Comet's Birthday Party

Comet was one of the town's tie-dyed ladies, and was turning sixty.
Word got out that she was having a party at her house on the Bolinas Mesa.
My freeloading head was filled with visions of snacks, weed and booze, when word reached me. I arrived to find the party in full swing at around 8 pm - many of the celebrants having been at it since early afternoon.

There, I found my friend George Marzocchi, (jazz-sax man and French horn player extrordinaire), Zane (a young guy that lived in his camper truck on the Mesa), The Fondue Brothers, and about forty other assorted locals.

There was a very large vat of a potent orange colored 'Punch' (aptly named) which had been spiked with acid, and everyone but me had been dipping into it with total abandon (acid was off the menu for me, following a few bad trips).

As folks succumbed to the influence of Marin homegrown, LSD, and high test booze, the volume level of the party escalated. People took up various exotic instruments - the beer bottle flute, the boot-to-floorophone, the tabletop percussion array, and the armpit fartachord. More mundane instruments i.e.: guitars, & harmonicas, also found voice.

After a couple of hours of this auditory havoc, the next-door neighbor showed up at the door.

Herman was a small, bookish man, with tufts of gray hair and thick glasses - a little sensitive to rowdiness - and was clearly aggravated by the intense reveling of his sexagenarian neighbor.

He stood at the door, mildly irate and asking for a little consideration. He was given assurences, but as soon as the door was closed the volume of the party seemed to instantly go from '10' to '11'.

In about 20 minutes Herman again appeared at the door demanding an end to the cacophony.

This time he was met with jeers and taunts, as the celebrants stood up for their inalienable Bolinian right to raise hell. Herman left, steam rising from his tufted pate, and the party raged on.

As aforementioned, Bolinas has no police force of it's own. It's a Bohemian little town, governed only by the Board of Public Utilities Directors (B-PUD), themselves the cream of the Bohemian crop.

The nearest law enforcement authority is the Point Reyes branch of the Marin County Sheriff, whose officers wanted as little to do with Bolinas as possible. Their hope was that this den of counter-cultural nutcakes might self-destruct in the absence of any authority - the Darwin Effect. This was hardly the case as Bolinas flourished in it's near anarchy.

The call had gone out however, as Herman resorted to the most despicable measures a Bolinian could stoop to. Pt. Reyes dispatched a car to attempt to coerce the party-ers into a more civil state.

The cops showed at the door, and politely asked that the noise level be greatly reduced.

A mere two Sheriff's officers against a crowd of inebriated Bolinians was a major mismatch. The respect level was less than zero, and these two hawgs were met with the same taste of derision as shown to the weasel that had summoned them.

An argument ensued at the door between George Marzachi, and the officers. The crowd packed around George, as he staunchly defended the right of all Bolinians to burn down a good Saturday night.

As he was engaged in moving Oration, Zane slipped past the officers and slunk down the long walkway which was flanked on each side by a six foot redwood fence, out to the muddy road.

There, he found the Sheriff's officer's green and gold car idling away in the damp evening air, radio crackling , inviting him... irresistibly beckoning...

Reaching into the car, he removed the mic from it's clip. Depressing the talk button, he began repeating in his best Joe Friday deadpan, "One Adam Twelve, one Adam twelve...".

Meanwhile, the discussion between George and the cops was heating up and arrest was being threatened.

Hearing Zane's refrain on the radio, the dispatcher in Point Reyes became highly alarmed. Unable to raise a coherent response, several cars of backup were urgently sent.

George had spat some epithet that crossed the line, and the cuffs were employed. The officer's grabbed George and pulled him out the door, shoved him against the fence abutting the walkway, and began the Miranda incantation.
As they turned to hustle him out to the car, infuriated revelers poured out into the narrow walkway behind them.

At this point, the cops saw Zane, with microphone in hand, standing at the driver's door of their car.
"HEY!!!" they hollered in unison.

Zane to dropped the mic and start jogging down the muddy dirt road, into the darkness of the well-timbered Bolinas Mesa.

One of the officers took out after him, leaving the other to handle George and the crowd. These guys weren't big city cops for good reason. The crowd closed upon the cop and began tugging at George, determined to rescue him from the clutches of the Evil Empire.

The cop called out to his partner, who broke off the chase and rushed back to assist.

By this time the crowd had gotten the upper hand in the struggle and George was wrested from the grip of the law. The cop who'd chased Zane saw the melee in progress and panicked, pulling his gun against the superior numbers of the crowd.
This only served to inflame the revelers, most of who's reasoning was severely bent now by the euphoria of acid, booze and weed. Not so much though, as to not realize that the gun was a bluff. The cop was in a no win position and couldn't pull the trigger, period.

As the crowd taunted the two shaken young officers, several more cars arrived on the scene. The crowd spilled out onto the road and began hurling objects at the new arrivals.

A donnybrook ensued, with eight cops wrestling thirty stoners in the mud of Alder Road. The scene was chaos - lights flashing, people hollering and floundering in the muck, and in the middle of the whole throbbing mass stood Comet, gray haired flower child in her flowing dress, peaking on at least 1000 micro grams of LSD.

"Stop this!!! I love you!!!" she plead with the grunting, mud-smeared combatants.
"I love you!!! Make love to me" she cried, and with a hand on each side of the bodice of her long, tie-dyed dress, she ripped it away and it fell to the ground. She was naked as newborn. She'd obviously had a radical mastectomy, and revealed one very stretch marked, droopy breast.

The image was sort of stunning, and the crowd of mud wrestlers fell into an awkward silence. No one quite knew what to do.

"Ma'am, please put your clothes on" said one of the Sheriff's officers, dryly.

Though extremely stoned, I none the less knew better that to wrestle with cops.
I 'd stood amongst the amused spectators, but as the cuffs came out and people subjected to arrest, I took it as my cue to discreetly exit out the rear of the house.

I was later called as a witness at George's trial. The courthouse was at 'Big Pink' (Marin County Civic Center - scene of the Angela Davis trials), In San Rafael. After sitting in a room for three days and never being called to testify, I was dismissed along with the case.

I was paid $25 a day for my time, and considered it the easiest seventy five bucks I'd made in my young life. Beer money, on the County!