Shit Hits Fan
Thirty or 40 years is a long time in the life of an innocent butterfly, a gaping hole in the evening mist by anyone�s estimation.
This is particularly true from the perspective of human beings who monitor such things, people like the hypocrite who wrote this sentence while disoriented from diminished oxygen, between Confessional visits and trips to The Milky Way.
Because most anthropoids stick around for only about 70 or 80 years�if we�re lucky�wieners like the author with a number of pseudo ceramic teeth see any sequence of decades for what it is�a long sleep cycle.
Thirty or forty years ago in the country called USA a mighty cauldron of cultural storms did wreak powerful havoc upon the body politic and the brain cerebral.
Moorings that hitherto bound the multiple essences of North American civilization to a structured foundation gave way between 1968 and 1972 to an inexorable wave of societal upheaval, by God!
Worse yet, I never really got over that doggone Michelle Phillips.
Now it�s 2004. Tens of thousands of days have come and gone filling the conventional brain with countless new contingencies, variables and thought consuming considerations and muted out the deep past, rendering it insignificant. Yesterday for most of us is but a distant and not entirely relevant concept.
Still, I can reach back and touch 1968 with the ease of a gifted forklift operator.
Because 1969 was so poignant I can seamlessly go back to that epochal time in history with the avidity of a garrulous optimist peddling adrenalin supplements to defrock track stars.
Because 1970 kicked everyone�s ass, I�m still recovering, doctor. Which is OK with me. Inspired by Rev. Moon and lifted up literally by Cassius Clay�s daughter, I�ve made a number of positive adjustments over the years. They�ve helped transform a once wretched experience into an actually enjoyable day at Sonova Beach (gulp.)
Because 1971 was overly chronicled, I can gather its essence effortlessly, relying on notes I wrote to myself and letters I received from other star-struck inhabitants of that crazy passage in time.
Since 1972 stands among all years as the most nauseating 365-day run ever invented, even a child can recall the sound of George McGovern�s false teeth moving in his mouth as he denounced the Vietnam War and lost by a landslide.
Sure, it�s half-a-lifetime later as I sit here before this Buck Rogers word processor dumping on you these entirely made-up words describing a period long past. But that doesn�t mean any of us �got over it.� Shit, I mean hardly.
Because no one made us get over it, some of us still get under it. As in, thinking about it, analyzing it, assessing judgment upon it as objectively as possible and then opening another bottle of beer and thinking about something else, perhaps your sister.
Thirty-four years ago, in May 1970, the shit hit the fan in America. The shootings that occurred at Kent State University in Ohio let the feces fly into the propeller blades of our world.
Others have their own memories of this gross chapter in history. If their recall is anything like mine, they sense a deeply depressing interlude between ecstasy and bitter disillusionment, a time when many young people of conscience became older people of semi-unconscious as a matter of survival.
My recollections of what happened then -- and in the years that immediately proceeded and followed that fateful interlude -- are filtered now through a memory robbed of its original integrity by a lifetime of euphoric self indulgence and other manifestations of normal wear and tear, only to form the alleged content of this ostensible book.
As a singular study, this patch-quilt word romp makes no effort to embody anything resembling objective, empirical history. Rather it wants to bounce all over the room, like a ball of silly putty. Its findings are accurate yet personal, empirical yet Gonzo. They are ultimately only as consistent with the recall process of the person who formed it as that person can be, in the context of literary freedom and considering the lack of protein in his diet.
Literary freedom, in the flawed framework of this work, means every man for himself, especially when the gales of September come slashin�. Accuracy in this context is an illusive concept, a bad joke, really.
Bottom line, this extended essay deals in acute subjectivity, gleaned from imperfect recall, captured within the blur of modern-day abstractions, (three fire engines just drove by) sketched out of the memory of one slightly-skewed observer�an entirely abnormal, narcissistic person not lacking the passion to assemble this less-than-fully-enlightened reminiscence but a flawed person nevertheless, a fingernail-biting extempore still unresolved within the context of traditional maturity.
