The movie “Easy Rider” wouldn’t be released until later in 1969, so I’m not sure where my preconception that southern police were bad people came from. I know it didn’t arise solely from the other hitchhiker, who warned me, during the first ride of my adventure, to “watch out for southern cops.” It now seems like a northern and Hollywood snobbishness, likely partially derived from the civil rights movement and the idea all southern people were racists, which involved hypocrisy. Northerners and Hollywood certainly were not without sin. Boston had its own segregated neighborhoods.
The northern preconception that southern police were bad people may have in part been due to the simple northern sin of driving above the speed limit, which was not a wise thing to do through southern towns. It was said that some southern towns were quite poor, and ticketing northerners was a good source of income.
I was made aware northerners had their own problems by the fact one of my older brothers had a black girlfriend, which was rare in 1969 (or rare if you were white.) One time, while dropping her off at a bus station in Hartford, Connecticut, the police saw the well-dressed white college student with the well-dressed black woman, and immediately assumed she was a prostitute and he was a “John.” My brother did not appreciate their attention and wound up in jail. So I was aware that policemen could make mistakes. However I deemed the event a fluke, likely brought on because I knew that particular brother could be pugnacious, and I persisted with my belief that police, or northern police, were people we hired to take care of us.
Police were basically our employees. Why should southern police be any different? This was the question that apparently ran through my mind as twilight grew in Orlando, and as I discovered the small city had no YMCA. Spotting a policeman, I walked up to him and explained my predicament.
(I didn’t describe the event in my “Private Files”, so I am basing this all on memories 54 years old.)
The officer was immediately concerned and immediately his eyes sought their corners, as he sought his memory for places which might board me overnight for as little as a YMCA charged. ($5.00, back in those days when minimum wage was $1.60/hour.) An idea popped into his head, and he invited me into his police car. I sat in the front, not the back. We drove a dozen blocks down the quiet street and then pulled into a place without neon. He swung from the car, and I followed him across a dark parking lot into a lobby with a thick, stained carpet, where the policeman spoke with a clerk behind a counter, pointing at me often. The clerk nodded and the policeman left.
And that was my experience of southern police.
The clerk then took me to a small bedroom upstairs, pointed at a shared bathroom down the hall, and explained a dinner I could pay for would be served downstairs for another hour, but no later. I took a shower I desperately needed, donned my final clean shirt but kept my grubby jeans, and hurried downstairs to have a bland meal of chicken, tinned beans, and mashed potatoes with gravy, in a dimly lit and half empty dining hall, and then went upstairs to write my entry in my “Private Files”, covering Ride 13 through Ride 18 of my trip, and then concluded:
Round up 439 miles in 10 hours
43.9 miles per hour 73.2 miles per ride.
Pretty good job.
Sleeping tonight in an old persons home.
It is damp with cockroaches and
mildew on the bottom of the rugs.
I really pity the old people here.
wrote poem - in back
In the back of the notebook this appears:
I find the abrupt appearance of poetry interesting, because at this point in my life I had no clear aspirations to become a poet. In fact this abrupt poem suggests “being a poet” is not an occupation one trains for, but rather is an affliction.
The scribbled-out part, and a stanza on the next page (even more heavily scribbled out) rhymingly describes an old man who grabs the arms of his rocking chair, and wonders “does he dare“, and then others turn to see if he’s there, but he has hobbled down the stair. Where is he going? That apparently defeated me; the man’s escape seemed too what I called “corn-ball”, and I scribbled out the sentimental mush. However it indicates I felt the old people were incarcerated, much like I felt incarcerated by high school, and they wanted to seek like I was seeking. But what was I seeking? I couldn’t stretch my mind that far.
Guessing, fifty-four years after the fact, I would say that particular “old person’s home” was eking out an existence by serving those elderly who were reduced to eking out an existence.
The 1969 economy was booming, which allowed President Johnson and Congress to feel free to overspend, which may have not mattered much to the huge numbers of Baby Boomers entering the workforce and both earning and spending, for they could demand raises to their their wages, but did matter to old people on fixed incomes. Since LBJ (President Johnson) had assumed power every dollar an old person had saved had been taxed 15% by inflation, and was worth only 85 cents.
What does such inflation mean? In cases where the elderly had planned to spend 90% of their money getting by with 10% left over as “disposable income”, inflation’s cruel and secret government tax left the elderly 5% short of having enough to “get by”, with no “disposable income” to spend having fun. Retirement was ruined. And I was staying at a sort of flop house for these ruined retirees.
As I came down for breakfast I had no such economic awareness. Two years later, as I passed my “A-level” exam for Economics in Great Britain, I had a better idea of what a scam inflation is for unscrupulous politicians, but at age sixteen I was still innocent. Furthermore, I wanted a coffee. Once again I had stayed up too late writing, the night before.
In 1969 coffee cost ten cents a cup. Think of that. A person could make money charging you a dime for a coffee.
I hope the proprietor also made money on the two eggs, two strips of bacon, and two toasted slices of bread, with some butter and jam, which I had for breakfast. I would like to believe harboring a sixteen-year-old for a night helped that place stay solvent. However I wouldn’t recommend eating there. The old folk were certainly not looking “out the window”. I had the distinct impression that every eye was looking inward, at me. However they were all too polite to bother me, except for a lone old man, who shuffled over to ask me for my story.
I basically gave him my spiel by rote. I was writing a report for my English Class, “What I Did On My Vacation”, by hitchhiking down to see my Grandparents in Florida. I expected to get there by that afternoon. And that was all the information I chose to offer.
Now I kick myself a bit. I should have asked the old man for his story. I might have learned something. However I think in some ways I was suffering a sort of overload. I had too much information already, and didn’t want any more.
It is wonderful, looking back, that I should stay in such a place of incarceration on my final night on the road, because my journey was an escape from a place of incarceration called “high school”. In some vague way my mind was being forced to concentrate on what I was escaping, and what I was seeking. (I get no credit for this; it was the angels guiding me, and the Lord commanding those angels.)
It only took me three rides to arrive at my grandparents, but even these three rides seem strangely choreographed.
Tuesday April 22, 1969
Up late - at breakfast with all the
old folk staring at me. God, do they
want to go with me! I feel like I'm
leaving them behind to die.
Ride 19 where to where Orlando to intercection
of 4 and 27 How far 26 miles who truck
driver who used to be a race car driver
but he hurt his back in a acident (he
showed me scars)
What are the odds that the very first person I meet, after leaving people stuck in a room, is a person who was paid to go as fast as possible? True, he went fast in a circle, but he seldom went less than 100 mph.
I remember something he said about “hitting the wall”, which, (to define it), was a crash that tended to occur at the end of a straightaway, as cars went into a curve. He said something along the lines of, “At first you are scared of hitting the wall, but after the first few times it gets so that you think nothing of it.” However apparently he got a little too careless, and “hit the wall” in a way that caused his car to tumble, and he was seriously hurt. His scars were impressive. And now he was driving a dump truck.
Ride 20 4 and us 27 to Bradenton
How far 86 miles who fatish kid who talked about football
and how easy school was in florida.
This is a rather short entry for a long ride.
I already had a sense Florida was a watered-down version of the south. It was not so hard to understand the southern accents.
I remember now, with all the distortions memory produces in 54 years, that this fellow was enjoying a time in life where things go well. Good Karma. His parents had moved to Florida, and his life had become abruptly more enjoyable. The fact Florida schools were “easy” suggested it was not so “easy” where he had come from, which would be further north. In other words, where I came from.
As he described the fun of football I could not help but compare it with my own experience, which was not so fun. However I kept quiet, because for the most part the fellow was rejoicing, and my envy should be wise enough to avoid attempting to stick a finger in a fireworks display.
Ride 21 Bradenton to Longboat Key how far 15
who crippled man with special car
friendly but I felt sorry. Gaveme ride right up to door of resort
What are the odds that the last ride of my adventure would be “a man with a special car.” A man who was rebounding from some sort of Bad Karma. A man venturing back into life, just as I was venturing out into the real world.
I definitely did not give the man the attention he deserved. To be honest, I was more concerned with how my grandparents would receive my venturing than in a fellow adventurer.
As I scanned the road ahead I was looking down a very different Longboat Key than it now has become. Now it resembles Miami Beach, but back then it only held single story units like small motels, only on the ocean side of the road. Even in the winter there wasn’t much traffic. Finally I saw the sign for their place ahead.
I remember that, as I disembarked from this good fellow’s car, the person who appeared in charge of my grandparent’s place rushed up looking extremely alarmed and disapproving. I obviously didn’t fit the norm of ordinary arrivals. I was some punk with a knapsack. Yet, so cozy was the place that news spread fast, and, down at the seaside end of a long corridor formed by two rows of comfortable units, my grandparent’s faces appeared, his happily beaming and hers enormously relieved. The person-in-charge collapsed from indignation to ingratiation, like a tire on a nail, or perhaps like a good dog.
I can’t think of a better bookend to a day that began with me at a far less pleasant “old person’s home.” Such bookends would seem contrived in a novel, but were real in my life. At the time I didn’t even notice the coincidence, but after 54 years I do, and it adds to a sense I have I that I was coddled by higher powers throughout my adventure.
