Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
2/15/2025
Anything goes #15
33 responses to “Anything goes #15”
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That’s a great old song, one of my GD favorites, and I know we’ve had this conversation before, but … the studio version is so much better.
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Unsurprisingly, I don’t remember the conversation, but I’m always happy to compare single versions with album versions. Single versions are almost always shorter: in this case the single version is four and a half minutes and the album version is nearly six minutes (a minute and a half more of those lovely Phil Lesh bass riffs).
The touching “Touch of Grey” moment comes on the album version toward the end when Jerry and Bob raise their fists in the air on “We will survive”, an anthemic expression.
This is a matter of opinion, but I think the album version includes more of Phil’s inspired six string bass riffs.
I listen with cans, and the stereo separation really works well in the album version: single versions can only play mono.
Come to think of it, they are both studio versions after a fashion. The distinguishing factor is album version vs 33 1/3 version. Both versions were recorded in the Dead’s mobile studio truck and mixed down from there. There’s just an extra minute and a half ripped out of the single version.
However, if you’re used to listening to the two minute songs AM radio plays, I can see where a longer version could seem TOO long. I’m not a Deadhead, but six minutes doesn’t seem too long for the song that turned out to be the Dead’s only top 40 tune of their career, and certainly it would have been the shorter version played on AM radio because AM radio doesn’t play six minute songs as a rule.
The Dead were a jam band, and, at least up to a point, the more time to jam the better. Six minutes is one of their shorter songs.
Is that how the discussion went the first time, my brother? Thanks for listening carefully and having an opinion.
John
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OK, I see now that the AM shorter version was, indeed recorded in stereo, although most AM stations don’t broadcast in stereo. At least when you brought it home, you could listen to the song in two channel sound, which is a point for the Dead and a point for you.
jtb
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You will be aghast to learn that my sound system for movies and music is only the built-in speaker on a laptop, so everything’s mono. Surprisingly not tinny, though!
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Oh, certainly not too long. I can listen to the Dead overnight and into the next morning, so it’s never too long. Just… better. How can it not be better, when it’s been tweaked to perfection?
I rarely actually watch music videos, so the moment when they raise their hands would elude me, sorry.
My favorite songs, I always want the extended version. But I also want the studio version. It’s like that dumb Bible story about cutting a baby in half…
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OK, this isn’t splitting hairs (and I have very few left to split), but there’s a difference between a music video and a video of a live performance. In the music video, the production is focused on the cameras — in a video of a live performance, the production is focused on the audience. When the two guitar players both raise both their fists, they’re saying We Will Get By, musicspeak for the more San Francisco version, “Be Here Now”. They’re certainly not asserting that they’re not going to die: hell, Jerry Garcia only lived six years after they recorded this song. They’re saying that they’ll go all in for as long as they have. The audience totally understands the message and cheers wildly.
Here’s another classic moment in music from 30 years earlier, but just as powerful . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TwULx_wDiI
jtb
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That video is visually intriguing, worth watching instead of just listening. But usually I don’t watch. Unsure I’ve ever even seen Jerry and Bob raise their fists in unison. Which I guess they don’t do any more.
So I rewatched the Dead video, this time watching too, and it’s goosebumpy and cool when they raise their arms. But a whole lot of the singing is off key, and for me the raised arms aren’t enough to overcome all the missed notes. Give me the studio version.
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The Dead specialized in close harmony, which is why they relieved Phil of his singing chores. Close harmony live is working the high wire, and very few bands attempt it. It’s much easier in the studio where you might get it just right on take 19. I can’t hear well anymore, but the guys are not far off. For a live performance, it’s damn well done. Sometimes you have to choose between perfection and art.
John
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And to be clear, my hearing deficit is not a pitch deficit, but a volume deficit. If I can hear them at all, I can hear what note they’re singing and hear the interval. On the other hand, I’ll be 75 tomorrow, so most of the systems are failing. I’d rather not go into detail.
John
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“Well, six white horses that you did promise
Were finally delivered down to the penitentiary
But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree
Alright, so where are you tonight, sweet Marie?”B. Dylan
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> I’ll be 75 tomorrow, so most of the systems are failing. I’d rather not go into detail.
I’m just a spring chicken, but I can vouch for that.
All systems no!
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My Sex Life
I’ve had sisters, twice. I’ve had twins. I’ve had a mother and daughter later. I’ve had a woman when she was nineteen and again when she was forty-three. (The second time she told me I had scared her twenty-five years earlier when I screamed as the blowjob climaxed.)
I’ve been with an Egyptian, a German, a Mexican or three, a Japanese, a Chinese, a Spanish, a Canadian, a Dane, a Swiss, and an African-American or three. The rest were all Gringas, I forget a lot of their names and faces.
Most were one-night-stands, the bad lays outnumber the good, and I take fool responsibility for sexual ignorance and ineptness.
What started me on this list quest:
When I saw all these cute girls here at the university (UPS), a block away from where I have been staying in Tacoma, I wondered if I had gotten my “share” of young nubile bodies back when I was a youth, and I tried to remember those early experiences.
When I was in high school my crush and I arranged to go skinny-dipping at a swimming hole behind Lindenwood College in my hometown in Indina. We were out in the water floating, each holding a side of an old tire. I remember her pert sixteen year old breasts, long frizzy hair, and a big smile…(continued 4000 more words, available upon request.)
