30,000 Issues From a ’72 Van : ‘Monks’ on Road to Magazine Success

At the Hawkeye RV Park in Sedona, Ariz., class distinction is normally preserved through a parking hierarchy. Uptown spots go to the folks in the $30,000 motor homes. Down by the riverside, you’ll find the proletarian travelers in tents and campers.

But class lines snapped last summer when a 1972 Ford Econoline van came to Hawkeye.

Out stepped two men, both blue-eyed and bony. They planted a Macintosh computer on a picnic table. One then took to standing on his head in a yoga pose, while the other plugged in a waffle iron and stirred up a batter with dollops of soy milk and seaweed.

The First Van-Based Magazine

Soon the uptown ladies, the kids from the riverside and everyone in between was coming over to investigate.

Which was as it should be. After all, the blue-eyed travelers were there to contact the citizens of Hawkeye .

Michael Lane and Jim Crotty are publishing the world’s first Econoline van-based magazine, Monk, “the magazine with a Heart.” Conceived, written and executed mostly from the confines of their 12x6-foot home, the 18-month-old publication takes as its subject the people Lane and Crotty have met on the road.

More specifically, in terms reminiscent of another vagabond-writer, Jack Kerouac, the pair say they seek “the child, the goofball, the prankster” in those they encounter.

The venture began as a letter home. Lane, 37, and Crotty, 28, were living an upscale life style in a seven-room mansion on a hill in San Francisco when, in April, 1986, they abandoned what they saw as the “dark energy” of the city and set out in search of a fairer outlook.

“We agreed to write a newsletter that connected all our friends with our journey through America,” Lane wrote in Vol. 1, No. 1, and added that their hope was that the adventure would “help us once again feel the soul of a great nation.”

That first issue consisted of 1,000 copies in a crude newsprint format. By spending at least three hours of each day on public pay phones, Crotty managed to solicit advertisers--mostly manufacturers of health foods and New Age books, records and other products. The pair enlisted the assistance of local printers wherever they happened to be staying when it was time for a new issue.

Readers who picked up the publication at a health food store or metaphysical bookstore began sending $10 apiece to a San Diego address for a year’s subscription. (The address is 3841 4th Ave. Suite 124, San Diego, CA 92103.)

Today, Monk is a quarterly magazine distributed all over the country, with 7,000 subscribers and a most recent print run of 30,000, according to Crotty. Income from advertising and subscriptions supports the publishers and their magazine on a fittingly monk-like modest scale. (“We aren’t really making a profit at this,” Crotty said.)

An Extraordinary Feat

All this is no easy feat, according to Michael Coffey, editor of Small Press magazine, the unofficial trade journal of independent book and magazine publishers. “Seven thousand subscribers is very good for a magazine that is only four issues old,” Coffey said in a telephone interview from Westport, Conn. “What’s most amazing is that they’ve managed to attract advertisers from this rambling caravan of a publishing company.”

Thus far, Crotty and Lane’s peregrinations have led them through parts of California, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, and on into Kansas, Missouri and--currently--Nebraska.

The two are on the lookout for people who embody qualities Lane and Crotty see as an antidote to the urban blues. Qualities like joy, hope, humor, mindfulness and curiosity. Qualities of a monk.

They’ve found what they’re seeking again and again--in film directors, retirees, clowns, fashion designers, housewives and even real monks.

Lane and Crotty were sunbathing by a river somewhere north of Chico when out of the bushes emerged a former computer programmer from Los Angeles. He wore a cap, Izod shirt, shorts and sunglasses.

It turned out his name was Henry and he was a Catholic hermit, studying at a Trappist monastery nearby.

Every morning Henry arrived at Lane and Crotty’s campsite bearing fruit for breakfast and books to fill the time. The self-proclaimed monks and the card-carrying monk spent hours swimming in the river and doing tai chi on the shore, until Henry was called back by the monastery bells each evening.

“We happened to be the first outsiders he had met in eight months,” Lane and Crotty wrote in the newsletter. Proclaiming Henry “Monk of the Month” for their first issue, they said: “To us, Henry was an angel beamed over from heaven’s gate to deliver one important message: ‘Be kind to each other.”’

The Ford Econoline with a failing clutch and 163,000 miles under its fan belt made it over the Rockies this winter, but when the heater gave out in the vehicle, the Monks were forced to temporarily move indoors.

The two met with a reporter recently in a room they had rented in Boulder, Colo.

A third partner in the publishing firm, a cat named Nurse’s Aide, curled up in Lane’s lap while Crotty, who seems to sing nearly as much as he talks, warbled loudly in the shower.

Cat Scats

Lane explained that they had originally set forth on their sojourn with two cats, Nurse and Nurse’s Aide, but that Nurse had run away in the wilds of San Diego. As for Aide, “he would never leave us,” Lane said.

While Crotty supplies the brains and kinetic energy that keep the duo hurtling from one encounter to another, Lane seems to be the presence guiding this “traveling roadshow, publishing house and monastery.” With his memorable appearance--which alternates between saintly and goofy--and his unhurried manner, Lane radiates good will.

A native of rural Arkansas, the son of an iron-ore miner, Lane grew up with little money but a load of respect for the ways of strangers, he said. When Lane was 8, his father was killed in a mine cave-in and his mother and siblings soon after moved to California.

When he settled in San Francisco in 1980, Lane took a well-paid accounting job.

