I inched away as far as I could towards my side of the tent. I tried to pretend that I was alone in there, or that I was in the middle of some vague and off-color dream. He wasn’t touching me, but the heat of his body and breath made it harder and harder to ignore his proximity. I was in that twilight state between consciousness and sleep where you can’t truly formulate solid thoughts; but I remember the very real sensation of lying on my side with my nose almost touching the tent’s canvas wall, just wishing that he’d wake up, realize what he was doing, and move back to his side of the tent. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right, but luckily within a half hour or so, I had fallen back asleep.
________________
Most people at Zionon were weird, and Chris kind of was too, but he was my friend. We were seventeen. I had only been at Zionon since I was fourteen, when my Leftist father and his wife decided to move me and my two grade-school-aged half-sisters into the Woodside, California commune, which was located a little less than an hour south of San Francisco. We had lived in Reno before we were deported to the commune. My dad had a job teaching Greek mythology to delinquent kids in a juvenile detention center. His wife made documentaries about “Jews in the West.” I didn’t really know too much about it. But it was 1977 and the Socialist Residential Community thing was really happening, so of course the man who had been toting around a communist card in his wallet for twenty years and his kosher granola docu-wife had to jump on the bandwagon. I didn’t really know what to expect of Zionon when they told us we’d be moving there, but I had a strong feeling it wasn’t going to be as good as our life in Reno. I had moved around quite a bit back when I lived with my mother. So, when I moved in with my dad and his new family in Reno when I was twelve years old, into a real house, I knew it was the best living I was gonna have. I mean, my bed had springs. Dinner was served almost every night. Our front yard even had a gate, like something you’d see in front of a mansion.
Zionon was unlike Harlem or East LA or anywhere else I’d ever lived, or even been. It actually looked kind of like summer camp only I immediately noticed that there was no canoeing or general feeling of all-American revelry. There were bunk beds though. Barracks for every age group and gender. And there was always free peanut butter. But beyond that, it became quite clear, quite quickly that Zionon was not the sort of place you’d spend the summer for fun.
See, the concept of this community was straight up Socialist. Everyone had to live meagerly, so no fancy clothes or material luxuries, and we had to perform assigned chores on the grounds every day to ensure a communal Worker mentality. Our daily indoctrination in the Zionon Utopia was that ever leaving it would mean failure. Our leader and founder was Chuck Aldritch, a former alcoholic. He worshipped every line of Emerson and fancied himself a philosopher. Chris, and most folks in Zionon, were mesmerized by Chuck, and parroted every one of his platitudes as if they came from God himself. But the most important and distinctive quality of Zionon was that every single night, for a period that could last up to four hours, there was this game, a Palaver, which everyone was supposed to Play. It was called The Zionon Palaver; and each member of the community, no matter if you were eight years old or eighty, had to gather at a central meeting place, where you’d meet your PalaTroupe, or P-Troupe, as we were conditioned to call it. The sixty or so members of each P-Troupe were divided again in to groups of fifteen by a PalaTroupe Leader (P-Leader, of course). My P-Leader was Mario Bombari, a name fitting for the ex-con and drug addict who had joined Zionon five years ago in an attempt to turn his life around.
Mario would lead our sect of the PalaTroupe to a common room, where we engaged in what was something like a group therapy session, only there was no topic or direction or structure. Basically, the Palaver consisted of individuals standing up and raising whatever problems or beefs they had with others in the group, so everyone could tactlessly scream out one another’s faults until every last point was exhausted. There were no rules, except for no physical violence, and everyone went at it with a vengeance. One particular Palaver in April of my senior year, all of the P-Troupe’s maniacal heat got placed directly one me. It was a particularly extreme Socialist from LA named Jack Beamer who threw the first stone.
“What I’d like to know is how you, McGreggor, get off thinking you’re so much better than the rest of us, that you have to run off like some elitist sonovabitch to a goddamn public, government-funded Uni-fucking-versity. Berkeley? Really?? My god. Do you even understand the bureaucracy? It’s like Satan himself. I’ll tell you what, you are turning quite into a spoiled little snit, you know that, McGreggor? An elitist, spoiled little snit.” And this was only the beginning. A snippy ex-aspiring-actress named Linda Garrett stood up next.
“Have you not learned a single thing here?” she snipped. “Oh, no, that’s right, of course you haven’t. I spoke with Mr. Byrd from the school the other day. Turns out Mr. McGreggor has never even stepped a foot inside our school!” Gasps and commentary ensued. Linda was referring to the Zionon high school. It was true; I didn’t attend. “No wonder,” she continued, stirred from her crowd’s reaction. “You’re just going to go to stick your bony little self right in the middle of the System. And you could’ve been a real productive member of this community. Makes me just sick.” I tried to look somewhat ashamed or at least self-reflective, so the Players would think they were having a real effect on me.
The storm of Jack and Linda’s frenzied followers blurs in my mind, because true to the cult-like mentality of Zionon, and the Palaver itself, everyone in the P-Troupe threw an absolute tantrum at the news of my recent college acceptance. Well, not everyone. Lucky for me, Chris was always the quietest one. You never quite knew what thoughts he kept hidden, but in the expanse of screaming Players, he was easy not to notice.
