his thirtieth birthday: his hair reached to his bum when it was all combed out. As usual, he had it in a topknot, from which it hung to below his shoulders. His beard he kept shaved to a fringe, with a medium-long pointy goatee, and all his facial hair was pure white. He had a prominent browline with fairly impressive eyebrows, brown turning white. He was tanned and wrinkled, signs of a hard, mostly outdoor life.
He also knew that he gave off a peculiar vibe, one that attracted some discerning women. He’d been careful not to analyze that too carefully: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ he’d think. He hadn’t been especially lucky lately. ‘That’s mostly from being on trains and busses all the time, though,’ he thought, hopefully.
“Yakety.” said the PA. “Yak yak.” The train rattled to a stop. Mr. R sat on a stool by the bar.
“So,” she continued: “You’re a writer?”
“Well, when I’m not making a living.”
She laughed: “What do you do for a living, then?”
“Oh, various things. Gardener more than anything else, I suppose. Truck driver, secure messenger, delivery drone. I even delivered lost luggage for Amtrak for a while.”
“Yeah? That’s a contractor gig though, isn’t it?”
“Correct. No bennies, no sick days. Bleah.”
“Really, y’know?” She was sympathetic: “What’s your gig now?”
“Actually, I don’t have one. I scored a big wad recently, and I’m in a sort of traveling and writing mode right now.”
“Oh. Well, what do you write about?” The train lurched and began to roll.
“A little bit of Sci-fi, some historical stuff. And essays about economics, politics, culture. The history and techniques of swordplay.”
“Swordplay? Do you do SCA?”
“I was in deep for a while. I haven’t done much lately, since it doesn’t fit in with a vagabond writer lifestyle. Can’t haul the armor around with me, right?”
“Right! Well, I am Lady Lucy of Camden in the SCA.”
He stood and bowed: “Viscount Ambrose, Knight.”
“Oh, well, very pleased to meet you, I am sure,” she said, and curtsied. They both laughed, two people with a secret connection.
“So, are you a published writer?” She was clearly curious about his writing, not just his sexual potential.
“All of my stuff is self-published, except a couple stories. There’s some money trickling in from that. Of course you could check Tournaments Illuminated for my byline, there are several articles of mine in back issues of that.”
“Oh, cool! Can I get your stuff on the Webz? I’m Sally, by the way, Sally Ackley. Mundanely.”
“Ambros Rothakis,” he said. They shook hands. He gave her a three by five card with web addresses for his various sites and links. She grinned and pocketed it. Several customers entered the Bistro then.
“Me and my girlfriend are coming out to the Fair on Sunday. Maybe I’ll see you there,” she flirted.
“Maybe so,” he laughed, “if they haven’t tossed me out by then.” His coffee was gone; he picked up his briefcase. One of the blue haired ladies was giving him the evil eye. On the off chance that she was Greek or Italian he made a warding sign and then left the car before she could respond.
As he walked along, swaying with the movement of the train, he surreptitiously touch-checked his various belongings. Wallet in the left thigh pocket of his cargo pants, ring of keys in the right slash, watch and chain, folding knife. He’d just had the card case out, but he touched it anyway, in the right thigh pocket. Also there he carried a set of real and almost real credentials, from various schools and periodicals. They were in a leather folder, which he could feel behind the card case. He had three thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties in an opaque blue aspirin bottle in the left slash pocket. There was more money hidden in different places around his person, and in his briefcase.
In fact, absolutely everything of value that he owned was on his person. The backpack and bedroll he’d checked when he boarded the train in Seattle had nothing but clothes, blankets, and a few toiletries in them. Some of the clothes were his work, hand-sewn or crocheted; ‘Those would be a pain to lose,’ he thought, ‘but not a disaster.’
He sat down in his seat, putting his case beside him on the seat by the window.
The trousers he was wearing were a dark gray; his boots were black leather, half calf harness type, very worn. He felt along the inner seam of the left boot, checking the position of his knife. All good.
He opened the briefcase and pulled out his laptop. An eight-year-old Pismo, it was not one of his valuable possessions. Still, it had been free. He made it a practice never to actually pay for electronics. Someone always had an outdated relic that they wanted rid of. The most valuable thing he had in the realm of modern technology was a thirty-two-gig thumb drive. That was only of worth because it had his collected works loaded on it. That drive was password locked, zipped into two nesting plastic boxes and locked in an inner pocket of his briefcase.
He called up his mail program, answered a query, then made some notes on his trip. He set up all his accounts to dump incoming data into a message box, and put up a “Sorry, cannot respond now,” sign at his web site. Then he shut the Pismo down. ‘If I’m lucky,’ he thought, ‘I can stay offline until Tuesday.’
“Yakety Yak,” said the PA: “Our final station stop. Please take all your stuff with you. Yak.”
He was wearing a red crocheted vest, in design like a jerkin, over a long sleeved black tee shirt. He donned his hat, a crocheted item as well, which he had designed to allow him to pull his topknot through a hole in the top. The hat was black, with red trim in a meander pattern around the brow. The train stopped.
When everyone else was off, he rose and exited the train. His claim check got him his backpack and bedroll, which he strapped on. The air was cool, but the pavement was giving back the day’s heat, and it was still humid.
“Hey,” he said to the baggage guy: “Is there a cheap motel within walking distance?”
“Define walking distance,” the guy said, not looking up.
“Two years ago I hiked the Appalachian Trail.”
“Oh.” He looked up then: “Sure, just go up to Sixth Avenue and turn right,” he gestured: “there are several along that street and also some up a block on Seventh.”
Ambros winked: “Thanks.” He strode off into the wilds of Eugene, Oregon.
He awoke at six the next morning. ‘Hmm. Slept in,’ he thought. He rolled out of bed and did some light calisthenics and stretching, then he took a quick shower and dressed: boots and trousers as the day before, a fresh shirt and a more decorative jerkin. He braided his topknot so his hair wouldn’t tangle while it was wet.
“I want some breakfast,” he said aloud: “And some news.” He checked to make sure he had his key card, grabbed his briefcase, then headed for the office.
At the front desk, he engaged the clerk: “Hey, my name is Rothakis, room six. I got in pretty late last night, so I didn’t bother with arrangements. I want to pay for a week’s stay, no need to clean up or change sheets until I check out. Do you have a safe?”
“Yes we do, sir, and we are bonded,” she said. “I can give you a detailed receipt for whatever you entrust to us.”
“Excellent.” That was a huge relief, actually. Not every motel had such, and now he’d rest easier leaving his briefcase behind. “Also,” he continued: “where would you recommend for breakfast? I don’t mind a bit of a walk.”
The place she recommended was ten blocks away. He stopped at a convenience store to get a copy of the local daily paper. He checked the date: July 13, 2007. He paid and left the store. He found a red newspaper box where he acquired a local ‘alternative’ weekly, and spotted a rack near the café that had a half dozen or so free lefty tabloids on offer. Armed with this load of knowledge, he strolled towards the café-bakery-hangout. He passed through a gate in the fence next to the storefront, and found himself in a spacious patio floored with concrete. The floor was broken up with three treewells, the closest of which had growing in it a Japanese maple with astonishingly maroon leaves. He admired the pruning job on that tree, it was very much like the style he’d learned as a teenager. There were tables and chairs about, and some patio umbrellas in the square style that been the rage a couple years back. He went inside the bakery.
The barista grinned and said: “That’s a big stack of newsprint.”
“Yeah, I just got to town and I figured I’d better check out who’s saying what about whatever.” This he said in a self-mocking way, and with a wink. She laughed and he ordered up a pile of food. He checked the layout of the kitchen, which was just visible through the prep area, spotting a big window and some cast iron frying pans. ‘There has to be a door back there, somewhere,’ he thought.
He treated himself to homefries with his omelet, though that was a week’s worth of starch for him. A lot of salsa on the taters helped him rationalize that.
The decor was sort of ‘hip-yuppie’ with paintings and swaths of woven fiber art on the walls. The paintings had little cards, with statements by the artists, who were all locals. The fiber art was mostly from Central America. He noted a Guatemalan piece. There was indirect lighting from fixtures all around the ceiling, and hanging lights as well. That and the light from the big windows in three of the walls made for a bright, cheerful room.
He liked the ambience, it reminded him of cafes in the college towns he’d lived in during his twenties, and long discussions about philosophy and the state of the world. Things had looked a lot less hopeless then.
Sipping coffee, he began to peruse his catch, starting with the tabloids. First, a left-liberal rag from some Christian do-gooders, thinly disguised as an activist group. They hit all the correct causes with just the level of outrage he expected. He read two stories clear through, then skimmed the rest of the paper. He tossed it into a basket of discarded newsprint; he noted that he could have saved a buck on the daily by raiding the discards.
Here was a Stalinist-CPUSA paper—really? That followed the previous rag, unread. “Era Times” was next. It took him a few minutes to figure that one out; it was largely semantically null. Then he realized it was published by an arm of the Taiwanese Government. Toss.
‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘here is something...’ He had a copy of the IWW’s national paper, with a local tabloid insert. Both the national and the local Wobblies were in a swivet, noisily disagreeing about a particular action that had relevance to Mr. Rothakis. He read every word, chewing on the pros and cons, even the parts laden with logical or tactical fallacies. As though he or any of his confederates were going to “claim responsibility and justify this action”. He memorized the names of two local Wobbly contacts, then tossed the paper. He glanced through the other three lefty tabs, reading an article in one, a column in another. Then he tossed them. ‘Nothing but the usual,’ he thought: ‘liberal talking points and arguments about trivia, disguised in radical language.’ None of those papers had noticed the San Diego dustup, or maybe it was old news to them.
The local daily was exactly predictable: moderately right-of center, pedestrian, boring. He booted up the Pismo and soon determined that the owner, publisher and several of the top editors were all functionaries in the county Republican Party. Amusingly, the local ‘alternative’ weekly was owned and managed by two lawyers (!) and a dentist, all of whom were on the local Democratic committee. ‘Talk about control of the media...’ he mused. All normal, of course: “I used to be disgusted,” he sang softly, “but now I try to be amu-used...”
However...the weekly had an insert with a schedule and map of the Fair he was headed for. That he annexed, for further study. The daily had a weather forecast: it was going to be warm that day, warmer Saturday, and hot on Sunday. ‘Hmm. Extra undershorts and talcum powder,’ he thought.
He shut down the Pismo, deliberately not looking for mail or messages.
Back in his motel room, he made his preparations. He made the bed, then dumped out his pack. He pulled the smaller rucksack out of its pocket in the side of the framed pack, and put the clothes he wanted for the Fair, plus his toiletries, flashlight, and survival kit into it. He strapped that down, attached his bedroll, and set it by the door. He repacked the main backpack, then opened the briefcase. He took the blue bottle out of a pocket in the inner facing of the case. He pulled the rest of his money out of hidden pockets in his trousers and the briefcase. He suppressed the urge to count it, he knew how much was there: not quite thirty-two grand. ‘You know to the dollar how much is in each stash, and the total. Stop obsessing!’ That money was what was left of his share of the loot, and hard-earned it was. It needed to last him for a good while, too.
The total had gone down precipitously in the first two months after he got it. He knew that he was going to have to slow his spending, and soon. Still, the expenditures he’d made had been necessary...
Right after the balloon went up, he’d hightailed it to Miami, where he’d gotten his eyes lasered. Amusingly, with his myopia now cured, he found he needed reading glasses for close work. He checked: they were in his briefcase, so he moved them to a trouser pocket.
