44 WOMEN

44 WOMEN

A ROCK N’ ROLL MEMOIR. MARC CAMPBELL. ©

“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.” Rumi.

♥

Introduction.

DIVORCE. The unwelcome stranger is at my door, quiet as death. I can’t hear her. But I know she’s there. It’s a vibration, ethereal, mysterious and utterly sexual. Absence is at my door, seductive in her dress of absolute emptiness. Absence attracts, it hungers to be filled: a void to be fucked, to be glutted and engorged. And my heart, which too hungers to be filled, reaches toward the door and turns the knob, and there it is: nothing, nothing at all. The unwelcome stranger has moved on like a cruel breeze to another door where another hungry heart is about to reach toward nothingness. Pain is invisible, but it’s there. The invisible world is more real than this shit storm we call reality. Close your eyes. What do you see? The afterburn of whatever you were looking at before shutting your eyelids, followed by explosions of random colors and then …… nothingness. And what do you feel? Wait a few minutes. What do you feel? Everything… nothing… ultimately emptiness. Within all things, emptiness abides, even in pain. There is peace in emptiness. But, we are fools who fabricate worlds that in turn torture us. Expectation, attachment, obsession, and memories are the raw materials with which we construct the walls that enclose and imprison us. But, it is also through memory, obsession, and the almighty word, that we seek to find the illusive path that leads to the open field in which everything is possible, where our mind is limitless and our spirit unrestrained and joyous. The unwelcome stranger is “suffering”: the invisible pain that, according to Buddha, is the nature of existence. It is through this suffering that we learn to become compassionate and loving beings and to ultimately discover emptiness. The unwelcome stranger paid me a visit in the form of a divorce that sent me into the most profound suffering I have ever experienced. My wife of 18 years left me and I lost myself in a Dantean hellhole reserved for men who failed to love enough or loved too much or just fucked up a good thing.

Divorce ripped open my chest, tore out my heart and stuffed the bloody hole with something dead and rotting. For months, that seemed like years, I staggered through life, a putrefying zombie, smashing into things, bouncing off walls, stunned and staring into the pit that was my ravaged and tattered soul. The torment was beyond description. Unbearable. I felt like a condemned man waiting to choke down his last supper. Suicide, had I the courage to risk it, offered my only reprieve. I considered killing myself, but feared that death by my own hand would send me into some purgatorial realm in which the act of taking my own life would be repeated over and over again in an eternal loop from which there would be no escape. Instead of being freed from the agony of living, I would end up killing myself, killing myself, killing myself, killing myself, killing myself, killing myself……stuck in the groove of a dirge called “Suicide” - a real fucking tearjerker, jerking tears for eternity in the dancehall of the damned.

Suffering offers no easy solutions. If it did, it wouldn’t be suffering. So, I endured it. And as I fell further into the black cave of my despair, when my life had become an ordeal from which there seemed to be no way out, at the moment when I finally thought I could take it no more, I WOKE UP. The nightmare was a dream. I looked around and saw what was really going on. Beyond the walls of my personal prison, the sun was blazing in a pristine blue sky, leaves were shimmering psychedelically in the trees, a brisk wind ran mystical fingers through my hair and fluttering day-glo birds serenaded me as fluorescent flowers bowed and brushed their flickering petals against my feet. The world was vibrantly alive, kinetic and connected, absolutely and fundamentally perfect. On the flip side, the dark side - my suffering, my prison, was my own creation. I'd not only constructed the prison , I was its warden; the big bull on Cell Block 9 with a ring of keys dangling from a black weathered belt, jangling and taunting me - the chimes of freedom. Yes, I could break out at anytime. I just didn’t know I was free to go. Each moment offers you the choice of being free or being a slave. It really is that fucking simple.

Suffering ultimately brings you to a place where you appreciate the magic of uncertainty, of being in the moment, of being truly alive. Without suffering, we go through life taking things for granted, looking but not seeing, devouring but not tasting, hearing but not listening, fucking but not feeling. Suffering is a cruel gift. It snarls and tears us to shreds. It breaks us into a million little pieces. It annihilates us. But, in destroying us, it gives us an opportunity to rebuild on more solid ground. It gives us a chance to be reborn into the realization that life is a sumptuous mystery, that love is both treacherous and beautiful, that each moment is a gamble and the smart money rides on the wheel that always comes up zero. We create our hells and we create our heavens and we create both out of emptiness.

We pick our illusions. We pick our realities. I’m picking the one in which nobody goes home alone.

I’d like to thank my ex-wife for giving me the opportunity to truly suffer. She gave me the parting gift of freedom which I mistook for pain.

♥

44 WOMEN is a series of riffs linked by the women in my life: the lovers and friends who freed me and the sirens who left me shattered on the rocks. These women changed my life in myriad ways, both good and bad. A few were longtime partners who ultimately cut through my bullshit and left me. Others were brief encounters I barely remember but who still glimmer sweetly in my brain like distant stars. Some didn’t exist at all. I create my own mythologies. I make believe in order to have something to believe in. Experience isn’t measured in minutes, hours or days. It is measured in meaning. And these were the women, even those imagined, who meant something to me, who opened the field and showed me life’s possibilities. I dedicate this book to Amaranta and George. And to the unwanted stranger who taught me that suffering is the only path to true love.
Placencia, Belize. January 2009.

♥

In 1981 my band The Nails released a modest four track record called “88 lines About 44 Women”. Driven by a simple bass line and a rinky dink Casio rhythm track the song had an infectious hook and lyrics that were a series of 44 couplets about 44 women, 88 lines in all. It was the kind of song that lodged itself in your brain and stayed there.

I wrote the lyrics of 88 Lines in about two hours in a burst of automatic writing. It really was a case of my being the instrument through which the Muse spoke. Or, as the poet Jack Spicer once described it “the Martian who comes down and rearranges the furniture in your head”. When the process happens you step out of the way and let it do its thing. I make no claims that 88 Lines is good poetry (because it’s not), I think of it as a nursery rhyme with a haiku vibe. Within those 88 lines, were women and situations people could relate to, there’s at least one woman in the song that reminds you of someone you knew, loved or broke your heart. It’s been called one of the first rap songs sung by a white guy. It owes a lot to Lou Reed’s “Walk OnThe Wild Side” and Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died”.

While 88 Lines was a catchy little tune, it wasn’t particularly “radio friendly”. It was too simple and too crude in an era of overproduced slick bands like Duran Duran and Boy George. But, something unexpected happened. Legendary British deejay John Peel discovered the song and started playing it on his highly influential BBC radio show. Shortly thereafter, major record labels came courting. The Nails signed a deal and re-recorded 88 Lines in a more sonically sophisticated style and released it to the public. Indie and college radio stations picked up on it and it quickly became a cult hit. It still gets radio play today and has been used in movie soundtracks and television commercials. It’s been ripped off and paid homage to by a lot of musicians, from The Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper” to Trick Daddy’s “99 Problems”. Several girl bands like Sweet Pea have done their versions of the song from a woman’s point of view. I’m honored.

It was never a dream of mine to be a rock star. I never became one. I started a rock band because rock was my religion. I grew up on it and it changed my life. I started a band because I had no choice. The rock gods laid their hands upon me and I was converted. I rock therefore I am. In the early days, it was The Beatles, The Stones, Sky Saxon and The Seeds, Jim Morrison, Iggy, Bob Marley, later came The Ramones, Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Mink DeVille and many more. In all of their ferocious rock and roll brilliance, they showed me the way. But, it was the women I write about in 88 Lines that really mattered in my life. Rock and roll and women, I know it’s a cliché, the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll thing. But, as they say, in clichés there’s a shitload of truth. 88 Lines was the fusion of two things that mattered most in my life: art and pussy.

“44 WOMEN” is a memoir/novel that expands upon the song “88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN”. And while the women are central to my story, it’s also about the times and places in which I came to know these women. I’ve lived a chameleon-like existence, from being a hippie to forming one of America’s first punk rock bands. “44 WOMEN chronicles two of the most exciting decades in recent American pop culture history, the sixties and the seventies . It continues into the 80s and 90s, less siginificant decades in terms of rock n’ roll, but important in my life story mainly because I stayed alive. While the book is autobiographical, it’s also fiction. One because many of the women who appear in the book aren’t women I actually knew but amalgamations/composites/distillations of women I encountered in my life. And two because no one’s memory is perfect, particularly the memories floating through the battered brain cells of a man who has done his fair share of mind-altering substances. Now don’t get me wrong. I am a true believer in the judicious use of certain sacred sacraments. I’m also a guy who wasn’t always judicious and not every sacrament I ate, imbibed or snorted was sacred. But, looking back on my life, the memories that remain the clearest are the ones that involve sex, drugs and rock and roll. I remember the first record album that changed my life: “Another Side Of Bob Dylan”. I remember the total absolute glory of the first drug that I took: a quarter hit of Purple Owsley. And I remember the awesomeness of my first sexual encounter: fingerfucking Deborah in her family’s rec room, Virginia Beach, Virginia. 1964.

The book, like the song, is not strictly in chronological order. Memory doesn’t work that way. I’ve done my best to give shape to the shapeless, form to the formless and, when all else failed, I just did my fucking best to piece it all together and make it flow.

Buried in Mounds of Venus.

“Part of you is out there waiting to come into you, and another part of you is behind you, and the ‘just this’ of the ever-present moment holds all the transitory little selves in its mirror.” - Gary Snyder

♥

88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN

Deborah was a Catholic girl
she held out till the bitter end

Carla was a different type
she’s the one who put it in

Mary was a black girl
I was afraid of a girl like that

Suzen painted pictures
sitting down like the Buddha sat

Reno was a nameless girl
a geographic memory

Cathy was a Jesus freak
she liked that kind of misery

Vicki had a special way
of turning sex into a song

Kamala, who couldn’t sing,
kept the beat and kept it strong

Zilla was an archetype
the voodoo queen, the queen of wrath

Joan thought men were second best
to masturbating in the bath

Sherry was a feminist
she really had that gift of gab

Kathleen’s point of view was this
take whatever you can grab

Seattle was another girl
who left her mark upon the map

Karen liked to tie me up
and left me hanging by a strap

Jeannie had a nightclub walk
that made grown men feel underage

Mariella, who had a son,
said I must go, but finally stayed

Gloria, the last taboo
was shattered by her tongue one night

Mimi brought the taboo back
and held it up before the light

Marilyn, who knew no shame,
was never ever satisfied

Julie came and went so fast
she didn’t even say goodbye

Rhonda had a house in Venice
lived on brown rice and cocaine

Patty had a house in Houston
shot cough syrup in her veins

Linda thought her life was empty
filled it up with alcohol

Katherine was much too pretty
she didn’t do that shit at all

Pauline thought that love was simple
turn it on and turn it off

Jean-Marie was complicated
like some French filmmaker’s plot

Gina was the perfect lady
always had her stockings straight

Jackie was a rich punk rocker
silver spoon and a paper plate

Sarah was a modern dancer
lean pristine transparency

Janet wrote bad poetry
in a crazy kind of urgency

Tanya Turkish liked to fuck
while wearing leather biker boots

Brenda’s strange obsession
was for certain vegetables and fruit

Rowena was an artist’s daughter
the deeper image shook her up

Dee Dee’s mother left her father
took his money and his truck

Debbie Rae had no such problems
perfect Norman Rockwell home

Nina, 16, had a baby
left her parents, lived alone

Bobbi joined a New Wave band
changed her name to Bobbi Sox

Eloise, who played guitar,
sang songs about whales and cops

Terri didn’t give a shit
was just a nihilist

Ronnie was much more my style
cause she wrote songs just like this

Jezebel went forty days
drinking nothing but Perrier

Dinah drove her Chevrolet
into the San Francisco Bay

Judy came from Ohio
she’s a Scientologist

Amaranta, here’s a kiss
I chose you to end this list.