The Palaver was the fundamental Zionon activity, and it was designed to build character; but it felt more like the longest and most unnecessary fight amongst the most dysfunctional family on the Earth. Much of this was due to people like Mario, Jack, and Linda, who were just a few examples of Zionon’s particular inhabitants.
Two groups of people converged at the commune. One was comprised of recovering drug addicts, dope fiends as we called them, while the other consisted of “Lifestylers,” radical Socialists (like my dad and his wife), and their kids, many of whom might have been fairly normal except that their parents moved them to Zionon when their brains were still too malleable to grasp what a Socialist Commune even was.
Chris was a combination of the two types. His mom dumped him in Zionon after he got caught smoking pot at age thirteen.
I met him because on the day I moved in, he was the one guy who came up and asked where I was from and if I’d like a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. Gum, along with a slew of other normal things, wasn’t allowed at Zionon, but he wanted to make me feel welcome I think. Chris was a loner type of kid. But for some reason he came up to talk to me that day, and because of it, we became friends.
I didn’t go to the Zionon School like he did though. I had a very justifiable hunch that they weren’t teaching their students English and American history, but were instead brainwashing them to spell the alphabet Z to A and to believe that anything our forefathers did to establish this Capitalist nation was irrelevant, because we were going to be the generation to change it. Bloodcurdling stuff. So I stayed under the radar, so no one would complain that I hitched a ride every day with a guy who taught at a Junior High School in San Francisco, near where I attended a magnet high school called Lowell. And until Linda Garrett’s outburst during that Palaver in April, I had done this easily. But every evening I returned, and after being subjected to two to four hours of the Zionon Palaver, I didn’t really hang out with anyone but Chris. I tried to ignore how aware I was of the bullshit that constituted the lessons he’d been learning in school that day. But with a touch of self-induced denial, that wasn’t so hard to do.
Chris and I both really liked baseball, so we’d discuss the new players and stats of the Giants for hours some nights– always superficial shit. We’d talk about chicks too. Chris had this weird social anxiety, so he never really talked to girls, but he could definitely talk about them. Zionon was pretty small, so if a girl got hot over the summer or something, it was easy to notice. So we talked about that sometimes. But we didn’t shoot the breeze about anything as much as we did about hiking. Chris had probably left the Zionon grounds a total of five times since joining three years before, and he never got too far; so when we talked about climbing Half Dome at Yosemite or taking six months after high school to conquer the Appalachian Trail, this rare and distinctive grin would flicker in the muscles of his face.
I’d never been anywhere unless forced to, so I got a kick out of the fantasies too. The wild outdoors just seemed like the most opposite place on Earth to Zionon. And wherever that was, is where I wanted to be.
There were definitely things Chris wouldn’t talk about, though. He rarely mentioned his mother or much about his life before Zionon. But, every now and then he talked about finding his dad, who walked out on Chris and his mom when he was a little kid. I could tell that Chris felt more at home with me than he did with anyone else at Zionon, but the whole time we were there, I don’t think I ever stood closer than two or three feet from the kid.
By May of 1980, Chris was graduating from the Zionon High School and I was graduating from Lowell. About a month earlier, I’d received my acceptance letter from the University of California Berkeley, so I was already itching with anticipation of my imminent release. I showed Chris the letter. He stared at it for a second, and then handed it back without saying a word. For reasons that I didn’t even try to comprehend due to utter frustration, Chris was loyal to the commune, and hadn’t applied to any schools or looked for any jobs in San Francisco. I just knew he would stay forever. See, despite all the years of reliably free peanut butter, I felt no obligation to give back to Zionon before getting the hell out of there, but I did feel an obligation to Chris. He was my best friend. And for the last few weeks of our senior year, I could sense some kind of nervous urgency in him.
So I figured out a way to borrow the car that belonged to the man who’d been giving me a lift to school everyday, so I could use it the weekend before I left for Berkeley, allowing Chris and me to drive two hours north to a national park with some decent trails where you could pitch a tent. One of the things my dad actually owned was a tent, which he agreed to loan me, so everything was all set up.
When I told Chris, he couldn’t speak. I was actually shocked at just how overjoyed he must have been because out of nowhere, he was hugging me. I had never seen Chris shake someone’s hand or even make eye contact for very long, but all of the sudden he was gripping me so tight, I was almost the one who wanted to pull away. But I figured he was just grateful for the surprise. I mean, this was going to be the biggest adventure of his life so far, and definitely the most fun either of us had ever had.
So, on a Saturday morning in May, Chris and I loaded the only car we had ever driven in together, and headed north to Point Reyes National Seashore. Man, did that drive rev us up. Hitting Route 1, which runs along the California coastline, was like simultaneously hitting every single epic stretch of highway to anywhere in the world. For the first time in my life, I felt like a regular teenage kid taking a trip with my bud.
