THE shape of the brief but legendary Trasero County coast, where the waves were so high you could lie on the beach and watch the sun through them, repeated on its own scale the greater curve between San Diego and Terminal Island, including a military reservation which, like Camp Pendleton in the world at large, extended from the ocean up into a desert hinterland. At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes.
How it had come to this was a mystery to all levels of command, especially here, bracketed by the two ultraconservative counties of Orange and San Diego, having like a border town grown into an extreme combination of both, attracting the wealthy, who gathered around golf courses and marinas in houses painted the same color as the terrain, with vast floor areas but no more elevation than there had to be, flew in and out of private airfields, would soon be dropping in on Dick Nixon, just over the county line in San Clemente, without even phoning first, most of them solid Southern California money, oil, construction, pictures. Ostensibly College of the Surf was to have been their own private polytechnic for training the sorts of people who would work for them, offering courses in law enforcement, business administration, the brand-new field of Computer Science, admitting only students likely to be docile, enforcing a haircut and dress code that Nixon himself confessed to finding a little stodgy. It was the last place anybody expected to see any dissent from official reality, but suddenly here with no prelude it had begun, the same dread disease infecting campuses across the land, too many cases even in the first days for campus security to deal with.
But when traveling Movement coordinators began to show up, they could only shake their heads and blink, as if trying to surface from a dream. None of these kids had been doing any analysis. Not only was nobody thinking about the real situation, nobody was even brainlessly reacting to it. Instead they were busy surrounding with a classically retrograde cult of personality a certain mathematics professor, neither charismatic nor even personable, named Weed Atman, who had ambled into celebrity.
It was a nice day, everybody was out in Dewey Weber Plaza enjoying the sunshine, boys loosening their ties, even taking off their jackets, girls unpinning their hair and hiking their skirts up as far as their knees, a thousand students out on their lunch breaks, drinking milk, eating baloney-and-white-bread sandwiches, listening to Mike Curb Congregation records on the radio, talking about sports and hobbies and classes and how the work was going on the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of the cliff, gazing not out to sea but inland, towering above the campus architecture, and above the highest treetops, dark-and-pale, a quizzical look on its face. In the midst of a noontide scene tranquil enough to have charmed a statue, there arose, suddenly, the odor of marijuana smoke. That it was widely and immediately recognized later led historians of the incident to question the drug innocence of this student body, most of whom were already at least in violation of the California mopery statutes about Being In A Place where the sinister herb was burning. The fateful joint that day could have come, heaven knew, from any of the troop of surfer undesirables who'd lately been finding their way up the cliffside and in among the wholesome collegians, bringing with them their "stashes," consisting — up till now — mainly of stems and seeds, which because of a mysterious anomaly in surfer brain chemistry actually got them loaded but which produced in those they were trying to "turn on" only headaches, upper respiratory distress, shortness of temper, and depression, a syndrome that till now the college kids, not wishing to seem impolite, had pretended to find euphoric. But that day, at the mere distant spice-wind scent of the Joint in the Plaza, other states of mind ail at once seemed possible. Like loaves and fishes, the hand-rolled cigarettes soon began to multiply, curls of smoke to become visible, all from the same bag of what drug-agency reports were to call "extremely potent" Vietnamese buds, perhaps, it was later suggested, brought in by somebody's brother in the service, since it sure wasn't surfer product.
As events were later reconstructed, when a young woman suddenly fell to her knees and began screaming at Jesus to deliver them all from the satanic substance, a disheveled young man in a beige suit, with eyeballs like a county map and a loose smile he could not, for the first time in his life, control, approached the distraught girl, attempting, in a spirit of benevolent therapy, to insert a lit reefer into her mouth, which drew the unsympathetic attention of her boyfriend. Others took sides or, bummed out, began also to scream and run around, while several went off to phone the police, so before long units from Laguna to Escondido were responding, what they lacked in coordination being more than made up for by their eagerness at a chance to handle, however briefly, some college-age flesh. It was the following confusion of long crowdwaves, carrying smaller bursts of violence that exploded like seeds in a surfer's cigarette, that Weed Atman, preoccupied with the darker implications of a paper on group theory he'd just been reading, came woolgathering and innocent into the midst of. "What's happening?" he asked.