The List: (ONS=One Night Stand)
1)(CrissF) 1969 Close (ONS) 16
2)SuziZ, 1971 BJ (ONS) 17
3)LisaW, 1971 Earlham First Time (ONS) 18
4)Vicki, Bill’sWife Hot 1971 (ONS) 19
5)Jean, 1972 BerkeleyJrHighTeacher (ONS) 27
5.5) Woman 1973 Pregnant FtWayne (ONS) 17
6)Trudy,1973 WatkinsGlen 18
7)Pamela, 1973 ThePath 19
8)JanS, 1974 InBackyard (ONS) 20
9)Woman, 1974 TruckersWife (ONS) 26
10)Woman, 1974 RevWindham’s Son’sGF (ONS) 24
11)Woman, 1974 WMemphisTraveling (ONS) 23
12)SusanSmith, 1974, CountryTavern (ONS) 24
13)Woman, 1974 MassageBookNYC (ONS) 20
14)Woman, 1974 April’sMother (ONS) 26
15)Marian, 1974 Cousin (ONS) 24
16)Nicki, 1974 BigHouse (ONS) 45
17)Keddy Ann Outlaw, 1975 6th st/WBAI 20
18)Woman, 1975 ChelanApplePicking (ONS) 21
19)Woman, 1976 CuteFellowHitchhiker (ONS) 17
20)Woman, 1976 EurekaBuhneSt (ONS)26
21)Y, 1976, 30
22)Woman)1976 GreenCar/YellowTowel (ONS)22
23)Woman, 1977 Arizona (ONS) BJ 25
24)Rita, 1978 24
25)Joan, 1978 (ONS) 32
26)Woman, 1978 MexicanChick (ONS) 25
27)Woman, 1978 Field’sLandingMistakenIdentity (ONS) 23
28)Cezanne,1979 (ONS) 19
29)Claudia, 1980 German (ONS) 24
30)Colleen, 1980 (3NS) 28
31)Julie, 1981 (ONS) 25
32)Woman, 1981, Allison’sSister, CokeInCar (ONS) 26
33)PatM, 1981 (ONS) 28
34)Dolan, 1981 BlueLake (3NS) 30
35.5)Marnie SprowelCreek 1981 (ONS) 30
35)Chizuko, 1982 Hippocrates 45
36)Julia, 1982 MatehualaGirlSet-up (ONS) 25
37)Davney, 1982 (ONS) 27
38)Raven, 1982 (ONS) 23
39)Woman, 1982, Davney’s Sister (ONS) 30
40)Erin, 1982 BJ (ONS) 19
41)Chizuko, 1982 Hippocrates 45
42)Woman, 1983 InBoat ChemiseMtRd (3NS)25
43)Kathy, 1983 (3NS) 35
44)LizH, 1983, ArcataHottub, (ONS)24
44.5) Woman, 1985 RedwayBlack (ONS) 31
45)Woman, 1986 Benbow/Scrabble/ (ONS) 27
46)Lissa, 1988 (ONS) 34
46.5) Caroline/Bird lady 1989 3NS 36
47)*(Marjorie) 1990 HeavyPetting 33
48)Woman, 1990 Helen’sFriendSet-upSF (ONS) 42
49)Bonnie, 1993 TexasLawyer 43
50)AllisonO, 1995 GrassValley (ONS) 42
51)Mary, 1995 36 Woman, FromCo-op,Scrabble 1999 (ONS) 36
53)Carol, 1998 UbangiBoobs, CriedAtClimax (ONS) 42
53.5) Margarite, PoetryMeetingMutualMast (ONS)
53.5)Joelle, 1998 BlackBubblebuttSetUp (2NS) 38
54)Woman, 1998 SufiDanceEureka (ONS) 40
55)Veronica, 1999 FromChurch (ONS) 42
55.5)Jennifer, 1998 FoodCoopMassageScrabbleGropingCameInPants 36
56)Mariah, 1998 30
57)Sam, 1999, MickyMousePajamas (DryHumpToO) (ONS) 31
57.5)Amelia, 1999 GulchTeacher (ONS) 45
58)Maureen, 2000 Paul’sWorkshop ArcataTit-kissing BJ (2NS) 45
59)Amelia, 2000 Manila 42
60)Rebecca, 2000 From Church (2NS) 34
61)Angela, 2000, FromChurch, five juicy times 22
62)Wan, 2000 AmTrakSeduction 49
62.5) Kathy 2001 Mateel (ONS) 47
62.5) Karen 2001 Hopland Mateel (ONS) 40
62.5)Adriana, 2001 MexAmerican (ONS) 45
63)Eila, 2001 Canadien 27
64)Laurel, 2001 PinkNippledLoverSet-up 34
65)*(Joellen) 2001 HonorableMention MakeoutSessions 25
66)Maria, 2002, 43
67)Cherai, 2003 EgyptianGoddess (ONS) 34
68)MariaL, 2004 BestSexEver 34
70)Woman, 2004 Trinidad (ONS) 43
71)Woman, 2005 FatEureka (ONS) 42
72)Marylou, 2006 TallWillits (ONS) 42
72.5) RoseMarie FreyWinery 9ONS) 2007
74)Woman, 2008 Rhonda’sSister-Maid Interview (ONS) 48
75)Stephanie, 2008 (2NS) 39
76)Woman, 2009 SunnyBraiFriesEater (ONS) BJ 46
78)Kristy, 2009 Eureka 35
79)Jessie, 2009 (2NS) 35 (2003-gave orgasm down by the river29)
80)Jeri, 2009 AustinRedBraCL (ONS) 54
81)Woman, 2009 AustinCL (3NS) 44
82)Gretchen, 2009 SmithRiver (ONS) 34
83)Woman, 2010 ButtUglyBurgerFlipper (ONS) 39
84)Heather, 2010 39
85)Fawn, 2011, GreenSingles 44 (3NS)
86)Mati, 2011 (ONS) 40
87)Sara, 2012 NCGoddess 40
88)Mingo, 2014 SeattleGS (ONS) 46
89)Neve, 2015 $ BJ+ 26
90)BB, 2014 (ONS)46
91)K, 2017 (Hot) 46Decades:
70’s—27
80’s—19
90’s—13
00’s—24
10’s– 9-
You mentioning you banged twins reminds me of the great film *Teenage Twins,* starring Brooke and Taylor Young. Their love scene is unforgettable.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyoUkM3W8AY7JRR?format=jpg&name=small -
Lindenwood College? Fort Wayne? Do you mean St Francis, near Lindenwood park and cemetery?
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Oh yeah, St Francis College, Lindenwood Blvd, another crazy night that year:
Acid Flashback
One late summer night when I was sixteen I left the house with my duffle bag and a four-way barrel hit of LSD called Orange Sunshine, and trudged toward the TV towers, Lissa, and the craziest night of my life. I took the drug, told my mother I’d be somewhere else, and obsessively headed toward my girl.
The acid kicked in when I was in a field near Lissa’s house and I immediately lost my duffle bag which had my sleeping bag in it. I didn’t have a plan that night except to connect with Lissa somehow. I made it to her house and she handed me a very thin white blanket out her window to replace the lost sleeping bag and I lost that also.
I walked through the weeds looking for it and each weed had a scary dragon face looking directly at me and making strange sounds like, “Eek! Eek! Eek!” Hundreds of these weeds coming at me and shrieking with their intense angry faces. When I got to one of the lawns in the half-finished development each blade of grass was a squirming worm, but thankfully not talking.
The full moon was a pockmarked gangster face and at the edge of its mouth was a fat cigar shooting out bullets to the beat of the kids drag racing on nearby Lindenwood Avenue on the hot Friday night. I wandered over there to a phone booth, crawling with hundreds of bugs around the bright light, and tried to call Lissa as the draggers raced by a few feet away.
Having failed in my quest to be reunited with her I went back into the field and came upon my sleeping bag: it was spread out in the weeds and on top of it were a naked me and Lissa intertwined and gloriously making love. As I got closer I bent down, the hallucination disappeared, and I saw that it was just the skimpy blanket she had given me.
I tried to sleep on acid: my breathing slowed and I entered a state of dream/hallucination, my body was plastered across the sky, and I saw all my internal organs, every breath, every nerve. And then I was on my mother’s knee and rocking to some song, a rhythm that was accompanied with a chant which went something like, “Poomp nex zeebil.”
(Wandering around Tower Heights high on acid searching for my sleeping bag and Lissa became a template for how my life turned out: an unconventional non conformist, and lifelong lover of marijuana, who dropped out and lived in the woods for forty years. I might be envious of your normal lives with everything I didn’t have: wife, children, grandchildren, and stable career, but might you ever feel likewise about my adventurous one?)