No one ever said this writer�or any fool for that matter�is perfectly capable of recalling events that occurred more than three decades into the rear-view mirror, especially when this writer insists on doing this typing against the backdrop of insipid classical music. All this imposter or any phony intellectual can do is what others do�fake it. Try his best and fake it.
Forgetting the shootings at Kent State University will always be impossible in the minds of those us who were paying attention that day, May 4, 1970, when a small squadron of nervous and unqualified Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students and wounded nine others.
Politically minded zealots like my friend Darnel and I captured that event in our permanent mental reservoirs. There it exists forever along with other indelible dates like November 22, 1963.
Most of us can go back and place our souls on the Kent State shootings as easily as we can recall what we had for lunch five minutes ago.
Anti-war protests in Kent had erupted following President Nixon�s TV speech on April 30 announcing that U.S. forces had invaded Cambodia, thus enlarging a war he had once pledged to end. The next day Nixon derided students everywhere as �bums.�
The disturbances in Kent grew particularly nasty. When the college ROTC building was set ablaze�supposedly by students although that has never been verified�The Guard went on edge. On May 3, Republican Senate candidate and sitting governor James Rhodes called antiwar students �worse than brown-shirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes. They are the worst type people we harbor in America.�
Rhodes was wrong. In retrospect, neo-reactionaries like him come across as the more sinister. Others surely disagree. They may write their own books. I was there and can tell you with zero hesitation more than two-thirds of the people who protested the Vietnam War were bright, sensitive and as patriotic as the next guy.
More than anything, they were onto something important even if they were still slightly ahead of their time. While others may see this differently, it is my opinion that whole Vietnam mess was a bad war, as opposed to a good war. I may be wrong. I could very easily be wrong. None of that discourages this effort.
As for the young people who were murdered at Kent State, let the record indicate there was nothing fundamentally wrong with them. They knew the history of our country. They appreciated the terms of being a citizen of this noble experiment in representative government.
Like all of us, they assumed certain precepts:
- Dissent is an honored tradition and is tolerable, even laudable in the land of the free and the home of the caveman.
- If you think something is wrong, you have the right to act on your feelings as long as in doing so you don�t disenfranchise others.
What I learned between 1968 and 1972 was that there are certain times in the life of a moral being when it�s imperative to stand up to immorality and exercise your endowed-in-America right to speak truth to power. Even if you have no idea what you are talking about -- and that could easily have included the �me� I used to be -- you�re still entitled to verify what a fool you are by opening your mouth and proving your stupidity.
John Wayne earned that opportunity for all of us. We accepted it willingly.
My generation was instructed to go kill Asians. A few of us thought about it, rejected the premise and lived the consequences of our actions. We concluded that we were right and that they, therefore, were wrong.
Earlier we were told Civil Rights demonstrators were provocateurs. We up-�n spit-out that garbage, too. Shoot, some real dreamers from my age group actually joined the ranks of the brave pioneers who sought to rectify that particular realm of gigantic injustice. We were becoming slightly uppity.
Later we were told marijuana was evil. Some of us found that laughable. Ho-ho-ho, Uncle Ho, ho-ho-what?
Soon the bold among us shoved aside archaic environmentally destructive practices, let Gays out of the closet, stood aside so women could gain positions of leadership and embraced multiple dimensions of diversity in any number of additional ways.
When all the issues were sorted out, however, nothing really compared with ��Nam.�
Most Americans �bought� the Vietnam War rationale for many years, before events in that theatre began to change perceptions.
By May 1970, the tide of public opinion was changing quickly. The Kent students may have been in the vanguard. But they weren�t too far off from a historical perspective. And they didn�t deserve to die.
