The Sixties: Crazy, But in a Beautiful Way

TRUE FICTION                       

The 60s: Crazy, But In a Beautiful Way

~  Kind of Like the Gods  ~

Dreams, Drugs,
Hopes and Sweet Love
In the Crazy, Delicious Time
They Can Only Call ‘The 60s’


John E. Darling

To the comrades, beloveds, fellow travelers
in those amazing 60s
that we were blessed to live in.
We were heroes and we changed the world.




John E. Darling
Jdarling@jeffnet.org
Ashland, OR



c. 1987 for Summer of Love 20th anniversary,
Rewritten and c. 2001, 2011 by John Darling.

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher, except for quotations in reviews.

Cover photograph by author in San Francisco, Kent State protests, May 1971, copyright.


Published by Oregon Darlings Press, Ashland. Printed in USA




This is a work of fiction and any resemblance of any character to any person, living or dead is purely coincidental.  However, this book is “true fiction” in that the author uses the true framework of his life, the homes, cities, jobs, journeys, family, pals, notable personages which he did live, know and experience in some form or another, but, as likely as not, in varying forms and places and with different people than stated.  What an author writes about has to come from real life experience and therefore characters and experiences are often a collage of the real and imagined -- and, since the entheogenic drugs of the sixties were illegal, the author must make clear that tales of illegal drugs contained in this book are hearsay, are not drawn from his personal experience and are intended for entertainment value only, as part of a novel.  The author has taken care to honor all persons from those times (except a few public figures) and must state that all characters herein should be considered fictional.











Foreward

   I’ve been meaning to write this for decades but deep down felt fearful because the Sixties, the most fun, visionary and interesting period in modern life -- and certainly in my life (except for having and raising children) had been so trashed by the media, church, Reagan, televangelists, but hey, it gave the Republicans a focus for everything they hate and can raise money against for decades, so they should thank us.  We hippies.  The ones who changed the world.  For the better.

  But I felt a little guilty, I mean, all those ecstatic, highly revelatory acid trips, balling all those beautiful chicks, hitchhiking all over America and Europe, stoned, listening to the best music with a beat probably ever performed, being truly a free person, unchained from millennia of bullshit of preachers, generals, presidents, kings - and able to see the world as it is and love it. 

   If you were there, you know exactly what I’m talking about and if you weren’t you will get some of the vibes -- love that word, I mean, vibrations!  We could actually see them!  But then, we were regularly on drugs and thank god the establishment (which righted society after its long stagger into the weeds of excess and madness which to us was profound gladness) doesn’t do drugs, except their gin, ciggies and immense cornucopia of mood-altering meds.

  The Sixties was beautiful and good and it’s important because it did change the face of this society and many of its values and that will always be with us, no matter how much The System despises and ignores the real Sixties, by saying the Sixties was about Civil Rights, the Kennedys, an unfortunate war, mini-skirts and campus unrest!  Love that word ‘unrest,’ like the natural state of the young is rest.

   And I make no secret of the fact that the Sixties, as we know them, could not have happened without acid and I want to say that word loud and proud – acid, acid, acid!  LSD was a beautiful and magical potion, not a drug, that opened the minds of millions to love and flushed out all society’s fear-based conditioning, whether you like it or not. 

   This book talks about the role of acid, which metaphorically was the acid that ate the lock, that sprung the door on...consciousness.  So, the story is not about LSD but what’s behind the door that it opened.  It’s about this magic suit of clothes, this coat of many colors given to us, and which we are still struggling to fit into.  And that’s consciousness!

   Ultimately, the Sixties was an intrusion of the divine, a mystery infused into a world on the brink of nuclear hell and, it could be said, it lifted the consciousness of enough people that it changed and saved that world.
                                --J.E.D.


P.S.  Don’t take drugs.  This book is not intended to advocate use of drugs, legal or illegal, or the practice of unsafe sex.  My generation did LSD in the late 60s and early 70s.  We were angry and very unhappy about a culture that started random wars often and sent us to fight them while they sat around smoking ciggies and drunk on hard-A, arresting us for pot and acid, about which they knew nothing.  Those circumstances are much changed now and so is the world we live in.  The Sixties were a crazy time with a huge “generation gap,” something that’s long gone now, and with it the substances and free love we knew. Rock n roll is still here, however. Enjoy that!  And have a nice bottle of wine and make love to your sweetie!  Haha, just kidding.  Do what you know in your heart.











Everybody’s Talkin’ Bout a New Way of Walkin‘                1967-69

I would have to say the Sixties really began, for me, out in the Nevada desert, heading west into San Francisco, just out of Michigan State University, July 1967, when I saw a couple guys my age who seemed to be abandoning their overheated car and sticking out their thumbs, so I picked them up.  They were happy, nuts, giddy and full of the new language, like saying joint, lid, roach, hit (of acid), balling (sex) and talking about the fun there were going to have in San Francisco.  One of them searched the radio dial and found The Doors singing Light My Fire, which I hadn’t heard before and, slowly, it started dawning on me – this was different music. This had to do with sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.  This was not the Beach Boys.  Here was Jim Morrison calling out to a woman to light the fire in his life, loins, body, everything and “set the night on fire.” 

   I liked them.  I liked the energy.  We rolled through the beautiful desert, slowly gaining elevation up into the Sierras and winding through all those vast mountains, then down into the Bay.  I’d never been there.  The freeways didn’t have much traffic back then.  It was nice, manageable, not insane like it is now.  I dropped them off in The City and headed down the Bayshore Freeway to the apartment of my girlfriend, Dolores, the one I’d been with was with as I went through college  She’d got a job as a stewardess with United and was living with fellow stews in San Mateo.  They put me up for a few days till I decided to room with a neighbor of theirs, a guy.  Just for a while, till we figured out what to do. 

   That was my novelistic beginning of this book.  Wasn’t it sweet?  It’s true, too, and within a matter of days I had begun cohabiting with a woman for the first time and I was blown away by my first reefer, in Golden Gate Park, reading the Berkeley Barb and watching the nutty Hare Krishnas chant their thing with little cymbals.  It took a year (and a beautiful, wise lover) and down went the LSD -- and if any one little thing in my life can be called a game changer that was so it.  But, really, the 60s crept in slow, like a skunk in the moonlight, as the cowboys say.

   First, the baggage and whining you always hear about the Sixties.  The religious right love to rant that the 1960s opened up a bag of nasty things, first and always starting with drugs (which everyone is wolfing down now, most of them legal), quickly followed by a long list a decadent signs of civilization’s decline – gangs, out-of-control immigration, internet kiddie porn, women terminating fetuses at their whim, the hugging of trees, every manner of license, then gay marriage and a fundamentalist backlash, all underlain by a pervasive obsession with the self, at the expense of the good of society.  As if Republicans are not the original “me generation.”

  Well, that’s the conservative view, the one we hear a great deal about from televangelists and the one that made possible the Reagan Revolution, that is, the revolution of old white people against…The Sixties, that is, against “these people” who brought us these few, crazy, very unexpected years of change that turned the world upside down forever – and no amount of conservative attempts to put it back together the way it was will ever really work or even be fun or very interesting, even for the people trying to do it.  It will be resolved because they are old and will die off and that will be the end of it.


  It’s true, the Sixties did open the doors to all that and, no matter how you try to explain it with issues like war protest, civil rights, Baby Boomers coming of age, whatever, it was, it was really triggered and driven by the consciousness-raising drugs, mainly LSD, which opened the mind to amazing awe and understanding that millions knew was more real than the reality we were conditioned to.  It arrived weirdly at the same moment as another drug, The Pill, which for the first time in history allowed people to just go for it and make love to each other in every imaginable and desirable manner and place and with no mandatory pretext around being deeply in love and pledged to marriage – and without having to embark on decades of parenthood, if they didn’t want to. And millions of us would soon realize our parents didn’t necessarily want to. 

  Also arriving at that amazing intersection in that amazing year of 1967 was the realization that very quickly after President John F. Kennedy -- a very cool, young, handsome, smart man who did cool things like start the Peace Corps and sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- got his brains blown out, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, felt it was ok to start another major war, which sounded a lot like the useless Korean War – the same premises about stopping Communism in the north half of some small Asian country by sending young American boys to fight them, and get killed and have a generally bummer time, (bummer being a term that meant a bad LSD trip), but knowing we couldn’t really stop the foe -- but what the hell, do it anyway.  Like, hey, we have to test our new generation of weapons and rack up corporate profits.  We freaks, dropouts, hippies, alienated youth, as they called us, were, amazingly, the first people ever to say no to that -- the obvious and real reasons for war.  Oh, also usually to demonize masses with less than white skins.

   Random wars may have worked in the early Fifties, when young Americans, just five years out of the sacrifices and victories of a just war under a wise and beloved president, FDR, but as soon as the Baby Boomers, who didn’t have much of that loyalty, patriotism and respect for authority that their parents had, got on acid and abundant, delicious sex -- with great rock bands pounding the message home -- it just wasn’t going to happen.  No one ever expected the canon fodder to say “NO” to the canon.  We were the first ever.

   Given the expanded beauties of awareness that flowed from acid -- which was not just fun, like spring break, a new Corvette and feeling up Suzy Creamcheese’s fulsome bosoms -- but was absolutely life-changing and ecstatic (after the scary entry that sometimes happened) -- well, these kids were not going to follow the drill and sign up for years and go off to kill random peasants in some Asian jungle.  I mean, our leaders, didn’t even think they had to bother to tell us why we were going to die.  Or kill.  If you were ordered, you went, period, end of story – or else you were a traitor, coward and criminal.

  Also arriving at that fateful intersection in the mid-Sixties was some amazing music of the sort that had never been written or sung before, mainly by Bob Dylan and the Beatles and even though we had never heard anything like it, we knew it was important and was doing things to us, making us see and think things we’d never heard or thought before and this was before the acid and the war.  The music got vastly more amazing, engaging and mind-blowing after acid exploded on the scene about 1967, and it drove and fueled and fused the whole thing together, so that it was like a sound track to our “movie,” with many different cuts but one theme: this is Our Generation and our time and no one has every felt the beautiful things we think and feel -- and they’re right on.

   What we think of as “The Sixties” was mainly a white phenomenon, happening mostly among kids in their late teens and twenties and mostly on the two coasts of the U.S., plus London.  But you can also see how Negroes, as they were called (not a bad name, really, as it means black people, where African-American is kind of clunky and Americo-centric) were on a similar trajectory going way back to like 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education and Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus and that whole shift and heightening of awareness.  The Civil Rights revolution involved little or no sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, but it came from the same place, which is, hey, you can’t do this shit to me, you can’t isolate me, brand me, place me down your hierarchy, suffocate me, take away my hope.  You can’t use me and abuse me and in fact you can’t make my life shitty in any way!

  The white kids, who were called hippies (the ones more into consciousness and acid) or radicals (the ones who went to college and opposed the draft), were seen as having little or no right to object to anything because, hey, they were white and mostly came from the suburbs and their families had money, so they could easily cut their hair, get a good job and start drinking martinis any time they wanted.  Blacks, well, they were stuck with being black, that is, they were stuck with the hatred from white people and society had to see their point.  Eventually.  As long as they didn’t want too much, too fast.  People actually used to say that.

  But there was a big commonality among hippies or “freaks,” a name we loved, as in,  “Ya, I picked up this freak on the Coast Highway and we tripped and it was far fuckin out!  He balled me.  It was so cosmic.”  That would be a hippie chick talking.  Yes, we used the term “chick.”  It had no negative connotation till feminism, which only came in bigtime, along with environmentalism and gay rights, when the Seventies started.

  Guys were actually called “cats.”  That was a Negro jazz term from decades earlier.  Unthinkably stupid now, like we had the right to insinuate we were actually as cool as black jazz musicians.  Hippies called Negroes “spades.”  As in black as the ace of spades.  Hippies really looked up to blues musicians, thinking them “real,” while white people of most kinds weren’t real.  They were “plastic.”  Plastic meant artificial, not natural or real and that was bad.  Or they were redneck, which meant more like country hicks or beer-guzzling cracker hardhats from the city.  With the word redneck, you got the image of a real angry white male. Rednecks are the ones who started wearing the American flag on their hardhats, as if to say hippies were not from America.  Their slogan was “America, love it or leave it,” as if to disagree with the official program, official drugs, official war and official ruling class (white) was to oppose America and that meant that, instead of trying to create positive change, you were a traitor, not to mention unmanly, so it was ok to beat the shit out of you, if the opportunity arose.

   To the conscious young of the Sixties, this was not just illogical, but supremely stupid, brutish and autocratic, because, hey, the country was started by Founding Fathers who opposed the official story and the domination and arrogance that went with it.

   When you say “The Sixties,” you mostly think of white, long-haired, acid-tripping freaks, breaking the drug laws, living crowded in crash pads, getting crabs and scabies and living off god knows what, since they never worked.  But a lot of middle-class people with jobs also were swept up in the hope, played the music at home, smoked dope, dropped acid once in a while, read the few alternative books that were published and came to know each other just by random comments, since you couldn’t grow your hair and keep a job.

  The Civil Rights movement and black riots was the other Sixties, like a parallel universe beside the Psychedelic Sixties, as it was soon called.  It was happening, you knew it was right, you knew white people were going to resist equality and continue to hate Negroes and it was no surprise when they blew Martin Luther King away.  It just confirmed everything we already knew by then.  White culture – racist, violent, mean, smug, dominating and full of shit.  And we were white.  We didn’t want to be.  We were ashamed of everything white meant, at least in the modern world, and when, after being psychedelicized, we saw the beauty of each other, that is, white kids, we saw each other in a primal way, tapped into some kind of pre-whitey tribal world where everyone was good and fine – and you certainly would ball someone regardless if they were Asian or African, if the situation came up.  I think someone called us “voluntary niggers” at the time because you would get told to leave stores and restaurants and hardly anyone would pick you up hitchhiking (which was a very common and safe mode of transportation then) except other freaks and that was fine with us.  We freaks loved other freaks, literally.  You had a common language you were ready to speak and of course you were ready to love each other in every way and frequently but you also weren’t like obsessed with it. 

  You were “mellow,” another big word and concept of the time, that is, you were relaxed and in tune with the flow of the universe, which you understood in its depths and dimensions from acid revelations, tempered with “getting loose” with pot smoking and you were no longer uptight like The Man, that is, the guy who ran Maggie’s Farm, which meant the system, that being from a Dylan song.  If it happened that sex came along, which it did a great deal, that was fine and if not, hey, that was mellow.  You took what the Universe gave you and it clearly gave a lot.  You weren’t uptight about it, like The Man, who was always trying to grab and own everything and tell everyone what to do. 

   Anyway, maybe Negroes set the scene and the tune by standing up to The Man about discrimination, segregation, public accommodations, white drinking fountains, ghettos, lynching and all the gross, ignorant savagery echoing from slavery.  Their struggle was a lesson to everyone and its meaning was not lost on the new generation of white kids who were being asked to go off and fight another meaningless war, which happened to be the third or fourth or fifth (if you count Cubans and Indians) in a row against people who weren't white – and the kids took heart from the Negroes burning their ghettoes for the last three or four summers, which were called “long, hot summers” and which whitey dreaded deep in his chickenshit soul as a symbol of dark (literally) unknown forces swelling up out of the steamy jungle (ghetto) threatening to take over his world and all the centuries of Roman, Christian order, logic and whiteness that preceded it.

   The Negroes weren’t sucking up to The Man anymore and neither were the young white kids, at least enough of them to make it a real problem and that had never happened before in history.  A rebellion among the privileged!  The young bucks in history were always hot to go off and fight for country and glory and manhood, but this was the first generation of guys who didn’t see it that way, at least the middle-class kids, the sort who went to college. 

   History was being made and it broke LBJ’s balls finally and he quit the presidency.  Now THAT had never happened before in history and was in fact unthinkable.  Young men blowing off their rights of passage to manhood by organized violence and conquest.  And they grew long hair, which on Alexander the Great and Thomas Jefferson may have looked masculine, but to The Man in the mid-20th century, it looked sissy and feminine and sickening.  It made his neck red.

   Soon the politicians had to reckon that the times, they were a’changin’ and some of them, the liberals (you could still use that word with pride then) got the balls to speak up from consciousness and principal, also something that had never happened, well, not since the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, women getting the vote and Prohibition being repealed, all radical departures from the rigid, ruling hierarchies of The Man.  We tend to forget those, but they took a lot of balls and being willing to step outside the accepted box and endure being dissed, shit on, excluded and otherwise castigated by the club, especially in the beginning.  But they came to be embodied by a large part of the mainstream and soon you just did not open your trap and object to it (the new way) and eventually, as with African-Americans now, you just were doing it and living it, no prob.

   So, in ’68, Kennedy’s brother Bobby ran for president also and we loved him, at least those of us who were paying attention to politics and believed the system could be rescued.  In fact, we couldn’t believe some of the things that came out of his mouth and he clearly was putting his political life on the line and didn’t care if a lot of people were offended by it.  He was like us!  You never heard a pol before or since talk like that.  We also loved Gene McCarthy, who was also running for president and a lot of kids cut their hair to look like they were normal, sane, middle-class kids who’d never done acid, but Bobby, like his brother, got shot in the head and Gene was beat out by the veep Hubert Humphrey who was a good man but had to stay loyal to LBJ about the war in order to get the nomination, so a lot of kids, instigated by long-hairs who were a combo of hippie and radical and were called Yippees, rioted in Chicago during the convention, helping to convince the middle-class, which came to be called the “silent majority,” that hippies and Democrats were behind the degeneration of society and the decline of “law and order,” as they called it, so that cost enough support that Democrats, whom everyone had pretty much believed in since the Republicans brought us the Crash of ’29 and the Depression, got edged out by Richard Nixon, who exploited the chaos as the candidate of law and order, with a secret peace plan, (not) but instead kept the war going, then faced impeachment for being the biggest criminal ever in the White House.  It was just one thing after the other, from JFK’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, first thing in office in 1961 to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

    But that was all politics, we soon decided, after the heartbreaks from the killings of MLK and RFK.  Bobby would have changed the world, but it didn’t matter.  It just showed you that you can’t look to one famous, important, powerful person to change the world for you.  And if there’s real hope, then there will be blood.  We already knew that from our acid trips.  What mattered was that you got it, you changed, you saw the universe as one, you saw sex, not at sexual fucking but as a manifestation of divine oneness that’s in all things and creatures, even in the stones and bugs and you knew YOU were changed forever and like they joked, you knew you were never coming back from your first trip.

  You could say “The Sixties” ran between the markers of JFK’s election to Nixon’s shamed and welcome resignation.  Those were 14 wrenching years of deconstruction of regular America (and by extension, the world, as far as it identified with America – free, strong, ingenious, industrious).  The years, for us young people, were years of crazy, good happiness and being able to live very cheaply, because The Man did all he could to make life more and more expensive, although that didn’t really kick into high gear until Reagan championed the Eighties, which were kind of a perverse opposite of the Sixties, much to the delight of The Man.

  As all this change went down (another blackism – “went down”), people may have thought they were in control of it, but no one was.  It was happening by itself.  That’s what made it so beautiful, exciting, interesting and crazy.  Nothing like this has ever happened.  It opened up the world for everyone.  It introduced global culture and made possible the consciousness that allowed things like the the personal computer and the internet – which were creations of the 60s mind and so validated it and completed what the Sixties were trying to do, which is that it blurred all the borders, made everyone interested in touching, talking to and making love with people of other cultures, like, hey, they are not “foreign,” ok?  Don’t say that word (as Ted Turner told his CNN news people in the Eighties)!


   You could say The Sixties started from the first Elvis song in 1954, and though the words were whining, romantic, hillbilly slop, it was the energy in his voice, the lurid grease in his hair and of course the grinding pelvis, all of which said I’ve come to fuck your daughters and there’s thousands more behind me. Clearly, he was from the dark lands of the Negro and they had gotten to him.  That savage Negro lust that whitey had feared for so long had now jumped to the white class and was thriving.