I finally fell asleep, awoke cold and hungover in the morning, and headed to McMillan Park for a horseshoe tournament which I won by beating just one other contestant. When I finally reached Lissa on the phone and told her all the details of my freaked-out acid trip, her father was listening in on the other line, and I was banned from seeing her. (Crazy times to be a kid.)
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We both grew up in Fort Wayne then… You seem to be my parent’s age, I wonder…
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I went to Northside, class of 72,
how ’bout you?
Recently connected with a Ft Wayne native who
wrote many books, taught creative writing for 40 years, a grade behind me: Mike Martone,
good guy, one of those post card guys, has sent thousands,
to the point where his recipients make scrapbooks of his mini-missives…Fort Wayne Memories
Junior High
We moved from Muncie, Indiana in the fall of 1966 into an old two-story rental at 3031 Lake Avenue in Fort Wayne (433-7084) when my father got a job teaching English at the IU-Purdue Regional Campus. Squirrels ran wild and unabated inside the walls and drove us all crazy.
Our next door neighbors lived in a new suburban-style house and were a very nice family called the Kreigs: Dohr was the father, who played basketball with us, and Phil and Melanie were the children. The next house down was another old rental where Gary Lutz and his sisters Rhonda and Luella lived. They were a little odd, maybe hillbillies, and we played around sometimes though Gary always seemed very serious. They were probably an interesting family in their way.
I was taught early on by my liberal parents that if anyone said the most toxic word in the English language I should have nothing to do with them and write them off completely. Anyone who said the word “nigger” couldn’t be my friend ever and so I had few. I did like to play Stratego with Steve Adelman at his home in the nearby Jamestown apartments which stretched from Lake Avenue to State Street.
My sister and I went to schools on the edge of town across from each other two and a half miles away. We usually walked together or if we were running late we’d run up Hobson street, with our violas slapping against our backs, to catch the city bus on State which dropped us off near our schools: R. Nelson Snider High School and Chester T. Lane Junior High.
Moving from laid back Burris Laboratory School in Muncie to Fort Wayne was disheartening but I was soon absorbed into the culture of lanes (X,Y, and Z designed to separate the gifted from the slow) and paddling for discipline. (“Hurt to help,” was the mantra Mr Hatfield and the other teachers said.)
My first year I was put in the Y lane, a middling student, but at least not in the Z lane. When my father found out the next year that I was still going to be in Y I remember him talking to the school authorities on the phone, as I listened behind the closed basement door, as he insisted I be put in the X lane classes.
Once I tore up a detention I’d gotten for some forgotten reason and the classmate to my right gleefully pointed it out to the teacher, Mr Lowe. I was taken down the hall to the bathroom and Mr Hatfield witnessed Mr Lowe giving me four big whacks on the ass while I dutifully held my ankles as directed.
It was the worst beating, the most pain, I’d ever felt, then or since, and now I wonder what would have happened if I had refused the punishment? I could’ve said no and walked out of there and seen what would happen next but I, and all the rest of the boys, had already been propagandized, manipulated, and subjugated into what I now see as a terrorist organization: the state of Indiana.
Why are assistant principals often the enforcers–the principals like to keep their hands clean? At Lane there was this huge bastard named Koranovich who wielded the board to enforce the corporal punishment police state mentality, which sixteen states still practice including Indiana.
(Decades later I drove south down Clinton street on Sunday, passed the Bill Anthis Center followed by the Lester Grile Building, and felt extreme disgust at honoring these former pillars of the Allen County school system. I headed across town to the Unitarian Church to keep up a family tradition: my cool grandfather, who took me and my sister to Mexico when we were teenagers, along with his new wife on their honeymoon, used to hit the churches to meet women when he arrived in a new town.
I imagined tracking down Mr Hatfield and the others in some nursing home, pulling them out of their wheelchairs, and whacking their hemorrhoids right back up their pompous asses: “hurt to help” indeed!)
I guess I had a weird snorting laugh and the science teacher Mr Budenz ordered me to write 600 times “I must not make strange noises in class.” After writing it about thirty times he called off the punishment after I agreed to never laugh again. (Cheating in school seemed low-class, repugnant, and unnecessary and I never did except for one time: our eighth grade basketball team was practicing on a Saturday morning and I snuck into Mr Budenz’s science classroom, stole a copy of the upcoming test, and still got a lousy grade.)
It wasn’t just beatings in junior high, it was also girls and I remember those early rock-hard erections when looking over at stacked and cute Sue Shepard, hoping I wouldn’t be called on to walk to the blackboard. I didn’t spank the monkey until I was nineteen when I discovered myself by accident in the bathtub with a bar of soap when I came back to visit my father in another house on Lake Avenue which he rented after the divorce.
I had woken up once feeling that warm wet glow of a nocturnal emission but didn’t realize I could make that happen whenever I wanted: Sue Shepard, you would have been mine, at least in my dreams. I must have been sexually repressed or self-repressed though at least I avoided the stress of hiding youthful onanistic activities from everyone, right? (I later became an expert and wrote about it in my classic piece “Orgasm Addict,” available upon request.)
There was a little pond behind Jamestown where I fished for blue gill a few times and once found a pile of girly magazines covered with some mysterious slime, I’m not sure if I made the connection but it made me wonder.
I decided to have a paper route but couldn’t get up at 4am that first day to deliver the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette and gave up before I started. Instead I got an afternoon route for the News-Sentinel and delivered about thirty-eight papers after school in a neighborhood about a mile away in the Lakeside District for a couple months until I made the eighth basketball team and had to quit.
Wherever we lived I had a basketball hoop in the backyard or driveway where I shot around all year, even in mud or snow. Once in a game when we were losing to Kekionga by about eighteen the coach said, “Modic, get in there and gun some!” I did and a few minutes later we were trailing by thirty-four.
Our eighth grade basketball team got creamed by Franklin, a cross town school, 63-12, perhaps a local record for lopsided defeat. Coach Fecher left in disgust, the team had to find our own way home, and at our next practice the coach made up derogatory nicknames for the starters. Larry’s was “Lucky Lindholm,” and mine was “No Moves Modic,” which was a pretty accurate moniker, to be fair. (Anyone who missed a layup that afternoon got the board, ouch again, dammit!)
Our basketball team was pretty bad and we only beat Northwood and Fairfield, a surprise since they were mostly black. (After that game we got jumped by some kids as we were leaving the gym.) The other black teams, Weisser Park and Memorial Park, pulverized us as they were big and fast: once when Major Bear, our huge center, and one of the Memorial guys both held the ball the Memorial guy wrenched it away with such force that Major came with it and tumbled onto the floor.
After basketball I went out for track where I was the fastest of the slow runners, also tried to be a high jumper, and once made it over 4 foot 8 inches, my best, doing the now antiquated “Western Roll.” All us slow runners got to run in one event, the 660 yard dash in 7th grade and the 880 in 8th.
After we moved over to Wells Street and the Franklin Junior High district for 9th grade I tried out for the football team. I washed out after an uncomfortable couple of days of practice passing up a rite of passage which would have probably made a man of me, along with permanent injuries no doubt. I put on those heavy pads on hot August days and I just wanted to be a kicker but there were no specialists in junior high. They tried me at tight end and I did (and do) have really good hands.