Then he’d bussed to Kansas City to get his hernia and hydrocele dealt with. After that, it was on to NOLA for a date with the hackers: his birth persona was now, for all practical purposes, nonexistent. Ambros Rothakis had a minimal paper trail, and was filed in all the right databases. Rothakis had a passport, a bank account, debit card, and a notarized copy of a birth certificate. There was an excellent forgery of a 1954 Cuyahoga County birth certificate on file at that county’s Courthouse, in Rothakis’ name. The document it replaced no longer existed.
‘None of that shit was cheap, but it was all necessary.’ Money was only good if you used it, but he had to live on this haul at least until the ruckus died down.
Nevertheless, he needed some relaxation. His online contact from the Fair Family, one Luisa Milonacci, had invited him to come for the weekend, and suggested that he might like to write something about the countercultural aspects of the Event. He had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It was a mild and harmless con job he was engaged in, for the purpose of having a relaxing weekend in the country. The further advantage was that it would get him entirely out of sight of the real world for what could be a crucial few days.
‘Having enemies is a pain,’ he thought: ‘and well-connected, powerful enemies . . .’ But at least there was almost no chance that they knew who he was, now.
There was another advantage to the trip he was on: this Fair, from what he could see of it online and in the local paper, was a craft fair on growth hormones, among other things. He saw it as an opportunity to stock up on well-made clothes and accessories, stuff that would last a while. For example, his boots were about shot. They wouldn’t take another sole, and the toes were wearing through.
‘And if I pay cash, I won’t show up on the Webz,’ he thought, nodding.
In the end that decided him, as far as how much cash to carry with him. He took the money out of the bottle, three thousand, and put it into a small waxed leather wallet, which he stowed in a pocket hidden on the inside of his left pant leg. It was under the thigh pocket, so the stitching didn’t show. He snicked shut the snap lock on that pocket; it was as secure a way to carry the wad as he knew of.
His pocket watch was on a chain attached to his belt loop. He pulled it out, opened it and considered: was he likely to need to know the time? In the end he checked it against the room’s digital clock, wound it a bit, and put it back in his pocket.
The rest of the money went in the briefcase, along with the laptop and some other things he wouldn’t need at the Fair. He combed out his topknot, put on his hat, and picked up the rucksack. Checked his wallet: just over three hundred in small bills, and the ‘Dragon Pass’ that would get him on the bus to the Fair. Then he stopped for a minute, mentally going over all the stuff in the rucksack, item by item.
Here came another irrational urge: ‘You don’t need to check on the derringer. You don’t need to unpack the whole rucksack, get out the survival kit, look under the false bottom, and check on the damn thing. It is loaded, both chambers, the safety is on, the packing is secure, and nothing can go wrong with it.’
He took several deep breaths, checked his wallet again, for the key card to the room, then opened the door. ‘OK,’ he thought. ‘Briefcase in the safe, then I’m off.’
The bus mall was a few blocks east and a couple south of his motel. He strode purposefully along, the rucksack riding high on his shoulders. He stopped for a moment at an intersection, where he had a clear line of sight east: three snowcapped mountains were visible through the slight haze of smog. They rose above the hills and lesser peaks around them, many miles away, impressive even at that distance.
He thought: ‘I should find out their names. The indigenous names, too.’
A little later, he approached the downtown bus mall. That was an unintentionally silly faux-European construction, complete with a clock tower. It was only nine by that clock, but there was a long line formed already. The first buses were scheduled to leave the mall at nine-thirty, according to the tabloid insert. He looked that over while he was standing in line, studying the map. He recalled the booth number where he would find his contact, and found the booth, near the front Gate at the bottom of ‘the Eight’. He grinned at the generally chaotic maze of trails laid out on the map, eventually realizing that the trails on that side of the site did have a vague resemblance to a figure eight. There was a small river marked on the page, meandering through the property, with a tributary creek running into it from the southwest. Such of the Fair as lay on the other side of that creek was labeled as ‘the Left Bank’.
He was extremely impressed by the level of talent playing gigs at the Fair: he’d heard, or heard of, fully a third of the acts who would be performing on the stages set throughout the site. He resolved to explore that aspect of the event more thoroughly than he’d intended.
Despite his early arrival in line, he did not make it onto the first or even the second bus. He was offered a standing spot on the third one, but declined. Thus it was almost ten-thirty when he boarded the fourth bus, got a seat at the very back, and settled his pack between his feet.
A very large round man sat beside him. Large Man was already sweating profusely, but it was early in the day: he didn’t smell too bad. He was definitely rocking the ‘jolly and talkative fat man’ archetype, so Mr. R began to probe him for information:
“You been to the Fair before?”
“Oh, yeah, man, every year. Wouldn’t miss it. How ’bout you?”
“My first time in this part of the world. Never seen this Fair before.”
Three teenaged girls had squeezed into the other end of the bench seat that spanned the back of the bus: “Ooh, a Fair virgin,” one of them said. They all had white patches in various sizes and shapes painted on their faces and shoulders, and their hairstyles were similar as well. Each of them wore some version of what many people called a ‘fauxhawk’, with the hair on the sides of their heads cut very short and the top and back left long. It gave the impression of a horse’s mane. The three of them giggled and began to chatter about their experiences at the Fair. Their good times, it seemed, involved boys slightly older than they were, who were variously named Dylan, Tommie, Brandon, and so on. They were categorized as cute, hot, dreamy and dangerous. The exact proportions of these characteristics that each boy possessed turned out to be a matter of some dispute between the girls.
The bus was blasting along a five-lane highway, heading northwest. The driver suddenly spun the wheel, shifted into the left turn lane, slowed for traffic, then swung around onto a rural road going west. Blue-green hills rimmed the valley in the distance, and the farmland around about was green or yellow. Irrigation pipes on huge wheels either sat idle or shot arcs of water into the sky.
Large Man was more interested in the girls than he was in Ambros. Rothakis leaned over close and murmured, just loud enough for Large Man to hear: “Y’know, observation tells me that about one in ten thousand girls that age is interested in guys our age. Odds are not good, right? And they are underage. Hmm?”
Large Man cast his eyes down: “Yeah, I know. Just lookin’, huh?”
“Okay but, one: you are making them uncomfortable. And two: you are not very subtle. Which is part of why they are uncomfortable.”
Large Man frowned, thoughtful, nodding. Ambros let him stew about it for a while. Then, Mr. R encouraged him to talk about the History of the Fair, as Large Man saw it:
“So at the beginning, things were way more political. The people putting the Fair on were all these lefty-socialist-anarchist types, and there was a lot of talk about the Revolution and all. I miss those times, man. We were gonna change the world, peace, love, all that stuff. Lotta drugs and booze, too, and easy sex.”
“You must have been what? Fifteen, sixteen back when it started, right?”
“Yeah. Good times, man.”
“I’ll bet. But the paper here,” Rothakis waved the tabloid around: “says ‘Drug Free’ all over it.”
“Yeah,” said Large Man, “they hadda do that to get the County Mounties and the local government to back off.”
“Ah, I bet that changed the experience for you.”
“A little.” Large Man grinned infectiously: “I smoked up good after breakfast though, so I’m high until I get home. I got some brownies in my bag, and I may be able to score a few more hits. I know a lot of folks with camping passes.”
“That makes a difference, huh?”
“You bet. Campers can get on site early, and nobody searches their stuff. They can bring in booze, weed, acid. Nobody really seems to have crank, other than like coffee and No-doze. Don’t get me wrong, though. I mean, ya gotta be . . .” Large Man searched for a word: “. . . discreet, I guess you’d say. They’ll still run you if you’re puking drunk, or making trouble.”
“Interesting. So the real partying starts after dark, I guess.”
“If you have a pass. I only get one once in a while.”
“How hard is it to get one?”
“Pretty tough, even if you’ll work for it. If you’re like me, it’s even tougher.”
“You don’t work? Even for the sake of something like the Fair?”
“Nah. Mr. Slacker, that’s me.” Large Man seemed sad about that, so Ambros ventured:
“You could change that, though. Right?”
“I guess.”
The bus swung around a turn onto a smaller road, then shortly after that made a right into a yet smaller one. Ambros looked out the window and saw that the verges of this road were filled with people converging on the Fair from campsites on private property on both sides of the approach road. Interestingly, some driveways had stern ‘no trespassing’ signs posted, others bore signs with the Peach logo of the Fair on them, reading: ‘please respect our neighbors’. Still other properties were wide open, except for pop-up tents where folks were invited to pay for parking or camping privileges. The meadows at those properties were thick with tents, little and big, and vans and campers. There were even a few campsites with nothing but blankets spread on the ground. Booths selling food and crafts lined the road side of the properties. ‘So that extends the Fair’s financial effect on the towns around here into a sort of gray market. Funny, there was no mention of this phenomenon on the fan site or the official Fair web site.’
Mr. R asked Large Man about that, and got quite a talking-to:
“Yeah, back at the beginning these goat-ropers out here just hated the Fair.”
Mr. Rothakis nodded: “Heard a little of that shit since I started telling people I was coming here.”
“I bet,” grinned Large Man: “anyway, for years we fought with the neighbors about every little thing. Couple times I wondered if they were gonna come for us with torches and shotguns, y’know. Never quite happened, but still...at last, around ’89 or so, one of these guys thought of creating a camp for the overflow, people who couldn’t get passes. Then Toby Jackson, one of the Fair Family, he bought the next property west of the site. About that time, we went supposedly drug-free, then somebody who had a knack for talking to cops got high up in Security Crew, and since then, things have been mellower. Every year another neighbor finds some reason to make friends with us, usually so they can get some money out of it.”
“Money does seem to affect everything, doesn’t it?”
Ambros noted that Large Man was now including himself in the Fair Family, and that for all his professed slackerhood, he had a deep passion for the ideals of the founders. He said: “If you were tempted to work to support the Fair, where would you choose to go?”
Large Man shrugged: “I know some guys on Garbage Crew. Maybe there. Here’s the Gate. Good luck, dude.”
“Thanks, I may need it.”
Mr. R sat and waited till the bus was nearly empty before he got up and headed for the door. Last off the bus, he was nonetheless greeted with cheers and cries of welcome. The greeters were a fantastic bunch: intentionally so, he realized. One woman was dressed as a flower, a daisy. She had plastic petals sticking out of the sides and top of her head, green leaves in a ruff around her collar and a skintight green leotard. She was obviously, very obviously, wearing nothing under it.
There were more normal sorts of fancy dress: a clown, a bug-eyed alien, a man on a unicycle dressed as a knight, swinging a floppy foam sword. Ambros found that guy especially funny. He was just starting to turn away when the unicycle knight swerved a little close to him. The sword flipped in his direction as the unicyclist fought for balance: Ambros defended automatically, snatching the man’s arm, taking the sword away, then easing him off his mount and safely to the ground. He flipped the foam sword in the air, caught it by its ‘blade’ and handed it back to its owner: “Careful, there,” he said: “you might hit somebody.” Unicycle Knight was embarrassed and apologetic. Ambros waved off the apology: “It’s fine, really. I am not hurt.” He looked around and saw a golf ball sized river rock on the ground near the unicycle: “See, you probably hit this with your tire. Not your fault.” He picked up the rock and tossed it into the bushes.
It was hot enough by then that he was uncomfortable. He stripped off the jerkin he’d put on that morning and removed his shirt. He rolled it tight and stuffed it into the outer pocket of his rucksack, left empty for that purpose, then put the jerkin back on. This garment was unlike the cotton one he’d been wearing on the train. This one he’d crocheted of long strips of leather, in black and red. He’d decorated it with faux gold and silver cord, embroidering meander patterns and symbols from history and fantasy. He shook his head so his hair flew about a bit, and suddenly felt like he was at home.