♥

Deborah.

“Deborah was a Catholic girl she held out till the bitter end”

When Catholic girls sin, they sin with a vengeance. From the moment they enter those hideous Catholic schools they’re brainwashed to believe that sex is an evil and unclean thing. So when they finally do throw off the shackles of guilt and shame it’s with an impious fervor that can be breathtaking. In making the leap from good girl to bad, willfully hurling themselves into the fires of hell, a Catholic girl could seduce Jesus Christ off his cross and raise a million Lazarus’s from their cold dark graves. I love Catholic girls because they’re really wicked, wicked in epic and beautiful ways. Fucking a Catholic girl gives new meaning to the words Holy Communion. When all that guilt is vented through the labial gate, time stands still and Heaven’s angels heave a mighty sigh. Deborah was a Catholic girl. She held out to the bitter end, which in Deborah’s case wasn’t long at all.

I was baptized Catholic and went to Catholic schools until I was about 8 or 9 years old. Like many Catholics, I mostly remember those ghastly nuns who floated down the hallways like giant bats on silent roller skates wielding their foot long torture devices: the wooden ruler. I hated them. Unlike the priests, who I pitied in their forlorn and false piety, the nuns were monstrous, filled with sexual loathing and bearing the cruel sneers of genuine sadists. I was one of their victims.

At nights I would lie in bed trying to conjure up the concept and image of eternal damnation, the idea of being forever condemned to some Purgatorial hellhole, suffering without end. My dark apocalyptic fantasies had a sexual element to them. Fear of death is bizarrely titillating , like standing on the precipice of a tall building and leaning forward. There’s a certain exhilaration in being on the edge of annihilation, a sadomasochistic thrill.

There are two things that cause me to recoil the moment I see them: a nun’s habit and a policeman in uniform. Over the years, I’ve softened on the cops. The nuns will always remain horror movie material in my mind.

I was living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The year was 1964. I was thirteen. I was in my first rock band. Beatlemania was running wild and millions of kids across the USA were buying cheap Japanese electric guitars, drum kits and forming garage bands. My dad bought me a set of drums made by a company called Kent and I formed a group called the Continentals. We covered tunes by The Beatles, of course, had a set list that included “Louie Louie:, “I Got My Mojo Workin”, “Shout” “Hang On Sloopy”, a couple dozen 3 and 4 chord rockers. We played at the local firehouse rock dances, supermarket openings and the Princess Anne Plaza movie theater Saturday morning kiddie show. At those kiddie shows we were the only performers who weren’t lip synching to some Frankie Avalon or Leslie Gore tune. We were the real fucking deal.

I wore a moptop and it got me into trouble at school, where the rule was no hair over the ears and bangs had to be the width of two fingers above your eyebrows. I broke the rules on a consistent basis. One day I was sent home for wearing madras pants to school. Those were some fucking slick slacks. But, when all the other kids were wearing Gant shirts and Weejun loafers, my madras pants were an affront to the refined sensibilities of the pre-yuppie status quo of the early 60s. In those days, high school had a caste system composed of longhairs, straights, jocks and greasers. I was a longhair. And greasers hated the longhairs. But, I dug the greasers. Cause they were rockers. We were fellow parishioners in the church of rock and roll. It took a woman to help me discover this. Her name was, and I’m not bullshitting, Rhonda. She should have been in 88 Lines. How my muse overlooked her I’ll never know. You don’t question your muse.

The Continentals were working the crowd before a screening of some cartoon marathon at the kiddie show. We were tearing through “Eight Days A Week”, “Not Fade Away” “Gloria” and some other cool tunes for about 15 minutes before curtain time. The kids in the audience were really digging our shit. We got a nice round of applause from a 100 or so prepubescent hands, took our bows and walked off stage. As I made my way up the isle to the concession stand, there she was: Rhonda, a greaser goddess from the planet Maybelline. She had a beehive that defied fucking gravity. Marianne Antoinette had nothin’ on this home girl. Rhonda’s do was sculptural: a follicle wonderland where Antonio Gaudi and The Ronnettes sniffed hairspray and dreamed of Mayan pyramids. Rhonda had the fairest skin, the pinkest lips and the palest blue eyes I had ever seen. She was graceful and tall and moved with a serpentine stroll that would make a black snake moan; way out of my fucking league. This was woman in all her archetypal majesty - Shakti with a serious wighat. To my amazement, she was love-struck by me. She said she liked the way I played the drums and she leaned over and gave me a kiss that tasted of lipstick and cigarettes. My knees buckled and I felt for the first time that rock and roll was more than music, it was supernatural.

Back at school Rhonda and I kept our distance. The caste system was a barrier she was unwilling to cross. She was a greaser, I was a longhair. We were doomed. Like Hindu and Muslim lovers in a Bollywood flick, a rock and roll Romeo and Juliet. It was not to be. I lost my greaser girl to jiveass peer pressure and ended up with a sexy little Catholic girl.

Deborah had long straight hair and looked like a brunette version of Marianne Faithful - a slightly pudgy 13 year old version of Marianne Faithful. A few years ago I found a high school yearbook at my mother’s home from those days. I looked up Deborah’s photograph. She had scratched out the photo using a pen. I guess she thought the picture hadn’t done her justice. So, my only remnant of Deborah is a bunch of violent scrawls scarring up a photo in a yearbook. But I remember her as looking like the kind of girl that would be dating one of The Stones. She had that Carnaby Street mod look that just floored me.

When it comes to Deborah, there’s not much to tell in terms of anecdotal or whimsical storytelling. I barely remember anything about her other than she gave me my first taste of what was to become a lifelong addiction. She was the cosmic trigger, Kali in tight bellbottoms, who propelled me into the realm of earthly delight.We were young and we were both into British rock bands and we got along just fine. What makes Deborah a momentous part of my life is that she unabashedly enjoyed having sex with me (teenybopper sex, no fucking, fingers only) and this had a hugely liberating impact on my guilty Catholic self. Up until Deborah, I was a teenage masturbating machine who figured every jerk off was just one more turn on the ferris wheel of eternal damnation. At least with Deborah if I was going to be condemned to the fires of hell I had gotten a little of the real deal in return for my unending grilling on the Devil’s barbecue. I was willing to give up all chances for salvation for a little bit of pussy. And that changed my life forever. It was the ultimate fuck you to fear and guilt and to the body hate at the heart of Catholicism. I tossed off the hair shirt and leaped into the sacred realm of the yoni.

It was on a couch in her family’s suburban rec room. We were grinding away while her parents and brother were upstairs watching The Real McCoys on tv. I slipped my hand down her blue jeans and tentatively slipped my finger into her tight virginal pussy. I was springing full wood and she stared at me with this Mona Lisa smile that said everything was okay. There was no loud clap of thunder followed by lightning, no godly denunciation, there was just the heavy breathing and tender sighs of two young kids exploring their bodies, basking in teenage tantric bliss. Fuck Annette Funicello, I had found my Betty Page.When the commercial break came, Deborah’s dad shouted “how you kids doin down there’” and I popped my hand out of Deborah’s pants and we both meekly responded “okay, we’re just talkin’”. And that was it, my first dip into the mystical waters of the river poontang, my fingers anointed with its glorious stinkfinger residue. We got up from the couch, straightened up our clothes, kissed, and I was out the door.On my way home I got about halfway up the block when I was overcome with my first case of blue balls. Deborah’s pussy smell was all over me. I had a hard-on that wouldn’t quit and I could barely walk. So, I made my way around the back of some tract house sat on a garbage can and jerked off. The sky was full of stars and when I came it was as if I had created my own little milky way. Of course, at the time I didn’t appreciate the cosmic significance of what I just wrote. But looking back on that moment, thanks to Deborah’s peach fuzzed meat pit of mortal delight, I really think I had an inkling that all things are connected, that my cock was shooting stars, and earth and sky were one.Ironically, it took a Catholic girl to help me cast out and banish one of the things that haunted this Catholic boy most: those malevolent nuns in their dark habits, the squadrons of guilt and shame.

♥

CARLA

“Carla was a different type she’s the one that put it in.”

That line suggests I fucked Carla. I did not. My muse was speaking metaphorically - twisting the truth to make a point. Carla would have fucked me had I the guts to make the move, but I was fifteen and still too timid to deal with someone as hip and sophisticated as Carla. She was 16, Jewish and the first beatnik I ever met. She looked like Laura Nyro, read poetry, listened to Dylan and had an older brother who sold pot. Her family lived in a gothic dilapidated house in our otherwise well-groomed suburban Virginia enclave. Her house bordered the unpaved section of the neighborhood where the Blacks lived: Niggertown. It was 1966, it was the South, and terms like “Niggertown” were tossed around with calloused casualness. Racism was part of the fabric of our ignorant cracker lives. But, Carla and I were different. We dug Niggertown. We were the only white kids that walked through Niggertown, past the telephone poles plastered with posters advertising upcoming gigs in Washington D.C. for James Brown, Sam Cooke, Martha and The Vandellas, Otis Redding and every major league Black act touring at the time. Of course, we didn’t go to any of those gigs. They were for Black folks. But I bet, sure as shit, that had we gone we would have been made to feel welcome.

Carla was an intellectual at a time when I had no idea what that word signified. She was intense and poised and had a sort of worldliness that belied the fact she was only 16. I’ve met a handful of people in my life like Carla that have led me to believe that reincarnation is real. These people possess a quality of wisdom, an ageless grace and penetrating insight that only comes from having been around the block for several lifetimes. Most of them were women.

With the exception of a night where I clumsily fondled her tits, Carla and I never got it on - not in the Marvin Gaye sense. We got it on in a way that was equally sexy - we made love cerebrally. Carla took me from being a groovy suburban teenybopper into a fledgling Dharma bum.

I came down with mononucleosis, which was some kind of benign adolescent aids that seemed to attack young kids in the 60s. (Does anyone get this shit anymore?) I was bedridden for several weeks. Carla brought me two things to help occupy my time while I was lying in my mono-induced stupor: Jack Kerouac’s novel “On The Road” and a record of Allen Ginsberg reading his poem “Kaddish” on the death of his mother Naomi. This was an epochal event in my life. In that moment of discovering Ginsberg and Kerouac nothing would ever be the same. I was transformed.

“On The Road” opened a door to a world that I had no idea existed, a world free of worldly attachments, a world in which highways and freight trains led to worlds of unlimited possibility, a world parallel to my world, but completely different. I wanted some of that world.

Ginsberg’s poem, while hard for me to comprehend intellectually, was filled with a passion and lingual musicality that I had never encountered before. No rhymes and yet the whole thing hung together in rhythms and pulses that was alien to my sense of what words could do. It was like hearing rock and roll for the first time, or watching James Brown dance. For me, Ginsburg liberated poetry from the uptight structures, formulations and rules that I had been taught in school and made it sing in ways I never knew possible. It wasn’t long before I’d discover Ferlinghetti, Corso, Bukowski and the rest.

