"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

to watch it," he says.) The movie also featured Wavy Gravy, one of the founders of the Hog Farm
commune in Llano, New Mexico. The Hog Farm commune had recently become famous for running the
food kitchen at the Woodstock festival, where they also provided security. Just before the festival,
Wavy Gravy had explained to the press that security would be achieved through the use of cream pies
and seltzer-filled squirt bottles.
Medicine Ball Caravan was shot first in San Francisco and then in England, and during the
shooting Brilliant and Gravy became friends. ("Wavy Gravy is my best friend. I was just talking with him
this morning," Brilliant said to me not long ago. "I should explain that Wavy Gravy is two things: he is an
activist clown and also an endangered flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.") In England, Brilliant and his
wife, Girija, and Wavy and his wife, Jahanara Gravy-she's from Minnesota and is said to have been Bob
Dylan's girlfriend and perhaps even the model for the "Girl of the North Country"-pondered what to do
next in life. A terrible cyclone had hit the delta of the Ganges River in the Bay of Bengal, in what was
then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the eye of the cyclone had passed over an island named
Bhola. A hundred and fifty thousand people had drowned when a tidal surge had covered the entire
island. The Brilliants and the Gravys hit on the idea of buying a bus and carrying food and medicines to
the devastated islanders.
"Wavy and I and our wives-who, remarkably, are still our wivesdrove to Kathmandu," Brilliant
said. They started with a rotten old British Leyland bus that they bought cheap in London. They painted
it in psychedelic colors and filled the bus with medicine and food and a bunch of hippie friends. They
bought a second bus in Germany and equipped it similarly, and the Brilliant-Gravy bus entourage made
its way slowly through Turkey and Iran. The buses wandered around Afghanistan for months, and they
made it over the Khyber Pass, following the same road that Peter Los and his friends had driven a little
more than a year earlier in their Volkswagen bus. The Brilliant-Gravy expedition wound slowly through
Pakistan and crossed into India.tCivil war had broken out between East and West Pakistan-this was the
independence war of Bangladesh-and the border of Bangladesh had been closed, so they couldn't get
their buses into the country. They turned northward into Nepal, and eventually the buses pulled into
Kathmandu. "Wavy got sick and ended up going back to the U.S. weighing about eighty pounds,"
Brilliant says. The Brilliants abandoned their bus in Kathmandu and went to New Delhi, India. It seems
that the Brilliants were pondering what to do next in life, and nothing was coming along.
 One day, the Brilliants were at the American Express office in New Delhi collecting their mail,
when they encountered a man named Baba Ram Dass. Baba Ram Dass had recently been Professor
Richard Alpert of Harvard University, but he and a colleague, Professor Timothy Leary, had been kicked
out of Harvard for advocating the use of LSD. Baba Ram Dass spoke glowingly of a holy man named
Neem Karoli Baba, who was the head of an ashram at the foot of the Himalayas in a remote district in
northern India where the borders of China, India, and Nepal come together. Girija Brilliant was
captivated by Baba Ram Dass's talk of the holy man, and she wanted to meet him, though Larry was not
interested. Girija insisted, and so they went. They ended up living in the ashram and becoming devotees
of Neem Karoli Baba, who was a small, elderly man of indeterminate age. His only personal possession
was a plaid blanket. He was a famous guru in India, and the people sometimes called him Blanket Baba.
The Brilliants learned Hindi, meditated, and read the Bhagavad Gita. Meanwhile, Larry ran an informal
clinic in the ashram, giving out medicines that he'd taken off the bus when they'd left it in Kathmandu.
One day, he was outdoors at the ashram, singing Sanskrit songs with a group of students. Blanket Baba
was sitting in front of the students, watching them sing. He fixed his eye on Brilliant and said to him in
Hindi: "How much money do you have?"
"About five hundred dollars."
"What about in America? How much money do you have there?"
"I got paranoid," as Brilliant explains it, "because these Indian gurus have a reputation for ripping
off their students." He answered: "I have five hundred dollars in America, too."
Blanket Baba got a sly grin and started chanting, in Hindi, "You have no money.... You are no
doctor.... You have no money," and he reached forward and tugged on Brilliant's beard.