Austin City Limits

"Who’s your friend?" asked the woman, looking at me.

"He’s just giving me a ride. I met him out on the Drag . . . "

We went into the kitchen where several people were cutting up vegetables at a wide table. Heather and I got separated and I ended up hanging out with Xed until dinner. Xed had come here from New Orleans, where he’d been living on the street. Someone gave him a Zendik magazine and he hitchhiked here to join up.

"It’s okay," he said. "A lot of work."

A woman named Fawn walked by and told him that, speaking of work, he should try doing some. He and I took some buckets of compost out to an enormous pile near the garden and as we mixed it together I asked Xed if he had a girlfriend.

"No, they don’t really believe in that. You can have dates with different people if you want. It’s, you know, to

break down all the bullshit."

The problem for Xed was that he was kind of young for this place, and the older guys got all the women. If you wanted to have a date with someone, and by that he meant have sex, you had to bring it up with the group first and they would discuss it. He liked this one girl, Sierra, but he didn’t think the group would approve of the union. Later on, at dinner, I met Sierra. She was very pretty and probably the woman closest to Xed’s age. She was nice to Xed, but in the way an older sister would be. I sensed, also, that she had other options available.

I had wanted to sit next to Heather during dinner, but again we were separated. I wished that I hadn’t shaved that morning, or even better, that I had managed to grow a beard before coming, because that was clearly the favored look. I felt like I was being regarded warily, and when I told people I was living in Austin they gave me looks of sympathy.

Dinner was a big communal affair where about sixty people — almost the entire tribe, I gathered — sat around a set of tables and afterward made announcements concerning chores and future activities. There was some kind of dance performance scheduled for that night, and Heather decided she wanted to stay to watch it. I wasn’t sure if I was welcome, though.

After dinner, as I was helping with the dishes, an older woman approached me and introduced herself. Her name was Arol; she was Wulf’s wife. Together they had founded the place in the 1980s.

Arol had a set of very intense eyes and somewhat mystical aura about her. She wore a thin headband with a feather dangling from it and had a small tattoo under her eye. She kind of floated about as we spoke, moving from side to side.

"What brings you here?" she asked me.

"I’m just giving Heather a ride."

"But you are curious."

"Sure, yes."

"You are an artist."

"Not really."

"Don’t be bullshit," she said. "You are an artist. Or you want to be."

"I work in a diner," I explained.

"Don’t we all," said Arol.

And she walked away. Afterward, someone asked me what I had thought of "Arol’s wisdom," and I said I wasn’t sure. I guess I was a little flattered about the artist bit. Heather was off in a corner talking with a tall, heavily tattooed fellow named Birch. At some point they disappeared, and that was the last I saw of her that night. The Zendik Band had set up some instruments out in a barn, and most of the the tribe drifted over there to see the performance.

A heavy-set, dreadlocked girl named Raz saw that I was unsure what to do, and she took my hand.

"You’ll enjoy this," she said, leading me over there.

In truth, I didn’t enjoy the music much. It was a strange mixture of noise: screeching heavy metal and loopy New Age sounds. But the dancing was interesting. Several of the women danced about topless with fiery batons lit at both ends. This kind of fire dancing is fairly common now, but those Zendiks were the first I’d seen doing it back then. They said they picked it up down in Mexico.

Wulf Zendik showed up for the performance too. He had skipped dinner for some reason. He looked, I guess, just as you would think an old radical hippie poet who had founded his own tribe might look. He was kind of radiant, really, and wizard-like, with a long grey beard, a flowing robe and a jovial manner. He carried a carved wooden staff, too, and at one point he got up to dance with the fire dancers. Someone offered to light his staff on fire, but Arol said, "No, don’t do that."

Raz filled me in on their relationship. Arol was perhaps twenty years younger than Wulf, who was in his 70s. Wulf’s health was failing, but he still had a zesty sex drive. Several of the younger women had slept with him. Arol did not mind this. In fact, she had a younger boyfriend herself, and that relationship was about as close to monogamous as things got here on the farm.

"Arol doesn’t like to share him," said Raz.

"I’m not ovulating right now, though," she told me. "I know that."

If a couple announced they wanted to have a date, and that was approved, a spec-check would be performed to see if there was any risk of pregnancy. The creation of some of the tribe’s children had been arranged this way as well.

Although I’d expected the place to be full of psychedelic drugs and alcohol, there really wasn’t so much of that going around. Pot was pretty abundant, but it was surprisingly weak, and the Zendiks smoked it casually, like tobacco. I assumed they grew it themselves. They made their own beer too, and this was very strong, but not so ubiquitous.

It had gotten very late, and after the performance I found myself staring into a campfire with a drunken Xed and a few other stragglers. Raz had indicated that I could sleep in her bunkroom, and I wondered then if I was being given a pass on the quarantine rule. At some point in the evening she’d decided to dance and was now covered in copious amounts of sweat.

I pictured a memorable, but not entirely enjoyable, coupling between us.

In fact, Raz had not been offering me sex that night. The bunkrooms were strictly for sleeping. I fell asleep by myself on a dusty mattress, which I learned later was reserved for the dogs.

The Zendiks rose at dawn for chores. I wandered about in a haze, helping to feed animals and wondering what had become of Heather. Our original plan had been to just stay for dinner, and then I’d give her a ride back.

Heather showed up at breakfast, looking sleepy and holding the hand of Birch.

"I’m going to stay here," she told me.

"What about your stuff?" I asked.

"I’ll get that later. It’s unimportant."

After breakfast, I went to say goodbye to a hung-over Xed, who had been

assigned to watch the children for the morning. He was being helped by a woman named Liv, who said she dropped out of a Master’s program at Cornell to come down here.

"I was just tired of all the bullshit, you know?" she explained.

It was a word I heard a lot while I was there: "bullshit." As I drove away, followed by barking dogs and a group of giggling, naked little kids, I wondered if there wasn’t something to all that rejection of the outside world. As I left rural Bastrop and entered the bustling city of Austin I passed by gas stations and twenty-four-hour stores, massive billboards, and strip malls, and yes, I suppose it was all a bunch of bullshit.

But pretty Heather was out wrapping hair on the Drag just a few weeks later. She told me Xed had also left The Zendiks, and so had Liv, who grew tired of the bullshit on the farm too, I guess. Eventually, the Zendiks moved away from Texas and down to Florida, for Wulf’s health apparently, and then up to North Carolina, where Wulf died, and they got sick of all the golf courses and fancy neighbors moving in. So they relocated again, to West Virginia, where they currently reside. Arol still runs the show, and her daughter Fawn, is apparently poised to take things over.

The Zendiks have a new business now too, selling T-shirts on the streets of Washington D.C. emblazoned with their copyrighted slogan, "Stop Bitching and Start a Revolution." Apparently business has been quite brisk ever since the pop singer Christina Aguilera wore one on national television.  n°

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Arthur Bradford’s first book, Dogwalker, was published by Knopf in 2001, and in Vintage paperback in 2002. He is also the director of “How’s Your News?”, a documentary film series featuring news reporters with mental disabilities that has appeared on HBO, Cinemax, PBS and Trio (howsyournews.com).