  Rock was not an idea.  It was personal.  We personally started to rock n’ roll!  We didn’t know how, but we picked it up from American Bandstand on TV and from each other and from our own genetic, tribal memory and soon were rocking (side-to-side) and rolling (on a vertical axis), then both at once, then it just kind of got a mind of its own and god knows what gyrations were coming next, but they looked a lot like what was outlawed (but you could find in the bad section of downtown Detroit) under the heading of strip tease.  And at the Music Box up north at Houghton Lake, Susie Creamcheese, in her white shorts that looked like she was poured into them was actually gyrating her most lovely ass back and forth, then round and round and the guys, who, more than anything, wanted to look “cool” (that word came in from Beat and jazz argot about this time) (and has endured as the Best Slang Word of All Time), would try not to look at her but they couldn’t stop.  It was just too beautiful and gave you such a hardon and the other girls hated her but soon had to copy and exceed her and soon they were all having sweat clearly apparent in the clothing covering their bosoms and the lovely crack of their butts and, folks, we could mark this as the official end of perhaps the most boring ten-year period in American history, from 1945 to 1955, notable for the amazingly un-democratic Communist-hunting (really it was liberal-hunting) excesses of Sen. Joe McCarthy, the emergence of the atomic Arms Race with the Soviet Union and the execution of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of selling nuke bomb secrets to the Russians and maybe one of them did.

   But even the Establishment was getting sick of it.  The boredom!  The conformity!  The whiteness.  Even jazz wasn’t respected or played much anymore.  The mainstream masculinity icon Paul Newman, who actually has always been a conscious guy, took a teensy step out of the box, starring in the movie of John O’Hara’s From the Terrace, 1960, where this highly successful establishment male, married to a spoiled, gorgeous society lady, getting all kinds of great Ivy League connections to the upper floors of success in every way, finds it strangely empty, even corrupt, enough that it gnaws at his soul and he begins to long for, what?  O’Hara wants you to answer that.  What is MISSING in the life of this man who has everything?  He longs for authenticity, for something real about life and has the balls to go for it, though it costs him everything.

   Well, like James Dean, he listened to his own confused heart and, while Dean couldn’t figure out a nice, tidy solution, Newman made it look easy.  You just go get the earthy, honest woman of integrity, who’s able to love and who speaks the simple truth and, of course, she’s clearly much better in bed than that society bitch.  In reality, Dean was the realistic one, acting out how hard it would be – and we all, men and women, would have to do that hard work ourselves, no quick fix.

   Dean so ironically burst on the scene about the same time as Elvis and also Jack Kerouac and his On the Road, a trippy, stream-of consciousness paean to Beatnik freedom, happiness, trusting your own heart and doing a few random recreational drugs.  Lost, beautiful, pained Dean was the first anti-hero -- in Rebel Without a Cause and he was clearly as conflicted as the rest of us Boomers, who would cause so much trouble and upheaval for The Man.  Dean kept sending this weirdly invisible but powerful and seductive sine wave at us that said he was tuning into his OWN inner voice, no matter how troubling and isolating it might prove in his life and you could tell he WAS NOT ACTING, it was the real him and even though he was not macho, decisive and in control, like Newman and Steve McQueen, HE GOT THE GIRL!  Which is, in Hollywood, the stamp of validity.

   These three guys – Elvis, Dean and Kerouac – delivered three big body blows to The Man, The System, the whole conformist shitaree that came to a peak with the Fifties -- and we can’t forget Marilyn Monroe, who was far more than a sexy, blonde bombshell with great boobs.  If Stalin and Chairman Mao wanted to plant four people in this Running Dog Capitalist culture with hopes of breaking its moral fiber and steering it away from its upright, uptight Christianity, materialistic obsessions and general lack of interesting sexuality, well, here ya go.

   And if you had the chance, would you throw everything away for Marilyn?  There’s no way you wouldn’t.  Just like Jack Kennedy, although we wouldn’t find out about it till well after he got blown away, he totally represented the American people at the highest levels, not only of government, but of fantasy and instinct and making dreams come true by actually doing all that.  With Marilyn.  And when we all found out, in the Seventies, while some guardians of morality, like Hugh Sidey of Time Magazine tut-tutted JFK’s bedroom corruption and dishonesty, most people let a smile steal across their faces and thought, omg, holy fuck, those two in bed doing it, now that guy had class, I mean, kind of like the real James Bond – danger, ecstasy, cool, letting yourself live the most major visions at the highest level and why not?

   And even when he got his brains blown out, which had to be the major bummer of the Sixties, you still had to, maybe just for a moment say y’know, why not go out that way at 46 with all the world in love with you, after saving the freakin human race during the Cuban Missile Crisis, moving through the world with such aplomb, the suavest bastard that ever lived, and just having balled Marilyn Monroe – rather then getting old, jowly and grey and fucking around at conferences and panels, being a university president and having to put up with a lot of angry hippies, although who knows, if he had lived, if there would even have been a Sixties because, I mean, that was a major ripoff, his killing and no one knows (but a lot of people think) he would have kept us out of Vietnam, (in fact, I once interviewed Arthur Schlesinger, major JFK advisor and biographer, and asked would he have gone into Nam and he said absolutely not) so those two major travesties – pointless war and pointless assassination – (which oh, so coincidentally both just happened to clearly serve the ends and needs of the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower, that quintessential, decent fifties man, warned us against as he left the White House in 1961) just really turned us the fuck off, kind of like a big, nasty divorce in the family, kind of like getting mugged by history on the first day as we strode out into adulthood.  It was like, ok, fine, this is the way these gin-guzzling, racist, portfolio-building, shitbrains adults run our world?  Then why should we be adults?  Adults is a danger zone, a not-good idea, a put-on, a bad fucking joke.  It clearly presaged us to trust our own wisdom and instincts and acid just strapped rockets on it. 

   As they got used to the new wiring in their heads, largely provided by LSD in the late Sixties, these innocent, young, white hippies soon turned their attention to the most powerful known force in the universe, the source of all life and pleasure...sex.  And what they found was that they (we) seemed -- oh, so nice to be in your 20s and think so! -- as though they had worked out all the problems of love and marriage!  Also money.  And found nothing but a garden of delights, possibly with wisdom thrown in on top of it.   ~







A New World - Boy Meets Girl                        1968

   The Sixties was personal and, as the feminists were soon to say, the personal has a way of quickly becoming political.  So it jumped track from racial relations and the peace movement and drug politics into love, dating, romance, sex, us!  You can’t get more personal than that.  I could not take my old Midwest gf into the Sixties with me, I would soon find out.  It was wrenching.  She was such a nice girl.  But.

   Here was the scene and how I would soon learn that all the rules had changed and we were on a totally new boardgame.  I was new in the big city life of Portland, Oregon, which seemed like a bunch of small towns crammed together, innocent, not hip, kind of boring.  It was full of waterfront warehouses, antique shops, poor neighborhoods, black people (not many, but the only ones in the state), hippies, museums, fountains, big parks with views of the mystical Cascades, a few bums and used book stores.  I was just a year out of college in the Midwest and this was heady, naughty, dark and a bit thrilling.  And it was 1968.  A lot was happening. 

   Like the topless dancer with an absolutely lovely body right in front of me.

   I waited till she stepped off the stage for her break and just walked up to her, complimented her on her dancing and asked if she’d like to have a drink or something after work. 

   “I’m John, by the way. I’m a journalist.”  I felt I had to establish I was pretty much a normal guy and not a psycho, although there were hardly any psychos in those days.  I also felt there could be no reason in her mind why I might want to spend time with her other than that I saw her as a pretty gorgeous and sexual being who had aroused me.  Oh well.

   “Well, hi,” she said. “I’m Lila.  I guess that would be ok.  How ‘bout at the bar here?  I get off at 11.”  I watched her dance for another hour and a half, sipped his beer and admired her perfect, tall body.  She was blonde.  Her breasts were perfect.  Her nipples were lovely and pink.  It seemed a miracle to me.  Here was this gorgeous, naked young woman up there parading it all, when at the beginning of the Sixties, this was all the stuff of vice squads, burlesque, bad part of town, jail time, heroin.  To me, it seemed a good thing, a step forward in the evolution of society.  It brought out a higher part in me.  I wasn’t sitting here lusting.  I really wanted to talk to her.  She looked over once or twice and made eye contact.  I smiled in a friendly way.  I thought there was a slight, turned down smile in return.  She liked me, trusted me.  I could see that already. 

   When we talked, I found a, well, just a gal, a regular girl like you’d find anywhere.  I’d hoped she’d be a little more naughty and savvy and sinful, that she would teach me all sorts of things about sex only naughty girls knew and would help make me a little more naughty.  I saw myself as too white, suburban and middle-class and it served as some kind of Gardol shield (that was something from a fifties toothpaste ad) that kept me from the real depths of experience and wisdom I knew lay all around me.  She was -- like almost all the women I would love or get close to -- from a working-class family and hadn’t gone to college.  She was just average-looking, her eyes and mouth were kind of hard and sad.  Only later, when I got into psychology would I learn the marks of child sex abuse.

   It was hot and getting close to midnight.  The beer tasted flat a long time ago.  I asked if she’d like to drive around, maybe go look at the city lights from the park above downtown.  I told her I had a convertible, a Pontiac, and we could put the top down.  This was before you heard much about serial killers and had all those endless cable shows about psychos who preyed on women.  And it was the Sixties.  You could read people by their vibes and you went with that.  She said yes.

   This was good. We rolled through the moist night air up through the canyon.  Her long blonde hair waved in the wind and we exchanged smiles.  I liked her.  We drove out into the vast park, stopping by the low stone wall where you could see everything -- the city, the whole Willamette Valley, the Columbia rolling off to the sea. It seemed a happy chance I got work here our of college.  Lila stood looking out over it.  It occurred to me that maybe she’d never done this with a guy – just go somewhere and stand and look at the beauty of things.  I congratulated myself for not being a lustful beast.  I stood a little behind her, pointing out where I worked and the hotel where I was staying.  It was a relief, actually, that she wasn’t too pretty.  Or rich or educated or itching to get married or anything.  She was just this gal, Lila. 

   I, of course, asked her how she felt about dancing naked in front of total strangers. I was a writer, even if it was only journalism, and I was a bit of a philosopher, a seeker.  I had to know about these things.  She said it was just work.  She had to make a living and she knew how to dance and had a good bod. 

   “Well, pretty good. Not perfect or anything,” she said.

   “It’s good,” I said. We laughed.

   Was she saving for anything, like a house or college?  No.  She had grown up in the region and was happy to be out on her own and able to make her expenses.  I didn’t have the sense at 25 to ask about her childhood and parents.  From behind, I put my hands on her shoulders.  There was that slipping of the weight to one leg, the change in breathing.  It thrilled me.  I hadn’t known that many women.  I was pleased with myself that I could notice these things and that I wanted to learn about her and wasn’t just there to get in her pants.  I could sense she knew it too. 

   When I touched her, God, it changed everything, just like that.  She turned around and there was a little smile on her lips.  She didn’t wait for me to do it; she just stood up on her toes and put her mouth on mine, a quick kiss, then looked at me.  I didn’t smile.  It was all kind of serious to me.  And, though I wasn’t aware of it, I was operating on what I’d learned being raised with Newman and McQueen movies: love, kissing, sex, women – this was all some pretty serious shit.  You held your manhood like some strong, brave thing that withstood the battering of – what? – life? The onslaughts of chance? the rough, steely, bad crap of other men?  Whatever it was.  You just did it.  And women admired that manhood thing. 

   Poor me.  Here I was standing in Paradise with a young, sort of beautiful priestess of the dance and she had just kissed me.  I was only beginning to suspect the manhood script was a load of bullshit.  The antiwar thing was fueling that and, really, it probably was the first time in history that millions of men – and women – were getting to say that and be heard.  It was new information in human history and it went along with the sexual liberation and the drugs, which were fun, sensual drugs, not like whisky and heroin and all the drugs of the past that had hurt people and made them mean and had screwed up society.  I had smoked a little pot since coming to the West Coast a year ago, but nothing more.  It scared me, but yet, drew me on.

   I looked at Lila.  She took my hand.  I studied her face.  A look of doubt shadowed her eyes.  She knew she wasn’t pretty.  I saw it happening in her.  I put my hand under her chin and felt the soft skin there, then moved my face close to hers and let us kiss each other at the same moment.  I knew I wouldn’t love her. I knew she knew.  But I wanted to be with her. I liked kissing her.  And she was a Topless Dancer (!)  I was being run by that cue, as I would put it later, during his years as a counselor.  I sort of knew it, but my quest for honesty and truth didn’t extend that far.  When it came to gaining experience, that came first.

   “I’m getting a little cold,” she said.  “Wanna see my place?  It’s just an apartment in the old part of town.  Not far.  We’ll have tea or something.”  The ‘something’ was a little bag of pot and she held it out to me.  I barely knew how to roll a joint, but I did it passably and then we sat there on her couch in that still new, chancey and edgey other space of that drug.  I took to it like a spaniel to water.  We spoke and each word and idea and sound seemed ineffably new and lovely and wise.  I would listen to her words and they had a different, female shape as they came out of her mouth.  I could fairly see the layers of tones, timbres and inflections. The first time she laughed, it seemed like the first time I’d ever actually seen someone laugh.  I moved closer to her and let my hands move up her arms, feeling the skin.  She wore a sleeveless linen top, kind of low in front. 

   “God, you know, Lila, this may sound a little freaky, but…” I was looking down at her lap and trying to couch is words in sensible language.

   “I don’t think so,” she slapped her thigh and went into helpless laughter.  She was inferring that nothing in my thoughts or words could be crazy, so please go ahead and I will still…still…love you.  There it was.  Maybe it was the Sixties, but it was only a step to that with this woman, with so many people you might bump into, but they had to be in that place, that space, that – what? – that freaky place that was so freakin’ amazing and cool.  I loved that word freak.  Just a few years ago it meant a sickening, repulsive person, beneath contempt.  Now, the word meant the opposite -- people who could step over that line into a universe of unfolding understanding and delight…

   “That’s all right.”  She patted my leg and let out a lungful of smoke.  “Don’t worry.  I won’t ever love you either.”

   I couldn’t believe my ears.  Here was some truth.  I’d never heard anyone just speak up with truth like this.  It was so brave, so conscious.  Lila howled with laughter.  She’d obviously read my mind.  She was seeing the whole fabulous, fraudulent form around what happens between two young, available, horny people.  And pot, God, it must be some kind of oracular potion, to be able to give this gift of sight to Lila.  I was stunned.  I’d been out-truthed.  I looked on Lila as some kind of amazing archetypal sylph, although I didn’t know the meaning of either of those words at the time.  I closed the distance between us in one move and took her shoulders in my hands and kissed her.  I did it without his usual reservation, distance, conditionality.  She kissed me back for a moment, but burst right out laughing again.  I was offended, in spite of myself.  I looked at her like a spectacle.  She couldn’t stop laughing, but out of seeming pity, she stroked my hair.

   “God, I, you are so goddam cute.  I mean, you look like – and I’m saying this lovingly, ok? – you look like a little boy and someone just stole his yoyo or something!!” She was screaming out the last part with howling laughter but suddenly stopped and put her arms around me.

   “I, I – ok, I don’t mean this in the man-woman way, like y’know, we’re ‘going together’ or any of that shit?”

   “I love you, too,” I said, “and I mean it the same way, ok?”

   “God, you are so goddam beautiful, man.”  She touched my face.  I was over my snit, the caving in of his Paul Newman thing.  I smiled.  It was a real smile.

   “Ok, I just want to say it,” she said. She was still laughing a little, but then she stopped.  I waited.

   “I love you.  And my love for you,” she described it with her hands ascending into the air, “is as a spirit who is free to love you as a spirit.”

   I nodded.  It was like a dream.  It was just like I’d always wanted to hear it from a woman.  And yet this was a woman with whom I’d already decided I could never be in love.  But then, I’d never been in love, not really.  I saw these ideas going through my head, like things marching.  Lila swept them away with her hands.  She could see them!

   “Come.  We’re going to my bed.”  She let the plain desire show in her eyes.  I had never seen anything like this. 

   She took my hand and we went into her room.   ~










First Glimmers in the Fifties                        1954-59

   The signs of things to come, they were there in the fifties but no one could see them because, well, no one could imagine what was coming -- and no one really knew how repressive and stupid it all was.  Not until that crazy, liberating cocktail of unjust war, sexual freedom from The Pill, radicalizing rock n roll and, above all, weed and acid. Oh, and let’s throw in the obvioius lessons of “how to rebel” from four Long Hot Summers.

   It was like the killing of JFK, 1963, just quietly removed the lid off everything, like, hey, if you can do that, then fine, we can do whatever we want, too.  So much for toeing the line, going along to get along, keeping your nose clean and deferring gratification. We want it now.

   The fifties in America weren’t fun.  Bullying in schools was de rigeur, for instance.  It was how you became a man and how we socially sorted out the geeks and wussies, so they didn’t pollute the gene pool of our hot chicks, who belonged to strong (and cruel) white guys.

   The fifites, with their lurid, bizarre tail fins, Technicolor, jutting breasts and hoop skirts, were a suffocating time. You can almost feel them “trying,” pushing their way out of the black-and-white dreariness and melodrama of labor union lockouts and strikes, sordid torch songs like Cry Me a River, ugly cars and a ghastly Depression sandwiched between two ghastly mass slaughter sessions, called the World Wars.  And we were taking it all so seriously, or I should say, my parents generation were taking it all with such a straight face, chain smoking and drinking a lot of whisky and gin and their sex must have been absolutely rotten.  Or maybe not.  Who knows what they were doing in bed.

   And the humor.  There wasn’t any.  They thought Red Skelton was funny.  And Jack Benny and Gracie Allen.  Well, that was as funny as you could get with clean jokes – and not mentioning all of life’s neuroses, addictions and general unfairness.  My parents never laughed. Except when they got together with their gang and got drunk and filled the  house with cigarette smoke.  They were pretty hip for their time and place, Lansing, Michigan, but I didn’t get any sense they were having a good time or had anything I wanted.  I just wanted out.

  A lot of people in the fifties knew something was missing but each person thought he/she was the only one feeling it and was wrong to feel it, was a misfit, a troublemaker, an oddball – and it was important to fit in and like the system and be or at least appear to be happy and on top of it, but as it turned out, a huge number of us were different, and later, in the Sixties, realized how much we had in common, in our feelings that we not only didn’t conform, but didn’t want to!  We were all different.  From each other.  Which was fine.  It was beautiful and in the Sixties there came to be this poster, a quote from rebel-psychologist Fritz Perls, summing up this ambiguity: “You do your thing and I do my thing and if we find each other, it’s beautiful and if not, it can’t be helped.”

  That aphorism, which must sound strange to the young, post-Reagan kids of today, was eerie to us, yet when you read it a second and third time, it assumed a perfect coldness, like Brancusi’s Bird in Flight.  It was essence, the essential core of a piece of important knowledge and we knew it.  It meant we no longer had to like or please or conform to each other or win each other’s love to be happy, because you did not get happiness from others.  It just was in the Universe and it was there for you to tune into and turn onto and live by.  It was between you and the Universe -- and the Universe, by definition, was “everything,” so it was between you and everything and everyone and – the important part re your fellow humans – you were absolutely free to love and be loved by anyone you wanted.  And you did not have to think about those you were not loving or loved by.  They are doing their thing.

   Of the many things missing from the fifties and late forties, that was the big one.  We didn’t know it, couldn’t know it.  The culture and our parents just handed us the program and that was it.  Take it, don’t leave it.  There was no “leave it.”  There was no alternate universe or alternate lifestyle. 

   Take the word “lifestyle.”  I love to notice the first time a word or phrase comes into the culture and it was so cool that one day about 1968 when the very straight newspaper in Oregon renamed its Society section the Lifestyle section and wrote a little blurb explaining that, ok, it’s not about “society,” as that infers a small class of important people, but it was about everyone because everyone, while they may not belong to high society, did have a lifestyle, which they chose and created themselves and were very free to do so and it was just as valid as anyone in “society” living the style of society, which reeked of conformity, specialness and exclusion, although they didn’t say that last part. 