Straight, obedient America accepted the rationale that the Kent State students asked for the bullets that killed them, that the Guardsmen were correct in shooting at them. A line was drawn in American society. Clearly, a majority of citizens endorsed the government�s hardened approach to stifling dissent. Anti-Vietnam War elements were depicted as unpatriotic cowards. The polarization was mind numbing.
Over a several year period of time, I became opposed to the war. As I perceived it by 1969, our actions in Vietnam seemed to have less to do with protecting our country than they did with destroying another one. Practically zero attention was paid to the identities of the young men my age who were dying in Southeast Asia. Their names were anonymous, the nature of their death unquestioned or examined. Bottom-line, I could not accept the challenge of letting our military train me to kill. I did not perceive the anointed enemy as deserving to be killed by me. To have answered the call and willingly gone to the war to participate in the slaughter would have been to tacitly accept the government line�we deserved to live and they deserved to die. In my mind, it didn�t add up.
I came to believe anti-war protestors were correct in their suspicion the Vietnam War was a lie and eventually endorsed the premise it was the moral responsibility of all detractors to make our voices and opinions heard.
Of course, that is my take on the subject. I feel comfortable asserting it today, many decades later, as it seems to me now at least the tentative prevailing wisdom among historians and other possibly objective sources on this subject is that the Vietnam War was ill-advised, at best, and amoral, at its core.
We�ve picked that apart for a long time. Now it is important that we forgive each other for whatever we did or did not do at that time. Now we must persist in the process of doing our best to learn from history in order to draw instructive perspectives from our wins and losses, our accomplishments and our disasters. We must do this now so that in the future we and our �children�s children� will have a better chance of avoiding similarly predictable disasters.
When he cast his profane analysis Rhodes -- an individual with apelike characteristics and alleged links to the purported �missing link� itself -- was spewing hate and a false, self-serving summary of an infinitely more complex manifestation of protest. Sure, there were some bad actors in the movement, just like there were some textbook creeps persecuting the war on the other side of the rice paddy. How about that? Anyone who ever read a matchbook cover had the intellectual ability to sort through that contradiction.
For the most part, anti-Vietnam War dissidents were everyday people of a certain age group. They (we) were normally complacent individuals who had been stirred from conservative lethargy by a war that by then had been thrust upon John Q. Public for four or five years. They (we) were typical American young people who shared in common an early instinct that our government was up to no good in Southeast Asia.
America became involved in Vietnam in the early-�60s; the protest movement revved-up in late-1968. During most of the decade most of the populace was significantly detached from it all. By 1970s, all bets were off, Katie couldn�t bar the door because the door wasn�t there any more. Many of us who came of age during that time�especially me�were flipped so far off our rockers we could only roll, with the punches, the putridity, the pulchritude.
Because it was huge, we�re still there.
Please always keep this straight: There was plenty of courage to go around in the late-�60s.
Soldiers who answered the call of duty and put themselves in harm�s way in Vietnam had tons of it. I honored them then and feel even more strongly about it ten minutes from now. They did what they were told to do. Most of them did it well. Even those who faltered were to be forgiven, as theirs was a difficult task, as in illogical.
On the home side, young Americans who put their own ass on the line to protest the war displayed similar balls, although most veterans would argue that point. It is their right to do so. And it was our right as sincere opponents of the war to stand up against our government and plead our own case.
In our minds, we were acting within the established boundaries of exalted and previously fought-for American political tradition. No matter how you sort that out, four students did not need to die that day in northern Ohio.
Their demise occurred because our system broke down, allowing poor thinking to overwhelm good intentions. This study does not attempt to dissect that specific event or somehow address the greater wrongs of that awful day. Rather, it seeks to let the writer have a good time this afternoon. In doing so, this creepy empire-builder hopes to leave you with an imagined sense of what it was like to be there with an illegal spiritual hew and a pen that worked.