“Say,” he said to the Flower Woman: “I’m a Fair virgin, and I’m supposed to have a Significant Other camping pass waiting for me.”
“Cool! Welcome to the Fair Family!” She grinned. Then she hugged him. He hugged back, somewhat surprised.
He grinned back at her, then said: “I wonder where I go to get that pass?”
She gave him another hug, and directions to a Gate.
The people at that Gate said, “No, we don’t have your pass, go to Security.”
The man at Security scoffed, assuring him that no such thing was possible: “All the passes are already handed out, buddy. Don’t try to scam me...” Mr. R spoke softly and abandoned the Security Gate as quickly as he could.
After two more incorrect stops, he sat down by a water fountain and pondered. A scurvy looking wretch dressed like a combination pirate-homeless person-horned toad approached: “Hey, man, jokebooks for sale, best jokebooks in the world!”
“Let’s have a look,” said Ambros. He looked through the obviously homemade pamphlets, picked out one full of jokes about money, another one about politics. He handed over a couple of bucks, then asked for directions.
“Oh, yeah, man: that way for a quarter mile, look to the left and you’ll see a booth made like a dragon. That’s where everybody gets their passes.”
“Okay, thanks a lot.” He thought: ‘If this guy isn’t on speed, then he’s been popping no-doze like an addict.’
He was not at all surprised that the least reliable looking person he’d seen had given him the correct directions.
He reached the front of the line, drew forth the printout he’d made of the information his contact had sent him. “I need a camping pass...Sparrow Woodruff is the booth rep, and I’m a significant other for Luisa Milonacci.” This was supposed to be a magical incantation, which would open all doors and set him free of all bonds. To his surprise, it worked.
The functionary behind the counter, a woman of fifty or so, fetched a cardboard square with a printout attached. She looked at his ID and said: “Oh, yes, Professor Rothakis, I heard about you. Sign here...”
“Professor?” He took the proffered pen and signed.
“Yes, I heard you were a sociologist from somewhere in the Midwest. Luisa told my sister Anna you were coming, and since Luisa’s girlfriend had to work, she used the pass for you.”
“Ah, a game of telephone. No, I write social and cultural critiques, published online and POD. I would say I am more anthropologist than sociologist, and more syndicalist than scientist. Either way, though, I haven’t any educational credentials that would warrant ‘Professor’.”
“Oh, well,” she laughed: “better get used to it. If Anna thinks you are a Professor, most of the Family will know it.”
“Fascinating,” he said, raising one eyebrow. They wrapped a red cloth band around his left wrist, cinched it shut with a peculiar little tool, then noted the numbers on it, and the time of day.
She glanced again at his ID, and handed him a laminated card on a lanyard. There was a picture of a Green Man on it, and the inscription: ‘Elder’. He grinned sardonically and donned it, bowed and took his leave.
He thought about his new wristband, signifier of his Status as an Insider. He’d studied the Fair as well as he could, by lurking on the Fair’s fan club web site. Despite its origins in an egalitarian and revolutionary movement, its interactions with the mundane world in which it was submerged had inevitably caused cognitive dissonances to occur. Camping passes, while clearly necessary for the preservation of the site, also created a caste system. He’d determined that Fair Family and Crafters and Crew Members had these passes. Some but not all of the Entertainers had them, and who did or didn’t was a well-chewed rag of contention among the Family. Fair-goers who were close to Family could oftentimes cadge one for one night or more. Ordinary hippies who did no work to support the fair had a harder time getting them. Mundane fair-goers often didn’t even know the camping passes existed; they were there to spend their money, what a carny would call Marks.
The more hip and with-it folks among the Paying Customers were often there for more sophisticated reasons: to enjoy the Spectacle, or even to be part of it, and part of the Ambience. Most of the Ambience performers (as the web site called them) were also paying customers, and some of them resented it mightily. Mr. R. cautioned himself: ‘Better blunt the usual cynicism. It’s not like your carnival days, and not every Paying Customer here is a Mark.’
Nonetheless, having a pass made you high-caste, for real. He thought it likely that such Status was going to put obligations on him, though he didn’t yet know what those would be.
He wondered now if his additional and unexpected Status as ‘Elder’ would come with more such.
Considering all of that, he decided to be the Professor; that is, to bring forward to the front of his mind the guy he strove to be when he was writing analytical papers about Spectacle or critiques of Propaganda. ‘I’ll still deny any credentials, but I’ll try to think like an academic.’
He slogged back towards the Main Gate, through crowds of people surging out of the parking lots and along a path through the woods from the off-site camping. Halfway back to the bus stop he had to negotiate a sort of pre-Gate, where people in tee shirts that read ‘Security Crew’ were asking everyone a few pointed questions.
“Got any booze, glass, drugs or weapons in that pack?” asked a bored-looking twenty-something hippie.
“Nope,” he replied. He shed the pack and let the Security Guy look through it, which he did without unpacking it at all. The knife in his boot, the derringer hidden in the survival kit at the bottom of the pack, the metal flask of Irish Whiskey: all of it escaped detection, even though he hadn’t intentionally hidden any of it. ‘Not more than I always do, anyway,’ he thought.
When he’d cleared the Security Gate, he paused to look around. Most of the people, probably ninety-five percent of them, were dressed in perfectly ordinary fashion: in the way his SCA persona still thought of as ‘mundane’. Tee-shirts, Hawaiian shirts, a few men with no shirts; skirts, blouses, dresses; practical shoes, jeans, shorts for both genders; that was the general attire. People coming in from off-site camping tended more toward hippie or early twenty-first century slacker-barbarian clothes, and were more likely to be tattooed or pierced. They were also more likely to be naked, or partly so. The parking lots yielded up mostly ‘straights’, people with respectable jobs and good steady incomes. These two groups mixed with a minimum of fuss. Some of them greeted each other as acquaintances from previous years.
His outfit placed him dead center between those two groups.
Then there were the rest of them, the 5 percent. If you could fall back in time, and draw a hundred random hippies from the streets of San Francisco in 1968, then set them loose with free blotter acid in a combination of a thrift store and a theatrical costume shop...you get the idea. It was bewilderingly weird, but mellow, right outside of any experience he’d ever had. He loved it. His one trip to Burning Man was the only place where he’d seen comparable outfits. But at the Fair, almost everyone was free of the post-modern ironic attitude that pervaded Burning Man. ‘The costumes they wear here,’ he thought: ‘it’s more like they’re channeling their inner realities, and less like a sarcastic take on a costume party. And they are way more organized than the Rainbow Family. I could eat here and not get sick.’ He shuddered a little at the memory of ’92 at the RFG.
Everyone was smiling and happy, either having a good time, or looking forward to it. Three women chatted him up, separately, as he walked towards the main Gate, admiring his jerkin (and, he suspected, his hair and physique). ‘I’m not even in the Gate yet,’ he thought. ‘This...is gonna be great.’
He approached the Main Gate and cruised right through, waving his banded wrist at the crew.
That’s when the fun really began.
It was already warm and lots of people had taken off some or all of their clothes. Other people were preposterously overdressed: wearing outfits or costumes expressing various anti-Establishment themes, or ironically expressing pro-Establishment beliefs, or just dressed up as fairies or goblins or whatever. There were people on stilts, clowns on stilts, a woman dressed as a tree on stilts. He saw a man on stilts done up as a giant ox, with stilts for his arms as well as for his legs, drawing a steampunk gypsy wagon. A steampunky couple on stilts wandered along behind. They carried old-fashioned eggbeaters, with which they offered to scramble the brains of various people passing by. A surprising number of folks accepted the offer, and stood still as the eggbeaters whirled above their heads.
Then there were the Paying Customers, thousands of them, dressed in variations on the theme: ‘ordinary’. Many of them looked stunned and amazed. The paths were thick with them, making it hard to get anywhere quickly. People pushing strollers or pulling wagons full of children created blockages that caused the crowds to swirl in unpredictable ways. He watched as a man about twenty years old went snaking along the path at twice the speed of the traffic, dodging and squirming and never bumping anyone. ‘Must be a longtime fairgoer, he really knows the technique,’ Ambros thought.
Along the path came a group of people, naked or wearing only loincloths: they had painted themselves blue, with red lips and nipples. The straights and ordinaries cleared out of their way with alacrity and some alarm. The Blue People were hooting and moaning like owls on meth, dancing around and displaying their assets to the crowd. Some of them were quite attractive, others fairly hard to look at. It didn’t seem to matter to them. Mr. Rothakis grinned, nodding at the people all around, relaxing into a meditative state, trying to see everything, hear as much as he could, smell and feel the crowd. He sought to store it all up for future contemplation.
His first goal was to check in with the booth where he would be sleeping. There were five crafters, all women, one of whom was his contact. These women had decided (after a good deal of debate, apparently) that he could crash in the back of their booth. He had studied his map; he knew where he was going. The booth was very near the lower end of the Eight, and thus only a hundred yards or so from the Gate. It took a good twenty minutes to get there, what with the crowd and his desire to see as much as possible.
Eventually, he arrived at the booth. There was a counter on each side, and shelves and paintings on the walls deeper into the space. He double-checked the number, then said, loudly: “Is Luisa Milonacci around here somewhere? Or Sparrow Woodruff?”
“I’m Luisa, hold on a second or two,” This from a woman in her mid thirties, who was handsome in a Frida Kahlo-ish way, and indeed had a paintbrush in her hand. Her canvas was skin: she was finishing up the task of painting a blue-and-white feathery pattern onto the bare perky breasts of a twenty-something woman. She finished the job with a flourish, put the woman’s proffered twenty dollar bill into a lockbox, and excused herself to her next customer: “I’ll be back in just a minute or two, hold the line, okay?”
She stepped up and hugged him, then said: “Welcome to the Country Fair.” She was very bosomy, with a waist that his arm went right around. He smiled. He felt a wave of déjà vu, the strongest he’d ever experienced. Like he’d known her for years, like they’d been intimate, as though his arm had been there ten thousand times. He struggled to contain it, succeeded; it faded but didn’t leave him.
She continued: “Having fun yet?”
“Oh absolutely. Feels like home.”
“That’s wonderful. Come sit down, I just have a minute, then I’m back to work.”
She had written some stories that he’d liked and they’d struck up a correspondence online. It was she who had invited him to the Fair after reading some of his essays and a short story or two he had published. She led him behind some curtains at the back of the booth, saying: “Stash your pack here, the bedroll can go over there.” She grabbed another chair from the back and took it, and him, out to a spot behind one of the counters.
Then she introduced the others: the booth rep, Sparrow, an herbalist; two sisters, Mila and Mina, a painter and a graphic designer; a large and impressive dark haired woman named Ketterly, who was a jeweler; and various children and husbands and S.O.s. Then she said: “This is Ambros Rothakis, I told you about him. Some of you read some of his stuff online, right?”
They made some polite comments about his stories and essays. Luisa went back out in front of the booth, where she resumed painting nearly naked people in every possible color and pattern. He watched in amusement as a man got his face painted such that he resembled a werewolf. He was a dreadlocked hippie werewolf, with a ridiculously happy grin, but a werewolf even so.
The rest of them went back to poring over some newspaper clippings and deploring the contents thereof. There was a lot of “She doesn’t get it...she just doesn’t…I get what you’re saying...what doesn’t she get, though?”
After a bit, Sparrow said: “Say, Professor Rothakis here is a sociologist of some kind. Let him read the letters. Let’s see what he thinks.” They all laughed and handed over the clippings.
“Is this a test?” he jested, kidding on the square. They all laughed again. “By the way, I am not a Professor. Strictly an amateur.”