But at this point my grandmother became a problem. She was a powerful woman, at times making my grandfather appear meek, though he was also strong, and quietly held the ropes even when she was the mainsail.
How did she become a problem?
My original plan was to only visit for a night or two; Thursday morning at the latest I should start back north to be in time for school the following Monday. However, as my grandmother prepared dinner in the unit’s small kitchenette, my grandfather drew me aside and informed me my grandmother had been sick with worry the entire time I was hitchhiking south, and he wondered if I could spare her further worry by allowing him purchase an airplane ticket and fly me back north.
In a sense this was cramping my style, and represented a sort of censorship, but I was tired after four days on the road, and he got me at a weak moment. I overheard him tell her I had acquiesced as they did dishes together after dinner, and he murmured, “I didn’t have to twist his arm very hard.” This was true. Just because a man finds hardship appealing doesn’t mean the same man can’t find voluptuously sprawling on a warm beach appealing as well.
Yet, considering she objected to my adventure, my grandmother was also very interested in it. She noticed me briefly scribbling into my “private files” after dinner, with my road atlas in front of me, and said she could hardly wait to see the paper I wrote for English class.
This brought me up short. It confronted me with the fact I never intended to write a paper for English class. The idea I was hitchhiking to write a paper was a ruse, to gain permission to go on my adventure. I never intended to write a paper, but now it looked a little like I might have to.
This immediately confronted me with the fact I’d have to censor parts, or imagined I would. Actually my grandmother was very down to earth, and likely could have laughed at even the “carier Navy man’s” crude comments about a woman’s “pussy”, however I couldn’t bear the thought of talking so freely. Much of the “Cancel Culture” I was running up against was self-imposed. However not all. My favorite TV show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”, had crashed into a wall like a race car, and had been cancelled only two weeks earlier.
This in turn confronted me with a stranger question: If I didn’t want people to see my notes, who was I writing to? What was I writing for? This same question has reoccurred, in various forms at various times, for fifty-four years now.
However at age sixteen I had different concerns. I needed to work on my tan. To have a tan in April was a definite status symbol, back north in Weston. Keeping a diary was not. At some point I scrawled a brief, standardized, sort of false conclusion to my adventure, and then the “private files” goes silent.
Silence descended until May 6, when there is a prolonged wail of adolescent suffering. Apparently having a tan wasn’t enough.
1969 was going to proceed, and perhaps I’ll someday write more of what my “private files” reveal, but this work is about hitchhiking to Florida, so I’ll conclude it.
Besides describing an America far more safe and friendly than it has become, another thing this tale exposes is that, at least at the beginning, 1969’s search for freedom and its Summer of Love did not involve promiscuous sex or drugs, despite talk of such things. This surprises people. (I myself was surprised to learn some of Jimi Hendrix’s most “psychedelic” music (including “Are You Experienced”) was written before he ever tried “psychedelic” drugs.)
As a sort of postscript I should add my grandparents lived another ten years, and my grandmother never stopped saying how much she’d like to see my English paper. I hemmed and hawed and said I’d see if I could find it, though I knew damn well I’d never written it. Now at long last it has been written, and I dedicate it to her.
My third morning on the road saw me waking early, on a porch of a closed YMCA smothered by invasive kudzu vines, with no place to shower and no place to eat. Obviously there was only one solution to the fix I was in: A cup of coffee. I trudged back to the drug store where I’d interrogated locals the night before to see if they were open and served coffee. They were, and the coffee did wonders. Ordinarily I strongly frown upon all drugs, but coffee gets a pass, in my book. And this is my book.
I seemed to experience a sort of “second wind”.
In case you have never been tested, and stressed, and do not know what I am talking about, a “second wind” is a term runners use to describe a remarkable experience of rejuvenation which occurs in the middle of a race, wherein they have experienced exhaustion and cramps and feel like quitting, but press on, and abruptly the cramps are gone, the exhaustion is gone, and running is not merely easier, but in some ways joyful.
Mountain climbers experience the same exhaustion as they climb, and their sort of “second wind” contributes to the euphoria of cresting the final rise and standing at the peak. And a sixteen-year-old hitchhiker, even if he thinks joining the Track Team is a stupid waste of time, and climbing a mountain is an even stupider waste of time, is bound to learn about the mystery of a “second wind” if he, for some odd reason, decides to hitchhike 1800 miles. He is bound to get very tired, and feel like quitting, and then abruptly everything is better. Coffee helps.
The drug store I visited was of the old type, which besides having a counter where a pharmacist handed out pills to make you feel better, had a counter where you could drink a concoction which made you feel better. Originally called “tonics”, these concoctions could contain anything the pharmacist thought would be helpful. The original “coca cola” contained cocaine. Other tonics contained opioids. But then the government stepped in and robbed independent pharmacists of their freedom, and tonics became less interesting.
One thing that made people feel better, which was still allowed, was ice-cream. Therefore in 1969 one could still walk into a drug store and get a “phosphate” or “float” or “soda”, sitting and swiveling on a stool with a circular cushion on top, at a counter. Or, in the morning, you could get a tonic called a “coffee”. Some places also served bacon and eggs, sort of as a side. Many local people might therefore stop in at the drug store to start their day.
They don’t make drug stores like they used to, and I only bring this up because it was one of the details I did not note down in my “private files”. However I was very aware of such details as the coffee hit. In a strange way I felt like I was on the set of a movie. Everything was perfectly placed, to set the mood.
There are certain things I neglected to note but saw, as I traveled south, which affected my mood. There were beauties I took for granted, unaware they were not forever. For example, 1969 was a decade before the dogwood blight began in 1978, and back in 1969 these beautiful small trees filled the understory of southern forests with clusters of white blossoms in April. From Virginia south they paraded by on either side of the vehicles I traveled in, enchanting even while hardly noticed and not worth mentioning in my “private files”. Also, starting around Florence, I saw, like festoons draped from trees, Spanish moss. I chuckled when I saw it even draped from electrical lines. It was very cool stuff, utterly unlike anything I saw up north, but I never mentioned it. I mention it now because it contributed to my mood. And what was my mood? Southern.
Even as this lovely mood made morning beautiful, a sort of tough pragmatism was also stimulated by the coffee. I was annoyed at myself for oversleeping the day before, and was afraid I might fall behind schedule crossing “small road country”. Although I had saved $5.00 the night before because I didn’t have to pay a YMCA for sleeping on their porch, my budget was tight, and I didn’t want to have to pay for an extra day heading south. Also time was tight, and if I took too long heading south it would leave me less time to head north again, after visiting my grandparents. Common sense was winning out, over my romantic side.
Time to gulp the last swig of coffee, pay the tab, and hit the road.
Ride 13 where to where florence to 95 how far 3 mileswho buisness man on his way to Darlington. glasses, thin, didn't seem very southern.
I noticed the weather was getting hot, which made me appreciate the next ride.
Ride 14 where to where intersection of 52 and 301 to intersection
of 378 and 95 how far 29 miles who rich fatish man
super air conditioned car. kindly. gave me a
map of south carolina.
I must have mentioned something about my road atlas being outdated that motivated the “fatish man” to rummage about and hand me a amazingly up-to-date map of South Carolina. Thank you, sir, from 54 years in the future.
I am amazed how short the next ride was, due to the large block of my memory it holds.
Ride 15 where to where 95 and 378 to 301 at tuberville
how far 4 miles who to very black men
with deep southern accents. I was pretty
scared but they were friendly and I
think I learned something as we
passed fields with tin shacks and
mule pulled plows.
In some ways it is likely best to leave things as I stated them. Memory is too liable to exaggerate and embellish. “I think I learned something.” But what did I learn?
I can only look back, confessing my memory may be full of exaggeration and embellishment, and then try to plump up what I didn’t write down.
Because I-95 was incomplete, there were times the route shifted to the old route south, 301. But occasionally this meant you were neither on I-95 nor 301, but some rural route connecting the two. I found it humorous that the rural route would be emblazoned with I-95 signs. In fact the highway was a two-lane entrance into the impoverished landscape of sharecroppers.
The pick-up that pulled over to pick me up was big, green, and very battered and rusty. I assume I threw my pack in the back, as the second man scrunched over to make room for me in the front seat. I don’t recall him saying a word. Down at my feet was a child, or more likely a grandchild, who regarded me with round eyes as if I was a martian. But mostly I was focused on the driver.
Notice I do not describe the man as “black”, but as “very black.” He also struck me as very powerful. He had, or in my memory he has, a sort of thing I guess I’d call “presence.” He seemed much smarter than most, but not snooty about it, but was rather graciously finding ways to share his wisdom. I think he might have picked me up on a hunch that a smooth-cheeked white boy with a backpack might be a good way to show his friend and grandchild that all white people are not jerks. Of course, this is all my wondering, a half century later.
In any case, from the moment I was in the cramped cab all his attention was on me. I had trouble grasping his accent but he had no trouble grasping mine, so I assume he had experience with northerners; perhaps he served in the army in World War Two.