"You tell us, you're tall enough."
"Yeah, High-Altitude, what's going on over there?"
Weed saw that he was the tallest person in his vicinity, if "vicinity" be defined as a domain bounded by a set of points partway to the next person of a height equal to or greater than his own, six three and a half, this distance varying linearly with the height — His thoughts were interrupted by a scuffle nearby. Three policemen, falling upon one unarmed student, were beating him with their riot sticks. Nobody was stopping them. The sound was clear and terrible. "What the hell," said Weed Atman, as a throb of fear went right up his asshole. It was a moment of light, in which the true nature of police was being revealed to him. "They're breaking people's heads?"
"How about over that way?"
"Line of cops — helmets, fatigues — carrying some kind of weapons. . . ." Suddenly Weed was the spotter.
"Man, let's split!"
"Somebody get us out of here!"
"Follow this big dude!"
"I'm just tall, that's all," Weed tried to point out, but it seemed he'd already been chosen, already too many were going to move exactly the way he did. And he was still reeling from his law-enforcement epiphany. Without thinking, become pure action for the first time since ascending a rock face one sunrise last year in Yosemite, he led them to safety, out the back way, past Greg Noll Lab and The Olympics Auditorium. Most of them kept on going, but a few stayed with Weed, making their way finally down to the Las Nalgas Beach apartment of Rex Snuvvle, a graduate student in the Southeast Asian Studies Department, who while being indoctrinated into the government's version of the war in Vietnam had, despite his own best efforts, been at last as unable to avoid the truth as, once knowing it, to speak it, out of what he easily admitted was fear of reprisal. In his increasingly deeper studies he had become obsessed with the fate of the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Vietnam, a section of the Fourth International that up till 1953 had trained in France and sent to Vietnam some 500 Trotskyist cadres, none of whom, being to the left of Ho Chi Minh, were ever heard from again. What remained of the group was a handful of exiles in Paris, with whom Rex, in paranoid secretiveness, had begun to correspond, having come to believe that the BLGVN had stood for the only authentic Vietnamese revolution so far but had been sold out by all parties, including the Fourth International. What it stood for in his own mind was less simple. These men and women, few of whose names he would ever know, had become for him a romantic lost tribe with a failed cause, likely to remain unfound in earthly form but perhaps available the way Jesus was to those who "found" him — like a prophetic voice, like a rescue mission from elsewhere which had briefly entered real history, promising to change it, raising specific hopes that might then get written down, become programs, generate earthly sequences of cause and effect. If such an abstraction could have for a while found residence in this mortal world, then — of the essence to Rex — one might again. .. .
So did he envision himself counseling and educating Weed Atman, a dialogue in which together they might explore American realities in the light of this low-hanging Eastern lamp — but Weed, much to his dismay, turned out to be all but silent. At the Steering Committee meeting that night for the newly formed All Damned Heat Off Campus, or ADHOC, Weed just milled around. " 'To have said and done nothing is a great power,' " Rex quoted Talleyrand, " 'but it should not be abused.' " Weed smiled absently, absorbed by the beat of rock and roll music beamed by the megawatt in over the border from the notorious XERB. Girls everywhere, as if by magic, were become all thighs and dark eyelashes, and boys, seized as well by this geist that could've been poker along with zeit, had actually cut off pieces of hair from their heads and, too impatient to grow beards, glued it onto their faces. Innocent festivity ruled far into the night, not much by Berkeley or Columbia standards, maybe, though Rex did manage to place Weed in what looked like the emerging junta.
By all the laws of uprising, this one should have been squashed in a matter of hours by the invisible forces up on the base. Instead it flourished, as week after week amazingly went by, a small crescent-shaped region of good spirits in that darkening era, cheerful not in desperation or even defiance, but in simple relief from what had gone before, still innocent of how it could ever be stopped. Perhaps its very textbook vulnerability allowed it to be spared — why worry about anything that could so easily be brushed into the sea, like crumbs off a tabletop? At the same time, it was still too uncomfortably close to San Clemente and other sensitive locales.