Conscious that it was indeed a test, he sat down and perused the bits of paper. They were letters to the editor cut from a newspaper, or more than one. He read the first, finding it to be an indictment of the very event he was attending, complaining of the dust, the crowds, that the writer hadn’t enjoyed the food or the entertainment. She seemed also to be appalled at the nudity and overt sexuality expressed in places throughout the Fair, and to be particularly alarmed by couples of varying ages: most especially younger women and older men. “Teenage girls and thirty-five-year-old men,” as she put it: “This is not good.”
Fairgoers passed through while he was reading, entering the booth, looking and asking questions. Some of the crafters made sales, although it seemed to him that they were not especially eager for the money. Another un-carny-like attribute of the Fair: no hard sells. He breezed through the rest of the letters, variations on the same themes, with the worries about people’s couplings repeated most often.
He sat there nodding. He cleared his throat.
“Well?” asked Sparrow.
“Well. First, I think that her name is amusing. ‘Rosa L. Michel'. That is funny.” He wasn’t laughing, though. He wasn’t even smiling.
They all were frowning in puzzlement, so he continued: “It doesn’t seem likely that she is named after two revolutionary women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That she reprises their arguments against Emma Goldman and her advocacy of free love, that makes me think this is a pseudonym. Hmmm. Rosa L for Luxembourg, or L for Louise, Michel. See?”
“Ah,” said the redhead, Mila: “I do see now.”
“Also,” he said, “It seems clear to me that she doesn’t understand the nature of Festivals throughout human history. A Festival is very often a way for the lower classes to blow off steam. The idea is that for brief periods of time social norms are discarded or flipped, for the purpose of re-establishing them with at least the appearance of consent from the mass of the people. It is in the nature of certain festivals to draw the ire of the prude and the extreme conservative, especially when such festivals lead to people questioning the basis of the System. This Fair, with its pacifist ideology, and other radical ideas about process and such, is bound to trouble people who are insecure about the sustainability of the current global System. She, Ms. Michel I mean, she must be such a social conservative.”
“She claims to be a hippie,” said Sparrow.
“I could claim to be an extraterrestrial. Or a time traveler. It wouldn’t mean I was one.” That statement would become amusing, in retrospect. “Meanwhile, we live in a society where anomie reigns. Social norms in this country, indeed in the world, are in extreme flux: there is no social consensus on questions of faith, sex, politics, culture. Certainly not on economics.”
Sparrow, a woman of sixty or so, said: “I don’t know about that. Some things everyone agrees on, like, oh, slavery and human trafficking and such. Don’t you think? Well, I mean except the people who do those things...”
“Exactly,” he said. “You and I and everyone at this Fair,” he paused, frowned: “or at least every one in the Fair Family and most of the attendees, we all think that slavery is wrong and evil and trafficking in human beings is unethical.”
“But even the people who do those things must know that what they are doing is wrong,” said Mina. “How could they not?”
“In my experience—limited, but real—some of them do, some don’t,” Mr. Rothakis said sadly. “Certainly most of them realize that others disapprove of them. That’s not exactly what I meant, though. In terms of a lack of social consensus, I mean.”
“Oh, I think we all understand perfectly well what you meant,” said Mina.
Sparrow interrupted: “But a man who would buy or sell people would have to be a sociopath, wouldn’t he?”
“He—or she—might be a sociopath. Or just self-deluded, or desperate in ways we Americans can’t really comprehend. I knew a girl…”
“Go on,” said Mila.
Ambros hesitated. Then he said: “I knew a girl, in Guatemala, who was sold by her own mother. The mom had full knowledge of what she was doing, and . . . and again, that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t really want to get into that right now.”
Mina dragged the discussion back to the subject they had begun with: “I think we understand very well what you mean by anomie. I do, anyway. It’s hard to get anyone to agree about even basic stuff, like economics and such. There are people who think that what the bankers do when they steal big wads of money from the economy, that that’s okay. . . and that people who are poor, that it’s their own fault.”
“Exactly,” Mr. R nodded: “and in politics, in culture, in religion, in sexual mores: in all those things there is enormous disagreement, even polarization.”
“So,” said Mina: “in the context of Ms. Michel’s letters, it means what?”
“Among other things” said Ambros, “it means that it’s highly likely that there is a thirty-something man having a relationship with a much younger woman within a block or two of Ms. M’s house. Vice-versa, as well. Would that be as bad in her eyes? Those four might be in the sack together, and may have been having sex while she was writing these letters. Until we come to a wider social consensus on such things...”
“Her protests are futile,” said Sparrow, looking thoughtful.
Ketterly arched an eyebrow, sardonically: “Without that wider consensus, most protests are futile.” She went back to chatting with her customer.
Mr. Rothakis grinned: “Yes. Moreover, this kind of anomie, combined with an increasingly hierarchical System, means that the people have a much harder time controlling the institutions of society. When people are as polarized as we are, it allows all kinds of abuses to take place in the upper echelons of all kinds of hierarchies: Congressmen taking bribes or coercing their interns for sex, priests and ministers likewise with their secretaries, or altar boys, those bankers’ thefts from the commons, and on and on . . .”
“Or the US government starting wars in other countries,” said Sparrow. “Nobody I know wanted to invade Afghanistan, but the invasion happened anyway. I think that’s much worse than people having sex. Unless there is coercion involved. And even then, there are children getting killed by bombs that our taxes pay for . . .”
“An excellent example!” Mr. R exclaimed. “In spite of the fact that the American people voted overwhelmingly to reject that idiot Bush and his ‘Project for a New American Century’ gang, President Gore couldn’t keep his hands off Afghanistan. In spite of some pretty flimsy reasoning in favor, forty percent of Americans supported him in that action. Forty percent! Gore ordered the invasion, and most of the military obeyed the order. Many of them are having second thoughts now, but so what? To say nothing of the fact that the U.S. military is bombing innocent people in many other countries, and has been doing so more or less continuously since Reagan was elected. In that context, Ms. Michel’s complaints about people having sex at the Fair verge on the silly. That’s what I think, anyway. Hmm?”
There were murmurs of agreement, not just from the crafters, but also from kibitzers passing by.
“But don’t you think that teenagers, especially girls, should be protected from predators?” said a man in a kilt, a potential customer.
Ambros considered: “Well,” he said, at length: “I’d have to ask you to define ‘protect’ and ‘predator’, and also ‘teenager’. Then I’d disagree that there should be a clause protecting girls especially. But I’d like to avoid any dualistic or ideological arguments about such a complex subject. We’re wandering far afield from the original question, and Logic is sneaking out of the room as we do.
“It’s worth pointing out that the age of consent laws are state-based here in the US, and are a confusing patchwork of contradictory statutes. I don’t even know what the law here in Oregon is, I’ve only been here for two days; but it is certain to be significantly different from Washington’s, or Idaho’s.”
“Age of consent in Oregon is eighteen,” said Mila.
“Sixteen,” said Sparrow.
“Split the difference: seventeen!” laughed Sparrow’s son, sarcastically.
Ketterly pulled out her cell phone: “I have a bar,” she said, somewhat surprised. She pushed buttons. Then: “Oregon, eighteen; Washington sixteen; Idaho the same; California, as Oregon, and Nevada is sixteen. Professor Rothakis’ point carries.”
Kilt Man frowned at Ketterly, apparently befuddled, and then left, casting an angry glare in Mr. Rothakis’ direction. ‘Hmm,” Mr. R thought: ‘a kilt. That’s an idea . . .’
“I’ll also point out the obvious,” Mr. R continued: “most civilized nations put the age of consent at sixteen, which I’d bet would void most of Ms. Michel’s arguments.” He hastened to add: “That’s not to say I approve of verbal or physical force in matters of sex. But I disapprove of those in any situation, regardless of the ages of the people involved. Rape and predatory behavior are not limited to teenagers, as targets or perpetrators; nor are the victims universally girls or women.
“I’ve been talking a lot. I don’t mean to lecture…”
“They asked for your opinion,” said Ketterly, “and they’ve continued to quiz you. You must be keeping them interested.”
“Or maybe just entertained,” said Mr. R, grinning. He stood and stretched. “Anyhow,” he concluded, “if I were going to write, say, an essay criticizing her opinions I would structure it that way: whatever drugs, sex, political positions or anything else are happening at the Fair, those same things are happening on her block. And no one running this Fair--or attending it--is currently blowing up little babies in Afghanistan. So her complaints are trivial and she should chill.”
This started another discussion, about US foreign policy. He stayed out of that one. While it was going on, Sparrow drew him aside: “I am a little concerned about anyone who is going to write about the Fair. I’m not ashamed of any aspect of what we are doing here; but we’ve had bad experiences with the press in the past. I hope you will be careful to be fair to us.”
“I understand completely,” he said emphasizing the last word. “I can promise you that I will write honestly about what I see, I’ll use due diligence when researching facts, I will clearly delineate my opinions and not state them as facts: all the things American reporters so often fail to do.” He grinned: “Moreover, I haven’t that large an audience. If I were to write an essay, call it: ‘The Oregon Country Fair: an Appreciation and Critique’, it’s likely that a thousand people, worldwide, would read it. More than that would be very unusual for an essay with my by-line.” He laughed: “And if I use the Fair as grist for fiction, why, everyone’s names will be changed, to protect the people involved from any direct entanglement with my readership.”
“Okay,” Sparrow said slowly, “that’s the best we can expect, I guess. I mean, fair and respectful, and not overtly hostile, would be a huge improvement.”
“That bad, huh?” he asked. “You needn’t answer, I know exactly what you mean…” He was thinking of some of the articles and TV news stories about the SCA that he’d seen: superficial or completely wrong-headed, or using his group as a way to generate laughs among their audiences. “I am not at all hostile to this Fair, though I do have a critique of it. I would make every effort to be scrupulously fair if I wrote that critique down.”
“Well, good enough, then. Glad to hear it.”
He was amused by the fact that he had fallen so completely into the persona that he’d intended to adopt for the Fair. ‘Hmm. “Professor Rothakis” indeed,’ he thought, grinning inside.
He also found it amusing that he was starting to see the possibility of writing one or more essays on topics brought to mind by the Fair. That detached, analytic, amused-but-unconcerned version of himself was making notes, constructing outlines, taking the Fair apart and putting it together again. His con job was turning into a real project, one that he was actually eager to begin.
So, off he strolled, into the crowds.
TO BE Continued...
The Amtrak Cascades shook and wobbled, rolling the passengers from side to side as it passed over a rough stretch of track. Mr. Rothakis’ eyes popped open. He looked around as much as he could without turning his head, then relaxed and smiled a little.
“Yakety-yak,” the conductor’s voice came over the intercom: “Our next station stop is Albany. Yakety-yak.”
‘Almost there,’ thought Mr. R. He rolled his shoulders as well as he could in the seat. Happily, he had no seatmate, not since Portland. He stood up and stretched a little harder, then picked up his briefcase from the window seat and began to lurch forward to the Bistro car.
“A cup of coffee, please.” He handed over a couple bills, got a pittance in change. That went into the tip jar. It was dark, near ten o’clock, and the train was running two hours behind. No one else was in the Bistro.
“Why are you headed to Eugene?” asked the attendant, clearly bored.
“Mmm,” he said, sipping the coffee: “I have an online acquaintance who is an habitué of your Country Fair. She invited me to come hang out for the weekend, maybe get some material for some stories or essays.” Rothakis was bored, too. He wondered which of the so-far-standard responses he would get.
“Ooh, do you have a Camping Pass?” The clerk was one of the envious sort. “I wish I could get one...”