We only travelled four miles together, but the old truck was slow, and it may have taken ten minutes. Much of what he asked me I forget, but I clearly recall that I paused in mid sentence at some point to gape at a sharecropper at the side of the road straining as he plowed a field with a plow pulled by a mule. The driver followed my eye and then inquired, “Don’t see that up north?” I shook my head. He continued, “You got tractors?”
This question embarrassed me, for the fact of the matter was that, (with the exception of a single amazing farm to the west of the town center), every single farm in Weston had sold out to developers, and the land no longer produced food for man nor beast, but rather produced lawns. Lawns. What a contrast with a sharecropper in the April sunshine, in a sheen of sweat as he wrestled with a mule drawn plow, who actually fed a family. And what a contrast with my first ride that day, the businessman who “didn’t seem very southern”.
Thankfully I could avoid confessing my suburban shame, for my father and stepmother had run away from that world, and lived on a hardscrabble farm in New Hampshire that never made any money. So I could shake my head and, after a long pause, could say, “on our farm we use an old tractor that breaks down a lot”. The old man nodded.
Shortly after that I got out and was standing by the road again. Yet in some ways that was the most important ride of the trip. I felt very impressed by the man, and within a strange state like Deja Vu, thinking, “What just happened?” Now I can see I recognized the presence and power of a man is not measured by money, but at age sixteen the recognition was wordless.
My pragmatic side jumped ahead to thinking that, at four miles a ride, it was going to take a long time to get to Florida. Then I saw a battered truck, (commercial trucks almost never stopped to pick up hitchhikers) pull over.
Ride 16 where to where tuberville to Manning on
301 How far 19 miles who Truck driver of
the old type (who pick up hichhikers), Shaded
type truck...
...............with an old weary
engine. Talked a lot about nothing
I enjoyed the laid-back cheerfulness of the character, and the sense I was again in a movie driving in some sort of prop, but as I climbed down from the cab the sun was getting high and I was getting hot, and I’d come only fifty-five miles in four rides. Then I heard the roar of a very fast car coming down the road towards me. Despite the fact the driver had pulled out to overtake a slower vehicle, and had roared by the other vehicle, the car swung across to the shoulder to pick me up. I noticed it had Florida plates.
Ride 17 where to where Manning on 301 south to where
15 forks south - south to Walterboro 17A south
to 17 - south- 17 a over Savanna River south
on 17 all through Georgia. Florida - 95 south
to Daytona Beach 4 west to Orlando west
to florida turnpike how far 383 miles
who Greasy sort of kid in a thunderbird.
Might have been queer but didn't really
Push me any. Went over stinking
rivers in Georgia. Florida I see first palm trees
Though we spent over six hours together we didn’t talk much, largely because the “greasy sort of kid” was very focused on watching out for police while driving as fast as he could on old-style highways that often had no passing lanes. The driver knew passing was allowed because the double line in the center of the road became dashed on his side, but often it was dashed for only a short stretch. The young man would floor his Thunderbird and zing right by the puttering pick-up or lumbering tractor that slowed him down. Only past Savanah did the highways return to being the four-lane-racetracks which interstates initially seemed like they were. There were fewer cars in 1969.
Another reason we didn’t talk much was silly. We started to get a whiff of a bad odor. Of course, one does not make a big deal of another’s fart, especially if one is a hitchhiker and the person farting is the driver, but as time passed the whiffs became stronger and stronger, until they became alarming. I was wondering what sort of sulfurous beans the driver could have possibly consumed, but then saw him giving me an accusatory look, as if I was the culprit. I wanted to defensively protest, but neither of us felt able to bring the subject up even as the reek became extreme. Only when he rolled down his window and the smell got worse did we realize the smell came from outside.
I blamed the rivers, but in fact the stench was from the paper mill in Savannah, which produced a reek of near legendary proportions. 1969 marked a national awakening in terms of how bad pollution had become; the fire on the Cuyahoga River that June led to the creation of the EPA, but in April in Savannah there was a stink you could practically cut with a knife, and 16 months later, when talking with someone I had very little in common with in northern Scotland, just the mention of the stink in Savannah broke a smile on the other person’s face; it was something we could agree upon and laugh about. However it was not so laughable to endure.
I think it was all the sidelong glances, some about the stench and (I think) some to see if I appreciated how daring his driving was, that made me wonder if the fellow “might be queer”. Once the highways opened up south of Savannah he could really show me how fast the Thunderbird could go. He sped throughout the drive and we never saw the southern police I was warned to watch out for.
Thanks from fifty-four years in the future for a great ride, whoever you were. I was whisked from feeling bogged down in the backwaters of South Carolina to an abrupt landing in the middle of Florida. But that is seemingly how the angels who watch over hitchhikers work, and especially how they worked in 1969. They’d keep you in a place only as long as it took for for a dimly defined lesson to be learned, and no longer.
Ride 18 where to where int 4 and florida turnpike
back to orlando - how far 5 miles-who some kids
Had to go back it was getting dark.
The kids giving me a ride back to Orlando hadn’t heard of a YMCA, and didn’t even appear to know what a YMCA was. The people in the first coffee shop I visited were doubtful one existed. I was tired and needed a place to stay, so I then did exactly what everyone advised me not to do. I walked up to a southern cop. But that episode deserves its own chapter.
I found the old, yellowing notebook up in the dusty attic:
Please note it is not a “diary”. Diaries are for girls. Therefore it is called “Private Files”.
I had kept a journal since 1962 because I’d read “The Real Diary of A Real Boy” (Henry A. Shute; 1902) at around age nine, and enjoyed it so much I wanted to emulate the author. This involved not only keeping a record of my activities, but also having activities worth recording. Such activities tended to be few and far between, in the suburbs of that time, which were meant to be pristine areas of tranquility and beauty, but inadvertently involved idle hands, and created a devil’s playground, because I craved activities worth recording.
The fact the suburbs involved a freedom from work was not initially seen as a bad thing. Child-labor-laws were created in order to spare children the drudgery of working in factories, and suburbs seemed a refuge from such slavery. However children are in fact curious about work and like to see it. On a small farm the child trots behind his father and soon knows every chore, long before they are strong and able. But in a suburb the child often lives in a void, for often the father is gone.
Much ado has been made of poor children in the inner city growing up without fathers, and the harm it causes, however I believe harm was also occurring among the more wealthy people, able to escape the city for plush and yet fatherless suburbs. This was especially insidious in the 1950’s and 1960’s because people didn’t see the harm coming, until the children grew up and many expressed their loathing towards what they’d had to endure.
This is not to say all families suffered. Some fathers made sure to devote time to their families the moment they got home from work. However it was far more typical for a man to feel exhausted, and that he deserved a break, and for him to collapse in an easy chair, crack a beer, and watch the news. Many men were oblivious to the level of dissatisfaction their hard work was creating, and were blindsided when their wives requested a divorce. When I was in grade school divorce was rare, but by the time I was in high school it had become common.
This is not to say everyone experienced divorce. I greatly admire the families that remained strong through those times. They need to write books about how they managed it. But my tale is about a family that slid into dysfunction, and mostly about me.
I could (and have) go (gone) on at great length about causes. Whether you call it Karma or “the sins of forefathers”, actions have reactions, and it is perfectly logical that one winds where one wound up, even if it is an illogical place to be. One can justify being illogical, but why bother? So I shall skip all that. Instead I’ll just introduce you to myself on January first, in the year 1969. I was a junior in high school, but still fifteen years old. (I change names to protect, but all else is verbatim, including misspellings, from my “private files.”)
“Well, a new year has started, and so far it has been a blast. Last night I walked over to the Joyson’s house and had a little mental new years party.
Before I came I had 3 cans of beer so I was pretty happy. I got Izzy out of Bed, and we sat around listening to the radio waiting. Ruth came down and took my fire crackers except for one pack. I thought it was a joke and she’d bring them back but as midnight got closer I got worryed. We went outside and Izzy followed her tracks up to the Docport’s. It was too close to twelve to get them from her so I sat in the Glazier’s driveway and threw my one pack in the air. Then I had can 4 and can 5 of beer and went into the Docport’s. Boy was I drunk. Everything got blurry, well not that but sort of muffled. I said happy new year to Mrs. Docport and Mr. Docport and sat around there for a while. Then we went back to the Joyson’s and Ruth was there. We started throwing snowballs at each other. I jumped at Ruth and gave her a New Year’s kiss. We made a agreement that I’d let her hit me with a snow ball in the face if she’d tell me where my firecrackers were. She made a giant snow ball and hit me with it and then told me where my firecrackers were, then followed a snowball fight. It was great. I was so drunk I didn’t feel cold or hurt. Izzy and Ruth peppered me as I threw, pretty wildly, at them. Then Mr. Joyson told Izzy and Ruth to go in. Ruth did but Izzy stayed as I set off my firecrackers. The first pack I threw into the green. Bang Bang Snap Bnng ffffffftt Bang Snap fffftt Bang The second pack It lit, brought it back to throw BANG it went off right by my ear. Bang…BangBang I dropped (it) right by my feet, also by Izzy’s. I ran up to Izzy’s house, he ran, slipping and falling, into the green. Shit it was funny. I was laughing my balls off. We went into the house and talked. My right ear was ringing like anything. Nothing much happened after that, the snow had changed to rain when I walked home. I got sopped.