Carla taught me, in the words of Timothy Leary that “intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac”. She introduced me to the alchemy of words and to the Paracelsian magic that resides on the tip of the tongue, the theology of verb and noun. I had always been a writer since I was very young, but thanks to Carla and Ginsberg and Kerouac I saw a whole new dimension to language and the possibility that the word might set me free and so would the world in all of its expansive infinite glory. It wouldn’t be long before I stuck my thumb out and found myself on freedom’s highway; on the road riding with Kerouac and Ginsberg, top down, fearless, facing the mystical west, shadows trailing behind me like the ghosts of my young past. I would leave home at 16. I’ll talk about that later.Thank you Carla.

♥

MARY

“Mary was a Black girl and I was afraid of a girl like that”

Mary was the daughter of our family’s maid and lived in Niggertown. I wasn’t afraid of Mary. I was afraid of how I felt toward Mary. I loved her. She had a sweetness and pureness about her that was in complete contrast to the white conniving teenage bitches that made up most of the female population in my uppercrust neighborhood. But, this was the South and a white boy falling for a Black girl was seriously taboo. My memory of Mary is short and sweet.

It was Christmas, 1966. My mother had invited Mary and her mother over for dinner and for some Christmas gifts. My motherdidn’t have a racist bone in her body. And her invitation wasn’t based on doing something nice for those poor Black folks. She invited Mary and her mom over because they were our neighbors (yeah one was our maid) and my mother didn’t have many friends in the neighborhood. My father was in the Navy and was always away which made my mother a very lonely woman. Mom came from a poor peasant French family, left home when she was thirteen and had little in common with the upwardly mobile suburban housewives that were our neighbors. My mother’s only concession to the status quo was she had a maid. Probably more out of a need for company than help with household chores. Anyway, Mary and her mom came over on Christmas and we had a nice dinner and my mother gave them both Christmas presents. She had bought a gift for Mary, wrapped it in pink paper with a bright red ribbon and a card attached saying it was from me. Mary took my gift, still wrapped, downstairs to our rec room. When I noticed Mary’s absence I went downstairs to look for her. She was reclining in a Lazy Boy chair (every rec room had one), clutching the wrapped present in her slender and beautiful Black arms. She was sound asleep. I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. A faint smile crossed her lips and out of the corner of her left eye a tear rolled down her cheek. Mary, Mary, Mary, how I wish I’d gotten closer to you, Black girl.I never found out what the present was that my mother had given Mary. In my mind it still remains wrapped, ribbon and card attached, floating through my memory like an unfinished poem…..kind of like this….

♥

SUZEN

“Suzen painted pictures sitting down like the Buddha sat”

The “zen” in Suzen is perfect. She did sit on the floor in a half-lotus position painting simple but beautiful pictures using a sumi brush and water colors, focused and still, Buddha-like. She was uniquely beautiful with long brown hair and green eyes that shone with a pure emerald light. We were both 16 and going to the same high school in Fairfax, Virginia. It was 1967, the Summer Of Love in the Haight Ashbury. In Virginia, it was the summer of longing. We were craving to get the fuck out of our boring suburban prison. We listened to “Highway 61 Revisited” and planned our escape. We started dropping acid, copping from a head shop in D.C. called The Source. It was run by Art Kleps, the chief boohoo of the Neo-American Church where LSD was considered a sacrament. At the time, acid was legal and we were getting pharmaceutical Sandoz. A quarter tab would give you a clean 8 hour trip. It was big step up the cosmic ladder from the nutmeg, banana peels, laudanum, glue and various cheap highs we had settled for while waiting for the real thing.

High school becomes inane and immaterial once you’ve discovered the cosmology of LSD. Shit like algebra becomes a worthless abstraction, the ego chasing its tail, a mind game. The rituals of proms and sports and general conformity seem utterly ridiculous and a waste of time when you’ve travelled through the Bardo, died, been re-born and seen the shag carpet in your parents bathroom melt, re-form and expand like a hot pink hairy puffer fish. No more of that high school crap for me. And no more for Suzen.

Suzen was the first to make the move. She met, and I don’t remember how, a 32 year old creative writing teacher named Zoltan. He was a professor at the University of Baltimore and had a groovy bohemian pad in D.C. She moved in with him and I’d visit them on weekends. I was still in school but fading fast. In addition to acid, I discovered the writings of Alan Watts and a book by Alexandra David-Neel called “The Secret Teachings Of Tibetan Buddhism”. I had become a seeker of the truth. I wanted answers. What is God? Why are we here? What happens when we die? And who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?

I was discovering a reality beyond the borders of my little suburban existence, a reality in which entire universes existed in every cell of my body and existence was one massive cellular mashup, an infinite pulsing galaxy of neurons, wavelengths and vibrations slowing down into flesh and then speeding up and becoming spirit, a gigantic cosmic cluster fuck. Ego is an illusion, a fraud, a construct of lies, illusions, expectations and dead memories. Me? What’s that? It’s about WE, the infinite and eternal ONE, all of us interconnected, a gargantuan godlike group grope. “I am you and you are me and we are all together.” The whole Universe is 69ing itself like some kind of profound porno movie. And when we cum, we cum we cum together. Try going to woodshop class after experiencing shit like that.

Okay, so Suzen is in D.C. living with Zoltan and I’m visiting on weekends. Z, we called Zoltan Z, had a bunch of alcoholic beatnik friends and young acolytes like myself gathering at his pad on a regular basis. We’d all get ramped up on white crosses , pull out our rapidograph pens and write poems and make speed freak drawings (highly detailed, generally abstract doodlings) for hours and hours, entire days. Z put a sign on his apartment door that said “POETRY FACTORY. DO NOT DISTURB”. At the end of these marathons we’d read our poems out loud and pass around our drawings and then crash on makeshift beds on the apartment floor.I remember one morning, after a weekend of being on the poetry factory production line, being woken up by The Beatles singing at full blast”Good morning, good morning…After a while you start to smile now you feel cool.Then you decide to take a walk by the old school.Nothing has changed it’s still the sameI’ve got nothing to say but it’s O.K.Good morning, good morning…” Z had placed stereo speakers one on each side of my pillow and dropped the needle into the groove of that track on Sgt. Pepper’s and cranked up the volume. I bolted upright, startled and still half asleep, and there was Z. smiling at me and Suzen handing me a plate of freshly griddled pancakes. Head trip humor and a great breakfast.

I wanted to be conversant with Z and his friends, most of whom were writers. So, I devoured every book that Z gave me to read. Most important of all the books he gave me, at least in terms of confirming my desire to be a writer, was Charles Bukowski’s “CRUCIFIX IN A DEATH’S HAND”. Bukowski blew me away. He made writing look simple (simple is hard). His style was direct, it cut to the bone, no literary affectations, poetry honed as sharp as a switchblade and just as lethal. Bukowski didn’t fuck around. He called it as he saw it. Unlike Ginsberg and Kerouac, Bukowski was not part of a bardic tradition, he wasn’t a mystic (though all great art is inherently mystical), he wrote in a style that I’d call poetic noir. He wrote about the ordinary day to day bullshit in a way that summed things up in an almost Zen simplicity and with dark humor. He found truth and profundity in a bottle of beer and an old whore. He wasn’t looking for God in the stars or wheat fields. For Bukowski, God was sitting at the end of the bar nursing a Pabst Blue Ribbon and talking to himself. When I discovered Bukowski in 1967 he was an underground poet with a small but devout following. Of course years later he became a huge international success selling millions of books. I was lucky to discover him when I was young before all the hype. Nobody had to tell me he was great, I figured it out all on my own.

“The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.” Charles Bukowski

“Songs Of Leonard Cohen” and” Sgt. Peppers” were the soundtrack to our lives in ‘67. We’d smoke dope, sitting in a circle passing the joint, and ask the big questions: where did we come from, what are we doing here and where do we go when we die? Over 40 years later, I’m still asking the same questions.

I continued to hang with Z and Suzen on weekends while enduring High School during the week. Then things came to a head when I was thrown out of school for having long hair and being a general trouble maker. The school principle called my father and told him I had been expelled. When I got home all my possessions were on the front lawn. My father had gone apeshit. I grabbed a pillow case, stuffed it full of clothes, walked to the nearest freeway entrance ramp and stuck out my thumb. 3 days later I was in Los Angeles with a plan to eventually go up the coast to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. Why was I in L.A.? Because that’s where whoever picked me up was heading. It’s called going with the flow.

“Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase, then your mind might be free.” Charles Bukowski.

Having long hair and hitchhiking across the States in 1967 wasn’t some kind of idyllic existential romp through a Whitmanesque landscape of welcoming masses with genial hearts and arms wide open - quite the opposite. Cars would drive by me and the drivers or passengers would hurl bottles of beer or spit at me cursing at the tops of their depraved fucking lungs. I remember getting the shit beat out of me in by a bunch of drunk long haulers at a truck stop in Nevada. It may have been sweetness and light in San Francisco, but in the rest of America I was a pariah, a piece of hippie shit, a peace loving pinko bastard. But I made it to L.A. unbroken and determined to let my freak flag fly.

I didn’t last long in L.A. I was crashing wherever I could. There was a network of hippies who had apartments or houses that would provide a brother with a place to stay for a night or two, crash pads, where usually a dozen or so teenyboppers were spread out on the floor in sleeping bags, often two to a bag fucking.

One night I was hitchhiking on Santa Monica Boulevard when a police car pulled over and two cops got out to I.D. me. I was 16 under age in L.A. without adult supervision. Busted. They took me to jail, called my parents and arranged to have me flown back to Virginia.

I remember getting off the plane in Virginia and being greeted by my mother and a bunch of my friends who gave me a hero’s welcome. After all, I was the first to have leaped across the fence to freedom. I had turned my back on suburban conformity and security and took a chance on the unknown. My friends envied and respected me. My mother was just happy to see me alive. When I got home, my father acted as though I wasn’t there, though I knew deep down he was relieved that I had made it home in one piece.

The day after I got home I went visit to visit Z and Suzen. They greeted me love and a new found respect. Suzen admired me, Z treated me like an equal. I no longer had to prove that I was one of the chosen few. I had graduated from the Jack Kerouac School, a road scholar, I had earned my dharma bum diploma with flying day glow colors. A month later we were to become neighbors.

There was no way I was staying in the suburbs of Virginia. With my mother’s help, I moved into an $85 a month apartment on P street off Dupont Circle, the hub of outlaw culture in D.C. The Circle was where hippies, Beatniks, Blacks and bums hung out, selling dope, playing music and philosophizing. I was two blocks from Z and Suzen’s joint.

I was making rent money selling hashish. Pot was hard to come by, but hash was everywhere. It was being smuggled into D.C. by foreign diplomats and their assistants. I had every kind of hash imaginable: Tibetan temple balls, Morrocan primero, Lebanese, Afghan, Nepalese, a veritable salad bar of resinous bliss. I wasn’t some kind of big time dealer. I was a middle man between a good source and some suburban kids who’d come to D.C. on weekends to cop. I eventually branched out to selling acid. I was getting high grade Owsley white lightening LSD from my former high school English teacher John and his dentist boyfriend.