“Really?” At least this response was more pleasant than the ‘I-Hate-The-Country-Fair-Buncha-Dirty-Hippies’ rant. His seatmate from Tacoma south to Portland had been all over that one. That had been tiresome. “How tough would that be for you?”
She was about twenty-five, shorter than he was, and thin. She had blond hair turning brown as she aged, a snub nose and grey eyes. “Oh,” she said, “I guess I could do some food booth work or somethin’. It’s just this gig,” she waved around at the Bistro: “it makes it hard to do other stuff. A secure job, benefits, blah blah. But weird schedules. It’s hard to get time off, too.”
He nodded politely. He could see that she was looking him over; he knew that he was presentable. He was fifty-two years old, five-ten, a hundred-seventy. Not overly muscular or ripped, but wiry. The really striking thing about him, though, was his hair and beard. He had not gotten a haircut since his thirtieth birthday: his hair reached to his bum when it was all combed out. As usual, he had it in a topknot, from which it hung to below his shoulders. His beard he kept shaved to a fringe, with a medium-long pointy goatee, and all his facial hair was pure white. He had a prominent browline with fairly impressive eyebrows, brown turning white. He was tanned and wrinkled, signs of a hard, mostly outdoor life.
He also knew that he gave off a peculiar vibe, one that attracted some discerning women. He’d been careful not to analyze that too carefully: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ he’d think. He hadn’t been especially lucky lately. ‘That’s mostly from being on trains and busses all the time, though,’ he thought, hopefully.
“Yakety.” said the PA. “Yak yak.” The train rattled to a stop. Mr. R sat on a stool by the bar.
“So,” she continued: “You’re a writer?”
“Well, when I’m not making a living.”
She laughed: “What do you do for a living, then?”
“Oh, various things. Gardener more than anything else, I suppose. Truck driver, secure messenger, delivery drone. I even delivered lost luggage for Amtrak for a while.”
“Yeah? That’s a contractor gig though, isn’t it?”
“Correct. No bennies, no sick days. Bleah.”
“Really, y’know?” She was sympathetic: “What’s your gig now?”
“Actually, I don’t have one. I scored a big wad recently, and I’m in a sort of traveling and writing mode right now.”
“Oh. Well, what do you write about?” The train lurched and began to roll.
“A little bit of Sci-fi, some historical stuff. And essays about economics, politics, culture. The history and techniques of swordplay.”
“Swordplay? Do you do SCA?”
“I was in deep for a while. I haven’t done much lately, since it doesn’t fit in with a vagabond writer lifestyle. Can’t haul the armor around with me, right?”
“Right! Well, I am Lady Lucy of Camden in the SCA.”
He stood and bowed: “Viscount Ambrose, Knight.”
“Oh, well, very pleased to meet you, I am sure,” she said, and curtsied. They both laughed, two people with a secret connection.
“So, are you a published writer?” She was clearly curious about his writing, not just his sexual potential.
“All of my stuff is self-published, except a couple stories. There’s some money trickling in from that. Of course you could check Tournaments Illuminated for my byline, there are several articles of mine in back issues of that.”
“Oh, cool! Can I get your stuff on the Webz? I’m Sally, by the way, Sally Ackley. Mundanely.”
“Ambros Rothakis,” he said. They shook hands. He gave her a three by five card with web addresses for his various sites and links. She grinned and pocketed it. Several customers entered the Bistro then.
“Me and my girlfriend are coming out to the Fair on Sunday. Maybe I’ll see you there,” she flirted.
“Maybe so,” he laughed, “if they haven’t tossed me out by then.” His coffee was gone; he picked up his briefcase. One of the blue haired ladies was giving him the evil eye. On the off chance that she was Greek or Italian he made a warding sign and then left the car before she could respond.
As he walked along, swaying with the movement of the train, he surreptitiously touch-checked his various belongings. Wallet in the left thigh pocket of his cargo pants, ring of keys in the right slash, watch and chain, folding knife. He’d just had the card case out, but he touched it anyway, in the right thigh pocket. Also there he carried a set of real and almost real credentials, from various schools and periodicals. They were in a leather folder, which he could feel behind the card case. He had three thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties in an opaque blue aspirin bottle in the left slash pocket. There was more money hidden in different places around his person, and in his briefcase.
In fact, absolutely everything of value that he owned was on his person. The backpack and bedroll he’d checked when he boarded the train in Seattle had nothing but clothes, blankets, and a few toiletries in them. Some of the clothes were his work, hand-sewn or crocheted; ‘Those would be a pain to lose,’ he thought, ‘but not a disaster.’
He sat down in his seat, putting his case beside him on the seat by the window.
The trousers he was wearing were a dark gray; his boots were black leather, half calf harness type, very worn. He felt along the inner seam of the left boot, checking the position of his knife. All good.
He opened the briefcase and pulled out his laptop. An eight-year-old Pismo, it was not one of his valuable possessions. Still, it had been free. He made it a practice never to actually pay for electronics. Someone always had an outdated relic that they wanted rid of. The most valuable thing he had in the realm of modern technology was a thirty-two-gig thumb drive. That was only of worth because it had his collected works loaded on it. That drive was password locked, zipped into two nesting plastic boxes and locked in an inner pocket of his briefcase.
He called up his mail program, answered a query, then made some notes on his trip. He set up all his accounts to dump incoming data into a message box, and put up a “Sorry, cannot respond now,” sign at his web site. Then he shut the Pismo down. ‘If I’m lucky,’ he thought, ‘I can stay offline until Tuesday.’
“Yakety Yak,” said the PA: “Our final station stop. Please take all your stuff with you. Yak.”
He was wearing a red crocheted vest, in design like a jerkin, over a long sleeved black tee shirt. He donned his hat, a crocheted item as well, which he had designed to allow him to pull his topknot through a hole in the top. The hat was black, with red trim in a meander pattern around the brow. The train stopped.
When everyone else was off, he rose and exited the train. His claim check got him his backpack and bedroll, which he strapped on. The air was cool, but the pavement was giving back the day’s heat, and it was still humid.
“Hey,” he said to the baggage guy: “Is there a cheap motel within walking distance?”
“Define walking distance,” the guy said, not looking up.
“Two years ago I hiked the Appalachian Trail.”
“Oh.” He looked up then: “Sure, just go up to Sixth Avenue and turn right,” he gestured: “there are several along that street and also some up a block on Seventh.”
Ambros winked: “Thanks.” He strode off into the wilds of Eugene, Oregon.
He awoke at six the next morning. ‘Hmm. Slept in,’ he thought. He rolled out of bed and did some light calisthenics and stretching, then he took a quick shower and dressed: boots and trousers as the day before, a fresh shirt and a more decorative jerkin. He braided his topknot so his hair wouldn’t tangle while it was wet.
“I want some breakfast,” he said aloud: “And some news.” He checked to make sure he had his key card, grabbed his briefcase, then headed for the office.
At the front desk, he engaged the clerk: “Hey, my name is Rothakis, room six. I got in pretty late last night, so I didn’t bother with arrangements. I want to pay for a week’s stay, no need to clean up or change sheets until I check out. Do you have a safe?”
“Yes we do, sir, and we are bonded,” she said. “I can give you a detailed receipt for whatever you entrust to us.”
“Excellent.” That was a huge relief, actually. Not every motel had such, and now he’d rest easier leaving his briefcase behind. “Also,” he continued: “where would you recommend for breakfast? I don’t mind a bit of a walk.”
The place she recommended was ten blocks away. He stopped at a convenience store to get a copy of the local daily paper. He checked the date: July 13, 2007. He paid and left the store. He found a red newspaper box where he acquired a local ‘alternative’ weekly, and spotted a rack near the café that had a half dozen or so free lefty tabloids on offer. Armed with this load of knowledge, he strolled towards the café-bakery-hangout. He passed through a gate in the fence next to the storefront, and found himself in a spacious patio floored with concrete. The floor was broken up with three treewells, the closest of which had growing in it a Japanese maple with astonishingly maroon leaves. He admired the pruning job on that tree, it was very much like the style he’d learned as a teenager. There were tables and chairs about, and some patio umbrellas in the square style that been the rage a couple years back. He went inside the bakery.
The barista grinned and said: “That’s a big stack of newsprint.”
“Yeah, I just got to town and I figured I’d better check out who’s saying what about whatever.” This he said in a self-mocking way, and with a wink. She laughed and he ordered up a pile of food. He checked the layout of the kitchen, which was just visible through the prep area, spotting a big window and some cast iron frying pans. ‘There has to be a door back there, somewhere,’ he thought.
He treated himself to homefries with his omelet, though that was a week’s worth of starch for him. A lot of salsa on the taters helped him rationalize that.
The decor was sort of ‘hip-yuppie’ with paintings and swaths of woven fiber art on the walls. The paintings had little cards, with statements by the artists, who were all locals. The fiber art was mostly from Central America. He noted a Guatemalan piece. There was indirect lighting from fixtures all around the ceiling, and hanging lights as well. That and the light from the big windows in three of the walls made for a bright, cheerful room.
He liked the ambience, it reminded him of cafes in the college towns he’d lived in during his twenties, and long discussions about philosophy and the state of the world. Things had looked a lot less hopeless then.
Sipping coffee, he began to peruse his catch, starting with the tabloids. First, a left-liberal rag from some Christian do-gooders, thinly disguised as an activist group. They hit all the correct causes with just the level of outrage he expected. He read two stories clear through, then skimmed the rest of the paper. He tossed it into a basket of discarded newsprint; he noted that he could have saved a buck on the daily by raiding the discards.
Here was a Stalinist-CPUSA paper—really? That followed the previous rag, unread. “Era Times” was next. It took him a few minutes to figure that one out; it was largely semantically null. Then he realized it was published by an arm of the Taiwanese Government. Toss.
‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘here is something...’ He had a copy of the IWW’s national paper, with a local tabloid insert. Both the national and the local Wobblies were in a swivet, noisily disagreeing about a particular action that had relevance to Mr. Rothakis. He read every word, chewing on the pros and cons, even the parts laden with logical or tactical fallacies. As though he or any of his confederates were going to “claim responsibility and justify this action”. He memorized the names of two local Wobbly contacts, then tossed the paper. He glanced through the other three lefty tabs, reading an article in one, a column in another. Then he tossed them. ‘Nothing but the usual,’ he thought: ‘liberal talking points and arguments about trivia, disguised in radical language.’ None of those papers had noticed the San Diego dustup, or maybe it was old news to them.
The local daily was exactly predictable: moderately right-of center, pedestrian, boring. He booted up the Pismo and soon determined that the owner, publisher and several of the top editors were all functionaries in the county Republican Party. Amusingly, the local ‘alternative’ weekly was owned and managed by two lawyers (!) and a dentist, all of whom were on the local Democratic committee. ‘Talk about control of the media...’ he mused. All normal, of course: “I used to be disgusted,” he sang softly, “but now I try to be amu-used...”
However...the weekly had an insert with a schedule and map of the Fair he was headed for. That he annexed, for further study. The daily had a weather forecast: it was going to be warm that day, warmer Saturday, and hot on Sunday. ‘Hmm. Extra undershorts and talcum powder,’ he thought.
He shut down the Pismo, deliberately not looking for mail or messages.