Rhodes� dim-witted interpretation derived from a hillbilly brain in the body of a chauvinistic bully. He was a shallow yet politically successful man with a crazed look in his eye and a frightful incapacity to interpret reality with any measure of accuracy. He flourished in a system based upon work ethic, political instinct, a general willingness to play by the (lack of) rules and an abiding capacity to consume copious amounts of alcoholic beverages without throwing up on the shoes of your alderman.
Rhodes was a hayseed made good. I was a man/child, gone south.
This writer began working for the Republican Party in Ohio in 1968, one week after I got out of college and two years before the Kent State shootings took place. I met Rhodes more than once and joined him and hundreds of other extremely inebriated party insiders in attending that year�s sodden and guaranteed insane Republican Party Convention in hotter-than-fuck Miami, Florida, approximate home of Bebe Rebozo and the whole UJA.
Encouraged by media predictions, Rhodes actually thought Richard �Dollhouse� Nixon might choose him as his running mate in �68.
Perhaps they had a secret deal. Perhaps no one cares. Ohio was a must-win state for The Trickster. Even if he hadn�t been officially promised a place on the ticket, Rhodes as an over-the-top opportunist/should-have-been carnival barker could have mistakenly construed his destiny, multiplied by three-dozen Bloody Mary�s. I sure as hell don�t give a flying fig. I am only here to tell you he was but one or two steps removed from common lout.
At the very moment Rhodes learned Spiro Agnew would get the call instead of His Ignorance, he threw an enormous pout in an elevator in a hotel in Miami, where thousands of Republican �shooters� like Rhodes had gathered for a week of incredible alcohol consumption conducted in the guise of a convention.
In all, there were four people in the elevator. It was going up. It was early in the morning. It occurred to one of the elevator occupants�me, incidentally�that at least a few of the people in the elevator had been up all night drinking. Whether or not that was the case, it was clear Rhodes was a poor loser with a discouraging contempt for hotel property.
When someone told him Agnew was Nixon�s choice, Rhodes started kicking the elevator wall and cursing loudly, his anger unreserved, his stature forever reduced. He snarled and fizzled and came just about completely unglued although I don�t recall any actual weeping or sobbing, at least on the part of the other three of us.
We just watched him like sociologists observing an incorrigible juvenile delinquent.
I remember thinking at the time the country was probably better off with this particular nut off rather than on the ticket. Of course the other cross-dressing transsexual we eventually got proved to be more than a horse�s ass, himself, until Nixon eventually threw him under the bus, after Agnew had hurled Nixon himself beneath the semi.
These were people of intrigue. Destiny offered me an opportunity to watch them in action. They had about as much stature as a disposable birdbath.
Students at Kent State were supposedly armed with weapons. But none were found. Still, the men of Troop B opened fire. And the shit hit the fan.
I was driving from Syracuse, New York to Boston, Massachusetts when I heard the news that four students had been killed by National Guard troops in Ohio. I looked out the windows of my Volkswagen, beheld the Berkshires and realized everything was instantly different.
My whole world changed. In less than a minute, I concluded America as I thought I had known it was less like home sweet home and more like alien territory. In a heartbeat, I freaked out.
I knew all about Kent�a friend lived there and I�d been through the place as a political lackey with an illogical thirst for warm lager. Located near Cleveland, it was a hotbed of political rancor, a swelling cesspool of left-wing radicalism, a legendary citadel of exceptionally brilliant beer stores. Months before the Kent shootings, I�d driven from Scranton, Pennsylvania to Kent, Ohio one snowy winter�s day in my old VW with no windshield wipers in order to supposedly procure a bag �o hemp, only to later discover no such product was available. Offered heroin as an alternative, I quickly and decisively declined, drove to a nearby beer store and bought a 6-pack of Miller High Life.
There is a huge difference between marijuana and heroin, as you may learn from reading this. As a living person with average perceptive skills, I can tell you from experience that less than one of every 10,000 pot-smokers will ever gravitate to heroin use, even though the propaganda on the subject asserts otherwise. And there was a huge difference between protesting the amoral Vietnam War and deserving to be shot by National Guardsman, who, in the final analysis, probably deserved to be shot them self.