———-
Well, I got up at 7:30 but dozed until 11:00. For the rest of the day I sat around waiting for Izzy to go bowling with me. I had no hang over. Izzy called up at 5:00 but it was too late.
School starts tomorrow. Shit, vacation was a blast this year. I didn’t do much but what I did do was a blast.
That’s all.
Looking back fifty-five years from the future, I feel I should mention three things.
First, drinking five beers was not typical, and indeed this may have been a first, which made it worth writing down. Apparently I had obtained a six-pack, but I can’t remember how. I have vague memories of sometimes convincing older siblings to buy me booze, and there is even a slight chance my mother and stepfather, (being very liberal and not yet mugged by what permissiveness resulted in), may have bought me a six-pack with the understanding I’d spend New Year’s at home. I had a disgusting ability to bat my eyes innocently and agree to rules I had no intention of keeping, at that time. It now shames me but at the time I thought I was crafty.
Second, Izzy and Ruth were formerly next door neighbors, and our trio created a sort of awkwardness, for my best friend’s sister was “the girl next door.” Izzy could rhapsodize to me about some girl he fantasized was Super-woman, but if I said there was the slightest thing admirable about his sister he gagged.
In any case, when my mother remarried, the spring before, we moved away, and I should mention that “walking to the Joyson’s house” now involved two miles. Basically, when walking home after midnight in the rain, I’d pace from the start of Conant Road in Weston, through the town center, and then down Concord Road, up and over the Jesuit “Weston College” Hill, and then down Sudbury Road nearly to the Wayland border. It was roughly two miles to the Joyson’s house, and two miles home again, and I thought little of it. Oh, to have such strength again!
Third, the reason Izzy was unavailable to go bowling on Sunday may well have been because he was doing his homework, something I often didn’t bother with. He was subject to discipline I was “free” from, and of course he got better grades. His family wasn’t shattered by divorce, and had a stability that made it very attractive to me, yet at the same time I liked to brag about how “free” I was. The truth was I lacked guidance, and I had no one who I felt comfortable going to, when I needed help. In fact, when it came to discipline, I largely had to be my own sergeant.
This led to me doing quite a number of stupid things because, “it is something kids my age do.” It was as if I had a check-list, and read, “fifteen-year-olds break street lights”, and therefore felt compelled to go out and break a street light, even though it seemed like a stupid thing to do. Other things, such as drinking five beers, didn’t seem so stupid and instead seemed like “a blast.” Likely the most illegal thing I did was to go into Boston and buy fireworks in the tiny Chinatown and then resell them out in the suburbs. Likely the most dangerous thing I did was to go joy-riding without a learner’s permit or even a single driving lesson from an adult. Likely the most destructive thing I did was to smoke pot, but at this point I had only smoked a relatively weak marijuana once, hanging around with my older siblings the summer before. Yet all these things largely were “things kids my age do”, and a sort of “rite of passage”, and also were things I could brag to Izzy that I was “free” to do. I think I needed to brag because I felt inferior. In many ways I admired and envied him and his family.
How I felt about school comes across clearly in the next entry.
Thurs. January 2nd, 19689
Well, only the second day of 1968 and already I’m bored. I walked into school and bang! I was turned off. It is such a bore. I can’t communicate in school, for some reason I freeze up and can’t make too many friends.
After school in wreastleing I got killed. I really worked out. I weigh 146 right now. There are three weight classes I want to get in. 140 , pretty impossible, 147 probible, and 154 “if I get fat” wieght class. I’m sort of afraid of losing wieght because it might stunt my growth. As soon as wreastling is over I’m going to put it on.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to get in good with Ruth. I want to be a real friend of her but not realy a lover. I sort of want to wait with her for some reason.
Its pretty cold and dry out. Well thats all that happened today.
It is difficult to describe how boring school was, and also how schooling had a debilitating effect beyond mere boredom. I felt cowed. I was paralyzed. Rather than increasing my activity it decreased it. I hadn’t been encouraged enough, I suppose, and had been discouraged too often, and had reached a point where it felt like I myself was not allowed. To be myself I had to run away, find some other place outside of school.
There is a month-long blank in my “private files” at this point. I had decided there was something “phony” about my former discipline, which demanded I write in my journal every day. What was phony was that I would fall behind two weeks, and write “fake” entries to catch up. I had a discipline in keeping my diary I never displayed when it came to doing homework, but I became free of that self-imposed discipline when I decided it was “phony”.
“Phony”, as I recall, became a word which Izzy and I used a lot. In a rare example of scholarship I had actually read “Catcher In The Rye” in an English class I shared with Izzy, and the one thing we got out of it was the character Holden Caufield’s scorn towards “phony” adults. However I turned it back on myself and scorned any thing I did which appeared “phony.”
This story would rapidly proceed backwards through a series of flashbacks if I dwelt on what prompted me to become “more real”. Let it suffice to say I was troubled by opposing impulses, one of which loved to dream and fantasize, and the other of which loathed liars. At this point in my life school involved too much pretending you were someone you weren’t. You seemingly were suppose to swagger, but I couldn’t fake a swagger when I felt everyone would laugh if I did it. I had to get away.
When I got away I could do stupid things and humiliate myself and somehow the consequences were not so everlasting. For example, I liked to hang around with my older siblings because they were all out of high school, and I felt no word would get back to the hallways if I was a jerk. And one thing I felt I had to do, because “kids my age did it”, was to grapple and grope with the opposite sex to see “how far I could get.” I often felt very uncomfortable midst these experiments, because it was very obvious that no real romance and love was involved, but at the same time it was something you were expected to do.
A particularly absurd situation arose when I somehow included myself in a party involving my older sister’s friends, all around five years older than I was, and found myself in a dark room with loud music where everyone was “necking”. In other words, they were kissing, which is a fairly tame activity by the corrupt standards of 2023, but, by the puritanical standards of small-town1968, was practically an orgy.
And so it was I found myself “necking” with a woman five years older than I was, We boys called that “getting to first base.” I made several attempts to “get to second base” but the woman made it clear that wasn’t going to happen. Once that had been determined, I got bored. What was the point of all this slobbering? My chief desire then became to extract myself from the situation, even as the woman kept kissing. After suffering for what seemed to me like a very long time, I decided I saw an escape, and called out to my older sister, who was somewhere in the darkness, “Hey! Didn’t Mom say we had to be home at nine?” This was so obviously an uncool thing to say I immediately blushed, but it worked: I got the hell out of there, and no news of this debacle got back to the halls of my highschool. At the school such blunders seemed forbidden; no learning-experiences were allowed.
I couldn’t get away through the month of January, and after five weeks of school this entry appears on February 1, when I should have been happy because it was a Saturday and there was no school.
There then follows another long, blank period in the journal. Initially it was because school was proceeding through the dreary days of winter, and there was nothing to record but my paralysis. I seemed to have a complete inability to do homework. Now I can’t help but roll my eyes at myself. Why didn’t I just do the damn job?
Then I was rescued by the weather, and a miscalculation on the part of the town. Explaining their mistake will involve a digression.
On the east side of Weston, where Route 20 crossed Route 128, were two impressive quarries blasted five hundred feet down into solid granite by the Massachusetts Broken Stone company. The racket and rock-dust made by this industry annoyed the rather wealthy inhabitants of Weston, and therefore, when the company requested permission to start a third quarry on their land, the town fathers would not allow it. It was a death knell for the place, for the first two quarries had gone down nearly as far as it was possible to dig and still have the digging be profitable. They had a few years to go before they’d have to find a new place, but had no reason to be nice to the town fathers any longer, and it was at this point they stopped helping Weston snowplow its roads.
Up until that point there had been many snowstorms where Weston was the only town whose schools were able to stay open, to the smug satisfaction of grown-ups and the complete misery of schoolboys like myself.
I can remember many snowy mornings listening to the no-school-announcements on the radio, from A to Z. When they got to the “W’s” I began fervently praying, and then was devastated when “Weston” went unmentioned among the cancelations.
The disappointment nudged me towards Atheism, until someone suggested that the fact school wasn’t cancelled might not be due to God, but due to the fact we had massive quarry trucks rumbling around town, whereas other towns only had underfunded road crews and, in those days, rather pathetically small dump trucks with immobile blades in the front. Weston’s road crew had the most pathetic trucks of all, despite the wealth of the tax-payers, because the town could always count on the quarry for help. But then the town didn’t reciprocate, and help the quarry in return, and abruptly no help was forthcoming from the mine. Thrown back onto its own resources the town, (at that point one of the most wealthy towns in the world), did a pitiful job cleaning its roads, to my everlasting joy.
The first storm was known as “The Lindsey Storm” due to the chaos it caused in New York City, (“Lindsey” was the mayor.) The snow surprised the forecasters, and piled up in the Weston Hills more than in Boston, and measured more than twenty inches in my stepfather’s driveway.