Meanwhile, ominously, the education denied them now proceeded, as enough of them saw through to how deep, how empty was their ignorance. A sudden lust for information swept the campus, and soon research — somebody's, into something — was going on 24 hours a day. It came to light that College of the Surf was no institution of learning at all, but had been an elaborate land developers' deal from the beginning, only disguised as a gift to the people. Five years' depreciation and then the plan was to start putting in cliffside vacation units. So, in the name of the people, the kids decided to take it back, and knowing the state was in on the scheme at all levels, including the courts, where they'd never get a fair deal, they chose to secede from California and become a nation of their own, which following a tumultuous nightlong get-together on the subject they decided to name, after the one constant they knew they could count on never to die, The People's Republic of Rock and Roll.
The 24fps convoy rolled in the day after the official declaration. Cafes, beer taverns, and pizza parlors were ahum with intrigue. Young folks with subversive hair ran through the streets putting up posters or spray-painting on walls PR3, CUBA WEST, and WE'RE RIGHT UP THEIR ASS AND THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW IT! No hour day or night was exempt from helicopter visits, though this was still back in the infancy of overhead surveillance, with a 16mm Arri "M" on a Tyler Mini-Mount being about state of the art as far as Frenesi knew. Down at ground level, as things turned out, it was herself and the Scoopic. Not that she would have said she was working for Brock, exactly. When he took copies of the footage she shot, he paid no more than the lab costs. She told herself she was making movies for everybody, to be shown free anywhere there might be a reflective enough surface ... it wasn't secret footage, Brock had as much right as anybody. . . . But then after a while he was not only seeing the outtakes, but also making suggestions about what to shoot to begin with, and the deeper she got into that, the deeper Brock came into her life.
Meantime, most of the members of 24fps thought she was into "a number," as they called it back then, with Weed Atman. Prairie had her suspicions too, just from the way Frenesi was filming him, initially at a night wingding that was supposed to be a general policy meeting. Led Zeppelin music blasted from the PA, bottles and joints circulated, one or two couples — it was hard to see — had found some space and started fucking. Up on the platform several people were screaming politics all at the same time, with constant input from the floor. Some wanted to declare war on the Nixon Regime, others to approach it, like any other municipality, on the topic of revenue sharing. Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She'd never seen anything like it before. Then, in a shot of the whole crowd, she noticed this moving circle of focused attention as somebody made his way through, until a tall shape ascended to visibility. "Weed!" they cried, like a sports crowd in another country, the echo just subsiding before the next "Weed!" By this stage of his career Weed looked exactly like the kind of college professor parents in those days were afraid would seduce their daughters, not to mention their sons. "Attractive in an offbeat way," was one of the comments in his COINTELPRO file, an already lengthy stack of documents that eventually would oblige the Bureau, when they wished to move it about, to hang a WIDE LOAD sign on the back. His hair was approaching shoulder length, and tonight he wore a cowrie-shell necklace, white Nehru shirt, and bell-bottom trousers covered with four-color images of Daffy Duck. And oh how Frenesi, that throbbing eye, was lingering on him, and presently, in time to the music, zooming in and out every chance she got on Weed's crotch. "Subtle," remarked DL.
"Nuanced," added Ditzah. "I give it a thumbs-up." For somebody who spent as much time as he did with objects so abstract that most people went their whole lives without even hearing about them, Weed pursued a remarkably untidy personal life. Technically separated from his wife, Jinx, sharing custody of Moe and Penny, he was orbited as well by an undetermined number of ex-old ladies and their relatives and kids, who showed up from time to time either in person or by way of certified mail, process servers, or else all together on one of Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth, except of course for whoever the latest girlfriend happened to be — left to her own resources, she would usually, after a while, grow dazed with it. The kids ran thumping around, eating nonstop, the adults drank, took drugs, hugged, wept, had insights, marathoning through the night till breakfast, nothing ever resolved, false reconciliation abounding. All very jolly for Weed, naturally, being the one who got to set up and direct these extravaganzas, to preside beaming as two or more pleasant-looking women, in Weed's case often wearing provocative attire and getting physical about it, competed for his attention. Mysteriously, the various ladies kept going for this every time, and the kids loved it. If this was how adults were allowed to act, their own outlook might not be so bad.