It was a hot and humid D.C. afternoon and John and I were capping white lightening powder into gelatin caps. We were wearing surgical gloves and masks so the acid wouldn’t get into our mouths and pores. White lightening was extremely pure and powerful LSD. At one point, we stopped to take a break. There was a fan next to the table where the pile of acid was stacked. The fan pointed away from the table and kept the humid air circulating and relatively dry. I had taken off my mask and was feeling slightly high from being exposed to some of the powder. John was feeling higher and did something stupid or divine depending on how you look at it. He got up and turned the fan in the direction of the table and the pile of acid. The white lightening became a psychedelic dust storm flying into my face, my mouth and my eyes. I ran to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked Marcel Marceau. But this wasn’t clown makeup. This was several 1000 micrograms of high grade LSD. I started splashing my face with water, irrigating my eyes and washing out my mouth. But, it didn’t help. The acid was kicking in and I went through the ultimate death trip. Timothy Leary said if you didn’t go through the death trip experience on LSD you hadn’t taken enough. Well, I had. I sat on John’s living room floor and for what seemed like an eternity (and it was) I died, was reborn, died again, born again, flipping the metaphysical tv dial from cosmic station to cosmic station, whipping through the Bardo planes where hungry ghosts growled and laughed and mocked and danced and poked at me with their long ancient galactic fingers, chakras opening/closing , kundalini doing the serpent power mambo, passing through dimensions that not even Rod Serling could imagine, walls shimmering and breathing, rainbows everywhere, mandalas spinning like heavenly roulette wheels…I was so fucking high! And as far out and in as I went, I never lost it. I was so overwhelmed that my ego made no attempt to resist. I was without fear. I felt at one with everything, huge, expansive, complete and unbounded, totally absorbed by the entirety of the Universe: GOD, whatever you want to call it, I was there in that moment of complete union with all things. I was no longer functioning as a separate entity; there was no fear because the one who would have been doing the fearing no longer existed. This was enlightenment. 12 hours later as I started to “come down”, I felt exhausted but refreshed, renewed and reborn. Within a matter of days, I returned to being my usual egocentric little self. But, I had had a genuine religious experience, one that I often return to to put things into their proper perspective. LSD was wonderful. I would later discover that peyote had a deeper message. I’ll tell you about that later.

Life in D.C quickly became monotonous. Other than my visits with Suzen and Z there wasn’t much going on. I needed a change. I decided to fly to San Francisco and finally visit the Haight Ashbury. I was 17, the year I lost my cherry.

♥

RENO

“Reno was a nameless girl a geographic memory”

When I arrived in the Haight Ashbury in 1968 the Summer of Love had passed and the neighborhood was gradually becoming a cattle yard for runaways. Tourist busses clogged the streets, sightseers were everywhere and kids with no money were spare changing and ripping off weekend hippies by selling them bogus drugs. I spent most of my time on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate park reading books of poetry that I’d stolen from City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. Thank you, Lawrence. It was a great time for a rock freak to be living in San Francisco. I was going to concerts at the Matrix and The Fillmore West seeing Traffic, Incredible String Band, Eric Burdon and War, It’s A Beautiful Day, Albert King, The Dead (who I’ve never liked, now or then) Big Brother and The Holding Company, Country Joe and The Fish, The Airplane, a shitload of mind blowing music. A few years later, a similar rock revolution would spring up on Manhattan’s Bowery: harder edged, urban and less self-important than the late 60s bands, but equally radical and significant. But, we’ll talk about that later.

I was crashing at a pad on Waller street right off Haight. The place was being rented by a high school friend of mine and draft dodger named Willy. Willy was a year older than me and had made it to the Haight the year I had hitchhiked to L.A., 1967. There were at least a couple of dozen young runaways crashing at Willy’s place. One was this beautiful blonde girl with sad eyes from Reno, Nevada whose name I cannot recall. Thus, she became Reno in the song “88 Lines”. She had escaped a white trash background and had made it to San Francisco with a flower in her hair. The Haight had become a refuge for a lot of kids who were coming from some serious dysfunctional and abusive families. Not all of us were on a quest to find ourselves. Some of us were on the run from bad shit back home, comin’ to the Haight to get away from hate. Reno was one of those. She was sexually precocious and I can imagine the kind of attention she was getting from the predators back at the old trailer park in Reno. But, she had a sparkling quality about her that belied the sadness in her eyes. And I fell in love.

Reno was hooked up with Willy. But, back then, sexual relationships weren’t exactly binding. There was a lot of sharing going on. Because I was tight with Willy, I had my own “room”: a large walk in closet with enough space for a mattress. I covered the mattress with some groovy looking fabric from India and I decorated the walls with black light posters and called it home.

One night Willy needed his “space” and locked himself in the bathroom. I heard Reno crying outside the bathroom door and whimpering Willy’s name over and over again. Saint that I am, I went to console her. She was standing at the door completely naked, pale skin, long blonde hair, and small perfect breasts with nipples that looked like cherry flavored Jujubes. I threw my arms around her, lifted her off her feet and took her to my hippie hideaway. The black light posters were blazing da-glo, incense was burning, a candle lit. I gently lay on her on the mattress and proceeded to clumsily (and to an outside observer probably comically) lose my virginity. She was still whimpering Willy’s name (pun unintended) as I plunged my hard as a rock 17 year old cock into her pussy. This moment of bliss was exactly that, a moment. I came immediately. But, man I was in heaven. Reno, my gawd, I had just lost my cherry to the beautiful and lovely Reno. It was amazing. At least for me it was. For Reno it was a slightly different experience. She got up smiled at me and walked back to the bathroom and started gently knocking at the door while calling for “Willy, Willy”. I just lay there, mattress illuminated in da-glo, semen on my stomach glowing, feeling completely and utterly rejected. Yes, getting fucked was earth-shattering, but being so completely and utterly abandoned was more than a little heartbreaking. I was experiencing the kind of dejection that many women have spoken of after losing their virginity. You know, used. But, in reality, I hadn’t been used at all. Despite, the brief moment of feeling rejected, I pondered the absolute loveliness of what had just occurred. I had lost my virginity to a calloused little angel from Reno. And that was just fine.

A few weeks after fucking Reno my pubes start to itch like crazy and I was pissing fire. Reno had given me both the crabs and the clap. But compared to today, when sex can kill you, those were innocent times. A bottle of A200 and some penicillin quickly got me back to normal. Thanks Reno for the crash course in the both the upside and downside of the sexual revolution. There is no free lunch.

On Monday nights Stephen Gaskin, an ex- Marine and former teacher at San Francisco State College turned spiritual teacher gave lectures on spirituality at the Straight Theater. His style was irreverent, plain spoken and often remarkably insightful. 100s of people gathered for ‘The Monday Night Class”. Here’s a quote from Stephen’s website describing what was going on at those gatherings: “The glue that held us [the Monday Night Class, also known as the 'Astral Continental Congress'] together was a belief in the moral imperative toward altruism that was implied by the telepathic spiritual communion we experienced together. Every decent thing accomplished over the years by the people of Monday Night Class came from those simple Hippie values. It was the basis for our belief in Spirit, nonviolence, collectivity, and social activism.” While Gaskin was an entertaining and silver tongued “guru”, he also had a massive ego. I was later exposed to that ego one night when he had a showdown with Alan Watts at Alan’s houseboat in Sausalito. It was “The Shootout At The OM Corral”.

I remember going to the Straight Theater at midnight to see a screening of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. The movie was projected on the ceiling of the theater and a couple of hundred stoned freaks lay on our backs on the floor and watched the film flickering on the ceiling. Despite all of our serious spiritual and political passions, hippies did have a sense of humor.

♥

CATHY AND JEANNIE.

“Cathy was a Jesus freak she liked that kind of misery”

“Jeannie had a nightclub walkthat made grown men feel underage”

Willy moved out of his Haight digs and relocated across the Bay to Berkeley. I did the same, holing up in a sleazy rooming house with bad plumbing, decrepit furniture and the perpetual smell of piss and stale pot smoke. Every time someone flushed the toilet in the bathroom right above my room, sewage would drip through the ceiling into a bucket I had strategically placed on the floor. My neighbors were drag queens, hippies, ex-cons and drunks - my kind of people. I was 17 years old and living like some skid row bum. But, I dug it. Compared to my sheltered suburban upbringing, this was the real deal, life at its rawest, my very own Naked Lunch. I was scoring white crosses and writing poetry like a madman. I don’t know where I got my money (maybe mom was sending some bucks, I can’t remember), but living was cheap back then and I managed to get by.

It was while living in my little cesspool of a room that two of my friends from D.C. came to visit, Cathy and Jeannie. Both had left their boyfriends and decided to come to the Bay area. Somehow they tracked me down. Back in D.C., I had been attracted to both of them, but they were attached to friends of mine and I had never made any moves on either one. They moved into Spleen Acres and we became a threesome. My bed was only large enough for two, so Jeannie and Cathy would alternate sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag and sleeping with me - kind of a Branch Davidian set up (go ahead and hate me, but I was innocent, no misogyny intended, really) I was in pussy heaven. There was no jealousy, no weirdness, the three of us were comfortable with the sexual dynamic, but we had to get out of the rooming house. Its sleazepit charm had quickly worn thin.

We found a cheap attic apartment on Channing Way and set up house. One happy family. With me being the happiest. I was screwing two incredible women. Though to be honest, the sex wasn’t exactly electrifying

Around the house, Jeannie was always naked, she never wore anything other than a pair of high heel shoes. She had long black hair and chalk white skin with rosebud cheeks. In those heels, she looked like one of Irving Klaw’s pin-up photos for foot fetishists. On the other hand, Cathy was a Jesus freak. She quoted scripture, she was always slightly hunched over with a sheepish demeanor and a very low sense of self-esteem. She was extremely beautiful, had curly blonde hair that fell to her waist and piercing blue eyes. She was also close to being blind. She wore glasses with lenses that had to be a ¼ inch thick. Unlike Jeannie who strutted around the attic like a dominatrix, Cathy lurked in the shadows, silent, disappearing into herself. They were like night and day.

Jeannie was a selfish lover. She was so self-absorbed that when I fucked her I felt more like an appendage to her snatch than an actual person. Fucking Cathy was like fucking air, she was barely there. She had this distant look in her eyes as though she was staring off into a dimension were it was Jesus, not me, doing the dirty deed. To say we were an odd trio of lovers would be an understatement. We were an X-rated version of Todd Browning’s freaks. All we were missing was a pair of lesbian Siamese twins with nipple rings, fuck me pumps and pierced clits. But, it was family.

My happy family quickly came to an end.

One night I was walking home from Willy’s joint. It was past 10 p.m. and there was curfew in Berkeley for kids under 18. It was L.A. all over again. A cop car pulled up, the cops asked me my age. I told them 17 and the next thing I knew I was in a jail for juvies in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the Bay area, Oakland.

The authorities called my father and asked him to pay for a one way ticket back to Virginia. He said no. They held me until I turned 18 when they legally had to release me. For two months I did time in one of the hardest core institutions for under age criminals in the USA. It was like being in a Zen monastery for street thugs. I had gone from being in pussy heaven to jerk off city. But, it was an experience I count among the most important of my life. I learned a lot about myself and about the plight of young Black men in America. I was the only white kid in the joint. It was an education that made me a better and more compassionate person and a political beast.