My father had always insisted we shovel our driveway by hand at our old house, but my stepfather had a man come and plow his circular drive, and I had only to shovel the front walk and around the mailbox by the road, and tidy-up a place where he turned his car around. As I did this work it did seem odd to me our drive was far more clear of snow than the town road, but the storm had hit on a weekend, and I felt certain the roads would be clear by Monday. To my delight the roads were not clear enough for school to open until Wednesday. And that Friday school was let out for winter vacation, which meant there was no school for nine further days. As school reopened on Monday the 24th snow was starting to fall as a storm approached from the south, and this storm is remembered as “The Hundred Hour Snow.” It stalled off the coast and just dumped snow hour after hour. Many places received more than thirty inches. Most fell on the 25th, but it kept right on falling and accumulating until the 28th, and we had no school until Friday that week.
In essence, after February 7, we had a total of five days of school in three weeks. I was not inclined to be an Atheist any more.
I wish I had jotted some entries in my “private files” during that time, but I had gone from being too paralyzed to write to being too busy to write. Schools might have been closed, but that did not keep me from trotting two miles to Izzy’s house, or keep Izzy from trotting two miles to mine. We had turned sixteen just weeks apart, and were basically boys in men’s bodies, seething with energy. Often what we then did was walk fast together, peppering every telephone pole we passed with snowballs, and talking as fast as we walked, which was activity which likely would look boring in a journal, but had a satisfaction all its own, difficult to describe.
Only one of our shenanigans can I distinctly recall.
The combined snow of two storms was very deep, especially where it had drifted. The first storm’s snow had a thick crust on top, which made it possible to walk through the second storm’s snow, until you broke through the crust. Then the snow was up to your crotch and your feet didn’t even touch the ground. For some insane, adolescent reason this situation challenged Izzy and myself to jump three stories down from a roof into a deep drift. It took us a while to work up our nerve, but when we finally jumped we jumped together, and even from that height our feet didn’t touch the ground. However we then faced an unforeseen problem. We were stuck in snow up to our armpits like nails into a board. It took considerable struggle and time to extract ourselves.
That was the sort of “life lesson” we learned together. It was much more than I ever learned at school, however Izzy was different, because he did his homework and did learn from school. Also Mr. Joyson wasn’t entirely certain he wanted Izzy hanging around with me, learning my sort of “life lesson”.
It wasn’t until the end of March that another entry appears in the journal.
Sunday
March 31st, 1969
Well its been 2 months since I wrote
last. A auful lot has happened. We had
5 no school days with two record snow
storms. A lot of stuff happened but
I'm not going to talk about it.
...Yesterday was a blast. I went and
saw "The night they raided Minskies" , a C+
movie, with Izzy. After that we ate at a
a Italian place. When I walked in a
girl said "Hey, the barber shop is across
the street", I said, "Well actually I'm to
poor get a hair cut". Another said
"I'll give you one for 50¢. I said, "O.K."
She said "Well, er, uh..." It was a real friendly
exchange.
Later we got mildly drunk and we went
For a joy ride. It was sleeting and
the road was slippery. Once I almost
went off the road. Izzy scared my balls
off by pushing the button that makes the
garage door open automaticly. I thought
It was my stepfather. He would kill
If he found out I was joy riding.
Today was beautiful but rather
boring. Tomorrow is monday but I'm not
to depressed.
I should note that our interest in the movie was adolescent. Largely the theme was above our heads, but a woman did appear bare breasted, which was unheard of in movies we saw up to that time, which demonstrates how puritanical our society was.
My “long hair” likely barely covered the tops of my ears, and was more likely due to simple neglect than any desire to look like a hippy or make any sort of political statement. The fact I dared banter with the girls at the “Italian place” shows how I needed to escape my town and school, before I so much as dared to talk.
“Mildly drunk” likely means Izzy and I secreted a bottle of my stepfather’s beer from the refrigerator and shared it. It was typical of Izzy to play the sort of prank he did by hitting the button in the car that opened the garage door. I recall how horrified I was, and telling Iz to duck down below the dashboard, and him laughing. Lastly, the reason the following Sunday was “beautiful but rather boring” was likely (at least partially) due to Izzy staying home and doing his homework.
Two weeks of silence in the diary is then followed by the first mention of Florida. The journey is called “my third Take-Off” because the summer before I’d been on two adventures; first I hitchhiked to Nantucket, and later I hitchhiked to friends up in Canada.
The Beat goes On
Sunday April 13, 1969
Well I took the first step on my
third Take-off today. I sent a letter to
my grandparents telling them I might come
and visit and asking them if I could. If
I'm lucky they'll get the letter and send
back a reply before friday. I plan
to leave on Saturday but I can
go on Sunday.
I'm wicked mixed up about going.
I sorta want to lie in bed all
vacation and have to forse myself
to go out and do something.
Today --- in fact this whole
weekend I spent raking
the lawn. I think I might have
got a slight tan.
Shit thats all.
“The lawn” was a considerable area of grass inside my stepfather’s circular drive, holding four apple trees. I may not have done my homework but I was not without usefulness.
“A tan” was a status symbol in that wealthy town during the winter and spring. It suggested you had traveled to the tropics.
I became busier than I ever became doing homework, preparing for my adventure. I carefully packed several changes of cool weather clothes and warm weather clothes, meticulously plotted out my route in a road atlas, and also worked making an elaborate hitchhiker’s sign I could alter as I progressed southward. The top placard read “Florida” in large letters with “via” in smaller letters beneath it. Then, attached to the upper placard by two loose-leaf-folder rings, were a whole series of placards with the names of cities on them. Therefore my sign would read “Florida via NYC” until I reached New York City, where I’d change the sign to read “Florida via Philladelphia”. In Philladelphia I’d change the sign to read “Florida via Baltimore”, and so on and so forth all the way down the coast. On my way back I would flip the top sign over, so it read “Boston via” and the reuse all the bottom signs on my way north.
I hoped the trip would take three days each way but planned on four. If it took four days I’d only stay a day at my grandparents. On the road I planned to stay at YMCA’s, which cost $5.00 a night, and back then you could get a decent meal for under a dollar, but I wanted a little extra so I planned on $5.00 a day for food. I took $80.00 from my savings account to cover the nine day vacation, and hid $60.00 in my right shoe.
Friday, April 18, 1969
Well, I'm going tomorrow and shit it pouring.
Its suppose to rain tonight and all tomorrow. I'm
wicked scared about having to stand in the rain
all day tomorrow. I have to get a ride far enough
south so I'll be out of the rain.
I'm leaving tomorrow at 7:00. I want
to get to Richmond tomorrow. That's about 600 miles.
-------
April 18
Izzy came over at 7:30 and I havent
been able to get to sleep early like
I wanted to. Hell, its been fun as
all get out but I need the sleep.
While I've been trying to write he
has been playing my tape recording.
Also I strained my back today and I
want to soak it.
Shit, its 11:45, I've got to get to
get to sleep. I hope it stops raining.
Saturday April 19, 1969
Right now I'm in Richmond Va. at
the Y.M.C.A. I made a all time distance
record for me today.
I got up at 6:00 and talked with
Izzy. (He stayed over night because it rained
to hardfor him to ride his bike home.) I ate
breakfast, said bye to Iz, and took off.
Pop drove me to the Mass Pike, gave me 5$
extra, and left.
Suddenly I was alone, standing in the
drizzle, wondering what the hell I was
doing. It just didn't make any sence.
Why was I giving up a quiet restful
vacation for an uncomfterble stand in the
rain? I didn't really know
I went on writing until nearly midnight, stopping only for a sandwich, penning seven more pages meticulously detailing the 9 rides it took to reach Richmond, describing people and the landscapes, and calculating my miles-per-hour and miles-per-ride. But, beyond now pointing out, 54 years later, that this was the same self who seldom passed in homework, (and, when he did, seldom passed in more than a paragraph), I’ll leave the rest of the entry for the next part of this story. I prefer to end with the above because I simply like the writing. A different me had mysteriously appeared.
As I drove I-95 south through the New Hampshire night I had to shake my head, recalling what an amazing year 1969 was. In April, 1969 I’d been on the same highway, but over a thousand miles further south, hitchhiking to see my Grandparents in Florida. I came to a place where I-95 was not finished in southern swamps festooned with Spanish moss, and had to cut across country to where I rejoined another completed section of I-95 further south, traveling narrower and more curvy roads through a landscape of sharecropper’s hovels where plows were still pulled by mules. I was picked up by a battered, old, green Ford pickup holding a grizzled black farmer and his grandson. It was, (according to my diary), “ride eighteen” of the twenty-six it took to reach my grandparents, but in my memory it stood out as the best.
All the way south northern drivers had warned me about southerners and blacks and especially cops in Georgia, yet this was my second ride with black southerners. The first was three brothers who warned me to watch out for northerners and whites and especially cops in Georgia. (When I eventually was picked up by a cop in Georgia he kindly warned me to watch out for southerners, northerners, blacks and whites.) But the black farmer didn’t warn me about anything, and instead asked questions and told brief tales and laughed a lot. He’d been in the Army, years earlier, and knew not all white people were bad, and seemed to be trying to demonstrate this truth to his grandson, (who silently regarded me with round eyes, as if I was from Mars). But what I remember most is how quickly our nervousness melted to understanding and even friendship, though it was the brief friendship of a hitchhiker.