   People were just starting to wake up in the fifties, not a lot of people and it didn’t make a big splash and if something really caught on, well, the overarching society would find a way to take it in, tone it down and mainstream it, much as they had accommodated to Negroes and their jazz music, which just wouldn’t go away, so they had Ella Fitzgerald (nice Irish name) and Louis Armstrong (nice English name) deliver it to us and never mind that Satchmo was a major pothead and Ella sounded exactly like the nicest white girl you’d ever want to meet, but you could tell the white girl knew all about sex and loved it, which no singing actual white girl of the time had put out there. 

   Except Marilyn Monroe, not a great singer, but she represented a milestone, a huge, big door thrown open to let light in on dreadful serious Joe McCarthy America with her amazing big boobs and that smile and look in her eyes, I mean, hey, whatever she was coming forward with and pushing in your face, it was decidedly something miles beyond delicious and something Doris Day and Betty Hutton were never going to give you.  It was cheesy, a cartoon of womanhood, a candy-coated assault on your male dignity and strength and all the years you spent being a good boy and working hard and raising Junior and Babs and here she was, if you let her, and you had to let her, ready to just fuck you half to death. 

   I look back on the 1940s and 50s and it seems absolutely bizarre, like a sleepwalk, how no one was having sex or at least not us teens.  You never even heard of anyone getting laid.  Maybe once in a long while, with someone who you just knew was a slut.  There was this one chick in about 10th grade and she was doing it, so everyone said and she had that slatternly look in her eye, like poor kids had – hard times, drunken, abusive dad, beat up mom, though of course we didn’t know about such things then.  People didn’t talk about them.  I think it was because it was just part of life, not because people were ashamed of it.  But anyway, she sat in front of us in an assembly and was leaning forward in her seat talking to someone ahead of her and you know how that stretches a blouse and skirt and makes the ass so pronounced and that’s what it did and we all three guys could not take our eyes off her ass.  It was just perfect.  She was not a popular babe, so you couldn’t come out and say you wanted her, but we did.  We were just shaking our heads in amazement at our desire.  We’d never been that close to it.  We were all virgins, of course.  Boys were virgins back then.  But she was a woman.  She was our age and she was a woman and you just knew she could fuck you all night and have babies, but we could scarce think that far ahead.  But the message is that no matter how repressed and lame the fifties were, sex would not lie down and die.  But they wanted it to, the old preachers and Congressmen and generals and principals and they almost succeeded.  I remember actually thinking that females actually did not like males.  They certainly acted that way.  They couldn’t betray any shred of interest or desire, without losing face and appearing sluttish.

   Feeling unwanted by girls, I didn’t ask them out, period.  I was 18 before I took Susie on a few dates, out to the Starlite drive-in theater, called the “passion pit.”  It wasn’t that for me.  I would put my arm around her shoulder (front seats were one continuous seat back then, not bucket seats) and would clumsily and briefly kiss, feeling her bosoms sorta pushing again me and my hands would trail off the the side of her boobs, just the beginning and, with her arm, she would push my hand away.  Oh, the shame!  How dare I try that, me, a filthy-minded boy, who needed to be reminded of his place!  That was the fifties mindset - and all she had to do to change my world was be the exception and say, sure, John, go ahead, undo my bra and have the experience of your life!  Me, who’d never felt a breast!  And would have dug ditches for a month just to feel them for one minute!  It was crazy, cruel, stupid and crazymaking.  It was still the Dark Ages!  And as for conversation, we had no idea what to say.  It was a blank.

   But things were changing, very slowly.  It was like you were anesthetized in the operating room and couldn’t feel life coming back yet.  It showed up in movies, sometimes. In East of Eden, you saw the incongruous spectable of a delicious James Dean clearly painted as the hero when his righteous, overachieving brother, the Cain figure, fit the masculine vibe and dutifully marched off to World War I.  Now we were getting a fix on it.  The old-archetype hero is the one who doesn’t question, doesn’t listen, doesn’t feel, doesn’t get it.  The one in pain is the real man.  He’s taking it all in.  He’s in reality.  This is 1955, a dozen years before psychedelia.  A year later, you had Elvis charting #1.

   While most people can ignore the movies and books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, no one could ignore these first rock hits, I mean, omg, it was pathetic, Your Hit Parade trying to put on the songs of Elvis and sing them cheerily along with crap like Come Down From Your Ivory Tower.  They soon gave up and went off TV.

   But Elvis, god, playing through the starry night skies as we skate around the city ice rink – “You know I can be found, sitting home all alone…”  This was not our parents’ music, like that Hit Parade crap.  This was passion.  This was a 20-year old crazy guy, just like me or my pals, a guy who wanted to party and get laid and scream out his guts and you realize he got it all from the blues singers in the South and if we hadn’t had slavery back then and racism now, we wouldn’t have that beat and passion to draw from and we’d still be singing Yankee Doodle Dandy.

   Elvis said music wasn’t about listening to treacly crooning - and dancing cheek-to-cheek, letting your boner press into her tummy, if you knew her well enough -- all this so you could find a good wife/husband to raise your kids with.  It was about the other thing: sex, finding your lover, the one you could fuck silly right now and to hell with marriage and postponing intimacy.  For the uninformed, you were actually expected in the fifties to be a virgin at marriage - I mean the girls.  The boys could fuck around and ‘sow their wild oats’ as it was called.  Don’t know who they were doing it with.  Ho’s, I guess.  The girls in Japan, when we went to our military bases there. 

   Looking back on the fifties, you can see they seriously and casually expected us -- as with the Korean War, 1950, to slavishly continue this chain of World War I, then the Great Depression – I mean, the names they give these things, not just depression but great – and then World War II, I mean the whole world has to be in this war thing?  How could the whole world be mad at the whole world?  But there it was, twice in the lifetimes of our parents and let’s not even think about the Indian wars and slavery, I mean owning other people?  And we, the inventors of democracy and “all men are created equal?”  And then, one of our enemies, a civilized, white, industrialized nation, shoveling 6 million people into the ovens because they’re of a different religion – bad Germans – but these bad people were Northern European Christians just like us, so what made them so different and how could this shit be happening?  And while that’s “bad,” we nuke another nation and they’re supposed to be bad but we’re not bad. 

   So there was just a little hypocrisy and dishonesty to be dealt with here and, surprise, we barely saw it in the fifties.  But the cracks were starting to appear in the dike.  It was about ten years after the Greatest War, which was won by the Greatest Generation, as they came to be called after the Sixties, this to make sure we hippies understood we weren’t that. 

   The Russians got the Bomb in ’49 and, with the Cold War, we settled into a state of perpetual dread around the fact that this was World War III and would never end – or it might end with the end of the world.  We’d just won WWII with personal blood and guts and American ingenuity and sacrifice, but that was gone now.  This – scads of nukes that could be dropped anywhere at any time on anyone?  This changed all the rules.  The age of the macho male hero was over, since millions of such men, including the most cowardly or heroic, could be equally incinerated in a flash, not to mention gorgeous women and innocent children. And here we were again, after a mere five-year break, at war on some faraway mudhill in Korea, fighting for what?  We were fighting a client state of China and that war could never be won. 

   But we didn’t reason all this out.  Not yet.  It just started seeping in and, on the new, crude, black-and-white television set with one channel, we would see Doug Edwards bringing us the evening news about military skirmishes with China and school integration in the South -- and it looked really stupid and mean and not a good way to live and soon we would be adults and reject it.

   The movies would bring us these strong, taciturn men heroes like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, who were always smoking and being given shit by The Man or from some overwhelming force arrayed against them – often with Nazis or Orientals or mean capitalists as the bad guys.  And these men could hold their sand.  They knew they were in a losing fight, but they could walk away with their honor.  Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, 1952, throwing his sheriff’s badge in the dirt and saying, hey, if you’re not with me against these forces of badness, then to hell with it.  I’ve got myself.  I’ve got my woman to see and understand me – and to get love from.  I’ve got to make my own choices.  And anyway, I don’t understand this world.  I’m not going down with flag waving for you greedy, chickenshit, shop-owning bastards.  That world is gone.

   So in the end, he does take out the bad guys, but he doesn’t do it for society.  He does it as part of the warrior’s code.  If he dies, it’s going to be because he’s a warrior and he’s engaging and playing with those elemental forces and questions: what makes a man a man?  Himself.  It’s not teamwork and raising the flag on Iwo Jima with your battle-tested buddies.  In the end, he doesn’t really care if he gets the girl.  She’s running away, too.  In the end, he gets the real prize.  He finds his power, which is his own inner voice.  He did what he wanted.

   Did anyone get it, the movie?  Nah.  It was a good Western, a bit strange. In the hit song that went with it, Will Kane is yowling for his bride to not “forsake” him and he’s coming to grips with the fact that if he doesn’t listen to his true heart, he will lie a craven coward, (the worst kind) in his grave. 

   And that’s what Rosa Parks did, too.  She held to her seat on the bus, 1955, knowing that at any time a gang of angry white men could come for her with a rope and no one would stop them.  She didn’t get with her support group first.  She didn’t get an NAACP lawyer on the case first.  She didn’t organize the bus boycott beforehand.  She just did it. 

   What you have to realize and what no one did realize at the time was that it takes a lot of courage to do these things that are very unpopular.  To do them, you have to get to the place where you give up.  You don’t think anyone’s with you – and they’re not.  You realize you could and probably will die.  You accept that.  You don’t sit there and say, wow, it’s wonderful to have values and visions and know I’ll be famous.  You accept your death.   ~








Rock n Roll, The Pill and the Dawn of Free Love                1960-64

It had just turned the new year, the first moment of the Sixties and I felt something.  This was going to be different, this decade with the futuristic-sounding name of the Sixties.  This was the decade when all those visions on the cover of Popular Mechanics took place – the flying cars and tall, glass domes and rocket ships that anyone could ride anywhere.  And I was 16.  It was going to happen to me, and soon.  I would be an adult and free in just a year and a half.  I decided I would stay up all night, in fact, all 24 hours of 1-1-60.  And I did.

   My pal Steve was up for it.  I said let’s wallpaper the kitchen, so we can make ourselves stay up!  It will surprise my mom!  She will be elated, I thought, to see the brick-patterned contact paper on her walls.  It was the first of many surprises for her through the Sixties and, while she was gracious and pretended I was creative, innovative and daring, she didn’t like this innovation any more than the others that she would see from her strange son through the Sixties.

   But I could feel it.  Something was happening.  It was only a tingle, but the fifties were gone and Ike and Mamie would soon be done and gone, too, though I didn’t think much about the tiring, conformist oppression of Ike and Mamie and surburbia and white folks and their barbeques yet.  Few people were aware how tiring and white and rigid it all was.  That awareness wouldn’t come till the Sixties really started happening and you could look back.

   But the Sixties, as they grew, were like a tingle in your heart, in your pants, in your mouth, like chocolate in your brain, a thing that lured you on and whispered that life didn’t have to be like the awful stuff of our parents’ generation.

   I didn’t know what I wanted.  Maybe to escape.  That was a common thread in the Boomer generation in the fifties, on into the early Sixties, so naturally Route 66 was a hit on TV, starting in 1960.   It wasn’t their adventures or plots that got you.  It was that car and the open road and the idea that these clean-cut white boys had no jobs and could do whatever they wanted.  All they had to do was drive that road for half an hour, never mind the plot.


   JFK came to town in the fall of 1960, running for president and I biked down to see him -- didn’t understand a word of what he said, of course, but, with his bad back, he needed a hand getting off the stage in front of the state capitol.  He asked to lean on my shoulder and I obliged, quickly shaking his hand (the hand that would slide inside Marilyn Monroe’s panties!), looking for something for him to autograph.  All I had in my wallet was a playing card of a busty lady removing her bra as she lost at strip poker.  Kennedy signed it and flipped it over, laughing and cracking a joke about how he didn’t often get asked to sign pinups.  I made JFK laugh!  And off he rode into history, to save the world and get his brains blown out for it, quite literally.


   Movies are America’s oracle -- and in the first year of the Sixties, at 16, I’m watching Paul Newman in From the Terrace, stand up to these preppie capitalist old-money buggers in New England.  He’s gorgeous, smart and strong and he’d won the girl and success and the money and standing, but he was miserable.  I hunkered down in my seat.  Really, now, why is he in such pain and dragging so deep on those cigarettes and struggling with those inner demons?  This was good.  Though he had everything, John O’Hara was saying, he had bigtime soul loss and it mattered.  A lot.  Hollywood gives him the usual quick fix, falling in love -- but it’s with a gorgeous, grounded authentic woman of no social standing, but with whom he can really talk and BE HIMSELF, such a radical concept, giving up all that money, power and social standing for…for being able to, dare we say it, to do your thing!  That is his thing – to be an authentic man in a world of phony, white, power-tripping bullshit and to “drop out,” which is what this mature, sane, handsome, capable man did – and even as an mid-teen, I knew something was happening here, but I didn’t know what it was.  I knew it enough to see it a second time, alone, mind you, and sit there and say to myself, why do I love this man?  Why is he a role model to me?  Why do I want to be like him and live a life as he has done?  What has he done?

   This is 1960.  I would walk the long streets in the rain and crusty, ice-covered sidewalks at night, dragging on my Pall Malls, no filter, mind you, pondering these same big issues.  How in the fuck can you be a man in all this compromising bullshit?  One thing for sure, you have to listen to your heart.  But we didn’t call it that.  We didn’t know heart from handsaw.  Newman blew off his rich, sophisticated, blonde wife and began seeing this fulsome, black-haired woman, whose level gaze at her man told you everything.  There were no words in the movie to tell you what this woman had.  But she had it.  She stood erect, her shoulders square, her breasts pushing out with all the fierce, true, womanly reality that you never saw in Vogue Mag.  What did she offer Paul Newman?  Love, the real thing, reality, truth – and the passion that could live in that world.  He turned his back on the money and position and all the madness.  This was 1960, man. 

   That was all nice.  You smoked your ciggies and were your own man, knowing no one could see it or understand it but you.  But these guys, Cooper, Newman and McQueen were half a generation ahead of us.  They were people our fathers could relate to as men – and that our mothers could want as lovers.  But then came James Dean.  Our mothers didn’t or shouldn’t want him in the sack, not with that sexual ambiguity and unfathomable angst.  But we got him, completely.  He wouldn’t stand up and kick anyone’s ass.  He didn’t want any of the hot babes.  He made them want him, or no deal.  You saw it in Rebel, how he refused to stand up to those hot rod bully boys and just sank down in and surrendered to his confusion, his comprehension that there were no rules, no way to be a man and you said, ya, that’s it, that’s how I feel.  He got Natalie Wood, not because he wanted her or she was a busty babe he could strut around with on his arm, but because, she was as fucked up and lost as he was and they could start on a foundation of friendship and alienation.  Her father slapped her for wanting his love.  That said it all.  Would the fathers of Newman’s babes slap them around?  No.  But the pain, you could see it written all over Natalie Wood – and one day, decades later, in real life, she would literally drown in it.  Sal Mineo, the over-psychoanalyzed sidekick, he too, would die violently, helplessly, in real life. And so would Dean.  Bang.  These are sacrifices.  This is ritual. 


   The explosion of rock n roll with Elvis in 1956 put a lot of lovely butts in motion but didn’t do much to change the basic fact that good girls waited for the right man for marriage and nothing came before that.  I stared with complete and worshipful awe -- and a deep inadequacy -- at the girls beginning to rock out in my 8th grade Friday night Fun Fests at the Y.  I waited for the slow dances.  The sex life of me and my friends was nada.  It consisted of carrying around a huge, hard, unfulfillable longing with the understanding that we could break into the treasure chest of unimaginable delight if we found and married our dream gal, then worked our asses off for decades to pay for her and the kids.  Both of these experiences were compelling, but in completely opposite ways.

   I remember a cute joke from middle school. What did the butcher do when his shop caught fire?  He grabbed his meat and beat it.  Haha.  It was hilarious, the picture it tossed up in your mind.  We were the butchers and the shop was on fire every day. 

   Finally, it was hos who relieved us of the burden of our tortured cherries, but being a sensitive lad, I clearly realized, hey, wait a minute, I not only don’t love this person - I don’t even know her and I can’t wait to get off her and dash outta here, even with the job incomplete.  Not a good intro to a world I would (much) later know as the Sacred Feminine.  The lovely young lady in Tijuana, 1962, (she cost me $7) was not flattered by my performance, tut-tutted me with the words, “mucho frio.”  Very cold.  She was right. 

   I was 21 before I did it with someone whose name I knew, carpooling to night college with Angie, a married woman, 1964, out in the orchard lands of Southern California, but still, hey, you are smart and beautiful and I like you but...I don’t...we did it three or four times and I’m telling her I don’t want to do this anymore, though she’s pretty, funny and I like her.  Gee...what’s missing?  Is it this thing called love?  I guess it is natural and essential to sex!  What a discovery!  This morality, which the church and state had put so much energy into enforcing, is natural law and instinct, if you let it!  How could you do such an intimate thing with a fellow human and not be close to her and know her and care about her and laugh with her and want to hang and talk for hours, years?  We guys might look like we only wanted one thing -- and, oddly, we did only want one thing and it was lovesex or sexlove or likeadoremakelove.  It was slowly dawning on me that you couldn’t parse them apart.  They were one thing.

   And I didn’t know how to find it or what to do with it or see it or know it.  Not only did no one ever talk about how make love, they never talked about love itself and how to do it, find it, recognize it.  That was because hardly anyone knew how.  Whatever was out there, it was not love, so My Generation decided, after looking at our parents’ strange, sordid and clearly unhappy marriages.  Somewhere in the late Sixties, we got the idea that we could solve that problem, once and for all, and bring love into the world, real love.

   Well, when the first of My Generation became 18 and The Pill was on the market, that was job one, tearing down the Medieval moats and walls around sex.  We all did our part, mid-60s, getting docs to write prescriptions for our girlfriends and, omg, those first glorious days of sliding those silky pants down and knowing that the one huge barricade to “free love,” as it came to be called, was gone -- and we were free, the first people in all history, to enjoy the one great enjoyment of life, with or without love and marriage.  And without fear.  And, contrary to myth, we still respected Suzie after she let us into the treasure chest of our dreams!

   The church, especially the Catholic church, with legislators on their leashes, did all it could to shame such fucking and pronounce that certainly Jesus would never boink a woman just for his own selfish pleasure and absolutely would not do it with freedom from fear and responsiblity for parenting.  He and God didn’t have girlfriends or wives -- just not spritual, y’know.  Despite the “sexual revolution,” as it was later called, it didn’t become legal in all states for married people to buy contraception until 1966 and single people (who are an inferior class to married folks), until 1972.  And, excuse me, the Catholic hierarchy still doesn’t allow contraception but is nearly broke from lawsuits after schtupping all those choir boys for centuries.

   The first four years of the Sixties could easily pass as being an extension of the fifties, except for the presence of John F. Kennedy and his people -- and his visions, such as the Peace Corps, Test Ban Treaty and the quarantining of Cuba (armed with Soviet missiles) instead of an invasion, which the generals demanded and which would have triggered a nuclear exchange and the end of the world as we knew it.  You almost had to wonder if it were divine intervention, because almost any other president would have invaded.  Nixon, who came within a hair of the White House in 1960, certainly would have.

   But the rigid sexual mores persisted in this time, as did the bad rock music, short hair, conformity, domination by the church, lack of interesting books or ideas of any sort.


   Like so many well-meaning lads of 18, I got inspired with the cameraderie of the military, the adventure and travel, the sense of mission and purpose and service to democracy and went in the Marines with my best friend from high school, Bruce.  They said we would do good in boot camp, as we were tall, thin and strong - and we did.  We took our oath and flew through the night on a Super Constellation, landing in Bakersfield, where I saw the sun come up behind the black mountains, the first mountains I’d seen in my life.  I was amazed.  Within hours, I was bald, in uniform and scrubbing shitters with a toothbrush, deeply wondering why I’d done this. 