One of the mandatory programs at this institution was group discussion sessions. As I said, I was the only white guy in the place and I was also among the few that could read. One of the books I had recently read was Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul On Ice”. So, in my naïve white boy mind, I thought I had an angle on the “Black experience”. And as weird as it may seem I did. Keep in mind that this was juvenile detention center, we were all teenagers. Most of the inmates had little schooling, most were small time criminals who had been busted for dealing drugs, stealing cars or robbing convenience stores. They were punks but they weren’t murderers or rapists. They were mainly just poor kids trying to survive. In these discussion groups there wasn’t much discussion. The person leading the group was generally some middle-aged white psychiatrist who couldn’t get a real gig and was clueless how to get the inmates to open up. One afternoon when things were at a complete verbal standstill, I blurted out “how do you expect us to act like human beings when you treat us like animals”? The brothers were in complete accord, “right on brother”, “tell it like it is”. My white suburban ass had developed some kind of street cred among these young men who I had almost nothing in common with. But, what little we had in common was important. We knew that we were living in a racist society that favored the rich over the poor and that we were sending those poor people to fight a war to protect the interests of the white majority. You didn’t have to read books in order to know that American values were the dominion of the white, the wealthy, the privileged and it was poor kids that were being shuffled off to Vietnam to prop up a society that denied those very same kids the freedoms they were fighting for. In a handful of words I had gone from being the white devil to being Beaver Cleaver with some Eldridge thrown in.

In my cell I had little to do other than read. I had a sympathetic cell warden who was bringing me books that were eerily relevant to my situation: “Brave New World”, “Animal Farm” and “1984″. Lights out was at 10 p.m., but I remember reading Aldous Huxley lying on the jail cell floor and catching the light coming from the crack at the bottom of the cell door. Life imitating art.

Another way I found to pass the time was through meditation. I grabbed a comic book from the jail library (comic books were the jail library) and tore out an advertisement depicting the Tootsie Roll Kid in outer space. It was some little numbnut in a space suit surrounded by planets and stars and it kind of vaguely looked like a mandala. I stuck the picture on the wall of my cell and used it as a visual focal point for concentration as I meditated. I sat in front of the Tootsie Roll kid for hours doing Zazen, legs in the lotus posture, hands forming a mudra in my lap, simply focusing on a dumb cartoon taped to a wall. The door to my cell had a rather large plexiglass window so the guards could keep an eye on its occupants. This also allowed my fellow homeboys to see what was going on in my cell. You can imagine what they thought walking past my cell and seeing my white ass sitting in front of and staring at a picture of the Tootsie Roll kid for hours. I went from “the honky speaks the truth” to “the honky is out of his fucking mind”.

Now I had no formal Zen training. I had read a handful of books on Zen and had done some sitting with Zen groups in Berkeley. But, I was undisciplined when it came to the serious practice of Zen. But, jail provided the perfect environment for a kind of enforced meditation. When you’re in a 10×10 foot room you don’t have a lot of choices. You can only jerk off so many times, read so many books and pace for only so long. Ultimately, you end up finding yourself just sitting. I needed a focal point, Tootsie did the job. The only way out of my cell was going into my self.

The next group therapy session I had gone from being group spokesman to group idiot. I had to redeem myself. I needed to explain the Tootsie Roll Kid Dharma, the concept of simply sitting and quietly letting go of thoughts, not clinging to those things that made us angry, sad and hateful. Just observe them as they pass through us and realize that without our empowering them they are nothing. Now this was some heavy shit to lay upon a bunch of cats who had little patience for intellectual mind games. But, as I spoke of these things, I could feel the group honing in on what I was saying. I was getting through to them,letting them know that the small miserable world we were encased in was not the totality of our being. That we were much more than the hard nubbin of ego that had been rubbing against the world since shortly after we born, that simply sitting and observing the chaos of our mind without judgment, with detachment and humor could be refreshing and liberating. When I was done with my Zen rap, the brothers got up, most of them shaking their heads, and retreated to their cells. I had blown it. I was just another pretentious, privileged white dude. But, over the course of the next few days, I noticed that most the Tootsie Roll Kid ads in the library comics had been torn from their pages. Something was going on - Buddhism in Cell Block 9!

♥

VICKI

“Vicki had a special way of turning sex into a song”

I turned 18 on March 15, 1969 and was released from jail. It was a beautiful sunny day, with a nice breeze wafting off the Bay. I was free, legally on my own. But, I was homeless. Cathy and Jeannie had long flown the coop, Willy had fled to Canada (the heat was on for draft dodgers). The only friends I had were gone.

I took the long walk from Oakland back to Berkeley. I went to People’s Park and lay in the grass and soaked up the sun. It had been awhile since I’d been in the sun and it felt wonderful. The exhilaration of being out of jail completely overwhelmed any concerns of not having a place to live. I wasn’t worried. I’d been in this position before. Several times. Something always came along. It was a time and a place where people were generous and open and always willing to offer a charming young cat like myself a place to crash. I was free. That was what was important. Freedom.

Sometimes life seems to offer nothing but confusion and suffering. Sometimes it lays flowers at your feet and kisses you on the cheek. On my first day of freedom, on a very sunny day, in a park in Berkeley, in the late afternoon, when I was open to any possibility, feeling no fear and residing in the palm of God’s hand, life kissed me on the cheek. I met Vicki.

Vicki was walking her dog, a big clumsy German Shepherd that made for an odd contrast to Vicki’s delicateness. She was your quintessential California flower child. She had long brown hair parted down the middle, large brown eyes, dark California tan, wore a white peasant blouse, bell bottoms and was barefoot. She moved gracefully like a dancer, swaying in that way that hippie chicks swayed. We were both standing at an intersection on the edge of People’s Park waiting for the stoplight to change. We caught each others eyes, smiled, and crossed when the light turned green. Walking up Telegraph Avenue, side by side, we continued to exchange furtive glances and coy smiles . At one intersection she turned to make a right, our brief flirtation was coming to an end, but no, Vicki looked at me and gently gestured with her head toward the direction she was going. She was inviting me to join her. And I did. I followed Vicki to the driveway of a typically modest white clapboard Berkeley house and to a garage that had been converted to an apartment, Vicki’s groovy hippie pad, decorated with Buddhas, thangkas, Indian tapestries, candles and flowers. It was gorgeous. And so was she. And what the fuck was I doing there? From jail to nirvana in the course of one day. I was indeed one lucky boy.

“I’m Vicki”. The silence was finally broken. “I’m Marc”.

Vicki sent the dog outside, closed the door behind her, took off her blouse and bellbottoms and sat on the floor, totally naked. I undressed. She assumed the lotus position and so did I. We closed our eyes and meditated. In the 60s this was a mating ritual. And not a bad one. Instead of a lot of uncomfortable small talk, we just quietly sat in each others presence, breathing in unison and oscillating on the same wavelength. Yes, I know this sounds like corny hippie shit, but try it sometime. You’d be surprised how close you can get to someone without having to talk to them. Vicki grasped my hands and gently held them as we continued to connect on a vibrational level. I was also connecting on a much less subtle plane, a little more carnal, I was starting to get very aroused. After all, I’d been in jail for a couple of months and this was my first contact with a woman in quite some time. And this woman happened to be sublime, an angel, a goddess. Vicki must have picked up on my tantric vibe and responded by getting up, taking my hand and leading me to her bed. She was in complete control. I was not used to this. I was the one who was accustomed to making the moves, taking charge. Not with Vicki. I laid on my back with her above me as she stroked my body with her long brown hair. Every time I tried to touch or clutch her, she would gently but firmly put me in my place - which was that of recipient, of object, of the focal point of her erotic energy. My aggressive masculine impulses were being tamed, I was relaxing into the role of being submissive and accepting. And as I finally gave in, Vicki did something that had never been done to me before - she sucked my cock. I watched the whole thing with both a weird kind of detachment and a deep appreciation. I was being given this gift. I was being made love to. I was amazed. And thankful. It wasn’t long before my detachment and amazement turned to complete rapture as I came in her mouth. When she kissed me there was cum on her lips and I tasted myself on her. After basking for a few minutes in the afterglow of my first blow job, I reversed the roles and went down on her and ate her pussy until she came. And then we fucked.

I moved in with Vicki and immediately started to look for a gig. I got work at a health food restaurant on University Avenue called The Arbor Café. It was run by Meher Baba devotees. Baba had written many books on spirituality, most of which I couldn’t wrap my head around, but he had this slogan that was simple and direct: “Don’t worry, be happy”. That I could relate to. My main job at the Arbor was to show up at work at 6 a.m. juice the carrots for that day’s business and then later in the day I would wait on tables. Our menu was macrobiotic, lots of grains and steamed vegetables. At the time, it was the only restaurant of its kind in Berkeley and drew a large hip clientele.

Meher Baba was an Indian spiritual teacher who is best known for coining the phrase “Don’t worry, be happy”. He took a vow of silence and maintained it until his death, a total of 44 years. Baba claimed to be an Avatar, an enlightened being, which, is a claim that is pretty much impossible to dispute. There is no process through which enlightenment can be verified. It’s not like getting a drivers license. There are no tests, no cosmic obstacle course you have to navigate to prove your Avatarness. You gotta take this shit at face value. And the only way to find the truth is to spend time with the guru. If he is who he claims to be or not, you’ll soon find out whether he’s a scam artist or the real deal. The poseurs don’t stand up to intense scrutiny. I never met Meher Baba, but my gut feeling is that he was a genuine spiritual master. His many books are a complex fusion of Hinduism, Christianity and Vedantism. I have found them close to impossible to grasp and yet, in accordance with my limited understanding of such matters, I detect the glimmerings of enlightenment in his work

There was a Meher Baba center in Berkeley where his followers would meet and discuss Baba’s convoluted cosmic view. Pete Townsend of The Who was a student of Meher Baba. So, when The Who brought their tour to Berkeley, Townsend visited the center and proceeded to hold court. Along with a shitload of Who fans, I attended this Darshan with guru Peteananda. Townsend was dressed all in white like some kind of rockin’ Swami, Brit style. Here was one of my teenage idols, just a few feet away from me. I was starstruck…until he spoke. As soon as he opened his mouth and began spewing a series of spiritual cliches, my awe turned to disgust. Townsend was a pompous and pretentious asshole who covered up his lack of a genuinely keen intelligence with pseudo intellectual proclamations. For instance, he described The Who’s recently released album “Tommy” as being “a metaphorical story of different states of consciousness.” Well, I thought “Tommy” sucked and was the beginning of the end of rock and roll as I knew it and loved it. The concept of a “rock opera” was as far as I was concerned anti-rock. To me, rock and roll was all about being concise - condensing the life force into three minutes and a handful of chords. Rock was sonic Zen: to the point. On the other hand, “Tommy” was a bloated, self-important pile of shit. The Who, creators of sweet and short punky rockers like “My Generation” and “Substitute” had become the progenitors of “art rock” or “progressive rock”. Whatever you called it, it wasn’t rock and roll to me. In the wake of “Tommy” there followed a deluge of unlistenable artsy garbage from bands like Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Queen and Rush. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon” continued this dreaded tradition of dumb guy’s trying to make grand statements when they should’ve just stuck to making great rock and roll. There have been a handful of rock lyricists whose writing has struck me as genuinely intelligent: Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, Ian Dury, Jeff Buckley. Pete Townsend is not among them. Though, I will admit that “My Generation” is one of the greatest rock and roll songs ever written. In the case of rock lyricists, a little bit of intelligence can be a dangerous thing. The best thing to come out of the “art rock” scene is that it gave birth to a counter movement called punk. And punk saved rock and roll just as it was teetering on the edge of death. As I write this in 2009, it seems rock and roll is once again on life support. But, will rock and roll ever die. I doubt it. There will always be a new wave of young rockers to blow away the old and the tired.

