That bullshit stopped at once, and it has stayed stopped -- thanks entirely to Edwards' lawsuit; the local liberals called an ACLU meeting, and let it go at that. So only a waterhead could have been surprised when, a year later, a handful of us in search of a mayor candidate decided to call on Joe Edwards. Why not? It made perfect sense -- except to the liberals, who were not quite comfortable with a Freak Power candidate. They didn't mind Edwards, they said, and they even agreed with his platform -- which we had carefully carved to their tastes -- but there was something very ominous, they felt, about the “rabble” support he was getting: Not the kind of people one really wanted to sip vichyssoise with -- wild heads, bikers and anarchists who didn't know Stevenson and hated Hubert Humphrey. Who were these people? What did they want?

What indeed? The local businessmen's bund was not puzzled. Joe Edwards, to them, was the leader of a Communist drug plot to destroy their way of life, sell LSD to their children and Spanish Fly to their wives. Never mind that many of their children were already selling LSD to each other, and that most of their wives couldn't get humped on a bad night in Juarez. . . that was all beside the point. The point was that a gang of freaks was about to take over the town.

And why not? We had never denied it. Not even in the platform -- which was public, and quite mild. But somewhere around the middle of the Edwards campaign even the liberals got a whiff of what his platform really meant. They could see a storm gathering behind it, that our carefully reasoned words were only an opening wedge for drastic action. They knew, from long experience, that a word like “ecology” can mean almost anything -- and to most of them it meant spending one day a year with a neighborhood clean-up crew, picking up beer cans and sending them back to Coors for a refund that would be sent, of course, to their favorite charity.

But “ecology,” to us, meant something else entirely: We had in mind a deluge of brutally restrictive actions that would permanently cripple not only the obvious landrapers but also that quiet cabal of tweedy liberal speculators who insist on dealing in private, so as not to foul up the image. . . Like Armand Bartos, the New York “art patron” and jet-set fashion-pacer often hummed in Women's Wear Daily. . . who is also the owner/builder and oft-cursed landlord of Aspen's biggest and ugliest trailer court. The place is called “Gerbazdale,” and some of the tenants insist that Bartos raises their rents.every time he decides to buy another Pop Art Original.

“I'm tired of financing that asshole's art collection,” said one. “He's one of the most blatant goddam slumlords in the Western World. He milks us out here, then gives our rent money to shitheads like Warhol.”