When there was a loose ball the coach shouted, “Ball! Ball!” and we were all expected to jump on it but I didn’t like that frantic action. I looked for a way out and produced an ignominious lie that my mother had made me quit, probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Later in the year when basketball season started there was no way for a football quitter trying to make the team which the year before had crushed us when I was at Lane, 63-12.
My father got me interested in the “Punt, Pass, and Kick” contest sponsored by Ford and the NFL and one year I won the local and went down to Indianapolis for the area competition. They gave us a Ford Mustang to drive down there and coming into the city we got lost and for a few minutes were driving the wrong way on a one-way highway. When it was my turn to kick I forgot to change out of my punting gym shoes and into my hard toed street shoes and thudded the kick badly.
The two movie theaters downtown were the Strand for thirty-five cents and across the street the Rivoli for twenty-five. One Saturday afternoon my older sister Jessie and I waited in a long line for the opening of “101 Dalmatians” and sang the Beatles’ “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” over and over in front of the Strand.
Indiana had an annual state-wide music contest for the schools where everyone went to Indianapolis to perform and compete for medals. My talented sister usually won five or six golds every year playing violin and viola solos as well as duets and quartets. I had played five instruments in five years (drums, clarinet, baritone, cello, and viola) and then got into singing. One year I went to the contest, sung “Water Boy,” and got a measly mercy silver medal.
In high school at Snider Jessie tried out for the female lead of Nancy in the production of the musical “Oliver!” For weeks leading up to the auditions our house resonated with the songs from that Broadway hit until we all knew the words and sang along. But the fix was in, the rich girl Barb Teeter got the part after her father donated to the program, my vastly more talented sister was devastated, and had to settle for the supporting role of Mrs Bumble.
(Later she moved to the hills, played fiddle and sang in multiple classical and contemporary groups, created CD’s of children’s stories as well as folk music, taught violin for years privately and music at our local school, and performed naked in a Lesbian punk rock band painted completely blue except for her bush. Now a doting grandmother of seventy, she’s still playing and performing.)
In ninth grade I sang “Yesterday” at a variety show in front of the whole school, wow, really? I wasn’t very stage-worthy, just sitting there looking at a photo which someone had suggested I do. My sister had run away from home and was missing as I performed.
She took off with another artsy theatre kid, took a bunch of aspirin or sleeping pills, got her stomach pumped, and came home. The next year she went to Indiana University on a full scholarship, ran wild like a hippie child, took drugs, and jumped on the stage at the performance of “We Bombed In New Haven” after the actors rhetorically asked audience members to come on up. She left college without finishing a semester and never took a class again.
My father liked to take family drives out in the country and when my sister and I smelled that deep aroma of cow shit we loudly said, “Mmmm!” pissing the uptight guy off. When we were teenagers my sister and I sang songs from HAIR in the back seat and when we got to the refrain of the sex song we really belted it out: “Father, why do these words sound so nasty? Masturbation, can be fun, join the holy orgy Kama Sutra, everyone!” He scowled and shouted stop that! I don’t think we even knew what the words in that song meant: cunnilingus, fellatio, sodomy, and pederasty.
(I later mailed in for two tickets to HAIR in the spring of 1970 when I was sixteen and as it got closer to the August 26th date I realized I wasn’t going to make it to New York and Broadway. I sent them to my grandma, who lived fifty miles upstate, and she took a friend that summer to see the show.)
The 1968 Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago and I desperately wanted to drag my fourteen-year-old self out of my bedroom (where I had a “Grateful Dead” poster and another saying “Drop out! Wasn’t high school enough?”) and hitchhike 151 miles up Highway 30 to where the action was. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies had already nominated a pig for president in the days leading up to the convention but all I could do was lunge out of my window and land on and smash an old green table. Instead I watched all the exciting chaos and violence on TV: Balboa Boulevard, Michigan Avenue, The Stockyards, Mayor Daley, Grant Park, a bloody Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite calling the whole show a police riot, and enough turmoil to turn off middle America and elect Tricky Dick Nixon.
My new pal Kevin Burke gave me his copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution For The Hell Of It (along with a stack of underground comix) and later when Hoffman published Steal This Book, a collection of instructions and suggestions how to do scams, I stole it three times and gave them all away. (Five years later I babysat Abbie’s three year old kid America when I lived in New York. His wife Anita had recruited me from the nursery school where I worked, and America played, and the next week invited me over for chicken dinner in appreciation.)
Some juicy stuff, my first kisses, happened when I was in 9th grade and Linda Gresham, the holy roller down the ally, invited me to a “make-out party” which included another boy and girl. She and Mike made out on one end of the couch while Janne Dorsett and I did on the other. How did we break the ice, start kissing? I don’t remember, we were pretty innocent, and there was no French kissing or petting. She was an 8th grader with longish blond hair and wore a road sign round her neck which said “Soft Shoulders.”
She sent me many notes after that and I responded in kind. Her messages became elaborate, like she was infatuated or in love, the last one written on a piece of rawhide, so Indiana. Finally I’d had enough and burned all her notes, very unlike me as I’ve saved everything else and wish I had them today. (She said she would love me forever but when I found her a few years into our adulthood she wasn’t interested anymore.)
I never played spin-the-bottle, doctor, or any other harmless dirty game when I was a kid—I was deprived! I wonder if they play spin-the-bottle at adult retro parties today? Probably, I want to, I want to play spin-the-bottle before I die! (And what about The Prom? I never went, is it too late?)
In 9th grade I often played basketball with Kevin one-on-one in his backyard where his pretty family had built a beautiful house up in the woods above Franke Park. His team was “The Weathermen” (which he had stenciled on the back of his beige shirt) and mine was the “NAACP,” reflecting our relative radicalism.(His lawyer father ended up representing my mother in the divorce trial and we never heard the end of “Pin-head Burke” from my father after that.)
Kevin and I took the train up to Chicago one weekend to see a Cubs game and stay with his uncle and I was amazed to see hippie dealers selling weed openly in Grant Park. It was on that trip that I experienced the first of my seven “amazing coincidences” when we saw some undercover cops grab a guy right off the El Train and the next day at Wrigley Field the same two undercover operators grabbed someone else right out of the bleachers. I don’t remember the score but the Cubs probably lost.
High School
We both went to LRY, Liberal Religious Youth, the group at the Unitarian Church. I usually walked across town a few miles, along the tree-lined avenues of old elegant houses to get to the modern arty-looking church on the edge of Foster Park on the south side of town across from the Jewish Temple.
It was a small group, nice kids, one hottie and her sister not so. We called ourselves the James Reeb Club in honor of a Unitarian minister who was murdered by racist thugs in Selma, Alabama after answering Martin Luther King’s call for clergy to get involved in the civil rights movement.
Our big deal was church conferences every few months: An LRY group from out of the area invited us for the weekend and the seventies would ensue! Our group went to Cincinnati one weekend and Dayton later.