As you might know, the authorities got away with killing students at Kent State just like many years later the Chinese bosses would succeed in killing more than a thousand protestors in Beijing. In a world where thugs rule, thugs have a tendency to rule and to prevail with certainty. Of course, none of those thugs can stop me from writing the sentences that follow, nor can they prevent masochists like you from reading them.
To set the record straight, most everyday Americans supported the authorities in this unfortunate but galvanizing episode now known simply as �Kent State.� Protestors even as late as 1970 were still a decided minority. The movement as it were was still gaining momentum when Rhodes� conscripts sullied history. Their sinful shots resonated and ultimately gave additional credence and support to the emerging opposition to the prosecution of the Vietnam War, ultimately galvanizing the inevitable logic of the cause.
Whatever disaster beset the young �trouble-makers� (read �heroes�) on the Ohio campus, they had asked for it in the minds of �The Silent Majority,� a phrase cooked-up by Republican myth-makers to describe the American status quo, a realm within which rocking the boat was greatly discouraged. Perhaps with a few of them-there hippie-dippy protestors dead they�d shut up about the war and go home.
Historians and those of us who posture as such draw back from broad-brushing the complexities of the subjects at hand. Many elements comprised the silent majority. And disparate sources filled the ranks of protestors, from earnest individuals to self-serving sycophants, from Communist plotters to government spies and informants. You never knew who was passing you a joint. And you never knew what was in the joint. You could pretend to draw from the joint without actually doing so or you could �pocket� the joint and share it with your old lady afterwards, even if she was just 19.
And keep in mind�I was only one single person back then. I can�t speak for everyone. I did have my antenna up. But my radio didn�t always work.
Not everyone protested in those days. Most people did what they were told to do and towed the company line. Of the approximately 125 other males in my high school graduating class of 1963, I�m sure only a dozen or so of us became anti-war activists during the Vietnam War. Most men my age did what they were told. We weren�t necessarily smarter or dumber than they were. Then, people simply did what they felt they had to do. In fact, that is among the primary lessons learned from that military excursion.
Only a fringe minority successfully put two and two together, realized the war was wrong and went nuts trying to figure out creative ways to somehow try to help stop it.
The decisive events of May 1970 changed the paradigm. Kent State made it painfully clear America was tough on dissidents. But America was changing. America was on the verge of becoming permanently different than it had been before. A new dimension of introspection was infecting the body politic, the body cultural. A new capacity to see ourselves objectively, good and bad, was gradually cleansing our thought processes while elevating the national character, escalating the rate with we were about to become capable of assimilating the full picture and able to adjust our agendas consistent with a larger view.
�Four dead in Ohio� equated to a large loss of innocence and an even greater emancipation from the constraints of our charmed and childlike innocence.
OK, we inferred. You shoot back, with real bullets intended to kill, like real bullets do. Your indelicate response silences the stone-throwers, mutes the voices of some elements of your most passionate youth and ostensibly sets the record straight just as to who is running this rodeo. Yes, sir. You�ve basically had enough of this anti-war business, haven�t you? And you would prefer if those of us who have hitherto felt inclined to speak out against the nasty son of a bitch would instead stifle our instincts in favor of some alternative form of mutation. OK, we understand that.
Of course, we did not shut up. We did take one step backwards and reassessed the means by which legitimate dissent could be effectively channeled in the name of rational discourse. �Four dead in Ohio� inspired four million others to join the anti-war movement. The National Guardsmen killed a few kids. But all that did was finally give us the rallying cry we needed to turn our minority into an eventual majority and, in fact, stop the insanity in Vietnam.
After Kent State, we approached the anti-war equation with a more informed mind-set. We read a few more books, consulted with members of the clergy, slept in a wigwam, smoked a few placebo joints and thought about the role of creativity in altering the course of human events.