   The drill instructors -- the feared DI’s -- were demanding, just like in the movies and called us “lower than whale shit” and referred to us routinely as “dummy,” but were more like high school football coaches and clearly loved us as they guided us in the fineries of drill, pushups, smoking in formation, when the “smoking lamp” was lit for one cigarette and one cigarette only, to our eternal delight.  They taught us how you could insert “fucking” between any two words, suach as “Jesus fucking Christ” or “I don’t fucking know.”  This became a standard of hippie lingo later in the Sixties.  The DI’s taught us to strip an M-1 rifle in a very small number of seconds and reassemble same, blindfolded.  They schooled us in disembowling our enemy with a bayonet, climbing ropes, making the perfect “rack,” which was a bed -- with 10 inches of the lower sheet showing and if we failed, they would shout “my cock is 10 inches and that’s smaller than my cock!”  They taught us how to serve chow to our fellow Marines, including the rock star Everly Brothers, who happened to come through boot camp when we did.  It was crazy and scary and I even wet my bed once but they scared us only a little bit beyond our ability to cope.  I’d never touched a rifle before, but scored best in the platoon at Camp Mathews, now La Jolla, where our PMI, prelimiary marksmanship instructor one night informed us that, while some of us thought hunting deer was fun sport, there was nothing like hunting a man.  Oh, like wow, is that supposed to excite me?  It did not excite me.  I slowly began to realize I could probably never do that and felt a growing alienation -- and increasing sense of selfhood, NOT an increasing sense of teamwork -- but told myself I would get through this. We learned to do close order drill; I have no idea why this is so imporant, the learning to march in unison, but I supposed it had something to do with submerging the individual will and ego in the common team mission, something that never did have much meaning for me. 

   At the end of boot camp, they announced our MOS, military occupational specialty and most of the guys got 0300, which meant infantry grunt -- waking up every day and going on “field problems,” where you learn different ways to do what Marines do best, which is to kill and avoid being killed.  They announced my name and MOS and it was 4312.  I went up to our amazingly handsome and manly African DI, Gunnery Sgt Long and asked wtf was 4312?  He looked through some booklet and said “journalism,” adding that I was going to El Toro Air Station, which was by Laguna Beach.  I could have kissed him.

   The train took me up the coast to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, dropped me off -- and they decided to put me in photography and darkroom work for six months, with the old Speed Graphic camera you see in 30s movies and all the cool chemicals and enlarger, such fun, with journalism soon to follw.  At the first weekend, I said what do I do for 2.5 free days?  They said do whatever the fuck you want, just stay within an x-hundred mile radius and be back here at 0800 Monday.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was FREE and in Southern California, only 10 miles from Laguna Beach? 

   Grabbing some barracks buddies, we hitchhiked down to the coast and lay on blankets, smoking cigarettes and taking pictures of ourselves -- and there I am reading Jung’s The Undiscovered Self.  Clearly off and running into the alternate and bohemian world.  I don’t think I finished it back then, in 1962.  Hah!  I just ordered it on abe.com, so I can finish it, half a century later, and the cover blurb says, “A brilliant and searching inquiry into the dilemma of the individual in today's society.”  At 18, I knew there was a dilemma!  But what was it?  Soon, a few free-thinking Marines in my barracks cubicle turned me onto Philip Wylie and his Generation of Vipers, which was written in 1942 -- and stood up and pointed to all the hypocrisy and dysfunction in American society, starting with “momism,” -- the strange adulation we have for our mothers.  Throw in Herman Hesse, who started publishing in 1899, Aldous Huxley, 1916, Alan Watts, 1936 and Colin Wilson, 1956 and that was about it for books in print that challenged our culture or the American Way.  These authors were mostly obscure and you had to hunt for them.  And none of these brilliant lights were American.  The most lauded books in our country seemed to be about “guy games,” -- the wars and macho trips of Hemingway and Norman Mailer, aviation, ships, mountain climbing, racing, boxing, drinking, cops, courtrooms, whores, Wall Street.  This was the real stuff of life?  But self-doubt and questioning the dubious values of our society?  No thank you.  Save that for the depressing girlie-men of Europe.  That, by the way, was also where ecstasy was synthesized, 1912 and where LSD was created, 1943, and presented as possible tools in the world of psychology.

   After JFK got blown away in November 1963, there was a subtle shift in the country.  We tried to soldier on, like it wasn’t that huge a deal that such a cool president was snatched away.  We had another president, so we’re fine, right?  And LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the next year, so Negroes were going to be equal and happy, but they weren’t -- and they tore up Watts in the first Long Hot Summer, 1965.  And they kept doing it, year after year.

   Then LBJ started a war, the longest one and the only one we lost.  At first, summer of 64, it seemed, well, wtf, it might be just a little police action, like Lebanon or Manila Bay or something -- and they must know what they’re doing, but by 1965 and 66, it was getting in the gray area and no land was being conquered and no flags were waving and no boys were coming home. 

   It was easy enough, in conservative Orange County and just out of the Marines, to embrace the simple solutions of the far right. The treasury was being drained by welfare cheaters, they said, and the Negroes were forcing business owners not to discriminate and Communists were overunning the world with their godless tyranny and must be stopped, with nukes if necessary -- and the Reds were swaying the great brown masses of the Third World to their awful ways (which actually were awful) and teaching them to hate the freedom-loving America.  And the Democrats were spending money trying to redistribute the wealth of the hard-working successful class and give it to the lazy, worthless, undeserving folks of America, who needed to learn a lesson.  It was all very simple and I chaired the campaign of Goldwater in 64 at community college.  I was just learning to use my brain and didn’t know any better.

   Drugs were making strides into the culture, what with Mother’s Little Helpers, aka diet pills, loaded with dex and my pal Jim and I got some from a doc we were working for at a Southern California resort and started popping them for exams and term papers in community college, but, hey, it was only a few moments before I noticed that these were opening consciousness to another plane through the simple act of speeding everything up, especially our glandular array and homework could take a flying fuck - cuz what I was suddenly seeing and feeling was like...grand!  Just fucking grand!  It’s like someone took all the rocks out of your backpack, all the cultural and worrisome baggage and suddenly you could leap into the sky, dance, shout, see, glorificate, rant, talk all night, free associate and hope!  Yes, you could hope and that was a new one.  And you were COOL, quite suddenly.  You were cooler than the coolest, richest jock in high school.  All the potential lay out there before you, all the adventures you could take, allies, pals and lovers you could hook up with and know the REAL promise of life, especially youth, which, being 21, was approximately these next nine years, certainly no more.  Adulthood waited like a moray eel at the end of the twenties.  We could feel it, though we didn’t talk about My Generation yet.


   Pop music stepped up, way up, to the next level with Dylan and the Beatles in 63 and 64 and the Stones in 65.  The were...what? Conscious!  They were asking us to think and feel, to evaluate shit that no one had even put on the table in any big way, though the Beatles didn’t venture beyond boy-girl tunes (the best ever) until Rubber Soul in December 1965.  The Stones broke through with No Satisfaction in mid-65, spelling out the emptiness or ordinary, materialistic, success-oriented life where a man can’t be a man cuz he don’t smoke the same cigarette as me.  So true!!  And it wasn’t about no satisfaction because you can’t find or hold “the babe,” which is the answer to all anxieties or so the Western Myth told you. It was about the whole thing, the whole culture -- and where would the satisfaction come from? If not a babe, then it must come from...you.

   That was one of the weird discoveries that kept settling in -- and it showed up more and more in the music, that romance with the hot babe was not the answer to anything.  We were free individuals.  In Norwegian Wood, 1965, threre it was, summed up by the Beatles, the man leaving the woman to sleep in her bed while he slept in the bath - great symbology.  You could see the woman: some shallow blonde but very attractive and sexy.  But that’s not why we’re here, is it?  Sit anywhere, though there isn’t a chair.

   Dylan, this angel of truth with a strange, whiney voice, just blew us away with Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in May 1963, still in the hopeful and innocent world of John Kennedy!  Any one of his songs would have made him immortal and radicalized many a mind, but the album was full of them -- Masters of War, Oxford Town, Blowin’ in the Wind, Hard Rain, all of them staggering belly blows against a “system” we barely knew existed and which, clearly, brought us not just racism, but endless wars and for its own good, not for freedom or democracy or to defeat evil men in faroff lands.

   Dylan’s albums were not “popular” in the normal sense and were NOT on the radio, heavens no, but got under your skin in a private way.  I was alone, in my garage, fixing my motorcycle and -- I don’t know where the album came from -- but there it was, playing these songs and it was like I was hearing someone speak the real truth for the first time in my life.  You know that feeling.  The world is filled with news, politicians’ rant, preachers’ threats, the meaningless yammer of friends and family and then, with absolute confidence, this skinny geek from Minnesota sings this amazing stuff that rings with truth like an oracle, a perfect bronze bell, turning the rest into static and smarmy lies and tin cans rattling.  You just woke up.  I don’t think any one person has ever done that, anywhere, but here it is on a million selling album of music in America, like a gold statue of some powerful god rising out of a septic pool. 

   You didn’t play it at a party or run out and tell your friends about it, as you would the Beatles; you might mention it, so they might hear one of the songs.  You knew they would either get it -- or very much not get it and then start wondering about you.  And you!  What was happening to YOU?  You didn’t know.  Why did Hard Rain get under my skin?  Here I was a supposed Republican who worked on campus for Goldwater and hoped Romney or Percy would beat LBJ.  Why?  I have no idea.  Something about Goldwater’s insistence that the individual could do anything -- without government help or hindrance, kind of a proto-libertarian, Ayn Rand kind of inspiration, not hard to understand in a talented, 21-year old guy with the world ahead of him. 

   But Dylan!  Here was a wild card no one expected at all.  After one listen to that album, maybe two, I stood up from my motorcycle oil change and was looking at a different world.  I even wanted to travel up to the North Country Far and fall in love with with some dark-eyed woman whose hair rolls and flows all down her breast.  This was not your Surfer Girl, crooned of by the Beach Boys; this was a real woman, one with depth and pain, one who could talk to you and drink tea or wine with you while the north wind howled about her cottage up there on the borderline.  This was the first hippie woman, the one we would would all search for and most of us would find.


   I would find her, Deborah, when I was writing for the college newspaper in Southern California, fall 1964, and she was in a play, called “A Far Country.”  She was Freud’s wife Anna and on the playbill was a quote from Freud, “The soul of a man is a far country that cannot be reached or explored.”  That little statement was like a silent arrow sliding into my brain and my first question to her was, “What does this mean to you?”

   Deborah was married, not happily, and was a few years older than me.  She wasn’t pretty, as a girl should be, just average with dishwater brown hair and a geeky nose and chin -- and a brilliant mind -- and she readily answered my question, saying no one could really be known, even oneself and all we can do is keep experiencing oneself and others and keep letting it in, more and more, all we can handle and let our mysterious, unreachable soul feel it and eventually learn how to speak it.

   She immediately had my attention.  No one, repeat, no one, had ever stood there and looked in my eye and spoken the truth like this, truth that could have only been found by reaching down into said unknown depths with great bravery and willingness to report what was in there.

   I dutifully did our interview and took her picture, then said, “I want to know what’s down in there and I believe I can know it and in fact already do know a fair amount.”

   She looked at me and said, with utmost sincerity and not a trace of facile feminine charm, “I know.  I can see it.  As I know you can see it in me.  It’s unusual, you know, for even one person to have it and know it, but very unusual for two such people to meet.”

  My story, the first I’d ever written about the real stuff of life, said the egotism and kookiness of actors “give them the power to live life in almost total awareness” and I quoted her as saying, “They act like children in the good sense because they see life honestly and intensely...It’s a healthy thing to be an egotist. It is egotistical to think that I, by great discipline and strength that acting requires, can start from nothing and help create a play expressing an essence of life that the audience wants but can’t get in walking life. The actor chooses the stage as her mode of creation because she is afraid and finds she can hide behind the mask of her character.”

   She was my first.  The first woman I could talk to.  I wanted to kiss her and knew I would.  I could tell by the way she studied my face, then looked at the ground that she knew it too.  We decided to meet again and talk more, which we did on drives to Laguna Beach and up in the mountains in my darling ’57 VW Bug, where she said the hills looked like waves frozen in an ocean storm.  She would often go on flights of what seemed like willful fantasy, spinning circles around my conservative, white, ex-Marine self and sometimes I would tell her to wake up, grow up, get realistic.  For which I feel ashamed, still.

   Soon we were in bed, a mattress on the floor of my sparely-furnished student apartment and doing it, trying to do it, having no idea of how marginal I was in bed, I am sure, and wishing I were madly in love with her, but I wasn’t.  She was a spiritual companion and lover and friend, one of the most interesting and honest I’ve ever known.  She was the girl from the North Country.  It took me decades and a fair amount of therapy to realize I did love her.  Wish I could tell her.  She wasn’t going to leave her scientist husband and would say she was glad to be the first real lover of my life and, she smiled wistfully, how many more versions of me, as I grew into who I am, would be printed on the minds and hearts of other women who would also love me. 

   Her final communication was a poem, dropped off at the restaurant where I was working one evening -- and its last lines, taken from our hours at Laguna, are imprinted on me: “Sandpipers run ridiculous on the beach / And we all reach, John, we all reach.” ~








To Really Love Someone                            1963-64

It was a few days before Xmas 1963 and I hopped a freight plane out of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, free, of course. It was headed for Gross Ile Naval Air Station only an hour from the family in Lansing. The two piston engines of this lovely old C-119 Flying Boxcar churned sweetly and dependably over the Sierras, as orange splashed the western horizon and lit up the snow in the growing darkness -- a spectacle of beauty, mystery and adventure such as I’d never known. 

   Other Marines hunkered in the cargo bay, playing cards, reading crap paperback Westerns and ignoring the miraculous splendor of the mountains and looming desert.  I marveled at their naked, brute ignorance but also used the opportunity to grasp how different I was from them -- and how wonderful and splendid it was to have a mind, to possess awareness, hunger, curiosity, mystery, courage, all these wonderful male qualities that I’d grown up reading about.  Never seen them in a female and, in fact, virtually never in anyone.  But I knew it was out there, because, hey, here it was in me.  I was thrilled with myself.  I didn’t want to date women and waste my time trying to figure out their obtuse and generally unexciting ways, though of course, there was always the immense and stupefying mystery of their amazing bodies, smiles, the high sound of their laughter, the amazing curves of their breasts, butts, waist, legs - gee, that’s about all of it.  There was no part of them that didn’t curve in alluring ways, was there?  And what did I know about it all?  Virtually nothing.  I liked it that way and knew it wouldn’t last.  Just to breathe and walk and think, to catch a glimpse of myself in a store window, walking by, I seemed about the most amazing, dashing and unusual human being I’d ever seen or even heard of.  Of course I would never say or write that, let alone speak it.  But here it was again, me, looking out these round little portholes on the majesty of Earth itself in the electric dead of winter.

   I would catch my thoughts and marvel at them, also.  I’d just been on the USS Ticonderoga the month before, out in the Pacific, covering “quals” by an A-4 attack jet squadron and at dusk every day, when “ops” were shut down, I was free to go out on the very bow of the carrier and hold onto the railing while she rode the waves up and down and I “groked” the whole freaking ocean and heavens and my magnificent place in them.  Grok was a popular hippie word from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961, meaning to fully understand and experience something at the deepest soul levels -- and I would do that at random moments.  Mystic, crystal revelations, as they would term such moments in the musical Hair, 1967.  They would seize me, once while flipping burgers at the Tastee-Freez in Newport Beach, again standing in formation listening to Christmas Carols -- “I wonder as I wander all over this Earth” -- at Infantry Training at Camp Pendleton, 1961.  I had “it” and I knew it and I knew it was valuable and I didn’t know what it was but I knew I loved it.

   The plane dropped down into Las Vegas for the night, so everyone could get bombed on free drinks and gamble their money away, which they did.  But not me.  I knew better.  I got one silver dollar, made of real silver at the time and put it in a slot machine and it gave me five back.  I stopped there.  I had one sensible whisky sour and went off to a remote table to read Nietzsche.  I’d just scored his leather-bound Thus Spake Zarathustra for a buck at Acres of Books in Long Beach and was reading where he says God is dead, so I wrote on the flyleaf, “Nietzsche is dead. -- God.”  I was witty and sage and it was a dry, incisive wit and I was so fucking glad I had one!

   We blew out over the Rockies at dawn, thence onto the vast and tedious plains and farmlands of the Midwest, landing in Michigan about dinner on the third evening.  I could have called my parents for a ride, but, no, give me the wild unknown.  I got out on the highway and, wearing my uniform, knew it would be considered a patriotic duty, if not a pleasure, to pick me up and take me as far as they could -- which they did.  I covered the 90 miles in two hours and was taken to my doorstep, where the unsuspecting family shrieked surprised greetings, running to hug me and pour a shot or two.

   Dad wanted to drag me to the neighbor’s house while I was still in my uniform, to show me off, what a man I’d become, not this elusive geek sitting up in the maple tree in the backyard on a little wood platform he’d made, reading his paperbacks, like Walden and World War I air battles in biplanes.  He was a Marine now or as I would often joke in the radical part of the Sixties, I was a trained killer.

   The neighbor family were all rather amazed at Johnny, the guy who, at 16, had caught one of them when the boy was trapped on the roof.  I’d told him to just jump in my arms and he did.  After that, I’d assumed sort of mythical dimensions.  I’d also ratted out the druggist, after this kid told me that the guy was making advances on him -- and his dad had gone down and reamed him a new asshole, as we graphically said in those days.  But my eye was immediately caught by girl, a member of the gang of the ‘hood who’d played doctor up in the garage, so, as I stole glances at her maturing beauty, the now-high cheekbones, the straight, beautiful teeth, the radiant red hair, it flashed across my mind that I’d already known, loved and been thrilled by Mellie, but like grade school kids are thrilled by each other’s sexual teasing, games and foreplay -- which is no less thrilling than the way we are still thrilled by them.

   I tossed off a few remarks about Marine Corp life and my interesting work as a journalist covering a Marine Air Group of several squadrons and how I got to go body surf at Laguna and go to night college.  We went outside and tossed snowballs around and reminisced about the old ‘hood.  It was cold.  I walked her to her back door.  We stood there, Mellie and me and I said I had to get into some “civvies,” that is, real clothes and go find my buddies and have fun. 

   I leaned forward and kissed her.  On the mouth.  Not a French kiss - just a kiss that said, you are no longer the geeky girl next door and I like you and see you and want to see you again and know you more.  But the feel of it, that first kiss with someone you know and find pretty -- the mystery, the worlds it opens up, just that amazing warmth and smell and consent and feel of these warm lips touching for the first time, a little bit open, revealing the adventures, dimensions, gods, past lives, lives to come, the possibility of true love, of children.  All these things are not literally read out in words, like, oh wow, I might marry you, no, they are just present in these waves of happiness, kind of like you’ve been trudging through a dense, dank, sunless forest for months, years and you come round a bend and it explodes into your view, an ocean, a great sky, stars, a rising sun, a great new valley where you can explore, learn, settle, have a new life.  It’s all there in that first kiss -- or it isn’t.  And it was. 


   After Christmas, I hopped another air freight to Key West and was suddenly in 80 degree sun, such bliss -- and stuck my thumb out, hitchhiking up the Atlantic Coast of Florida, then to Dallas, where Marine pal Jim, also on Xmas leave, picked me up.  I wanted to see where Kennedy got killed, so he took me down to Elm Street and we explored Dealey Plaza, so familiar from Life Magazine photos -- and stood on the exact spot where the president got his brains blown out.  It had been only a month before, a Friday morning, finishing work on the base newspaper for the week, that the boss, Major McShane strode into our pressroom and rather frantically demanded to know if anyone had a radio.