At the Dayton conference there was a small room full of huge pillows and chunks of foam thickly spread all over the floor, a strobe light was flashing as rock music played, and the object seemed to be to roll around in there with others and see what happened. When I went in, there was a girl named Dara there, we brushed against each other, cuddled a little and embraced. I got excited and turned on, flushing and tumescent, and looked for her for years after that but never saw her again.
(We were the hippie church, the godless church, god-lite, or the Unitarian Meat Market as I liked to call it thirty years later when I was back in town helping out my sick old man and having flings with some those those eager church ladies.)
Our group hosted Bloomington’s LRY group and my sister let us use her $50 a month apartment in the arty district on the westside. There were no adults chaperoning, just a group of kids crashing in sleeping bags on the floor. I had my sister’s rollaway bed, had met a very friendly and forward lassie named Criss Farmer at another conference, and had been getting to know her by exchanging letters.
She joined me on the narrow bed and we began snuggling, cuddling, touching, seeing what might happen, and was I really going to lose my virginity at sixteen? The bed squeaked loudly in the little studio apartment and I was so embarrassed to be heard by the other kids that I disengaged from randy Criss. (Now, over fifty years later, I’m trying to contact her to ask if she had planned to ravish that innocent virgin boy that night?)
I probably wouldn’t have known what to do if I’d found something in my hand, like a vagina, but Criss seemed experienced, being a professor’s daughter from a hip college town, and she probably would have guided me into where I should have known I needed to go. (If I were back there now I’d kiss her, touch her, stick my hands in her pants, and just relax and enjoy myself, but alas. Criss got way into Scientology and when I found her online a few years ago she still was into it, which seemed a little scary.)
Kevin invited me to do some acid and we camped out in a tent in his backyard with his younger brother and their little excitable dog. It might not have been exactly LSD, maybe cut with speed, and we were up all night talking and laughing and for some reason frigged the little dog occasionally.
In the morning Kevin reported his elicit, though possibly not very “mind-expanding,” drug experience to his parents who immediately took him to see a psychologist while I stumbled home in a hazy groggy afterglow. There were no more epic Weathermen vs NAACP basketball games.
When we got to high school age Linda Gresham and I used to make out and practiced deep French kissing just for fun as I couldn’t get past the religious thing. One day our water was out, she offered to let me take a shower in her house, and I thought it would be funny to walk into the living room naked with an erection and shock the little Christian.
I was clueless with girls but did have a make-out session with Ann Jones downstairs on the couch as her family slept. Her father was an undertaker at Sloan Mortuary and she had a nice sister named Jennifer who I also liked. I had a date with a Lesbian named Mykie Andrew. My father refused to let me drive his old car so Mykie’s father lent me his. Downtown we had an accident in an intersection, I took Mykie home, and we never saw the movie.
I went to a New Year’s Eve party at Kathy Miller’s house, who I had a crush on, on Spring Street and when the clock struck midnight my hand flew into the air, hit the low basement ceiling, and I still have the faint scar on my knuckle. Mike Leach and I used to play pinball at that sleazy motel on the way to Gateway Plaza, then I went alone later.
I was a cut-up in school as I went for class clown and one day I squirted the French teacher Miss Hess on her back with a squirt gun. Another day I went into the classroom early, pulled down the movie screen, taped a naked centerfold from Playboy on it, and just like it worked where I saw it in a comic book, she pulled down the screen and exposed that random naked lady.
At Northside a group of us, the outsiders, the hippies, the protestors, sung the “air song” from HAIR but we had been programmed to behave so we self-censored and cut out the words, “Welcome, atomic orgasm,” from the performance, what weenies!
I was lucky enough to have a high school sweetheart, or major crush, and I guess she was freaky enough to like me too: once following an after school snack at Tastee Freeze she lit a fire in a cup and we ran out of there. She had smooth hair when I first met her then let it frizz out majestically. Once we took acid and went to school; it was too much for me and I had to leave chorus class with Mr Holloway but Lissa hung in there with that tiger-colored outfit she liked to wear.
She invited me to go skinny-dipping in a little pond near her house behind Lindenwood College under the TV towers at the edge of town. She had that long frizzy hair, a big smile, and cute teenage tits. We floated out in the water holding onto opposite sides of an old tire for awhile as we talked and gazed at each other, so innocent I didn’t know what to do with her.
When I was sixteen I stole a couple bottles of Mateus and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and with pockets full of bottles met Lissa at one of the nearly finished houses being built in her suburban addition called Tower Heights. We drank most of it, there were some drunken kisses, and I staggered toward home.
My best friend Tim Mills met me by the Gateway shopping center, called a strip mall today, and in my drunken exuberance I pushed a shopping cart while running, let it go, and watched it roll along the walkway where it veered left and bounced into an off-duty policeman’s car. He called a squad car and as I was being driven downtown I knew I had a joint in the inside pocket of my sports jacket but was so drunk I couldn’t get it together to ditch it or eat it. Tim had once said to me, “Why do you carry that joint around? Just so you can be busted at any time?”
I was sitting in the police station after they found the joint, barfed copiously on the floor, and my parents were called. My mother contacted her friend Hugh Martz, the director of the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission, and somehow he got me out of there without charges. “I pleaded middle class and got off,” I have been fond of saying ever since.
Lissa and I arranged to have a sleep-over at Patti McMahon’s house. Patti’s’ morbidly obese mother was one of those parents who let her kid do anything, like smoke cigarets and have friends overnight. Lissa and I had each told our parents we would be somewhere else and we met on the living room floor naked on our sleeping bags, two virgins wanting to do it.
I was clueless and had never heard of the words foreplay or clitoris. (What’s that? Where’s that?) Did I kiss her? Talk to her? Touch her? No, I just clumsily tried to mount her like an animal, I can still see her alarmed expression as she squirmed away, and we were still virgins in the morning. (I tried to contact her recently to apologize or congratulate her and ask if she remembered any of that and what it meant to her then, but she ignored me because when I last saw her I committed my all-time verbal faux-pas and deeply embarrassed her in front of her new husband. I apologize effusively Lissa, if you’re reading this.)
We met secretly after that in the woods near her house, attempted sex again on the bare ground, but I came up soft. I didn’t know how to kiss, touch, or fuck and twenty years later still didn’t know how to pleasure a woman properly. (When I was thirty-eight a lover taught me what she liked and I finally had a clue. Through the decades, though I was often isolated, depressed and lived a lonely life, ninety-six horny women spread their beautiful legs for me.)
Lissa finally dumped me, broke my heart, and put me into a deep depression when she started going out with this older guy, Terry Doran, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. He picked her up after school in his old sports car and they drove off, probably to have sex, dammit! I guess she wanted a man, not a boy. (We did finally get together years later for a one-night-stand when we were both back in the old home town and she told me that when her father was dying he was hallucinating me.)
After Lissa dumped me she and Tim got to be good friends too. He lived right near Northside High so it was easy access to hang out. (At the 25th Reunion Tim kept trying to tell me something but I brushed him off, thinking he was referring to one drawstring being longer than the other on the rain jacket I was wearing. Later I realized he was trying to tell me that the size strip was still attached to the new pair of jeans I’d just bought for the occasion. When I told him I’d heard that Kathy McMahon had died he was bummed out for the rest of the night, and now Tim is gone too.)