All twenty-six rides were like that, examples of people’s goodness and kindness, for even people’s distrustful warnings about others were a demonstration of their caring and concern for me. The world seemed full of beautiful people. In my memory the United States was bathed in some sort of beautiful, purifying light.
Some later equated 1969 and its so-called “Summer of Love” with sex and drugs, but the twenty-six rides involved no drugs and no sex. Therefore, in my mind’s eye, I separated 1969 from hippy drug-dogma. When I hitchhiked in 1970 the rot had already set in and the experience seemed different, and strangely tainted by filth. Therefore I cannot claim the evidence that drugs are harmful was not there.
If I’d been wiser I would have quit drugs sooner, but I was a fool. I found drugs very attractive, but even at the start my stomach felt a queasiness, an intuition which should have alerted me. I suppose I needed to suffer to learn, but by the end of 1972 I had become a rabid reactionary, and felt that for every good there is a push-back of evil, and that the purity of 1969 had been betrayed by tricked people, (among whom I included myself), and that drugs were the Trickster.
Drugs were a devious Trickster, for it was impossible to call “getting high” anything other than “high”. I had a terrible time attempting to convince friends that what they could see was obviously “high” was actually a sort of optical illusion. I couldn’t find the words, (even though, where my friends might be excused because they suffered amnesia regarding the “high” they had experienced, I had notebooks full of reminders that prevented me from forgetting, which I could refer to). It was a source of great frustration to me that my reformer’s-zeal sounded so prissy and preachy, and that I was the object of scorn.
One problem was that people desired objective science. They still do, but even after fifty years of research and amazing technological advancements the human brain remains a shimmering, flickering map of a billion pathways, like a busy city seen from above at night. Certain general areas can now be identified pertaining to certain emotions and certain activities, and it can be seen whether it is “rush hour” or not, but the structure of individual thoughts and of crucial insights remain hidden in the complexity. Understanding remains what it was fifty years ago, more subjective than objective. The best way to understand a mind is to use it.
Therefore, to explain the difference between a drug-high and a natural-high, I resorted to poetic symbols and analogies, which are not scientific and can be dangerous. I would say “A drug-high is like X while a natural-high is like Y”, and my observations could be scoffed down in flames with the two words, “Prove it.”
For what it’s worth, after decades I came up with the symbol of an arch with a keystone. Before the keystone can be put in place the two sides of the arch must be raised, and it takes considerable energy, in the form of disciplined concentration, to keep the two sides from falling, but once the keystone is in place all that energy is freed, for the two sides support each other. The sensation of having freed-up energy is pleasurable, a “high”. When a person does something as simple as a crossword puzzle they are presented with a problem and are enjoying the “high” of finding answers.
Often, once an arch is completed, one doesn’t need to think of it any more. Learning to walk or drive a car involves considerable concentration, but later we walk or drive largely on a sort of autopilot, without thinking about what we do. In fact at any given moment our awareness is a laser focus on one spot, even as an enormous amount goes on in autopilot in our subconscious. Millions of individual arches involving millions of keystones are involved, and major arches are built of countless smaller arches.
Besides times of building there are times things need to be taken down. A useful analogy is a desk that gets so messy it becomes impossible to work, so work must cease and a new work, cleaning-the-desk, must be done. While this can be experienced as a pleasurable event like doing a crossword puzzle, it is often experienced as a depression of sorts. We’d rather eat than wash the dishes. We are creatures of habit, and prefer doing what we enjoy, and some of the greatest crises of our lives involve stopping what we enjoy, and doing what we don’t.
Using my analogy of an arch, this involves removing the keystone of an old arch. Immediately the energy of the two sides is released. One had better be prepared, for otherwise the arch collapses into a heap of rubble and much energy does little more than raise a cloud of mental dust, (which may be a good thing, if the old arch was a bad habit causing serious problems). If one is prepared, one has some sort of new-and-improved arch they are trying out (perhaps very tentatively). In other cases one may backslide, reverting from a better behavior that feels new and uncomfortable to old, tried-and-true behavior that has negative consequences.
Like all analogies, the “archway-keystone” analogy has shortcomings, but one thing I liked about it was that it explained why a drug-high was negative. Drugs removed keystones in a higgledy-pigglety manner, freeing up energy without regard to what arches were involved. I noticed that drugged people were initially very “liberated”, in that they were able to abandon old ideas and accept new ideas, but at times this merely meant they were suggestible, and willing to accept new ideas that seemed downright dumb. The discipline of careful thought was abandoned, and, in the long term, rather than carefully crafted new thoughts they tended to backslide to the old. Consequently they were able to say “drugs haven’t changed me”, when change in fact is a crucial component to growth, and failure-to-change is the fabric of frustration, and even madness.
To be honest, left to my own devices, I would have destroyed my physical brain with drugs in the manner some of my closest friends did, for I would have tried harder and harder to get high and stay high until the damages became too great. I can’t take credit for the fact I could compare being on-drugs with being off-drugs, while reviewing old notebooks, because I wouldn’t have ever quit. The grace of God did the quitting for me.
The first period off-drugs was due to my stepfather, (who could see what drugs were doing to students at Harvard). He tricked me into going to school in Scotland. I thought the school would be “far out” and “groovy” because it was in a castle, but when I got there I discovered it was like joining the marines. In my view there was far too much exercise and far too much study. There were no drugs available and no way to run away, as I couldn’t figure out how to hitchhike across an ocean. Then, when I finally returned to the States, I could see my friends had been strangely damaged, but instead of blaming drugs I blamed President Nixon.
The second period off-drugs was due, strangely, to my incorrect conclusion that what was damaging friends was economic pressures, which could be solved by making heaps of money buying drugs very cheaply and selling them sort-of-cheaply, which involved me in an escapade aboard a “borrowed” yacht, and two months at sea with no drugs.
Even despite the evidence I received by being able to compare periods on-drugs with periods off-drugs, (which was a blessing and likely saved my life, if not all of my brains), I refused to blame drugs, and therefore went to hell a third time, perhaps experiencing what scripture describes as being “given to your sin”. My notebooks show me learning things the hard way:
Even as I insisted upon being stupid I recall my conscience nagging me, and also I kept being quietly harangued by incidents in reality, such as someone walking up to me in Harvard Square and handing me a pamphlet that had been kicking around since 1966:
At that time Meher Baba’s face had a habit of popping up unexpectedly, for example briefly in the movie, “Woodstock“, or midst pictures on the cover of an album by Peter Townsend. Meher Baba was definitely opposed to drugs:
“Tell those who indulge in these drugs (LSD, marijuana, and other types) that it is harmful physically, mentally and spiritually, and that they should stop the taking of these drugs. Your duty is to tell them, regardless of whether they accept what you say, or if they ridicule or humiliate you, to boldly and bravely face these things.”
As I started to toy with the idea of going to India I discovered I would not be welcomed by Meher Baba’s disciples unless I had been off drugs for six months. At first this meant I simply wouldn’t visit them, though it had become increasingly obvious to me drugs were failing to get me as “high” as they once had done. The problem was that I had become completely dependent, and without marijuana I couldn’t get “high” at all. Therefore, (though I knew I could quit as I’d quit twice before), quitting drugs meant I’d face a gray time (I had no idea how long) when I’d have to go without the very poetry which the Trickster had used to attract me to drugs in the first place. The fact I eventually went through a gray period without poetry may not seem like much, (especially among those who deem my poems a good reason to rush screaming from the room), but in retrospect it was one of the braver things I’ve ever done.
I went through this chaos between age sixteen and age nineteen, and it was during this time Audley went through a similar upheaval, and also was the time we became friends.
I eventually decided the Trickster was especially effective right after 1969, because there was a sort of afterglow due to the “natural” event, an event which was some sort of worldwide “revival” or “jubilee” or perhaps what they call a “darshan” in India, and people on drugs noticed this effulgence and gave drugs credit when drugs deserved none. In 1970 I simply and naively decided a “revolution” had occurred and the world was changed forever, and I went wild.
The second half of my senior year of high school turned into one, long, accelerating party, and I barely graduated. The parties extended into the summer, as if everyone knew their time living pampered in a wealthy suburb was drawing to a close, (not one of us could afford to even rent a house in such a town), and everyone wanted to have one final, crazy binge. There seemed to be an underground network that determined whose parents were away, and that house would be where the party was; in a wealthy suburb hard-working parents deserved breaks and could afford many vacations, and therefore many homes became available; sometimes I attended three or four parties a night, unsure what town I was in by dawn. When I looked in a morning mirror, the face I saw I looked nothing like the youth I was in February, when I placed sixth in my weight-class in the state wrestling meet. My face was becoming a papery hue of ashy gray and I’d lost fifteen pounds, though I was thin to begin with.
While I cringe slightly, looking back and seeing debauchery and decay, it is important to remember the Trickster was aided and abetted by older people, (some merely fools but some truly evil), who stated we were “expanding” our consciousness. I truly felt I was a pioneer on the frontier, and that, if I was clumsy, it was because I was inexperienced, and that further experience would result in further learning. Jimi Hendrix’s album, “Are You Experienced” (1967), made me feel a sort of smug pity for those who were not “experienced” (although the hit “Purple Haze” was not about drugs; it was about a dream, and was written before Hendrix tried LSD). The problem was that drugs involved amnesia. It is hard to learn from experience when you can’t remember what the experience was.