   “Kennedy’s been shot,” he said.  We all leaped to our feet, shocked silly, and said there’s got to be one in the radio shack, further down the hall, where interviews were done for hometown radio stations.  The corporal flipped it on and there was that language we were to hear over and over, decade after decade, “hail of assassin’s bullets,” “while riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas,” “rushed to Parkland Hospital,” “priest summoned to give last rites” and “now, this word, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 pm, Central Time.”  It took them a while to get it all up on TV; they weren’t practiced in catastrophes like we are now.  But soon, there it was, all the witnesses telling a story that would never be clear and firm to history -- and before the Sixties were out, there would be Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and many other books, spelling out how unlikely it is that one lousy marksman with a crappy, bolt-action rifle could do the hit -- and too many witnesses around the grassy knoll said it came from behind them, not from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository and if Oswald didn’t act alone or didn’t act at all, all that meant is that it was a conspiracy by those with the motive and means, namely people in the CIA, Cuban exile community and Mafia, all of whom felt betrayed by the Kennedy brothers for Jack’s refusal to back the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the loss of Mafia-run gambling turf in Havana, his plans to pull out of Vietnam and his many peace initiatives toward the godless Commie empire, who only wanted to bury us, right?  We would learn much later that his lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, brought him LSD and that certainly would substantiate his growing vision for peace, actual world peace, though surrounded by generals, spooks and CEOs who found war cozily profitable.  On the other hand, the Commies of Russia and China were the worst sort, no better than Hitler, Mussolini, imperial Japan, so what was a prez to do? 

   All this hopeful, tragic and bizarre political stuff became a constellation in the sky of the Sixties, along with counterculture, civil rights, rock music, LSD, sexual liberation and a New Consciousness that exploded into so many movements in the seventies -- feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, new musical forms and the polarizing backlash against it all by the religious right and Reagan.  And that bloody spot where we stood on Elm Street in Dallas was a portal we all had to walk through into the future.

   Six months later, I was out of the Corps (or the “crotch” as it was called) and had driven my black ’57 Ford Fairlane across Route 66 to Lansing, where I would take the summer courses that got me the ‘early out’ from the military and had one big thing on my mind, that I might run into Mellie, the girl next door. Walking into my Western Civ class one August morning, I heard the class abuzz, as with something they all shared and knew, likely from the news.  It was.  An outraged LBJ had essentially declared war, which would last nine years, this in revenge for North Vietnam lobbing a shell at one of our ships and scratching up the paint -- with no Americans hurt.  But I didn’t care.  I had served and was out and they couldn’t touch me.  Many high school classmates would not be so lucky.

   Studying my history in the backyard lawnchair that summer, in my shorts, an uncharacteristic dress and location, I hoped for Mellie to wander over.  She did.  What a breath of amazing feminine attention, hope, delirium, though I would have no way of knowing or identifying, let alone admitting it.  Can you imagine me saying, “oh my god, I am so happy to see you and this amazing heart opening is so sweet and I hope it breaks through my hard-won Marine armor!” 

   We began a friendly banter that would go on all summer as we tried to figure out who we were -- who oneself was and who the other person is.  I didn’t know what to say.  She was 17 and didn’t either.  We, of course, tried to act cool, experienced, sage and a bit fun.  She clearly loved me, though I couldn’t know that.  She kept coming over.  That’s how I knew.  No one had ever done that -- a woman asserting interest, desire, adoration?  No, never happened before.  And I (would that I could take back a few awful words in my life!) said she was a pushover.  Where I got that word, I have no idea.  Maybe from my father and his generation, which dreamed up such wretched, demeaning terms as “round heels.” Makes ya wanna puke.  My parents’ generation were clearly in the dark about sex, love, honesty or anything and it would be up to us, we (later) learned, to reinvent love.  Mellie had no idea what I meant by pushover.  It meant she would make love to me if we both wanted -- and that meant she was morally loose.  Well, she wasn’t at all, but since I, at that point had barely made love with anyone, I was trying to sound superior to anyone who would have sex with me.  It’s good that the gods are merciful to those who know little of love, which was almost everyone back then.

   Charmed with my budding love affair, my dad took a picture of her standing beside my chaise lounge as I read.  Mellie was absolutely adorable and gorgeous.  In the picture, I wore my “angry Marine” look, as if being assaulted by...love?  Yes, exactly, and my sisters later would ask me why I look so angry in that pic.  It would take a couple years of therapy to find out -- much later down the road. 

   I was in love with her, crazy in love but didn’t know it.  I didn’t fantasize making love with her and I think it was because I didn’t know how.  I just fantasized the amazing beauty of her divine body, which she carried to my backyard every day in her pale pink swimsuit, full to bursting with her lovely teenage breasts -- and one humid August night, all restraints on that lovely divine body would come off, down by the riverside and I could see her amazing female form in the summer starlight, things I had never really seen or taken time to see in hurried tyrsts with women I barely knew.  But I knew this one and I did my best to kiss all that I could find available to me -- and knew I didn’t deserve it, couldn’t do it justice, didn’t know how to love her. 

   And I knew this was a real first in my life, someone I really loved and who loved me and was beautiful, as I was beautiful and who was strange and different as I was and with whom I had this strange divine sympathy and amity and - what do I call it? - humbleness, the humility of a grown man and a dear young maid, as confused as I was but also as full as I was of crazy, hopeful desire, including the desire to learn about love -- and the only way to learn it was to put your whole body into the fire, which we did that night by the river, where we knew no one would be, because of one simple fact, that the mosquitos would be out in hordes and they were but we absolutely didn’t care and I kissed her all over her divine, dear, lovely young body and tried to make her know that although I didn’t have the words or moves, I had this love for her and gave it to her, overwhelmed with kissing it all over, knowing I could not possibly take the experience in -- just wanting to adore and kiss all of her and I did and she seemed to like it and feel comfortable though I was pretty sure she was as scared as me and we did it, did our best, did all we knew and it was so many firsts for us, the first person that we knew and liked and loved that we did all that with.  That was the big part.  No one would ever have that or take that away.  It was all an extension of that kiss which was also the first (real) kiss for both of us and this was a continuation of that kiss. 

   I drove us home and it was 230 in the morning and the parents were enraged, blaming, freaking out, knowing that I’d taken the virginity away from this maid and that two people who loved each other had drawn close in that love and made that love real with each other, as I’m sure they did in their youth or tried to do. 

   The summer term ended and I bought the first of many of my VW Bugs, a ’57 and drove back across the US to live as a single, free man for the first time in my life, living with Jim in a Santa Ana apartment, waiting tables, working at Disneyland, doing community college, learning about so many wonderful things in my classes -- geology, astronomy, music appreciation, philosophy, this wild range of knowledge that would lead me to late hours of listening to classical music pieces I’d never known existed, such as Barber’s Adagio for Strings and going to hear jazz at the San Francisco Club and flying down the freeway in my Bug hearing the Stones scream out for the first time that they could find No Satisfaction and, I didn’t know why, but I agreed with them. 

   And this dear, wise, funny, bohemian lady and I would always know and love each other and email and drop in and once in a very long while, would draw close in love and I would come to recognize that some divine presence does give you the gifts you need, the ones that change your life and shape your soul and I’m so glad she was the first.  ~







The Waning Days of Traditional Boy-Girl Romance - or So We Thought        1965-66

She was a secretary, a family friend, single, gorgous, of full bosoms and liked to drink beer and smoke cigarettes -- and I was a junior at Michigan State University, a Big Ten diploma mill with 42,000 students and professors you would never speak to.  Fun.  I was working my way through college doing radio news which was fun and astoundly easy - and it gave me a resume’.  It was the last of the simpler years when life could be about beer, a girlfriend who was on The Pill (yippee!), going out dancing on Friday night and wondering what in hell you were going to do after graduation, which was soon.

   As we got closer and “doin’ it” drew near, Dolores had to tell me something, she announced.  I’d never heard that phrase from a woman and didn’t know it invariably meant something bad.  We were on a weekend in Chicago and about to do it and she tearfully and shriekingly confessed that she had a kid and had given it up, in high school -- and clearly expected to be shamed and rejected by me, as she was shamed and rejected by her parents, who shipped her off to the unwed mothers home.  I instantly said I don’t care, that’s fine.  I thought it would be cool to have a gf who was a mother and even cooler that I was the kind of guy who could let that be ok, like, how brave and grand of me, what a broadening experience for me!  I didn’t even know or think it might have affected her and left a mark, a wound and maybe impacted her sexuality, which always remained tepid.  It was all about me, wasn’t it?  I said it was fine so -- end of story.  So, on we went, becoming a couple, my first time at that.

  Dolores and I would make gin-tonics and go to the lake to tan (with cocoa butter on our skin) on Saturdays in summer -- and listen to this strange combination of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul , California Dreamin and then Frank Sinatra crooning, It Was a Very Good Year, in which (so sexist, manly and ‘using’ today) he sang, “It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls who lived up the stair, with perfumed hair and it came undone, when I was 21.”  Obviously, he didn’t get to know the young lady very well, but had his way with her, he being a stud who knew how to make the hair come undone.  This, in the 70s, would be called the attitude of a “chauvinist pig.”

   I didn’t know anything about that in 1966.  I thought, cool, that’s what men do -- and maybe someday you find the Woman of Your Dreams, who has what qualities?  Well, gorgeous of course, loves to ‘do it,’ has ‘brains and beauty,’ so she can carry on a conversation with a man, who, by implication, has more brains -- and she’s a good mom, if that day ever comes. 

   This, of course, is a program, one about which I would have no clue until a couple years later when LSD would pull the covers of all programs, the lame ones as well as those you identified with.  It hit reset.  Game over.  Square one, but with a lot of seemingly natural inner wisdom.  That’s when the real Sixties began and it did so at full speed from 1967 to the end of the decade.

   So, I slogged through my last two years of college, knowing it was necessary to get resume, job, career -- and Dolores and I would get a beer buzz and do it in her parents’ basement rec room, then her apartment, when she got one.  We would do spring break in Daytona and, sitting on her motel balcony while the kids rocked out in the courtyard one night, she said “I love you,” something I’d never said to anyone or heard.  I stepped way back from that one.  I said, um, that’s a really serious thing to say.  She said, I know, I know and I’m sorry but I can’t take it back, can I? 

   But there it was, on the table, that crazy dichotomy that would plague most guys - this thing of wanting a woman but on what level?  Girlfriend, living apart?  Might work, but, even with that, you’re expected to be monogamous.  Marriage?  Nah, that had to be sweeping, compelling, lifelong, so you absolutely had to be very much in love and she had to bring the full hand to the table, beauty, brains, bod -- and, yes, bucks.  That would be nice.  It used to be called a dowery.  I’d never thought about it.  I just thought everything should be for love.  But the guy was giving up a LOT, wasn’t he?  Mainly, his freedom.  What was that worth?  Priceless, man, priceless.  So, why would a man ever buy a cow when he could milk it through the fence, as the sexist saying went in those times.  There was just no advantage for a guy to make commitments, was there?  And saying “I love you,” hey, THAT was a major milepost on the road to commitment!  Why say it?  Just show it.  You care.  You buy her things.  She does it with you.  And she better look like she craves it (sex), right?  Guys gotta have that.  End of story. 

   So, the deck was stacked.  It was a crazymaking dynamic.  To so need and long for love, intimacy, sex, companionship but so to fear it and something you paid for with your freedom, cutting off this stream of possibility, unfolding, becoming, evolving -- not just with romantic bonding, but with everything: where you went, who you were, what you did.  It was too complicated.  And it was a different hand dealt to men and women.  A single, free man could do anything.  It was all potential, wasn’t it?  A single woman, though, was aging by the hour and would soon be viewed as unable to get a man, then where was she?  Dead in the water.  An old maid.  Bested by the younger babes.  Or “foxes,” as they were called then.  How quickly the transition from fox to...cow, right?  And that haunted women.  They had a window in which to get what they had to get.  But a man just got more wealthy, distinguished and important with the years and didn’t really show age for a few decades right?  So, eventually, a 40-year old guy could score a 20-year old fox, right? 

   It was all too crazy and even the guys knew it -- and they SO knew it on that first acid trip in which it all suddenly boiled down to one thing: love.  That’s all.  All you need is love, so the Beatles sang, in June 1967, the month when “The Sixties” were really born. But, skimming Wiki, you note they first tripped in Spring 1965 -- and out came “Help,” in which John Lennon informs us that when younger, he never needed anybody’s help in any way, but now those days are gone and he’s changed his mind and opened up the doors -- as in Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, a journal of the author’s tripping on mescaline, this in 1954, when many of the intelligentsia and illuminati in Europe and America were singing its praises as a bringer of inner peace and vision.

   I was graduating in a few months from college and couldn’t wait to blow out of the flat, boring Midwest, land of my benighted parents.  Dolores blew out of it also, joining the airlines, a bastion of hot foxes or flying waitresses as they were called and was domiciled in San Francisco. 

   The song, If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) told us there were “hippies” in California and they took LSD and the guys let their hair grow long and they wore headbands and bell-bottoms and were “dropped out” (from work) and danced a lot and seemed to have a lot of fun and opposed war.  Nice.  Interesting.  But wtf was all that?  Who needed drugs, hair, peace, joblessness?  It didn’t register much. 

   On graduation, I headed west to SF and picked up a couple of these hippies in the desert and in days, someone was passing me a “joint” in which there was dope or grass or weed or pot, as it was called and I rather quickly began to tune in, as they called it, and realized, oh, it’s not about getting messed up or dumbed down -- it’s about consciousness!  It’s about awareness, how you see the world and suddenly you realized that, in the simple act of smoking pot, or putting the stub end -- the “roach” -- in your pocket, you had broken the law and were a criminal and were “carrying.”  You could be arrested, your house searched, your car pulled over and sniffed out.  You could go to jail.  You would have a “record” and would not get a job.  Word would get around that you were a drug-user, an addict, not dependable, not a good person. 

   So, in one stroke, you had to look at the fairness of that and you realized it was not fair at all.  You were the same person you were yesterday and that was a Good Person, though maybe you now had a few new ideas, such as this one: it was ok to relax, slow down, lay in the park and escape stress and anxiety for one goddam hour and look at the way the trees and leaves moved in the wind and notice the smiles of the young hippie girls, oh, and they are smiling at ME and their lovely breasts are swaying back and forth, obviously unrestrained by bras and you smile back.

   And you are STONED.  That’s why you are noticing all these things.  This didn’t happen on alcohol!  You got drunk.  And cigarettes didn’t do anything but get you addicted to cigarettes and die of cancer.  So why aren’t they illegal, since they’re lethal, but pot IS illegal and all it does is make you “groove” and feel “mellow” -- new words in the popular argot and you suddenly and completely understood them.  This was a chain of reasoning that led you to the inevitable conclusion that whoever made the laws -- legislators, preachers, generals, older, churchgoing conservatives who vote, all the people in charge of the system -- didn’t want you to groove, take time, let alone drop out and refuse to take part in war -- and booze/ciggies went with war while pot did not.  Pot made you peaceful, inclusive, mellow and -- it being the Summer of Love -- you saw the Diggers giving out free food in Golden Gate Park and on Haight, food they scored from dumpsters behind restaurants and markets and you realized, well, why not give it away and try to help people and...love them.  So then, you were connecting dots between drugs and love and peace and pretty soon a new picture began to form and they called it “radicalization.”  But pot was like going to the 30-yard line, if you will indulge a football metaphor.  LSD was going the full hundred yards and taking a huge daring leap out of the stadium on a magic carpet, suspecting you would never be back.  And you weren’t.

   Dolores, btw, didn’t appreciate my tales of pot and angrily let me know it, a snit that passed in a few days as she lit up her first one.  We got a house and began living together and I taught high school.  It was my first cohab and I liked it, realizing, heck, I like her a lot.  She’s groovy and I want to groove with her.  She no longer brought up the question of whether I love her or not -- and certainly not the issue of marriage.  That was in The System, a bunch of structures and rules our parents and ancestors had dreamed up and, man, it was fading, right?  Who knew?  We didn’t know where it was all going.  It was a puzzle of conflicting values and now My Generation was marching against the Vietnam War in large numbers and openly opposing The Man and his System and you looked at the war and couldn’t disagree, like wtf are we doing over there in the jungle dying, hundreds a week and for what?  You read the Berkeley Barb and there it all was in print -- markets.  We were fighting for markets for our corporations and dying for them and, shit, what did that have to do with me?  Not much, except we young were always expected to patriotically die for freedom and democracy, but if they’re arresting you for smoking pot and doing what you want with YOUR body, then did we have freedom? 

   The dots were coming together faster and faster and the picture emerged - the radical left was “right on” (another negroidism), in other words, they were “up front” and “get down” and “telling it like it is” and the Sixties were just getting started. 

   So, did I “love” Dolores?  Hah!  That was The Man’s game!  What if I loved everyone?  Then it didn’t much matter.  No one “owns” the love of another person!  You wanna know why?  Well, because I was a free person.  And that’s what they meant by free love -- not that you went to bed with everyone but that you were free to relate to and love everyone freely, without caging it up in marriage, engaged, going steady or any of it. 

   We were awesome!  We had broken the age-old code and finally learned true freedom!  Didn’t we??  Yes, we did.  Would it last?  No, of course not.  Do you see it around now anywhere?  Yes, here and there.  You can love any way you want.  You can stay single.  You can have friends with benefits.  You can be gay, bi, polyamorous and find the community for all that, but it’s off to the side, not in the mainstream.  But we were there and lived it and opened that Door of Perception and saw the infinite beyond the door, which, as William Blake observed in his vision of cosmic unity, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793, is how things really are.

   Did I love her?  It would take some years of therapy to know it, but I did -- and if it were the fifties or lame eighties instead of the Sixties, I would have married her, had kids, done my career and enjoyed life with her, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes together and we would have been pretty happy, right? 

   Not really - because a new requirement would enter into the relationships of conscious people and that is that you have to grow.  And tell the truth and take responsibility for your shit, your shadow and speak it.  That would emerge in the 70s, in the Human Potential Movement and once you opened that box, you could never go back to the old ways. I loved her and, as I have learned to say, it completed its cycle and I let it go.   ~







Please Stop Shooting Us                            1967-69

   The Sixties are generally thought of as encompassing the whole decade, but they didn’t really start blowing up in the face of the regular, old culture (and my face) until June 1, 1967, with the Summer of Love in SF, the explosion of people doing acid and the release of a revolutionary Beatles album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had nothing specifically to do with the Sixties and seemed to be charming and funny songs based on some fantasy, free-association about a long-ago vaudeville act.  So it was just like the Sixties: be you, be as weird as you want, we honor that.  In fact, most of the songs didn’t have much to do with anything we recognized, but they were cute, funny, kind of outside the boundary and wonderful musically -- and the music screamed the new vision of the Sixties -- and we listened to them over and over for many months, especially A Day in the Life, amd they totally rewired our heads. 

   We’d just arrived from the Midwest, where the Sixties never really happened, not much anyway -- and were fascinated by the psychedelic posters to be found at the Print Mint on Haight Street. I put a peace sign, a new thing to me, on my t-shirt with a marker and made a statement in public.  It was exciting.  We were dilettante hippies.

   A graph of the Sixties would show this: It built up slowly through the Kennedy years, began to take hold in a population scared shitless of nuclear war, escalated with Vietnam, Dylan and the Beatles in 1964-66, then came the Real Sixties -- the crazy years it’s famous for -- from mid-1967 until December 1969.

   Then it suddenly want “clunk” in the last month of the Sixties, with the arrest of the long-haired, Beatles-loving Manson family murderers and the Rolling Stones Altamont Festival fiasco, in which biker bodyguards killed a member of the audience. No longer did you trust everyone who had long hair and said, “far out, man.”  Those two things broke the heart of anyone with ideals that the Sixties would give birth to a world-changing era of peace and love.  They were brutal “mindfuckers” (another big Sixties word) and wounded all. 

   The nail went in the coffin of the Sixties in May 1970 when the National Guard shot students protesting Nixon’s invasion of Laos, killing four -- and the Silent Majority, as it was called, didn’t exactly object.  I learned the news while camping in Yosemite with Dolores and knew this was a game-changer.  The next day, back in The City, I joined a protest march in Berkeley and watched my radicalized peers “trashing” (a new word to me on that day) bank windows with rocks.  I took a great pic of a kid selling the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe newspapers with headlines screaming “Shit Hits Fan!” and “America Is Dead” and “Rise up!”  I wandered in and wrote a story for the underground radical paper Berkeley Tribe and they were sure I was from the FBI - and treated me with hostility, certainly nothing close to comradeship.  I didn’t go back.  There was a ‘shoulder Sixties’ for a few years after that, with good music (with something to say) into the fall of 1971 -- and crazy, ubelievable Watergate, where Nixon’s presidency was destroyed (just as JFKs was) up to August 1974. 