One night Tim and I cut through a ratty neighborhood on our way to Gateway Plaza to see what was on the Lincolndale Drive-In movie screen. Some sketchy-looking adults accosted us and made us sit on the street, captured and held prisoner. Finally the bullies let us go, we continued on to Gateway, and I never thought about that odd experience again.
Larry Bowers hired Tim and me to dress up as Revolutionary War soldiers and stand at the door of his house welcoming guests to a cast party for the college production of “1776!” Somehow I found myself on the edge of the large sloping lawn with my face pressed against the bare breasts of a happy drunk coed, a very exciting experience for a high school virgin, and for weeks after that I tried haphazardly to find her.
After surviving Vietnam, Dan Ray hung out with us and tripped on acid a lot with Don Culver and Tim. (Don once said he’d tripped over 400 times, definition of a burnout if true.) Ray got together with Lissa’s sister Jan, they got married, and then he got a job at the city garbage company. On his first day at work he jumped into the back of the truck to push something down, the compactor started up, his hair got snagged, and he was fatally crushed with the garbage.
The next year Kevin got me into taking summer school with him for some reason and our Indiana History class took the obligatory tour of Chicago’s museums including the notable Field. On the way back I sat next to and got friendly with Suzy Zirzow, we kissed, petted, and it got pretty with us hot on that bus. We had an exciting date later that fall on a snowy night, high on weed, and driving on the icy roads outside Ft. Wayne. Suzy’s little Ford Falcon hit a patch of ice, spun around, and came to a stop on the berm.
We were fooling around and I took off her panties, lowered my head, and was probably just sort of lapping around down there. Eventually Suzy said, “When do I get my turn?” and she gave me a blowjob, my first real sexual experience.
(A couple years later Suzy wanted me to streak the radio station where her boyfriend worked as the DJ. When we got there we stripped down, ventured into the broadcast room, and were met by Larry Bowers again, now the station manager. I announced loudly on the air, “This is a streak to impeach Nixon!” It was the summer of ’74 after all.
Ten years after that Suzy and a boyfriend visited me in my off-grid cabin in the woods with the big ocean view in Whale Gulch, California. They were living in Dahlonega, Georgia, I came to visit, and put some money down on a piece of land by a lake. I first tried to put the property in my sister’s name and when that didn’t work out I put it in Suzy’s. I never heard from her again.)
Our family trips were usually a quick jump a couple hundred miles over to Cleveland to visit my father’s side where we stayed with grandma on 126th street and went with her to Catholic Mass a few times, the priest still giving it in Latin. I played all the sports with my cousins while the parents visited with the very nice aunts and uncles.
About once a year we did a quick overnight in Cleveland then spent the next day on a long grueling drive back east across Pennsylvania, through all those tunnels on the turnpike, to visit my mother’s side in New York, Massachusetts, and up to New Hampshire. (Once, for some oddball reason (“Impulsive Paul” was one of my nicknames) I sent my cool grandma a joint from Mexico and many months later as we were unpacking I found one in her parking lot! Could it be? Well, it was slo-mo smuggling but it got the job done.)
When we were visiting my cool grandpa in Boston we went over to Cambridge and I scored some marijuana, probably Indiana ditch weed, from a hippie in Harvard Square. On our way back to Fort Wayne we visited our old Muncie friends, the Heimers, in Indiana, Pennsylvania and their daughter Kim traded me a hit of Purple Haze acid for some of the marijuana.
Later that summer I flew up to Minneapolis for $30 on TWA to visit my sister who had recently moved there. It was during her shoplifting phase and on my birthday she ducked into a store and stole me a book for my birthday present titled What To Do Until The Messiah Comes.
I went out to a rock festival with some of her friends on the nearby Apple River in Wisconsin, featuring Long John Baldry, Little Richard, and It’s A Beautiful Day and I swallowed the hit of Purple Haze that Kim had given me. I sat there reading Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut waiting for the music to start, and realized the LSD was coming on when I noticed I was reading the same sentence over and over and over again.
I decided to visit Nancy Visser, my good friend from Burris Lab school in Muncie, in Emporia, Kansas where they had moved for her father to be president of Emporia State. My cool Grandma was driving west to take her grandson Ricardo, my cousin, back to his family in Los Angeles and was going to drop me off in Kansas along the way.
She let me drive and on a clear summer day I hit a ladder on crowded Interstate 465 outside Indianapolis at 70 mph. We got completely turned around, I found myself driving headlong into an oncoming semi-truck, veered toward the shoulder, glanced off a brown sedan, and banged into the guardrail to make sure I was off the road. (That accident would lead to losing my cherry, followed by an international espionage incident.)
The car was totaled, we were all shaken up, Grandma and Ricardo headed to the train station to continue their trip to LA, and I thought I’d try hitch-hiking on a private plane at a nearby small airport. I turned down a free flight to Jackson, Mississippi and headed back onto the Interstate to hitchhike west. Just outside the airport a young brother-sister combo picked me up and took me back to the entrance ramp.
I slept out that night and the next day got as far as Topeka where I got hung up for a couple hours and out of frustration and boredom started making silly hitchhiking signs like “Heaven,” “Russia,” “China,” and “God.” I was so proud of my absurd signs that I ran to the other side of the road going east to wave my wacka-doodle dandy there also, as the nearby police started to get interested in the spectacle.
I finally got to Emporia and the only thing I remember about that visit with Nancy was watching a movie called “Dr Phibes,” that her older sister Betty was a vegetarian, and it was the first time I’d heard the term “veggies.”
That fall I was visiting Larry at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana and
he said someone there knew me. It was Lisa, the sister from the car that picked me up outside Indianapolis, majoring in the popular Chinese studies program there. That night we got it on at the edge of the cemetery where I buried my last three joints along the fence line, never to be retrieved. (A couple years later there was a story about Lisa on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, expelled from China as a suspected spy.)
After the clown job and the paper route I got a couple of phone solicitation jobs and hated them—one was trying to sell tickets to the policeman’s ball. I got a job as a parking lot attendant downtown for $1.35 an hour and decided to organize the attendants into a union. I was tripping on mescaline as I made the rounds one afternoon passing out cards from the AFL-CIO but then I met an IWW guy who got to me and said that was the way to go. It got confusing so I gave up that crusade. (My sister got heavily into those little white cross speed pills for a while and once we tripped together at home on mescaline sulphate. She sat on the back porch laughing and said, “Look, I’m feeding the ants ice cream!” as she tossed spoonfuls onto the ground.)
Terry Hirons hired me and her to help paint a house and when we were done he didn’t pay us. I sued him in small claims court, won the $90 judgement, but he skipped town. Another painter hired me to paint and do his dirty work: a couple times he sent me up on a tall ladder to spray poison on the wasps’ nest below the eaves. After that he had me painting a garage out in the suburbs and as I worked I distracted myself by planning a bank robbery, going over and over all the details. (I saved nearly every dollar from my teenage jobs, read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, went on the road when I was seventeen with nearly $500, and was the richest hitchhiker out there.