Meanwhile, Crotty, son of a physician and a mother who serves as symphony guild chairwoman at home in Omaha, landed in the Bay Area at the end of a long odyssey. Soon after graduating from Northwestern University in 1981, he sold his life insurance policy to go to the spiritual community Findhorn in Scotland, he said, but got sidetracked en route.

He became a debate coach at Columbia University, and, still driven by spiritual longings, took shabby digs above a New York City repair shop because the space was also occupied by a Tibetan monk. To top off his spiritual blitz, Crotty sat meditating for three months in a Korean Zen monastery in Rhode Island.

Crotty today looks back at that period as rather comical in its fervor. Reflecting his current lighter approach to life, he is given to whimsical garb. On a recent morning, he was wearing shorts and a cowl-collared shirt that looked like something a peasant would wear in the Middle Ages. On his head was a felt Robin-Hood-style hat. Before going out in the snowy streets later, Crotty changed into an ankle-length robed garment.

Lane and Crotty, who are gay, met at a drug-free, alcohol-free dance on the last day of March, 1985. They spent the following day, April Fools, at San Francisco’s St. Stupid’s Day Parade (akin to Pasadena’s Doo Dah Parade). “That set the stage for our relationship,” Lane said.

The two found they shared a desire to leave the city. Crotty was languishing in a job as an administrative assistant. They were living in the Castro district and seeing their peers cut down by AIDS. There was pessimism all around.

“We realized you can’t really stay healthy in the city,” Crotty said. “We just wanted to be more in the sunshine, more on the grass.”

After their belongings were sold or given away and their debts paid, the two left town with about $600 between them.

“One of the few things we hung onto was this computer,” Lane said, pointing to the Macintosh. “And just before we left, a friend had given me a desktop publishing program.”

Within a week, while camped in the Sierra Foothills near the town of Paradise, Crotty said he was feeling a bit like Eva Gabor in the TV series “Green Acres.” He was homesick for the city.

One day during this uncertain period, Lane was playing with the Macintosh and discovered he could create a newsletter format with it. At that moment, he said, the prospect of sending reports home in newsletter form gave him and Crotty the reason they desperately needed for continuing the journey.

At a birthday party in La Jolla, the Monks met the Yogi from Muskogee, a man who dresses in a furry turban and sequined vestment and bills himself as “a cross between Ram Dass and Haagen - Dazs.”

Sensing that they were in the presence of a fellow seeker, the Monks traded stories with the Yogi and found that he hails from Oklahoma, where he was raised as a Presbyterian but underwent a “sect change” and now espouses a mystical philosophy.

The guests at the party put questions to the Yogi in a session the Monks transcribed for their magazine:

Are you celibate?

“Well, I sell a bit here, sell a bit there.”

Have you ever astral-projected?

“I’ve not had an out-of-body experience but I have had an out-of-beer experience.”

Do gurus wear shoes?

“This guru wears shoes because along the path there is much to step in.”

Although Monk magazine is being distributed in haunts of New Age types, the publication is equal parts itinerant New Age Journal and--in the publishers’ words--the National Lampoon of the New Age movement. Serious discussions of healers and macrobiotic diets run side by side with computer-generated cartoons of the cat Nurse’s Aide experimenting with crystals or channeling.

Courtesy of an Aunt

The balance reflects an editorial policy that is courtesy of Lane’s Aunt Babe back in the Ozarks. Lane said she has often advised him that “even the President has to go to the bathroom.”

Said Lane: “Monk is a reminder that ordinary people can have extraordinary habits and extraordinary people can be ordinary.”

Crotty added that the magazine champions “quirkiness, imperfection, the sloppy, the human. Human beings are slap-happy creatures,” he said. “We’re gawky. We’re not robotic.”

The Monks chugged into Los Angeles last June, doing “pretty well” on 50 cents a day. “There are a lot of free things to look at,” they reported, “like restaurant menus.”

When it was time to go to work, they set up an office in an alcove housing two pay phones at the Pacific Design Center. One day a respectably dressed business woman encountered Jim Crotty in the “office.” He was barefoot, with a gnawed-on loaf of bread in hand and an empty bottle of soy milk nearby. Scattered around him were papers pertaining to Monk business.

“We were soon asked to leave,” the Monks wrote. Next there was “an equally short stay in the Beverly Hills Hotel phone booth.”

Among the people the pair met in L.A. were two drifters from Seattle who were down to their last bag of potatoes. According to the publishers: “We gave them some buckwheat, soybeans and pickles and tried to coax them into being ad reps.”

Crotty, the self-described “rich kid from Omaha,” and Lane, the lanky jester, continue to wander without a real plan, bound only to get the magazine out more or less on time and to never become so complacent that adversity doesn’t force them into new experiences.

(It’s tempting at moments to stop all this running around and rent an office, hire help and install phones, they admit, but their creed is: “Simple, mobile and true.”)

Despite the unexpected success of what was meant to be nothing more than a letter home, Lane and Crotty have not lost their sense of scale.

If Monk were a radio station, Crotty said, it would be one of those little scratchy frequencies sandwiched between the big boys on the dial.

But, he added, if you can imagine some guy up late at night fiddling with his radio and he unexpectedly picks up a faint, friendly voice from Brazil or somewhere far off--that sudden flush of belonging is what some people are going to feel when they discover Monk among the noisier publications.

When someone tunes into that place, Crotty said, “We’ll be waiting for them.”