  Doing political journalism for United Press International in the Oregon capitol in the heady late Sixties, covering the presidental campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, I flew around with them, ate with them and was blown away (another Sixties term, this one from Vietnam) by their honesty, passion, intelligence -- and daring to speak what’s real, something rarely seen in any politician, unless freed up by radical times, as these candidates were.  I would run into the other candidates, Nixon, Humphrey, Percy, Rockefeller, Muskie and we journalists all assumed that, despite these epic shifts, the mainline old guard would get the nominations and life (and war) would go on per normal, which it did. 

   So much of what was happening in the country was personal and took place inside you, whether it was the drugs, the news, the new love -- and it all changed you, sometimes hugely. 

   After a hard day of political journalism, I was sitting in my living room with a pile of dinner on my knees watching the news, then an address by LBJ, who had just been humiliated by the Tet Offensive (which clearly showed the war couldn’t be won) and by the near-defeat at the hands of McCarthy in New Hampshire. At the end of a dreary talk about Vietnam he says, therefore, I shall not seek and will not accept your nomination as president for another term -- and my dinner flew all over the room and I grabbed the phone to call my colleagues in the profession, getting out a “reactioner” from state pols on where they would throw their support, to McCarthy, Humphrey or RFK -- all people of great stature who could wake up tomorrow and run the country and do it for the good of all.  The event was “news,” but it was hugely personal and life-changing.

   At the end a press breakfast one day during the Oregon primary campaign, I asked RFK just what he thought of the Warren Commission report, which backed the lone nut, single shooter scenario of his brother’s assassination and he said they did their work and history has its answer.  He didn’t sound convincing, just dismissing -- and a week later, in California, he would tell the press, “I now fully realize that only the powers of the Presidency will reveal the secrets of my brother's death.“  Whatever that meant.  Like, the CIA would have to tell him?  Not likely.

   On those days of late August, 1968, watching the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which we thought would just be a formality in favor of Humphrey, we saw it turn into guerilla theater, with the “pigs,” as police were routinely called by hippies, wail on 10,000 kids assembled nearby and chanting, poetically, “the whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”  And it was.  I was radicalized.

   I was driving down the SF Bayshore Freeway, the night of his California primary win, a week later, and there it was on the radio, Kennedy had been hit.  I was flying across the country a couple days later, when the pilot came on, saying, “um, we have some news here. It’s about Senator Kennedy.”  Never mind the rest.  We all knew he was a dead man anyway and now it’s just official.  It was just a little too coincidental - two Kennedys, much loved by “the people” and now both toast and also MLK and we’re supposed to keep buying this “lone gunman” crap till the end of time?  There was a nationwide sigh heaved at that moment and it said, “Fuuuuuuck you, you sonsabitches who just take a man out if he’s going outside your little kennel, where most presidents are kept.”


   It was just too much.  You just realized life was about you and nothing too glorious or positive would be allowed to happen.  Life went on and, amazingly, the 60s were still good and we knew it.  I skiied Mt. Hood in winter and climbed it, the highest point in Oregon, in summer, with a group from the Mazama Club, a stunning experience -- and affirming one’s personal power and the inestimable majesty of nature. I came to love climbing around on Smith Rock, out in the Oregon desert, long before it was a rock climbing mecca and would go often to the Oregon Coast to feel the crashing breakers and again, tune in with the power of eternal nature.  Sitting there looking at the tide pools at the end of that crazy summer of ’68, with the Oregon primary and all the hubbub over, I just suddenly broke down and started crying for Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the huge loss of their sagacity and sanity, which would rarely return to the American political scene.  And the fact that now, their nemesis of many decades, Richard Nixon, so transparently a insecure, mean-spirited, dishonest politician of the worst sort, would March on into the White House.  You wanted to puke.  If anything could be a more worst case scenario, I’d like to hear how.  And the lying sack of shit, elected on a secret plan for peace, would continue the war AND be reelected again, while running a criminal empire from the White House.

   Did you hear me rant?  It was called radical rhetoric and all us liberal, long-haired freaks learned to speak and write it by the early seventies.  It became tiresome and futile.  By 1972 or so, people just gave up on The System or rationalized that you had to “work within the system to change it,” which turned out to be true, though it could be pretty tedious -- and you had to get “back to the land,” own a piece of nature, get close to the cycles of life, be real.  And millions, including me, would do that.

   The Sixties went on inside the system and even the old guard, at least in liberal Oregon, would groove with it.  In the 1969 legislature, Gov. Tom McCall, a tall, genial, visionary, much-loved man and a liberal Republican, took the first steps toward environmental consciousness, cleaning up the fouled Willamette River, pioneering the Beach Bill, which made sure no one could buy and develop the ocean beaches -- and also the Bottle Bill, which mandated a deposit on bottles, so they wouldn’t get tossed all over.  He and the enlightened legislature -- this was before the religious right got organized -- legalized abortion and decriminalized personal stashes of pot -- and a few years later, passed the country’s first Land Use Planning, so developers couldn’t splash ticky-tack housing and malls all over the state’s signature landscape.  He set up an Office of Energetics with these young, genius hippies making us look at “net energy” involved in any project or plan, so that everyone realized projects had big environmental impacts long after developers took their initial profit and ran. 

   In 1970, faced with possible riots by hippies against Nixon, who was coming to Portland to boost his war to Legionairres, McCall threw a big rock festival, called Vortex, in the boonies an hour east, to draw the freaks away.  Always loving a party or rock fest over politics, the hippies bought it and went off to get stoned and dance naked and make free love.  And no one got hurt.

   Pardon the banal jingoism about Oregon and its high percentage of cool politicians, but I reject the idea that writers have to be jaded, cynical and find the hypocrisy in everything.  The fact is, rain aside, I quickly realized in the Sixties that I lived in a paradise -- and that it has ocean, mountains, desert and valleys and was full of liberal, wise people of both parties, who had the habit of voting for people like U.S. Senators Wayne Morse, a Democrat, and Mark Hatfield, a Republican, both of whom came out early against the insane and endless sinkhole of death in Vietnam and both of whom I knew and considered philosopher-king (Plato) types, as was McCall.   ~







Jewels in Pools                                    1968

   It was against this backdrop of hope and vision in Oregon -- and war, assassinations of our heroes and election of a cur for president that I did what a lot of hippies did -- turned my gaze inward to my own life. 

   In that autumn of ’68, came Ingrid into my world.  We talked and joked easily and soon were going out, here and there for fun little things, including a football game.  We could communicate.  About anything.  She was smart and depthy with feeling and understandings -- and she radiated womanly musk and passion, which, though 25, I could barely realize was affecting me and digging way under my smooth whitey suburban veneer. 

   When we kissed in my car, in front of her vintage mansion above Portland, well, it was one of those moments when you realize that everyone you’ve been kissing all your life didn’t know how to kiss and wasn’t very moved by the experience -- and the same judgment should fall on me. I don’t think I’d ever said the word ‘passionate’ before in my life; there was nothing to say it about.  But here it was and it was kissing me with such commitment and involvement of her every cell and breath and with full welcome, obviously to every part of her body, which I reciprocated, though I felt swept along by a river - and with the awareness that this could and should rule out all “skinny-lipped virgins with blood like water, who’ll give him a peck and call it a kiss,” as Bill the Barker roared in Carousel.

   Did I feel inadequate?  I didn’t even know what the word meant.  But if I had, I would have denied it and maybe tried to project my insecurities on her by saying she was too this, too that, too wanton, too horny, too in the man’s role, but I didn’t.  I knew down deep, though she readily owned her shit and pain and darkness, that she was wiser and better than me, and that (I would discover in therapy, years later) I “rose above” such pain and shit, masquerading as a “together” (another big Sixties word) guy who was basically aware, responsible and in control of his life, doing well in his career, had a gf, Dolores (in faroff SF, whom he saw every month or two and thought of as a ‘good girl’), so I was “safe” and could handle this ride, right? 

   If you want to talk about just sex, which is always a huge and often denied piece of the puzzle of life and love, then you could basically say that Ingrid showed me, the first time we made love, that I’d never yet had sex or made love.  I’d had discreet intercourse and with quite lovely and acceptable young ladies -- that’s about as far as you could go with it.  But again, I had no real way of knowing this depthy stuff.  I sorta realized I was handing myself over to be taught by this woman, this sage of the couch, who, at 19, knew a lot more about sex, life, love and pain than me or anyone else I knew. 

   She was beautiful, in an offbeat way, which is always better -- long, brown hair, amazing azure eyes and a slow way of talking or just looking into me and not talking.  And one day, she asked if I’d ever done acid.  I said no.  She said would you like to?  I said, with you?  She said yes, obviously.  Well, if there were a moment of truth in life, this was one.  Everyone knew acid was not beer.  Or pot.  It was some kind of potion that changed things, changed your life, opened your eyes.  It was a commitment, a journey.  You couldn’t turn it off.  It took all day, maybe all night, too.  Also, it was something used by people who were different - not ‘straight’ people who went to work at responsible jobs.  You didn’t know what box you were opening and what would come out of it -- maybe someone like Pandora.  I didn’t know it then but but Pan-dora was Greek for all-gifts.  Kind of appropriate. 

   How vividly I remember it all, working the quickie Saturday morning shift at Salem UPI, then driving to Portland, stopping just before her house and taking a picture of Mt Hood in the lovely October sunlight, far off in the east, about noon.  I would later label the snapshot, “last view of ordinary reality.” 

   She welcomed me into her old mansion in the hills over downtown and we didn’t seem to have any room for small talk or making out or anything - just the serious work of...dropping acid.  She walked me to a sink in the lower level where she lived and -- how the picture is burned in my memory -- bent over to take a swig of water from the faucet, then swished her darling brown hair back over her thick white corded sweater and swallowed the magic pill.  She bade me do likewise and I did.  We were kind of solemn, not joking around and saying ‘good luck’ or anything or ‘I will be here to support you.’  That was a 70s notion.  You just took it, bravely.  Very bravely.  I’ll never know what possessed her to help me through the door into the greater reality but I have always felt supremely grateful and blessed she did.  I was pretty straight.  But she saw the potential in me, clearly, to be wavy.  To be trans-dimensional.  And she was right.  I took to it like a duck to water.  I seemed to know its territory and demands right away and I went with it.

   The first part of the trip was called “rushing.”  You so knew you were taking off on a trip and that it was not like getting drunk or stoned, in the least.  You were shaken, taken, possessed, gently but powerfully unzipped and opened up to the universe.  We were in my car out front of her place when it really took hold.  It was like the universe began singing and our DNA were the notes.  It was unbelievable.  I was no longer me, this smart, tall, agile young man from the Midwest who was in control of himself.  That was a joke, an illusion although it was a good one and didn’t harm anyone. 

   We were hugging in the front seats of my Pontiac convertible and...I just held onto her and smelled her hair or whatever these billions of beautiful strands were, coming off her “head,” which also was the head or some part of a god or angel and smelled like it, too.  I could see the billions of tiny sun fragments pouring off each cell of each hair and instantly found them unutterably beautiful and divine and magic and amazing beyond anything I’d ever seen or known.  In fact, in a flash, I realized everything I’d ever seen or known was somehow not real, was two-dimensional, a ‘symbol’ of what it really was.  Like hair.  It was a symbol of fantastic universes and dimensions, which I’d never really looked at or understood at all.  You didn’t reason all this out; you just groked it and knew it and beheld it and were gifted by it and were divine with it.

  I pulled back several inches, so as to look in her face, a feat of unimaginable bravery and will.  I mean if her hair were that astounding, what would her eyes be?  They would be jewels in pools of consciousness, love and wisdom of such clarity and presence that I could only look into them for a moment.  I tried to speak.  I probably said something like, “Oh, my God, you...” but then I would realize there was no ‘you,’ not a being, an ego, a separate self from me.  There was this amazing universe of ‘it’ - this presence of, well, all you could call it was love.  There is nothing higher to call it.  And you couldn’t dream of saying “I love you” or anything so trite and romantic, as that implied that this illusion known as “I” had “feelings” for this illusion known as “you.”  These were all concepts, thoughts, head sets, conditioned romantic nonsense and you knew it intuitively and instantly.  There were no words for it, at all.  It was vastly bigger than any words or concepts ever used by any poet or god.  You realized at once that all the poets didn’t know shit, nor did all the religious leaders.  None had seen what I’m seeing now.  In fact, you not only knew that, you knew everything, such as that all religions were the most monstrous bullshit, fabricated from the minds of ordinary guys who wanted security in their own insecurity and -- power.  They had never seen this or they would never have made up such a bunch of idiotic rules and codes, all of which faulted...sex, by the way - and now you knew why.  Sex was “it,” at least on the human, material plane and that meant you were at the highest level of the human, material plane and didn’t need or heed preachers or kings.  But this.  This was way, way, way beyond sex.  So this set you free, not for life, but forever, and you knew that in every cell of your DNA. 

   I looked in her lidded azure eyes and let my gaze sweep ever so slowly across her amazing iris and pupil and to each lash, then the bridge of her nose and to the other eye.  It was a universe.  This was not a girl, a lady, a girlfriend, a chick, none of the above.  This was not someone you’d “marry,” whatever that meant.  Why would you “marry” this “person” other than to find security in some role, which was not necessary.  She was free and would love you if that’s what the universe felt good about and if not, then wonderful.  You would move on.  The whole idea of choices and either-or seemed completely preposterous.  No wonder this stuff was illegal.  It turned all society and its rules inside out with just enough powder to cover part of a pinhead.  And you thought about that and all the fear around it and your “mind,” whatever that was, just could not contain such an absurd concept and it would let it go and your eyes would wander back to her lips, which you would touch in the most profound amazement and you would say, “beauty” and you would instantly realize the absurdity of even that word.  You would look outside the “Pontiac” -- an Indian name from Michigan and how completely absurd -- and see the ivy growing up the wall and you would see its intent to stick to everything and spread all over and you would be astounded, like, where did it get this idea, because that’s what it was, a thought, a vision, a wish -- and with that intent, it would just climb the wall each year, on and on, forever and spread its leaves.

   She was also following my gaze and smiling at the ivy and its dream of covering everything.  She shook her head and touched it, tearing a leaf off and kissing it and presenting it to me.  I just stared at it, the veins of it, the way it was “dead” now, not “alive” but it was not the end for it, because it would go back in the soil somehow and feed the next living thing -- or maybe even me. 

   I studied her amazing lips, so rosy, rich red and she knew and groked that I wanted to kiss her lips and she smiled a tiny smile that ripped open the universe and showed me her teeth and tongue, these organs and instruments of...eating, of devouring “food” that we would “eat” every day and maintain this act of being “alive.”  Her teeth were beautiful and at the same time instruments of ripping, crushing, desiring, consuming, devouring, ingesting.  She saw I might “freak out” with such thoughts and leaned forward to kiss me very gently and I swooned with the mad purity and happiness and goodness of this kiss, which was just light on my lips.  I pulled back and tried to speak. 

   “It’s all I can handle,” I wanted to say but I knew that sounded immediately like I was an idiot -- for, after all, who was “I” and what were my limitations, which had never been tested?  I  realized how desperately I didn’t want her feelings to be hurt.  But she saw my fear of hurting her and stroked my hair.  Oh, so, no one would die if it were known that I were afraid and insecure and full of the most preposterous bullshit?  Yes, she knew this.  She had done this acid before and knew to say simple reassuring statements. 

   “Thank you for kissing me.  I love when you kiss me.  It’s all beautiful and I’m so happy I got to know and love you.”

   I could hear her voice coming up out of her throat and mouth and her lips making parting sounds that were so interesting and dear.  It dawned on me that she’d said ‘I love you’ for the first time.  But it sounded all different, not the romantic love where you had to say it back.  I just knew she loved me and I knew how she loved me and I knew it wasn’t the romantic “we’re going together now” kind of love.  There was just this love in, among and between us and it was so obvious that to speak it inferred you controlled this love and had “decided” you could give some to this other “person” but that was not love at all.  Love couldn’t be owned, hoarded, given, none of it.  It just was.  So all you could do was just try to breathe and keep looking at this amazing person in front of you and just know she felt the same as you did about everything, so...I just hugged her for what seemed like hours.

   I knew that acid did not “make” us fall in love or give us some special experience that bonded us, but rather, it was like ten cram PhD degrees in cosmology and how the universe and the heart all work - and that could never leave you.  I knew I was in some kind of epi-consciousness where I was watching how the mind worked and created this patina of “reality” over everything, then we believed it, as if it were “out there” -- as real as real could be.  But, now, I knew it wasn’t.  And if I created it and agreed to it, then I could create it a different way, couldn’t I?  And if me and a lot of my friends agreed that it was a different way, say, peace and love, to start with, then it was and there was no stopping it, was there? 

   I knew without a shadow of a doubt during that first trip, that the mind was not in charge.  Something else was.  Maybe it was, as Emerson in 1836 called it, the Divine Soul.

   We eventually went inside to her bedroom and got out paints and painted lips and faces and crazy stuff all over her white brick wall.  As I painted the faces, I realized they were “coming out of the wall to talk to us” and that’s what I wrote on the wall.

   There was no lovemaking.  That would have overwhelmed us and been so extremely organic, I might have started screaming at the sheer biology of it.  Sex.  Now that was cosmos stuff.  The stuff that created actual new humans and bonded people in...”love.”  Or something.  Not that I knew anything.  You got that old saying about he who knows does not speak (and vice versa) and you knew why the wizards didn’t speak about it.  But for a pill to do it! What a short-cut.  Was this “real?”  Undeniably.  The gods were being injected into us and our lifestream, our thought stream and they would never leave.  You just knew that  You were one of the initiated now and that could never be taken away.  You were smarter, wiser than any president, pope, philosopher, poet, anything.  And could you hang onto it?  No.  But, also, you could never lose it.  

   Ingrid and I loved for three months and then went our different ways.  I’m not sure that in the world of conscious, Sixties people, that anyone fell in love and were “lovers.”  It was more like we were shamans of love to each other, able to explore the vast dimensions of love, but not interested or ready to settle down and be a couple and have kids.  That would come in a big way in the seventies.  But she was my soul shaman and I learned more from her or with her than all other people in my life and I emerged a different being.   ~







Something Entirely New on the Face of the Earth                1967-69

There have been a lot of idealistic, ecstatic utopian schemes, visions and communities in history, like the Dionysian revelries and Eleusinian Mystery rites (for a thousand years before Constantine the first Christian emperor of Rome), perhaps the Soma visions of the Vedas (all now thought to have been inspired by psychotropic mushrooms), the Transcendentalists of mid 19th century America, the Lost Generation of Left Bank Paris, 1920s -- but nothing like the Sixties ever happened and we knew it when it was going on. 

   We knew it when we took that first acid trip, knew it beyond any filament of doubt, knew that our lives had changed forever and that that trip could never be taken back.  We’d said adieu to whoever we were before.  We knew instantly that this was our “real” self and that the old, conditioned mind was the “altered state,” not really “me” and that, by extension, all people living out their conditioned state were not in reality as who they really are and that all people fighting, screaming and breathing fire over their religious or political belief systems were to be pitied, if anything and certainly not taken seriously.