So, we arrived at Point Reyes and unloaded our tent from the car, plus a backpack full of water bottles, sandwiches, and a Map of Grand Canyon, which we knew was absolutely useless at Point Reyes but brought anyway because it fit this image in our minds of real explorers and their maps. Supplies in tow, we picked a trail that went up a mountain to a waterfall further inland. All the hikes were pretty backcountry, which made us feel like real hotshot adventurers. The hike took us about 6 hours round trip. Chris and I didn’t really talk too much during the whole thing. Talking was what we did with a P-Troupe of lunatics in a gray-walled building, or what we did before bed out of boredom, while daydreaming of the open air. Now, we had the forest and the smell of the sea, the burn of lactic acid in our throats from climbing the massive West Coast peak, and the surreal sensation that we were actually doing what we only ever talked about while laying in our bunks within the walls of the Woodside commune. I caught Chris’s eye when we reached the peak 4.5 miles inland. He had this subtle squint and steady gaze that made it look as if he’d seen views from the top of mountains a hundred times before, like he had always been an adventurer. We felt like men on that peak. At least I know I did.
It was nearing dusk as we arrived back at the campgrounds about half a mile from the car. After gnawing on a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, Chris and I set up my dad’s tent and filled it with the blankets and pillows we’d grabbed from our bunks. By 10 PM, I was beat, so I crawled in, and Chris followed not too long after. It was close quarters in there, but we were so exhausted from our day, I figured it wouldn’t bother him too much. I drifted right to sleep.
It was probably about 1 AM the first time I woke up to what I thought was Chris rolling over in his sleep. I was in one of those three-quarters-asleep phases when I felt his hand brush against my lower body. It was pretty startling, especially since I’d been sleeping alone in a twin size bunk for three years. But without the alertness to think, I swept his hand away and quickly fell back asleep. What felt like a few hours later, I felt it again, Chris’s hand creeping over the same place on my body. It was so weird; I had never noticed before how much he moved in his sleep. I rolled over. Later in the night, I half woke again to the feeling of Chris’s hot breath and the weight of his body inching towards me. I tried to ignore how uncomfortably small this tent seemed, and scooted as much as I could towards my side. I had this eerie, uncomfortable feeling that something in that tent was not quite right, but tried not to think anything of it, since I couldn’t even lucidly describe it. I fell back asleep maybe half an hour later to the sound of Chris’s oddly heavy breathing. I chose to believe that our hike had just made him restless or something. Even so, I remember distinctly that whatever was going on in that tent in the wee hours of that morning in May, definitely felt wrong.
The next day, it was noticeable that the energy between Chris and me had shifted from the minute I woke up. I rolled over to see the sunshine peaking through the leaves and into our tent, and to see Chris laying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. I sat up, unzipped the door of the tent, and crawled out. When I asked if Chris was ready to hit the road, he didn’t respond; he just lay there in the tent for a while until finally surfacing. I decided maybe he was just sad that our trip was over. He asked if he could drive us home, and I told him sure. We didn’t talk at all during the car ride, and about halfway down Route 1, I noticed that his eyes were kind of misty, which freaked me out in a way.
When we finally arrived back at the Zionon grounds, I had to start getting my stuff together so I’d be ready to turn around and leave to go to Berkeley by bus the next morning. When 5 PM rolled along and it was time for the Zionon Palaver, I watched the buildings empty of people, my bunk members, including Chris. I skipped the Palaver that night. I knew my absence wouldn’t matter, plus I had some packing to do. But I guess I really should have gone, because Chris didn’t sleep in his bed that night, and I couldn’t find him anywhere the next morning.
As I was waiting for the 10 AM bus to Berkeley, I was struck by a memory of one of the first times Chris had ever really talked to me about finding his dad.
“Yeah, I think he might be in Vegas,” he said. “My mom said once that he had this, well, I guess you could call it a dream… of opening his own pawn shop. And I mean, if I was gonna open my own pawn shop, I would do it in Vegas. Doesn’t that make sense?’ I nodded of course. “Now, I would just get ahold of a Nevada phonebook and look him up, but I doubt he’d be doing all that officially. I bet it’s more of an under the table operation. I’d have to go there and physically look for him. But, you know, I don’t know… I’d have to take the bus and all that…”
________________
I recall specifically the moment I realized what Chris was trying to do with me in the tent on that night in May. It was a few weeks after I’d started classes at Berkeley. When the realization struck me, I was putting a load of whites into the machine. A weakening sensation crept into my body as it all started to make sense, that there was such overwhelming, secret desperation in somebody about whom I thought there was nothing else to learn. I could read through every cultish motive at Zionon, but I couldn’t even see the kid standing two or three feet from me.
But I suppose the whole encounter in that tent was a fitting send-off from the commune.
“Maybe one day you and me could both take the bus to Vegas,” I remember Chris saying. “We could gamble and see all the buildings and billboards. I could look for my Dad. Stay a week or so. We’d make a real trip of it.” I half smiled at him and wondered why anyone would go so far from Zionon to stay only a week.
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