Frenesi in fact had gone directly from a sinkful of dishes accumulated during one of these all-night love feasts right on to an early jet to Oklahoma City, where by now she was meeting Brock Vond for regular trysts in the waterbed suite of a motor inn out on South Meridian, by the airport. She hitched a ride up to LAX with Jinx and the kids, to whom she pretended she was headed for the Bay Area. "It was nice of all you guys not to gang up on me."
" 'Cause we've all been there," Jinx's smile unrelaxing.
"He doesn't strike me somehow as ... real groovy husband material?"
"Oh — he thinks he is. Thinks being married will help anchor him to real life, so he won't go floating off into some other dimension?"
"Do you understand any of this math trip he's on?" After a pause, the two had a short laugh. "He tried once, but after a while he must've forgot I was there, just kept on writing equations and stuff."
" 'From the foregoing, it is intuitively obvious ...,'" Jinx doing his voice. "That's how soon I knew it was over. But as you probably found out, once you can stop him talking, he's all business. So, you know, you do kind of hang around."
"A lot of this is the politics too, Jinx, I hope you dig."
"Just don't tell me you're in love, OK?"
"Sister, I ain't even in line."
The kids were giggling in the back. "Funny, huh?"
Giggles. "We're just waitin'," said Moe.
"What for?"
"For one of you to say 'asshole,' " said Penny.
Flying to Oklahoma was like taking a shuttle to another planet. After a lunch hour of sex, they lay among plastic room-service litter in front of the Tube, which had just announced that the powerboat racing out by the dam at Lake Overholser had been suspended. Voices accompanied by weather maps kept breaking in with updates on a number of storm cells moving out in the landscape, surrounding the city. Ghostly predigital radar images appeared, of gray mother storms giving birth from their right-hand sides to little hook-shaped echoes that grew, and detached, to glide off on their own as murderous young tornadoes. Weather commentators tried to maintain the tradition of wackiness the job is known for, but could not keep out of the proceedings an element of surrender, as if before some first hard intelligence of the advent of an agent of rapture. Outside, from a remote camera, the sky was the underside of a beast, countless gray-black udder shapes crawling in in front of a squall line, behind it something distantly roaring, dangling immense stings veined with lightning, sweeping, destroying. . . . She felt electrically excited — more than his cock, just then, she needed his embrace. Fat chance. He'd been watching it all like a commercial, as if the Beast opposite the city were a coming attraction he had grown overfamiliar with.
What he seemed to want was to talk business. He had drafted, sent up, and was about to have authorized a plan to destabilize and subvert PR3 with funding from one of the DOJ discretionary lines. "It's a laboratory setup," Brock argued, "a Marxist mini-state, product of mass uprising, we don't want it there and we also don't want to invade — how then to proceed?" His idea was to make enough money available to set them all fighting over who'd get it. It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost.
She lay with her hair all messed up, lipstick smeared, arms and legs in a loose sprawl, nipples erect and, to the infrared-sensitive eye, glowing steadily. A peal of thunder from outside fell close enough to send a shuddering fine ache all across her skin. She wanted so to hold him. She had entered a brief time-out in the struggle, from which, if she'd chosen to, she also could have seen most, maybe all the way to the end, of what she could lose for this — OK, there he was, full-length, the whole package — for what? The fucking? Anything else?
On the screen, the weather crew had fallen queerly silent. At first Frenesi wondered if the sound had gone out, but then one of them laughed nervously and the others joined in. It would happen again before suddenly, unannounced, a preacher with a hand mike, in front of a great luminous cross, appeared on the screen in stylishly long sideburns and a leisure suit of some lurid brick-colored synthetic. "Looks like we're in the hands of Jesus again," he announced. "Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus, and he'll be talking to you all, on a nationwide hookup, instead of this old ignoramus from the piney woods. No friends, I'm no expert, wouldn't know a suction vortex if it walked up and said bless you brother — ah but I do know how the men of science measure tornadoes, and that's on what they call the Fujita Intensity Scale. But folks, maybe today that name should be Fu-Jesus.. . ." "Mind if I, uh —" Frenesi reaching and turning off the set. "Your mathematician doesn't go in for that sort of thing?" Frenesi put her ears back, and white triangles appeared at the corners of her eyeballs.