Back in his motel room, he made his preparations. He made the bed, then dumped out his pack. He pulled the smaller rucksack out of its pocket in the side of the framed pack, and put the clothes he wanted for the Fair, plus his toiletries, flashlight, and survival kit into it. He strapped that down, attached his bedroll, and set it by the door. He repacked the main backpack, then opened the briefcase. He took the blue bottle out of a pocket in the inner facing of the case. He pulled the rest of his money out of hidden pockets in his trousers and the briefcase. He suppressed the urge to count it, he knew how much was there: not quite thirty-two grand. ‘You know to the dollar how much is in each stash, and the total. Stop obsessing!’ That money was what was left of his share of the loot, and hard-earned it was. It needed to last him for a good while, too.
The total had gone down precipitously in the first two months after he got it. He knew that he was going to have to slow his spending, and soon. Still, the expenditures he’d made had been necessary...
Right after the balloon went up, he’d hightailed it to Miami, where he’d gotten his eyes lasered. Amusingly, with his myopia now cured, he found he needed reading glasses for close work. He checked: they were in his briefcase, so he moved them to a trouser pocket.
Then he’d bussed to Kansas City to get his hernia and hydrocele dealt with. After that, it was on to NOLA for a date with the hackers: his birth persona was now, for all practical purposes, nonexistent. Ambros Rothakis had a minimal paper trail, and was filed in all the right databases. Rothakis had a passport, a bank account, debit card, and a notarized copy of a birth certificate. There was an excellent forgery of a 1954 Cuyahoga County birth certificate on file at that county’s Courthouse, in Rothakis’ name. The document it replaced no longer existed.
‘None of that shit was cheap, but it was all necessary.’ Money was only good if you used it, but he had to live on this haul at least until the ruckus died down.
Nevertheless, he needed some relaxation. His online contact from the Fair Family, one Luisa Milonacci, had invited him to come for the weekend, and suggested that he might like to write something about the countercultural aspects of the Event. He had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It was a mild and harmless con job he was engaged in, for the purpose of having a relaxing weekend in the country. The further advantage was that it would get him entirely out of sight of the real world for what could be a crucial few days.
‘Having enemies is a pain,’ he thought: ‘and well-connected, powerful enemies . . .’ But at least there was almost no chance that they knew who he was, now.
There was another advantage to the trip he was on: this Fair, from what he could see of it online and in the local paper, was a craft fair on growth hormones, among other things. He saw it as an opportunity to stock up on well-made clothes and accessories, stuff that would last a while. For example, his boots were about shot. They wouldn’t take another sole, and the toes were wearing through.
‘And if I pay cash, I won’t show up on the Webz,’ he thought, nodding.
In the end that decided him, as far as how much cash to carry with him. He took the money out of the bottle, three thousand, and put it into a small waxed leather wallet, which he stowed in a pocket hidden on the inside of his left pant leg. It was under the thigh pocket, so the stitching didn’t show. He snicked shut the snap lock on that pocket; it was as secure a way to carry the wad as he knew of.
His pocket watch was on a chain attached to his belt loop. He pulled it out, opened it and considered: was he likely to need to know the time? In the end he checked it against the room’s digital clock, wound it a bit, and put it back in his pocket.
The rest of the money went in the briefcase, along with the laptop and some other things he wouldn’t need at the Fair. He combed out his topknot, put on his hat, and picked up the rucksack. Checked his wallet: just over three hundred in small bills, and the ‘Dragon Pass’ that would get him on the bus to the Fair. Then he stopped for a minute, mentally going over all the stuff in the rucksack, item by item.
Here came another irrational urge: ‘You don’t need to check on the derringer. You don’t need to unpack the whole rucksack, get out the survival kit, look under the false bottom, and check on the damn thing. It is loaded, both chambers, the safety is on, the packing is secure, and nothing can go wrong with it.’
He took several deep breaths, checked his wallet again, for the key card to the room, then opened the door. ‘OK,’ he thought. ‘Briefcase in the safe, then I’m off.’
The bus mall was a few blocks east and a couple south of his motel. He strode purposefully along, the rucksack riding high on his shoulders. He stopped for a moment at an intersection, where he had a clear line of sight east: three snowcapped mountains were visible through the slight haze of smog. They rose above the hills and lesser peaks around them, many miles away, impressive even at that distance.
He thought: ‘I should find out their names. The indigenous names, too.’
A little later, he approached the downtown bus mall. That was an unintentionally silly faux-European construction, complete with a clock tower. It was only nine by that clock, but there was a long line formed already. The first buses were scheduled to leave the mall at nine-thirty, according to the tabloid insert. He looked that over while he was standing in line, studying the map. He recalled the booth number where he would find his contact, and found the booth, near the front Gate at the bottom of ‘the Eight’. He grinned at the generally chaotic maze of trails laid out on the map, eventually realizing that the trails on that side of the site did have a vague resemblance to a figure eight. There was a small river marked on the page, meandering through the property, with a tributary creek running into it from the southwest. Such of the Fair as lay on the other side of that creek was labeled as ‘the Left Bank’.
He was extremely impressed by the level of talent playing gigs at the Fair: he’d heard, or heard of, fully a third of the acts who would be performing on the stages set throughout the site. He resolved to explore that aspect of the event more thoroughly than he’d intended.
Despite his early arrival in line, he did not make it onto the first or even the second bus. He was offered a standing spot on the third one, but declined. Thus it was almost ten-thirty when he boarded the fourth bus, got a seat at the very back, and settled his pack between his feet.
A very large round man sat beside him. Large Man was already sweating profusely, but it was early in the day: he didn’t smell too bad. He was definitely rocking the ‘jolly and talkative fat man’ archetype, so Mr. R began to probe him for information:
“You been to the Fair before?”
“Oh, yeah, man, every year. Wouldn’t miss it. How ’bout you?”
“My first time in this part of the world. Never seen this Fair before.”
Three teenaged girls had squeezed into the other end of the bench seat that spanned the back of the bus: “Ooh, a Fair virgin,” one of them said. They all had white patches in various sizes and shapes painted on their faces and shoulders, and their hairstyles were similar as well. Each of them wore some version of what many people called a ‘fauxhawk’, with the hair on the sides of their heads cut very short and the top and back left long. It gave the impression of a horse’s mane. The three of them giggled and began to chatter about their experiences at the Fair. Their good times, it seemed, involved boys slightly older than they were, who were variously named Dylan, Tommie, Brandon, and so on. They were categorized as cute, hot, dreamy and dangerous. The exact proportions of these characteristics that each boy possessed turned out to be a matter of some dispute between the girls.
The bus was blasting along a five-lane highway, heading northwest. The driver suddenly spun the wheel, shifted into the left turn lane, slowed for traffic, then swung around onto a rural road going west. Blue-green hills rimmed the valley in the distance, and the farmland around about was green or yellow. Irrigation pipes on huge wheels either sat idle or shot arcs of water into the sky.
Large Man was more interested in the girls than he was in Ambros. Rothakis leaned over close and murmured, just loud enough for Large Man to hear: “Y’know, observation tells me that about one in ten thousand girls that age is interested in guys our age. Odds are not good, right? And they are underage. Hmm?”
Large Man cast his eyes down: “Yeah, I know. Just lookin’, huh?”
“Okay but, one: you are making them uncomfortable. And two: you are not very subtle. Which is part of why they are uncomfortable.”
Large Man frowned, thoughtful, nodding. Ambros let him stew about it for a while. Then, Mr. R encouraged him to talk about the History of the Fair, as Large Man saw it:
“So at the beginning, things were way more political. The people putting the Fair on were all these lefty-socialist-anarchist types, and there was a lot of talk about the Revolution and all. I miss those times, man. We were gonna change the world, peace, love, all that stuff. Lotta drugs and booze, too, and easy sex.”
“You must have been what? Fifteen, sixteen back when it started, right?”
“Yeah. Good times, man.”
“I’ll bet. But the paper here,” Rothakis waved the tabloid around: “says ‘Drug Free’ all over it.”
“Yeah,” said Large Man, “they hadda do that to get the County Mounties and the local government to back off.”
“Ah, I bet that changed the experience for you.”
“A little.” Large Man grinned infectiously: “I smoked up good after breakfast though, so I’m high until I get home. I got some brownies in my bag, and I may be able to score a few more hits. I know a lot of folks with camping passes.”
“That makes a difference, huh?”
“You bet. Campers can get on site early, and nobody searches their stuff. They can bring in booze, weed, acid. Nobody really seems to have crank, other than like coffee and No-doze. Don’t get me wrong, though. I mean, ya gotta be . . .” Large Man searched for a word: “. . . discreet, I guess you’d say. They’ll still run you if you’re puking drunk, or making trouble.”
“Interesting. So the real partying starts after dark, I guess.”
“If you have a pass. I only get one once in a while.”
“How hard is it to get one?”
“Pretty tough, even if you’ll work for it. If you’re like me, it’s even tougher.”
“You don’t work? Even for the sake of something like the Fair?”
“Nah. Mr. Slacker, that’s me.” Large Man seemed sad about that, so Ambros ventured:
“You could change that, though. Right?”
“I guess.”
The bus swung around a turn onto a smaller road, then shortly after that made a right into a yet smaller one. Ambros looked out the window and saw that the verges of this road were filled with people converging on the Fair from campsites on private property on both sides of the approach road. Interestingly, some driveways had stern ‘no trespassing’ signs posted, others bore signs with the Peach logo of the Fair on them, reading: ‘please respect our neighbors’. Still other properties were wide open, except for pop-up tents where folks were invited to pay for parking or camping privileges. The meadows at those properties were thick with tents, little and big, and vans and campers. There were even a few campsites with nothing but blankets spread on the ground. Booths selling food and crafts lined the road side of the properties. ‘So that extends the Fair’s financial effect on the towns around here into a sort of gray market. Funny, there was no mention of this phenomenon on the fan site or the official Fair web site.’
Mr. R asked Large Man about that, and got quite a talking-to:
“Yeah, back at the beginning these goat-ropers out here just hated the Fair.”
Mr. Rothakis nodded: “Heard a little of that shit since I started telling people I was coming here.”
“I bet,” grinned Large Man: “anyway, for years we fought with the neighbors about every little thing. Couple times I wondered if they were gonna come for us with torches and shotguns, y’know. Never quite happened, but still...at last, around ’89 or so, one of these guys thought of creating a camp for the overflow, people who couldn’t get passes. Then Toby Jackson, one of the Fair Family, he bought the next property west of the site. About that time, we went supposedly drug-free, then somebody who had a knack for talking to cops got high up in Security Crew, and since then, things have been mellower. Every year another neighbor finds some reason to make friends with us, usually so they can get some money out of it.”
“Money does seem to affect everything, doesn’t it?”
Ambros noted that Large Man was now including himself in the Fair Family, and that for all his professed slackerhood, he had a deep passion for the ideals of the founders. He said: “If you were tempted to work to support the Fair, where would you choose to go?”
Large Man shrugged: “I know some guys on Garbage Crew. Maybe there. Here’s the Gate. Good luck, dude.”
“Thanks, I may need it.”
Mr. R sat and waited till the bus was nearly empty before he got up and headed for the door. Last off the bus, he was nonetheless greeted with cheers and cries of welcome. The greeters were a fantastic bunch: intentionally so, he realized. One woman was dressed as a flower, a daisy. She had plastic petals sticking out of the sides and top of her head, green leaves in a ruff around her collar and a skintight green leotard. She was obviously, very obviously, wearing nothing under it.
There were more normal sorts of fancy dress: a clown, a bug-eyed alien, a man on a unicycle dressed as a knight, swinging a floppy foam sword. Ambros found that guy especially funny. He was just starting to turn away when the unicycle knight swerved a little close to him. The sword flipped in his direction as the unicyclist fought for balance: Ambros defended automatically, snatching the man’s arm, taking the sword away, then easing him off his mount and safely to the ground. He flipped the foam sword in the air, caught it by its ‘blade’ and handed it back to its owner: “Careful, there,” he said: “you might hit somebody.” Unicycle Knight was embarrassed and apologetic. Ambros waved off the apology: “It’s fine, really. I am not hurt.” He looked around and saw a golf ball sized river rock on the ground near the unicycle: “See, you probably hit this with your tire. Not your fault.” He picked up the rock and tossed it into the bushes.
