Flatulent Friday (The 13th)

Not much tonight. Random brain-dump shit, what they'd call "Truthful Tuesday" on FaceBook except with it being Friday and all it doesn't really fit, besides which I hate FaceBook more than seems reasonable and won't use it except when I do, and also "Truthful Tuesdays" or "Saturday Seven" or whatever goofiness is going on usually consists of a wad of short, single statements, and this ain't any of that.

So, then, almost exactly the same.

And when it's time I'll go and lay
Beside the legendary fountain
'Till I see her form reflected
In its clear and jewelled waters
And if you think I'm ready
You may lead me to the chasm
Where the rivers of our visions
Flow into one another
 - "Wasn't Born To Follow" (Carole King, covered by The Byrds) -

Channel surfing tonight, I happened to hit a station that is running "Easy Rider," got there in fact just as it was starting (it's running now,) and I was immediately sucked into celluloid time and dumped out into my youth.

I was a fucking hippie for a year or two, did you know that? I don't remember if I ever said, and I'm too lazy to look it up. We old guys make up shit and repeat ourselves a lot anyhow. So if this is one of those times, just roll your eyes, and grit your teeth and put up with it because that's what people do.

It started at an anti-war protest I got wound up in. No real excitement, just a parade, some cops, a bit of tear gas that barely touched me, some signs and posters to annoy the citizens. I didn't even go to jail.

I know I've talked about this, about Harper's honey-blond sister who was a couple of years older than me and was a radical organizer, a dyed-in-the-wood revolutionary True Believer. Whether I have mentioned it or not, I lusted after her with all the passion a heaping helping of teenage hormones could generate, which, after a lifetime of experience in the matter, now seems as good a reason as any to take up a Capital-C "Cause."

She wouldn't have anything to do with me of course, and it all ended in its convoluted way with me in my red '60s Beetle roaming around SF and SLC, Haight District and State Street and Golden Gate Park and Sugarhouse Park. I put what seemed a million miles on that car.

Sugarhouse Today -- Fewer Hippies, More Joggers

There was a kid in Sugarhouse who saved my life and it probably killed him doing it. I hope not, but I'm pretty sure it did. I think about him now and again. He was a skinny, pale kid, blue eyes, sixteen or seventeen, I'd guess, although with that baby face he could have been older. He always wore a dark-brown suede jacket with lots of fringe and ragged levis and sandals and called himself some goofball hippie-dippy pseudo-Indian name. That jacket. I just realized, it looks just like the one Billy is wearing in Easy Rider, although this was pre-Easy Rider. No wonder he came to mind.

He's the first guy I ever saw get injected with anything outside of a doctor's office. Methamphetamine.  A black guy with a giant afro who seemed to be in Sugarhouse all the time showed him how to cinch his fringed woven belt around his arm to make the veins pop, then fired him up when the kid turned out to be too chickenshit to stick the needle in himself.

I lay there in the cool summer grass of the park under the blue Wasatch mountains as the sundown hours spiraled toward twilight, my head in the lap of the dark Apache-flavored girl from Holladay, letting her play with my hair, watching the heart nearly explode out of this kid's chest, his skittering eyes with blown pupils taking in the whole world at once, the chattering rushing high so high he was nearly crawling out of his skin.

The black guy saw me watching and asked me if I wanted a ride and I said sure why not but what with one thing and another which seemed to revolve around my lack of funds and his unwillingness to just trust me for it, we never got around to it.

That night I was drifting off to sleep on the couch at a friend's crackerbox walk-up apartment down on 21st South when the Holladay girl, cuddled warm against me, her shining straight black hair feather-light against my cheek, whispered that she was glad I hadn't shot up because none of the speed freaks she knew could fuck and she liked fucking me. 

Hippie girls — (shrug) — what are you gonna do? Again, as reasons go, it wasn't much, but it seemed a pretty good one right then and right now, too, if it gets to that. Anyway, it was better than nothing; better than most other somethings. 

Weeks later I was with Randy bumming on 2nd South after midnight, aggravating the hookers who'd never give us any play because we were always broke. Not that we were even interested — just bored. 

I spotted the fringed jacket going into the all-night restaurant on Main Street, and when we went in the kid looked at me unrecognizing, tweaking, still chattering inanely, licking his lips like a lizard, hardly even blinking at all. I wondered if he'd been roaring since that day in the park. 

He tried to bum some spare change off of me, standing close, looking into my eyes. My chest suddenly crushed closed and I couldn't breathe, and ice-water flowed loose in my guts, because for the first time ever, I saw Death. Not just dead — I'd seen that once or twice. No, this was different — it was Death the Entity. In those days He was not the laughing familiar who eventually came to accompany me through my life. No, He was new to me then and He scared the fuck out of me. 

The kid had tombstones in his eyes, as Steppenwolf would have it. 

I gave him a buck and we talked for a couple of minutes about nothing and I was trying to not stare down into that place where his companion looked back out at me and then he was suddenly gone out onto the street, crossing into the dark through the fading pool of sodium yellow cast by a streetlight, and I never saw him again.

It's not often one gets to watch the slow-motion pull of the trigger in a nasty suicide. From then till now, I never once touched anything that came out of a needle that wasn't medical, and I credit good luck and this poor, dead, anonymous, horror-show kid and his grinning passenger for warning me away. 

Heh — just occurred to me — "Saved By An Angel." Bet they wouldn't make an After School Special about that one.

Not long after, I hit the wall. The Holladay girl was fondly remembered, but long gone. I was so broke I couldn't buy enough gas to get back home, and I was bored to tears with bad weed and bad vibes and walking the streets with wandering bands of increasingly annoying misfits and flower children all trying to be someone and all competing to be the best at Finding Meaning in every lump of trash, political claptrap, or mundane life they ran across. 

I was a bad hippie.

Fall and winter were coming on, and I was more and more realizing that I had nothing going in my life that would substantially differentiate me from the Dead Kid. There's a wad of Truth and Enlightenment that seemed to have escaped the others.

I wandered at random in a deep funk until one afternoon I found myself back down on Main Street. The yearly draft lottery was coming up, and I had no reason to believe I wasn't soon going to be in Vietnam (or Canada if I followed the zombies' advice.) 

I stood in front of that joint-service recruiting station for a lifetime. Then I literally shrugged and muttered "Why not?" So, with the ink barely dry on my High School diploma, I pulled the glass door open and stepped in, and four days later was on a plane into another life. Turned out later that my draft call-up number was so high they'd have taken cripples and little old ladies before I'd have had to go. I could have spent a whole 'nother year circling the drain before the lottery would come up again.

But that's another story. So now to punch the "Publish" button, then back to watching Easy Rider, and leave 'till tomorrow consideration of the wisdom of writing while marinated to the gills in freezing vodka. Hey, it has to be a better outcome than Ambien, right? Besides, there's still a pretty good batch left. Maybe I'll post another...

In Our Next Episode: We revisit Harper's sister, who, last I heard, was a high-dollar real-estate agent and Chairman of the local Republican Party. When I wrote that just now, I found that I wasn't even surprised.

Supplemental: Nothing to do with anything, I don't think. It's just been stuck in my head for a few days, so I figured I'd dump it here to see what it does. Maybe it will write my next post for me:

It's the terror of knowing
What this world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming 'Let me out'
Tomorrow gets me higher
Pressure on people - people on streets
Chippin' around, kick my brains 'round the floor
These are the days - it never rains but it pours
 "Under Pressure" David Bowie/Freddie Mercury