We lived on a hill across from the Sol A. Wood jail for teenagers and during winters we sledded all the way down to Mildred Street. Once for Christmas my younger sister and I bought cheap little toys and brought them over to give to the delinquent boys.
I heard about the 1896 pollution law where you could turn in companies for polluting waterways and get a major share of the fine. I went out in a row boat on Spy Run Creek, collected samples downstream of Dana Corp, and took them to a science teacher at IU-Purdue. Nothing came of it though the professor, who had a hot wife or girlfriend, later killed himself.
One night I went out with a bottle of spray paint, sprayed “Stop The Killing” on the draft board, an omega on the courthouse door, and a peace sign on the library. Years later I could still see the outline of the peace sign on the wall.
After Kent State I pulled our flag at Northside down to half mast, twice, and finally Principle Anthis came out and chased me off. I really wanted to go to Kent State to protest, got on the highway to hitchhike, but then changed my mind and went home.
There was going to be a big moratorium demonstration against the war back east which I really wanted to go to but had gotten into a play called Aesop’s Fallibles, to be performed at the Presbyterian Church downtown. I was playing a rabbit and wondered how I could get out it and go to the protest? (I considered burning down the church.)
I wrote Ann Landers a letter, probably about family turmoil, and she wrote me back a reply. I wrote Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black a letter questioning my school’s right to make me cut my hair and he wrote me back telling me to work it out with them. When I left home I didn’t think about them again and by the time I did years later they had disappeared.
My father went to a psychiatrist and my mother also later. Once they had a session together and I was invited to give my family input. It was interesting to see them cowed under a higher authority, Dr Trier, but I forget what I contributed to the meeting.
Soon after that I snuck through the office, crawled past the receptionist’s desk, and crashed a session. My parents and the shrink were upset and he threatened to call the cops. (During one visit back home I organized the household jobs for my sisters to do and attached the list to the refrigerator.)
I liked to listen to the Larry Glick Show out of Boston at night on AM radio and when Miss Nude Universe was performing at the Gibson Club downtown I arranged for Glick to interview her. (So helpful!)
After I had taken Indiana History in summer school Northside High was being renovated, the periods were shortened to forty-five minutes, and there were ten: half the school went in the morning, the other half in the afternoon. I decided to go all day and took ten classes including Sociology/Econ with the seniors.
I met Kathy Fry and went with her and her Brethren church group to Chicago for “work camp” at Douglas park where we painted a rundown building. I had a crush on her, we slept next to each other on site with our sleeping bags touching, and there was a moment there but nothing happened.
Cloudi Koletski was an German exchange student staying with the Fry’s and we went to a movie, Andy Warhol’s “Trash,” starring Joe Dellessandro. (We wrote letters for years and in 1979 I visited her in Marburg, Germany where she was studying medicine. Every time I drifted into sleep she jabbed me rudely awake because I was snoring.)
The Brethren were antiwar, pro-social justice, and nice fun people. I went to their summer Camp Mac for a week where at the variety show some of us performed a skit from The Firesign Theatre: “The broken bones, the broken homes, the total degradation of you, the little people,” and on and on. I met Patti Opper there, a hot cool girl from Mamaroneck, New York, we exchanged letters for a while and I was obsessed with her but never saw her again.
I started my first marijuana seeds in the basement under a fluorescent office light and once the meter reader went down there. I didn’t know anything about male or female, leaves or buds, or how much light to give them. I transplanted one on the side of the house in the sun but my father pulled it up when it was a couple feet high, thinking it was just a weed. I gave Larry the other one, he transplanted it on his father’s land just outside of town, and never came back to water or check on it.
I met Larry through the church and he had also been at Lane when I was there. He was an adventurer and one summer joined a traveling carnival for a week or so and made forty-five bucks.
I ran away from home on the Fourth of July, 1971, four days before my seventeenth birthday. Larry and Randy Fry had decided to hop a freight train to Ocean Grove, New Jersey and invited me along. I asked my parents, they said no, and when I was leaving my mother tried to block me from going out the back door but I burst through her arms and out into the neighborhood.
A couple blocks down the street I used a school chum’s phone to change the pickup point, hid behind some bushes, watched my mother riding my one speed Schwinn around looking for me, and saw my father go by in his beat-up Dodge Polara a few times. We got to the train yards near the evening fireworks display but the train we wanted to take going east was going too fast so instead we jumped on one going west up to Chicago as the fireworks exploded above us.
It was a bouncing uncomfortable experience and I vowed never to do it again. (Just as a decade later I said never again after driving the twisting mountain road in Mexico from Mazatlan to Durango.) We went to sleep in our railcar in Cicero, Illinois and in the morning we were roughly awoken when our car was “humped” by another, even though we had been warned never to be inside when two cars are violently joined together.
We walked from the railcars to the highway where eventually a man from Oklahoma gave us a ride all the way to New Jersey where my friends had some girls to visit who were working in Ocean Grove, next to Asbury Park. (They called it Ocean Grave because they sold canes in the ice cream stores.) We waded into the sea at night and it was exciting when the girls wore only their underwear.
I inexplicably called the famous painter Roy Lichtenstein’s ex-wife Isabel, an old family friend, and told her that I had run away from home. A few days later we got a ride to the highway in a friend’s hippie van and I left behind my army duffle bag when I got out to hitch-hike. I was always losing things in those days like glasses and my wallet.
On our hitchhiking trip back from New Jersey Larry taught me the cigaret machine scam at the Howard Johnson’s along the way: you go up to the machine, pretend to put money in, rattle the knob a bit, then go up to the counter and ask for a refund. He used the fake name Harold Schafer from Fort Worth, Texas when he filled out the small form and they gave him the fifty cents, or often more. Sometimes we hit one side of the turnpike and then I ran across to the other side: low risk, low reward, but it added up.
(Later I tried it on my own when I was down in Bloomington living in a farmhouse at Solsberry with my sister and her friends. I went all over town, hit every cigaret machine, and after an hour I’d made fifteen bucks and bought a lid of pot.)
I took the Amtrak train once and realized that if I kept moving the conductor, ticket-taker, would never catch up with me to punch my ticket. After the free ride I got a refund but my father found out and made me donate the twenty dollars to Caesar Chavez’s latest boycott. (We saw him speak in downtown Cleveland and at the Cleveland airport I got Roy Roger’s autograph on my Mad Magazine, which has also disappeared.)
Larry was as antiwar as all of us but he didn’t go to Canada or pretend he was crazy, gay, or lame: on his eighteenth birthday we had a party outside the draft board with snacks and music, played guitars and sang songs, and then Larry went in and announced he wasn’t going to register.
He didn’t identify himself until a year later when he wrote them a letter. The FBI tracked him down at a farmhouse outside North Manchester and asked him two questions: Had he registered for the draft? Did he know it was required? He answered no and yes and those two questions were the government’s total case when it came to trial.