I met a lot of people at the Arbor, but one was to become a major influene on me as a writer. His name was John. (John is currently a well-known music critic and somewhat successful recording artist. Out of respect for his privacy, I’m not revealing his last name.)John was a small guy, pale as a ghost, with long dark brown hair and Chinese eyes. He was a poet, not a great poet, but one who had this wild style that was a mixture of the profane and the mystical with a lot of humor thrown in. He was an ardent student of the writings of Wilhelm Reich and his poetry reflected Reich’s views on contemporary society’s repression of sexual energy. John and I became constant companions. With Vicki in the mix we were like a hippie version of the movie Jules and Jim.

John and I formed a band called the Pits Of Passion. It was just the two of us playing acoustic guitars and performing original tunes like “JERKIN’ OFF, “BLOW JOB” and various other provocative little numbers. We were a younger West Coast version of The Fugs, punk before punk was punk. The spirit of the Pits Of Passion was kept alive in some of my later song writing with The Ravers and The Nails.

I finally had the money to move into my own place. I loved living with Vicki, but I needed my privacy. I found a ground floor apartment in the Berkeley Hills with an incredible view of the Bay. I had no furniture, just a bed and a small altar upon which I had placed a statue of the Buddha. It was my retreat. Vicki and John visited me regularly, but otherwise I spent a lot of time alone reading: Dark Night Of The Soul by St. John Of The Cross, the works of William Blake, Henry Miller, Richard Brautigan, Ginsberg and books on Buddhism. I was also writing a lot of poetry.

For two weeks in May of 1969 Berkeley became a war zone. It all started on May 15, also known as Bloody Thursday, the day of the People’s Park riots.

People’s Park was a vacant lot that was owned by the University of California which had purchased the property for new dormitories. But, nothing was done with the land. It just sat there, ugly and useless. In April of 1969 people in the neighborhood decided to put it to good use and create a park. Hippies, artists, activists, students, street people, local home owners and merchants got together laid down sod, planted trees and built a children’s playground. The people of the community, using their own resources, time and energy took an ignored piece of land and turned into something special. It improved the neighborhood and for three weeks became a gathering place for both local residents and students. But, Governor Ronald Reagan who considered Berkeley “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants” wanted People’s Park wiped. So, on the morning of May 15 he sent 250 cops into the area to block off People’s Park while work crews went about destroying it. This was the park where I had met Vicki. Within a matter of just a few hours, thousands of people gathered near the park to protest its destruction. Several hundred cops were called including Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies. The confrontation between protesters and the police escalated to the point that the cops started using tear gas and firing shotguns filled with buckshot into the crowd of protesters. One bystander was killed, James Rector, one was blinded and 100s injured. A full scale riot ensued. Reagan declared a state of emergency and in 2700 National Guard and eventually Martial Law was declared. For two weeks the streets of Berkeley were barricaded with rolls of barbed wire and freedom of assembly outlawed. There were tanks on street corners and a curfew was established.

Vicki and I decided to get the fuck out of the war zone. We were walking down University Ave. toward the freeway on ramp bearing our backpacks when a cop car pulled over, siren blaring, and a bunch of pigs jumped out, wildly waving their nightsticks, grabbed us and threw us to the ground. They ripped the backpacks off our bodies and tore them open, scattering their contents all over the sidewalk. Instead of bombs or guns or whatever the fuck they were looking for they ended up with a few bags of whole grain cereal, dried fruit and brown rice. As the cops were piling back into their car, a van pulled over and its longhair driver shouted for us “get in, get in”. We threw our stuff into the van and jumped into the back seat. This pissed the cops off. They actually got back out their car and started hitting the sides of the van with their nightsticks. It was like some nightmare version of the Keystone Cops. The Berkeley pigs had gone nuts. The scent of hippie blood was driving them wild.

The guy with the van dropped us off at the on ramp and we hitchhiked to a remote beach where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean in Sonoma County, Jenner beach. Over time, people had built primitive shacks out of driftwood and anyone who wanted to could stay in them. When we got there, the first few days were rainy and overcast. We had one large sleeping bag and we spent most of our time in the bag fucking and sleeping and fucking. The bag was so cum encrusted we had to wash it in the ocean.

Eventually the sun came out and we got naked and lay on the sand for hours. We were completely alone, far away from the horroshow we’d left behind. I had brought my journal with me and in a burst of creative inspiration wrote a series of short poems called “Land’s End” (which I later sent to Z and Suzen). After a few more days of being beach bums, Vicki and I decided to return to Berkeley. We couldn’t continue to avoid what was going on. We felt an obligation to get back and get involved with the People’s Park protest. It wasn’t going away. And avoiding it was a chickenshit approach that I couldn’t live with. On May 30th over 30,000 people marched to People’s Park to protest the destruction of the park and Reagan’s occupation of their city. Vicki and I were among them. Young girls slid flowers down the muzzles of bayoneted National Guard rifles and a small airplane flew over the city trailing a banner that read, “Let A Thousand Parks Bloom.”

The park was surrounded by a fence. Inside the fence were hundreds of young National Guardsmen. Outside the fence were thousands of peaceful protestors. Some of the Guardsmen looked terrified; others were smiling and flashing peace symbols. Community leaders and organizers were making speeches from a couple of flatbed trucks. Music played. At one point a bunch of us jumped up one of the flatbeds took of our clothes and started dancing. We were chanting to the soldiers inside the fence to “join us, join us”. Most of them looked like they were ready to leap the fence and do exactly that. Seeing a bunch of cute hippie chicks naked and offering their bodies to them was mighty tempting to those horny young guys. Some of whom were actually Berkeley students who had joined the guard to avoid going to Vietnam. They knew they were on the wrong side of the fence. I later read that several of them did end up joining the protestors and were severely punished for having done so.

Two years later, People’s Park was resurrected. It exists to this day. Power to the people and their parks.

One afternoon this guy with a wild blonde afro came into the Arbor Café. He was from Arizona and wanted to trade a bag of fresh peyote buttons for food. We made the trade. I gave him all he could eat and he gave me three dozen big fat juicy buttons. I called John, told him about my score, and that night we had our first peyote experience. An experience that taught me more about the Universe, God and my place in the grand scheme of things than all the books I’d ever read or have read since.

John came up to my apartment. I had laid the peyote buttons on the altar. We each ate 12 buttons while drinking black cherry juice to try to mask the extreme bitterness of the cactus. 12 buttons is a large quantity of mescaline for even an experienced peyote eater. We had made a serious commitment to Mescalito.

John stayed in the room with the altar. I went into my room and sat on the bed. When the peyote came on, it came on strong. The window in my room looked out over the Bay and I could see the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond glowing in a haze of bright luminous lights and spewing infernal smoke, a futuristic vision of hell. I felt a sense of dread, doom. But soon that dark vision was swept away by a surge of powerful euphoric energy, the beginnings of the awakening of my kundalini and the activation of my chakras. Okay, I know what you’re thinking. This sounds like some new age mumbo jumbo. But, keep in mind, this was 1969 and I was 18 years old. All the new age crapola hadn’t been written yet. There were a handful of books by scholars of Eastern mysticism on the subject of kundalini and you had to make an effort to seek out this information. I’d read the books on kundalini (serpent power), dormant energy coiled at the base of the spine just waiting to be awakened, and I knew about the chakras: seven points of energy along the spine that corresponded to bundles of nerve endings. I had read it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Well, peyote introduced me to all of this in precise and intricate detail. Unlike the epic acid trip I’d stumbled into back in D.C., my peyote experience was as physical as it was mental, fuller and richer and more organic.

I was in the grip of Mescalito’s magic. My body was humming with energy, my spine tingling with waves of ecstasy. Beautiful and perfectly detailed geometric mandalas were spinning in the space between my closed eyes. My chakras were spinning, sparkling and luminescent. And when all the chakras were vibrating at the exact same frequency, none prevailing over the other, I disappeared into an infinite white light and no longer existed. Ego death.

While I was going through this extraordinary transformation, John was having a similar experience in the other room. From to time, we’d call out to each other “you still there, you still there?” Until we weren’t there anymore.

The lesson I learned was this: when we emphasize one aspect of our being while ignoring the rest, we create ego. If our sexual energy is dominant, we create ego. If our intellect is dominant, we create ego. If our emotions are dominant , we create ego. Only when sex, heart and mind are in complete balance and harmony do we experience so called enlightenment. When all of our chakras, our energy centers, are vibrating on the same wavelength, at the same pitch, we become in tune with the cosmos. We are refined and subtle beings not just meat and bone. Embodiment is the result of getting stuck in just one corner of our totality. The Catholic concept of original sin, the idea of humans as fallen angels, is simply the result of being out of balance. When our mind is in tune with our heart and our sexuality is in touch with both, we become one with the natural order of things and no longer exist apart from the world. That’s how it works. If you don’t believe me, eat 12 fat peyote buttons and get back to me.

The morning after Mescalito’s visit, John and I re-entered the world tenderly, with the vulnerability and openness of newborn children. We looked at each with amazement and humility. We were no longer quite as solid as we were before our peyote trip. We had been introduced to something that was so enormous in its scope and yet so pure and simple that we were both blissed out as well as bewildered.

The deal with psychedelics is that you get the Cliff Notes version of cosmic consciousness. Don’t me get me wrong, the experience is real, genuine, but it’s also just a kind of crash course giving us a quick glimpse of who we really are. Most of us, actually all of us, can’t afford to leave our jobs, family etc. to sit on a mountaintop and contemplate the nature of existence. There have been a handful of human beings who could make that commitment: Milarepa, Buddha, Jesus and a few divinely intoxicated bums who used to practice their Dharma on Bowery and Broadway back in the 70s. But, in this day and age, when there are so many forces conspiring against our attaining even the slightest insight to who we are and what has authentic value in our lives, we need guidance that can lead us to a deeper and more profound understanding of why we are here and where we are going. I suggest taking the crash course. If you can get your hungry hands on some peyote, psilocybin mushrooms or clean LSD (I’m not sure it still exists) go for it. Don’t wait for the world to become your paradise. Throw away the travel brochure. Create your own cosmic getaway. If your head’s in the right space, Newark is just as beautiful as the beaches of Belize. But ultimately it’s up to us to follow up on the psychedelic experience and do the hard work of self-realization on a daily basis. While psychedelics do open the doors of perception, its still up to us to walk through those doors and keep walking. There are no quick fixes for what ails us. Peyote showed me the way, a cosmic road map, but I still had to do the driving.

Vicki and I continued to see other, but I was becoming increasingly self-absorbed and remote. Between working at the café, spending time with John (who was my only male friend) and focusing on my writing, I had little time for a serious romantic relationship. As wonderful as Vicki was, we had little in common other than great sex.

I missed Suzen and Z and the intellectual circle that surrounded them so I decided to make a trip back to D.C. to visit. The night before I left, Vicki slept at my place and we held each other tight as a beautiful full moon hovered over the Berkeley Hills . I did love her. The next day I was in D.C..

Being back in the company of Z and Suzen was like going home to family. I felt grounded in their apartment with its shelves lined with books, walls covered in art and the pungent smell of Z’s Gaulois cigarettes. But, things seemed different between the two of them. While Z was as playful and as sharp witted as ever, Suzen seemed bored and listless, though clearly thrilled to see me. In the past two years, I had been to the West Coast twice. She had never left D.C. At 19, she’d been Z’s old lady for close to three years and I think she was tired of playing the role of wife at a time when most women her age were just starting to get a taste of independence. I represented the kind of freedom she was longing for. Z was set in his ways and those things that Suzen had initially found seductive and exciting about Z had become routine. And I had gone from envying Suzen and being in awe of her, to her feeling that way about me. Things had changed radically. I was about to find out just how radical that change was. But, for the moment I had no idea what was going on in Suzen’s head.