It was hot enough by then that he was uncomfortable. He stripped off the jerkin he’d put on that morning and removed his shirt. He rolled it tight and stuffed it into the outer pocket of his rucksack, left empty for that purpose, then put the jerkin back on. This garment was unlike the cotton one he’d been wearing on the train. This one he’d crocheted of long strips of leather, in black and red. He’d decorated it with faux gold and silver cord, embroidering meander patterns and symbols from history and fantasy. He shook his head so his hair flew about a bit, and suddenly felt like he was at home.
“Say,” he said to the Flower Woman: “I’m a Fair virgin, and I’m supposed to have a Significant Other camping pass waiting for me.”
“Cool! Welcome to the Fair Family!” She grinned. Then she hugged him. He hugged back, somewhat surprised.
He grinned back at her, then said: “I wonder where I go to get that pass?”
She gave him another hug, and directions to a Gate.
The people at that Gate said, “No, we don’t have your pass, go to Security.”
The man at Security scoffed, assuring him that no such thing was possible: “All the passes are already handed out, buddy. Don’t try to scam me...” Mr. R spoke softly and abandoned the Security Gate as quickly as he could.
After two more incorrect stops, he sat down by a water fountain and pondered. A scurvy looking wretch dressed like a combination pirate-homeless person-horned toad approached: “Hey, man, jokebooks for sale, best jokebooks in the world!”
“Let’s have a look,” said Ambros. He looked through the obviously homemade pamphlets, picked out one full of jokes about money, another one about politics. He handed over a couple of bucks, then asked for directions.
“Oh, yeah, man: that way for a quarter mile, look to the left and you’ll see a booth made like a dragon. That’s where everybody gets their passes.”
“Okay, thanks a lot.” He thought: ‘If this guy isn’t on speed, then he’s been popping no-doze like an addict.’
He was not at all surprised that the least reliable looking person he’d seen had given him the correct directions.
He reached the front of the line, drew forth the printout he’d made of the information his contact had sent him. “I need a camping pass...Sparrow Woodruff is the booth rep, and I’m a significant other for Luisa Milonacci.” This was supposed to be a magical incantation, which would open all doors and set him free of all bonds. To his surprise, it worked.
The functionary behind the counter, a woman of fifty or so, fetched a cardboard square with a printout attached. She looked at his ID and said: “Oh, yes, Professor Rothakis, I heard about you. Sign here...”
“Professor?” He took the proffered pen and signed.
“Yes, I heard you were a sociologist from somewhere in the Midwest. Luisa told my sister Anna you were coming, and since Luisa’s girlfriend had to work, she used the pass for you.”
“Ah, a game of telephone. No, I write social and cultural critiques, published online and POD. I would say I am more anthropologist than sociologist, and more syndicalist than scientist. Either way, though, I haven’t any educational credentials that would warrant ‘Professor’.”
“Oh, well,” she laughed: “better get used to it. If Anna thinks you are a Professor, most of the Family will know it.”
“Fascinating,” he said, raising one eyebrow. They wrapped a red cloth band around his left wrist, cinched it shut with a peculiar little tool, then noted the numbers on it, and the time of day.
She glanced again at his ID, and handed him a laminated card on a lanyard. There was a picture of a Green Man on it, and the inscription: ‘Elder’. He grinned sardonically and donned it, bowed and took his leave.
He thought about his new wristband, signifier of his Status as an Insider. He’d studied the Fair as well as he could, by lurking on the Fair’s fan club web site. Despite its origins in an egalitarian and revolutionary movement, its interactions with the mundane world in which it was submerged had inevitably caused cognitive dissonances to occur. Camping passes, while clearly necessary for the preservation of the site, also created a caste system. He’d determined that Fair Family and Crafters and Crew Members had these passes. Some but not all of the Entertainers had them, and who did or didn’t was a well-chewed rag of contention among the Family. Fair-goers who were close to Family could oftentimes cadge one for one night or more. Ordinary hippies who did no work to support the fair had a harder time getting them. Mundane fair-goers often didn’t even know the camping passes existed; they were there to spend their money, what a carny would call Marks.
The more hip and with-it folks among the Paying Customers were often there for more sophisticated reasons: to enjoy the Spectacle, or even to be part of it, and part of the Ambience. Most of the Ambience performers (as the web site called them) were also paying customers, and some of them resented it mightily. Mr. R. cautioned himself: ‘Better blunt the usual cynicism. It’s not like your carnival days, and not every Paying Customer here is a Mark.’
Nonetheless, having a pass made you high-caste, for real. He thought it likely that such Status was going to put obligations on him, though he didn’t yet know what those would be.
He wondered now if his additional and unexpected Status as ‘Elder’ would come with more such.
Considering all of that, he decided to be the Professor; that is, to bring forward to the front of his mind the guy he strove to be when he was writing analytical papers about Spectacle or critiques of Propaganda. ‘I’ll still deny any credentials, but I’ll try to think like an academic.’
He slogged back towards the Main Gate, through crowds of people surging out of the parking lots and along a path through the woods from the off-site camping. Halfway back to the bus stop he had to negotiate a sort of pre-Gate, where people in tee shirts that read ‘Security Crew’ were asking everyone a few pointed questions.
“Got any booze, glass, drugs or weapons in that pack?” asked a bored-looking twenty-something hippie.
“Nope,” he replied. He shed the pack and let the Security Guy look through it, which he did without unpacking it at all. The knife in his boot, the derringer hidden in the survival kit at the bottom of the pack, the metal flask of Irish Whiskey: all of it escaped detection, even though he hadn’t intentionally hidden any of it. ‘Not more than I always do, anyway,’ he thought.
When he’d cleared the Security Gate, he paused to look around. Most of the people, probably ninety-five percent of them, were dressed in perfectly ordinary fashion: in the way his SCA persona still thought of as ‘mundane’. Tee-shirts, Hawaiian shirts, a few men with no shirts; skirts, blouses, dresses; practical shoes, jeans, shorts for both genders; that was the general attire. People coming in from off-site camping tended more toward hippie or early twenty-first century slacker-barbarian clothes, and were more likely to be tattooed or pierced. They were also more likely to be naked, or partly so. The parking lots yielded up mostly ‘straights’, people with respectable jobs and good steady incomes. These two groups mixed with a minimum of fuss. Some of them greeted each other as acquaintances from previous years.
His outfit placed him dead center between those two groups.
Then there were the rest of them, the 5 percent. If you could fall back in time, and draw a hundred random hippies from the streets of San Francisco in 1968, then set them loose with free blotter acid in a combination of a thrift store and a theatrical costume shop...you get the idea. It was bewilderingly weird, but mellow, right outside of any experience he’d ever had. He loved it. His one trip to Burning Man was the only place where he’d seen comparable outfits. But at the Fair, almost everyone was free of the post-modern ironic attitude that pervaded Burning Man. ‘The costumes they wear here,’ he thought: ‘it’s more like they’re channeling their inner realities, and less like a sarcastic take on a costume party. And they are way more organized than the Rainbow Family. I could eat here and not get sick.’ He shuddered a little at the memory of ’92 at the RFG.
Everyone was smiling and happy, either having a good time, or looking forward to it. Three women chatted him up, separately, as he walked towards the main Gate, admiring his jerkin (and, he suspected, his hair and physique). ‘I’m not even in the Gate yet,’ he thought. ‘This...is gonna be great.’
He approached the Main Gate and cruised right through, waving his banded wrist at the crew.
That’s when the fun really began.
It was already warm and lots of people had taken off some or all of their clothes. Other people were preposterously overdressed: wearing outfits or costumes expressing various anti-Establishment themes, or ironically expressing pro-Establishment beliefs, or just dressed up as fairies or goblins or whatever. There were people on stilts, clowns on stilts, a woman dressed as a tree on stilts. He saw a man on stilts done up as a giant ox, with stilts for his arms as well as for his legs, drawing a steampunk gypsy wagon. A steampunky couple on stilts wandered along behind. They carried old-fashioned eggbeaters, with which they offered to scramble the brains of various people passing by. A surprising number of folks accepted the offer, and stood still as the eggbeaters whirled above their heads.
Then there were the Paying Customers, thousands of them, dressed in variations on the theme: ‘ordinary’. Many of them looked stunned and amazed. The paths were thick with them, making it hard to get anywhere quickly. People pushing strollers or pulling wagons full of children created blockages that caused the crowds to swirl in unpredictable ways. He watched as a man about twenty years old went snaking along the path at twice the speed of the traffic, dodging and squirming and never bumping anyone. ‘Must be a longtime fairgoer, he really knows the technique,’ Ambros thought.
Along the path came a group of people, naked or wearing only loincloths: they had painted themselves blue, with red lips and nipples. The straights and ordinaries cleared out of their way with alacrity and some alarm. The Blue People were hooting and moaning like owls on meth, dancing around and displaying their assets to the crowd. Some of them were quite attractive, others fairly hard to look at. It didn’t seem to matter to them. Mr. Rothakis grinned, nodding at the people all around, relaxing into a meditative state, trying to see everything, hear as much as he could, smell and feel the crowd. He sought to store it all up for future contemplation.
His first goal was to check in with the booth where he would be sleeping. There were five crafters, all women, one of whom was his contact. These women had decided (after a good deal of debate, apparently) that he could crash in the back of their booth. He had studied his map; he knew where he was going. The booth was very near the lower end of the Eight, and thus only a hundred yards or so from the Gate. It took a good twenty minutes to get there, what with the crowd and his desire to see as much as possible.
Eventually, he arrived at the booth. There was a counter on each side, and shelves and paintings on the walls deeper into the space. He double-checked the number, then said, loudly: “Is Luisa Milonacci around here somewhere? Or Sparrow Woodruff?”
“I’m Luisa, hold on a second or two,” This from a woman in her mid thirties, who was handsome in a Frida Kahlo-ish way, and indeed had a paintbrush in her hand. Her canvas was skin: she was finishing up the task of painting a blue-and-white feathery pattern onto the bare perky breasts of a twenty-something woman. She finished the job with a flourish, put the woman’s proffered twenty dollar bill into a lockbox, and excused herself to her next customer: “I’ll be back in just a minute or two, hold the line, okay?”
She stepped up and hugged him, then said: “Welcome to the Country Fair.” She was very bosomy, with a waist that his arm went right around. He smiled. He felt a wave of déjà vu, the strongest he’d ever experienced. Like he’d known her for years, like they’d been intimate, as though his arm had been there ten thousand times. He struggled to contain it, succeeded; it faded but didn’t leave him.
She continued: “Having fun yet?”
“Oh absolutely. Feels like home.”
“That’s wonderful. Come sit down, I just have a minute, then I’m back to work.”
She had written some stories that he’d liked and they’d struck up a correspondence online. It was she who had invited him to the Fair after reading some of his essays and a short story or two he had published. She led him behind some curtains at the back of the booth, saying: “Stash your pack here, the bedroll can go over there.” She grabbed another chair from the back and took it, and him, out to a spot behind one of the counters.
Then she introduced the others: the booth rep, Sparrow, an herbalist; two sisters, Mila and Mina, a painter and a graphic designer; a large and impressive dark haired woman named Ketterly, who was a jeweler; and various children and husbands and S.O.s. Then she said: “This is Ambros Rothakis, I told you about him. Some of you read some of his stuff online, right?”