   We are conditioned to say, in our society, that if we realized something on a drug then it’s to be invalidated, written off, even scoffed at, because, after all, you were drugged!  But what LSD did was not so much pop you into an altered state or change your brain around with artificial chemicals as that it had that uncanny capacity to lift all the conditioning out and let you see yourself, life and the world without all the interpretations as just the natural, beautiful universe it was and that was truly a state of awe and if you think awe is fun and easy, well, think again.  It’s amazing and terrifying, stunning.  They didn’t call it mind-blowing for nothing.  It blew the mind away, that is, if you think of mind as the acquired layers of habit, action and understanding conditioned in us, supposedly for survival, by parents, the church, the media.  You got to have a day without that.  And the day lasted forever.  It would dim with time but you would never forget that you’ve been to the fountainhead, the source, the center of reality and found it completely perfect, right and beautiful and beyond any discussions about religion, God, democracy and any delusions that humanity is the highest and best living thing.  Everything just was.  Or is.  It just is without our endless layers of interpretation and pronouncing this right and that wrong, this sacred and that profane, this high and that low.  Your mind just couldn’t hold those dualities.  They melted and became one panoply, one spectrum, like, pardon the sentimentality, like a rainbow or butterfly.  It just was and it was just perfect and you were filled with awe and it’s very important to get that “awe” is what happens when the conditioned, limited, survival-obsessed human mind is confronted with reality and is unable to filter it through its conditioned, limited defenses.

   So when they made LSD illegal in 1966 after a bunch of bullshit articles about it causing birth defects.  We just looked at it as another travesty by our parents’ idiot generation and we saw Ronald Reagan signing the California law and then he and his pals going out for a double-martini lunch and getting hammered and being supported by their drugs in keeping their conditioned mind and smoking their weed, which was poisonous and we just got more “radicalized,” as we called it, which means getting more and more to the sticking point where you say, y’know I don’t care if I get busted with acid or pot and they have a file on me calling me a drug user and pictures of me with radical long hair protesting the Kent State shootings of students by the National Guard and I, god forbid have a “gap” in my resume (“where were you during the years 1967 through 71???), I have got to be me and go with the life and people I know and love.

   So, what was different about the Sixties from the other utopian episodes was that it was immanent, that is, it descended over the whole society like a vapor, a change in mindset, an opening of mind and it subsidized the individual with freedom, which is what America was supposed to be about (that was another hypocrisy that really pissed us off) to be and do whatever he/she wanted to be and do, as long as you weren’t “laying your trip” on others.

  That was a great phrase, widely used, like, sure, go ahead, realize anything you want to, paint it, write it, sing it, but let it be what it is – don’t lay your trip on ME.  Like if someone wanted to start pushing a whole big idea of how to live, well, fine, go ahead, do your thing, blow your own mind but don’t bring me down by laying it on me.  A lot of this was junkie lingo and we thought that was pretty hip because we knew hard drugs were as stupid as gin and whisky and the Sixties was about consciousness, man!  Not getting fucked up on life-harming drugs or life-harming anything, right?  Very simple. 

  The Sixties at its essence was also, of course, about love.  Tripping your ass off on acid, after you got over the shock and awe of the first hour (bummers were from trying to hang onto the conditioned mind, fearing that death of the conditioned defenses was actually death of the person), it was easy to see the love.  You were the love.  Every little stick and blade of grass held the universe and the universe clearly was wise, eternal and in love for all time and our inability to see that in so-called normal consciousness, well, that just invalidated normal consciousness, didn’t it?  It was all very clear.  We held that secret and we woke up every day with it and would throw off the blankets and look out the window and just see filaments of it streaming across the mountains and down the busy streets and everything was right with the world, not every second, but in some significant moments of each day and you would pass another freak on the street or catch the eye of a “hippie chick” (sounds so lame and banal now) and she would raise her two fingers in that happy, inviting gesture, the peace sign (again, so banal now), which would say volumes, like sure, why don’t you say hi to me and talk a little and maybe I will invite you over to my pad and we can maybe roll up a doobie and go down to the beach, then if we groove on each other (people didn’t say groove much, but it was a good word and captured the essence of mellow and do your own thing), then maybe we…we fumbled with a word for sex.  We said “balled” but most of the time we would just widen our eyes and say “wow, man, wow!”  Then you knew, ok, my friend here got to have sex with that beautiful lady.  We said “lady” a lot.  I guess it came from “my old lady,” meaning my girlfriend, a blues term useful to avoid the conditioned, straight mindset of wife and husband.  We also said “straight” a lot, meaning mainstream people and their things or events – also indicating we were not straight. 

   It was weird but we felt we were the “moral” ones.  It set up this disorientation, a cognitive dissonance thing, kind of like we were walking around with a secret, which millions of us young adults knew and shared but if we tried to tell it to our parents or politicians or any of the older generation, it would come out in clichés and gibberish, and they went away shaking their heads, horrified and branding us as people who only lived to ball lots of our peers and do lots of drugs with them and betray the flag being carried into a war against Godless communism.  So, you didn’t try to have these conversations very often.  Once or twice was enough. 

   And then the guys were letting their hair grow long.  If anything was the capper, that was it.  Hair.  Before 1967, if the hair even touched the top of a guy’s ears, he was, well, there were no words for it.  It just wasn’t possible or tolerable.  Even spree-killers had good haircuts.

   And the chicks were letting their bosoms flop around freely under skimpy garments.  Never happened before the Summer of Love, anywhere in North America.  Bras, hosiery and girdles were tightly locked down on the female form.  But when the bra went, the Visigoths were clearly spilling over the Alps into Rome.  It was the spike through the heart of Western civilization and all its Christian Soldiers.  And you loved catching the balding, potbellied, mouth-breathing businessman in his cheap suit gazing with faux disgust at those nice, high, loose young boobs moving in their filmy clothing and you knew, if even for a moment, that he got it and wished he was here with us, heading out on the open road, no job, lil bag of dope in the back of the Volkswagen bus, Led Zepplin blasting on the radio (there were no in-car tape decks then and cassette tape was just coming in).

   So, hey, WE weren’t starting any wars.  We didn’t assassinate anyone.  We weren’t investing in corporations that made nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands.  We weren’t over-using chemicals that led to alcoholism, disease and death.  Not to mention smoking, which had just been found, duh, to cause cancer.  We weren’t in dead, loveless marriages with bad sex or no sex and unable to love our kids or communicate with them.  So when the morality thing came up about promiscuity and drugs, we just said, see?  I mean, hypocrisy?  Dishonesty?  Immorality?  We knew we were right and right on and had opened the door on a big, new, beautiful world that would endure for the ages and eventually wipe away all war, racism and despoliation of the planet, though we hadn’t gotten to that one yet, the environmental stuff.  

  I heard about the hippie communes of Southern Oregon, checked around and located one and did a story on it for UPI, full of banalaties like this one: “All are dropouts from normal society and most came to their haven after deciding the LSD from which they’d been getting their kicks provided only an illusory escape.”  The story tells how they own no personal property, share everything with the 60 other members, go nude a lot, ake no drugs, even birth control or aspirin -- and honor all religions, holding hands in a circle and chanting om. 

   The story went all over the nation and into the offices of Life Magazine, which sent two young journalists out to do a cover story on it.  The wire service was intrigued by acid and wanted another story on how that drug shaped the behavior of the young, so I did a follow-up piece noting, “The rapidly growing hippie phenomenon would not have happened for another 100 years without LSD, the residents of the commune believe.”

   “Since society emphasizes ego at the expense of love, they theorized, “the user turns to love. The so-called ‘bum trip,’ they added, is caused by the overwhelming feeling of insecurity accompanying the stark realization that reliance on the ego and ‘success in life’ is ill-founded.’

   “The explanations came at an informal ‘news conference’ around the family’s hearth.  All said earlier use of the ddrug led directly to intense religious awareness, now the basic cement of their family.

   “We don’t need it , we’re so high on God,” one said.

   “LSD showed us the higher reality,” Nancy said, “and we try to live it. We were raised in a world of becoming, always working toward something.  Acid gave the flash and wore off in a few hours.  Now we have found the life of being in the spiritual world of meditation.”

   “Ron, a former professor of computer science, said western culture contained nothing to explan the total awareness and complete involvement possible through LSD, so it was natural for many who had taken the drug to turn to the intuitive eastern religions.”  

   Having just taken his first couple acid trips, your faithful UPI reporter, me, was able to write (freely larding it with his personal experience in his own generation), “It is commonly held among the long-haired set, they explained, that young people already dissatisfied with society tend to drop out once they take the illegal hallucinogen.”  Which is exactly what I did a few weeks after my life-changing stay at the commune.   The dropped-out wanderings, seekings, tripping and free love would go on for three years. 

   I went to New York on my way to half a year bumming around Europe.  John, the Life Mag journalist bade me stay at his pad -- that’s the way “my generation” did things -- and I did, for a few days.  He said why don’t you come to this rock festival in upstate New York.  It was August 1969.  I said, no, it sounds like a bunch of traffic and rain, which it turned out to be.  It was called Woodstock.  Oh well. 

   Off I went to Europe and within 24 hours was bombed on rose’ in Trier, marveling at this whole thing called the Old World, where this thing called the Sixties had only made a scratch. 

   Bummed around with a lot of kids my age, only one with hair, that I recall, a German guy.  Happy I was to get back to the US by Xmas and soon was smoking pot at a New Year’s party and people were walking out in disgust, wanting to evade arrest and a besmiching of their “record,” so my pals and I went to the party of old pal Tim, who had a bucket of mescaline and within half an hour, I was soaring and realizing this whole new dimension of, fuck, I don’t know, I would just have to call it complete love of myself and a smile that just would not go away.  What instruction for the coming decade!   ~





We Were There to Say Yes - and We Said Yes

   As soon as they started shooting us, as in Kent State, (protest of the illegal U.S. invasion of Laos) and you saw, at the very end of the Sixties, the sickening things done at the Altamont concert in the East Bay and by Charlie Manson and friends, and these were long-haired young people of the sort you would unthinkingly pick up hitchhiking, that threw a whole different light on what was hip and what was straight.  Maybe straight wasn’t all that bad.  Or at least, maybe it was time to think of having a small circle of somewhat freaky friends and maybe, yes, sort of settle down with one lover, maybe somewhere out in the country, where you could be close to the land and think about what mattered.  Maybe cut my hair.  Not real short.  Just pull down the freak flag to half mast.  Maybe start looking for some “meaningful” work, y’know, try to “work within the system.”

   That was about the time, in ’71, that Dirty Harry came out and we were sitting there watching this great character and realizing, hey, here’s Clint Eastwood, a right-on San Francisco cop and he’s hunting down this psycho kidnapper with long hair, a Manson type, and…who do you love?  Harry is as straight as you can be.  The long-haired freak is nuts and dangerous.  That’s when it finally sinks in that, ok, you can’t tell who’s who by their costume or jargon anymore.  Hair don’t mean nuthin.  And cocaine is named Drug of the Year by some idiots at Rolling Stone Magazine, I mean, hello?  Coke is not a magic potion, like acid, where you go off to Mt. Tam on a lovely summer day with friends to seek beauty and visions.  This is a REAL DRUG of the sort obtained from real dealers who, somewhere up the line, have real guns.  This is not what we signed up for, we suddenly realize, to our horror.  And Oregon starts to look real good and only a few weeks later this sweet couple comes tripping through Golden Gate Park selling LPs to get to Oregon, where they want to start a new life and they ask if we know anyone with a van, who can drive.  I say, “I can.”

   That’s how a lot of things happened in those shinin’ times of the Sixties.  It seemed like fate, destiny, the Universe being an active player in your life, give and take.  I mean that incident, where the sweet couple in Golden Gate Park in March ’71 asks if we can drive them to Oregon to start a new life (and maybe we wanna start one too?), that was just a little blip, really and we could have said no thanks, have a nice day (that expression, by the way, was started about that time by hippies, to say, hey, focus on today, which is ALL you will ever have and it’s sooo beautiful, we hope you see the amazing beauty of yourself, me, all of us, this day!)

  But that moment has made all the difference in my life, in where I spent the rest of my life, in the children that got born, the marriages that got made, the homes bought, the hearts broken and mended, the divorces, the many careers, the grandchildren born from that moment – and why did it all happen?  It was because I was willing to be there and be the conduit of the fucking Universe’s energy and meaning, if only I could tune into it and catch the glint of destiny, which I did and why did I?  It was because I was just “there” willing to be doing it, no matter how mundane or casual it seemed.  These people selling their LP’s to get money for the trip, instead of being desultory, downbeaten losers, had that smile playing about their teeth and eyes and it so said, here’s the door, come with us, play with us, we are holding the opening for you…leap!  It wasn’t the only time that happened.  It happened all the time.  But this one happened to control the rest of my life and I took it.  And I took several people with me and it changed their lives forever, too.  But it was because I saw it and recognized it as a main channel of destiny, not because I am or was so cool and aware and hip, but just because the Universe chose me to stand at that door and say, yes, open it.  That’s how it was in the Sixties.  It didn’t happen because you were cool or trippy, but that you opened your chest and life and all your fucking energy to this passage – and there were passages constantly happening and shaping the future and those with the balls to take them did.  And you didn’t open your life to these passages because you were brave or anything else, but because you recognized…no, “you” didn’t recognize it, but you were just present to say yes and you said yes.  You were SO part of a choir of things and beings and moments who were saying yes and you joined them and said yes.  It wasn’t you.  It was like Lincoln said, “the better angels of our nature” did this.  And it was plural, angels, not one angel, not me, but a lot of beings, joyously joining in that, so we got in my ’59 VW Bus and went for it, up the I-5 in that March of 1970 to Jacksonville and then the Applegate, where we found, for $800 this lovely cabin perched on a rock above the lovely green water of the Applegate River at the Calif-Oregon line and we bought it, on a gold mining claim that had maybe five years to run before the Forest Service took it over and we had a beautiful time for a year or more, building treehouses, learning how to hike the wilds, learning how to operate a wood stove and kerosene lanterns, tripping on acid on the middle fork bridge in the moonlight, whether summer or December, singing songs like John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” – how we loved shouting that line, “but you’re still fuckin’ peasants, as far as I can see!!”

   You mention transportation in the Sixties and what pops to mind is the VW Bug or Bus – and sticking out your thumb and, when you saw one of these coming, you almost certainly knew you were going to get picked up by some like-minded freaks and have a good time and speak the same language and maybe, very likely, get laid and lead onto – who knows? – but all this would be unthinkable now or really, after about 1974, as there came to be too many crazies and it seems most of them were drug casualties who let their inner self come out and it shoulda stayed back in the box.

  After the fall of ’71, it was like a curtain closed and we cut our hair and went into town and got jobs in tv and construction and bought houses and found spouses and had kids and raised them over the decades and that was never as clear or intense as what we knew and did in The Sixties, but it was beautiful and responsible and it created and cared for the next generation and god knows what they will do, or their kids.

  I don’t realistically think this happens very often in the timeline of our society, that the Universe so opens its energies to us and lets us yank on the levers of destiny, but it was so doing it in the late Sixties and early Seventies and you felt so confident going with it and opening your life and fate to it.  You knew you were in good hands, not the random dangers that were to come with the Eighties and herpes and HIV and gangs and crack and Reagan and greed is good and the buildup of the Cold War military to defeat, once and for all, the Evil Empire of Communism, which after all was a bunch of freezing, scared idiots left over for seven-plus decades after they shot the Czar and his wife and kids. 

   Those random dangers would start in the seventies and with a vengeance in the eighties.

   But so would a lot of other stuff.  Like cocaine.  Who would imagine that the unutterably beautiful visions, enchantments and ecstasies of LSD and the mellow, friendly, fun of pot would move onto cocaine and eventually meth and free love would move onto AIDS?  But it’s so the American way.  We should have guessed – if something’s good, then much too much is a lot better, right?  It’s the American Way that if you can’t fight it, feed it.  Take it to excess, then say, see?  We told you it was wrong, bad, immoral. 

   In the big picture, nothing succeeds like excess.  It’s the Hegelian dialect haunting history – thesis (the vision!), then antithesis (repression, nastiness, there will be blood), then synthesis (oh well, fuck it, a little won’t hurt). You see it with the Romans offing the idiot, unsexy Christians who would walk calmly to their martyrdom, defying all the values of millennia of the pagan world, then Constantine says, well, crap, maybe this can work, we can marry it to the Roman hierarchy and dominate by making the masses feel guilty about sex and killing, but of course we’ll keep doing whatever we want.  Then the church actually displaces the Emperors and all their excesses, then must decline of its own meanness, dishonesty and lack of fun, which is about where we found it in the Sixties -- obeisance to form, empty of content. 

  As far as bad drugs, I know it sounds lame, but we young, long-haired people of the Sixties could never have imagined it or wanted it and if we thought our mystical visions of acid, which we took as a sacrament and heart-opening journey (trip!!) would ever have segued to cocaine or any other such shit, we would have said only The Man could think of something so insidious, to destroy the hope and visions we had – and maybe that IS what happened.

    I have no idea what I was doing but I would take off hitchhiking across the whole US, just stick out my thumb and know the adventures would roll in -- and they did.  My stewardess roomates would just let me on their airplanes and I would fly across the country and just say bye and hitchhike back the other way, making love to the maids as I went -- and they would recognize and, without hesitation, pick me up in their little VW Bugs, in the back of which I would make love to one, then, when they switched drivers, would make love to the other.  And was there rivalry or jealousy?  No, it would have been absurd, limited, strange.  It was like we all knew this was only going to last a couple years before we got back to the usual jealousies and murders over who fucked who.  And the fucking was sweet, dear and lovely, though we were young and didn’t know how to fuck very well.

   One of my housemates, Cindi, flew me out to Boston and we went up to this Cape Cod home of her friends and did some kind of lobster barbeque out on the lawn in spring and we were young and gorgeous and mysterious to the elder generation and she offered me some weird green stuff from the lobster which she said was a delicacy.  They were all watching us, these two beautiful people and one of them, me, was hitchhiking around?  It was just incongruous but incredibly romantic and they assumed we were fucking though we we scarcely were.  We just loved each other and could communicate, ie, talk and talk, hour after hour as if we were old souls who had known each other many lifetimes, which I know we had and, in response to her offer of the weird green lobster food, I looked askance at it, with everyone hanging on each word and said, “well, as long as it’s highly prized and doesn’t offend” and I popped it in my mouth, to the delighted screams of all present -- and that was a typical moment in the Sixties, mixing all generations, food, situations, drugs and of course, the sex, which she and I shared that evening, though not well as, despite repeated attempts, we were just lovers of each other’s souls, not bodies -- and so you “Let It Be” what it is and that’s what it was.

   Typical of this age, I took off hitchhiking to New York and looked up Mariah, a former lover of some pal of mine in Michigan and she just took me into her bedoom that evening.  She was lovely, blonde and smart.  I just was not trying to screw women at this time or in any years near this time, so I just lay in her bed and was warm and close and good to her and as the hours went by and it became clear I was not going to try to fuck her, she straddled me, me on my back and took full control of it all, something I’m sure she has not known before or since and it was lovely, maybe as lovely and pure as anything I’ve known before or since.  It’s lodged in my memory that she took us to visit another couple the next evening and that the guy wanted to have group sex, which I’d never even heard of and begged off with an excuse (true) that I had a cold.  I took it as an intro to the seventies.  This was not the Sixties.  I did not want to touch him or his gf and we left.

   In the spring of 71, home to Lansing for a week, I found dear Jamie shopping for books in East Lansing and what a beauty she was, the dark hair, full lips, amazingly fetching stature of the quintessential maiden.  I don’t know how it is, but a man can know instantly that, hey, I could love her and have children with her -- and it’s passing before my eyes right now, so say something and I did.  I said I knew the author of that book she was holding.  It was Stephen Gaskins, a guru is San Franciso, whose fun lectures I’d attended a few times, an obvious, wacky, visionary stoner who was setting up The Farm in Tennesse and to which I’d almost traveled as his buses full of true believers left SF.  So glad I didn’t.  It’s just not me. 

   Jamie, 19, bade me out to her farm on the Lookinglass River about 10 miles out of my childhood town of Lansing and it was so outrageously open to the seed of the future.  Within an hour, we were walking through the lush fields of this farm she was renting and my hand was down her lovely pants and in minutes we were doing in it her barn and she, wittily, said, well, we got some seeds planted today.  The whole future was passing in front of me and was there for me to choose, a simple yes or no.  For weeks, we made love in her lovely farmhouse bedroom with the lace curtains blowing in the spring breeze and I knew, all I have to say is...yes.  Let’s do this.  She loved me.  All I had to go on was my heart and instinct and some amazing well of inner truth to chart the next decades of my life -- and she was hitchhiking to the dentist and getting fillings without novacaine, which was such a signal of her purity and power, as I saw power then, in my way, in my youth,  and I just listened to that inner voice and said...no. 