"Or does he? Maybe he's one of these servants of the Lord, with a holy mission to defy Caesar?"
"Think I covered that on one of those forms of yours." "I read it," almost breathless, looking like a boy, "I watched all the film footage, too, but I never saw anything about his spirit. That's what I'd like to hear about sometime. I want his spirit, hm? I'm happy to leave his body to you."
"Oh, I don't know, Brock, he might be just your type." He took off his glasses, smiled at her in a way she'd learned to be wary of. "Actually he is, and I'm sorry you had to find out this way. Remember last time, when I told you not to bathe, hm?
because I knew you'd be seeing him that night, knew he'd go down on you — didn't he? ate your pussy, hm? of course I know, because he told me. You were coming in his face and he was tasting me all the time."
Brock's homophobic sense of humor? She tried to remember if that was how it had happened, and couldn't... and what did he mean about "wanting" Weed's spirit?
"You're the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that's all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places."
She was too young then to understand what he thought he was offering her, a secret about power in the world. That's what he thought it was. Brock was young then too. She only took it as some parable about his feelings for her, one she didn't exactly understand but covered for with the wide invincible gaze practiced by many sixties children, meaning nearly anything at all, useful in a lot of situations, including ignorance.
Somebody had left a promotional magnum of Grand Cru de Muskogee Demi-Sec, made from a Concord grape variety imported from Arkansas, in a wastebasket full of ice. It had a nearly opaque, deeply purple color bordering on the ultraviolet and a body comparable to that of maple syrup, through which its bubbles, though multitudinous, were obliged to rise slowly and, alas, invisibly. But Brock, an aspiring gentleman, did the gallant thing and managed to choke down his share, even managing to toast Weed once or twice. She gave him the little-girl photofloods, 4800o of daylight blue, and whispered, "It's why you kill each other, isn't it?"
"Who?"
"Men. Because you can't love each other."
He shook his head slowly. "Missed the point again — you never get beyond that hippie shit, do you."
"Point I didn't miss," she finished the thought, "is you prefer to do it by forcing things into each other's bodies."
"I hope that's a mischievous look."
"Don't get many of them, do you?"
"It's Atman who's been putting you on this 'trip,' you're getting too old to be such a smartass on your own."
She smiled and raised her glass. "You got it, just a 'medium,' goes in these four holes, comes out this one. Hey, and let's not forget nostrils, huh?"
They lounged around the room, on and off the waterbed, becoming more grapey than drunk, and Brock just wouldn't give the Weed situation a rest. Outside, beyond the dense rubberized drapes, now a solid black rectangle rim-lit with a least glimmer of failed daylight, was the storm, the Event. Just when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America — here were sounds in the air they couldn't have imagined, roars too deep for any Air Force jets from Tinker, some nonliquid clattering on the roof that could only be insects of a plague. Frenesi went to the window and pulled enough of one drape aside to have a look. At the sight of the black rolling clouds she caught her breath — she'd never seen a sky like this on Earth, not even with the help of LSD. With no warning, everything would pulse hugely with light, and the undersides and edges of the great clouds be hit with electric blue and now and then, all creviced in black, a terrible final red. In the last light out the window, near enough to see, a funnel cloud, its tip not yet touching the earth, swung slowly, deliberating, as if selecting a target below. She pulled the drapes open to allow a sword-shape of outside patio light, which had just come on, to fall across the bed, where Brock lay with his forearm over his eyes and his socks on. "You can figure it out, can't you?" he cried over the booming death-drone outside, "you have a smart-assed angle on everything else, why can't you see this one? Your boyfriend is in the way. In our way." Just quiet enough to register as deferent, sincere.
"Real easy, then — just take me off the case. Chances are he won't even notice."
"Anyone can deliver me his body," called Brock Vond across the room, "if that was all I wanted, you'd've been off it long ago."