The sense I had at that time was that the inner world was especially loaded with inspiration. I could hear it when guitarists freed themselves from the constraints of sheet music and simply improvised. Therefore, on one hand, I wanted to be free from constraints, while on the other I wanted to record the improvisations, which imposed a new constraint. I had fascinating talks with people who wondered if attempting to record, write-down, and in a sense make-a-map of the new landscape was detrimental to exploration of that landscape. Some suggested my note-taking meant I was “up tight” and failing to “go with the flow”, however it was in my nature to keep notes. I asserted the notes themselves were a sort of musical instrument like a guitar, full of poetry and art that spilled onto the page spontaneously. During parties I’d place a large sheet of paper on a table with colored markers, so people could improvise what came into their drug-addled brains, so we could remember later, even after the amnesia set in.
I especially liked getting to know others better. It seemed like I’d spent years on my best behavior, walking around prim and proper and constrained, while secretly and deeply desiring to get the hell out of town to some place where I could be myself; now suddenly people were more open and honest. Even some “people-over-thirty”, (a term-of-scorn originally aimed at old, gray communists at the Kremlin (1964), but later a catch-phrase covering all “square” adults, used by radicals such as Abbie Hoffman)(1968), turned out to be people-over-thirty who were interesting. When parents came home unexpectedly early and discovered their children having a party some surprised me. Where I expected such parents to blow a gasket some sat down and talked, telling interesting stories about how they came to be wealthy. A few even smoked marijuana, which struck me as shattering all rules and preconceptions.
Despite all the joy of all the parties I sometimes felt deep exasperation, because people didn’t all improvise beautiful music or pontificate profundity. Some seemed purely focused on the physical sensation of a “buzz” or “rush”, or on the gluttony of the “munchies”, or on how hard it was to order fast-food when they were so stoned that they couldn’t read the illuminated menu above the counter, (they got lost in the menu’s dazzle), and my exasperation leaks into my notes:
...My friends: They all are saying
Things they've said before.
Deep inside I'm praying
They'll say a little more...
"...shit, man,
We were so stoned,
I mean really wreaked,
And everything was so funny.
We walked into this place
With all these librarian
Type people...
You know.
And they were all
STARING AT US
And we were really stoned,
Fantastically wrecked
And we started laughing
Really hard
And had to leave!"
More more more more!
The stuff they see is such a bore.
Unless they stop to investigate
They'll feel so small
And break and fall
And it will be too late...
For those who doubt the veracity of my claim (that I kept scientific notes which included noting my increasing frustration), I’ll include a picture of the page that held the above fragment. (Proof that the notes were highly scientific is that they were inked onto graph paper.)
Freudians informed me my frustration was due a thwarted sex-drive but, in terms of sex, while I felt sheepish about my lack of experience, I simply lacked the craving others had. I recall walking into a party where everyone was naked and painting each others aroused bodies with day-glow paint under black-lights, and, after watching for a while, I decided the conversation had no intellectual merit and was downright boring, and left to find a better party. I felt no tugging lust or hankering, and while some shamed me, and I myself felt embarrassed for being “sexually repressed”, I was merely innocent. Now that fifty years have passed I think that rather than “repressed” I may have possessed a degree of something called “purity”, and should have been praised for incipient spirituality, rather than shamed.
Not that I was a saint; I did have a girl-friend, and we did experimentally “fool around”, but the petting was secondary to our other problems and disagreements, one of which was that she didn’t approve of drugs and most parties, a second of which was that I often would rather write poetry than talk with her, and a third of which was that I had around seven other girlfriends.
I think these “other women” simply recognized my innocence made me sexually nonthreatening, and a good confidant. They were all a year or two younger, and a few years later might have represented a considerable temptation, but at the time I can honestly say they were more of a bother, like little sisters with problems that seemed to be all fuss and drama. I endured hearing their woes about boyfriends, and also hearing their boyfriend’s woes about them, but I’d rather be out with a couple pals my age, driving about pretending to be full of braggadocio like The Three Musketeers, when in fact we were quite shy. My pals were a year older than I, and sometimes we’d become competitive in terms of physical prowess, or in terms of our prowess in sweet-talking girls from the windows of cars, or in terms of our artistic prowess. I’d often feel inferior to them, which was odd because I had a girlfriend and they didn’t, and I had seven girls seeking my advice, while those same seven girls were a bit wary of my pals.
This all stewed together into what I suppose was our “community”, or perhaps “gang.” It was a precarious association, because we had no place of our own, and there was a vague awareness that the wealthy suburbs wanted us ejected, because we were in fact too poor to live there, without our parents. Perhaps no other community on earth rejects youth to the degree those wealthy suburbs did, (although scripture speaks of a Canaanite god “Moloch” which demanded child-sacrifice). To me going to Vietnam seemed a sort of child-sacrifice, and even going to college involved the shattering of our community, which had existed since kindergarten. All in all we felt unwanted and unwelcome, which in an odd way pushed us closer together and made our community stronger.
Besides finding houses where parents weren’t home, we found a place out in the woods. There was several hundred acres of overgrown farmland where the towns of Lincoln, Wayland and Weston came together, and, though developers had plans to turn the area into a country club and vast golf course, for the time being we called it our own. We even entertained plans to somehow get rich quick, and buy the land. Perhaps it awoke some ancestral memory of times when the young simply moved further into the woods to start a farm of their own, but we moved out into the forest and had parties out where no one was bothered by us. The parties were wonderful barbecues, with people playing guitars and flutes in firelight, involving long conversations, some deep and some whimsical and full of laughter, until birds serenaded the green light of dawn.
Unfortunately word spread about how nice our parties were, and each party was larger and more successful, until several hundred people showed up. This caused parking problems along suburban streets, and caused suburbanites to be dismayed by long-haired, garishly-dressed strangers entering and departed the woods via their backyard trees. Back in those times a party was deemed successful if the police showed up, but our biggest party had the officers from three towns wandering the midnight woods, meeting lost youths who also wondered where the heck the party was. To me this suggested our “community” had a problem, accented by the fact that after the biggest party the parents of seven young girls strictly forbid their daughters from ever attending such parties again.
I wanted to get away and think about the problems that were surfacing, but got no relief. This was in part due to my being a sort of missionary of the counter-culture, which was in part brought about by the fact my business of importing fireworks from the inner city to the suburbs evolved, in a perfectly natural way, to importing drugs from the inner city. (Suburban marijuana at that time was heavily laced with alfalfa, and a cigarette would barely get one high, whereas marijuana from the black, urban neighborhood of Roxbury was “the real deal” and earned the suburban nickname “Mooner.”) While I saw little difference between fireworks and drugs (they both let you see pretty colors) the law begged to differ, and the risk I blithely faced was considerable jail time, which led me to scrutinizing people and wondering if they were “narcs”. At the same time it became widely known, “Mooner is the best stuff”, and friends were constantly introducing me to strangers, young and old, some of whom had never smoked marijuana before in their lives.
I had a strangely developed sense of responsibility about the mental health of novices, for a criminal. Some novices were as young as thirteen, and I worried they couldn’t handle the “expansion” of their brains. At worst I suppose I was selfishly afraid they’d “spill the beans” and land me in jail, but I’d insist that if they smoked that they first smoke with me, so I could oversee and guide.
I suppose it was because I was a “guide” that it came to pass that when someone was suffering a “bummer” or “bad trip” people brought these suffering souls not to a hospital or parent or priest, but to a seventeen-year-old me. I was cock-sure I could handle such cases, and this arrogant attitude was furthered by the fact I was strangely good at waking people from their bad dreams. I’m not sure how or why, but I just was unafraid of their schizophrenic states, and jollied or bullied or distracted them from the mental ruts they were in. In one case it was as simple as taking the bummed-out person outside to watch some fireworks; the dazzle in their eyes made them utterly forget whatever their nightmare was.
Another time a girl was slouched on her haunches in an incredibly ugly way, with her head between her knees, softly wailing, “I’m ugly.” She was repeating, “Ugly…ugly…ugly” when I intruded, “You’re not.” I was so firm about it she sat up straighter and looked less ugly. “I’m not?” “No, your not.” She smiled, and didn’t look ugly at all, and just like that her “bad trip” was over.
One time, before school let out, some younger students had come rushing up to me exclaiming “Agatha is bumming out! Agatha’s having a bad trip! If the teachers find out they’ll call the police!” I had no clue who Agatha was, but went where I was led, and saw a girl in a chair, her back against a wall and her arm folded, pouting with her jaw thrust out, wearing an olive-green army jacket and looking very militant, as she glared out from under hair that hung over her face. I dragged a chair over and sat next to her and folded my own arms, looking sidelong at her. Her friends all watched anxiously from the distance. After a while the girl looked sidelong at me, and I smiled and inquired, “Something wrong?”
“Yes, They’re annoying me.”