The day after I’d arrived from Berkeley, Suzen and I were alone in the apartment. Z had gone out to get beer and cigarettes. I was sitting on the floor reading. Suzen sat down across from me, took the book from hands and kissed me on the lips. I had always been enamored of Suzen ( that’s putting it mildly), but I never felt it was reciprocated. She was Z’s old lady, completely off limits as far as I was concerned, so the kiss took me completely by surprise. I was stunned. She kissed me again and again, feral and ravenous. She thrust her hands down my pants and started to jerk me off. She was about to go down on me when we heard the click of the apartment door lock. Z was back. We disengaged, I picked up the book. Suzen got up and walked to the kitchen. Z was all smiles, completely oblivious to the infidelity that had just taken place between Suzen and I. I felt guilty but exhilarated. Suzen was extraordinarily special in my life but I never in a million years thought that we might become lovers. But, we did. That night.

Here’s the tough part. Suzen and I decided to go stay at a friend’s of ours place, Bruce, who had a house just across D.C.’s Key bridge in Arlington, Virginia. I was going to be honest with Z and tell him up front that Suzen and I were going away for the night together. He was in his study at his desk working on something. I tapped on the door and walked in. He looked up from his work, smiled and said “what’s up?” I told him Suzen and I were going to Bruce’s. He asked if he was invited. I said no. We both understood what that meant. He looked at me calmly and simply said “oh”. He then picked up from the desk the thing he had been working on. It was a book that he had bound himself featuring water color illustrations by Suzen. The book was “Land’s End”. My poems. “Here” he said, handing me the book. “This is for you from Suzen and me”. It was a gorgeous book. I was overwhelmed that someone who I had looked up to for so many years had found my poetry worthy of such attention and care. I thanked him and slowly walked out of the room clutching the book to my chest, confused, conflicted and racked with guilt. But, Suzen and I walked out the front door and continued walking toward the bridge, walking away from Z , walking through the darkness, walking together.

It’s strange fucking someone you’ve been a friend to for so long. For me, the sex usually comes first followed by friendship. Suzen and I had been friends for 3or 4 years and fucking her satisfied a curiosity - getting to see her naked body, to be inside her, added a new facet to a larger relationship. We had shared so much over the years that finally sleeping together seemed very natural, no big deal. It didn’t deepen our friendship. It wasn’t romantic, but it was intensely pleasurable. Her pussy was musty but sweet and she had large expressive nipples. She loved sucking my cock. Z had taught her well. The sex was satisfying but not epic, not what I was expecting. Perhaps we knew each other too well, it was like fucking a family member (not a sister but let’s say a distant cousin). There was too much psychological complexity involved. For Suzen, it was her way of beginning the process of breaking away from Z. For me, fucking someone who I had considered unattainable was empowering. I was no longer Suzen’s acolyte but her peer and lover. When we awoke the next morning, I put Love’s Forever Changes on the stereo. Suzen and I lay on the bed and silently stared at the ceiling. I was thinking of Z and how I couldn’t possibly face him after what I’d done. Suzen took a cab home. I stayed at Bruce’s for a few days and then flew back to Berkeley.

“Zilla was an archetypethe voodoo queen, the queen of wrath”

“Kamala, who couldn’t sing, kept the beat and kept it strong”

I was glad to be back in Berkeley, back in my apartment and back to work at the Arbor Café. The D.C. trip had been traumatic, though I do think I was part of helping Suzen break free of a stifling situation. She would eventually join me in Berkeley.

Vicki and I were spending more time together than ever. She was a steadying force in my somewhat chaotic life. I was always searching for something, constantly window shopping at the spiritual super mall. I had some form of religious attention deficit disorder.

It was in the midst of this spiritual yearning that I attended a performance of a theater company called The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company. I was blown away by what I’d seen and through sheer persistence and some good karma became a part of the troupe.

The Floating Lotus Magic Opera was founded and directed by by Daniel Moore who, along with being a writer of plays, had two of his books of poems published by City Lights . We were a loose knit collective of actors, musicians and divinely intoxicated idiots exploring ritual drama based on everything from Tibetan Buddhism, Native American mythology to the writings of William Blake and the work of Julian Beck and The Living Theater. We created our own costumes and masks and had our own makeshift orchestra consisting of all kinds of ethnic instruments. We performed at The Family Dog Ballroom and the Esalen Institute, but mostly in parks and outdoor amphitheaters. Our performances always concluded with the actors going into the audience and breaking bread that we ourselves had baked. Occasionally some of the troupe would end up sneaking off into the bushes to fuck willing members of the audience; this took the Living Theater concept to another level. The Floating Lotus Magic Opera made the Broadway production of “Hair” look like a slightly hipper version of The Partridge Family.

In one our performances Zilla portrayed Kali, described by Daniel as an “awesome monster female Eater and Goddess of Destruction, transformed later to simple naked woman, clean as primal earth, and mother; at beginning all in black with head-necklace of severed victims and blood-fire burning up from the ground (hem of skirt) at her feet. She waves a long black cloth as her own dark cloud.” Kamala was a dancer in the Floating Lotus. Yes, I had sex with them. There was a lot of that going in our group. It was almost unavoidable. Intimacy, openness and honesty were what our theater was striving for. We got naked, both figuratively and literally. And fucking was part of it.

The Floating Lotus Magic Opera was given the opportunity to relocate from Berkeley to a beautiful mountain location near Santa Rosa. We pulled up stakes, left Berkeley, and created a community in the mountains. We figured this was the perfect environment to work on future theatrical productions. There were about 20 of us and we lived in makeshift lean-toos, tepees and tents. The property was formerly the site of an abandoned sawmill, so some of us took shelter in existing structures like giant conical sawdust burners and storage sheds. I bought a parachute form an Army surplus store, hung it from a tree and created a tepee-like living space, my translucent nylon cocoon.

While at our mountain retreat, it was our mission as actors/shamanic wannabees to go deep into ourselves and create a character for our next production. One afternoon, as I was walking through the woods I stumbled upon a rusty piece of metal lying on the ground. I picked it up. It was shaped like a dog’s face and was covered in moss that resembled hair. It became the mask around which I created my totemic self, a trickster, “dog howling at death’s hollow footsteps”. I returned to the theater’s cosmic base camp, put on the mask and did a dance while improvising some wild dog-inspired poetry (you can imagine how ridiculous this shit was. But, I did it with conviction). The troupe loved it. My new character was going to be part of the production. Although, none of us knew what the production was. We were flying by the seat of our pants, though some of us weren’t wearing pants.

It was around this time when The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company came to a fork in the creative road. We were stuck. There was little being accomplished in terms of an actual play to be performed, just a hodgepodge of mystical mumbo jumbo that hadn’t take on the form of anything resembling a coherent, intelligent or even remotely entertaining theatrical spectacle. We needed a kick in our collective artistic ass. So, we did what most theater people did, we decided to eat some blotter acid and peyote tar. This is an age old tradition among theater people.

On October 1, 1969, the day the Floating Lotus planned to take our collective acid trip, there was an extraordinary and portentous occurrence. All morning and throughout the day threadlike clouds were crisscrossing each other forming diamond shapes. The sky looked like a giant sheet of graph paper that had been pulled askew. Some renegade clouds had broken from the graph and seemed to be forming celestial hieroglyphs, a language composed of frozen crystals. It was the strangest and most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And those clouds seemed to be sending a message. Something was putting us on notice. But, it was a language I couldn’t speak. It was late afternoon, when the Floating Lotus gathered at a ridge that overlooked a valley that seemed to recede into eternity. We often went there in groups or alone to meditate or just hang out. But, this time we were on a quest. The members of our group had taken acid (a few ate peyote tar) and were waiting for a vision, some creative guidance, a voice from on high. Fog started to roll in. It had reached the summit of the ridge, the valley obscured by clouds, as darkness started to fall. Someone in the group lit a match and leaned over to set fire to a bunch of wood we had gathered to create bonfire. The moment the match was struck, the earth started to move, violently rolling and shuddering. A few of us were knocked of our feet. After a minute or so, the earth settled down. We had no idea what had happened. Was it the drugs? Had we had some collective hallucination? We all took a deep breath. The fire starter leaned over and struck another match. The earth went crazy again, heaving in waves and trembling. It was like riding an enormous undulating snake. And then it stopped. When the third match was about to be lit, someone shouted “no, no, don’t”! The person doing the shouting was absolutely convinced, as many of us were, that the earth’s shudderings were somehow related to the lighting of the bonfire. Moments later, the earth went into a major convulsion and we all hit the ground. Somehow, through this we managed to fumble about, form a circle and hold hands. Daniel, our director, started playing his zither and we all started chanting Om Mani Padme Hum (a Tibetan mantra on compassion but that in these circumstances translates to “I’m scared shitless”). As the earth continued to wobble and shake, our human circle started to slowly rotate in a clockwise direction and began to rise into the air. We were levitating. I know what you’re thinking. But, believe me I was there and we were levitating. I remember looking down through the middle of the circle and seeing the earth hundreds of feet below. That’s all I remember. When the sun rose we were all scattered on the ground, some still holding hands, all of us sleeping. As we awoke of course we all started questioning what happened. Had we had shared some wild hallucination? Were we in the same dream together? Had we all gone momentarily insane? What the fuck happened?

Later that day part of the puzzle was resolved when someone returned from town with a newspaper. On October 1, 1969, the city of Santa Rosa was severely shaken by two earthquakes. These quakes were distinctly felt throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, but it was in Santa Rosa where the most damage was done. The quakes were the most severe to hit that city since 1906. An earthquake releases an incredible amount of energy. LSD sensitizes you to energy. A large group of people tripping on acid during an earthquake will probably experience something very much out of the ordinary, perhaps something mystical, magical, a little bit mad, who knows. Whether we levitated or did not, I don’t care. Something happened that was shamanic, powerful and life changing. Had the earthquake unleashed in our collective unconscious forces that might have been considered miracles in an earlier time, in those days when Jesus turned water into wine and rocks into bread? That was the last time I took LSD. I figured I had had an experience that would take a lifetime to integrate.

The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company had their vision.

We packed up our few possessions and moved back to Berkeley prepared to get down to the serious business of putting together our next production. After several futile weeks of trying to organize writing workshops and rehearsals, it soon became apparent that the Floating Lotus Magic Opera had run its course. Daniel was absorbed in his poetry and the rest of us were splitting off in different directions. We decided to do one last event at The Family Dog. It was a mishmash of old stuff and improvised new bits. I did my dog routine. We danced, sang and played our instruments with a wild unfocused abandon - a loosey goosey swan song (pun intended). What made the night memorable was that we were on a bill with Alan Watts. He was the opening act. And Watts was indeed an act. He was funny and smart, a master of crazy wisdom, a Zen stand-up comedian. Stephen Gaskin was also part of the event. On this particular night, he was much more serious than usual and seemed to be competing with Watts as though this was a steel cage match between two wrestlers disguised as gurus. He questioned Watts’s legitimacy as a spiritual guide. He was throwing down and it wasn’t pretty. Frankly, Gaskins was coming off like a complete asshole.