There, as her mother used to sing, he said it again.
"Remember handing me all that shit in your office till I agreed to send in a written report? You said then there wouldn't be anything more."
"But you're right there literally in bed with him — perfect placement. He's the key to it all, the key log, pull him and you break up the structure," and the logs would disengage, singly and in groups, and continue on their way down the river to the sawmill, to get sawed into lumber, to be built into more America — Weed was the only one innocent enough, without hidden plans, with no ambitions beyond surmounting what the day brought each time around, he just went lurching on happily into his new identity as a man of action, embracing it as only an abstract thinker would, with the heedless enthusiasm of some junior doper discovering a new psychedelic, enjoying the unqualified trust of all who came inside his radius. With him gone and the others scrambling after the greenbacks in Brock's safe, PR3 would fall apart.
"Never thought you'd try to hustle me like this, Brock." "I didn't think you'd ever get into it with Atman, either," his voice just for the moment stressless, unprotected. "Plans change, I guess. . . ."
She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do it — not for him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children. She came and lay next to him, but not touching. The storm held the city down like prey, trying repeatedly to sting it into paralysis. She lay on one elbow, unable to stop gazing at Brock, pretending to herself that it made some difference to him whether or not she and Weed were fucking . . . just as she had to pretend that Brock was not "really" what he looked like to everybody else — namely, the worst kind of self-obsessed collegiate dickhead, projected on into adult format — but that someplace, lost, stupefied, needing her intercession, was the "real" Brock, the endearing adolescent who would allow her to lead him stumbling out into light she imagined as sun plus sky, with an 85 filter in, returning him to the man he should have grown into ... it could've been about the only way she knew to use the word love anymore, its trivializing in those days already well begun, its magic fading, the subject of all that rock and roll, the simple resource we once thought would save us. Yet if there was anything left to believe, she must have in the power even of that weightless, daylit commodity of the sixties to redeem even Brock, amiably, stupidly brutal, fascist Brock.
At some point he must have gone drifting off to sleep, and she hadn't noticed. She watched over him, hers for a while, allowing herself to shudder with, even surrender to, her need for his bodily presence, his beauty, the fear at the base of her spine, the prurient ache in her hands... at last, so swept and helpless, she leaned in to whisper to him her heart's overflow, and saw in the half-light that what she'd thought were closed eyelids had been open all the time. He'd been watching her. She let out a short jolted scream. Brock started laughing.
AS a resident of the everyday world, Weed Atman may have had his points, but as a Thanatoid he rated consistently low on most scales, including those that measured dedication and community spirit. Even his first of many interviews with Takeshi and DL, continuing off and on over the years, had been enough to establish a detachment of attitude, a set of barriers neither found they could cross. We are assured by the Bardo Th?dol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the soul newly in transition often doesn't like to admit — indeed will deny quite vehemently — that it's really dead, having slipped so effortlessly into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancing factor in Takeshi's opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?
At first Weed went around feeling like a political defector. People pretending to be amateur students of the sixties kept showing up to fish for information and annoy him with entry-level chitchat. He was often obliged to be at functions not to his taste, wearing tuxedos it was impossible for the average Thanatoid to rent anyhow, owing to the usual complexities in the credit situation. Weed soon found he'd been 86'd from every tux outlet in Hollywood and on south, so he headed the other way, up over the passes and out the long desert arterials, out past the seed and feed houses and country music bars and Mexican joints with Happy Hours featuring 99￠ margaritas out of a hose, under the smog, the dribbling rain, the toxic lens of sky, to where folks, he hoped, were more trusting if less picky about what they wore, and where in fact formal dress, by some subterranean fashion law, turned out to be much less conventional. Soon he began showing up at Thanatoid service-organization affairs in ensembles of vivid chartreuse, teal, or fuchsia, the ties and cummerbunds hand-painted with matching motifs like tropical fruit, naked women, or bass lures. For tonight's tenth annual get-together, Thanatoid Roast '84, Weed sported a stretch tux in an oversize aqua and gold houndstooth check, with lime-green athletic shoes. Each year the community chose to honor a Thanatoid old-timer w............