Soon we realized there was more than one door to the barn. And it began to occur to us you didn�t necessarily have to enter the building in physical form to free the ghosts from the shackles of misery. There was also the matter of the soul and the subconscious mind and the ethereal self and the timeless waif and the eternal concept, the almighty OM. Some of us may have gone temporarily insane at that point, around that joint.
Marijuana was lethal then. A lot of it came from Vietnam, in fact. Tons of the stuff called cannabis indicus flowed into our heads through our mailboxes, you dumb sons of a bitches, mailed to previously totally straight frat boys like me by soldiers, sent by soldiers (former frat boys themselves) to their friends in Kent and throughout the country.
G.I.s in the Mekong Delta could buy a large fistful of pre-rolled, brain cell destroying dobbins for less than a dollar. Thousands of them did, mailing the shit back to real kooks like me in the heartland. It was devastatingly powerful pot they bought for a nickel a joint, rockin� reefer that was stronger than a palate of crazy glue and more mind-altering, too. In many respects, you would have to say the stuff was TOO good, TOO strong, although from a real hippie perspective that seems like a misnomer. For objectivity�s sake, it was dangerously lethal pot at best and ridiculously overstated in essence. Although the product filtered into our society compliments of our friends serving in Vietnam who mailed it to us, none of us really needed it, actually, although many surely benefitted in ways that seemed compelling in context and even a few of which survived the test of time.
From a 2004 perspective, I can tell you that marijuana from Vietnam was halfway between suspiciously potent and devastatingly lethal, to the point of possible conspiracy. I can only imagine the raw fear experienced by a young American G.I. zoned on �Nam pot in the middle of a mortar attack in the middle of a strange country where in the fierce illumination of a overly- hyper hemp buzz the inherent illogic of the larger military mission surely came home loud and clear.
Our soldiers bought their pot from sources whom they assumed were committed to their best interests. In wrecked-�o-spect, it is now obvious the Mama San�s who peddled creeper �Nam weed were just as likely intent upon debilitating as many white-skinned interlopers as possible. Which leads to a discussion of whether pot, in fact, is good or bad, which leads to closer analysis, which leads to the men�s room.
Whether we needed it or not is not the subject of this book. That we smoked trunk lockers� full of it probably gets closer to the theme�we freaked out, some more than others. Some didn�t freak out at all. Some freaked out so badly, so far, that they could not and therefor did not come back to reality in any recognizable way.
I smoked several pounds of the crap between 1969 and 1972 and became a different person in the process, metamorphosing from abnormal to fringe. I gave up taking my shirts to the dry cleaners and learned how to play �Heart Of Gold.� I forgot everything I knew before and rented my brain out to a hurdy-gurdy man. It was a disgusting development in a perfectly cosmic sense and did beget so much eventual hilarity they named a state after me. (New Hampshire.)
Worse yet I lip-kissed stuff I would now regard as taboo, as readers will discover in the section of this book that includes letters written to me by the same friend in Vietnam who also sent me several packages of pre-rolled cannabis indicus dobbins, many of which were tainted with highly-addictive opium.
The only good thing you can say about Vietnamese marijuana 34 years after the fact is you can�t get it anymore, assuming you got it in the first place. We only had access to that particular product for a relatively short particular period of time, which surely enabled at least a few minds to retain some vestige of mental functionality, some miniscule but biologically redemptive layers of mental particulate to foster the beleaguered formulation of some kind of lousy example of a logical conclusion to this lengthy and rather pointless sentence if you can really call it that.
Only 40 or 50 people in 1970 had heard about cocaine. It came crashing in later. I saw my first �coke� in 1971. I thought it was ugly. Unfortunately, most people my age who liked to screw around with altering their brains eventually became swept up in cocaine�s insidious allure. And America got out of Vietnam in 1975, although the two �events� occurred outside the gravitational pull of one another.
How these dissecting historical points on the compass of the rear-view mirror of the mind alternatively messed with the lives of people who inhabited that world at that unbelievably poignant time is the object of this study of male chimpanzee hygiene.