He used the defense of International Law, everything he tried to introduce as evidence was thrown out by Judge Jesse Eshbaugh, the jury found him guilty of draft evasion after a one day trial, and he was sentenced to six months in low-security prison. After three unpleasant weeks in the Allen County jail he was shipped down to Ashland, Kentucky where we all went down to visit him later in the year. I hitchhiked down the night before and slept out on a nearby hill with a candle burning. He got out after four months but his crush, Jeanie, hadn’t waited for him and he was crushed. (He was the last draft resister to get jail time in that federal court, the rest got probation.)
When he got out we hitchhiked up to Ann Arbor and scored a couple pounds of weed from the house on Church Street where I had lived for a while the year before and where there was a weed-dealer living in every room. We hitched safely back with our load.
Connie Hoylman had talked me into going to the big rock festival in her VW van at Watkins Glen, New York and Larry came along also as he was heading to Boston. He wandered around the rock festival site for an hour or so, and then continued east with his pound of weed which was soon stolen out of his friend’s apartment where he was staying at 96 Gainsborough. I wandered around high on acid selling my pound by the ounce among the 600,000 music fans who had come to hear The Band, The Allman Brothers, and the Grateful Dead. The next morning I met Trudy, a cute Jewish girl from Brooklyn, we headed for New York City together, and I soon realized that I’d left all my weed proceeds behind in Connie’s van, about $225.
I drove taxi for awhile the next summer in Fort Wayne, radio-directed to the fares. “What’s your twenty?(location)” the dispatcher rasped on the squawk box. The whites mostly gave you a quarter tip and the blacks a dime or nothing. Once I was sent to the ghetto to move a woman out of a house as the police stood by and a man cried and moaned on the sidewalk. I loaded her stuff in the trunk and we drove away.
I got a fare out of town to North Manchester where Larry was living with a couple Brethren guys in an old farm house. I surprised them in my Checker cab and we had a fun time with the nitrous oxide someone had stolen from a dentist.
Larry’s friends Jim and Randy worked a scam where one distracted the owner of a local music store while the other walked away with a $400 Martin guitar. (A few years later when Larry told me that Jim had gotten religion, been born again, I asked about that theft and he said Jim was making amends and paying the old guy back.)
Randy and his longtime girlfriend, and later wife, Joicy moved to West Virginia and I wrote them a letter once addressed to them in “West Vagina” which pissed off Joicy. (There is a word for those who think they’re funnier than they actually are: obnoxious.)
In PE class at Northside when we had to run up and down the stairs in the gym it was so grueling I needed extra inspiration so I thought about the struggling Viet Cong fighting for independence in the jungles of Vietnam. (When I was a nineteen year old taxi driver in New York City I registered for the draft late and went in to try to get conscientious objector status. They asked me the classic question: “If your mother was being raped would you use violence to try to stop it?” I said yes I would and my petition was promptly denied. I had a low lottery number and then the war ended.)
By the time I got to high school Northside adopted baseball and I tried out for the first team. Well, I tried to: it was the intersection of hippie and sports and I was banned from even trying out because I had long hair. Well, I had watched the March on Selma, Alabama with my mother on our little black and white TV seven years before, knew my rights, and enlisted one of her friends, Hugh Martz again to help me. As the director of the Fort Wayne Human Relations Commission, he called the school, and voila, I got to try out.
During a batting practice I ignominiously broke a bat while hitting and my fate was decided by that splintered lumber. Though over the years I’ve lost the letter from the Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black about the same issue, long hair on boys in school, I still have the thick upper part of that bat I broke in half fifty years ago.
When it was time for school to start in the fall of my senior year I already had the requirements and credits to graduate but went back anyway, signed up for challenging trigonometry, and decided to run for Student Council president against Larry Strong. My sister made me colorful hippie campaign signs which were recipes for whole wheat bread with honey and said “Vote For Paul Modic” along the bottom.
For the campaign I went to the local Burger Dairy store on Goshen Road at Five Points and bought 400 pieces of bubblegum to hand out. When I thought the checker was occupied counting out the Bazooka Joe I impulsively slipped packs of cigarets into my pocket even though I didn’t smoke. She caught me, I raced out of there with the cigarets and gum, stashed the smokes in the bushes, and made it home in time to impersonate my father when the call came.
“I can’t understand how this could happen,” I said in my phony dad voice. “I can’t believe my son would do such a thing, I’ll have a talk with him!” Burger Dairy banned me for life.
I passed out all the bubble gum but I wasn’t prepared for my speech, just got up there to address the school in my paint-stained jeans and announced that the election was meaningless, and there would be a party in the school for the rest of the day.
I lost the election to Larry about 230-170, and quit school the next day. With lots of time on my hands I went downtown, climbed the rickety ladder to the top of the court house dome, smoked a joint as I looked out on Fort Wayne through the small window, and then went down to the court rooms to observe hearings and trials and watch the black man get screwed.
Toward the end of my time in Fort Wayne I met Worm and Crum (Crumwiddie) on the westside downtown. Worm was a nice, good-looking boy who said you should only eat four almonds at a time. Once we smoked some DMT and I said, “This is like heaven!” Worm had a sweet teenage girlfriend and I was very surprised when he hung himself.
Crum and I had been talking about starting a marijuana co-op and when I got back from Michigan with my weed I went to his house, knocked on the door, and there was no answer. I opened it, dropped a pound inside, and left. I heard later that Crum was very upset with my careless handoff.
Our friend Dave was the first one of our group who had his own apartment. I had heard that Jenny, his sweet blond teenage bride, was fucking Dave’s friends too. I went over one day when Dave was gone and Jenny was alone with the kids. Like, what about me? That nubile lassie rode me into delirious pleasure, still memorable. Looking up at her blond hair, breasts and smile as I experienced the singular joy of having a woman put me in her and ride me to oblivion. (Ah Jenny, that was the best sex of my life, until the German woman thirty years later in Mexico, when I realized that what made good or great sex was just normal sexual intercourse when you came at the same time.)-
oops, now THAT was a steaming pile of verbiage, whew…
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I was wondering if I should scold you for an unnecessarily rude remark, before noticing that you were talking to yourself…
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Damn, take that long shit off, okay?
I was so excited to run into another Ft Weiner
that i overshared and came all over everybody,
sorry…-
There’s lots of it, but it’s good stuff, man, and I am *proud* to have your cum stains here!
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Shit yeah, you ain’t gonna cancel me for over-sharing…
still it looks like an amorphous blob, a testament to no impulse control,
which it was…got a sweet love story moment ready for the next one…
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Holy shit no way am I reading all of that.
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Jeebers, man, how has your dick not withered with rot and fallen off? Have you at least worn condoms for most of these?
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hey, it’s like two a year, that’s not much, thanks for your concern, haha…
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Your penis is always one of my highest concerns.
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haha
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House REPUBLICANS taking away MY healthcare and Food? That’s BIDENS FAULT!
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Thanks, OBAMA.
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I am and will always be the king of over-sharing.
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Is there anyone in the current crop with even 1/3 the talent of any one of them?
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