“Oh? How?”
“They keep saying I’m bumming out!”
“You’re not?”
“I’m not bumming out!”
I laughed, And Agatha looked at me sharply, and snapped, “Why are you laughing?”
I said, “I’m laughing because, if you’re not bumming out, it means they are the ones who are bumming out. Just look at them. I think they are.”
She looked over at her friends, who were all gnawing their nails and looking very worried, and then looked back at me, and then a wonderful smile slowly spread across her face, as beautiful as dawn. Then her friends, of course, could see we were both smiling, and all were immensely relieved, and they all started smiling as well. I stood up aware my reputation as a bummer-buster was sustained. Once again I was a super-hero who had saved the day, through doing next to nothing.
By summer I was finding the business of doing next to nothing increasingly tiresome. Particularly wearisome was the fact my stepfather’s old house had two wings, a parent’s wing and a children’s wing, and my friends felt walking into “my” side of the house without being invited in, or even ringing the doorbell, was part of the new world, a world without property or borders. I often had dinner with my parents, and would walk down to my bedroom expecting to retreat and write, and instead would discover between three and seven members of my “community” in my bedroom, eager to see me. I never told them to buzz off, but at times I wanted to. I suspected they were using me, because I always had Mooner and was generous, (and in fact my records show I never made money as a “pusher”, because marking-up prices was “exploitation”, and not something one did to one’s friends.) I also suspected they were using me in another way, liking the way I did “next to nothing”, but never doing “next to nothing” in return.
What was the “next to nothing” I did? I couldn’t find the words, and even poetry was failing me, and poetry was “next to nothing” personified. I felt in touch with something hugely important, but unable to grasp it. And perhaps this is the most wicked evil of the Trickster. He allows one to glimpse a shore from a ship moving the wrong way: The energy that allows one to see is gained by knocking out keystones that enable one to grasp. I was unable to grasp what was happening to me, but knew I wanted to grasp.
One event struck me as a sort of final straw, or perhaps as a pebble that precipitated an avalanche. It involved a time I was being one of The Three Musketeers with my two buddies. Lord knows what pill we were high on, but we were on a hill overlooking a small lake, looking down on people by the shore who seemed very tiny as we felt absolutely giant. And while in this exalted state my two buddies became involved in a competition about who was more huge, in intellectual terms. One would say, “Aristotle said…” and the other would counter, “Yes, but Plato said…”
I stood back and felt small, for I knew little about poetry and nothing about philosophy; I knew who Shakespeare and Robert Frost were, but poets like Keats and Shelly drew a blank. Philosophy seemed boring and useless to me, so I had no interest in Camus or Nietzsche, yet my buddies seemed like authorities because they could name and quote people I knew nothing about. I felt younger and less educated and quite inferior, in this boyish competition, yet I had something they lacked. I had “next to nothing”.
There was no getting around a simple fact: No one really liked the poetry they wrote, while mine had won an award. It was handed out during our graduation ceremony. It came with no money and involved more trouble than it was worth, for though my best buddies tried to shake my hand and congratulate me I sensed they resented my five-minutes-of-fame. In the strange, competitive world of adolescent youth I was guilty of a crime, for I had won with “next to nothing”.
I couldn’t fathom what I sensed; I could see but could not grasp. In a troubled mood I just wanted to get away and think, and followed a whim, loading up my backpack and leaving town.
My hitchhiking wandered west across upper New York State and up into Canada, with my aim not a particular place but to “get away.” However I had the definite sense 1970 was not like 1969. Perhaps, because my hair was longer and my skin was less rosy, a different sort pulled over when I stuck out my thumb, but I had the sense some sort of push-back was occurring, opposed to the sheer beauty of 1969. The world did not seem full of beautiful people. The beautiful light was still shining down on the land, but clouds were gathering.
I can’t truly tell of the details of that trip, because the notebook dedicated to that trip was lost, but perhaps my recollection of how I came to lose that notebook will give the flavor of the journey.
Back in those days crossing the border was usually quite easy. The official would ask you if you had anything illegal, you would reply you didn’t, and that was that. However the young driver of the car stuffed with young men I was hitching a ride in, heading back into the United States, became sweaty. He was nervous because he had three cases of illegal beer in his trunk. When the bored border-agent asked if the driver had anything illegal to declare the driver, for some guilty reason, replied in a strangely strangled tone, “No, but he…” and he jabbed a thumb back at me, “…is a hitchhiker”. The border agent seemed to wake midst a yawn, looked at me with interest, and inquired, “Do you mind if I look in your pack?”
What could I say? I very much minded, for I had drugs in my pack. However I hoped he wouldn’t find them, as they were secreted in the aluminum tubes of the pack’s frame. So I said, “I wouldn’t mind at all,” and swung out of the car and handed my pack to the man. And then, before I could reach back into the car for the overnight bag that held, among other things, my notebook, there was a squealing of tires and the vehicle whipped away. The young driver who had demonstrated compassion when he picked me up had run out of compassion, and had left me in the lurch.
As I turned back to the border agent my mind was working very fast. I didn’t want him to search my pack, and my mind intuitively seized upon a way to stop the search. I looked the man in the eye, as he looked after the swiftly vanishing car with a perplexed look, and protested, “They drove off with my other suitcase!”
The man looked at me with a sort of vague horror, as if I was presenting him with a problem he didn’t want to deal with, and his immediate response was to shove my backpack into my arms, swivel, walk into a little office beside the road, and slam the door.
As I walked south from the border, chuckling and feeling a bit smug about the fact the pack I shrugged up onto my shoulders hadn’t been searched, I couldn’t fail to notice that two men, the driver of the car and the border agent, had both turned their backs on me in roughly thirty seconds. Two men had seen me as a problem to avoid.
Not that I blamed them. As I turned to walk backwards, dangling my thumb out at a long string of cars, every car that passed without slowing represented a person who saw me as a problem to avoid. Most couldn’t be bothered, and the cars that slowed were the kindly exception to the rule. But there seemed to be more kindness in 1969 than 1970.
What was so very different? There was something about 1969 which didn’t involve anyone turning their backs on anyone, and instead involved seeing “everyone is beautiful in their own way.” 1969 was like the keystone of an arch that brought both sides together and freed up energy. Was it something so simple as “Love”?
By the time I got out of a car by the toll booth on the Massachusetts Turnpike, back in my home town, I was aware my trip had been a success, in that it was full of adventure, but an utter failure in terms of “getting away”. In 1969 I had escaped my boring town into a wonderful world of especially kind people (because that is who picks up hitchhikers), but in 1970 I seemed to be seeing the same problem my hometown had, in different people, no matter where I went.
In fact one 1970 ride set the record for the fastest I ever traveled while hitchhiking. A big, burly man had “pegged out” his wide, swaying Cadillac (over 120 mph; 193 km/hr) on I-81 between Watertown and Syracuse, New York. He was jovial, and kept telling me, “Relax, kid. What’re you so tense for? Here, have some more whisky.” The whisky didn’t help. I was tense because I didn’t like the way the big car floated and drifted and was never quite in the center of the lane, and I was also tense because, while 1969 witnessed the freedom of falling shackles and chains, 1970 seemed to be a constant reminder that how you used that freedom might kill you.
The toll booth was about as far as I could get in town from my home, and it was around three AM. I shouldered my pack and faced a six mile walk beneath streetlights, from pool of light to pool of light, up and down hills. Now, fifty years later, such a hike, without dinner and without sleep, would probably kill me, but at the time I disparagingly muttered to myself over what bad shape I was in.
Such disparagement was uncommon in my poetry, but all through my diary entries, which is likely why they required separate notebooks. The poetry spoke of hope and high places, while the diary spoke of how I needed to shape up and stop being such a damn fool. As dawn broke, and I trudged up the front steps of my home, I was in the mood to reform. I felt burned out (partly because the final ride had been from soldiers on leave racing to get back on base before they were AWOL, and they were handing out No-dose (pure caffeine) like they were mints, but the pills were wearing off). I needed food and water and most of all sleep, things my mother was good at providing.
My mother was up early, and, much to my astonishment, when I walked through the door I faced her ire. Before I could say a word I learned that, while I was away, she had heard a noise after she’d gone to bed, and when she walked up to my end of the house she discovered a party going on, and that the air, as she put it, “reeked of marijuana”. When she asked my friends what on earth they thought they were doing, they blamed me, insisting I had invited them. Then she folded her arms and tapped her toe, as if demanding I explain.
I was too tired to explain, and anyway, the only explanation I could think of wouldn’t have sounded good: “When I said I was leaving town they must have thought I said you were leaving town”. I just winced annoyance and shook my head in disbelief and spread my palms. Then I swung my pack from my shoulders and turned to head off to bed.
She added, “Please keep the noise down. A friend of your brother’s is sleeping in your sister’s old bedroom.”
“Oh really? Who?”
“Audley Bine.”
I winced again. The lady made no sense. She got all bent out of shape when my nice friends were in her house, yet felt it was perfectly fine to put one of my brother’s creepy friends into the bedroom next to mine.
In any case, that is how Audley Bine became my next door neighbor.
Sunrise's Swansong 