We closed out the ceremonies with our performance and headed to Watts’s houseboat in Sausalito where we had been invited to join him for wine and conversation. Wine was a big part of Alan’s life at that point. He had become an alcoholic. It was a lovely night. Alan was a great host and he and Daniel were shooting the cosmic shit keeping us all fascinated and amused. Then came a knock at the door. Alan’s houseboy opened it and standing there, along with his entourage, was Stephen Gaskin. Actually it wasn’t his entourage, it was his husband and two wives. Gaskin was in a four way marriage. He maintained it kept people more honest when three people could call you on your bullshit instead of just one. So, Stephen his wives and husband walk into Alan’s houseboat like they owned the joint sat down and Stephen proceeded to tell Alan that he was a washed-up, irrelevant old charlatan. Gaskin continued taunting Watts in a stunning display of rudeness, certainly not the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear from someone who considered themselves a spiritual teacher. Gaskin was being a world class prick. You just don’t talk to Alan Watts like that. Watts, along with D.T Suzuki, had done more to introduce Zen and higher states of consciousness to the United States than a thousand Stephen Gaskins. While Gaskin continued to rant, Watts just sat there soaking it in and smiling. Finally, he got up and took off his shirt, revealing an ample Buddha-like belly, and started beating on it like a drum. Alan didn’t say a word. He just kept beating on his big old belly while strutting around the room with a goofy smile on his face. This really pissed Gaskin off. The more Gaskin ranted, the louder Alan beat on his belly drum. We all watched in bemused silence as Alan, displaying the wisdom of a Zen master, effortlessly turned negativity and chaos into calmness and clarity, using wit and a simple gesture. His belly had outfoxed Gaskin. Alan didn’t argue, he didn’t resist, he punctured Gaskin’s egocentric veil with humor and an open spirit. Alan had won the battle by not battling. He created open space in which Gaskin’s ego spread out, spread thin and simply dissipated. It was a marvelous teaching from a great drunken old man. I was privileged to have witnessed Zen in action.

Suzen showed up at my apartment. I had no idea she was coming. She had left Z. Her plan was to move in with me until she could find her own place. Now normally I would have been thrilled at the prospect of living with Suzen for a few weeks, but I was in the middle of a relationship with Vicki. But, there was no way I could turn Suzen away, she was my close friend. So, of course, Suzen stayed. And I ended up fucking her and fucking Vicki and was risking losing both of them. This was the 60s, the era of free love, but when it came right down to it, jealousy is so deeply engrained in some primal part of our selves that no matter how you try to philosophically dance around it the motherfucker just won’t go away. Vicki got jealous and laid down the ultimatum that I choose between being with her or being with Suzen. I’m not good at making decisions and I’m worse when those decisions involve people getting hurt. But, I didn’t want to lose Vicki. She was a genuinely beautiful soul who I knew truly loved me. Suzen, on the other hand, was a friend who I was fucking but felt I had no real future with. She was an artist, intellectually stimulating, had a lovely cunt and sweet tits, but I felt she was using me as a bridge from where she’d been to where she was going…and where she was going had little to do with me. And the more time I spent with Suzen, the more I came to realize that she was slightly crazy and was getting weirder and weirder. She had radically changed from when I’d last seen her in D.C. It may have had to do with leaving Z and being in a new place. I couln’t figure it out, but something was clearly wrong, very wrong. She’d retreat into herself for whole days and not talk and then when she did it was in a stream of cosmic gibberish. I later found out from Z that he and Suzen had taken a massive dose of mescaline a few months before she’d come to visit me and the experience had been a bad one. Suzen hadn’t fully recovered from the trip. Now, I’ve met very few so called “acid casualties” in my life. Of the millions of people who have taken psychedelics I would venture to say that a minute fraction of those people were irreversibly damaged by the experience and most of them were probably nuts anyway. Shit, some of the best minds of our generation were acid heads: The Beatles, Steve Jobs, Ken Kesey, Jack Nicholson, Bill Gates, Andrew Weil, Richard Branson…So, I don’t buy into the idea that there were all these “casualties” of the psychedelic era. But, Suzen seemed to be one of the few. I called Z and told that Suzen was losing it. He flew out and took her back home to D.C. She’d later return to California and move to Humboldt County, not exactly the best place for someone recovering from a psychosis triggered by drugs.

With Suzen out of the picture, Vicki and I were back on solid ground, as solid as things get when your 19 years old. The whole idea of having a serious long term relationship when you’re that young is pretty unrealistic. In the ’60s and early ’70s it was not only unrealistic it was impossible. This was a period in time in which unfettered experimentation was encouraged and concepts like monogamy, marriage and traditional sexual values were being reassessed, deconstructed and even ridiculed. Vicki and my attempt at being a “couple” was quaint and most certainly doomed. In our case it wasn’t another woman that came between us, it was my own selfishness and a town called Boulder.

In April of 1970, John, Vicki and I hitchhiked to Boulder, Colorado for a massive gathering of spiritual teachers and gurus called The Whole Earth Fair, a cosmic blabfest that drew thousands of people from all over the world. The speakers at the event included Yogi Bhajan, Swami Satchadananda and our old friend Stephen Gaskin. Boulder had a certain magic and I concluded that it was the Tibet of the western hemisphere. I immediately fell in love with the place.

I decided to stay in Boulder, as did John. I had become more enchanted with Boulder and the idea of living there than I was in my relationship with Vicki who did not share my infatuation with our new surroundings. As I delved deeper into the Boulder scene I began to ignore Vicki. Though we continued to share a sleeping bag while we camped in the Boulder foothills, for the most part I was doing what I wanted to with little regard for Vicki’s needs. So, one day she decided to return to Berkeley and I did little to dissuade her. Something I still regret. That I let such a wonderful person just walk out of my life without putting up some kind of fight is testimony to my own self-absorption, narcissism and propensity for taking women for granted, even those I adored. I think my cavalier treatment of Vicki also kick started the beginning of John and I falling out of friendship. He had always loved Vicki and felt I never fully appreciated her. He envied her love for me and felt I didn’t deserve it. He was right. Vicki left. Like that. Back to Berkeley, back to where we met on a street corner next to People’s Park. My beautiful, soulful California girl was gone for good. And I barely felt a thing. Yeah, I was a prick.

♥

Rowena.

“Rowena was an artist’s daughter the deeper image shook her up”

I needed a place to live and I needed work. I got a gig at a natural food restaurant called the Carnival Café and was offered a free place to park my sleeping bag , a gazebo located in the back yard of a rambling old house situated on a beautiful street just a few blocks from the cafe. Several young women lived in the house. One was an exotic petite brunette who had large brown eyes that could swallow a man whole. She was half Egyptian. Her first name was as exotic as her looks, Loubna. In 88 Lines I refer to her as Rowena, her middle name. At some point in her childhood, she became Lola.

I fell in love with Lola at first sight. As I write this I’m wondering if that’s even possible. Do people really fall in love at first sight? Are we talking about love here or some kind of premonition telling you that it is preordained you’re going to end up spending a chunk of your life with this person? Of the three long term relationships I’ve had, love at first sight happened twice. The woman I lived with the longest and eventually married, Jennifer, was not a case of love at first sight. That relationship snuck up on me. But, I am pretty sure that Jennifer knew something that I did not, that we were destined for each other. I think the love at first sight phenomenon is rarely shared simultaneously by both parties involved. One might feel it, while the other feels nothing. When I first saw Lola, I fell in love. I don’t think she noticed or cared. She was too absorbed in making a macramé plant holder or some kind of hippie bikini. Yes, I fell in love with someone who actually macraméd. But, she wasn’t Sasquatch in a mu mu, she was delicate and beautiful. Her skin was the color of fallen leaves. Her hands were like small birds. I watched her in silence for several minutes as she sat on the floor in front of a little table tying knots out of twine. When she finally looked up at me, I felt exposed; her eyes penetrated into the core of my very fucking being. Lola was only 18 but she had the eyes of an ancient and wise soul. And when she smiled at me, the corners of those eyes arched upward and smiled too. Nothing was said, nothing needed to be said.

“It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for lolaLo-lo-lo-lo lola”

In the early ’70s, Boulder, like Berkeley, was a hippie magnet. Both are University towns. But unlike the campus at Berkeley, which was a hotbed of radical politics and activism, the University of Colorado at Boulder was (and still is) a school with a predominately rich white student body most of whom like to ski, hike and ride bicycles. So, the Boulder youth scene was an interesting contrast of all-American privileged kids and societal drop-outs like me. There wasn’t much intermingling between the two cultures. Ironically, the UCB professors tended to be a lot hipper than the students. The professors, hipsters, local poets and unredeemable drunks (some of who were combinations of all those things) would hang out at a local watering hole called Tom’s Tavern. Tom’s sold cheap beer, had a pool table and a jukebox stuffed with vintage rock and country and western. It was the center of off-campus intellectual life in Boulder. Within the smoke stained and booze infused walls of Tom’s Tavern I found my University, a joint where Jean Paul Sartre could drink Hank Williams under the existential table while Arthur Rimbaud shimmied to Smokey Robinson and The Miracles singing “Mickey’s Monkey”. I had always considered alcohol the drug of choice for straight people. It was my parent’s drug. Alcohol was for squares. But, at Tom’s you drank. And that’s what I did. I started drinking. I also started getting serious about being a poet.

Boulder had a small but robust literary scene of which the poet Jack Collom was the principal galvanizing force. Jack was a tall rangy guy with short curly hair and somewhat feminine features. Despite his size, he was delicate and graceful. He had a wife, three kids, worked for IBM and was a hard drinking, chain smoking womanizer. He was also a terrific poet. He became my close friend and, like Z, my mentor.

Jack edited a poetry magazine called “THE” and was the first person to publish some of my poems. This made me feel legit. I was a poet. It was official.

I squeezed carrots at the Carnival, lived in my gazebo and wrote. One night I slinked into Lola’s bedroom and slipped into her bed. That’s the way things happened back then. Hippies didn’t date. We fucked - bypass the bullshit; get right down to the meat and bone of the matter. Lola welcomed me with slightly open arms, not a rousing welcome. But, I was unbowed. I kissed her neck, her lips and sucked her proud brown nipples. I slipped my fingers into her pussy. She was uptight. Lola wasn’t a virgin but I felt I was having sex with a teenage nun. When I went down on her, she asked “why are you doing that?” It was the first time someone had ever eaten her out and she seemed genuinely surprised to see me down there lickin’ her clit. The idea that this might be pleasurable for both of us wasn’t registering with Lola on any level. My pussy munching was an experiment in futility. Most women prefer to have their cunt licked than fucked. Lola observed the whole thing like she was looking at a museum diorama of a chimpanzee eating a toupee. Lola was from another dimension. She had a tenuous relationship with her body. It would be awhile before she would become a sexual creature. As for me, I’ve always thrown myself totally into the act of fucking. My mission is to always make my partner cum. The more you put into fucking, the more you get out of it. Lola’s disinterest in sex was alienating but also a challenge. Would I ever be able to initiate Lola into the pleasures of the flesh? Could her sexual code be cracked? It never occurred to me that I just didn’t turn her on. Sex should never be work, unless you’re getting paid to do it.

Writing and fucking. Fucking and writing. This was the life I was meant to live. The 9 to 5 grind was not going to be my destiny. I would never be average. I would never be content to spend the rest of my life under the thumb of a boss or a wife. I was a savage. Domesticity, ordinariness, being another face in a crowd of faces, blank and dazed, marching slowly toward death, no not my destiny. I was convinced I’d never live to be thirty. My existence was day to day. I didn’t think of the future. I never thought I’d have one.

♥

to be continued....