A person could literally be �on the reservation� from 1968 through 1972 and still have no idea of why Tonto deferred to the masked man or who killed Kennedy, or why McNamara ran 3.5 million Americans through the Saigon Airport, or how so much oily hemp plant found its way into our dresser drawers, let alone what really happened during a four or five year run through recorded hegemony.
Take this writer for example. (Take him outside and grill him a cheeseburger.) Ask him what he remembers. Like an escaped loon from the old folk�s home he�ll start talking to you about baseball and lesbians. He�ll fill your head with so much psychobabble, you�ll think you�ve died and gone to Art Linkletter University. He thinks he knows a lot but chances are, what he does know would probably fit in a Japanese phone booth, with room to spare for the rickshaw. He�s full of blarney, drained of wisdom and absent of anything resembling a moral rudder, relying instead on choral stutter.
But look, he speaks like a real scholar and stands up tall to make his points and organizes his words in published format as if to say �ka-zoon-tyke� to the real literary world, where only sycophants do lunch with Abner Doubleday�s great-grand nieces and agents who think Don Imus is some kind of God (wherein he is really more like a Moses figure with a recovering alter ego) convene in over-priced cafes downing double lattes like there�s no tomorrow, or even five minutes from now.
Look closely. Do you see the words �Random House� anywhere on this book? You probably don�t. You probably see the words �Refrigerate after opening.�
The events surrounding the time period embellished in this excusable excursion into the historical murk will ring particularly true to people who shared those moments, other turned-on geezers like me and my buddy, Reggie Jackson. Instinctively, like shamans, they will know in their hearts the author is not making anything up other than the actual facts and the thousands of responses various assignees of different astrological signs had to those non-happenings.
Whether or not any of this bears any resemblance to things as they were will no doubt be sorted out by future librarians and will remain less important than any reader�s willingness to embrace the work with an open mind and a pocket full of discounted elk jerky.
When the shit hit the fan, the shift change became more like a global waltz with couples changing partners and partners changing couples, with enzymes entering the vernacular and hibernation giving way to short naps. America changed 437-degrees after Kent State, only to revert to normal again before flinging off into caffeine addicted pure free-fall by the time of Nixon�s reelection, just before Watergate fall-out rocked his�and my�world.
So many things took place in the same relatively short time frame, most people gave up trying to keep track of the various sequences and simply opened disco clubs or at least hired nannies.
As writer of this blasphemy, I will admit I did at one time shake my bootie with members of many other nationalistic tribes at prominent disco clubs in downtown San Francisco, back when I had money and my roommate, Pauline, made me do it. She was my best friend�s older sister and was cuter than Mary Magdalene. I swiveled my hips and snapped my fingers as we danced to �More Than A Woman,� �Staying Alive,� �YMCA� and other epic numbers from the era.
That�s the only reference I�ll make to Pauline in this book, other than to say she insisted I become a writer like all her friends either were becoming or had become. I don�t want to mention Pauline again as she was a minor figure in my life. Plus, like everyone else I ever knew, she insisted I promise I would never use her name in a book that I agreed not to do, basically. Her boyfriend, Shannon, was a great writer who considered me a sugar addicted frat boy. We spent most of our free time soaking up the bohemian atmosphere around North Beach. I became a lot of other things like vague vagabond, truck driver and small time gardener before formally taking up the pen, which, by then, had become more like the computer keyboard.
That was a long time ago, more than 34 years, in fact. The shit hit the fan and the novice took notice. Pauline blamed it on the Republicans, Shannon got a job washing dishes, Janice checked out on heroin and I saved all my letters and clippings. I knew I�d eventually dive back into this mass of yesterday and glean something worthwhile, perhaps an old pinner stuck in a stack of poems or a formerly slender girlfriend�s phone number from before when they had area codes and/or before when the girl met someone who smelled better than I never did and married the guy, just in time to reinforce an already hyper-extended inferiority complex.