   I stuck my thumb out and disappeared into the West.  She would look me up 30 years later in Ashland and tell me she had four sons with an alcoholic jerk and moved on to get rich making some kind of nutrition bars for joggers and she was driving an expensive Mercedes. She said she could recognize me by my eyes.  I couldn’t recognize her by anything.  Had I said yes, those four boys would never have been born -- and a whole different scenario of love would have been played out between she and I, but in those times, you bowed to the majesty of fate and karma and went with that flicker of truth in you gut and that determined your life and the lives of many children.  And when she told me how her life had turned out, hey, I knew I was right in going with my gut.  The magic and vision and power didn’t deceive you and it only took a moment to know what to do.

   I would hitchhike all over the country, reading strange new books with strange new wisdom from America, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass, former pal of Timothy Leary in LSD research about how to be a Buddhist and live in the present, very popular -- and Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, about how to be a shaman like the elders of some Indian tribe in Mexico who could teach you how to go to separate realities, which we all longed for, by losing personal history, which we also longed to do and which may have helped us start anew, though it is questionable.

   I would arrive in SF, not knowing for sure what I was to do, certainly not paying the rent and working, though I did drive Yellow Cab and be a Kelly Girl for a few months, for pocket change, then off I would go again, hitchhiking with a fellow hippie chick and seeker who also didn’t know where she was going or why, but she enjoyed each day, up and down the California coast, as did I.  I don’t remember her name, but she was beautiful and leaving her husband or whatever he was and we loved being together for several days and making crazy love, but after that, no, it was over and gone, as it should have been.

   One of our roomates was dating a guy in the opening act for the Grateful Dead, so we would hang around them and one Sunday afternoon in Sausalito, about January 1971, the Dead got out their guitars in someone’s living room and -- after I fucked Vickie in my VW Van in front of their house -- we went in and sang the songs from their new American Beauty album.  It was just so crazy and right to be balling Vicky in my van on our knees with glorious happiness and passion, though we didn’t use that word yet.  I think my girlfriend Dolores was inside at the party as I was balling Victoria, but that’s the way things went then.  There was no guile, no lying, no greed about it, only doing the happiness of the Sixties -- and believe me, the old possessiveness and ownership of the lover would have plenty of time in the 70s to reestablish its claim over the human heart.  But not yet, and we knew it.

   At this time, we faced the first oil spill, which happened when two tankers collided in SF bay in January 1971 and we were out there cleaning birds and feeling self-righteous.  I fouled my fashionable Frye boots and sent a bill to the oil companies, which they ignored, but we made the first eco-claim, eco-remediation, eco-anything and at that time the Rolling Stone put out the first of its monthly tabloids called Earth-something and we all knew the Sixties was over and a new decade had begun, with new issues and demands -- and new satisfactions, that did not flow out of a pipe or pill.

   When 1972 begain, well, folks, you could just feel the Sixties were about over - and that a whole new world was opening up, one that bade us come into town from our cabin on the Applegate and get a job, settle down with a nice woman, one who maybe hadn’t taken much if any acid and maybe plant a garden and think about the children.  It was bizarre, the movement back to the normal.  I cut Louie’s hair out at the cabin, in the front yard, after he told me he had to get back to town and back to normal life and couldn’t do it with hair.  I just took the scissors and did it in about two minutes and it looked pretty good -- and soon he was sheetrocking new housing projects and teaching other former hippies how to do the same. 

   I took some self-timer pics of me with very long hair by the cabin at the end of that summer of ’71, then cut off my hair, all by myself, kind of a sad termination of a golden age.  I thumbed down to Santa Monica to see Jim and my also the brothers Eric and Bruce, who would become my best friends in the post-60s world.  I balled a chick who picked me up going down to Santa Monica and one coming back.  Both took me to my doorstep and into my bed and wanted me and seemed also to sense these were the final days of this epic period and we might as well be women in charge of pleasure, as we have been for years.  I was desultory with both of them, though they were lovely ladies and I’ve wished I could go back and have an intelligent post-60s conversation with them and share a bottle of wine and some laughs. 

   But it was over, the Sixties, and, driving down Crater Lake Highway in Medford one February day, I saw KOBI-TV and remembered them as one of the recipients of my political reporting in the late 60s, so I pulled a u-turn and went in to see about a job.  It was time to ‘go straight’ as they called it, and I did.  In minutes, the news director recalled my work and offered me a job, starting the next day, which I accepted.  I dashed out to Goodwill and scored some ties and coats, rented an apartment in Ashland and showed up the next day for mainstream journalism, which came back to me naturally and was reading the news live at 6 before you knew what happened. 

   I could and will sum up the next few years -- the last with any energy from the Sixties -- in a few lines.  I loved the time, feeling like a pioneer in this first wave of hippies settling in Ashland, buying land and beginning to raise children.  I met Carrie, my love of the next 10 years, at the TV station, where she had a woman’s show and I co-parented her dear daughter Heather, who was two at the time.  We rented then bought a lovely home in the country, in Ashland, with land and view and planted a garden.  I built a tipi, got in Reichian therapy, the first of many Human Potential therapies that would teach me how to feel and love and started my master’s degree in psychology.  We watched Nixon go down, got in the musical Hair, a blast, hung out with Ken Kesey as he did Bend in the River,  a citizens’ conference statewide about goals for the future of Oregon  We had a lovely life in the country, although it did not work out in the long run, me trying to love a straight chick and essentially marry my mother and seek to be redeemed to the American middle class. 

   You can’t change the fact that you got conscious and soon that would be accepted as my track, my home, my life, the real me.   ~








It Wouldn’t Last, But It Did Happen - and We Were There!

I’ve had my kids and also younger lovers come up and say to me, do you have any idea how lucky you were to be alive and grown up and young in the Sixties?  And I say yes, I do and I did then.  It was, along with having children, the most important, amazing and transformative experience of my life and I feel those changes didn’t just help me, but seemed to help the world.  Or the Universe.  It wasn’t just being done to “me,” this person with this name and mind and history, but everyone.  It was a gift from some unexpected corner of the Universe, given to us all, but only for maybe 1 percent to really get, like a song playing through the world and only one in 100 could hear it – and thank god it didn’t come with “god” and a bunch of bullshit religious interpretations and layer cakes to shove down your throat. 

   And yes, even though we weren’t very good at sex and had little experience with it, it FELT like we did.  It felt like we knew so much about sex that we could take it very casually, take it or leave it, look on the eyes and lovely young breasts of the beloved and just say, “wow.”  You didn’t want to say “you” are SO beautiful and sex with you is SO awesome and amazing (the word awesome wasn’t in common use till the early 80s, by the way) because that would be localizing it to a personality and maybe even building up her ego and that would suck (we said suck even in the early Sixties, by the way) and be erroneous because “she” wasn’t being gorgeous or sexy.  It was like all creation or the Cosmos was lifting the curtains on an eternity of it.  So we looked like we were experienced and “hip,” but we were just children turned loose in the Garden and we knew it – and no one thought it would end or go down the tubes.  You didn’t think of that, as that was the future and it would be uptight to think about it.  It would be ungrateful.  It would be unhip.  So, actually, we were pretty hip because that’s what hip means, to be given all the blessings of ecstasy and the truth of tribe and know it for how things are supposed to be.

   So, yes, there was a lot of fucking.  So much.  But to think of it as that, fucking, well, we just didn’t.  We tried to call each other “brother” and “sister” but that was way too corny and self-congratulatory and besides, who wants to do it with your sister?  But the abundance of “sex” – and the simple beauty of it – took all the charge off it, so there wasn’t the urge to get it, to get more, to have it, to know it, accumulate it.  You just let it be, which coincidentally, was the title of the Beatles’ last album, a farewell to the Sixties, put out in early 1970 – and everyone automatically knew what the words meant, though they were very ambiguous.  Yes, “let it be” what it is or let it alone to live its own life and destiny or just “be” – and let that happen.

  I think back on that time as a forest of naked young maids, smiling, taking off their tops to bare their lovely firm breasts and pulling me down on top of them, fully indulging THEMSELVES in this lovemaking, which I’d really never heard of before, happening to anyone.  But the chicks were enjoying it exactly on par with the guys, the cats.  And yet those labels chicks and cats, were like a joke, I mean, we SO weren’t that.  The women were way beyond chicks in beauty, wisdom, maturity and possession of seemingly universal knowledge of love.  Like, wow, man.  And the cats were not sly, cool cats but as a whole just silently bowed down to this gift of adoration, love and physical ecstasy from women – so much of it just before or after, sometimes during (though that could be pretty overwhelming) tripping on that “problem child,” acid. 

  We just fucked and fucked as often as we could, but not obsessively, as if trying to absorb some universal code that didn’t come down to earth very often, maybe every couple thousand generations!  And we sort of subconsciously knew that, but you avoided anything that implied a comparison or that insinuated we were better or deserved it.  It was...just...let…it…be.

   And there was humor, like nothing before or since as people would get odd connections and double-meanings and grasp incongruous scenes and start giggling.  Like the time I was fucking this chick Victoria in Mill Valley at someone’s house and this other chick just opens the door and says, hey Vicki have you seen the scissors?  And Vicky says no, maybe in the bathroom and the chick goes out.  And we look at each other and just let that crazy acid smile steal across our faces and notice the amazing color of our cheeks and in our happy eyes and just giggle, like, can you imagine that?  We may be the first people in a couple thousand years who got burst in on, while fucking, and we didn’t get uptight.  We both knew and appreciated – she’s one of us.  She’s on this trip with us.  Like, everyone we knew, anyone who would be in this house has gone through the awe and submitted their minds and souls to the transformations of acid and you just take SO much for granted in allowing them that freedom and trust. 

   Of course, it wouldn’t last but IT DID HAPPEN!  And we were there.  We saw it and knew it and were loved by it over the course of three to five years.  That was long enough to condition us to it!  And at the deepest levels, it overcame the old, nasty, fearful conditioning and we did know that.  We could still talk normal to normal people and go get a job for a while if we had to but now the deepest conditioning was from acid and it was cosmic.  No wonder they felt compelled to outlaw it.  It made you want to make love, not war, as the slogan went (a slogan you had a hard time arguing with) and you didn’t know why because you were overwhelmed with awe every time you took acid and if you think awe is easy, well, it ain’t.  Awe is the ego and its world dying.  Ego is the sense of self built up so carefully by parents, teachers and society.  You are killing that by the simple act of dropping this tiny pill or piece of blotter.  You are killing society or rather you are turning it upside down and arranging it with the most important and deeply felt values at the top and the dumbest and most needlessly destructive ones at the bottom or even out of the picture. 

   Acid pushed your face in the deepest question, which is how come we’re so good at making love and it’s clearly the most wonderful consciousness and action in existence, especially when combined with physically expressing the love, so how come our parents, government, media, military and the NFL is telling us it’s important to be good at making war or shooting criminals or any kind of violence, I mean, man, that’s just a mindfucker, which was a word we used a lot and it could be good but was mostly bad, like a conundrum, chiefly being played out in us being at war with who?  Charlie?  The Vietcong?  Who are they, really?  Communists?  That’s the opposite of capitalists, right?  So who’s the “bad” side?  We all know capitalists oppose Castro and lots of leftwing regimes in Latin America, and we want their resources and that’s why we try to kill them, right?  An occasional conversation would go that way, with a joint being passed around and you would have to sit in a circle, often on the floor and people immediately recognized it as a primal way for people to sit and we loved it!  And passing something around, so, like we were sharing!  And equal!  And each kind of feeding each other something! In that circle of stoners, people liked to kind of explore trains of thought and posit the official story against the story felt in the consciousness of the hippie and it usually ended up being pretty funny.

  And right in the middle of it, we would hear some song lyric that popped in SO appropriate, so cosmic, so a wink from the Universe, like the Beatles singing in Blue Jay Way and it went, “Please don’t be long” over and over till you heard “don’t belong!”  And man, we do get that!  And did we belong?  No.  We had dropped out, as it was called – and that took a lot of courage, by the way, to quit college, career, inheritance, bad marriage to some straight chick or dude.  I think the word dude came in the Seventies, so, no, we didn’t belong to that shit -- and by the way, if we had been restrained from saying shit and fuck in the Sixties, I don’t think too many sentences would have been completed,  in fact, you could argue “shit” meant “life” because we constantly would say gotta get my shit together or her shit is so untogether.  Like, your “shit” should be “together” and what the fuck did that mean?  What did together shit look like for a hippie?  Well, you didn’t let anything go too far.  Like a relationship.  You would do it and there it was.  But to obsess over keeping or losing it was not thinkable.  You had your shit together and though no one said or thought shit about “self love” yet in the Sixties, that was the logical extension of together shit.  What else could it mean? 

   Another weird modifier was “stone,” as an extension of stone dead, you could be stone groovy, stone together, stone cool, whatever.  It meant totally.  It was a precursor of Valley Girl jargon, which has also infested our culture and actually is omg so bitchin.  Actually, bitchin, of course, is a surfer word from the early Sixties but so deserves to live forever. 

  Anyway, the sex was amazing and actually awesome in the same way acid was awesome, that is, it flooded you with a sense of actual awe and as we’ve covered in an earlier lesson, awe is not a fun walk in the park.  It grabs you by your neck and shakes you and makes the hair stand up all over your body and you vaguely sense you could fuckin die if you don’t pay attention and honor it right and see it and learn from it and be humble before it but of course not like some Christian idiot sniveling in church or anything. 

  And the proof is in the porno – there was none.  We didn’t have low necklines or nudie calendars, none of that.  No sly jokes about a great ass, etc, etc.   It all just was in its ineffable perfectness.  Our art was in the covers of our LP’s (which I better explain, in case this is being read 100 years from now, an LP was a long-play record made of vinyl) and they were really something, as there was a subtext in the subculture about subconscious meanings of just about anything and everything.  Like you would see that scandalous Blind Faith album cover with the pubescent girl, about 11, standing out on a lawn naked, her tiny breasts beside a silver, very phallic, aerodynamic airplane.  What the hell was that all about?  But you got it.  God, she’s just a child, yet in her hands she’s holding the – what? – well, shit, it’s an idol, is what it is, of a penis and that’s about to become a major element of her life, the pipeline of seed for life and she’s starting to have feeling in her very pink, budding nipples and IT’S ALL COMPLETELY INNOCENT!  It’s not porno.  And we could all see it, the awe at stepping into the first moments of sexuality for this young girl, because we were doing the same thing!  We’d never fucked either!  It was all coming in pure on us.  We couldn’t deal with it.  That’s what all the straight people couldn’t know and of course, we couldn’t either.  It was all too beautiful, just like they say in the song Itchycoo Park.  It is STILL too beautiful and that’s why, like soldiers back from battle, we can’t talk about it.  You do NOT hear old hippies sitting around talking about the Sixties.  The awe scorched us, deeply.  And the pain of losing it made us close up like sea anemones, knowing it would be very hard to find again, though many of us have tried – and settled for Buddhist clear light, which may or may not be real or as good as what we knew and, I think is not.  But it’s what we have and we want some part of that, so, boring as it is, it will do for now.

   Or you would see the Beatles on the cover of their Abbey Road album and what are they doing?  They are walking in file across the street in a cross walk in various costumes or normal dress, as they felt or saw fit, with pretty long hair, it being 1969 and you would just look and look at it and you would see, hey, they are truckin’ – which was such a word for us, like “keep on truckin” which meant, again, that to truck was to live. Keep on living’.  Ok, that’s what I’m doing and it’s all that needs to be done.  Better to be able to truck on like that than to run a corporation and probably do harm and inflate your ego.

  The Rolling Stones and Rolling Stone Magazine and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” were all trying to get at that, which came from the old saying, “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” which means keep on rolling, that is, living. 

  And the Stones were the other British group and, while the Beatles carried the hope, genius and heights of awareness of the Sixties, the Stones carried the shadow, the Dark Side, the instinct that knew itself and liked itself, like the Bluesmen of the American South or the savage aggression, sexual awareness and self-possession of the Celts, from whose genes they sprang.  If the Beatles were acid, the Stones were speed and whisky and cocaine.

   No one can touch that music, but again, so much of it was inspired by quality acid that was everywhere available and free that to understand it, you almost have to be in that state.  Don’t try.  It might be fun for an afternoon, but you can’t get there from here.  It was the context, the set (mindset) and setting that wove the magic around it.  And it truly defined magic, because magic is that which can happen but not very often and not without the shared vision, passion, hope and understanding of a lot of people.   ~










And Finally, What the Fuck Was It All About?

Everyone really involved in The Sixties -- and it may have been only 10 percent of American adults under 30 -- was always aware of what it was about, keenly aware, and were able to talk about it with most long-haired, obviously hippie friends or strangers.

   It really wasn’t about sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.  Or peace and love.  Though it couldn’t have happened without them.  I think it was a case of the smallest number of young, inexperienced people in one culture taking the biggest evolutionary leap anyone had ever taken, much bigger than the Renaissance and becoming probably the first people in history, as Johnny Cash wrote in a song in 1972, to be able to say,

I can see clearly now, the rain has gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are re the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright, bright sun-shining day

   No culture of people in history has ever been able to say that.  But we said, knew, felt and lived it.  Do you know what it does to you to see your way clear to paradise, not after you die, but right here and now?  Yes, as Cash says, there are obstacles BUT YOU CAN SEE THEM!  Gone are the dark clouds that had us blind.  We know our power and promise, not as me, talkin’ bout my generation, but as us, talking about the full potential of humanity.

   They may have killed the Kennedys and Kings but it didn’t even slow the Sixties down; it just kept growing till...what?  Till the transmission was ended?  Till the bliss stopped?  Till we got the message and hung up the phone?  Till we were sure it could never be erased from world culture?  Yes.

   But when it was over, these time-honored miseries were dead - racism, sexism, gay-bashing, domestic violence, environmental despoilation, random wars, throwing everything in the trash, smoking, binge drinking, drunk driving, not listening, on and on -- even spanking.

   It made history not only obsolete, but boring, because no nation or hero had ever even talked about these things, let alone done anything about them, except maybe Ghandi.

   It was the summer of 74, which I peg as the true twilight of the magic opening, the end of the real “Sixties,” that Ken Kesey was at the house, having fun (we were all doing the Bend in the River citizens conferences), just shootin the bull about consciousness and the future of humanity and he says, you gotta read Colin Wilson’s “The Mind Parasites,” a scifi novel about a small portion of humanity discovering that human consciousness, as a whole, has been dominated for millennia by these alien bugs the suck our energy, hope and vision and bring us depression when we get wise to them and start freeing ourselves -- but this group figures out that the mind parasites aren’t really that smart and they devise a strategy to liberate the human consciousness from them permanently.  I read the book and could hear myself overthrow them and take my power back - and know I could keep that gain and they would never get me and they haven’t. 

    The Sixties was like that strategy, carried out on a mass scale.  Not all kept the gains.  Some did.  The freedom is wonderful, more wonderful than you can imagine.  The media and even participants in the Sixties often try to reduce it to acid, free love, great rock and peace marches but the heart and core of it was this shift in the human heart that can never be taken back from us.  If the hippies were a “counter” culture, that is, opposing the “normal”  culture in some kind of competition, well, we won.  Not by force, wit or being right, but by opening up that crack in the jail so enough people could see outside and know how beautiful it is and that our rightful place is as the gods we once assigned to live in that beauty and infinity. 

   But the truth is that we live there.  It’s ours.   ~






-- END --



Praise for Crazy, But in a Beautiful Way...

“Reading the book on the 60's and I'm really enjoying it. You’re telling it like it is and was, which is refreshing. You are addressing issues I have thought a lot about over the years, but are seldom talked about.  Congratulations on the good work.”     --Bruce Hornak