They made some polite comments about his stories and essays. Luisa went back out in front of the booth, where she resumed painting nearly naked people in every possible color and pattern. He watched in amusement as a man got his face painted such that he resembled a werewolf. He was a dreadlocked hippie werewolf, with a ridiculously happy grin, but a werewolf even so.
The rest of them went back to poring over some newspaper clippings and deploring the contents thereof. There was a lot of “She doesn’t get it...she just doesn’t…I get what you’re saying...what doesn’t she get, though?”
After a bit, Sparrow said: “Say, Professor Rothakis here is a sociologist of some kind. Let him read the letters. Let’s see what he thinks.” They all laughed and handed over the clippings.
“Is this a test?” he jested, kidding on the square. They all laughed again. “By the way, I am not a Professor. Strictly an amateur.”
Conscious that it was indeed a test, he sat down and perused the bits of paper. They were letters to the editor cut from a newspaper, or more than one. He read the first, finding it to be an indictment of the very event he was attending, complaining of the dust, the crowds, that the writer hadn’t enjoyed the food or the entertainment. She seemed also to be appalled at the nudity and overt sexuality expressed in places throughout the Fair, and to be particularly alarmed by couples of varying ages: most especially younger women and older men. “Teenage girls and thirty-five-year-old men,” as she put it: “This is not good.”
Fairgoers passed through while he was reading, entering the booth, looking and asking questions. Some of the crafters made sales, although it seemed to him that they were not especially eager for the money. Another un-carny-like attribute of the Fair: no hard sells. He breezed through the rest of the letters, variations on the same themes, with the worries about people’s couplings repeated most often.
He sat there nodding. He cleared his throat.
“Well?” asked Sparrow.
“Well. First, I think that her name is amusing. ‘Rosa L. Michel'. That is funny.” He wasn’t laughing, though. He wasn’t even smiling.
They all were frowning in puzzlement, so he continued: “It doesn’t seem likely that she is named after two revolutionary women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That she reprises their arguments against Emma Goldman and her advocacy of free love, that makes me think this is a pseudonym. Hmmm. Rosa L for Luxembourg, or L for Louise, Michel. See?”
“Ah,” said the redhead, Mila: “I do see now.”
“Also,” he said, “It seems clear to me that she doesn’t understand the nature of Festivals throughout human history. A Festival is very often a way for the lower classes to blow off steam. The idea is that for brief periods of time social norms are discarded or flipped, for the purpose of re-establishing them with at least the appearance of consent from the mass of the people. It is in the nature of certain festivals to draw the ire of the prude and the extreme conservative, especially when such festivals lead to people questioning the basis of the System. This Fair, with its pacifist ideology, and other radical ideas about process and such, is bound to trouble people who are insecure about the sustainability of the current global System. She, Ms. Michel I mean, she must be such a social conservative.”
“She claims to be a hippie,” said Sparrow.
“I could claim to be an extraterrestrial. Or a time traveler. It wouldn’t mean I was one.” That statement would become amusing, in retrospect. “Meanwhile, we live in a society where anomie reigns. Social norms in this country, indeed in the world, are in extreme flux: there is no social consensus on questions of faith, sex, politics, culture. Certainly not on economics.”
Sparrow, a woman of sixty or so, said: “I don’t know about that. Some things everyone agrees on, like, oh, slavery and human trafficking and such. Don’t you think? Well, I mean except the people who do those things...”
“Exactly,” he said. “You and I and everyone at this Fair,” he paused, frowned: “or at least every one in the Fair Family and most of the attendees, we all think that slavery is wrong and evil and trafficking in human beings is unethical.”
“But even the people who do those things must know that what they are doing is wrong,” said Mina. “How could they not?”
“In my experience—limited, but real—some of them do, some don’t,” Mr. Rothakis said sadly. “Certainly most of them realize that others disapprove of them. That’s not exactly what I meant, though. In terms of a lack of social consensus, I mean.”
“Oh, I think we all understand perfectly well what you meant,” said Mina.
Sparrow interrupted: “But a man who would buy or sell people would have to be a sociopath, wouldn’t he?”
“He—or she—might be a sociopath. Or just self-deluded, or desperate in ways we Americans can’t really comprehend. I knew a girl…”
“Go on,” said Mila.
Ambros hesitated. Then he said: “I knew a girl, in Guatemala, who was sold by her own mother. The mom had full knowledge of what she was doing, and . . . and again, that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t really want to get into that right now.”
Mina dragged the discussion back to the subject they had begun with: “I think we understand very well what you mean by anomie. I do, anyway. It’s hard to get anyone to agree about even basic stuff, like economics and such. There are people who think that what the bankers do when they steal big wads of money from the economy, that that’s okay. . . and that people who are poor, that it’s their own fault.”
“Exactly,” Mr. R nodded: “and in politics, in culture, in religion, in sexual mores: in all those things there is enormous disagreement, even polarization.”
“So,” said Mina: “in the context of Ms. Michel’s letters, it means what?”
“Among other things” said Ambros, “it means that it’s highly likely that there is a thirty-something man having a relationship with a much younger woman within a block or two of Ms. M’s house. Vice-versa, as well. Would that be as bad in her eyes? Those four might be in the sack together, and may have been having sex while she was writing these letters. Until we come to a wider social consensus on such things...”
“Her protests are futile,” said Sparrow, looking thoughtful.
Ketterly arched an eyebrow, sardonically: “Without that wider consensus, most protests are futile.” She went back to chatting with her customer.
Mr. Rothakis grinned: “Yes. Moreover, this kind of anomie, combined with an increasingly hierarchical System, means that the people have a much harder time controlling the institutions of society. When people are as polarized as we are, it allows all kinds of abuses to take place in the upper echelons of all kinds of hierarchies: Congressmen taking bribes or coercing their interns for sex, priests and ministers likewise with their secretaries, or altar boys, those bankers’ thefts from the commons, and on and on . . .”
“Or the US government starting wars in other countries,” said Sparrow. “Nobody I know wanted to invade Afghanistan, but the invasion happened anyway. I think that’s much worse than people having sex. Unless there is coercion involved. And even then, there are children getting killed by bombs that our taxes pay for . . .”
“An excellent example!” Mr. R exclaimed. “In spite of the fact that the American people voted overwhelmingly to reject that idiot Bush and his ‘Project for a New American Century’ gang, President Gore couldn’t keep his hands off Afghanistan. In spite of some pretty flimsy reasoning in favor, forty percent of Americans supported him in that action. Forty percent! Gore ordered the invasion, and most of the military obeyed the order. Many of them are having second thoughts now, but so what? To say nothing of the fact that the U.S. military is bombing innocent people in many other countries, and has been doing so more or less continuously since Reagan was elected. In that context, Ms. Michel’s complaints about people having sex at the Fair verge on the silly. That’s what I think, anyway. Hmm?”
There were murmurs of agreement, not just from the crafters, but also from kibitzers passing by.
“But don’t you think that teenagers, especially girls, should be protected from predators?” said a man in a kilt, a potential customer.
Ambros considered: “Well,” he said, at length: “I’d have to ask you to define ‘protect’ and ‘predator’, and also ‘teenager’. Then I’d disagree that there should be a clause protecting girls especially. But I’d like to avoid any dualistic or ideological arguments about such a complex subject. We’re wandering far afield from the original question, and Logic is sneaking out of the room as we do.
“It’s worth pointing out that the age of consent laws are state-based here in the US, and are a confusing patchwork of contradictory statutes. I don’t even know what the law here in Oregon is, I’ve only been here for two days; but it is certain to be significantly different from Washington’s, or Idaho’s.”
“Age of consent in Oregon is eighteen,” said Mila.
“Sixteen,” said Sparrow.
“Split the difference: seventeen!” laughed Sparrow’s son, sarcastically.
Ketterly pulled out her cell phone: “I have a bar,” she said, somewhat surprised. She pushed buttons. Then: “Oregon, eighteen; Washington sixteen; Idaho the same; California, as Oregon, and Nevada is sixteen. Professor Rothakis’ point carries.”
Kilt Man frowned at Ketterly, apparently befuddled, and then left, casting an angry glare in Mr. Rothakis’ direction. ‘Hmm,” Mr. R thought: ‘a kilt. That’s an idea . . .’
“I’ll also point out the obvious,” Mr. R continued: “most civilized nations put the age of consent at sixteen, which I’d bet would void most of Ms. Michel’s arguments.” He hastened to add: “That’s not to say I approve of verbal or physical force in matters of sex. But I disapprove of those in any situation, regardless of the ages of the people involved. Rape and predatory behavior are not limited to teenagers, as targets or perpetrators; nor are the victims universally girls or women.
“I’ve been talking a lot. I don’t mean to lecture…”
“They asked for your opinion,” said Ketterly, “and they’ve continued to quiz you. You must be keeping them interested.”
“Or maybe just entertained,” said Mr. R, grinning. He stood and stretched. “Anyhow,” he concluded, “if I were going to write, say, an essay criticizing her opinions I would structure it that way: whatever drugs, sex, political positions or anything else are happening at the Fair, those same things are happening on her block. And no one running this Fair--or attending it--is currently blowing up little babies in Afghanistan. So her complaints are trivial and she should chill.”
This started another discussion, about US foreign policy. He stayed out of that one. While it was going on, Sparrow drew him aside: “I am a little concerned about anyone who is going to write about the Fair. I’m not ashamed of any aspect of what we are doing here; but we’ve had bad experiences with the press in the past. I hope you will be careful to be fair to us.”
“I understand completely,” he said emphasizing the last word. “I can promise you that I will write honestly about what I see, I’ll use due diligence when researching facts, I will clearly delineate my opinions and not state them as facts: all the things American reporters so often fail to do.” He grinned: “Moreover, I haven’t that large an audience. If I were to write an essay, call it: ‘The Oregon Country Fair: an Appreciation and Critique’, it’s likely that a thousand people, worldwide, would read it. More than that would be very unusual for an essay with my by-line.” He laughed: “And if I use the Fair as grist for fiction, why, everyone’s names will be changed, to protect the people involved from any direct entanglement with my readership.”
“Okay,” Sparrow said slowly, “that’s the best we can expect, I guess. I mean, fair and respectful, and not overtly hostile, would be a huge improvement.”
“That bad, huh?” he asked. “You needn’t answer, I know exactly what you mean…” He was thinking of some of the articles and TV news stories about the SCA that he’d seen: superficial or completely wrong-headed, or using his group as a way to generate laughs among their audiences. “I am not at all hostile to this Fair, though I do have a critique of it. I would make every effort to be scrupulously fair if I wrote that critique down.”
“Well, good enough, then. Glad to hear it.”
He was amused by the fact that he had fallen so completely into the persona that he’d intended to adopt for the Fair. ‘Hmm. “Professor Rothakis” indeed,’ he thought, grinning inside.
He also found it amusing that he was starting to see the possibility of writing one or more essays on topics brought to mind by the Fair. That detached, analytic, amused-but-unconcerned version of himself was making notes, constructing outlines, taking the Fair apart and putting it together again. His con job was turning into a real project, one that he was actually eager to begin.
So, off he strolled, into the crowds.
TO BE Continued...
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New Word!
Date: 2013-08-04 11:18 pm (UTC)I am enjoying the story, (Tho this timeline is close enough to ours it threw me for a bit at the beginning) and look forward to more chapters!
You should, indeed, feel accomplished, sir!
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Date: 2013-08-05 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-06 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-06 11:50 pm (UTC)