It�s here, in composite form. What I remember and what ancient artifacts assist me in bringing back into focus comprise this shady document. It�s old but real, dated but daunting. We go there now to learn in order to go forward perhaps more aware of where we came from so our steps from here on might conceivably (it is very unlikely) occur in greater harmony with Earth truth, as recalled eons later but not a second too soon for erudition�s sake.
Welcome back to the late-�60s. Welcome back to even before then. Welcome into the life (as recalled) of a person who lived then, who lives still, whose need to write about all of this is slightly greater than his instinctive aversion to allocating these hours of effort to such a self-centered subject.
To set the record straight, this backwards lunge was ultimately triggered by the collective curiosity of many �young people� I met who expressed great interest in the time period of record. They were, they said, intrigued to know that someone from the era is still walking around making no sense whatsoever.
This still happens. I meet a young person. They smell patchouli oil on me. When they learn I was there in the now-legendary late-�60s and that I also write, they urge me to write about it. Imagine that. This real encouragement is certainly all this or any writer needs to force the issue.
With this in mind, I propose to lead you on a genuine tour de farce, an embarrassingly stupid journey undertaken by the person I used to be. I made more mistakes than Stanley Laurel on dental gas. I demonstrated such abysmally poor business instincts it�s a wonder my body still works or that I even have access to the computer being used to create this borderline screed.
Sacre bleu and Hey-Zoos Krees-too, Rabbi Rosenbaum, it really stretches the limo, sir. Still, ride along with the man, OK? You know, they were jolting times. We aren�t liable to encounter anything again like this in the next few minutes.
Go with me if you feel like it and feast your eyes on how one ninny stumbled from capitulation to capitalism without losing your virginity. See how a coward converted to the Catholic Church overnight, only to return to the teachings of Mormon the following afternoon. Read how one mediocre person found salvation on the back of a matchbook cover. Infer the wonder of canned tuna. Lose yourself in a loser, albeit risen.
Start by saying �howdy� to a real blast from the past, a gal from St. Paulie Girl, a gorgeous gift to humanity I met by the side of a swimming pool at a motel in Ohio. I know, I know, that is so funny! Yes, it happened. These things do happen. She was sitting there in the lifeguard chair. We still keep in touch. How weird is that? Along with the �young people� who provoked this narcissistic voyage of the ankle, she literally inspired and demanded this book. Her affirmation of my need to write set the whole enchilada on its way from the grille to the carryout bag. Praise her, blame her, she did it.
Early in the life journey, she vanished from my ephemeral sphere as suddenly as she entered. Our �relationship� never became one. I, for one, was too crazy to participate in such an arrangement. Being together with someone else requires a person to be together with ... you get it. Short of that, you just don�t do it. You can�t feed another person, let alone yourself, with less than five-cents. You just can�t do it. You might want to do it and I�m sure I wanted to get some carry-out as I was always wild about this person. But you can�t pay for dinner at The Four Seasons with oxygen. Believe me, I tried it. They sued both of us.
That was one of many things she never forgave me for although I suspect she remains intrigued with me because I write everything down and am always looking for the humor in any aspect of existence. Still, I pissed her off millions of times, especially the time I stopped by a guy�s house to pick up some boo instead of getting her to the airport on time so she could be a responsible hair line stewardess. Plus, she did indeed doth convey adversely of the crap when she did get there. It was humiliating, for her at least. I thought it was kind of cool when the jet took off. No, I didn�t. I wanted to be her boyfriend. Unfortunately, that was impossible. I was about as together as a jigsaw puzzle in a paper bag. She flew off and I tried to figure out where I�d put the matches. I was dumber than a stick-pile. And by then, I was off to another town, doing my best to stay out of The Vietnam War.
After this paragraph you get to pick up the narrative in context. It�s all there, way too much of it, really. Blame the �young people.�
